This post was five seasons in the making, fermenting over the years as I’ve watched AMC’s Mad Men and been left speechless, over and over, by how well-written it is.

A warning: although I’m a couple episodes behind this season, this post may contain spoilers for those of you who haven’t caught up yet, either.

But there’s a moment in a recent episode of Mad Men that I just have to write about. Not just because the writing’s perfect, but because it shows what makes great writing. It’s all in the choices we make. The writers could’ve chosen to go one way. They went another. And that (as Robert Frost would say) has made all the difference.

To set it up, Sally, Don Draper’s pre-teen daughter, is tagging along to a gala in which her father is receiving an award. Don’s partner, Roger Sterling, is going solo, so he takes it upon himself to be Sally’s date. It’s adorable, and innocent, and throughout the night as Roger teases her about how she’s had too many “drinks,” how she needs to help him remember people’s names,  and how pretty she looks, it’s clear that Sally’s enjoying it. What little girl doesn’t want this kind of attention? She’s at that age where she’s anxious to be a woman, but too young to truly understand everything that comes along with it. She basks in the illusion of being the apple of Roger’s eye.

But of course there are other women at this party, and one in particular who clearly has her eyes on Roger. They drink, they flirt, they end up sneaking away to an empty room, where conveniently enough, there is a lone chair for Roger to sit back on and enjoy as the woman pleasures him. Poor Sally wanders off and catches them, then quietly sneaks away undetected and dumbfounded.

That evening, while everyone’s asleep, she calls a friend, her one true confidant. Since she’s staying with her dad in Manhattan, her friend asks how the city is. Sally answers with only one word.

“Dirty,” she says. And the episode ends there.

Most shows would’ve had that conversation play out very differently. They would’ve had Sally tell her friend about what she saw, and how it made her feel. But in one word the writers of Mad Men not only got it across, but they kept me thinking about it after the show was over. Days and weeks later.

Because they chose not to tell us everything, they left me with so much to think about. I admire this kind of writing because these choices aren’t easy to make. We wonder if we’re giving the reader (or viewer) enough when we go the subtle route. We worry that they’ll draw the wrong conclusion. If we don’t draw them a map, will they get to where we want them to go? But if we do, won’t it be a boring, unpredictable journey for them?

Great writing is carefully crafted to leave just the right amount of hints. But even then, not everyone will interpret them the same way. That’s part of the beauty of writing and being read: the work is a breathing thing, it’ll take on a life of its own (many lives) depending on who’s reading.

As writers we can only control how the story’s told, not how it’s read. We have to make a choice to focus on what we can control: the writing (always the writing).

Fresh Ink is a monthly series of interviews with debut novelists that focuses on the journey to publication. I’m so excited for today’s interview with Jennifer Miller, author of The Year of the Gadfly, which debuted just yesterday. Jennifer stumbled upon this blog about a year ago and emailed me to say hello because we’re both represented by the same agency. At the time, she’d just finished submitting final edits to her editor, and I’ve so enjoyed cheering her on from the sidelines as time crept its way closer to her launch!

Jennifer and I spoke just weeks before her pub date—about the writing process, the choices she made while developing her novel, and her advice for aspiring authors…

Length of time from the book’s start to your pub date? 7 years.

# of agents that you queried before signing? I only worked with one agent on this book, but I’ve worked with two agents in my career.

# of books written before this one:  Just one. Inheriting the Holy Land, which is non-fiction.

# of revisions you went through: Too many to count. It was a work in progress the entire time.

We’re lucky that there are so many great resources for writers to learn about publishing these days. That being said, what’s the one aspect of the process you never could have predicted? 

It’s just really interesting to think about the difference between starting to promote this book and promoting Inheriting the Holy Land, which came out in 2005. I felt like back in 2005 there really wasn’t very much that I could do, and I kind of just had to leave it up to the publicity and marketing department. But now, I find that there’s so much that I can do that I never expected. Not just being on Twitter, but Facebook, just being able to connect with all these book bloggers that I previously never knew existed. Connecting with people on Goodreads, which I’m really making an effort to do, every day pretty much. And starting a correspondence with readers around the country, or potential readers around the country, who I may never have had access to back in 2005. I can actually do outreach.

Most of the people I’ve interviewed on the blog are debut authors. But this is really your debut fiction. Are there any ways that you feel that this prepared you? Either in the publishing process or the writing, going from a non-fiction author to now a fiction one?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that, in terms of preparation, I definitely—because I wrote a book before—I knew I had the stamina to write another book. Inheriting the Holy Land, I recorded in six months, and I wrote it in six months, and it was done. This [novel] was obviously a seven-year process. So I knew that I could do it. I knew that I could produce content of that length. And so that definitely helped me.

Even though I published a book before, and I had an in into the publishing world, it actually didn’t, in a lot of ways for me, didn’t make it any easier for me to write this book or sell this book or anything like that. If anything, if your first book doesn’t do well, then you’re at a disadvantage for your second book. And honestly, this novel, part of the reason I think that I was able to get it published is because I did switch genres. The research book got really great reviews. It didn’t really sell very well. And I remember the publishing company asking me for sales figures. They’d already bought the book. They wanted sales for the last book. I was like, (jokingly) “I’m not giving you the sales figures. If you really want to find them, you can go find them.” It’s all part of like how—you hear this about authors failing to sell a book, and then having to publish under a pseudonym because if a book doesn’t sell well, you kind of have a mark against you. And I hate that. My suspicion is that because I was switching genres, they saw it as I’m starting over in the eyes of the publishing world. If that makes sense. I don’t have that mark against me because I switched genres. It’s a totally different—fiction is very different than non-fiction.

That’s interesting, because I was reading in your post on Writer Unboxed how your previous agent had mentioned that switching to novels would be a bad career move. What kept you going? Because even if the previous book didn’t do well, you do write a lot of non-fiction. You’re a journalist, and you’re very well published in that arena, so what kept pulling you toward fiction? What do you feel feeds you in the process in a different way than non-fiction?

I still love non-fiction and journalist stuff. I still would love to write another non-fiction book. But I’ve always, always, always wanted to write fiction. And I’ve always wanted to write a novel. I’ve always been in love with stories, and with characters, and with compiling a narrative. So I knew that this was something that I had to do.

And once I got into the process—I’m a private person. I’m a little bit obsessive. Once I get started on something…once I decide that I’m going to be invested in something, I really can’t stop working at it until it’s finished. Or until I feel like I’ve succeeded. Which is why was able to continue to do this over seven years and write five or six drafts. Because I just can’t stand to know that there’s a draft of something sitting on my computer. It sucks. I hate that knowledge in my own head. I have to keep working at it to make it better.

How did The Year of the Gadfly evolve from those initial drafts to what you ended up with? And what do you feel took you down that path?

An intro of the book: the book has three narrators. The main narrator, Iris Dupont, who’s a young teenage journalist, she actually did not exist until a couple of years ago. She was the very last addition. Which gives you a sense of why there were so many drafts of this book.

Initially the book was about two characters. It was about Jonah and Lilly. Jonah is this microbiologist who experienced a tragedy when he was a kid and runs away. And then the other main character is…this albino geek girl named Lilly, who is the daughter of the school principal. Jonah is closely based on my younger brother, who, like Jonah, is a scientist. And then Lilly is actually very much based on me, because the guy that she dates in the book is based on my boyfriend in high school, who was killed in a car accident the summer before our senior year of high school. And I knew that I wanted to write about that experience, and I wanted to write about my boyfriend, because he was a very, really an extraordinary person. And as I wrote, the book kind of started turning into a mystery, started turning into a novel in which basically the characters are running away from their past, and various events start calling them back to face up to the things that they swore they would never face up to.

I realized at a certain point, they needed a vehicle to push the plot forward—I was really focused on the back story. I was really focused on the past and what happened to these characters in the past, and what they were running away from. And at a certain point it occurred to me that it’d be awesome to have an investigative journalist, because that’s inherently cool, to have a character whose job it is in the narrative to start uncovering things. Walking into things and meeting, and trying to pull out people. So that’s really where the character of Iris Dupont came from. And she emerged after I went to journalism school. And I think if I hadn’t been to journalism school, I might not have even thought to create her.

That’s why she came really late to the process. But obviously I didn’t just want Iris to be a tool. I wanted her to be a well-rounded character in her own right. I wanted her to have her own story, and her own challenges, and her own problems.

She sounds so cool. I love the idea of her communing with the ghost of Edward R. Murrow. I wondered where that came from. At what point did it occur to you and why did you feel like it fit her and fit into the story?

Iris has this ideal about truth with a capital T. And the beginning of this book for her is really about exposing the truth above all else.

So the reason I chose Murrow is because Murrow, in a lot of ways, he is the ideal representation of truth. He is the heroic figure who will be true to power, who will go up against McCarthy, who will basically always stand up for his ideals and for the importance of free speech. He seemed like the perfect person for Iris to obsess over.

At the same time, Murrow was actually a very broad figure with a lot of demons and his own past. I wanted the realization of Murrow’s ideal versus Murrow the human being to also be part of Iris’s growth over the course of the novel. She was idealizing him, and at a certain point she has to start seeing him as a real human being who is just as flawed as everybody else.

The other reason I chose him is because I just wanted a really sharp juxtaposition between 14-year-old prep school girl, and then you’ve got 50-year-old, chain-smoking Edward Murrow. I just love to kind of bring those two opposing figures together and see what would happen when they’re forced to talk.

I was reading how you teach writing as well. What’s a piece of advice that you give most to students?

The thing that I emphasize…is that the ideal is to communicate what you want to say in a clear and straightforward way. You want things to be accessible. At least I want the literature that I read to be accessible. This isn’t to say that all writing has to be that way. I actually really do enjoy Joyce, and I enjoy Foster, and people whose writing is actually not accessible. But I think that just like any sport or creative field, or art, or whatever you do, it’s always about practicing and honing your skills and getting down to basics. And I think that that’s true with writing, too.

Know the rules, and then break them. Especially for writers who are just starting out – and I’ve done this plenty myself – there’s this tendency to just completely overdo it. To write these long, complicated, flowery sentences that you think sound fantastic, but actually don’t say anything. So for myself even, I’m always trying to simplify my language, even in my fiction.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to mention?

I would just say to anybody who really wants to write and is trying to publish a book and is feeling frustrated—I talk to a lot of writers about this, and there really is a general consensus of some of my friends that if you just keep doing it, and you just stick with it, you’re going to have some kind of success.

It’s just that it’s very much a marathon and not a race. I remember so well the afternoon that I got up in front of my agent, I had just finished a draft. The first time that I finished a full draft of Gadfly and she read it. And we got on the phone and within five minutes, she had told me that the second half of the book had to go entirely and the first half of the book needed serious reworking. And she was right. She was absolutely right. And that’s the other thing. Be open-minded. Find a reader that you trust, and don’t be defensive when they tell you that you have to throw out half your book.

At that point, I could’ve easily been like, ‘You know what, I did a lot of work, but I’m done with this. I’m tired, I’m done. I’ve already been working on it for five years. I don’t have the stamina to keep going.’ The thing is that you’ve got to keep going. You have to see that criticism as an opportunity to improve. And then keep working at it. Keep doing it, and eventually you’re going to get to the good product.

Thanks so much for the great conversation, Jennifer, and congratulations on your fiction debut!

About The Year of the Gadfly:

Iris Dupont is a teenage reporter who communes with the ghost of Edward R. Murrow.  Jonah Kaplan is a failed microbiologist-turned biology teacher who is haunted by the ghosts of his past.  Each embarks on a private investigation to uncover a secret society in their remote New England town.  As Iris and Jonah’s paths start to intersect, they are drawn into the darker corners of their town, their school, and their own minds.

The first time I went back felt like the first time I’d ever been there. Having moved from Peru to the US when I was only three, I had no memory of it, just images from pictures and shaky video footage that I occasionally tried inserting in my mind, as if that alone would help bring some recollections to surface. But I wanted more than anything to be a part of it, to reclaim it as my own. Because I’d never had a chance to remember my birthplace, my parents made sure to never let me forget it. They taught me its history, nourished me with traditional dishes, made sure the language didn’t become foreign to my tongue.

The first time I went back I was twelve. I was an old romantic. In Spanish, we call our homeland mi tierra, my earth, and I wanted to always have it near me. So I took a small bag and filled it with dirt from the backyard of the house my mother grew up in. The soil was black and moist; it stuck in clumps to my fingers. I remembered seeing a picture of me eating dirt as a baby, and wondered if the particles I held now came from the same place as they had ten years ago.

Years later, the dirt was dry, cracked and gray. I must’ve thrown it out because I can’t find it anywhere. By then, I’d had many trips back to Lima. Each time back I’ve had the strangest sensation, of being from there, but not of there, at least not completely. I’ve moved around so much by now and redefined the idea of home so many times that I often feel a bit scattered. I go back and find pieces of myself only to realize I’ve left others back home. I wonder if we can ever truly be complete in one place.

The last time I went back to Peru was this February, and I took pictures and wrote every day in a journal (yes, by hand!) because again, I wanted to take bits of it back with me. I spent precious time with family I hadn’t seen in years, and precious time alone at the beach, fighting with the waves or reading in the sand. I thought I’d get home and write about my trip immediately on the blog, but months later I realize I’m still taking it all in, missing and longing for it in ways I can’t completely express.

But I did take one picture that I always intended to post here. Walking along the beach with my sister, I thought it’d be fun to write a message in the sand (similar to what Julia Munroe Martin did on her blog). I wrote “Hi from Peru!” and before I could snap the picture, the waves had washed over it, leaving only half a message captured.

With love.

Fresh Ink is a monthly series of interviews with debut novelists that focuses on the journey to publication. Today’s interview is with Lynda Rutledge, author of Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, which debuts this Thursday, April 26 from Amy Einhorn Books (Lynda’s in amazing company: The Help, The Good American, The Weird Sisters…anyone?). 

I’m really excited about featuring Lynda, especially because, in this world where I mostly hear about new books and authors through online connections, I learned about Lynda the old-fashioned way: at a bookstore where we were both attending Sere Prince Halverson‘s book signing. After hearing about this gem of a book I knew I’d be featuring it on the blog soon. Lynda will be returning to BookPeople in Austin on April 30, this time for her own signing. If you’re in town, I hope to see some of you there!

Length of time from book’s start to pub date:  Lost count.

# of agents you queried before signing: Ditto

# of books written before this one:  I call them “practice” novels. So they don’t count.

# of revisions you went through: Countless. (After contract: 2-ish.)

We’re lucky that there are so many great resources for writers to learn about publishing these days. That being said, what’s the one aspect of the process you never could have predicted?   

How fast it can finally happen when the time is right and the right people are involved. It’s incredible. There’s an old joke that says it takes years to be an overnight success.  It seems like that in publishing. I used to tell my students that, at a certain point, talent is a given. After that, becoming a published author takes a mix of timing, networking, world-class stubbornness, and luck. I still believe that: Hone your talent, do your homework, be persistent, and then be sure to stand where the lightning is going to strike.

How did the idea for Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale come to you? Was it a vivid spark or a slow simmer of ideas over time? 

Very slow simmer. I had the idea years ago, and even dashed off a short comic novel attempt set at a garage sale. But it didn’t go and it shouldn’t have. The right idea came before I was right for it. I still use humor, but it’s in the service of bigger, deeper themes now.

I’ve heard your book described as being “very Texan” many times, which is so interesting because while all books take place somewhere, not all encapsulate their setting. Was this intentional on your part?  

No, not intentional at all. To have written something “very Texan” conjures stereotypes for most of us: cowboys and horses and tumbleweeds. I even have a line in the book that says the movies get it wrong about Texas, or as the daughter character expresses it, “my mother’s Texas.” But I don’t really think that’s what these readers meant. The overall sensibility of the tale is probably a mix of Texas and Southern, since East Texas, I’ve always said, is the Deep South with cowboy hats. The novel takes place down some forgotten farm-to-market road in Southeast Texas between Austin and Houston, but it could also have taken place anywhere. So I think what being called “very Texan” might mean a tone or a way of telling a tale, since Texans are born and bred in an oral history culture. We are big storytellers. But the fact that I seem to have nailed the cadences of dialogue and description of that part of the state for some readers is gratifying, indeed.

You’ve lived/written/studied all over the country and all over the world. How do you capture the essence of a place? What kind of details do you look for?

In one of my many writing lives, I was a travel writer. And I learned to “see” in a way I hadn’t before, to feel invisible, connected to where I was on the planet as it spins. It was a remarkable thing to feel, and learn, as a writer. But in truth, any writer can use this ability wherever they are; it’s one of the advantages of being a writer: The world is fodder.  Standing in line at the DMV is no longer a boring chore, because everything is usable if you have eyes to see, ears to hear, and are not made to wait past even a writer’s endurance. The writing life is not the easiest life, but it can sure make you aware of the world in ways “normal” people don’t.

You mentioned that you once broke up with fiction. Can you tell me a bit about what led to the breakup, and eventually, the reunion? What pulled you back together?

Ah, well, that’s my humorous way of explaining what challenges and serendipity the writing life can hold. For years I was a freelance journalist with too many literature degrees who could never quite shake my literary pretensions, piling up one “practice novel” after another, even attracting big-time agent interest a couple of times. After the last attempt fizzled, which happened to be with the afore-mentioned early garage sale comic novel try, I’d had it. I turned my back on fiction, the little heartbreaker, moving toward creative nonfiction instead. But my garage sale idea wouldn’t leave me alone. For a failed idea, it was rather pushy. My mind kept playing with the idea, slowly reinventing it. I’d sneak a few minutes with it now and then, but never allowed myself to get “serious.” Then, while working on an MFA in creative nonfiction, I had to take a fiction workshop, so I threw my reinvented idea into it. And before I knew it, fiction and I were back together. And look, I’m writing a column for you about what happened next. If this were fiction, that would be the happy ending, right?

What plans do you have for April 26?

I’m doing an interview on Austin’s public radio station’s morning talk show, then I’m going to drop by to visit my books at every bookstore between the station and my home. Then who knows? Whatever else happens, there will be some cork-popping champagne toasts involved. And lots of grinning.

Congratulations, Lynda, and thanks so much for being a part of Fresh Ink! See you soon at your signing! 

More about Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale:

On the last day of the millenium, sassy chain-smoking, 70 year old Faith Bass Darling is selling all her valuable worldly possessions at a garage sale on the lawn of her historic Bass, Texas mansion.

Why? God told her to.

Because she knows what this is about. It’s about dying, and about killing her long-gone husband Claude. As the townspeople grab up the family’s heirlooms, the antiques of five generations of Faith’s founding family—a Civil War dragoon, a wedding ring, a French-relic clock, a family bible, a roll top desk, an entire room of Tiffany lamps–reveal their own secret roles in the family saga, inspiring life’s most imponderable questions:

Do our possessions possess us?
What are we without our memories?
Is there life after death?
Or second chances here on earth?

And is Faith Darling really selling that 1917 Louis Comfort Tiffany lamp for a $1…???

Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve entered my blog in the Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards, and I would so appreciate your vote!

Four winners will be chosen from four categories (Adult Fiction, Adult Non-Fiction, Young Adult & Children’s, Publishing Industry) and will receive a trip to attend Book Expo America NYC in June. Voting closes Monday, April 23 at 11:59 p.m. eastern. Vote, help spread the word, and discover some amazing new blogs while you’re at it.

Here’s the link where you can vote for this blog:

CLICKY-CLICKY

And here’s the hug I will owe you forever and ever. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9v0SYn7T8w

For the past week or so, this has been my view when I sit down to write:

That image is not an error. I have literally been writing in the dark, with my favorite bandana as a blindfold and my computer on my lap. Thank goodness I learned how to type without looking when I was eight, or my exercise in getting the romance back into my writing would have failed miserably.

But I’m so happy to tell you it’s really worked. It’s liberating, actually, to not have to see the words as they appear on the screen, and to know that I can’t delete more than a few keys because otherwise I’d lose my train of thought. When I’m writing in the dark, there are no distractions—I can’t let my gaze wander away from my computer to my bookshelf or the park outside, or to my dogs playing tug-of-war. I can’t remove my fingers from the keyboard unless I want to struggle to find my place again. By forcing myself to see nothing, the images in my mind become clearer, and I worry less about how they look on the screen and more about just jotting them down. I’ve become kind of addicted to this game of typing for what seems like a short amount of time, only to realize I have several pages’ worth of writing when I remove the blindfold. Of course, then it’s time to edit. That’s a job done with eyes wide open.

Around this time last year, I read a post by Dani Shapiro called On Writing in the Dark. Her darkness was a figurative place, but it resonated with me so much that ever since I’ve always wanted to get back there. In the post she laments not having stayed in the dark longer. Talking about her unpublished writing students, she writes: “In the dark, they are free to grow, blooming like midnight plants. Even though it’s not always comfortable, that darkness is the best possible place a writer can live. There are no expectations, no definitions.”

But stepping “out of the dark” doesn’t just apply to published writers anymore; it applies to aspiring authors wanting to build their online platforms, writers who monitor Twitter and blogs to learn more about craft and the publishing industry. Eventually we realize that all this information needs to be managed properly or else our world gets too noisy. We need to be able to step away sometimes, lower the volume, turn off the lights, and find a quiet place with our thoughts.

For me, for now, I feel like I’ve finally found that place. I just wasn’t expecting it to be so literal.

Have you ever tried writing in the dark? What do you do when you need to clear your mind and focus on the writing?

When I was a teenager I had a favorite writing spot. We had (by Miami standards, anyways) a pretty big backyard, with a canal running through it, and before you stepped onto the grass you’d pass under a ceramic-tiled gazebo, where there hung an orange hammock we’d bought years ago on the Mexican border. At night, if I held still long enough for the motion sensitive lights to shut off, I’d be surrounded by darkness. The only light was the one I switched on overhead as I sat on the hammock and wrote.

I loved that spot because of how isolated it felt, as if I’d snuck away to spend time with my thoughts and words. It was unusually quiet—most nights all you’d hear was the rustling of palm tree leaves getting pushed around by the wind. I remember writing about how the wind hugged me with its cool arms (I was a teenager, remember?) and closing my eyes to take it all in.

Looking back, it was all very dramatic and romantic, even slightly cheesy, judging by the poems I wrote. But I miss it. Not just the hammock and the backyard, but the seduction and excitement. If writing is a lifelong love, then this was my infatuation phase, when I couldn’t get enough of words on paper, and I wrote without fear or insecurity because I was too caught up in wanting it.

Is my love affair with writing quite as steamy more than ten years later? Now that I get to write all day every day, for both work and fiction, I don’t doubt that the love is there…but I want the romance back. It’s easy to lose that part when you’re told that writing is all discipline, that it means doing it even when you don’t want to, that it’s revising and rewriting and scrutinizing every last sentence. I don’t want to just make time for fiction in my life; I want to steal small moments with it, sneak off to a dark corner and get a few words in to hold me over for the next time. I want to feel stupid, and silly, and overly-sentimental about it (this post is a good start). I want writing to make me feel young and foolish again.

But romance isn’t just a switch we can flip. So here’s what I plan to do, and I hope you’ll join me if you’re looking to reignite that spark, too.

1. Read more poetry, preferably aloud. It’s more sensual this way; you can feel the words forming on your tongue and then release.

2. Don’t leave your house without either a book or a notepad. Next time you’re standing in line somewhere and want to check your phone for email or Twitter, don’t. Love means making time and making time means prioritizing. Show your love in even the tiniest moments.

3.  Make a date out of it. Go someplace romantic with just you and some pen and paper. Sit alone in a crowded cafe or under a tree on a blanket and spend quality time with your thoughts.

4. Experiment. Rewrite a scene from a new POV. Write on your computer, blindfolded. Indulge all the senses—taste what your characters can smell and listen to what they’re touching.

5. Stay in the moment. Even if it’s just five minutes. Always remember that you’re lucky to be in this relationship.

Did I miss any? Add your own tips in the comments.

xoxo…

 photo credit: wewiorka_wagner

Fresh Ink is a monthly series of interviews with debut novelists that focuses on the journey to publication. Please welcome Stephen Dau, author of The Book of Jonas, which launches today through Blue Rider Press, one of Penguin’s newest imprints. 

I first learned about The Book of Jonas through Twitter, in one of those retweets of a retweet that somehow finds its way to your stream, and you’re so glad it did. It’s about a fifteen-year-old boy whose family is killed during a U.S. military operation in an unknown country, the soldier who saves his life and then disappears, and how their stories unravel a painful past once the boy moves to the U.S. and meets the soldier’s mother.

Length of time from book’s start to pub date: 7 years

# of agents you queried before signing: 40+

# of books written before this one: 0

# of revisions you went through: Countless

We’re lucky that there are so many great resources for writers to learn about publishing these days. That being said, what’s the one aspect of the process you never could have predicted?

Probably how important relationships are in the process. I think I  used to believe that if the writing was good, it would naturally rise to the surface, that it would, almost inevitably, be published and find an audience. In retrospect, I think that may have been a little naïve. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, that work doesn’t get picked up off the slush pile and get published and widely read. But there is just so much really good writing out there, and my sense is that agents, editors and publishers are sometimes looking for road signs, so they often turn to people whose tastes they trust.

If you think about it, this just makes sense. We all do it with book recommendations all the time. I heard a writer say recently that he had come to the conclusion that he was never going to be able to read all the books he wanted to during his lifetime, so he was looking to friends for suggestions about what he should prioritize out of the sea of writing. And that’s a sea consisting of published, generally acknowledged works. Literary agents receive on average something like a thousand manuscripts a month. It’s only natural that they would turn to people they trust to help them wade through that vast amount of material.

The country that your main character, Jonas, is from goes unnamed; how did you reach this decision, and did it present any challenges? Did you ever have to balance the need for specificity with the vagueness of the unnamed?

I thought about that question a lot. I had at least two reasons for leaving his country vague, one of them practical and the other aesthetic. On the practical side, although I’ve traveled around a little bit,  I didn’t feel that I knew any one place well enough to stick a flag in the ground and call it Jonas’s country. As soon as you do that, you’re rendering yourself subject to the reality of that place, and to the knowledge of its residents and visitors, who have spent more time there, and know it better than you do. The other primary reason is that leaving Jonas’s home country vague lends the story a certain universality. By happening nowhere specific, it could have happened anywhere.

To balance that out, I felt I needed a place that was very concrete and real. I spent the first twenty four years of my life around Pittsburgh, so I felt that was a place I could characterize pretty well. But the decision to set it there wasn’t even a conscious one. I was just writing about this place where Jonas comes to, and one day I sort of realized it was Pittsburgh. After that it became much easier to write about it, though.

You worked in post-war reconstruction in the Balkans and international philanthropy in DC. At what point did you decide you wanted to pursue writing, and what sparked your interest in it?

I have wanted to write since I was a kid. I have a memory of sitting on my parents’ sofa writing what I thought of as a book on stapled sheets of notebook paper. I credit my parents with sparking the interest. There were always books around our house, and my brother, sister and I were taken to libraries and bookstores and read to a lot.

I studied English in college, but when I graduated, writing didn’t really seem like a viable career. I think a big part of it was fear of rejection, which is something that every writer I know of has had to go through. So I decided I would go off and try to save the world. Which, it turns out, is even more difficult than it sounds. Or at least I was not particularly good at it.

At a certain point I realized that I was getting older, and if I was going to make a go of this writing thing, which by then had been on the backburner for the better part of a decade, I was going to have to buckle down and do it. It’s cheesy and cliché, but I figured that when I look back when I’m a hundred years old, I would much rather have tried to do it and failed than to have not tried to do it at all.

One of the things that drew me to The Book of Jonas is the question of memory and trauma, and what happens when they intertwine. As a reader and a writer I have a bit of an obsession with exploring memory from different angles. Do you have similar obsessions that you find pop up in your writing, or the books you most enjoy?

I absolutely do. I am fascinated by the way past experience can condition our current emotions or responses. I think some of the biggest work any of us has to do is overcoming our histories, or our past conditioning, to be able to live presently now, unencumbered by it. To overcome our memories, in other words. But part of doing that involves acknowledging and dealing with past experiences which have gone unexamined. My interest in stories involving memory comes from that. I also read a lot of history, which I think of as an accounting of collective memory.

Why do you feel memory played an important role in this story? Is that something you set out to explore from the beginning, or is it something that you discovered as you wrote (and if so, at what point)?

One of my all time favorite short stories is called The Deep, by a Canadian writer named Mary Swan, which is about twin sisters who volunteer to be nurses during World War I,  and what that experience does to them. She does amazing things with the lens of memory. The whole story is told through the memories of multiple characters. I’m sure that story influenced how I wrote Jonas. For a story teller, memory is like a little sprinkling of gold dust. It allows you to explore not just what was, but what could have been, or what is remembered differently by different characters, which is telling of them, or what wasn’t remembered at all, which is often as telling as what was remembered. Memory is like a thin veil that both allows you to see something and also obscures it. It’s tantalizing. It’s expansive and restrictive at the same time. Storytelling gold.

But for all that, I wasn’t aware that The Book of Jonas was in part about memory, as a subject, until late in the game. It always was, but wasn’t really aware that I was exploring it as an issue. I thought I was just using it as a device to tell the story. And I was, but I was also unconsciously looking at it as a subject in and of itself, at what happens to memories when we try to remember them, and what they do to us in the process.

Not only is The Book of Jonas your debut novel, but it’s also your publisher’s in a way, since this is the first novel they’re publishing. How would you describe the experience of working with them on such a big first?

I was so amazingly fortunate to wind up at Blue Rider Press. I cannot say enough about them. It’s true that it’s a new imprint at Penguin, and that I guess you could call this their debut novel, but actually it’s a team of all stars who have been in publishing for some time. My editor, Sarah Hochman, is amazing, and I have felt incredibly supported and guided by her throughout this entire process. At least two other writers much more experienced than I am have told me that they think she’s the best in the business. (Of course I agree.) And my publicist, Brian Ulicky, is truly an artist.

One of the things I like most is that they’ve got guts. They published Michael Hastings’s book The Operators, about the war in Afghanistan, when other publishers thought it was too controversial. I think it’s going to be seen as one of this generation’s most important pieces of journalism. I’m a debut novelist and they’re sending me on a nationwide book tour, which is practically unheard of these days. That’s literally putting your money where your mouth is. Their approach is paying off, at least among the books they’ve published so far, which have had pretty amazing rates of success. Who knows if  that will continue with Jonas, but at least if it doesn’t I’ll know that it wasn’t because they didn’t do everything they could possibly do. That’s a wonderful feeling to have.

Thank you so much for being a part of Fresh Ink, Stephen, and congratulations on your debut! 

 More about The Book of Jonas:

Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed country. With the help of an international relief organization, he is sent to America, where he struggles to assimilate—foster family, school, a first love. Eventually, he tells a court-mandated counselor about a U.S. soldier, Christopher Henderson, responsible for saving his life on the tragic night in question. Christopher’s mother, Rose, has dedicated her life to finding out what really happened to her son, who disappeared after the raid in which Jonas’ village was destroyed. When Jonas meets Rose, a shocking and painful secret gradually surfaces from the past, and builds to a shattering conclusion that haunts long after the final page.

Every once in a while, I’ll come across someone who tells me they read, but only non-fiction because they don’t have time to read fiction. Obviously this hurts a bit, but not because I want to tell people what to read, or because I think they should read the books I love. It’s just that a statement like this usually implies that fiction shouldn’t be taken as seriously as non-fiction. What value can we take from stories that are make-believe? What can fiction teach us that facts can’t?

By the name of my blog, you can probably see where I’m going with this. Truth is a complex thing. It is not simple. It is not always evident based on the facts. It’s something that writers—non-fiction and fiction alike—strive for, even when they know that absolutes are impossible, that the best they might ever hope for is “truest” or “true at the moment,” because this, too, can always change. How an author chooses to tell a story—by sticking to what we know, by venturing into what one can imagine—is as much about the writer as it is about the story.

Some stories beg to be told while others beg to be answered, because they are little more than questions that history left behind. Take for example, the story behind Jessica McCann’s All Different Kinds of Free. I read this book a couple of weeks ago while I was in Peru for a long weekend, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. McCann’s novel was inspired by the 1842 Supreme Court case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, a case which was at its core about a man, Edward Prigg, who abducted Margaret Morgan, a free black woman, and her children from their homes. They were sold back into slavery, separated.

The history books and newspapers of the time say little of Margaret Morgan. They stick mostly to the historical significance the case had in the years that followed, because it sparked the early controversy that would eventually lead to the Civil War. If we stick mostly to the facts available to us, we learn little of what eventually became of Margaret, of what her nights must have been like, wondering who her children had been sold to, wondering if her husband would ever find them and take them back home to the house they’d built themselves and raised their family in, wondering if her youngest even remembered what freedom felt like after the years passed and no one came to right such unthinkable wrongs.

We can’t possibly imagine the depths of the horror, the hope, that Margaret Morgan went through, but we have to at least try. Because if we don’t, we’re not even scratching the surface of that reality—we’re just cloaking the truth with facts curated by a time we’d like to think is in the past. Books like All Different Kinds of Free might be fiction, but they get to a truth we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. McCann stays true to Margaret Morgan by not letting us forget her, by bringing compassion and empathy to a story that years ago, was left behind.

Reading this book was both a history lesson in the things I never could’ve learned in school, and a reminder of why stories—true, imagined, or a mixture of both—are so important. The role of fiction is not simply to pick up where non-fiction trails off into unknowns. The role of fiction is to let us imagine. And not just the worst things that we’d rather not see, but the best things that inspire us to want something better. Because how else can we build a better reality if we don’t think beyond it?

question mark  photo credit: Rusty Clark

Let me just say that I’ve always known there is a very special bond between writers. We’ve all seen it play out online through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other forums, but there is something magical about finally meeting someone in person and realizing that they’re just as amazing (if not even moreso) as you’d always imagined.

On Thursday, Seré Prince Halverson came to Austin to sign copies of The Underside of Joy at Bookpeople (you remember I interviewed her for January’s Fresh Ink, yes?). Lucky for me, not only was I in town (I almost wasn’t!) but I also got to meet other writers who’d come to Austin for the occasion. Can you think of a better way to spend the evening than listening to an author read from her book, tell you about the process of writing it, get that book signed, and then have dinner with her and other new writer friends, only to keep talking about books and the writing life?

No? Me neither.

Because I promised you all pictures…

I finally got to meet Seré and two new writer friends. I’d met Julie Kibler (in red) previously on Backspace and Facebook. Her novel, Calling Me Home, will be published in early 2013 by St. Martin’s Press. Julie introduced me to Lynda Rutledge (far left), whose debut novel, Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, will be published by Amy Einhorn Books in April. So many great books to look out for!

During her talk, Seré talked about her path to publication and how an agent she’d worked with previously said that her book’s message needed to be something that could be embroidered on a pillow—something uplifting and uncomplicated—because that’s what would sell. She decided to look for a new agent

Seré, Julie and me after dinner. I really hope we get to do this again sometime! (Maybe for Julie’s book launch?)

I know we’ve all discussed the power of online connections before, especially among writers. It’s hard to believe that we can develop such meaningful relationships with people we’ve never actually met, but that’s what happens when you bond with someone over a common passion like writing, whether it’s over drinks or Twitter. I’ve exchanged emails, letters, web videos, and even books with friends I’ve met online, and each time we’ve finally had a chance to meet in person, it’s felt a lot like having an evening of great conversations with old friends—because it kind of is.

I hope that I’ll get to meet many of you in person someday and have that same experience! In the meantime, (to get a bit Golden Girls on you) thanks for being a friend. If you’re ever in Austin or if I’m ever anywhere near your town, please, please let me know and point us to the nearest book store/chai latte in town. We’ll make a night of it.