Screw Iowa Blog

Sue Grafton has another successful Kinsey Milhone mystery as she starts the race to the end of the alphabet. Only five books from the end of series, Grafton tells Writers Digest in the February issue that it hasn’t gotten any easier for her.  Grafton started the series in 1982 with A is for Alibi and has produced a new novel about every two years.

She describes the journals she writes for each of her novels, calling them “long, whiney conversations I have with myself about what I’m doing.” She says she thrown out far too many ideas that she decides would not be workable, hoping for inspiration to strike. She also tries very hard to keep the voice she calls “Ego” from taking over her work, preferring to let the voice she’s named “Shadow” to write. “Shadow knows how to write books. . .Shadow is that still, quiet voice in your soul that tells you if you’re on track or off track.”

This newest book has Kinsey’s curiosity roused when a young man presents himself in her office, claiming to have seen two men burying an abducted child when he was a youth. Although Kinsey finds out this fellow is known to stretch the truth, enough of his story checks out to involve her. And she’s off and running. . .

The book has tons of twists and turns, enough to satisfy any Milhone fan.  Grafton says her husband is her first reader, and this is his favorite of the novels. “He loves this book.”

I found it interesting that Grafton admits that this series was born during a brutal divorce, when she imagined various ways to murder said ex!  She found a wealth of ideas to start Kinsey on her adventures.

Grafton says each book has gotten harder and harder to write.  Even as she admits one of her favorite sayings is “trust the process,”  she says she has to keep reminding herself that  writing “should be a form of play.”

As an author awaiting the release of my own first novel, I take great comfort in Grafton’s words:

I keep saying the fate of the free world does not hang in the balance. Even if I write a book that fails, nothing will happen. I’ll be mortified and embarrassed, but lives will not be lost over this.”

Amen to that!

“We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”        ~~    Aristotle

Today I re-wrote my author’s bio for the umpteenth time. I have many versions of it: a short , a shorter, a short-short, a micro-mini, a long, a complete, a new, a newer-to-date, etc.

It is important to update a bio frequently and make necessary changes–add, delete, change, substitute, etc. because as writers, we are constantly sending our bios out to a vast array of people. The bio goes inside cover letters,  query letters, is sent to agents, to editors and to publishers.

I keep a separate CV as well.   And I update it often, and so should you.

Here’s a quote by Vita Sackville-West about writing that says it all: ”It is necessary to  write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the  net over the butterfly of the moment?”

In the February 15th 2001 issue if  The Writer Magazine, there was an article or interview with Ha Jin.  His advice to writers is this: “Persevere. You have to forget about commercial and social success. You have to sit at a desk and face a blank page.”

He also said that he learns the craft of writing by teaching a great story or poem. It’s something many teachers have said, including me.  If you want to get to the heart of  somehting and truly understand it–teach it to someone else.

And jumpinng to another topic entirely, let me offer this.  Last night I had a dream and in it someone asked me, What is your mission in life?  Not a bad thing to contemplate, so today I am donating time to answer this question. Why don’t you try to answer it too?  If nothing else, it’ll give us some insights we might not have pondered before.

Auntie M is in the process of waiting for the bound proof of her novel to be delivered, almost shivering in anticipation the way my dog does when he sees a juicy bit of meat on its way to his mouth.

I’ve always been in love with my books. My library shelves were so filled to overflowing that I had a mega-clean-out a few months ago, and it literally took me days to decide which beauties I could bear to part with the for library in town or the prison library in our county, where my donations end up.

Now the Oxford University Press has published a two-volume compendium that will definitely be on my Christmas/Birthday list this year. Yes, it’s pricey at $ 275, but it’s one of those items I’d happily take for all of my gifts for both those occasions without batting an eye.

The Oxford Companion to the Book promises to be the anything and everything you could want to know about books, from antiquity to the age of Kindle and Nook.  Since the earliest books were treated as sacred texts, reader and those who were read to treated books as a source of divine revelation.  The books were often kissed before and after use.

Now I’m not in favor of bringing back that tradition, but I do get a wonderful feel of satisfaction after finishing a wonderfully told story, written in clear prose with bright imagery. Although threatened recently with extinction by these new electronic devices, I believe nothing will change the heady anticipation of opening the pages of a new book. And as a writer, nothing will ever replace that feel of the blank page that becomes filled with words I’ve chosen.

A review in the Wall Street Journal by author Norman Lebrecht (The Life and Death of Classical Music), describes the enormity of this FIFTEEN-year project, written by 398 scholars from 27 countries and the results of its editors:

Unusually in an academic compendium, Father {Michael} Suarez, director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and Mr. {HR} Woudhuysen, professor of English at University College, London, set out to give as much pleasure as knowledge and to have some fun along the way. . .it is completely unnecessary but humanly warmaing to find out that “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” was originally titled “Tenderness.”

Lebrecht goes on to warm my heart even further as he discusses this set of books as being about the book as object:

It is a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine. It refreshes where Google merely sates. We will always need books for the depth of memory, the free association of random thought. This dangerous two-tome sits on my living room shelf, an irresistible distraction.

Auntie M agrees; what say you, dear reader?

Today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said this: “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”  This quote reminds me of one by Michelangelo Buonarroti, who said: “I saw the angel trapped in the stone and I set him free.” 

Think about what this means to you and your writing and have a creative day!

Today is Khaled Hosseini’s birthday as I was informed this morning when I read the e-mail from The Writer’s Almanac.

His first novel was such a extraordinary best-seller, he felt the bar was set so high for a second novel that he had a difficult time beginning the writing, and can be quoted saying  he had “this almost pathological fear of boring the  reader.”  

 Hosseini’s second novel, a much more ambitious one than the first, A Thousand Splendid Suns, seems to be his answer to a challenge he was afraid to meet.  Personally, I loved it—enjoyed looking for the distinguishable marks of change that the author made—and think every woman in the world should read it.  Nevertheless, back to the argument of second novels—let’s face it they are hard to write, especially after a successful first one.

 So what can you do about this problem?  I’m not saying my work is a phenomenal success, I can merely supply an answer to what to do about second novels.  Authors and novelists, here’s what I did.

 I wrote a novel, got an agent, and the novel was sent to about twenty editors.  One of these was even Hosseini’s editor. I received these oxymoronic letters: the writing is strong, or evocative, or lyrical or spellbinding, BUT it’s not marketable. How could that be?

 Okay, I thought, I’ll put it away and write another.  That’s precisely what I did, and that’s precisely what anyone out there who has faced rejection should do.  Write another novel.  Now this second novel will be your first, and if it is picked up, will probably stand more of a chance then your first one, which will now become your second novel.  With the experience of writing another novel, you can now face that first one now dubbed “your second,” and make it stronger and marketable. 

 Maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than your first.  Why? You’ve gained much more experience. Surely, you won’t have trouble beginning it, because all you’ll have to do is read it over, make notes, and then revise it. Read it again and make final changes.  You’ll save yourself time, emotional roller-coaster feelings of self-doubt, and be able to send your agent that “second novel” sooner rather than later. How long did it take you to get that final draft you sent out? Think of all the time saved!

 Of course, it helps if you have a terrific writing group like the one I have to give you support.  It helps if you’ve co-authored The End of the Book: Writing in a Changing World, or if at least you’ve downloaded it and read it!

 There is no perfect writing—there is only re-writing. Deal with it. Good luck.

“Ira Glass said in a recent interview: ‘It’s hard to make  something that’s interesting. It’s really, really hard. … Basically, anything  that anyone makes. … It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that  anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The  natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity  in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse  of the universe. … So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is …  an act of will. ‘ “

For those of you who enjoy a good mystery, sometimes set in exotic locales such as South Africa, Russia or Norway, and all connected somehow to the world of jockeys and horse, I have sad news for you. The leader of this genre, author Dick Francis, died a few days ago at age 89, after entertaining his way through more than 40 novels.

Raised in southwest Wales, Francis learned to ride when he was 5 and won his first race at 8. He dropped out of school and began racing for a living at age 15. After a stint in the Royal Air Force, he married his beloved Mary, a university-educated literate schoolmistress, arriving at their wedding with his arm in a sling after a fall from a horse. Little did he know then that everything that happened to him would be fertile ground for his novels in the future.

After turning pro,  Francis was Queen Elizabeth’s number 1 jockey for four seasons in the 1950’s, until he broke so many bones he was advised to give up racing. Out of work, he wrote his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, and for the next 16 years made his living as Britain’s Sunday Express racing correspondent. It was Mary who encouraged him to try his hand at a novel. He drew on his jockey experience and wrote Dead Cert.

It was so well received, he wrote a book a year after that.  Horses feature in all of the novels, as well as injured jockeys, lonely or divorced men whose valiant efforts to pursue villains, especially those involved with the racing world, kept the books fast-paced. When they not set at one of the UK’s champion racetracks, Francis takes his protagonist to one of those exotic locales.

I came to Dick Francis novels later in my reading life, thinking a mystery about jockeys would not interest me. I was so wrong. Once I’d discovered him, I read all of Francis’ back list and then each new one as it was published. Wife Mary became her husband’s research person, often learning the specialized fields that overlapped the ‘horse’ story. She learned to paint for In the Frame and about wines for Proof. For the novel Flying Finish she learned to fly and loved it so much she kept up her pilot’s license. After Mary’s death in 2000, their son Felix helped his father produce the novels.

If you’re looking for a new old writer to explore, with enough books to keep you busy, try one from a master:

DICK FRANCIS.

Thank you, thank you , Garrison Keillor!

If you don’t subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac–you should. Every day you receive a poem and a bunch of wonderful information and insights into writers’ lives…for instance this long quote, worth the read, (below) arrived today about Elizabeth George–

“It’s the birthday of a woman considered by many to be the  greatest living mystery novelist, New  York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George,  born in Warren, Ohio  (1949). The London Times recently ranked her with Sir  Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie on its all-time best ‘masters of  crime’ list. She’s the author of the Inspector Lynley series, which includes  the titles Payment in Blood (1989), Well-Schooled in Murder (1990), In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (1999),  and A Traitor to Memory (2001).
  She grew up in Mountain View, California,  where Google is now headquartered. But back then, it was a sleepy, slightly  rundown town, which she’s described as ‘pre-pre-Silicon Valley.’ Her parents didn’t have that much  money, and trips to the public library were her family’s most constant form of  entertainment. She always knew she wanted to be a writer, and she wrote her  first novel when she was 12. It was a mystery in the Nancy Drew tradition.
  She graduated from college with an English major. Rather  than sitting down to write novels, which she knew was her calling, she did what  she calls the ‘Divine Dance of Avoidance.’ She was busy doing  everything except writing. She got a teaching credential, became a high school  English teacher, and got a master’s degree in counseling. Every summer break,  when she’d get 10 weeks off of school to write, she would be filled with anxiety  about starting a book, about whether her plot or characters would be any good,  or whether she’d be able to write convincingly, or whether she’d be able to  finish anything she started.
    And then, in 1983, her husband bought a computer in order to  write his graduate thesis. They’d never owned a computer, only typewriters, and  she said she knew it could make her ‘life as a writer much easier,’  to be able to cut and paste and edit on the screen. She chose to make it a  defining moment: When the computer arrived at their house, she said: ‘I  was faced with the simplest life question I’ve ever had to answer. I asked  myself whether, on my deathbed, I wanted to sigh and say, ‘I could have written  a novel’ or ‘I wrote a novel.’ Believe me, the answer was simplicity  itself.’
  She sat down on June 28, 1983, created a file called  ‘Simon’ on the IBM PC, and on September 5, she stood up,  having finished the first draft of her first English crime novel. It featured a  cast of characters that included Thomas Lynley, Simon St. James, Lady Helen  Clyde, and Deborah and Joseph Cotter. She called it Something to Hide, which, she later joked, ‘was pretty much  the recommendation of those who read’ the novel. The novel was rejected by  everyone she sent it to, but the people at Scribner’s said along with their  rejections some nice things about her writing style, and she was thoroughly  encouraged.
  She made a trip to England, wrote a second English crime  novel which was similarly rejected, made another trip to England the following summer,  and when she returned she had 42 days left until she needed to go back to the  classroom to teach high school English for the year. She felt like she’d come  up with a great plot, structure, and twist, and she was determined to write the  novel before school started up. So she sat down and wrote for 8 to 16 hours a  day. She finished the first draft of the novel in three and a half weeks. She  revised it and sent it off to an agent. The agent sold it Bantam Books, which  was just beginning a line of hardcover mysteries.
  The book was A Great  Deliverance, her first published title and the first in the Inspector  Lynley series, and it was a great success. She quit her high school teaching  job of 13 years and began writing full time.
  She writes five days a week when she’s working on the first  draft, and when she’s on subsequent drafts, she writes seven days a week. She  always gets up at 6 a.m., she says, feeds the dog and takes vitamins and works  out on an Exercycle for 30 minutes while reading a meditation book, then  inspirational book, then a novel. And she lifts weights for 35 minutes while  watching The Today Show. She  meditates for 10 minutes, sits down at her desk, reads great literature for  about 15 minutes — something along the lines of Jane Austen — and writes a  paragraph or page or two in a journal. And then she begins to work on the novel  she’s writing. She keeps a plot outline, and everyday she writes a minimum of  five pages, even if she’s on the road for book tours or on vacation.
  George said, ‘The only way to succeed at the  writing life is to be able to live according to a schedule that accommodates  time to write.’ Her newest Inspector Lynley novel, This Body of Death (2010), comes out this April.”