The Book Isn't Ready

by Kasie Whitener

 

Last week I had the longest conversation I’ve had with my agent since she said she wanted to sign me. We spoke for nearly two hours about the first 100 pages of my manuscript. After reading them for the second time, she wanted to share her thoughts.

 

I took four pages of notes in a separate Google document while we spoke. Everything she said was spot on. She had questions I couldn’t answer about the world I’ve built. She found contradictions and inconsistencies. She found confusing motivations and no motivations and inconsistent motivations.

 

She found out the book isn’t ready.

 

And this creates a lot of work for both of us. Me on revision, her on reminding herself that I will make her money someday. Just not today.

 

I knew Being Blue wasn’t ready for an agent or a publisher. I knew it even as I sent it to her. But I also didn’t know exactly what to fix. The exchange went like this:

 

Me: You rep vampire novels? I have one of those.

Her: Send it to me.

Me: It’s not ready. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it.

Her: Send it to me.

 

And here we are, eight months later, talking about what it needs to make it ready. To make it irresistible to any editor she shares it with. She didn’t drop me. She told me to revise it.

 

I’m not discouraged. In fact, Amy was so supportive of the work – and continually said she loves it – that I felt excited to jump back in. I felt like I stood in front of Gordon Ramsey while he tasted my dish and he said, while rubbing his lips together, “So savory. For anyone else, this would be great. But it’s not your best.”

 

Fresh eyes on your work can be transformational. Being Blue has been workshopped through Columbia II for years. I mean, years. Every scene has been in front of other writers. But Amy isn’t looking at this like a writer. She’s a reader. Even better, she’s a salesperson. She knows what readers buy.

 

I’ve been given painful feedback before. Everything from dismissing vampires as a misdiagnosis of rabies to being accused of being a Twilight wannabe. My vampire pages have been in front of readers who wanted to love it but didn’t and readers who wanted to hate it but couldn’t.

 

“It’s well written,” some reluctant readers say, not liking the sex, the cussing, or the killing. “But vampires aren’t really my thing.”

 

I’ve received painful feedback before, but Amy’s was like the day after a 120-squat workout. It’s a good hurt. You know it took effort. You know it built muscle. You know it’s the next stage that will get you to the next stage.

 

And since Tuesday, I’ve been working on the key fixes she identified for me so that the next time we talk, we can address a different set of fixes. Again and again. Until it’s ready.

You Write Like a MOTHER

by Lynda Maschek

We all do it. Straight or Gay. Male or female. Young or old. Experienced or novice. Alien or human. When we write, we write like a MOTHER.

Mothers and writers guide the plot, (child) into new directions and can change the course of a child or a story. A good writer will grip your attention, change your outlook, give you hope or tell you what you need to hear but don’t want to know, all in the same sentence. Mothers are like that, too.

Much like a writer, Mothers guide us to find new adventures at the neighborhood playground, the mountains or foreign shores.

Mothers nurture and nudge our curiosity, they educate and inform. 

Mothers can hold us in suspension about our next Birthday surprise or they can hold our suspension about the next psychotic character they plan to marry. 

Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, created a memorable character who typified the essence of motherhood. Mrs. Gump was a proper Southern woman who startled the reader with her savvy sexual methods to persuade the school Superintendent to accept her son into mainstream school.

Seeing the potential for a strong plotline and character structure is another mothering gift. A writer has to dig behind the obvious, (think teenagers,) and discover what is hidden within the character.  Writers and mothers can guide a mediocre personality and develop it into its full potential, for good or evil, as did Mrs. Gump. She saw the potential in young Forrest and filled him with wise quotes that later were necessary to guide him in his life, proving him more intelligent that the people he encountered. 

Mrs. Gump also taught Forrest that he had no limits, nothing to fear, and to not let anyone tell him he was ‘different” or unworthy of accomplishing great things.

A writer writes a story, holds the hand of the story, builds it up nurtures it and then knows when to let go. The storytelling of the sacrificial mother, working multiple low paying jobs so that her gifted child can attend Juilliard, will one day realize her hardest sacrifice will be to surrender her child and allow them to pursue their dream. 

The mother/writer gave all she could and then struggles with the dreaded right-of- passage, when her work will ship out and make its own way through the world to be reviewed by critics.

Writers naturally develop a mothering consciousness about their work, be it novels, short stories or poetry.  Similar to a brooding mother bird, writers protect their literary nests of heart and art. They minister to the growth of words, characters, mysteries, dramas and adventures, allowing their unique stories to unfold.

Just like Mom.

Giving Women What They Want

By Laura P. Valtorta

Stieg Larsson, (1954 – 2004) the Swedish author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (in Sweden originally titled Men who Hate Women), The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, wrote books that are wildly successful because they give women what they want: a strong female character who defies every despicable stereotype. The character, Lisbeth Salander, lives the way she wants in a society that tries its best to suppress her. More than 27 million copies of Larsson’s novels have been sold in 40 countries.

There is no doubt in my mind that Larsson’s longtime companion, Eva Gabrielsson, helped invent the characters in these novels, especially Lisbeth Salander. Full credit must be given, however, to Larsson for being strong enough to write such a fantastic female character, who steals the show from Blomquist, the character who may be Larsson’s alter ego.

But to say that Blomquist is Larsson’s alter ego is unfair. Every character is part of the author’s psyche. Lisbeth is Larsson.

Lisbeth Salander exists in a world of misogynists, a world that is constantly trying to beat her down. She thrives, nevertheless, because she displays so little emotion. For a five-foot-tall woman she is exceedingly strong, physically, and knows how to use weapons and fight. She always protects herself and successfully fights off the larger men who try to kill her. She has sex when she wants, with whom she wants, and then she walks away unscathed. (Except for Blomquist, who is the love of her life, but whom she ignores when he goes off with another woman.) She excels at math and science and makes her living as a computer hacker. She depends on no one.

There are no children in Lisbeth Salander’s world. No husband. She makes her own money – lots of it – and spends it as she wants – on a luxury apartment and lots of travel. Nothing ties her down. When the time comes, she drives off on her motorbike, leaving the expensive apartment, and its IKEA furnishings behind.

This is the dream world, the ideal world that Stieg Larsson has given us. It is a wonderful gift.

An Outsider Asks: What Is Southern Lit?

By Janie Kronk

“You learn a lot about where you’re from by learning about someplace new.”

These words were spoken to me by my boss in Ohio, shortly before I transplanted myself south for graduate school. Taking this statement to heart, I’ve done my best to be a good pupil while living here, learning about “The South” and trying to piece together what it teaches me about the north.

There are many aspects of Southern living to hold up in comparison to what I knew back home: Southern Architecture, Southern Cuisine, Southern Literature. This last item on the list is of particular interest to me. While it is easy to see the influence of climate and history in the buildings along the coast, and hard to argue with the zeal for barbeque that permeates the region, I have a little more trouble recognizing what makes writing “Southern.” Is it literature that takes place in the South? Written by Southerners? Or is writing made Southern by the presence of certain thematic elements? If so, what are those elements?

The tradition of southern literature includes greats such as William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Mark Twain and many others. There are anthologies published to highlight the work of contemporary Southern writers. I must admit, I have not witnessed quite the hype over a tradition of Midwestern literature, even though Ohio alone claims authors such as James Thurber, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

For a time, I thought this may have something to do with my home region being part of “Middle America” – thus having no distinctive character of its own around which to form a literary culture. Still – and this may just be because it is “home” – I do find something unique about the blend of farm and factory, rivers, cities, and cornfields. But the sense of identity with the place is more subdued than what I have witnessed in The South.

So far, the thing that strikes me as being most unique about The South is not its food, its cities, or its literature. It’s not the manners, and it’s not the hot summers. It’s the sense of being Southern that Southerners seem to have.

This sense of uniqueness is there even though modern life has erased many of the boundaries that define one place from another – throughout the country we see the same strip malls and the same sprawl; we have the same food shipped to us in our grocery stores; we have access to the same information over the internet and in our libraries and bookstores. Despite everywhere becoming more and more the same, there still seems to be a consensus: something is different about The South.

This different-ness holds up as writers continue to fabricate stories. But what makes these stories different? Maybe Southern Literature in the 21st century is itself a fabrication – not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of being a built thing – an identity constructed again and again with each telling of a new tale while other distinctions vanish with the shift to a global culture.

Male Writers

By Laura P. Valtorta

Men. What are they seeing? What are they feeling? Why is Woody Allen a sports fan? They act so bombastic and inscrutable that I must read their fiction to understand them. Here are three of my favorite writers:

RICHARD FORD. For the past 20 years he has led us through the life of character Frank Bascombe, the hero of the books The Sports Writer, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He also has written several short stories, some of them in collections. His latest short story appeared in The New Yorker magazine about a year ago.

When Richard Ford came to speak at USC as part of the Jeanette Turner Hospital program, I wondered if he would be snobby after so much success. He is a Louisiana native who writes about New Jersey, a child dying, two divorces, and growing old in the real estate business. Funny and poignant. I thought maybe he wrote about himself. Turns out, Frank Bascombe is not much like Richard Ford, who has been married to the same woman for many years, has no children, and divides his time among homes in Colorado, New Jersey, Ireland, and Louisiana. His talk was entertaining and never condescending. He seemed happy with himself and his life.

Richard Ford is short and compact, unlike his writing which is sprawling and unedited. He is about 60, has clear blue eyes and is part Native American. He talks to his fans; he talked to me! As the studio executive once said about Carole Lombard: “Me likee.”

HARUKI MURAKAMI (say it fast) is the master of existential fiction. I can’t get enough of him. Luckily, all of his novels and short stories have been translated from Japanese to English.

The best way to meet Haruki is through the short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Reading and re-reading the same stories. They draw the reader along. The characters are rich, the metaphors come to life. The intrigue is that these stories are difficult to understand. "The Poor Aunt" is a good place to start. The narrator doesn’t just feel like he has a poor aunt on his back. He actually does, which makes life cumbersome. I see the poor aunt as a metaphor for depression. The other stories are more complex. What happens in “Birthday Girl?” What does “The New York Mining Disaster” have to do with New York? Why the obsession with cats?

Haruki Murakami has written an autobiography called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which doesn’t shed much light on his stories but says a lot about being Japanese and loving jazz.

TOM PERROTTA. This writer is not someone I want to meet. He is too preppy and reminds me of the frat boys in college. He probably drinks beer and uses pick-up lines. He might think he’s good-looking. Maybe he is.

What strikes me about Perrotta’s writing (Election, Joe College, Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher) is that he has mastered the art of creating characters through alternating points of view. In The Abstinence Teacher, he writes from two minds: a woman, a sex education teacher, who wants to be able to teach freely about birth control in public schools, and a man who has been “saved” by a fundamentalist Christian Church. The characters clash. Perrotta makes them both likeable. How does he do this? He understands how women think. How? Maybe men and women are not so different after all.