Q&A with Emma Donoghue, author of ‘Room’

Emma Donoghue’s latest novel Room tells the story of Jack and his Ma who live in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11. As Jack reaches his fifth birthday, he begins to ask questions concerning their surroundings, provoking his mother to reveal to him that there is a world outside of their room.

Q: The story of Room is told from five year old Jack’s perspective. What was the inspiration for adopting a child’s voice and how did your approach compare to writing from an adult perspective?

A: I would never have tackled such a story except from the novel perspective of the child: a five-year-old’s vision seemed to me to offer possibilities for making this a really interesting story. It was really no harder than using an adult narrator, because every individual voice needs to be crafted, and every narrator has their limitations; it’s always a matter of trying to suggest more than the narrator understands.

Q: I read elsewhere in an interview with you that the story of Room came to you quite quickly. Is this always the case when it comes to your writing?

A: Sadly, no: although I often get an initial idea fast, it usually takes a lot of chewing over before I find the right shape or angle for a novel. Room was unlike any of my other works in that it really dropped into my lap and I knew at once that this was a story people would care about.

Q: Your writing has contributed to many different mediums of expression, such as novels, short stories, plays for stage, radio and screen. Do you find any of these disciplines you have turned your hand to more pleasurable, or more fascinating than the others?

A: Well, they all have their satisfactions, some (I’m thinking of literary history) quieter than others. The most exuberant times I’ve had have been with a theatre company in rehearsal, but overall fiction is my favourite, perhaps it’s because it’s the one in which I get to control everything!

Q: How does the practice, sources for inspiration and the creative process of writing novels, such as Room, compare to that of writing literary history, such as Inseparable?

A: The research for works such as Inseparable is tiring but demands less of me personally; the novels are faster but I have to put more of myself into them, they’re more of an emotional marathon. When I write fact-based historical fiction I get to wear the two hats of researcher and novelist in turn, which is great fun.

Q: The premise of Room, a mother and son locked away from the outside world, sounds disturbing and eerie on paper, yet the innocence of Jack, and the love between him and his mother suggests otherwise. What inspired you to use this notion of extreme isolation and take it down such a tender path and revelatory path?

A: The initial trigger was reading a few headlines about Felix Fritzl, who was five when he encountered the outside world for the first time. But I knew that what I wanted to write was a purely fictional story so I stepped well away from the Fritzl and other cases and came up with my own scenario which in many ways (e.g. the presence of natural light) is much less horrifying than the real ones. My aim was to simplify and ameliorate a kidnapping scenario so that the emphasis would be on the issue of freedom versus safety: the question of whether Ma can possibly give Jack what he needs for a happy childhood.

- Laura Cude

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

What do you want to write?

Guest blogger, Susanne Dunlap

I’m beginning to think of that question as a luxury for either the unpublished writer who is still finding her way to her voice, or the superstar writer who can pretty much take charge of her own career and write whatever the heck she wants.

Let me backtrack a little: I can’t put the hard work, soul-searching and sheer hours into writing something that’s really not what I want to write. Every book I’ve written, whether it has ended up being published or not, has been something I’ve felt passionate about.

That said, as I am becoming more and more of a career writer (I quit my dreadful day job three months ago and haven’t looked back), the question of the market and how much a writer should consider it when planning projects, has become much more real to me.

I write historical fiction for adults and young adults. What’s more, at least to start with, my books were about musical subjects, because that’s my background. I spent a good chunk of my adult life in graduate school getting a PhD in Music History, and I discovered so many incredible stories, so much rich material, that if I mined it forever I would never exhaust it.

But it’s not a great time out there for mid-list writers like me. I made a career shift a few years ago when my agent suggested I write a young adult novel, since my adult novels tended to have heroines on the brink of adulthood going through something that gets them to the next stage of their lives. I thought about it, terrified at first that I wouldn’t be able to appeal to younger readers, and discovered something buried in me that reveled in reaching back to explore the emotions and thoughts of a teen. After the first YA novel, I was hooked.

I’d left the ending of that novel, The Musician’s Daughter, up in the air a bit to allow for a sequel, which I already had formed in my mind. I wrote it and submitted it to my publisher as the option book. To my complete astonishment, they didn’t buy it. They wanted another book from me, but weren’t sure about marketing a sequel.

I’m a pretty resilient person, and I soon thought of another subject that fascinated me, but it really took me away from music for the first time. Anastasia’s Secret was a rewarding exploration for me, and it opened me up to more possibilities. In the YA world, maybe I didn’t have to stick closely to music history, which was my “brand differentiator” in the adult world. Hmmmm.

I’m pleased with where my YA novels have taken me so far. The Musician’s Daughter has been nominated for several awards, something I never expected. But the huge success of writers like Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, or Shannon Hale is still only a pipe dream for me.

And that makes me think. Are readers simply not as interested in the things I want to write? I could no more write dystopian fantasy than fly to the moon. I admire those writers immensely, but I’ll never write the way they do. But I would be kidding myself if I claimed not to wish for more success, more readers, for my stories. I find myself reading other writers like an archeologist, digging into the prose to try to figure out what it is that has ignited so many imaginations, and wondering if I could do that with my own preferred subject matter.

I haven’t found the answer yet. But I’m up for just about any challenge. I like to think that each book I’ve written has helped me grow as a writer. And you know what? It’s actually kind of exhilarating to discover that my career as a novelist doesn’t have to be tied to my expertise in music history.

So I’ll end this blog post with a secret: In addition to the book I’m under contract to write for my wonderful publisher, Bloomsbury USA Children’s, I’m working on something pretty frighteningly different. I don’t know yet if it will work, or if it will ever be published, but just doing it has reminded me that the only restrictions on our creativity are the ones we put on it ourselves.

What do I want to write? I want to write something that will push me beyond the limits I thought I had into a new world, a new audience, and new insight about myself. That’s the real joy of writing: what it teaches you about your own capabilities. I feel like a marathon runner of words. An Olympic gymnast of plot. A major-league baseball player of character development.

I’m stoked.

Susanne Dunlap has published two adult historical novels, Emilie’s Voice and Liszt’s Kiss, and two young adult novels, The Musician’s Daughter and Anastasia’s Secret. Her next book, In the Shadow of the Lamp, will be published by Bloomsbury USA Children’s in April, 2011. Susanne lives in Brooklyn, is the proud mother of two adult daughters, a doting grandmother, practically lives for her dog Betty, and loves to ride her bicycle.

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Confessions of a Porn Researcher

Guest blogger, Gail Dines

When people ask about my occupation, my answer is usually a conversation stopper. They do not expect to hear that I research porn, and, after the inevitable jokes, most people are actually fascinated to hear what I have to say about the harms of porn. Of course, not everybody agrees with me, and what often follows is a spirited and lively conversation. It is amazing how many people have stories to tell. Some tend to reveal too much and then regret it. My former dentist, for example, told me about how he liked to spank his wife but then, at my next visit, terminated me as a patient because he said I had a “difficult mouth to work with”! I have had complete strangers write long letters to me about their masturbation history, and one even cc’d the president of my university.

Some of these letters are actually very moving, because they are from men who feel that their porn use is out of control and they don’t know how to stop. Others tell me how porn led to divorce or bankruptcy. And then there are the women who write to say that their partner’s use of porn is a form of betrayal. My suggestion to them to seek help feels inadequate in light of the desperation these people are feeling.

There are also those who enjoy throwing insults at me, but after twenty years I have grown used to this. I have been accused of being a man-hating feminist, a prude, anti-sex, and a book-burning zealot who wants to control how people have sex. What makes dealing with these insults difficult is that a good proportion of these critics have never read my work. Debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of scholarship, but how can I engage with someone who is basing his or her arguments not on my actual work, but on what they think anti-porn feminists have to say? And of course the most likely source of these stereotypes is the media.

The media often caricature us as angry feminists who think that every man who reads porn is going to turn into a rapist. No anti-porn feminist I know would ever make such a claim, because we believe that the effects of porn are often subtle, even barely detectable. But in order to make this case to the public, we need airtime—and for anti-porn feminists this is a rare commodity indeed. I was once a guest on a show on MSNBC that was self-described as an investigative account of the porn industry. For 50 minutes they offered up a glamorous version of the porn industry, but when they came to me in the last 10 minutes, I was swiftly dispatched because I said the show was an example of shoddy journalism.

All of these negative reactions, however, are far outweighed by positive ones. I get emails from people all over the world thanking me for taking on the porn industry and being willing to speak publicly about a topic that generates so much emotion. I am very grateful for these emails. But—to be honest, and knowing what I know about porn—I have no choice but to keep speaking out. Silence would mean capitulation, and as long as there is a porn industry, I will be an anti-porn feminist.

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. She has been researching and speaking about the porn industry for over 20 years. For more information on her new book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, please visit her website at: http://www.gaildines.com/.

Weekly Writing Prompt #9

Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt.

Create a piece (short story, poem, etc.) inspired by this excerpt from the poem Loba: Parts I-VIII by Diana DiPrima:

“like pearls
in the road
she
dances”

Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

Juncturing

Guest blogger, Marissa Matarazzo

In February of this year, my first book, a collection of short stories titled Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums was published. The stories are all connected. The connectedness happened first by accident. And I thought I’d made an idiot mistake. Eventually things got better.

I wrote the bulk of the book in grad school and at the start of my MFA program. I thought that collections of short stories should be a medley, a book of examples of the many things the writer can do. Like an actor’s reel, but in words. I had amnesia about reading and loving Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and David Shickler’s Kissing in Manhattan, both collections of interconnected shorts. A handful of stories later, into what would become Drenched, I noticed that I kept writing about the same thing (love—finding, losing, longing for it, and the magic that occurs in the pursuit of it). I thought of Lorrie Moore’s short story “How To Become a Writer.” At a college cocktail party, the main character is asked what she writes about and her “roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese, and no crackers at all, blurts: ‘Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.’” —a line I’ve always loved but then suddenly identified with in a caught and embarrassed way. I considered my stories and noticed that the narrator and main character in several of them (lazily? uninventively? persistently) felt like the same woman. I’d intended for her to be several characters, different in each story. For whatever beginner or scaredy-cat reason, I thought she couldn’t or shouldn’t be the same. That would prevent the collection from being varied. I panicked and my brain turned twelve and it said: never put too many songs by the same artist on a really good mix-tape. I felt like I was making the worst mix-tape. And what’s most horrifying about thinking I’m writing the wrong thing is the thought of having to dump everything and start over.

I eventually outgrew my panic. I reminded my brain it belonged to an adult and I told it to relax and to not confuse writing with mix-tapes. Then I experimented with this recurring lady narrator and imagined all the stories as parts of a whole—a single world where love and grief and water cause extraordinary things to happen. Like a discovery game, I found and developed the points where the stories could overlap or connect. This game stitched the stories together to give them what started to feel like a cohesive texture.

In the end, that character I was so worried about narrates three of the ten stories in Drenched, and makes a cameo in two others. All the stories are connected by character or event or place, and the second half of the book follows a genetic line through several generations. In the way that single short stories occupy a defined space and have a particularly satisfying heft and shape (like a bocce ball or a souvenir sack of ocean glass—this feeling of dense weight I can palm is something about short stories I love most), connecting all the stories seemed to do this to the collection as a whole. Made it feel solid and contained and like a point on a map I could find and visit. This felt really good.

Marissa Matarazzo is a fiction writer and author of the recently published Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her short stories have appeared online and in literary journals such as FiveChapters, The Nervous Breakdown, Faultline, and Hobart. She has won several writing prizes and earned her MFA from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.

www.marisamatarazzo.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Framing the Past

Guest blogger, Zetta Elliott

In the past, when I taught my course “Gender, Terror, and Trauma in African American Culture,” I urged my students to consider this problem: how can we study representations of trauma when trauma resists representation? How do writers find the words to describe unspeakable acts of violence, and how can artists give form to shapeless feelings of terror? Over the course of a semester, we would grapple with these questions and sometimes conclude that the most a writer can do is frame the traumatic experience. Toni Morrison employed this strategy in her brilliant ghost story, Beloved. Ella refuses to talk about the years she spent locked in a house, the sexual slave of her sadistic owner and his son. Ella insists, “You couldn’t think up what them two done to me,” but the reader is left to do just that—imagine the endless possibilities framed by that isolated house of horrors.

As I work on the sequel to my time-travel novel, A Wish After Midnight, I find myself confronting these issues once more. How do I write about the brutality of slavery and the devastation of war without turning my readers off—or turning them into voyeurs? In the nineteenth century, writers of slave narratives had to be careful not to offend the “delicate sensibilities” of white, genteel, Christian readers—after all, the goal of slave narratives was to provide a vivid, first-hand account of “the peculiar institution” that would convince northern readers of the pressing need for abolition. Today, most of those constraints are gone, and neo-slave narratives can delve into aspects of the slave experience previously deemed too shameful or risqué.

My goal, however, is not to shock readers with my uncensored version of history. Instead, I seek to represent something virtually indefinable—what fellow black Canadian writer Dionne Brand calls, “the fissure between the past and the present.” My enslaved African ancestors were brought to the Americas via the trans-Atlantic slave routes that came to be known as the Middle Passage; Brand characterizes this horrific forced migration as “a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being…a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.” That Atlantic slave trade ended in 1808, but its legacy remains an unhealed wound, a “visible secret” in this country still divided by race. So how can a contemporary writer represent a profoundly traumatic experience that lasted for hundreds and hundred of years?

For me, speculative fiction offers a number of possibilities. When the official historical record fails me, I am allowed to ask, “What if?” I can take a set of known parameters and fill in the blanks with imaginative, educated guesses. Most importantly, the time-travel device enables me to recreate the jarring experience of dislocation that my ancestors endured. Torn from their families and cultures, stripped of their languages and religions, and thrust into a violent, unjust, and confusing country, these survivors quite literally moved between worlds. When I snatch a teenage girl from contemporary Brooklyn and send her back to the Civil War era, I force her into the same hybrid existence faced by her African American forebears. Genna tries to remain true to her 21st-century self, but she must simultaneously adapt to a racist, sexist society that has little use for young black women. How much of her original identity can she retain? What kind of person does she have to become in order to survive in this hostile environment?

Writing this sequel has left me searching for signs—where would today’s teens find traces of Africa in New York City? I have started with religion since that seems most closely linked to what many still refer to as “black magic.” Separated from her boyfriend Judah, Genna is desperate to open another portal that will lead her back into the past. My job now is to help her discover the tools she’ll need to reverse history. Hundreds of years ago, enslaved Africans had no choice but to pass through the Door of No Return; crossing that threshold led them away from Africa and out to the boats that waited to transport them to the New World. I am hoping to devise a way for Genna to harness the power of her African ancestors so that she is able to control her own movements and shape a past that, to many, still seems beyond redemption.

References:
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott moved to Brooklyn in 1994 to pursue her PhD in American Studies at NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published in several anthologies, and her plays have been staged in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Her first picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest; it was named Best of 2008 by Kirkus Reviews, a 2009 ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Bird won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Elliott’s first young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “gripping,” “vivid, violent and impressive history.” She currently lives in Brooklyn.

www.zettaelliott.com

www.zettaelliott.wordpress.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

I Believe

Guest blogger, Melanie Sumner

Over the summer I asked students in my online creative writing course to post blog entries about “hidden agendas” in their writing. These were graduate students writing fiction and creative nonfiction, and I was surprised at the number of them who claimed they wrote for entertainment and informational purposes only. Aside from a couple of students admitting the intention to share their religious views, most fiction writers swore they weren’t trying to get anything more than a good belly laugh or an honest tear out of the reader.

I would have said the same thing a few weeks earlier, before some New Mexicans took offense at the portrayal of Taos in my new novel, The Ghost of Milagro Creek. The novel had only been out for two weeks and was selling widely across the United States when a local bookstore in Taos announced their refusal to carry it on their shelves when I came to Taos on my book tour. They cited “inaccuracies” as the reason.

Around the state, the opposition gathered to affirm that indeed, Sumner’s fictional barrio outside of Taos, New Mexico, a mixture of Latino, Native American, and Caucasian people struggling with big hearts through a web of poverty, addiction, and violence, was….well, just not right. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, those in opposition to The Ghost of Milagro Creek are gringos like myself. Native Americans and Latinos in New Mexico have praised the book for capturing the essence of a unique culture.

When the hullabaloo over the book arose, I thought, “Oh, for Pete’s sake; it’s just a story. You’re allowed to write whatever you want in fiction.” A turning point came for me on the Leonard Lopate show in NYC. Leonard said that his visits to Taos left him with the impression of a tourist town. As a tourist, he wasn’t familiar with the portrait I had of the area, a rendering that included such heavy issues as suicide, alcoholism, addiction, child abuse by a member of the clergy, parental neglect, and homophobia. “Because that’s what life is like in the barrio?” he asked. I answered that that is what life is like in a lot of places for a lot of people. “I believe,” I said, “It is often a consequence of poverty and what is happening in our culture as family ties weaken and individuals lose their sense of place in a community.”

There, I had said it. “I believe.” I could have gone on to blame television, fundamentalism, patriarchy, capitalism, the lack of socialized health care, standardized testing, and the insidious cult of marketing. Did I ever really think that I could tell a story about people I made up in situations I invented and not expose my viewpoints? Did I believe that I was writing fiction for any reason other than to change the world?

The Ghost of Milagro Creek is my third book and my first step away from autobiographical fiction. I had prided myself on the fact that although I had lived in the area for three years, and still consider it the home of my soul, the story was not true, and I did not appear in the cast of characters. Then friends began to remind me that some of the violent episodes in the novel originally showed up in newspapers or in schools where they had taught. I had not consciously thought of these accounts while I was writing. I thought only of what Abuela was putting in her compost, what Mister Romero might say to his friend Tomas when he realized that they were in love with the same girl. All the same, that information dwelt within me, and it came out in the novel. Although a good writer leaves no fingerprint on the page in terms of telling a story, all of us, consciously or unconsciously, address the prevailing issues in our society. Let the bookstores lock their doors on The Ghost of Milagro Creek; an old Taosensio named D.H. Lawrence would be the first to admit that a little controversy never hurt a novel.

Melanie Sumner is the author of the novels The Ghost of Milagro Creek, The School of Beauty and Charm, and a collection of stories – Polite Society. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines and anthologies. She is a recipient of The Whiting Award and a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University. The book trailer of The Ghost of Milagro Creek can be viewed on You Tube.

www.melanie-sumner.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Weekly Writing Prompt #8

Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt.

Write a piece incorporating the words pearl onions, slingback heels and blue hydrangeas. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

It’s Showtime! Your Novel is Born!

Guest blogger, Ilie Ruby

You’ve waited your whole life for this to happen. And now it’s finally here: the publication of your debut novel. You have given up everything for this book—men, jobs, nights out with the girls. You worked so damn hard on it—almost ten years, but you know that a lot of people work hard for things and never get them. You revel in it all. You feel unimaginable gratitude. But you remember the before part….

While you are waiting…. Before your book is published, when you are still struggling, you take a lot of stuff from people. Some ask, are you still working on that book? And, whatever happened to that book? And sometimes you resent your book. Even though you LOVE your book, you resent how much you love it. You sit at a coffee house, turn on your computer and instead of writing you make a list of all the men you could have married if it weren’t for the existence of this book. I mean, it was your lover. Your number one priority. You are nothing if not devoted. You immerse yourself in the setting, letting it take you away. You spend hours thinking about story arcs and crafting real and whole characters with dire flaws that are still somehow relatable. You fall in love with your characters. When your writing hits a rough patch, certain things have to be cut to allow you to refocus, and often the casualty is whatever man you happen to be dating at the time. The writing life is a solitary life, at least that is what they told you in grad school, and so you see it not as something that has been forced upon you but as a right of passage. You follow sage advice. You get a room of your own. Usually it’s a tiny studio apartment. If you live in California, you sleep on a Murphy bed that pulls out of the wall and you cry many tears there about why your life is not happening when you are such a good person and a hard worker. You are only 26 years old but you feel like you are 46 and that you have been a writer forever. You have a cat, but not the type that cozies up on your lap while you write, the type that leers at you and thinks you are an impossible dreamer. You go to poetry readings and meet other writers and you commiserate over cups of mint tea and glasses of chardonnay. You win scholarships and awards to writer’s conferences where you actually feel validated and a part of a community and then you must say goodbye, because conferences only last a week. You publish short stories and poems in literary magazines. When you have your manuscript critiqued by well-known authors you ask them inane questions because you feel so inferior. Some of these people are kind and encouraging. They tell you to absolutely keep writing. They tell you that you are talented. Some are not so kind. And you leave and vow to out the unkind people when it does happen for you. But of course you don’t, in the end. You simply don’t. Still, something in you knows that one day it will happen for you. One day. Just a matter of time. Tick tock. And that is why you must keep going. You promise yourself you will be very kind when it is your turn to critique.

When it does finally happen for you it is years later. You have just started to get busy doing something else. You are creating a family. You think your work is over and that it is time to take a nice long vacation to Mexico with your husband and drink Margaritas on the beach. But there is no time for that. There is a lot of hurry up and wait. You’re not quite sure what to do with yourself in the months after you receive the news so you shop a lot. You hunt for bargains at TJ Maxx and look for dresses to wear for readings. You imagine what you will say about how it all happened for you. You rehearse your story. You learn what social networking sites are the best for authors, how to network, and how to make a book trailer. Your 3-year old daughter starts asking if Luke Ellis, one of the characters in your novel, is coming to dinner. And then suddenly, things begin to move at lightening speed.

You lose your anonymity. Old friends, lovers, and nemeses start calling and emailing questions and to say congratulations. There are reviews and quotes to get and parties and interviews and book tours and publicists and suddenly you are thrown into a whole new world where there are new hurdles and you find yourself with no rule book but you quickly begin to learn on your own. The road to publication is paved with angels and devils and you learn to keep the angels close and let the devils go to hell. The angels drop presents in your path and show you what to do and who to meet. You become obsessed with googling your name on the internet. You now belong to the world of authors, at least your name does. You vigilantly monitor book sites and feel eternally grateful to book bloggers. You revel in the praise and take slight offense at criticism and then you get over it because someone tells you to get over it: that this is your dream, that the reviews are great, and it is all finally happening for you. And you should just be happy! And so you calm your little self down and have a good long talk with yourself about it and you may even cry a few happy tears.

And then you begin to really start to enjoy it. I mean, really enjoy it. Maybe even LOVE it. And you start doing readings and you LOVE that even more. Maybe you love that the most. You LOVE your readers. You can’t believe how much you love them. They don’t know how much work you put into your book but they can appreciate the story and love your words. You adore talking to them. You start to fall in love with everyone. At every book signing you meet at least 5 amazing people that you want to take home with you so you can listen to their stories. After all it is in your nature to ask questions. You embark on a book tour and your first stop is your launch in NYC at a fabulous bookstore. You are gripped with worry that no one will show up except for one strange guy lurking in the back row sipping coffee and flipping through a Maxim magazine. You bring your children, even the ornery unpredictable three-year old Tasmanian devil, and dress her up beautifully and she is thrilled to pieces to be with you. You show up early to the bookstore for your reading. They tell you to wait in the green room but you don’t want to wait there. You return to mill about with the audience and talk. Moments before it’s time to take the stand you receive texts from three friends who say they have accidentally gone to the wrong bookstore, and then more texts from other friends saying they are stuck in traffic. When it is your time to go on, it comes too soon. You hear your name announced over the loud speaker. It is surreal. You’d rather keep talking to the people in the audience. But the show must go on.

At the podium, everyone is waiting for you to be clever and confident and you actually feel both of those things for the first time in such a long time because you know your work better than anyone else. There are smiles and you relax and smile back and thank everyone for coming and you mean it. You thank your amazing agent because she has stuck by you for a lifetime. And then you start to read. The sections are flowing perfectly. You keep the audience entertained with personal anecdotes and you relax and feel really comfortable. And just when you’ve hit a dramatic highpoint in your story, your 3-year old begins to shriek “MOMMA! I WANT MAMMA! COME GET ME, MAMMA,” from the audience, and she is pointing at you as though she is being tortured by your absence. And you don’t skip a beat. You introduce your darling daughter to the audience and instruct your husband to go get her a cupcake and he shoots you a dirty look but does it dutifully. And you pick up where you left off and finish up your reading.

After, when you sit down to sign books, the line grows longer and longer with all the people who showed up late, and all the people that have been waiting for you. Your three-year old crawls up onto your lap with chocolate frosting on her face and watches you sign books. Your nine-year old hangs on your shoulder, watching, because she has just announced her plans to become a writer. People who you have not seen in 20 years suddenly appear from out of nowhere. Some of them buy three or four books at a time. They have braved their way through the NYC traffic to get here. A few old friends shed a tear or two because it has been so long and the fact that you have achieved your dream reminds them of their own. It’s just so good to share this moment of happiness with them. People try to hug you across the table but it is too wide. You talk too long to each person but no one seems to mind. This could go on and on forever. You want it to. You feel complete. Content. Just happy to have had this moment tonight. After, you go out for a drink with your agent and she says you were marvelous and asks, “So, when can you get me the first 50 pages of your next book?” And you get to thinking and on the ride home, you begin anew.

Ilie Ruby is a Boston-based writer whose novel The Language of Trees (Avon HarperCollins) debuted on July 22, 2010.

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Rules of the Story

Guest blogger, Irene Ziegler

I grew up on Lake Byron in DeLand, Florida where my journey as a writer began. Both my books are set there. My father was an avid fisherman, and gave me my first tackle box when I was six. He was also a man who respected water, and because my sisters and I spent so much time in it, insisted we obey his rules of the lake: No Swimming Alone, No Diving in Unknown Waters, and the one that got me in the most trouble, No Using Dad’s Rod and Reel.

Remembering my childhood, I am flooded with images of water. Water was my playground and deathtrap; sustenance and enemy, and today, is the dark pool of memory into which I cast my hook. One particular, dark incident over forty years ago brought forth a wellspring of creativity still bubbling today.

When I was nine years old, the man next door, whom I knew as Mr. Fischer, sexually molested me. (I’m fine, and he’s dead.) For years the incident lay dormant in my memory, a monster fish I couldn’t see but knew was there, waiting to bite me in the behind. Then, in 1982, I went trolling for that monster fish, dragged it into the light, and wrote it down. “Hooked” was my first short story.

“Hooked” won the Irene Ryan Short Story Award, was published, and on the strength of that same story, I was granted a fellowship in creative writing from the University of Virginia. “Hooked” was also the anchor story in my solo performance piece, Rules of the Lake, which won the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Drama. Then it became part of a collection of stories, Rules of the Lake, which was named a Best Book for Young Readers by the New York Public Library.

I mention these milestones not to toot my own horn, but to mark my journey as a writer. I turned a “monster fish” into an elevated version of itself, suitable not just for public consumption, but for critical praise. Rawest memories, then, are often seeds for fiction because, as we all know, monsters make good stories.

Although fiction may begin with real life, it cannot dwell there. Fiction is crafted; real life is not. And when drawing from memory, a writer must always be guided by the Rules of the Story.

The line between fact and fiction may be a fine one, but it must exist. Real life is incidental, fiction is planned. Real life unfolds slowly; fiction has pace. Real life isn’t fair; fiction evens the score. Writers interpret “what really happened” and transform it into “what happens next?” Facts are set aside, events reordered. Characters take the place of real people, who behave according to the writer’s plan, not their own. And the words used to describe characters, settings and events do not live in the mundane terrain of the real. They are carefully chosen so as to elevate the reader’s experience in a perfectly balanced world.

I created Annie Bartlett and dropped her into the setting of my life. Her story, like mine, unfurls in water. But her memories and monsters melt and swirl into a faded picture postcard of a Florida I once knew, but now belongs to her. Annie’s journeys, while inspired by real life, are firmly grounded in rules of the story: No Sticking to Facts, No Creating Characters That are Real People; No Writing Dialogue Exactly as Heard; No Telling it Like it Was.

Irene Ziegler’s new book, Ashes to Water, is a mystery/thriller featuring Annie Bartlett. www.ireneziegler.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Next Page »