Category Archives: Uncategorized

O Come All Ye Faithful Book Buyers

Posted on by

I just returned from my local independent bookstore, and I’m pleased to report that the place resembled a supermarket hours before a major storm is predicted to hit. Aisles crowded with shoppers, a line fifteen deep at the register, store employees earnestly connecting customers to the books they’re desperately seeking. All in all, a sight for sore eyes.

Of course, there’s no hurricane or snowstorm on the horizon—just Christmas, beginning less than twelve hours from now. And the rush at Politics & Prose, located just ten blocks from my house, appears to be part of a nationwide trend (as described a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times) back to hard copies of books and brick-and-mortar bookstores. No one has apparently yet figured out how to enable shoppers to give e-books as presents (and it’s not clear people would find them to be appealing gift purchases anyway, virtual as they are). And even Amazon can’t make a book appear on your doorstep just hours after you’ve hit the one-click button.

I can only hope the trend, if such there is, lasts beyond the Christmas shopping season. I understand the lure of Amazon—the low prices, the convenience, the nearly unbelievable delivery time (what, do they bribe the Post Office or something?). But I don’t particularly want to live in a world without actual bookstores, and sometimes it seems as if that’s where we’re heading.

Not that I think Politics & Prose is in danger of going out of business anytime soon. I’ve never seen it as busy as it was today (and I confess I left empty-handed rather than brave the checkout line), but it has a loyal and devoted following in this part of the world. In fact, “loyal and devoted” is a significant understatement. A year or so ago, when its longtime owners (and founders) announced that they were planning to sell the store, the level of trepidation around here was commensurate with what a group of devout Catholics might experience at the announcement of an imminent change in the papacy. Actually it may have been more acute, since even devout Catholics aren’t about to start worrying that their Church is going to disappear.

Things are calmer now. Politics & Prose has not only survived a change in ownership, it appears to be thriving. The new owners are treading carefully, aware that their constituency is nervous about sudden changes. But they have introduced a few innovations, including a weird-looking machine installed in the fiction section, christened Opus, that can print books on demand. I have yet to see it in action, but who knows, it may well be the wave of the future. Imagine a bookstore that has only display copies of books, so that you can leaf through one if you desire. If you decide you want to buy a copy, it can be printed while you wait. No longer would stores have to try to calibrate the number of copies of a certain title they can sell, risking either overstocks—which they then have to return in possibly unmarketable condition or sell at a deep discount—or long waits for customers ordering books, which may drive them to Amazon. And no such thing as out-of-print titles, either.

If Opus is the ticket to getting Politics & Prose to flourish well into the 21st century, then I’m all for it. Like many in this part of D.C., I find it hard to imagine life without the place. I’ve spent many happy hours there combing through the shelves and display tables, bumping into friends and acquaintances, chatting over coffee or lunch in the café, and—last but not least—buying books. As I seem to keep saying, my novel The Mother Daughter Show isn’t autobiographical, but one of the lines I use about my main character, who’s under pressure to earn some money, could be applied to me: “No more dreaming about getting a job in her cozy local independent bookstore, where she spent so much time browsing some people probably thought she did work there.”

One of the things you often hear about Politics & Prose is that writers in the neighborhood (and there are many) have written entire books in the basement café. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it. I tried to just proofread the galleys of The Mother Daughter Show there and found it nearly impossible. There was just way too much going on. Among other things, I was being stalked by an irresistible, wide-eyed toddler who was practicing her newfound stagger by repeatedly advancing on my table. My galleys couldn’t compete with that.

But if I haven’t written a book there, I will soon be doing one thing quite a few other local authors have done: appearing at an in-store event (on January 15th, at 1 p.m.). Not that this is an honor limited to folks in the neighborhood. Bill Clinton recently appeared at Politics & Prose to tout his book, and shortly before that the store packed them in to hear Walter Isaacson discuss his new biography of Steve Jobs. I’m actually starry-eyed and somewhat disbelieving about standing at the very same lectern where I’ve seen many of my own favorite authors speak. The chance to hear in person someone whose writing you’ve admired, to ask that writer questions, to exchange a few words as he or she signs your book—say what you will about Amazon’s prices and convenience, but that’s something I doubt they’ll ever be able to offer to their customers.

In Darkest Amazonia

Posted on by

I have recently been receiving an interesting, if painful, lesson in how the publishing marketplace works these days.

In my last blog post, I mentioned that, in the midst of all the great publicity I’ve gotten for The Mother Daughter Show, there was one little fly in the ointment: on the day the book was supposed to be released–the same day I got a huge PR boost with an item in The Reliable Source, the Washington Post‘s gossip column–Amazon for some reason chose to list my book as “out of print and unavailable.”

That problem has been corrected–sort of. The next morning, December 2, the status on the book’s Amazon page shifted to “ships in 1-2 months,” which was better, but not exactly enticing to anyone looking for a holiday gift. Later the status shifted to “ships in 4-5 days.” I would have preferred “ships immediately,” of course, but this was certainly a vast improvement.

Yesterday someone alerted me to the fact that the book’s status on Amazon has now gone back to “ships in 1-2 months.” And as of this writing, that’s what it says.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of books available. What, you may ask, is going on here?

Well, here’s how things work at Amazon, as best I can determine–at least when you have a small publisher, as I do: When Amazon gets an order–or a group of orders–it relays the information to the publisher, who is required to send the books to an Amazon warehouse within a few days. The cheapest way to send books is via media mail, which can take a week–or, during the holiday season, possibly longer. Then, when the books arrive at Amazon, they need to be logged in to the system, which can take a few days. Then, at last, they get sent out to customers.

This system may work fine when only a few orders come in. But when there’s high demand for a book, Amazon doesn’t have enough copies on hand to fill orders, and apparently the computer system gets nervous (I realize I’m anthropomorphizing here). Rather than saying something like, “We should be getting some books in any day now, but I can’t absolutely promise that,” it decides to hedge its bets and say something like, “ships in 1-2 months.”

This is apparently what has happened in the case of The Mother Daughter Show. Books should be arriving there any day now, if they haven’t already, but you’d never know that from looking at the Amazon page. And of course, even after those books come in, if more orders come in as well–which I hope they do–the status may well revert to the dreaded “ships in 1-2 months.”

This wouldn’t be so terrible if Amazon didn’t completely dominate the marketplace for books. I’m not necessarily blaming Amazon for this situation. I’ve been telling people they can get the book right away by ordering it through the publisher’s website–fuzepublishing.com–but it’s not clear anyone has chosen that option. People are used to ordering stuff from Amazon, and they may be reluctant to go to some website they’ve never heard of and enter their credit card information (even though you can use Pay Pal!). Amazon has made ordering online such an easy, user-friendly experience (except in the case of my book, of course) that people just naturally gravitate there.

Then there are what have become known as the brick-and-mortar bookstores–if you can still find one. In all of the United States, there is, at the moment, only one actual bookstore that’s carrying the book–Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. And right now they’re temporarily sold out of the book as well, although, again, more books are on their way. (My publisher is working on getting books into the remaining Barnes & Noble stores, but so far that hasn’t happened.)

The whole experience has brought home to me the power that Amazon wields in the marketplace. They’re kind of like God. You can’t actually talk to anyone there to get the situation straightened out. All you can do is send an email, which my publisher informs me gets routed to India. And then you pray. Sometimes they answer your prayer and fix the problem, sometimes they don’t. They move in mysterious ways.

I’ve also realized that books, as we have known them, are probably on their way out. Much as I prefer to read an actual book rather than an e-version, the fact is that there are huge costs and inefficiencies associated with printing and shipping them. All during my travails with Amazon, it’s always been possible–as Amazon cheerily reminds you on the book’s Amazon page–to download The Mother Daughter Show and start reading it on Kindle in “under a minute.” (It’s also available, through Barnes and Noble, in a Nook version as well.) The problem right now is that if you want to give a book as a holiday gift, somehow the e-version just doesn’t quite cut it. But even that may change someday.

Of course, if you’re really intent on ordering a hard copy of The Mother Daughter Show through Amazon immediately, I see there is one option: there’s a used copy available for $88.16. Technology may change, market paradigms may shift, but the American entrepreneurial spirit apparently springs eternal!

My Fifteen Minutes

Posted on by

If Andy Warhol was right about everyone being famous for 15 minutes in the future, I think I’ve just about used up my allotment.

Yesterday my new novel, The Mother Daughter Show, was featured in The Washington Post‘s gossip column, The Reliable Source. There was even a nice photo of me, along with a larger photo of one of the buildings at Sidwell Friends, the school whose real-life Mother-Daughter Show inspired the novel.

People in DC may skip the business section of the Post, they may briefly skitter their eyes across the depressing national and international news, they may shy away from the Metro section, but a lot of them, it seems, make a bee-line for page two of the Style section, where The Reliable Source appears five days a week. The first congratulatory phone call came at 7 a.m., followed by a steady stream of emails from friends and acquaintances, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in many months.

I more or less expected that. After all, I rarely miss a day of The Reliable Source myself. Undoubtedly there are those who consider it little more than fluff. My husband, for instance. While he was thrilled with the item about me and the book, he allowed as how some people reading it might conclude that today was a slow news day. Obviously he hasn’t been paying much attention to the kinds of news items that ring The Reliable Source’s chimes.

For instance, I shared page C2 with items about who Alex Ovechkin is dating; what Michelle Obama ordered at a local restaurant the other night; and the filing of a legal separation petition by Kim Kardashian’s fleeting husband. Anyone who makes the Reliable Source their bread and butter is aware that there was nothing particularly slow about this news day. But my husband is the type of person who would have to ask who Kim Kardashian is (he has actually done this, on more than one occasion).

I’m well aware of the pull of gossip–or whatever you want to call it–on the human imagination. (Right now I’m working on a novel that is partly about that, and it’s set in 1807.) And frankly, at 7:30 in the morning I often find it a lot easier to absorb information about Michelle Obama’s restaurant order (swordfish sliders, sounds good!) than about the latest development in the European debt crisis, although I always promise myself I’ll get to that eventually.

Still, I was brought up a little short yesterday when I was signing my mother out of her assisted living facility and the receptionist greeted me with a broad smile and the words, “I read about you in the paper today!” Then, when I got to my mother’s dentist’s office–which also happens to be my dentist’s office–the staff greeted me by waving the torn-out page from the Post, which they apparently were considering affixing to the wall. (I believe the page has actually been posted on the wall of an organization where I’m a regular volunteer.) Now that’s fame!

It would have been nice, of course, if all this attention could have been translated into book sales before the next edition of Reliable Source appeared and relegated me to my usual state of obscurity. But late yesterday afternoon–on the very day The Mother Daughter Show was supposed to be released–I discovered that Amazon in its wisdom had declared the book to be “out of print” and “unavailable.” You can download the Kindle version, but you can’t even order the print version!

Amazon, I’ve discovered, moves in mysterious–and no doubt robotic, non-malicious–ways. But if someone actually wanted to sabotage my book sales, this would be an excellent way to do it. My publisher is working on correcting this glitch–which, of course, involves emailing someone in India and waiting for a reply, which so far has not arrived. (Apparently, as of the morning of December 2, we’ve made some progress: Amazon now says that the book will “ship in 1-2 months” and warns that it will arrive after the holidays. Not true: plenty of books on hand!)

In the meantime, anyone who would like to buy a print version of the book can easily do so at the website of my publisher, fuzepublishing.com. Or you can buy one of the e-versions: Kindle, Nook, and possibly others as well.

Or, if you’re feeling particularly hostile to technology at the moment–as I confess I am–you could just walk into an actual bookstore and buy a book off the shelf. If you live in Northwest DC, that is. Because as far as I know, the only actual bookstore that’s stocking The Mother Daughter Show is the excellent one in my own neighborhood, Politics & Prose. By all means, patronize it!

Go Ahead, Judge the Cover

Posted on by

The cover for my forthcoming novel, including the watercolor painted by my friend Lidya Buzio.

We all know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. And yet who doesn’t? We do it both in the metaphorical sense and the literal one, constantly. Put a plain brown book cover next to a striking colorful one, perhaps with a clever hook, and which do you think the average buyer is more likely to pick up in a bookstore?

Even in these days of Kindles and Nooks, the cover makes a difference, or so I’m told. It has to be bold and large-scale enough to come across in the thumbnail images that buyers see on websites – even if they may never see the cover again after buying the book.

I know the importance of a good cover from experience. I was lucky enough to have the cover art for my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, done by the famed early American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. He happened to have painted a portrait of one of my main characters in the early 19th century. I’ve gotten compliments on that cover from a number of people, although I always give credit to Mr. Stuart.

So when it came time to settle on a cover for my forthcoming novel, The Mother Daughter Show, I knew it would be an important decision. I had an idea—red velvet stage curtains with the book title emblazoned across them, which I hoped would convey the general idea that “all the world’s a stage”—but translating that idea into reality was a tricky proposition. None of the designs that were presented to me quite matched what was in my head.

Then I—or rather, my husband—had an idea. We have a friend, Lidya Buzio, who is a wonderful artist. Why not see if Lidya would do a watercolor of some curtains for the cover, my husband suggested?

It seemed like a lot to ask, but I knew she’d do a great job. Little did I realize how great. Lidya threw herself into this challenge, sending me over a dozen different versions—even working through Hurricane Irene, which battered her house and studio on the eastern end of Long Island and left her without power for several days.

When at last I saw the finished product—the actual book—for the first time just a couple of days ago, it almost brought tears to my eyes. It’s the cover I’d imagined—no, actually, it’s way better: vivid and inviting and whimsical. These curtains have character! If people really do judge books by their covers, this one should fly off the shelves.

And for me, if not for all those potential readers out there, the cover art is all the more beautiful because it was done by a friend (which is one thing I couldn’t say about Gilbert Stuart). Lidya’s is only the most visible of the contributions that numerous friends of mine have made to this book. I don’t know about other authors, but I don’t seem to be able to do these things alone. I had a small army of friends, Lidya included, reading various drafts, making suggestions, and cheering me on. (This would include my poor husband, who probably rues the day he decided to hitch himself to someone with aspirations to be a writer.)

So to Lidya and all the rest (you’ll find their names in the Acknowledgments section of the book), thank you from the bottom of my heart.

What’s in a Name?

Posted on by

Reading a piece about the opera singer Maria Callas in The New York Times a few days ago has set me thinking about the use of names of real people in fiction.

The Times piece discusses the Terence McNally play Master Class, currently on Broadway, which is based on a series of classes Callas gave for aspiring young opera singers almost 40 years ago. Regrettably, I haven’t seen the current production of Master Class, but I did see another production years ago, and I remember it fairly well. Callas was imperious, dictatorial, at times almost sadistic with the students. It was fascinating to watch, and great theater.

But, Anthony Tommasini tells us in the Times, that’s not exactly what happened. It turns out there’s actually a book about Callas’s master classes, and also a three-disc recording of them. And according to Tomassini, they reveal a Callas who was “frank and demanding,” yes, but also “unfailingly patient and encouraging.” Most important, she was way better at providing substantive artistic advice than the Callas of the play. And it bothers Tommasini that theater-goers will come away with the wrong impression.

It bothers me too. If you’re going to write fiction that messes around with the facts of people’s lives–and that clearly presents itself as fiction, the way McNally’s play does–why use those people’s real names? I find this particularly bothersome when the people whose names are used are still alive (see, for instance, the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network), but I also find it a problem when the subjects are dead. Maybe it’s actually more of a problem, since they can’t defend themselves. Would it have detracted from the drama of Master Class if the main character had been a Callas-like figure who was called something else?

I’ve come across a number of instances of this lately in fiction. I recently finished a novel called City of Light, set in Buffalo around the turn of the century. Among the many things that bothered me about the book was the fact that the author played fast and loose with the reputations of a bunch of real people (most of them known only to aficionados of Buffalo’s local history), inventing a plot in which they casually father illegitimate children with underage girls and scheme to offer up the protagonist as a kind of sacrificial virgin to the sexually rapacious Grover Cleveland. (Okay, Cleveland really did father an illegitimate child–but I doubt he was as warped as he’s made out to be in the novel.) A descendant of one of the people slandered by the author has posted an understandably outraged review of the novel on Amazon.

I also recently had a conversation with someone about the E.L. Doctorow novel Homer and Langley, based on the lives of the Collyer brothers. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the novel because I read that Doctorow changed quite a few facts, including having the Collyer brothers live on into the 1960s, when in fact they died in 1947. None of that bothered the person I was talking to, who was enthusiastic in her recommendation. She even told me that Doctorow had changed the brother who was blind, making it Homer when it had actually been Langley (“Well, he had to,” she said, alluding to the blindness of the original Homer). It turns out it really was Homer Collyer who was blind. But what bothers me is that the person I was talking to wasn’t bothered by the idea that Doctorow made the switch.

I’m currently reading a novel in which Senator Joseph McCarthy is a minor character. I’m not finding this as bothersome as the other examples I’ve given, maybe because McCarthy isn’t “on stage,” as it were, all that much, and maybe because the way he’s portrayed seems pretty consistent with what I know about him. Still, I find myself wondering: Did McCarthy really have a childhood friend whose house he moved into when he was in disgrace? Did he really spend all his time trying to get people to take his phone calls? If he’d merely been presented as a McCarthy-like figure, I suspect I wouldn’t be asking myself those distracting questions.

Of course, there’s a reason writers like to use real names: it arouses people’s interest. We all want to know the intimate details of other people’s lives, or most of us do. But the problem is we’re not usually getting the real details. Yes, we could look up most of these people on Wikipedia and get the true story, or try to, but I doubt many of us bother. Instead, we just assume that what we’ve read or seen is true. A number of people have told me how much they despise Mark Zuckerberg, based on the movie. But is Mark Zuckerberg really like the “Mark Zuckerberg” of The Social Network? I’ve read enough about the divergence between the two to make me doubt it.

I realize this may sound hypocritical coming from someone who wrote a novel based on the lives of real people, using their real names, and is currently working on another one. But I’ve chosen to write about people who are long-dead and pretty obscure. And I’ve almost never changed a verifiable fact that I’ve come across in the historical record. Instead, I’ve let my imagination play in the many gaps between the facts. Plus, I try not to just make stuff up about my characters in order to create a juicy plot, which (it seems to me) is what the author of City of Light did. I’ve tried to understand as much as I can about who my characters really were, from the scant evidence available to me, and then extrapolate from there. (And I have to say, I haven’t gotten any complaints from descendants–quite the contrary.)

I don’t mean to get on a high horse about this. Obviously, there’s been some wonderful fiction and drama that has taken liberties with the lives of real people, going back, as Tommasini points out, to Shakespeare. But when an author deliberately alters the facts of someone’s life, I think it’s only fair to signal that departure by making up a name as well. Yes, readers might lose some of the thrill that comes with getting what they think is an inside story. (And, with the passage of time, that thrill has to dissipate. No one goes to see Hamlet to get the goods on a former Prince of Denmark.) But on the other side of the scale, novelists and dramatists would no longer be distorting the factual record and promulgating misconceptions that can seriously damage people’s lives and reputations.

Fearing Success

Posted on by

Some months ago, when I was balking at rewriting the manuscript of my second novel for what felt like the 37th time, my agent accused me of suffering from “fear of success.” To her mind, this was the only explanation for my reluctance to come up with a new plot and somehow figure out how to insert it into the existing framework of my novel.

To my mind, though, the idea that I was afraid of success was ludicrous. I’d been twisting myself into knots and jumping through hoops for months in order to ACHIEVE success. What I was afraid of was failure. In fact, I find the whole “fear of success” thing no more convincing now than I did when I first heard of it–back in 1972, when I was an undergraduate at Radcliffe, and Matina Horner, who originated the theory, was its president.

But lately I’ve come across the life stories of some writers that have made me think that maybe we all SHOULD fear success.

One of those is William Styron, whose first novel, published in 1952 when he was 26, was a huge critical and popular success. But, as I’m learning from a fascinating and beautifully written memoir by his daughter Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father, from that time on he was more or less tormented by his own perfectionism–and perhaps by the fear that whatever he wrote next wouldn’t equal that first success. Indeed, his second novel was pretty much roundly derided. Although he went on to write two more highly acclaimed novels–The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer, and his masterpiece, Sophie’s Choice–he spent the final 27 years of his life either trying unsuccessfully to write another novel, or in the grips of debilitating depression, or both.

Then there’s Ernest Hemingway, the subject of a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by his friend A.E. Hotchner that detailed the final, paranoid year of his life. And a piece by Jonathan Franzen that appeared in The New Yorker on April 18, 2011, about his friend David Foster Wallace, who suffered from chronic depression and, like Hemingway, ultimately committed suicide.

It’s hard to say that all three of these highly successful writers suffered from mental illness BECA– USE they were successful writers. But the writing, and the pressure of sustaining their success, was clearly related to their suffering. As Alexandra Styron says in her memoir, when her father died it had been “twenty-seven years since he’d felt good about himself,” because it had been twenty-seven years since he’d finished a novel. When Hotchner asked Hemingway why he wanted to kill himself, the reply was, “What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself?” And Franzen suggests that Wallace’s suicide was related to his struggle to finish his final novel: “When his hope for fiction died … there was no other way out but death.”

The knowledge that you have thousands and thousands of readers out there, waiting for your next novel, and that as the years pass their expectations are rising … that’s got to be paralyzing. Maybe even more paralyzing than the fear, known to many less high-profile writers, that you’ll spend years pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into a work of fiction, only to find that you have NO readers. In other words, the fear of failure.

It’s interesting, but perhaps not significant, that all the writers mentioned above were male writers–and, in the case of Hemingway and Styron, Male writers with a capital M. Maybe there’s something about being considered the Great American Novelist (a title that has yet to be bestowed, even putatively, on a female writer, to the best of my knowledge) that makes the head that wears a crown all the more uneasy.

But I don’t know that there’s anything gender-specific going on here (although I feel compelled to point out that, according to Matina Horner, it’s only women who are afflicted with fear of success, associating success with “depression, illness, and sometimes even death”–maybe they know something men don’t?). A while ago I heard the author Stephen McCauley speak about writing. He’s not quite in the Great Writer category, but he’s been highly successful and has a loyal following (myself included). He revealed that he’d been suffering from writer’s block, which had been broken only when he received a call from an editor he knew inviting him to write “women’s commercial fiction” under a pseudonym. Released from the persona of “Stephen McCauley,” he found the words flowed, and he had a blast. (He declined, alas, to reveal the pseudonym under which he had written–but he said the books were available at Costco.)

I could certainly understand that story. I wouldn’t presume to place myself in the same category as McCauley, but my first novel garnered a few intensely enthusiastic fans. When these people told me how much they loved A More Obedient Wife, and how they couldn’t wait for my next novel, I was of course pleased. No, make that thrilled. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if I could possibly do it again–whatever it was I had done.

My second novel did flow (at least the first draft did — I’m now about to embark on draft ten, which I hope will be the last). But maybe that’s partly because it’s so different from my first novel, which is told in the voices of two18th-century women. My second novel, a contemporary comic tale about mother-daughter relationships, might actually be categorized as “women’s commercial fiction.” I didn’t use a pseudonym, but like McCauley, I felt liberated by the idea that I was doing something completely different.

Who knows — maybe Styron, Hemingway, and Wallace could have benefited from forgetting they were Great Writers and trying their pseudonymous hands at a little lower-brow fiction. After all, just because it’s not Great doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Do Characters Need to Be Likable?

Posted on by

In my last post, I mentioned that I recently appeared on a panel on historical fiction at the AIW annual writers’ conference in Washington, D.C., and that I had a couple of thoughts I didn’t get a chance to voice at the session. My last post focused on the wisdom of changing facts–historical or geographic or otherwise–when writing fiction.

Now for my second thought, which also relates to both historical and non-historical fiction. While discussing the challenges of writing historical fiction, I mentioned the difficulty of making characters who hold very different beliefs from our own sympathetic to a modern reader. Only I didn’t say “sympathetic,” I said “likable.”

I then got a question from a woman in the audience. “Do you think your characters have to be likable?” she said.

This was a weird moment for me. Here’s the back story: my agent and I have gone several rounds now on whether the main character in my second novel needed to be more “likable.” Frankly, I thought she was likable enough as originally written. But what I saw as “edge,” my agent saw as bitchiness and whininess. My agent was very emphatic about the importance of making the character likable (and making her husband and her daughter likable as well). And–given that my agent’s experience in publishing is far greater than mine–I reluctantly went about softening my character’s edges and eliminating some of what I thought were her best lines. But I continued to ponder the issue. In fact, about six months ago I went to a panel consisting of some of my favorite writers–Elinor Lipman, Stephen McCauley, and Cathleen Schine–and raised my hand to ask them the very same question the woman in the audience had just posed to me.

Alas, I didn’t get called on when I raised my hand, so I don’t know what those writers would have said. I do know, though, that my two fellow panelists at the AIW conference took the view that characters (and I guess we’re talking here about protagonists, really) DON’T need to be likable. One of them brought up Satan from Paradise Lost, who of course steals the show. Yeah, but–as I pointed out in passing–no one likes a “perfect” protagonist, like God. Plus, Milton gives Satan a dynamite speech.

It’s possible that the rule that your protagonist has to be likable has more force in commercial than literary fiction, although sometimes the line between those two isn’t that clear. My second novel, according to my agent, can be categorized as “commercial women’s fiction,” albeit (I hope) somewhat high-end commercial women’s fiction, and maybe that’s why my agent was so insistent about the likability issue. There do seem to be different rules in the realm of commercial, and certainly of “genre,” fiction. Romance novels, for example, generally follow a prescribed formula. But once you’re in the category of “literary,” you can pretty much do what you want, as long as you do it well.

But regardless of the type of fiction at issue, I do think readers need to want to spend time with the main character. If they find the main character boring, for example, they’ll probably put down the book. What if they find the main character repulsive? Well, someone might say, look at Humbert Humbert in Lolita: an unrepentant pedophile. What could be more unlikable than that? And yet we’re happy to spend time with Humbert, because Nabokov managed to make him, through his wit and his peculiar vision, irresistible. That’s what I meant when I said at the panel that I thought that the author has to work harder when the protagonist isn’t likable, at least in the conventional sense.

What I actually had in mind when I spoke at the panel was the fact that one of the two main characters in my novel A More Obedient Wife was a slave-owner. The challenge for me was to write realistically in the voice of someone who owned another human being, and who thought that was an acceptable thing to do, without alienating 21st-century readers who (like myself) find the concept of slavery to be anathema.

At one point I have my character Hannah Iredell musing about the female slave she owns, Sarah, who–like Hannah herself–desperately misses her absent husband. I have Hannah thinking that it’s difficult, sometimes, to remember that Sarah has feelings just as she does. To me, this was an accurate reflection (or what I imagined to be an accurate reflection) of a slave-owner’s attitude. After all, how could you justify owning another human being if you attributed to them all the thoughts and feelings that you yourself experience? To acknowledge that Sarah did have these feelings seemed to me a mark of humanity on Hannah’s part, a reflection of her underlying ambivalence about slavery. But one of my early readers recoiled when she reached that line, thinking that it made Hannah morally repugnant. Fortunately, other readers don’t seem to have had that reaction.

Maybe “likable” wasn’t the right word–it probably came into my head because of my recent back-and-forth with my agent. But what IS the right word to describe what we look for in a character, what keeps us reading? One of my fellow panelists suggested “compelling.” That’s certainly the word that you’re likely to see in rejection letters–as in, “I just didn’t find the characters compelling.” I got a couple of rejection letters like that for my second novel, early on, and I just shrugged. My agent, on the other hand, told me, “It’s simple, you just have to do this one thing–you just have to make the characters compelling.” But when I asked her how I could do that, she replied that she couldn’t possibly tell me. (Ultimately, it turned out to be a matter of changing the plot. Who knew?)

Compelling, likable, sympathetic. None of these words are particularly specific. And, of course, one person’s “likable” (or “compelling”) is another person’s boring or repellent. As with so many things in writing fiction, it’s pretty subjective. Bottom line: if you can find one person who thinks your character is compelling–AND who is in a position to publish your book–then maybe you don’t have to worry so much about the people who don’t.

Changing the Course of the Mississippi River

Posted on by

A few days ago I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel on historical fiction at the American Independent Writers Washington conference, held at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. My co-panelists were Barbara Esstman, author of The Other Anna and Night Ride Home (and a former instructor of mine, years ago, in a novel-writing workshop at The Writer’s Center); and C.M. Mayo, author of the intriguing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire — based, like my novel, A More Obedient Wife, on the lives of actual historical figures. I’m grateful to the moderator, author David Taylor, for inviting me to join them.

I don’t know how the audience felt (we were the last panel of a day-long event), but I would have been happy to go on talking and listening and answering questions from the audience well past our allotted fifty minutes. I had a few thoughts I didn’t get a chance to give voice to. But luckily, I have a blog!

So … here’s one: how much freedom should a writer exercise in playing around with historical fact? One of my fellow panelists, Barbara Esstman, opined that novelists should feel free to make up, or alter, whatever facts they want to, and mentioned that in her novel she had changed the course of the Mississippi River by five miles. It’s all in how you present it, she argued. You can make anything believable, if you handle it the right way.

True enough, but personally, I’m loath to fool around with facts, or at least the ones that are fairly well known. Once, years ago, I had the opportunity to hear William Styron speak, and I asked him basically the same question about the interplay between imagination and truth. Styron, whose Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize, answered that historical novelists should give free rein to their imaginations with one important parameter: they should be careful not to contravene known historical fact.

Why? Because it can be distracting to the reader. At one point during the panel session, Barbara also cited John Gardner‘s famous dictum that a novelist should create for the reader “a vivid and continuous dream.” It seems to me that if your narrative includes a detail many readers know to be untrue, they may suddenly be shaken out of that dream. “Huh?” they’ll say. “That’s not how it was. What’s she (or he) talking about?” And pouf, the spell that you’ve carefully woven with your words will be broken.

Styron’s advice made sense to me, and I tried to abide by it in A More Obedient Wife. I changed some little-known personal details — for instance, I omitted a few siblings belonging to a couple of characters who came from dauntingly large families — but I worked within the general framework that history had given me.

It seems to me that geographical fact should generally be treated in much the same way. I once read a novel set in an area I was familiar with, and I was constantly distracted by “mistakes” the author had made about where things were. Maybe she’d made those changes deliberately, although I can’t fathom why. I wasn’t focusing on what she presumably wanted me to focus on — the characters, the story — because I kept calculating distances and drawing mental maps and asking myself what she was talking about.

Of course, as with everything in writing, there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. It’s always a balancing test. If you feel a fact is sufficiently obscure that no one will really notice if you change it, maybe you’ll want to go ahead. Or even if it’s not that obscure a fact, you may feel the change is sufficiently important to your story that it’s worth risking the distraction. Or maybe, like Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America, the whole point of your story is that it’s counter-factual. And, as with everything in writing, it’s all subjective. Maybe some readers won’t mind at all if the Mississippi River isn’t where they expect it to be, and maybe some writers don’t care if they shake things up a bit.

But speaking just for myself, I try to stick with the facts and let my imagination play around in the gray areas — of which, in the stories I’m drawn to, there are plenty.

Remembering the Ladies

Posted on by

Just wanted to alert people to a post on another blog — The CockleBur — about the difficulty, and the importance, of uncovering the role that women played in the history of the American Revolution and the Early Republic.

Full disclosure: the blog post contains a favorable mention of my novel, A More Obedient Wife — and it was written by someone I know, Palma Strand. (Fuller disclosure: I hadn’t spoken to Palma in years, but she emailed me out of the blue some weeks ago to tell me her book club was reading my book — how she came across it I’m still not sure!) But the post also discusses other female historical figures and the late sociologist Elise Boulding, who coined the phrase “the underside of history” to describe the general absence of women from the historical record. I highly recommend it — along with Palma’s other posts, especially one called “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Godliness?”

Further Adventures in Publishing

Posted on by

One of the topics of this blog is “writing,” and one aspect of writing — the most vexing, often — is getting published. So herewith, my views on the current state of the publishing industry, admittedly offered from my own rather limited vantage point:

You’d never know it from the state of most bookstores, cluttered floor to ceiling with books (this is, of course, assuming that you can still find an actual bookstore in your vicinity), but it’s gotten really, really hard to get a book published. Especially a novel. And more especially a first novel, if you’re not a celebrity of some sort or at least a close friend or relative of some powerful and/or famous person.

A lot of good books still get published, of course. But what may be harder to discern, from outside the industry, is that a lot of good books never get published. And a lot of not-so-good books do get published (this is something you may have actually noticed!).

When I found an agent for my first novel, about five years ago, things were tough. Now that I’m on my second agent and second novel, things are even tougher. Now, instead of routinely sending out rejections, a number of editors have apparently given up sending out anything. At the moment, four editors have had my novel for over two months; one has had it for three months; and one has had it for five months. We’ve had no response from any of them, despite my agent’s efforts, and there’s no indication we ever will. If I thought there was more than an infinitesimal chance that any of them would take it, I might be content to wait. But my agent has had the manuscript for over a year now, and frankly the prospect of being in this limbo indefinitely is beginning to get to me.

In the old days — a few years ago, that is — authors really had no alternative but to wait. It was mainstream publishing or pretty much nothing. That’s not true anymore. As the mainstream publishing industry has contracted and fossilized, new publishing life forms have been springing up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.

Perhaps the largest, and most obvious, new form is self-publishing. Thanks to low-cost print-on-demand technology, the number of self-published books has far surpassed the number of traditionally published books (according to a New York Times article, the figures for 2009 were 764,448 self-published books to 288,355 traditionally published books, and those figures have no doubt diverged more widely since then).

Most of these books, of course, languish in obscurity — and in many cases, that obscurity is no doubt well deserved. After all, with self-published books there’s no vetting, no cultural gatekeeper letting in the sheep and keeping out the goats (or is it the other way around?). Who’s to say that any of these books are worth reading? Some self-published authors — the ones setting down memories for their grandchildren, for example — don’t really care about reaching a wider audience. But for those who do, the question is how to get your self-published book to stand out from all the others.

When I resorted to self-publishing my first book, A More Obedient Wife, I did so with a heavy heart. I was embarrassed to admit that I’d self-published, but I figured I’d just give the book to friends and family. It was only after I started hearing from a few strangers who told me they’d loved the book that I began to think bigger.

And that’s how I began to discover that there actually were some mechanisms falling into place that enabled a self-published author like me to secure some objective seals of approval — someone other than little old me saying, hey, read this book. I entered it into two contests open to self-published authors, and it won awards in both (had I been more savvy, I could have taken advantage of other similar contests). I put it up on sites like Goodreads, where members list and rate the books they’re reading. I urged readers who told me they liked the book to review it on Amazon, where at one point I was up to 11 reviews, all five-star (somehow, that number has mysteriously shrunk to 10).

And I sent it in to a website called Indiereader, which I had read about in the New York Times article mentioned above. Indiereader not only gave the book a favorable review, they included it in a program that funnels selected self-published books to independent bookstores around the country. Indiereader has also started reaching out to book clubs, giving them (in the words of its founder, Amy Edelman) “a dedicated page, the opportunity to do Q&As with authors (when they’re able), to share their faves with other book clubs, and the chance to discover something new.” And recently a book group in Pennsylvania that found my book through the Indiereader website picked it as one of their selections–thank you, Bad Girls Book Club of Broomall, PA!

I’ve also noticed that some of the numerous self-publishing companies (or “indie publishing” companies, as they’re now beginning to style themselves) have started programs that incorporate this vetting function. Abbott Press, a division of Writer’s Digest (which sponsors a self-published book award that my first novel won), will publish any book — but, for a fee, you can have your book considered for a “Writer’s Digest Mark of Quality” that indicates “high literary merit.”

Of course, chances are that even a book with the “Writer’s Digest Mark of Quality” isn’t going to hit the New York Times bestseller list. With a few notable exceptions (mostly fantasy and romance writers), self-published authors are never going to strike it rich. In fact, despite the hype you’ll hear from self-publishing companies, we’re almost certain to lose money rather than make it. But for me — and, I suspect, for many others — it’s not about making a killing, or even a living. I just want at least a few people — okay, maybe a few hundred — to read what I write. And these days, the mainstream publishing industry, whose denizens are so certain that they know what’s deserving of publication and what isn’t, can’t stop me.