1st BOOKS: Reading and Writing with Friends

I first hosted New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch’s on 1st Books when The One That I Want released in paperback from Broadway, a Random House imprint. I’m delighted to welcome her back today as she plunges headlong into the new adventure of doing the publishing herself. She has sold audio and large print rights for The Theory of Opposites—which is just out—and the book has been optioned for film by  Jennifer Garner. I certainly enjoyed her post about this brave new world, and I hope you will too. – Meg

I’m so excited to be back here on First Books, not least because so much has changed for me since the last time I blogged. Last week, not only did my new book, THE THEORY OF OPPOSITES, come out, but I also shared the fact that I opted to self-publish this book.

Yup, really. After four books at the traditionals – HarperCollins, Random House, and Penguin – I went my own way for this one. And I know the question that a lot of people are asking (I mean, if they care enough to ask, it’s not like I’m flattering myself that people are running around wondering about my career!) is why.

I’ve given a lot of thought as to how to answer this, and when I first started writing this post, I got into detailed explanations about the financials of what I thought I could earn, and the control over my marketing, and the joy of pricing my book at $2.99. And all of those things that might seem interesting to writers but aren’t particularly interesting outside of our little bubble. So I dug a little deeper and really tried to get to the heart of the matter as to why I jumped off this cliff.

And this is what I came up with:

When my fourth book launched, I found myself at an emotional crossroads. I was exhausted from the highs and lows of the industry; I was drained from worrying about my publisher fulfilling their end, about sales, about big reviews getting bumped (and pulled), about all of the things that had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with publishing. There’s a very big difference between the two, and these days, as the industry is forced to re-evaluate what makes a book successful, the divide seems to be widening. More and more is asked of authors that has little to do with their writing, and some of it, I enjoy. I enjoy the hell out of chatting with readers on social media and writing up fun Q/As to help promote the book and all of that good stuff. But I don’t enjoy the pressure that’s placed on writers, when ostensibly, that’s what the publisher is there for, and the blame that’s cast writers too, when, again, ostensibly, that’s also what the publisher is there for.

So I stepped away from writing novels for a while. I actually thought it would be permanent. I was busy with some screenplay work, and more gratifying, I was busy with my kids, my family, living our lives. I started cooking and gardening and oh my God, this is about to turn into a Martha Stewart essay, so I’ll stop myself. But I guess, what I’m trying to say is that I found joy outside of my job. Which I had before, of course. But I intentionally set my career aside and asked myself: “Who would be if I’m not an author? And am I okay with that definition?”

I was, or I thought I was, but slowly the words and the characters started seeping in. I opened up an abandoned partial-manuscript and fell in love with the world I’d started to create before I gave it up. So hesitantly – oh so hesitantly – I started writing again. But differently than before. I vowed, I swore, I told everyone I knew, that I was writing this manuscript FOR ME. Not for an editor, not for my agent, not for a sales team. ME. The end. And for the most part, I managed to do that. I wrote a bigger, bawdier, more outrageous book than I’d ever written, and oh my lord, did I have fun with it. I did it without worrying about the mean reviews that readers might put up on Goodreads or the sharp eyebrows that editors might raise when we submitted. I wrote it. I loved it. That mattered. It mattered so, so, so much.

This is getting long, so I am skipping a few steps between the writing process and the book debuting. Ultimately, after early discussions with some publishers and editors, I asked my agent to stop submitting because I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted, just as I had vowed in the writing process, to stay true to ME. And I think some of that comes with age – I turned forty and have realized that I don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. My ambition, the ambition that was maybe so strong in my earlier working years, has waned, and instead, I think it’s been replaced with, I don’t know quite how to say it, a desire to be true to myself. Even if that meant doing something sort of reckless and leaving the typical model behind. Hitting the bestseller list didn’t matter to me anymore. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. (Though sure, it will and would be great. I’m not trying to say that.) But enjoying myself on the journey somehow matters more now. Sometimes, we’re so concerned with the destination (Sales! Marketing! Reviews! Co-op!), that we forget how much fun we can have along the way.

So I think that’s why I self-published. And I think that’s also probably why I’m the happier for it. And why that joy spills out onto my pages of this new book. Enjoy the journey. That’s something I’d tell my characters too. – Allison

A note from Meg: if you enjoyed this post, you might also like Allison’s post about the process of self-publishing, which appeared on Writer Unboxed.

I am so delighted to host Harriet Scott Chessman on the occasion of the publication of her stunning new novel, The Beauty of Ordinary Things. Her previous novels, Ohio Angels, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (a #1 Booksense pick), and Someone Not Really Her Mother (a Good Morning America “Read This!” book), have a special place on my bookshelf. I was fortunate to read an early copy of The Beauty of Ordinary Things, and would urge you to do drop everything and read this little gem! – Meg

It is wonderful to have the chance to look back at a book you write, and to chart its course, from early, hesitant drafts to – yes! – miraculous publication.

My new novel, The Beauty of Ordinary Things, took over seven years to write.  I thought it was complete at a few points during those seven years, and of course I felt enormous frustration and sorrow when I couldn’t find a publisher for it.  Looking at this process from a calmer, happier vantage point, though, I realize something important: this book may have taken longer than my others to develop and bring into its fullest form because it is so profoundly personal.  All of my writing has had personal elements, yet this one somehow really appeared to originate inside me, in a way that was often inchoate.  I could feel the novel I had in me to write, and I knew, from the start, that this would be a book in some sense about the sacred.  How to write it, though?  How to find a form for what was more yearning than knowledge?

Benny Finn was the first character to come to me, and he stood, leaning against a kitchen counter in his mother’s kitchen – or in my heart – for a long, long time.  I knew he was a young Vietnam veteran from a large Irish Catholic family in Boston; I knew he had suffered; I knew, or thought I knew, he would be drawn to the priesthood.  Pretty soon, I also knew he would fall in love with Isabel, his brother Liam’s girlfriend.

I did my best, and by January of 2007 I (possibly with thoughtless courage) sent this novella – titled Benny Finn Writes to God – to my agent at the time, who said, “This is a gem, Harriet, but no one is buying gems.”  She said it was much too short to be commercially viable, and suggested that I rewrite it, this time from a female character’s point of view.  I thought she might be right, about the virtue of adding the voice of a female character, and at first I chose Isabel.  Yet I loved and believed in Benny, and couldn’t abandon him.  I stubbornly held on to his voice, and interwove his chapters with Isabel’s.  I thought maybe he just hadn’t come through somehow, and I struggled to understand him more deeply, to bring him out more sharply.

That spring, at the urging of a new and immensely encouraging agent, I added yet more pages – about 10,000 words (a lot for this minimalist!), so that I could squeak past 55,000.  This time I created the voice of a young nun, Sister Clare.  I hoped that, with this addition, the book would become more resonant, in addition to coming closer to the accepted commercial length for a novel.

I confess, I approached the voice of Sister Clare with trepidation.  I knew she was closer than Benny to the sense of the sacred, which I hoped could shine somehow at the quiet core of this novel, but how could I possibly know what it might be like to be a cloistered nun in a Benedictine Abbey?  Yes, a beloved friend had become a nun – Sister Lucia Kuppens, O.S.B. (now Mother Lucia) – at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut.  I have always been astonished by Mother Lucia’s wisdom and her gifts of insight, her compassion, and her choice to enter this Community.  Yet how little I really knew of her life!  I wasn’t even Catholic.  Raised Baptist, with touches of my mother’s Episcopalian heritage, and embracing the world of Reform Judaism through my husband and children, I remained Protestant and fairly secular, in the way Protestants can be.

To my great surprise, however, Sister Clare’s voice came to me in a rush.  I felt she had been waiting for me all this time.  As I wrote, I immersed myself in research, and in spite of my doubts about my capacity to write something authentic about a character who had chosen to become a nun, I trusted in Sister Clare’s presence and her approach to the world and to Benny Finn, Liam and Isabel.

During this process, and in the years to follow, several of my friends at the Abbey helped me, each in her own way.  Mother Margaret Georgina Patton gardened with me – and to garden with this amazing woman (and poet!) is to have the chance to talk about all things under the sun.  Mother Augusta Collins walked with me in the pastures, as we spoke about the cows, the barns, literature, children, and more.  Mother Angele Arbib read the manuscript a couple of times with great insight, and we rolled up our sleeves and dug in together.  Mother Noella Marcellino (the “Cheese Nun”!) laughed with me, and regaled me with stories.  The presence of the entire Community inspired me in my crazy effort to offer at least a small window into a life devoted to work and prayer.

What I strove to gain, as I discovered Sister Clare’s voice and revised the manuscript in the fall of 2007, was a clearer sense of what the heck my story was about – I mean, what it was really about. A few generous writer friends, and my fiercely intelligent daughter, read the manuscript and gave me superb advice.  And over the course of the following year, my agent sent it to over twenty-five publishers.  She gave it her all.  I received positive comments from a bunch of editors, yet no contract.  Discouraged, one day I placed the manuscript on a shelf.

I realize now that I needed two things above all: (1) distance (temporal and emotional) and (2) some brilliant and amazing editor, who could help me pull this little boat out of the mud and patch it up, paint it, find the oars, nudge it in a good direction, so it could have a chance to get out of the marsh and onto open water.

Distance can come with the years passing, thank heavens, if one is lucky, so by the time Mark Cunningham – a writer colleague, author of the gorgeous, unusual novels The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son – invited me to send my Benny Finn manuscript to the new micro-press he had founded in Portland, Oregon, I was ready.

Mark did what the greatest editors can do: he listened to the still largely inchoate meaning inside this book, and figured out through insight, questions, wisdom and instinct how to help me develop the story so that it could find its truest form.  In our conversations, I told him about the earliest version, Benny Finn Writes to God, and he asked to see that as well.  Intrepid, he suggested going straight back to that early novella, in Benny’s voice, weaving Sister Clare’s sections through Benny’s – seeing what would happen.  Instantly, I could envision a new architecture – an ark!! – and started to build.  I cannot say enough about Mark’s responsiveness throughout this process – his care for the vision and his attentiveness to each word.  He helped me bring each character’s voice into greater authenticity, passionate honesty, and clarity.  I owe so much to him – more than I can possibly say.

For this young and wholly unjaded editor, it has never been about the word count or the vast commercial potential; it has been about finding the book’s soul and bringing it to the fore in as beautiful and true a way as possible.  Through his welcome and inspiring suggestions, I came back to the manuscript, and rewrote it from start to finish, in about three months, surrendering to the material’s own grace and demands.  Mark’s trust in me and in this book encouraged my own trust in this creation, in what it could become.  And for seven more months after that, he helped me hone and sharpen each page until both of us were satisfied.

May all writers have the chance to develop their work with the aid of a publisher as brave and clear-sighted as this.   And may all of us have the courage and stubbornness – in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words, the “brute beauty and valor and act” – to hold to our visions and discover our course.  May each of us honor the windhover, floating somehow, in spite of all, miraculously, above our little boats.

. . . the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
(from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”)

- Harriet

I’m delighted to be hosting my friend Ellen Kirschman, a real life police and public safety psychologist and the author several nonfiction titles, who has just published her first mystery.  Camille Minichino calls Dot Meyerhoff of Burying Ben ”the most interesting heroine to come along in a long time.” If the humor that Ellen brings to her post here is any indication, she is clearly right. Enjoy! – Meg

I know I’m wrong about this, and I mean no disrespect to my fellow non-fiction writers, but, to me, writing fiction seems like real writing, which is why my fourth book and first novel, feels like a debut. My non-fiction books were an eminently more readable version of my doctoral dissertation. The literary equivalent of twenty five term papers strung together by colorful case histories. Readers can put a non-fiction book down and pick it up without losing the thread. But the fictional dream is a fragile thing, easily interrupted by a jarring word, an implausible action, or an unbelievable character.

A lot of people ask why I switched from writing non-fiction to writing fiction. I could answer this question in many ways, but the truest response is that I was delusional. I actually thought it would be easier to make stuff up than to do all the research that’s involved in writing books for the families of cops and firefighters, and for the clinicians who treat them. I would sit at my computer, surrounded by books and piles of notes, staring out the window, thinking how liberating it would be to rely solely on my imagination. I read a lot of mysteries and I knew I could do better. After all, hadn’t I spent decades in the trenches watching first responders at work and sharing their secrets? I know self-diagnosis can be tricky, but I stick by my original assessment – I was delusional, perhaps with a touch of grandiosity.

Not that I’m complaining, a little grandiosity and a lot of persistence keeps a writer on her chair, day after day, revision after revision. Burying Ben went through some eighteen revisions.  I was teaching myself a new craft, after all. Writing a mystery was a puzzle to be solved, one that challenged all my weak points – an abhorrence for details and a non-linear mind. My big “aha” moment came when I changed from third person point of view to first person. Once I put my psychologist hat back on, I was in familiar territory. My next challenge was to stop telling myself that whatever was happening in the book wouldn’t really happen this way in the real world. Faithfully adhering to reality is what drives non-fiction. But reality is often boring and not the stuff that keeps a reader reading.

Then I encouraged myself to have fun. No longer the subject matter expert, I had the freedom to say things that would have gotten me fired. Off I went, taking pot shots at cops, psychologists, my ex-husbands, and myself. This was my opportunity to even the score with all those people who thought I couldn’t be trusted not to leak everything they said to the chief or who kept me at arm’s length because they thought I could read their minds. I have to tell you, payback is very gratifying.

Few of my friends had read my other books, which were aimed at specific readers.  But they’re all reading Burying Ben. That would include my hair stylist, my dentist, my dentist’s receptionist, my doctor, my neighbors, and some strangers I met in the airport. (Other people carry photos of their kids and grandkids. I carry postcards of my mystery and I’m not shy about handing them out. Not something I did, or needed to do, with my non-fiction work.) So now I have all these people asking me if I really did the things that my protagonist, Dr. Dot Meyerhoff, does, such as breaking and entering and assault with a deadly weapon. I did not. They want to know if Frank is really modeled after my husband – he is – and my husband wants to know if Frank will get lucky in the sequel. These are not questions I am accustomed to answering.

I’ve had a number of careers in my life; dancer, probation officer, social worker, police psychologist, and psychologist who writes books. Now, with the publication of Burying Ben, I consider myself a writer first and a psychologist second. See what I mean? Writing fiction feels different. I’m no longer reporting on something external to myself.  I’m reporting on what goes on in my head, rolling it out in a forward moving stream rather than organizing it logically according to topic. I’m trying to turn delusion into imagination while tackling a real-world concern, police suicide. I’ve always felt that novelists come closer to the truth of human experience than do psychologists. I’d like to think that Burying Ben, with all its twists and turns, reveals a greater truth about cops and about the therapists who serve them. – Ellen