The Book Doctors Announce a New Partnership
Write Articles to Help Get Your Book Published, Build Platform, & Promote Your Work.
The Book Doctors are proud to announce we’re starting an exciting new partnership with Shawna Kenney, journalist, author, writer, coach and teacher.
We regularly tell our clients that writing and publishing short pieces is a great way to build your brand and resume, get your work into the world, prove to a publisher that there’s an audience for your work, become a better writer, and publicize your book when it comes out.
We’ve brought Shawna onto the team to show you how to craft and shape a short piece, how to research and find the appropriate editors, and how to query magazines, newspapers, online publications of every stripe, and literary markets. Then we can show you how to leverage your published piece into attracting agents and/or landing a book deal.
Shawna will:
- Walk you through her 3-part pitch formula
- Take the guesswork out of sending work to literary and commercial markets
- Share successful query and pitch letters
- Find current calls for submissions and writers’ guidelines
- Offer ideas and resources for finding the right home for your writing
- Shape a memoir chapter into a memoir-adjacent personal essay
- Turn your expertise into salable service pieces
- Revamp your bio or book proposal
Shawna Kenney wrote the award-winning memoir, I Was a Teenage Dominatrix (Last Gasp), co-authored Imposters (Mark Batty Publisher), edited the anthology Book Lovers (Seal Press) and co-authored Live at the Safari Club: A History of Hardcore Punk in the Nation’s Capital (Rare Bird Books). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, Playboy, Creative Nonfiction, The LA Weekly, Brevity and more. Her essays appear in numerous anthologies, with “Self-Propelled: How Biking Steered My Writing Life” forthcoming in Moving Writers on Peter Lang Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles where she teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a Contributing Editor with Narratively magazine.
Contact us at arielle@thebookdoctors.com to schedule a consultation with Shawna.
When Art & Commerce Meet – Interview with Wayétu Moore
Wayétu Moore, author of SHE WOULD BE KING and founder of the nonprofit One Moore Book, shares the publication journey for her debut novel and reflects on art, writing craft, commerce, and more.
Filmed at Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival 2019.
WHAT WE COVER
0:35 Writing a draft of SHE WOULD BE KING and exploring identity as an African in America and as an African-American
2:19 Pressures writers put on themselves, writing craft, and not resenting your art
3:26 Writing discipline and respecting your art
4:01 Publishing industry trends
4:23 Wayétu Moore’s next novel is about mermaids
5:32 Publishing SHE WOULD BE KING
6:00 Meeting literary agents at conferences
7:06 Editing a manuscript with a literary agent and making a book as strong as possible
7:54 “If you’re writing for yourself, keep a journal, but if you do commit to writing for others and being mindful and considerate to the sensibilities of others, then you do need to be conscious of what readers would be in to, how they would process your work. . .”
8:23 Shopping a manuscript to publishers, dealing with rejections, and the reality of when art meets commerce
9:14 Publishing SHE WOULD BE KING through Graywolf and the benefits of being with an indie press
12:00 Cover design and avoiding cliches designers use for African, Islamic, and Indian narratives
15:04 The meeting of art and commerce as well as time and capacity in Big Five publishing
15:59 Versify, an imprint by Kwame Alexander, and One Moore Book, a nonprofit serving children who rarely see themselves in print
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Versify: an Imprint from Kwame Alexander
Joshua Mohr on Writing and How to Publish a Book
WAYÉTU MOORE
Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King, released by Graywolf Press in September, 2018. Her memoir is also forthcoming with Graywolf.
Moore is the founder of One Moore Book. One Moore Book is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization that encourages reading among children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures by publishing culturally relevant books that speak to their truths, and by creating bookstores and reading corners that serve their communities. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015.
Her writing can be found in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications. She has been featured in The Economist Magazine, NPR, NBC, BET and ABC, among others, for her work in advocacy for diversity in children’s literature.
She’s a graduate of Howard University and the University of Southern California, and is currently a Margaret Mead Fellow at Columbia University Teachers College, where she’s researching the impact of culturally relevant curriculum and learning aids in elementary classrooms of underrepresented groups. Moore is an Africana Studies lecturer at City University of New York’s John Jay College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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David Gilmore on Finding Love in Strange Places, Writing About It, and a Colonoscopy
We first met David Gilmore many years ago during a writing conference in Tucson, Arizona. He stood out among the other attendees in part because he was just so smart, funny. He had already done so much work as a writer, and he was a fantastic listener. When we saw that he had a new book out, How I Went to Asia for a Colonoscopy and Stayed for Love: A Memoir of Mischief and Romance, we decided we would pick his brain about writing, travel, love, and colonoscopies.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: How did you learn to be a writer?
David Gilmore: Pretty much everything I’ve done in my life has been self-taught. I learned to write because I needed to clear my head so I could have a good night’s sleep when Xanax was getting a little expensive and addictive. I also learned to write when I had my radio show on Public Radio International (Outright Radio). Back before that I used to write in my daily diary as a kid. I would open up the little red vinyl book and scribble something profound like, “Normal day.” Doesn’t that just scream future author? I dunno. I guess I learned to write by being an observant person. I listen. I watch everything carefully. I ask questions. I feel too much. And this all fills my mind and at some point, I have to just start emptying it onto the written page. So, one could say writing has become a survival skill in not becoming overburdened by everything and everyone.
TBD: What are some of your favorite books, and why?
DG: Mostly I read non-fiction because with politics these days, really, who needs fiction? Basically, I’ll read anything by Michael Pollan, Bill Bryson, and Beth Lisick. It doesn’t matter to me what they write about, I’ll read it. I recently found a copy of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid in Goodwill and I bought it for a dollar. Bryson’s hyperbolic style has me squealing with delight. And he takes us back to a time in America — his childhood in Iowa — when life seemed simple and people didn’t go around with semi-automatic weapons in their suitcases. I’m currently reading White Trash by Nancy Isenberg because all that’s going on with Trump’s rise to power is dissected in that book. I also am reading God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet about a doctor who works at an old almshouse in San Francisco caring for the un-curable. I like books that fill me with someone else’s life experience or help explain to me what in Sam Hill is going on here, and frankly, right now I am in need of a lot of ‘splaining.
TBD: Tell us about the long and winding road to writing How I Went to Asia for a Colonoscopy and Stayed for Love.
DG: The long and winding road began in the States where I had become bored with my romantic life and unable to afford health insurance. Coming from a long line of intestinal malcontents I was in need of a colonoscopy. I had read that Thailand was the place to go for overseas medical care, so on a whim, I just booked a flight and made an appointment for the procedure.
After having a colonoscope make its way through my long and winding intestines, much to my delight I found that Thailand actually suited me. I had the time of my life! And when I came back to the States, my life seemed so empty and dull that I just kept going back to Southeast Asia and expanding out from Thailand to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and eventually Malaysia.
Then something really big happened. I don’t want to spoil the book, but I felt compelled, so to speak, to move to Malaysia. It wasn’t just a holiday. I gave up my life in the US and moved there. And within 6 weeks of arriving, I met the guy I’d been looking for my whole life. Thus began a storybook gay romance in a Muslim country, of all places. It was starting to seem like a plot from a book or a movie…something perhaps by Elizabeth Gilbert. I knew that if my Malaysian boyfriend and I ever got married, the book would have a full narrative arc and I really would have no choice but to write it. And that’s how it came to be.
TBD: We’re curious about how you approached publishing this book. Did you go after agents and publishers?
DG: I did go after agents. And there was some initial interest from several. I think, however, the raunchy beginning to the book may have put some of them off if they didn’t go beyond the first few chapters. However, I am of the belief that the publishing industry is no longer in its golden age and to be an author with an agent and a contract with a publisher isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve heard too many stories of authors getting little or nothing from their publishers. I know friends who have book contracts who have to pay for their own book tours and do all their own marketing. Or agents who never found a publisher for their clients. I began to wonder what the point of a publishing contract was. I felt that my story was begging to be told NOW and couldn’t wait for agents and publishers. Thus, I jumped on the self-publishing bandwagon.
TBD: What are the pros and cons, the do’s and don’ts of self-publishing? How do you avoid some of the pitfalls?
DG: The biggest con for most people is that you’re on your own to produce and market it. For me that’s not a con because I am by trade a graphic designer, and so knocking out the cover and interior design is something I can do while watching Sarah Huckabee Sanders do her sour face at the White House press corps. The plus side of self-publishing is that you as the author have full creative control and no one is going to reject you because you’re unknown or frankly, your story is kinda dumb. Anyone can publish, which is a blessing and a curse. People have been known to strike a chord with readers and hit it big, but it’s a long shot and it’s a game. And if you’re up for playing the game without getting defeated by the odds that you’ll be a huge success, the world is your playground. But you know, when your book is released and you check the sales tally and on your first day you only sold 17 copies, well, you have only yourself to blame. And when you find that you misspelled something, you can’t call the editor and have a hissy fit about it.
TBD: This is kind of a personal question, but what was your budget for making the video trailers for this book?
DG: Hmm, let’s see…my budget. OK, the Marketing Budget Office has deliberated and just released the figures on the video trailer budget. It was zero. In addition to writing, I also make films so I just pulled those together myself from videos I shot over the years of traveling in Asia. The trailers seemed to catch people’s attention. Whether they translate to sales remains to be seen.
TBD: What was it like to have a colonoscopy in Thailand?
DG: Now that is a personal question! Basically, getting a colonoscopy in Thailand was just like in the US except at about 1/10th the cost. A colonoscopy, however, no matter where you are, is kind of a disgusting proposition. Being in Thailand makes it more fun because I find Asians so fascinating and amusing. Sitting in the “bowel preparation room” in Bangkok (appropriately appointed with brown furnishings), I’m more likely to have fun chatting with someone or watching inscrutably bad Thai daytime television. I did enjoy a night of frolicking in the world’s most extraordinary sex club with the cleanest colon on earth afterward. Perhaps that should have been the title of the book? Really, though, the book is not all about my colonoscopy (who would want to read about that) or even sex. The book starts out there and moves on to more meaningful adventures like the slow boat up the Mekong River, the Flying Nuns of Luang Prabang, and negotiating a gay relationship in a Muslim country.
TBD: How did writing this book about rediscovering yourself in the middle of your life change you?
DG: Well, I lost something significant in Asia: my loneliness. And I got my life back. For years I moped around America complaining about being middle-aged, nerdy, and unlovable. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I took off the tight shoe of American life and let myself go on an incredible journey of love. And I got what I always wanted — a partner — and brought him back to the US with me. His name is Chuan and he tucks me in bed each night and tells me he loves me. Meeting him turned my life around. I went from being a cranky curmudgeon to being contented, playful, and at least somewhat hopeful about my life.
TBD: Was there any part of your book that was particularly difficult for you to write?
DG: Yes. There is a chapter about a young student I had when I was teaching for the United Nations in Malaysia. He was a Burmese refugee who fled over the border from Myanmar fleeing religious persecution. I taught him and a bunch of adorable kids in a filthy, run-down, absolute hole of a school in a slum in Kuala Lumpur. Well, something awful happened to that boy and it broke my heart. It pained me so much to write that chapter, and to this day I cannot read it without bursting into tears. That boy’s life touched me and I will never forget him.
TBD: We hate to ask you this, but what advice do you have for writers?
DG: I don’t know that I’m in the position to be giving advice to other writers, honestly. But if I had to say anything to anyone about writing (or any creative pursuit) I would say this: be critical. Be REALLY critical of your own work. Ignore that nonsense about defeating the inner critic. The inner critic is very important to your process of refinement. I’m not of the school of belief that anything we create is beautiful and worthy. I believe the PROCESS is valuable to simply write whatever is on your mind. But I don’t believe that it is necessarily going to be worth reading by others. Reading and staying aware of current events and thought trends and history and keeping your eyes open to all aspects of society is very important, not just to being relevant but for one’s output to be taken seriously.
David Gilmore is a freelance writer, photographer, and filmmaker living in Tucson, Arizona. He was the host and producer of the Edward R. Murrow Award winning radio show Outright Radio, featured nationally on Public Radio International from 1998-2004. He is a NEA and CPB grantee and has contributed essays to theGay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Advocate, and was a contributing author in Johns, Marks, Tricks, and Chickenhawks. He is the author of the bookHomoSteading at the 19th Parallel — one man’s adventure building his nightmare dream house on the Big Island of Hawaii.
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Peter Ginna on Getting Published, Saying No, and What Editors Do
We were absolutely delighted when we got a request from editor extraordinaire Peter Ginna to write something for a new book he was putting together called What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing. Because Arielle is an agent and writer, and David is a writer and book doctor, we have a very different perspective than most people who make money editing books. We thoroughly enjoyed writing our piece, but it was much more fun reading some of the amazing pieces in this book. So now that What Editors Do is out, we picked Peter’s brain on what it was like to go from being the guy with the red pencil to the guy waiting to see how many red marks would come back on his pages.
Read full interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: As your subtitle suggests, and as your introduction states, being an editor today includes so much more than editing. What should you expect from your editor? Or if you’re looking to become an editor, what skills do you need to do the job well?
Peter Ginna: Let me answer those questions in reverse order. As I said in the piece that you mention, editing encompasses many different roles. The core of the job is still working with an author to make his or her text as good as it can be. Some editors inside publishing houses, and most freelance editors, focus almost entirely on that task. But most editors, especially in trade publishing, have to shepherd a book all the way from the author’s keyboard into the marketplace, so they have to be very involved in marketing, design, production, publicity—everything that goes into bringing that work to readers.
If you’re looking to become an editor, nobody expects you to be an expert at that stuff right away. But you need to have an interest in learning about it, because it’s crucial.
If you’re an author, you should expect your editor to be passionate about your book, and to treat you as a valued partner in the publishing process. For a lot of authors, the publishing house is a black box. The editor owes them frequent and honest communication.
TBD: Why is it that in relationships, as in books, it’s so easy to see what’s wrong with someone else’s stuff, but so hard to see what’s wrong with our own stuff? Is there any way to bring the editor’s outlook to your own work?
PG: It’s incredibly hard to judge your own work! That’s why there are editors. At the risk of seeming to suck up, your chapter in this book on self-editing for authors has great advice on this. At a minimum, put your manuscript away for a week (or longer) and reread it with fresher eyes. Read it aloud so you can really hear how it flows, or doesn’t. Even better, enlist some “beta readers” whom you can trust to give you an honest response.
TBD: We have found that editing other people’s books makes us better writers, and being writers helps us as editors. What did you learn from writing and putting together this book that you will bring back to your job as editor?
PG: Hah! —I learned how hard it is to meet your editor’s deadlines! And continuing from your last question, learned, from the author’s side, how valuable it is to be forced to think about why you said something a certain way, and whether there might be a clearer or cleaner way to say it.
TBD: While we’re on the subject, what was it like exchanging your editor hat for your writer hat? And did you end up cursing your editor silently or out loud? And what advice do you have for writers when they receive an edit back on their most precious book?
PG: I never cursed my editor, who was wonderful. My experience in thirty-plus years of editing has been that authors rarely cursed me out. I believe that what authors want, more than praise or even success, is to be read. For a reader to connect with their writing. If the author knows you’ve read their work really closely, even if you are criticizing something or asking them to change it, they are usually grateful. I have definitely found that it’s the best writers who are most gracious and receptive to editorial suggestions. (With very rare egomaniacal exceptions…)
TBD: We always tell people that editors and agents are trained to say “no.” Can you speak to the experience of rejecting books? Is it rote at this point or do you actually feel anything when you are rejecting? And if you dealt with rejection with this book, can you tell us how it felt to be on the other side?
PG: I understand why you say editors are trained to say no—we do it 95 percent of the time, or more. And especially as traditional publishers compete with self-publishing, we’ve heard a lot about the editor as “gatekeeper,” an image that makes you think of a bouncer turning away people from a hot party. But that’s not how editors think about it—nobody comes to work hoping to turn down a lot of books that day. Editors live to find books to publish, and new titles are the lifeblood of a publishing house. Every day you open your email hoping to find something you love. It’s easy to reject a manuscript that leaves you cold, but editors really agonize when they come across a book that shows talent but that they can’t make an offer for—either because colleagues won’t support it, or because it’s too flawed in some way. Fortunately for me, my editor and I worked together on creating What Editors Do from the beginning so I didn’t have to go through the process of pitching it.
TBD: Can you tell us the process a book goes through at a publishing house once a deal is made? And are there any differences in the actual editing process between a Big 5 publisher, an independent house, or an academic press?
PG: Whew, the process is quite complicated and anyone who wants a thorough description of it should read the chapter by Nancy Miller called “The Book’s Journey.” The first part of it is the actual editing, where editor and author revise the manuscript (sometimes several times). But there’s also a multi-pronged marketing process that begins at acquisition and really ramps up when the final manuscript is delivered. At that point there’s also the complex work of turning the author’s text into a printed or digital book, which itself usually takes several months.
The principles of editing don’t vary between presses, but it is often the case that academic presses do a kind of triage on their lists. They don’t have the resources to edit every book intensively, so many books don’t get too much more than a copy edit. However, for books where they feel the effort is appropriate, scholarly publishers often do just as good a job, or better, than trade houses. My editor, and the whole press at Chicago, did a superbly thorough job on What Editors Do. I should add that there are chapters in my book by editors from independent and academic presses who discuss their work in more depth.
TBD: Speaking of academic presses, What Editors Do is published by The University of Chicago Press. Why did you choose to go with a university press? Does the fact that they publish The Chicago Manual of Style influence your decision at all, since this is a book every editor needs to have on her desk? What was the experience like and how did it differ from the publishing experience of say, Bloomsbury, where you were Editorial Director?
PG: Chicago, in fact, proposed this project to me, which was some form of kismet because I had been thinking for some time about the need for a book like this. This subject made sense for them, because good publishers are always looking for books in areas where they’re already strong—they know the market and have a head start on getting recognition for new titles in that field. And for me, because Chicago is a leading publisher in this area, I was thrilled to be on their list. For an editing book, to be marketed alongside the Manual of Style is a big advantage. It’s hard for me to compare Chicago vs. Bloomsbury from the author’s point of view because I have only been an author with one of them. I’d say the main difference is that Chicago is placing more emphasis on marketing to courses and libraries than most trade presses would, and is less focused on the trade market.
TBD: Is it possible for writers to approach editors at larger houses directly? What is the best way of doing this?
PG: Realistically speaking, I would recommend authors try to find an agent before approaching publishers directly. It’s simply much harder to get an editor’s attention when you submit “over the transom.” That said, as an editor I was always open to an intelligent, well-targeted query. If an author wrote me and said, “I saw that you were the editor of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mysteries. I’ve written a new crime novel with a brilliant, enigmatic detective and classic whodunit elements that I think will appeal to the same readers who love Morse,” I would always give that person’s work a read. I knew that the author had at least done some homework and thought about why they were sending it to me.
TBD: Our essay in What Editors Do is about self-publishing. Many people ask us, “If I self-publish my book, will it ruin my chances of getting published by a bigger publisher?” How would you answer this question?
PG: You probably know more about this question than I do, but especially nowadays I don’t think there’s any stigma attached to having self-published your work. What’s important is to self-publish your work well. If your self-published book is full of mistakes, badly typeset, or amateurish-looking, it will reflect badly on you. (Covers are hugely important!) But if you do a good job with it—and especially if you sell enough copies to show there is an audience for your writing—I think that gives you a leg up on finding a publisher for future work.
TBD: You rarely hear a kid say “I want to be an editor when I grow up.” This is particularly true if you don’t grow up in a typically white, well-educated, upper middle class environment. Chris Jackson has a brilliant essay in the book about the fact that there is little to no diversity in publishing despite all the talk about the issue. If someone is reading this interview and wants to become an editor but doesn’t fit into these boxes, what tips do you have for breaking into the business? How can you encourage someone to make the effort to break down doors?
PG: I would urge anyone, of any background, to read Chris’s essay because it shows how a person who is passionate about books found his way in publishing despite both his own handicaps—Chris says he didn’t know how to type a letter when he started out as an assistant—and the structural obstacles in the system. It’s unfortunately true that, like many other old-school businesses, publishers are oversupplied with applicants from privileged backgrounds with fancy college degrees, and they still hire lots of those people because it’s easy to do. The good news is that most every publisher understands the importance of diversity and many houses have explicit efforts under way to increase it, so it’s a great time to apply for a job in publishing.
Also, I truly believe publishing is democratic in the sense that, if you really love reading, and really know your way around books, and you’re smart and willing to work hard, that will get recognized really fast. And it’s actually way more important than whether you went to an Ivy League school. This may sound silly, but what we all have in common in the book business is that we love books! And being among people who self-selected on that principle makes for a pretty congenial working life. Whatever “box” you fit into, if you are one of those people who spent your teenage years reading with a flashlight under the covers, you should think about a career in publishing.
Peter Ginna is an independent book editor and the author/editor of WHAT EDITORS DO: THE ART, CRAFT, AND BUSINESS OF BOOK EDITING. He has worked in publishing houses for over 30 years, most recently as publisher and editorial director at Bloomsbury Press, an imprint he founded at Bloomsbury USA. Before that he held editorial positions at Oxford University Press, Crown Publishers, St. Martin’s Press, and Persea Books. Authors he has worked with include James M. McPherson, David Hackett Fischer, and David Oshinsky (all winners of the Pulitzer Prize), Daniel Ellsberg, Michael B. Oren, Alice Kessler-Harris, Suze Orman, and Colin Dexter. He comments about books, writing, and publishing at the blog Doctor Syntax, and has written for Creative Nonfiction magazine, Nieman Storyboard, and the Huffington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at @DoctorSyntax.
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The ThriftStylers on Writing, Upcycling and Fabulous Couture for Cheap
We met the ThriftStylers at one of the great comedy writers conferences in America: the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. We knew as soon as we saw them that they were special, in the best sense of that word. So when we found out they were coming out with a book, ThriftStyle: The Ultimate Bargain Shoppers Guide to Smart Fashion, we decided it was in everyone’s best interest to pick their brains about writing, style, and being awesomely thrifty.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: What in the world made you want to write a book?
Reise Moore: I had been quietly thrifting for years and had started a thrifting blog that had gone defunct. Allison and I had a lunch date (the Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles Summit) where she mentioned she and her twin Margaret (Peggy) had been kicking around a TV show on thrifting. I revealed that I was an avid thrifter and almost everything I wore, except underwear, was thrifted head to toe. Next thing I knew, Allison said, “So let’s work on this show.” I’m a mom of three and I was finishing up grad school at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC, so all I was thinking about was sleep. But Allison is convincing. Next thing I knew, I was nodding and saying, “Yeah, when we produce the show.” The idea morphed into us writing a book first and using it as a calling card for a show.
TBD: Did you have any books that you used as models for ThriftStyle: The Ultimate Bargain Shoppers Guide to Smart Fashion?
Allison Engel: There aren’t that many books on thrifting, but the few I saw tended not to have the ring of truth. They showed fabulous couture quality items that the author admitted buying three decades ago in Paris and were not relatable to readers looking in their local Goodwill today. We made a conscious decision to buy items that were in thrift stores right now, and for each item shown we included the price we paid and where we bought it. We also wanted lots of photographs of people wearing thrifted outfits. We used our diverse friends and family as models (both male and female), further making the point that these are clothes and accessories that can be found and worn by real people right now.
Reise Moore: I wanted ThriftStyle to be a love letter to thrifting. I wanted readers to realize the creative possibilities by upcycling and making simple fixes. And I wanted people to understand that textile waste is real and thrifting is a way to recycle and reuse. I wanted ThriftStyle to be the ultimate book on thrifting. In the quest to achieve that, we touched on so much more, such as developing your personal style and using thrifting to support charitable causes. The book is way more than I imagined it would be at the onset.
TBD: How did you go about getting the book published?
Margaret Engel: Our original idea was to make ThriftStyle a television show, and we are now working with a Hollywood production company to do just that. When I was managing editor at the Newseum, the museum of news, I had worked with a publisher on several books about journalists. That publisher reconnected with me when his firm was merging with a larger publisher, Charlesbridge, and asked me if I had any ideas for a mass-market book. I mentioned that the three of us were starting work on a possible television series about thrifted clothing. He suggested doing the book first, and we dove in.
TBD: What were some of the joys, and some of the pains, of writing this book?
Reise Moore: One frustration in writing the book is in thrifting; most everything you find is one of a kind. Everything in our book — clothes, jewelry, shoes, handbags, belts — is thrifted. So there is no size up or size down if the clothes don’t fit your model. We were thrifting clothes and doing fittings before shoots. If it did not work on the model, the outfit you loved on the hanger was out the window and you had to go back shopping. Allison’s apartment was overrun with all things ThriftStyle. It looked like a Salvation Army outlet!
We have more than 350 photos in ThriftStyle. Shoot days brought me huge joy. They were tough and long. We were a skeleton crew jamming in a bunch of set-ups, but we were pushing the dream forward. It reminded me of my film school days. Our photographer, the amazing Roger Snider, was patient and flexible and the hardest worker of all.
TBD: We are married, and we’ve written several books together. What was it like to navigate writing this book with your twin?
Margaret Engel: Allison and I began writing books together in the typewriter and carbon paper days of the early 1980s, mailing finished pages to each other cross country in envelopes with stamps, so the advent of cheap long-distance phone calls and emails has made the process much, much easier. When we are writing, we can still have the world’s shortest phone conversations, because we don’t need to give a long preamble or carefully couch criticism. We can be quick and direct. We tend to write different sections and then send it to each other for edits. Working together in a room, with one person typing and the other looking over her shoulder, is not a recipe for success for us. It takes twice as long. When Reise joined the team, we used the same strategy. We divided up chapters – or parts of chapters – and each of us wrote separately, then emailed the results to the others.
Reise Moore: It was daunting to step into the dynamic of twin sisters who have written successfully together and you are the literal third wheel. Allison and I were friends first so I knew she was cool. But I was super concerned about Peggy and I wanted to make sure she was OK with it. I was super concerned about me because here I am suddenly writing alongside two very accomplished and successful writers who have had a whole lifetime of being each other’s sounding board. There were a lot of “what ifs” on my end. But I had to get over it quickly because I noticed early on that everything was about the work. Once I got over myself, we were cooking. I found the room to be as big and expressive and creative as I wanted to be, and it easily became a creative space we shared and collaborated in. We complemented each other well.
TBD: How did you get into the whole world of ThriftStyling?
Reise Moore: My big sister Barbara Biggs-Lester is a jewelry connoisseur with a stunning fully-thrifted collection, and she was my muse. It started with some cheaply made purses I was so proud to have scored on sale at a retail store. She saw them, was not impressed, and said, “Let’s go thrifting.” I discovered the quality and bargains I could find in a thrift store and took off. Soon after, I became aware that thrifting is green and philanthropic, and I never looked back. What keeps me thrifting now is I love the idea of looking good while doing good for the planet, for important causes and for my own creativity.
TBD: Can you give us the top-three list of dos and don’ts when it comes to finding awesome bargains for pennies?
Reise Moore:
- Don’t judge a thrift store by its cover. Some of the most amazing clothing I have found has been in a place I was afraid to walk into. The neighborhood was dicey, but once I was inside, the designer pieces were jumping off the racks. The folks were warm and friendly and most everything was priced between two and five bucks.
- Do seek out a top-notch dry cleaner. If you turn your nose up at thrifting because someone else has worn the clothes, please know that several studies have shown that even new clothes hanging in a store can be pretty darn dirty. We immediately take everything we thrift to the dry cleaner or wash it ourselves. If you focus on quality, natural fiber items at thrift stores (and you should), they deserve the extra cost of dry cleaning.
- Do develop a clear idea of your own personal style. Thrifting newbies often are seduced by the low prices and end up with armloads of items in a grab bag of styles. Being able to focus on the silhouettes, colors and styles that flatter you and make you happy can help you sift through the sometimes overwhelming thrift store inventory and find what speaks to you. Tastemakers and trendsetters know this, and that’s why some of the best-dressed people I have ever seen have been in thrift stores.
TBD: What are some of the things that you learned talking to all the people in the book?
Allison Engel: We realized the absolute explosion in thrift and consignment shopping in this country, with new online outlets and new brick and mortar chains, as well as the longtime charitable thrifts. The Association of Resale Professionals has determined that thrift stores generate $12 billion in annual revenue. One in six American adults now shop second hand, and they are increasingly drawn to thrift stores because they are eco-friendly. Textile waste is a huge problem, and thrift stores are luring millennials who are concerned about the issue.
We interviewed thrift shop owners, dedicated thrifters, personal shoppers at thrift stores (they exist!), professionals who help people downsize and organize their belongings, costume designers, tailors, dry cleaners, cobblers, re-weavers and many others, and filled the book with their tips and observations. We loved the hints we received from Chelsea Confalone, who scouts the bins at thrift stores where items are sold by the pound. She buys clothing in beautiful fabrics that might have a rip or tear and remakes them into items for her young children. She’s now taking sewing lessons. Pinterest can supply clothing redo ideas (look under “Remake Clothes” under the “Explore” tab), and YouTube has instruction videos. I love the idea that thrift stores can spark creativity and an interest in handmade, refashioned items.
TBD: Why should people thrift?
Reise Moore: People have a misconception that thrifting is just for folks without money or down on their luck. Don’t get it twisted, I can afford to shop retail and I definitely can afford to shop discount clothing stores. I thrift because I want to be a better kind of consumer. I don’t want my purchases to add to the huge issue of textile waste that is fueled by fast fashion. I want my purchases to count toward the missions of the charity-based thrift stores I frequent.
Also, I have never felt so creatively unchained when it comes to clothes. Your unique take on how you choose to clothe yourself is a form of self-expression. It can be unleashed in thrift stores because there is so much to choose from. When it comes to trends, nothing is better than thrift stores because trends often repeat or harken back to some specific decade. So if I see that ‘90s grunge or ‘70s chic is back, I can find original representations of the look in thrift stores. Nothing beats originals, as they are a much higher quality than what can be found in fast-fashion outlets. It is the reason why celebrities and fashionistas wear vintage and frequent thrift stores.
TBD: We hate to ask you this, but what advice do you have for writers?
Allison Engel: Be persistent. Most of the ideas we’ve had for books and plays have existed in our notebooks, computers and brains for years and years. We don’t give up on ideas we think are worthwhile, even if it takes others a while to agree. We had our Food Finds idea for several years before our first book was published – and we still were very early in identifying and chronicling the rise of American foods made by small, family-run producers.
If we hit a roadblock, we might abandon a project for a bit, but we simply hold the thought until we, perhaps, meet someone who will help it along, or wait for the topic to catch fire in the national consciousness. If we listened to naysayers and gatekeepers, we wouldn’t have published or produced much in our lives.
Allison Engel is a journalist who has written articles and produced photographs for Apartment Life, Metropolitan Home, Traditional Home, Country Home, Renovation Style, American Patchwork & Quilting, Quilt Sampler, Midwest Living, Palm Springs Life and others. She was a longtime columnist for Saveur, and her freelance articles have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. She and her twin sister wrote three editions of a book on family-run food producers (Food Finds: America’s Best Local Foods and the People Who Produce Them) for HarperCollins, which they turned into the show Food Finds for Food Network that ran for seven years.
She holds a dual bachelor’s degree in textiles/clothing and journalism from Iowa State University, a master’s degree in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A play she wrote with twin sister Margaret Engel, Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, attracted Kathleen Turner for its premiere production, and has received several other record-breaking Equity productions around the nation in the last three years. A second play, Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End, had its premiere at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., last year, an Equity production in Cincinnati this past spring, and several upcoming productions scheduled.
For five years, Allison was senior editor of the University of Southern California alumni magazine and web editor for USC News, and she currently is the associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC.
Maricia “Reise” Moore has more than 16 years of experience producing and managing productions, including shows for Animal Planet and A&E’s Biography. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts with an emphasis in production, and holds a master’s degree in communication management from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She is currently an executive in charge of production for the Campus Filming Office at USC, overseeing major production companies on feature films, network and cable television and national commercial shoots.
Reise is a thrift store fanatic. What started out six years ago as a grudging trip to a thrift store swiftly became a passion for quality and beautiful, unique clothes at a rock bottom prices. She prides herself on dressing head to toe every day —including accessories—in fabulous thrifted finds. When she is not combing the aisles of thrift stores, she is happily being mom to three kids and wife to her writer husband in Los Angeles.
Her first book, ThriftStyle: The Ultimate Bargain Shopper’s Guide to Smart Fashion, written with Allison Engel and Margaret Engel, was published in September 2017. Reise and the Engels currently are working with a production company to turn the book into a television show starring Hollywood costume designers who shop at thrift stores to help everyday consumers solve fashion problems.
Margaret Engel directs the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation and was the managing editor of the Newseum. She was a reporter for the Washington Post, Des Moines Register and Lorain Journal and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. She co-wrote Food Finds: America’s Best Local Foods and the People Who Produce Them with her twin Allison, and helped turn the book into a show for Food Network, where it ran for seven years.
She and Allison wrote the play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, which is still being produced regularly, and has had about 35 productions to date around the country. She also co-authored the play Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End, which has had several Equity productions, with upcoming productions in Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.
She has served on the board of Theatre Washington/Helen Hayes Awards, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and chairs the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism awards board. She is a judge for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight awards and is a member of the Nieman Foundation board.
She and her husband, Bruce Adams, wrote three editions of a Fodor’s travel guide to America’s baseball parks, with the help of their children, Emily and Hugh.
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Dana Meachen Rau on How to Write 340 Books
We recently attended the annual New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Regional Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts, and one of the things we love about that conference specifically, and great writers conferences in general, is getting to sit in on lectures and talks by people we don’t know, but should know. One of those people is Dana Meachen Rau. David happened to stumble into her class and ended up learning so much about how to create memorable and complex characters, how inanimate objects can be used to help communicate the emotional state of our characters, and so much more. Now that the dust has settled on that conference, we thought we would pick her brain about books, writing, and all that jazz.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: How did you become interested in writing and drawing as a kid? What were your early inspirations and why?
Dana Meachen Rau: Truly, I don’t remember how it all started. My parents always encouraged my early attempts at writing and drawing. Creative expression is empowering, especially to a little kid. I do remember a lot of play. I had a brother who was always a willing participant—he’s blind, and together we invented whole worlds that neither of us could see, but that felt completely real. Instead of a sandbox in the backyard, we had a dirt hole, where we planned to dig a tunnel to a multiple-room clubhouse. (Imagine a time before apps when kids played in dirt holes!) The clubhouse never happened, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter.
As a reader, I didn’t devour every shelf of the library. Instead, I had a few well-worn books that I read countless times—Charlotte’s Web, Encyclopedia Brown, and my absolute favorite and forever inspiration, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I reread it recently, I tried to pinpoint what drew me in so passionately as a kid. It must have been the visuals, the silly language, and the underlying creepiness. It was subversively magical.
TBD: How did you get a job editing children’s books, and what did you learn from this that you could apply to your own writing?
DMR: After college, I wanted a job with a tangible end product, and that led me to publishing. Luckily, instead of having to move to big and scary NYC, I landed a job at a small children’s publisher in Connecticut—and I mean small. I was the only member of their editorial department, so I communicated with a bunch of freelancers—authors, illustrators, editors, consultants, designers. It was a crash course in children’s publishing. I moved on to Children’s Press, where I edited early readers and school-and-library nonfiction until my son was born and I began freelancing.
My editorial work laid the groundwork for my writing career in ways I didn’t anticipate. It taught me the value of feedback and revision. I can self-edit while the manuscript is in my hands, but I can also let it go to all the fresh eyes that have a stake in the process. Everyone wants it to be the best it can be.
TBD: Do you think it’s important to write every day?
DMR: I suffer from journal envy. Many writer friends pour out their thoughts onto pages daily, and I’ve tried to be like them. But all I have to show for my efforts is a pile of journals with “Finally, I’m going to start writing a journal!” scrawled on the first pages followed by a bunch of empty ones. I just can’t make it happen.
But it is important to write every day, and I do in some form. Often, it’s related to my current project. But sometimes it’s a lesson plan, a random idea for the future, a quick poem, or even an email. The purpose of all writing is to effectively communicate an idea or image. That’s an important skill to practice. That’s what writing every day is…practice.
Even if I don’t have hours or even minutes to work on my latest project, at least I’ve been maintaining my writing skills. Then muscle memory kicks in when I have more extended time to write.
TBD: How did you become a writing teacher, and what effect has that had on you as a writer?
DMR: I developed a 10-week creative writing class for the Warner Theatre Center for Arts Education (Torrington, CT), to hone in on the basics of creative writing. I tested out writing exercises (some sane, some wacky). It was a chance to experiment. I realized I craved an extended relationship with students, so I sent out my resume to local colleges. When the University of Hartford needed an adjunct to fill out their Fall 2016 schedule, I jumped at the chance.
I teach rhetoric, the art of persuasive writing and speaking, and while it might not seem to apply to creative writing, it has most definitely fed my work. I keep persuasion in mind every time I draft a scene between two characters who are manipulating each other. I think of rhetoric when trying how to sway a reader toward a certain understanding. The intentionality of each word choice applies to both rhetoric and creative writing.
I’m still trying to find that perfect balance, though, between teaching and writing. My current work-in-progress novel has been pushed to the back burner while I navigate my way as a professor. But the benefit of the back burner is that the story is still stewing. Because time is more precious, my chances to write have become a treat to look forward to. When I do have time to write, I’m amped up, eager, and ready to dive in.
TBD: What’s it like writing books for the wildly popular Who Is (Was) … series? And why are their heads so big?
DMR: Out of the blue in 2013, I got a call from the Who Was editor. She had been reading a biography I had written more than a decade before, and thought my voice would be a good fit. Since then, I’ve written six books for the series, with another one waiting on my desk.
Who Was has been one of the most fun series I’ve ever worked on. The process starts with full immersion. I surrounded myself with research, absorb it, map out a plan, and get writing. I don’t work linearly—each manuscript is like a sculpture. First I build the armature, then I slop on lumps of clay. I mold here, shape there, take bits away, add elsewhere. Each book has its own process and personality. Eventually it all comes together under the helpful guidance of my astute and savvy editor, Paula Manzanero.
The best part of writing this series, though, is the reaction from kids. They love those big heads! All the covers (more than 150!) were illustrated by Nancy Harrison, but the idea for the big heads (and for the series) came from editor Jane O’Connor. She says the big heads were inspired by the caricatures that used to appear on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. She thought they would have fantastic kid-appeal.
She was right. When I visit schools, the kids can’t hide their excitement over what they call the “Bobble-Head Bios.” Almost everyone has read at least one, some kids collect them, and they all have their favorites.
TBD: Tell us about your road to publication and how you navigate the stormy seas of the book business. And how in God’s name does one person write 340 books?
DMR: As I mentioned above, I started my career as an editor, and my first few books were for the companies I worked for. When I went freelance, I continued writing for them and for other school and library publishers. Books for the school and library market are often work-for-hire assignments, so my “day job” for the next 15-ish years involved taking on as many assignments as I could to earn a steady income (thus so many books!). I wrote for a variety of age levels on all sorts of topics—roller coasters, cupcakes, sneakers, ladybugs, aliens, suffrage, rocks and minerals, robots, planets, brains, sandcastles, rock climbing. You name it, it’s very possible I’ve written a book about it! Meanwhile, I was also working on picture books and middle grade novels, submitting them to publishers, and marking off rejections on my spreadsheets. So, while I passed the 300 mark for published books, I also passed the 300 mark for rejection letters. (It’s all part of the process for authors writing and submitting over so many years!)
In 2013, I got the itch to become a student again, so I enrolled at Vermont College of Fine Arts to get my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Coming out of that program, I secured an agent, who’s currently marketing a middle grade and a picture book while I work on a YA novel.
Through the years, no matter what the project, I grew as an author. I’ve also realized that there isn’t, nor should there ever be, a point of “arrival.” It’s healthy to give yourself goals along the way, but success is more about the development, patience, and perseverance of the journey.
TBD: What is an objective correlative, and why is it so important?
DMR: I first learned the term objective correlative in graduate school from author Tim Wynn-Jones, and it sounded so academic and important. But it’s quite a simple concept, at least how I interpret it—an author can use an object (setting or event) to correlate to an emotion. In other words, you don’t have to name an emotion to communicate it to readers, you can show it through sensory description. Suzy doesn’t have to say she feels neglected. Instead, Suzy can be looking at a dying, cobwebbed-covered plant on the windowsill that never gets any sun. That says neglected more than the word “neglected” ever could. The plant becomes shorthand for the emotion, so when the plant is reprised in the story, we feel “neglect” again. And then, if that same plant is thriving and blooming by the end, we feel the significance of that change, too.
TBD: How do you inject emotion into characters in a book?
DMR: For me, it all comes down to empathy—getting the reader to feel the same feelings as your character. I think of emotion as the engine of the story. A character’s wants and desires will drive what the character does (action/plot), what the character sees (setting), what the character says (dialogue), and what the character remembers (flashback). Everything in a story has to be in service to the emotions.
To get readers to empathize with characters, the author has to empathize with his or her characters, too. If you can tap into your own authentic, vulnerable, core emotions when writing, then those emotions will show up on the page and transfer to the core of your reader.
TBD: We hate to ask you this, but what advice do you have for writers?
DMR: This is a great question! Lord knows I’ve needed all the writerly advice I could get my hands on through the years.
Write what scares you…We often say we want to be bold and brave, but that’s not possible without fear. If you don’t think you’re a poet, write a poem. If you don’t think you could ever write YA, try it. You have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. You’ll most likely surprise yourself by easily conquering what you thought impossible.
Find a community… Often the people in your immediate circle (spouse, kids, family, every day friends) don’t understand the writer part of you. You need to find a team. Teams have teammates, of course, who understand the game. But they also have cheerleaders to spur you on and coaches who offer advice to help you become the best version of yourself. Join a critique group, join the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, find your people.
Give yourself permission to play…for so long I thought I needed to be efficient with my writing time. But when I experiment, I create an unexpected (and better) result. Turn off the side of your brain that tells you your writing must have a purpose (and even worse, that it has to be good!). In other words, dig in the dirt hole. You never know what you’ll discover.
Dana Meachen Rau is the author of more than 340 books for children and young adults, including early readers, biographies, history, science, cookbooks, and craft books. Her most recent titles include Who Was Cesar Chavez? and Who Are the Rolling Stones? A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford CT, and Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT, she currently teaches writing at the University of Hartford. To find out more about her books and her blog, visit www.danameachenrau.com.
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Eddie Muller, the Czar of Noir, on the Importance of Finding Empathy in Darkness
If you live in the Bay Area, which we did for many years, and you have a penchant for the dark side that draws you toward the underbelly of noir, you know Eddie Muller. He’s a legend. Let’s face it, you don’t get to be the Czar of Noir for nothing. So when we found out he was editing the new Oakland Noir, part of the great noir series by Akashic, we jumped at the chance to pick his dark brain about Oaktown, writing and the book business.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: What are your earliest memories of being interested in noir? What were some of your favorite noirish books when you were going up, and why?
Eddie Muller: I’m of an earlier generation, pre-VCR. I was first drawn to noir by movies I’d see on Dialing for Dollars, weekdays afternoons when I’d cut school. Stuff like Thieves’ Highway and Cry of the City and The Big Heat. I started combing TV Guide to find movies with “Big,” “City,” “Street” and “Night” in the title. There’s a title: Big City Streets at Night. I’d watch that. The look of the films and the attitudes of the characters resonated with me. I was at the epicenter of the hippie movement in San Francisco, but I was intrigued by this earlier generation’s style and attitude.
In high school I started reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and the die was cast. In that way, I’m like virtually every other crime fiction writer. It’s amazing the influence those guys had, especially Chandler. His prose was intoxicating. Reading Hammett’s short stories made you want to be a detective. Reading Chandler made you want to be a writer. After that, you just start devouring everything. At a certain point I began distinguishing between mystery writers and crime writers. And I became less interested in the detective whodunnits and more fascinated by the noir stuff: Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford. Their books don’t resolve neatly. Things aren’t going to end well.
TBD: What are you currently reading?
EM: I’m looking forward to a couple of days off so I can read Paul Auster’s latest, 4321. I’ve seen some discouraging reviews, but I read everything of this. He’s my favorite living author. I enjoy how his mind works and I like how he translates it to the page.
TBD: What are some of your favorite noir classics, and again, why?
EM: Derek Raymond’s Factory series books are pretty great, especially I Was Dora Suarez. He really turned detective stories into noir literature. Forgive me for touting the obvious touchstones: Hammett’s big three: Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Here’s the thing about crime fiction: you end up loving a writer’s body of work more than a single book. I like reading David Goodis, but I can’t say I like Cassidy’s Girl more than Nightfall. Same with Jim Thompson. Charles Willeford, The Burnt Orange Heresy. I like Highsmith’s Ripley novels. I like Highsmith in general. She still doesn’t get her due because, obviously, she was a woman writing in what’s perceived as a man’s genre. I had that bias once, as a younger and stupider man. Then I wised up. More guys should wise up.
TBD: Having been published in San Francisco Noir, part of the Akashic series, I’m a big fan of these books. How did you become involved with Oakland Noir?
EM: Well, we were both in that San Francisco noir collection! I was sort of wondering when Johnny Temple, Akashic’s publisher, would get around to Oakland. I mean, seriously, how can you have Duluth Noir before Oakland Noir? As it turns out, Jerry Thompson, who’s a writer and bookseller in Oakland, had pitched Johnny on an Oakland Noir collection but hadn’t gotten a green light. Then Jerry approached me about co-editing the anthology—and I guess because Johnny and I had some history we got the go-ahead.
TBD: What was it like editing all these amazing writers?
EM: It was great! Jerry and I shared a vision of what we wanted the book to be—an accurate demographic reflection of the city. Meaning we wanted an appropriate gender/racial/ethnic mix to the stories. Which can be tricky. You want good well-conceived, well-written stories, not just stories featuring a black or Asian or Hispanic character. Let’s be honest: it’s a crap shoot. Jerry did the hard work of selecting most of the contributors, because he knew the literary landscape of Oakland; I pulled in a couple of my buddies, Kim Addonizio and Joe Loya. We had a vision of how the book should play out, but you can’t tell writers what to write. In the end, I was happy with the result. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly complained that some stories weren’t really noir, but the Kirkus reviewer understood completely: our mission was to reveal the city beneath the mainstream perceptions, to use genre fiction show sides of Oakland not usually seen.
TBD: What do you think separates great noir from everyday pulpy potboilers?
EM: Empathy. Great noir writing makes you feel and contemplate lives gone off the rails. That’s not entertaining for a lot of people, but to me it’s one of the purposes of art.
TBD: What exactly is a noircheologist? (Spell check really hated that word!)
EM: I dig through the past to rescue and revive this stuff. That’s the mission of the Film Noir Foundation, which I founded in 2006. We rescue and restore films, specifically noir, that have slipped through the cracks and disappeared. There are a lot of savvy small publishers who are noircheologists on the literary side, but I’m the guy when it comes to film. We recently resurrected a terrific 1956 noir film from Argentina, Los tallos amargos (The Bitter Stems), and preserved a sensational picture from 1952 called El vampiro negro; it’s an Argentine reworking of Fritz Lang’s M. I’m on a crusade now to show that film noir was not specifically an American thing.
TBD: You have one of the coolest nicknames around: “The Czar of Noir.” How did that come about? And how can I get a nickname that cool?
EM: A woman named Laura Sheppard, event coordinator at the Mechanic’s Institute Library in San Francisco, was introducing me one night. She was reading the far-too-lengthy bio I’d supplied—you do that when you’re young and trying too hard—and, frankly, I think she just got tired of it. So she said, “Hell, he’s just the czar of noir.” It’s been the gift that keeps on giving. If you want a cool nickname, I can put you in touch with Laura.
TBD: Will you ever get tired of noir?
EM: I don’t think so. Not once I realized there was far more to it than what was ascribed by the original scholars on the subject. It annoys some purists when you stretch the boundaries, but who cares? We sold out a week of shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York presenting virtually unknown film noir from Argentina. Akashic’s Noir series has been a fabulous way of getting new writers published and providing a valuable anthropological–literary experience. There’s been a long overdue rethinking of this terrain as strictly a male-only province. All good, as far as I’m concerned.
TBD: We hate to ask you this, but what advice do you have for writers in general, and writers of noir specifically?
EM: Understand that noir is not about the body count. It is often about violence—the psychological pressures that lead to it, and the inherent drama in trying to stem the tide. It bothers me when books and films featuring ugly people engaged in relentless killing are described as “noir.” It’s not. Those are just Tom and Jerry cartoons for post-adolescent boys. Not entertaining to me, and not of any significant value to the culture at large. I guess my advice would be “Aim a little higher.”
Eddie Muller is the world’s foremost authority on film noir. As founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation he is a leading figure in film restoration and preservation, and a familiar face and voice on the international film festival circuit, DVD special features and Turner Classic Movies, where he hosts Noir Alley every Sunday morning at 10am EST.
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Julia Kite on Tottenham Hotspur, Rejection, and Her Long, Strange Trip to Getting Published
We first met Julia Kite many years ago, when she won one of our Pitchapaloozas (think American Idol for books, only kinder and gentler). She pitched us a fantastic story, full of fantastic characters. It’s been a long haul, but her book, The Hope and Anchor, has finally found a home, so we thought we would pick her brain about writing, authorship, books, and all things publishing.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: Why did you decide to become a writer?
Julia Kite: I never decided on it— it simply happened. I learned to read at a very young age, starting in a curry house where the owner gave me a calendar to play with because the food was all too spicy for me and I had nothing else to do. I made my parents read it to me until I memorized what words looked like, then I figured it all out from there and ever since then I haven’t stopped. Eventually I realized that if I was reading books that other people wrote, then I could write them as well. I was often bored in school and I needed some quiet, unobtrusive way to pass the time without getting in trouble. Turns out if you look like you’re working on an assignment or furiously scribbling notes, you can get away with actually writing a story. To this day, I’m a wimp who can’t deal with anything hotter than chicken tikka masala. It’s sad. I know.
TBD: What where your favorite authors and books when you were a kid, and why?
JK: I always liked the realistic stories of other girls’ lives— Beverly Cleary’s books were favorites of mine, because Ramona was so relatable in her mischief and her well-meaning imperfection. I saw a lot of myself in Harriet the Spy, wanting to know everything about everybody and write it down in a book, and I must have read Matilda a million times. It didn’t hurt that when the film adaptation of Matilda came out, I looked like Mara Wilson with a bigger nose. What fiction did to me was give me aspirations— look at these fascinating lives other people are having!
TBD: How did you learn to be a writer?
JK: I got there by first reading everything in sight, and then by being constantly observant of the world around me. I strongly believe that there’s only so much you can directly teach someone when it comes to writing. Being able to write is the function of being able to read, listen, interpret, synthesize, and abstract. These are skills you can only refine by going out and living in the world. You learn by doing. To be honest, eavesdropping on trains and in cafes probably taught me more about dialogue than any how-to book. Strange as this may sound, boredom also has had a lot to do with it. When you’re bored, you think a lot about other people’s lives, about things you’d rather be doing, places you’d rather be sitting at that exact time. You imagine that everything else in the world is so much more intriguing than what you’re stuck in at that moment, and you imagine being a part of it, what you’d do if you were someone else. And that’s the bedrock of fiction.
While I love being able to learn everything about anything at any time using my smartphone, I worry that if I’d had one when I was younger, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities brought by boredom and letting my mind wander. I think that’s a necessity when you’re young, and if people lose that because there’s just so much stimulation, their creativity is going to suffer.
TBD: How did you find a publisher for your debut novel?
JK: What a long, bizarre, maddening trip it has been. The Hope and Anchor is actually my second novel. My first novel was called The Results and it was about two sisters in Liverpool who start up a betting ring, choosing people in their neighborhood who they believe deserve a bit of joy in their lives, based off one girl’s unwanted knack of correctly predicting how every soccer match is going to end. They end up in too deep and realize the only way they can make a clean break with their pasts is to con everybody on the night of the Cup Final, making themselves rich and everybody else an enemy so that they can really never come back. The kitchen sink meets magic realism. I pitched it at your Pitchapalooza competition when I was living in San Francisco back in late 2011 (bloody hell). I ended up winning Pitchapalooza and it was a massive boost to my confidence, which was in the basement, because a year earlier I had abandoned my perfectly lovely life in London to move to California and study for a PhD, which turned out to be a disaster, to put it lightly. Within the course of one year I had gone from living the dream as a financially independent young woman with a decent job, a nice flat, a loving boyfriend, and one hell of a cute pet bird, to an anxious and depressed wreck running into bureaucratic brick walls with my research, earning barely above minimum wage, living in a neighborhood where I couldn’t wear sandals for all the used needles on the pavement, essentially undergoing massive culture shock in the country where I was born. California and I didn’t get along. I couldn’t even watch my beloved Tottenham Hotspur thanks to the eight-hour time difference, and if that means nothing to you, suffice it to say that is a very big deal. The one thing I still had was my writing. No arrogant professor or unhinged person screaming under my window at 3 AM could take my imagination away from me.
After Pitchapalooza, I was convinced my luck was going to change, and I would finally be getting somewhere with my writing. And despite a significant number of rejections, for a moment it looked like that was going to happen. I began working with a well-established agent in England who helped me edit The Results. He really liked it, but explained that unknown new authors of literary fiction are difficult to sell. If he was going to take me on as a client, I had to prove I had more than one book in me. So I wrote The Hope and Anchor…and it didn’t do anything for him. We parted company. I read the writing on the wall and put The Results aside.
After realizing there was a reason average time to degree in my department was nine years, and recognizing there’s definitely something wrong when blood-soaked clothes on the street no longer faze you, I found the courage to quit my PhD and I moved back to the East Coast. While I worked on rebuilding my interrupted policy and research career, I went back to the drawing board with pitching The Hope and Anchor and followed all the directions, writing personalized query letters to agents, double-checking their guidelines, making sure I was doing everything they wanted. I had quite a few agents request my manuscript. Unfortunately, none of them bit. I received many rejections with zero feedback— the most common response was, “I just don’t love it enough,” and variations on that theme. It was frustrating to me, because there’s no way to improve without clear feedback and concrete criticism. It almost would have been more reassuring to hear that they thought I had some kind of deficiency of skill, because at least then I would know what I needed to fix, where I needed to improve. You can learn to improve your mechanics, but you can’t force somebody to fall in love.
There was one agent who replied to my query with incredible enthusiasm and asked for the full. A few days later, she wrote me a bubbly email about how she was halfway through and absolutely in love with the book, and she would get back to me the following week. I was on cloud nine but I knew I needed to be patient, so I waited. And waited. A week passed. Two. Three. I didn’t want to be an annoyance, but after a month of no contact I finally sent her a polite check-in and she rejected me with zero feedback. I asked her if she would mind telling me what hadn’t worked for her in the second half of the book, essentially what had cooled her enthusiasm, but I never got a response. And I was utterly gobsmacked. I understand that the sheer volume of manuscripts literary agents have to deal with precludes detailed feedback, but I felt that I had been strung along and that I had the right to be miffed about a process that put me on ridiculous emotional roller-coasters. That was probably the moment when I first considered that maybe my book wasn’t the problem, the industry landscape was.
At the same time, I was trying to learn as much as possible from people in publishing, and from authors who had found mainstream success. Yet every time I went to a talk by an agent or an editor or an author, I left feeling utterly despondent. An agent spoke to my writing group, gave us all kinds of advice for landing someone like her, then revealed that in the past year, she had signed exactly one new client out of a slush pile of over 400. Then an author with her literary fiction debut published by one of the Big Five told us she had spent most of her modest advance on hiring a publicist, and my jaw hit the floor and stayed there far longer than could possibly be sanitary because I thought the entire point of signing with the Big Five was that they took care of publicity for you in-house. A member of my writing group landed a top-notch agent, then found out that they wanted him to completely change the genre of his book before editors would consider it. I saw people get agents who didn’t sell their books, and they’d part a year later, back at square one. At a certain point, the practical part of my brain intruded and said, “You’re a complete unknown writing literary fiction, and every indication is that the odds are stacked against you, no matter how good a writer you are. Why are you making yourself miserable, trying to do the impossible?” In my day job I’m a very analytic person, very evidence- and data-focused, and all the statistics were screaming that continuing down the same path was not going to magically make a door open. It would only make me bitter.
Friends asked me why I didn’t self-publish, but I knew that was a road I didn’t want to take. It can be fulfilling and occasionally lucrative for genre fiction, but that’s not what I write. Then one day in my Facebook feed, a friend had shared a link to a book one of his work colleagues was funding on a website called Unbound. The author was Gautam Malkani, and I recognized the name— he had published an acclaimed book called Londonstani several years earlier, and was now crowd-funding his second book after parting with his publisher. I knew that if a writer as talented as Gautam was going this route, it had to be legit, and that if his publisher had dropped him, then clearly there were issues with traditional publishing. Friends of mine in music were going their own way, recording brilliant songs and releasing them independently, and I realized that publishing needs to innovate just as the music industry has done over the past decade. Clinging to romantic notions of an industry that has changed almost beyond recognition would not get my book into the hands of strangers, but trying something new and exciting just might. I vetted Unbound very carefully, then submitted my manuscript.
I know now that “I just didn’t love it enough” can mean, “It’s good writing, but it’s not going to sell a million copies, and I need a book that will sell a million copies for this to be worth my while.” It’s business, not personal. But I believe there’s still space for good writing that’s not necessarily going to have wide enough appeal to be a summer beach read— and fortunately Unbound does, too.
It’s funny, you work for years to get anywhere with your book, and then two offers come along at once. I turned down an offer from a literary agent on the day I signed with Unbound. I didn’t want to go through any more of the craziness.
TBD: What is your book about?
JK: The Hope and Anchor is a story about love and loss, at its very core. Not only the actual disappearance of a beloved person, but also coming to terms with how your life isn’t going to turn out the way you had always planned, and the need to put old dreams, as lovely as they may have once been, to rest.
Our protagonist is Neely Sharpe, a woman in her late twenties who once believed that as soon as she moved to London, she would be somebody. She figured her life would take off and she would have the bright, exciting future she had always wanted growing up in a satellite town. She figured she had done everything right: being middle-class, highly educated, and ambitious. On paper, it seemed like the city should have been hers for the taking. Unfortunately, the recession took the shine off her big dreams, and so she finds herself working a dead-end job and living in a scruffy, downmarket part of West London. The one bright spot in her life is her relationship with her girlfriend, a local woman named Angela Archer. Angela’s upbringing couldn’t have been more different from Neely’s: nothing much was ever expected of her, particularly after her mother died and her troubled older sister moved away. She has epilepsy, but insists on not being treated differently. Her job at the local leisure center is never going to bring in a living wage, but to Neely she seems happy.
Neely, in her increasing dissatisfaction with life, is prone to making foolish and self-destructive decisions. The morning after one of those bad decisions, she stumbles home hungover and finds Angela is gone. And she’s not answering her mobile phone. Oh, and the medication Angela should have taken yesterday is still sitting in its little box in their kitchen.
Doubt and self-loathing leave Neely unsure of what to do. Locals who have known Angela since childhood tell Neely not to panic, and not to treat her girlfriend like she’s fragile or stupid. Neely, meanwhile, fears Angela may have left deliberately, perhaps knowing more than she let on about Neely’s drunken hookups with a mutual friend— but then there’s the matter of that medication. She finally goes to the police, but not until after making a few more potentially unwise decisions along the way.
We meet Andy, Angela’s older sister, who thought she had left behind her difficult upbringing when she married a middle-class man, moved to the suburbs, and had children. With Angela’s disappearance she gets pulled back into a life she never wanted to see again. Neely’s search for Angela, meanwhile, is interspersed with flashbacks of Angela’s teenage years, where one particular event left her determined to never leave this particular corner of the city. Little by little, Neely finds out just how little she really knew about her girlfriend. It shatters her self-image as someone who should have been smart enough to not end up in this mess, but also gives her greater clarity about her situation. She has to get a grip, get a clue, and come to terms with how little she knows about life, love, and London.
Without giving away too much of what happens, Neely ends up scouring the city, from pubs, to parks, to the sewers in a snowstorm, ending up far more immersed in her girlfriend’s history than she ever imagined. The only shot she has at finding answers is to risk losing all the illusions she ever had about what her life would be like.
I want the reader to be left wondering how much of one’s past you can really leave behind, and whether it’s wise to even try to do so.
TBD: What inspired your novel?
JK: I used to ride my bike along the towpath of the Grand Union Canal in West London, usually going all the way from my flat near Paddington Station out to a suburb called Greenford. When I traveled along the bit that runs beside a railway depot and a nature reserve, I was struck by how much it didn’t feel like the city out there. It was wooded and quiet and it felt a million miles from the council estate where I was living at the time. I thought—and don’t take this the wrong way— that if anybody wanted to get away with hiding a body, they could probably leave it there and nobody would find it for quite some time. I really don’t know why I thought that. I’m not a morbid person. But it planted the seeds of this book in my head. After I moved to California, writing vividly about a place I missed so much helped keep alive my plans to eventually get back the happiness I’d had in London; I suppose it was a grieving process, really, for the life I thought I would have. I picked the title as the name of a fictional pub, a complete wreck of a place, not really realizing at the time how well it fit me when I was writing the book. While Neely is definitely not based on me, I can certainly empathize with her situation where her best laid plans have gone astray and the world is passing her by. Had I not been so miserable in California, she probably wouldn’t have been so rich a character, so you have to take the good with the bad.
The imagery of the Grand Union Canal, which runs through Neely and Angela’s neighborhood, is constantly present throughout the book, as is the London transportation network. They link Angela’s past with her fate, Neely’s dreams with her reality, and Andy’s old resentment and shame with her determination to have a better life. Angela’s father is a Tube driver on the Circle Line, which, unfortunately, was re-routed a few years ago so that it’s no longer a circle, so that kind of wrecks a bit of imagery, but oh well. My day job is in transportation policy, and I’ve always been intrigued by the topic. Most teenagers wanted their own cars but I just wanted to ride the train to the end of the line, looking out at different neighborhoods, watching people come and go and wondering about their lives. In that aspect transportation has been an oddly massive part of my development as a writer, even if I’m the first to admit it’s not exactly sexy. My background in urban policy and planning has taught me that the only constant in any city is change, and the corner of West London captured in The Hope and Anchor is no different. I knew I had to get my book out in the world before the neighborhood morphed beyond recognition. Whenever I go back there, it seems like another pub has closed, another new development I could never afford is rising. It’s already too late for the police station that features throughout the story… it has been turned into luxury flats.
The strangest thing happened the last time I was in London, last year. I went for a walk down the Harrow Road like I always do, but when I passed by the building I had chosen for Neely and Angela to call home, I noticed the door leading to the flats above the shop was on the latch. Not wide open, just a crack. I pushed it open, walked into the hallway, and it was exactly how I had imagined it, with the mail on the tile floor, even though I’d never set foot in that building before. In the book, the light in the corridor has long burnt out and Neely always has to feel her way up the stairs to her flat. Well, I tried hitting the light switch— and just as I had written it, it was burnt out. I kind of freaked out and ran back to the street at that point. It was just a bit too eerie.
TBD: Tell us about your publisher; they’re quite unusual.
JK: Unbound uses what is essentially a modernized form of subscription publishing, which was popular with everybody from Samuel Johnson to Mark Twain back in their day. Authors essentially crowdfund a certain amount in pre-orders of their book, with different rewards for different levels, much like Kickstarter but without the risk. Once the author hits their funding target, full production of the book begins, like at any other publishing house, and the books land on shelves in brick-and-mortar stores as well as online. Everybody who pledged gets their name in the book as a nice thank-you for helping it come into existence.
The Unbound model makes a lot of sense from a practical standpoint. I’m an unknown with a literary fiction debut. Most unknowns with literary fiction debuts don’t make heaps of money for their publishers. In fact, a few years ago the New York Times said that seven out of ten books overall don’t earn back their advance. These more “niche” books are essentially subsidized by the big bestsellers. What I now realize, after my long experience trying to get a literary agent, is that someone like me is simply a bad risk from a business perspective.
Fortunately, Unbound realized that, too— and made room for people like me. By essentially outsourcing the risk to me, they can bring my book into physical existence without worrying that they’ll pay out thousands in an advance, spend lots of money on production, and then potentially not recoup their investment. You wouldn’t be in business very long if you kept doing that, no matter how skilled your authors— hence the Big Five’s focus on the celebrity clients and proven best-sellers over debut literary authors. I first prove that I can bring in an audience, and then Unbound goes ahead and invests their time and money in creating the physical book to be marketed and sold like any other. The pre-orders show there is a market for the book, as well as provide a financial cushion prior to the full print run. I don’t get an advance, but books sold in shops or online after hitting the target net a much better royalty rate than most authors typically see.
Unbound also gives me as an author a bit more control than a traditional house would. For example, I deliberately chose to not do a hardcover. That’s for a very practical reason: I live in a small Manhattan apartment with another voracious reader, and bookshelf space is at a premium! While I love the look of hardcovers and they certainly give you that “I’ve made it” feeling, I rarely buy them because they’re expensive, heavy, and difficult to shove into a handbag to take on the subway. Producing one would have meant a higher funding goal as well. Paperbacks and e-books are what I like and what are going to sell more effectively than a hardcover, so that’s what I’m going to have.
Unbound is not a vanity press, nor are they a self-publishing service. What I love about them is that they seem truly dedicated to getting an audience for quality writing. For a house that has been around only six years, they’re punching above their weight; they had a book longlisted for the Booker Prize a couple years ago.
TBD: How do you plan to promote and market your book?
JK: Social media is a huge part of this. I’ve had my Twitter account (@juliakite) for… oh god, more than eight years now. You bet I have chronicled the long, long journey to publication, and my followers have been along for the ride, so it’s great to finally be able to have something to show them for it. To find people outside my immediate network, I think about what aspects of the book might interest people who have never heard of me. Number one is the setting. It’s massively important to the story, so I’ve been a bit cheeky and searched for tweets mentioning the Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal, and reached out to clubs and businesses in the neighborhood. I cringe a bit sending unsolicited messages, but the worst that can happen is that someone calls me annoying and then I move on. I also made an author page on Facebook and ran an ad targeted specifically to people in London who listed reading and novels as an interest. While it wasn’t hugely successful, I did get a few pledges, and when you’re completely unknown, every new person reading your book matters. I’m not the best at self-promotion, but I need to learn if I want this to be successful! I’ve made a video, which is on my Unbound page, featuring a lot of my photography. I think that helps humanize the project a bit, even if my hard-to-place American accent might come as a bit of a shock to some…
A few months ago I was on Jeopardy, where I lost spectacularly on the final question after leading for the entire game, but had a great time regardless. The Jeopardy contestant community is surprisingly close, and it includes several bookworms. I’m also fortunate to be part of a writing group called the Columbia Fiction Foundry, which is hosted by the Columbia University Alumni Association. All of us have the goal of being commercially published, and so we support each other. We’ve got a considerable mailing list that hopefully I haven’t completely irritated yet. The members of the workshop have seen this book come together over the past couple of years, and I hope that when they finally have copies in their hands, they’ll know they were an important part of it.
Several Unbound authors already have established careers in journalism, TV, or music, and many have successfully published before. Readers pledge to their projects knowing it’ll be something they will probably like. Me, I’m a complete unknown! I’m asking people to take a leap of faith, and it’s difficult to get a complete stranger to part with money when they’re not familiar with my work other than the excerpt on my Unbound page. I’m ridiculously grateful to everybody who has pledged, but especially to the people who don’t know me at all, because they’ve put their confidence in me. I really hope they’ll enjoy The Hope and Anchor.
TBD: What is your next project?
JK: Oh, wow. I feel like I haven’t had time to think about the next project because technically this first one isn’t finished! Sometimes I consider reviving The Results, but it may be time to simply let that one go. I feel like my next book will have to be set in New York City, as it’s a place I know as well as London and there’s infinite possibility for the kind of stories you could write about here.
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing about the aftermath of a fatal car crash, focusing on the surviving driver. In my job, we insist on saying car “crashes,” not car “accidents,” because even if it wasn’t deliberate, it’s down to the actions a person chose to take and which they could have prevented, rather than an act of God. That distinction is very fascinating to me and I think the exploration of personal agency versus chance is a pretty fertile seam to mine. But I’m still in the very, very early stages.
TBD: What advice do you have for writers?
JK: Be Patient. This was a difficult trait to cultivate in myself. I’m still not the world’s most patient person. If I had told 18-year-old me that I wouldn’t have a book deal until my early 30s, I probably would have torn my hair out. NaNoWriMo is great for motivation, but you shouldn’t expect a novel in one month. Not even the bad bare bones of one, if you have a day job. I’ve found that some of my best writing has come from times when I wasn’t expecting to generate anything substantial. I just started thinking, started writing, and what I created was far better than I expected. If you pressure yourself by putting time constraints on your writing, you miss out on the serendipitous joy of an idea simply popping into your head after ages of long slog.
Similarly, accept that writing the book is the easy part. You should expect to spend far, far more time editing and revising than you did actually getting the words onto the page. And it’s worth it. There’s no substitute for slow, deliberative, quality work.
Be judicious when incorporating autobiography. Remember that above all, your novel must be a work of fiction, and if you are constraining the possibilities of what you’re writing in order to match reality as you lived it, then you’re doing it wrong. Of course, you can lift scenes or character traits from your own life— if something interesting has happened to you, then why not? But be very careful. Your audience of complete strangers wants to read a good story, not your therapy session. They care about whether you can write an interesting, gripping book, not whether everything you’re writing about actually happened in real life. For example, I dropped out of a PhD, and I made Neely someone who has done likewise because I knew I could write really well from the emotional perspective of having derailed what you thought was your surefire plan in life. But the similarities largely stop there. Likewise, there are a few scenes where I’ve lifted the bare bones of the action from real life, but I fleshed them out with imagination. My bike rides along the Grand Union Canal are not Angela’s, even though we traveled in each other’s wheel ruts and looked at the same scenery. She can’t possibly be seeing things the exact same way I did, because she’s not me; she’s had a different life, a different perspective. The magic of fiction is that you get to create these characters who are nothing like you. You get to play God of your own tiny world in a way you can’t do anywhere else in life, so why force yourself to stay within your own experiences? That would be a failure of imagination. Why limit yourself to characters who only tick the same identity boxes that you do? That defeats the purpose of fiction, in my opinion.
I’ve found it’s quite obvious when fiction is really thinly-veiled autobiography. It’s difficult for your peers to critique honestly, because it feels like saying anything negative is casting disapproval on someone’s actual life. But without honest critique, you won’t have a decent book. If your real life is interesting enough to be fictionalized, you might as well write memoir, but remember that unless you’re Malala, Madonna, or Maradonna, few people outside your circle of friends and family will find it interesting.
Get a group. Writing feels like a solitary activity, but you must, must, MUST have readers giving you constructive criticism. Without the Columbia Fiction Foundry, The Hope and Anchor would have been a much weaker book. Your friends and family are lovely people, but they can’t always give you the tough critique you need to grow as a writer. As writers we pour our heart and soul into our work, so criticism can sometimes feel like an attack, but you have to force yourself to get over it. It’s medicine: taking it feels absolutely awful, but it’s what you need to get any better. In a good workshop environment, you’re all going to want each other to succeed, and that means hard truths and hard work, so remember that the people reading your work are just trying to make it the best it can be. Which brings me to my next point…
Don’t take it personally. This applies whether it’s a critique from a workshop or a rejection from an agent. Your work is separate from who you are. Someone not liking your story doesn’t mean they don’t like you. Someone thinking your book isn’t ready for publication doesn’t mean they think you’re talentless. It’s difficult, but you need to remember that writing this specific book is something you do, not something you are. You will fail at individual tasks— that’s simply part of learning and growing— but that does not make YOU a failure.
Cut, but don’t trash. For The Hope and Anchor, I created a Word document I titled excisions.doc, and I put in it everything that needed to be cut for the sake of the story, but which I felt was too well-written to simply throw away and get rid of forever. It functioned as a holding pen for good writing that simply wasn’t right for the moment. It turned out to be a wise idea; while doing a major revision, I found that lots of great lines that I had to cut from Andy when I made her a less central character were easily adaptable to Neely.
Don’t read the comments. Good advice for life, that.
Julia Kite lives in Manhattan, and calls New York City and London home. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Obsessed with cities and the people in them, she started her career researching housing and urban regeneration, and she now directs policy and research for Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s advocates for walking, biking, and public transit. Before she began working to make New York City’s streets better for cyclists, she was taking long rides along the Grand Union Canal in West London. She is a member of the Columbia Fiction Foundry, an alumna of quiz shows The Chase and Jeopardy, an urban wildlife rehabilitator, a keen amateur baker, and the owner of an opinionated parrot. The Hope and Anchor, currently funding on Unbound, is her first novel, a work of fiction about a very real place she holds dear.
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Kris Spisak on Writing, Publishing, and the Dire Importance of Grammar
We first met Kris Spisak at the awesome James River Writers Conference. (Yet another reason to attend writers conferences!) We were immediately impressed by her professionalism, generosity, goodwill, and great hair. She’s been at this for a long time, and now that her book Get a Grip on your Grammar: 250 Writing and Editing Reminders for the Curious or Confused is out, we picked her brain on what it takes to get successfully published.
Read this interview on the HuffPost.
The Book Doctors: Why in heaven’s name would you want to become a writer?
Kris Spisak: There’s not a question of wanting to be a writer. Everyone these days is a writer. Whether you’re writing the next bestseller, an email to your boss, a manifesto on social media, or a note to your child’s teacher, you are a writer. Communication is a part of our everyday lives, whether we appreciate it or not. I contend, no matter how it is that we use our written words, it’s time we step up our game.
TBD: When you were a kid what were your favorite books, grammatically?
KS: I didn’t care about grammar when I was a kid any more than anyone else. If I was a kid in today’s generation, maybe I’d simply appreciate the semicolon for its versatility in winky-faces. Coming to appreciate the subtleties in language arose somewhere later around a fascination with what a single writer can achieve with well-designed words. I wanted to see how that was done.
TBD: What inspired you to write a book about grammar?
KS: Words matter. You could argue that how we use our words matters more today than ever before. Everyone has a voice, so why not use it? And if you’re going to use it, use it well.
So many books about business writing etiquette, bettering communication skills, and grammar rules are as dry as we remember from pre-adolescence. I wanted to create a writing resource that was jargon free, easily digestible, and written with a sense of humor. Get a Grip on Your Grammar is a writing resource for those moments of temporary bewilderment and for those moments we all want to show off our absolute best.
TBD: Why is grammar important?
KS: Grammar is important because clarity is important. The world will never know the brilliance inside your head unless you can craft it with precision. This is true for fiction writers, journalists, composers of academic essays, and business communicators alike.
Grammar ignorance isn’t bliss; it can be devastating. A weak understanding of English language use is the cause of missed job opportunities, lowered grades, love poems gone wrong, and certainly rejection letters from publishers. Getting a solid grip on your grammar can impact a life for the better. Even being a writer and an editor, I don’t think I’m biased when I say that.
TBD: What are some of your grammatical pet peeves?
KS: Of course I have personal pet peeves—“further” versus “farther,” for example, or “nauseous” versus “nauseated”—but I’m not one to go around correcting people’s English unless they are asking me to. When they ask me to, oh, I can have some fun, but no one likes to be torn down for simple mistakes.
TBD: What do you want people to take away from this book?
KS: Grammar isn’t something to be intimidated by or to be snobby about, and it certainly isn’t something to fight over. There are simply lessons that remain untaught or unsolidified in people’s minds. English might be our native language, but that doesn’t mean we understand it as well as we should. We are all human, and the English language is hard. We rush our communications because we live busy lives; however, what is more important than our expressions of our ideas? Personally, professionally, and creatively, there’s room for us all to do so much better.
TBD: What effect has Twitter had on grammar?
KS: You can look at Twitter and text messages and see the downfall of grammar and punctuation, or you can realize that people are communicating more than they ever have in human history.
TBD: Does being a grammar expert help or hinder you as a creative writer?
KS: As a fiction writer, I leave my editor self behind as I craft my early drafts. If I worried about perfection with every word and squiggle of digital ink, I would never get to that final page. When I do get to the editing, my process may be meticulous, but forcing myself to pay attention to every single word choice creates a manuscript that is fine-tuned when I get there.
TBD: What is your next project?
KS: The project that became Get a Grip on Your Grammar has had an interesting journey from a weekly writing tips blog to an indie published ebook to the literary-agent-represented, traditionally published book that it has become. That weekly writing tips blog continues on kris-spisak.com, and I’m having more fun with it than ever.
As for other projects, I have two novels in the works, which I hope to find homes for in the near future, and I don’t think my non-fiction side is anywhere close to finished. I have a new grammar-based project that’s bubbling in the back of my mind, as well. Stay tuned for that.
TBD: We hate to ask you this, but what advice do you have for writers, and for the grammatically challenged?
KS: No matter how well educated or how confident we may be, our writing skills can always be better. Writing is a craft to practice and improve. The more we draft our written words, the stronger that they will become. And if someone happens to be looking for a resource, Get a Grip on Your Grammar: 250 Writing and Editing Reminders for the Curious or Confused is now available from your favorite bookseller.
With degrees from the College of William & Mary and the University of Richmond, Kris Spisak began her career as a college writing instructor; however, after six years in the classroom, she transitioned to professional writing and editing. Helping writers sharpen their craft was the driving force behind her book, Get a Grip on your Grammar: 250 Writing and Editing Reminders for the Curious or Confused (Career Press, 2017), and the creation of her writing program, Grammartopia. Kris is also pursuing the publication of her first novel and is the co-founder of Midlothian Web Solutions.
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Three Ways to Edit Your Book
One of the biggest mistakes writers make is sending out their books before they’re ready.
In this month’s video, we cover how to be your own reader, how to find readers and critique partners, and when to hire a professional editor. Whether you just “finished” your first draft or are ten years into a manuscript (like David), these editing tips can work for you.
Be your own editor
Sending out a terrific manuscript begins with you. You must be your own critical reader.
Read your work out loud. This practice reveals so much about your manuscript. When you stumble over a sentence, 99 times out of a 100 there is something wrong with it. You get a different effect when the words go in your eyes, through your brain, and out of your mouth.
Once you do everything you can possible do yourself, it’s time to hand your manuscript off to readers.
Find readers
First, your readers should be avid readers of books like yours. Readers in your genre know the marketplace, your comparable titles, and the category in bookstores.
Second, you need readers who aren’t related to you. Yes, you want your mom to read your book, but eventually you’ll need someone who isn’t tied to you by DNA or relationships. Find people who don’t know your voice.
Here are ways to find readers.
- Join a critique group.
- Visit Goodreads to find people who read in your genre and maybe you can arrange a manuscript swap.
- Edit someone else’s book because it teaches you a lot about editing your own book.
Hire a professional editor
You want to find someone who has expertise in your area to ensure you’re adhering to tropes and conventions within your genre. We’re book doctors, but we want other editors to read our books, too. David has been working on a novel for ten years–he’s on his 90th draft (yes, 90!) — and he has paid four trained professionals to look at his book.
You can find a professional editor no matter how small your budget. If your budget isn’t big, we recommend asking booksellers or librarians who know your genre. There are freelance editors who once worked at publishing houses.
But buyer beware! Do your research before you give anyone your money.
NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza and more!
At the end of the video we share a bit about the live NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza happening on February 28, 2017. We hope you’ll be able to join us on YouTube at 4PM PST. You can participate live at this link. If you can’t watch live, a recording will be available. Learn more about NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza here.
We’re also offering a free webinar (worth $75) for anyone who buys our book between now and March 15, 2017. You can learn more by watching the video or reading this post.
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