FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do you schedule your writing time?

I keep school hours – as soon as my kids are off to school, I write. I’d like to say that I write every day, but I confess that I don’t get a whole lot done during the summers, when everybody is around the house. Sometimes it’s good to let a project sit on the back burner for a while. Usually I’ll go back to a novel in September and see things that I never saw before, like structural problems and solutions. So it’s a good break.

What authors have inspired you?

Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, John Irving, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter.

Some of my favorite books, as I’m looking at my bookshelf: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Sapphire’s Push, Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabelle. A little gem called Fruit by Brian Francis, published in 2004 by MacAdam/Cage.

What are you reading these days?

Broken: A Love Story, a heart-wrenching memoir by Lisa Jones, about her transformative experience with Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Arapahoe healer. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read, and I’m not exaggerating. Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, which I loved for all its complexity; Nick Hornby’s Slam. Right now I’m right in the middle of an advanced reader’s copy of Ron Carlson’s The Signal, marveling at his storytelling craftsmanship. I took one of his workshops long ago at Aspen, and I’m still learning from him. And Every Bit of Grace by Josh Sundquist (another advance copy, due out next February) -- a phenomenal memoir, not to be missed.

What’s the most difficult part of writing for you?

Getting back to work on a manuscript after being away from it for a while. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t manage much work time in the summer. And, while the break will eventually prove invaluable, nevertheless I hate that first day of sitting down and re-reading those pages I last saw in June. I’d rather do anything else. In fact, it’s during September that my passion for vacuuming becomes rather intense.

What advice do you have for beginning writers?

Go do other things! Travel, read, work as a waitress, sail ships, go to law school, whatever – I think you need to live other lives. But that being said, I also think creative writing classes – whether as part of a degree program, or through writers’ conferences – are extremely helpful to teach you what not to do. As for what to do, of course, you have to figure that out for yourself.

And read good stuff! Read the kind of stuff you want to write. If you want to write literary fiction, read it, and don’t even let trashy fiction into your house. If you want to write crime, read the very best crime writers. And when I say read, I mean study-read. Underline passages that work, and ask yourself why they work, and what the writer did or didn’t do to make it that way. You’ll be a slow reader, but a better writer.

At what point do you know how a novel is going to end?

Not until I’ve written and rewritten it seven or eight times. Usually the way I work is, I will write 70% of a novel, then go back and reread it – and discover I need to rewrite the whole thing. The next time I might get 75% through – and then I go back. This goes on and on until on the 8th or 9th draft I am finally 98% there – and the ending suddenly becomes obvious.

On the other hand, while I don’t know exactly how it will end during much of the writing process, I usually have a sense of where I want to be at the end of the novel, emotionally. It’s like going to France – you know you want to get there, but you don’t know if you’ll go via the English Channel, or via China. You find out as you’re going.

photo by Scott Reuman

Questions?