Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Be patient, Jo, don’t get despondent or do rash things, write to me often, and be my brave girl, ready to help and cheer all.

- Marmee’s last words as she leaves to take care of Father in Washington, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

When I update my friends and (gulp) fans about book progress, there always seem to be a million unanswered questions.  Is there a cover yet?  Have you seen it in print?  When will it be in stores?  Have any of the foreign rights sold?  How will you possibly wait until October to hold your book in your hands?  Believe me, these are questions I share, too.

From sale (May 1, 2009) to publication (October 19, 2010) will have been just about a year and six months.  But before that came an even longer wait…three years of having an agent and no book to sell, years before that writing books that will (thank God) never see the light of day, waiting, working, and more waiting.  And I’m one of the lucky ones.  So many writers wait what seems like eons before finding the right publisher or agent for their work, before honing their craft or moving on or finding their perfect project.

Like Jo March, patience has never exactly been my strong suit.  I am quick to solidify an impression and even quicker to get flustered when things don’t go my way.  So this entire process has been an exercise in self-control.  Now that the years seem to speed by like unruly comets, I know that October will be here before I know it.  My challenge is to fill the wait with both enjoyment (this is my only time to enjoy being a first-time author, to experience the mystery of seeing my debut come into the world) and productivity (it’s time to get cracking on other projects so there is some kind of literary future ahead of me).  When people used to ask me about being a writer, my first question would be “how hard are you willing to work?”  Now I add “how are you at the whole waiting thing?” to the mix.  A heroine might not always be patient, but she can learn to love the wait, right?

I got the pretty, pretty page proofs for The Heroine’s Bookshelf over the weekend and have been rereading the book for the 2325632262368236th time (isn’t rereading a book about rereading that you yourself wrote so very meta?).  And, surprise, I’ve been thinking even more about literary heroines and the place they occupy in my life and the life of my friends and fellow readers.  Part of what motivated me to write the book was a sense that none of the books on reading I had come across really managed to convey the power literary heroines have had for me.  But I never expected to tap into a bit of my own resilience and (dare I say it?) heroism while writing a book about heroines.

When you think about it, the idea of heroism is a bit hard to wrap your mind around.  The definition I prefer goes something like this:

expansive: of behavior that is impressive and ambitious in scale or scope; “an expansive lifestyle”; “in the grand manner”; “collecting on a grand scale”; “heroic undertakings”

It’s hard to live your life in a grand manner, especially in times that aren’t exactly expansive.  So often, I’ve seen ambition rewarded with failure, high hopes with blah realities.  As someone who always seemed a bit off-kilter and out of place in her childhood home, I spent a lot of time looking outside myself for role models, people to emulate or call upon when I felt down.  I found many of my heroines in between the pages of the books I love; I found even more in history and some in my own personal life.

In my travels around the blogosphere I recently ran across this sentence by debut author Sonia Gensler, who writes in this blog post:

To the left of the bulletin board is my framed poster of the Brontë sisters. When I’m feeling whiny and pathetic, I think of the Brontës and how isolated they were, how many loved ones they lost, and what a crazy mess their brother was. So many sorrows and distractions threatened their creativity, and yet they managed to be quite prolific. One glance at that poster and I straighten my spine and get back to work.

I’m like Sonia:  after spending a year plus thinking about heroines, I love to invoke the idea of a heroine when, say, I am crampy and cranky and want to crawl into a cave for a year and cut off all contact with humanity.  I invoke the idea before a business meeting that scares the bejeezus out of me.   And I cut myself a bit more slack because I can see the ways in which my miniscule, pitiful daily struggles really speak to something heroic.  I am, after all, the girl who went to Germany knowing two words in the language and survived for a long exchange year at the tender age of fifteen.  I’m the girl who somehow got herself through college, who played roller derby and sung in an indie rock band and has started two successful businesses thus far.  And I’m the girl who, despite my wildest fears and reservations, keeps returning to the page even when nothing comes out right.

I bet you’re a heroine, too.  So…what personal heroism do you have to celebrate these days?  And who are the heroines you call on when you feel like quitting?

One of the most gratifying parts of writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf was discovering the backstories behind the women who wrote some of my favorite books.  And it wasn’t all fun and friends.  During the course of the book, I got to look at the underbelly of some of these women’s lives:  depression, chronic illness, opium addiction, adultery, even suicide.   And you know what?  I loved every minute.

Why embrace the serious sides of my literary heroines when many of them left such happy, pert, intelligent women as their legacy?  (Anne of Green Gables or Lizzie Bennet, anyone?)  Why not just focus on the picture they wanted to present to the world…the picture of the productive, happy writer who left her dirty laundry between two covers and moved on with life?

I was reminded of this question when reading this article about Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dirty little opium secrets (or not-so-secrets, as the case may be).  For me, the answer is all about context.  When we look at the real lives of these writers, their accomplishments in the face of great trials and hardships are even more impressive.  Louisa May Alcott wrote her books in a state of constant, crushing financial worry…and if she hadn’t known what it was like to be poor, she could never have given us the image of four sisters sewing their way through dire straits and attempting to burden the load they must shoulder.  Could Charlotte Brontë have made Jane Eyre‘s Lowood School so terrifying if she herself had not survived a similar experience?

Now that I know the backstory behind my favorite books, I feel even more grateful that these women took time out of their lives to give something to us, people they never met or even imagined.  Not that I subscribe to the thought that writers must be tortured (that’s probably material for a whole ‘nother post), but I think they’re at least allowed to be human.  When we deny a Jane Austen or a Frances Hodgson Burnett her humanity, we miss out on the rest of the story.

Today is the 197th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s immortal (so far) Pride and Prejudice, which is fittingly the very first book I dove into when writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  After all, what bibliophile in her right mind can really resist such a spirited, flawed, funny, sexy, and articulate heroine (and such an arch and fascinating authoress)?  In celebration of Lizzy Bennet’s debut into the literary world, here are some of my favorite links and factoids about the eternal P&P:

• Jane began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was just 21 years old.  The book was originally entitled First Impressions.
• Jane actually gave away the rights to her best-known book, selling them to publisher Thomas Egerton for just £110 (he argued her down from £150).
• Though witty and accomplished herself, Jane was more similar to her grumpy, outsiderish leading man, Fitzwilliam Darcy, than her sparkling female protagonist.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the spoof spinoff from Quirk Books, has sold over 700,000 copies to date and spawned an entire series of spooftastic books related to classic literature.
• The 1995 Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is the best televised or filmed P&P incarnation, ever.  This is an incontrovertible fact.

Finally, here are two of my favorite P&P resources:  a detailed Pride and Prejudice character map (left), and Pride and Prejudice in Facebook form (right):

Publishing a book is a saga, though I’d never presume to think it’s as exciting as the lives of the women writers I’m writing about (how very meta).  I just received a very incisive and encouraging revision letter from my editor at HarperCollins and as I go through the manuscript, adding layers and clarifying, I am reminded that the ability and opportunity to revise is in and of itself a blessing.

Think I’m being cheesy?  Just think of Louisa May Alcott, tart author of Little Women and other beloved girls’ classics, and the hurried way in which she had to write her books.  She was so busy sewing, going out as a servant, and caring for her impoverished family that she never had much time for revision.  In a way, though, much of her literary work was revision: editing out (sometimes ineffectively) her frustration over her ongoing poverty, her family’s crushing expectations, and her never-met ambitions.  Writing is rewriting, and Louy spent much time rewriting herself into something more socially acceptable than the clumsy, sarcastic, workaholic who was just as compelling as any of her heroines.

…[Jo] read several liberal offers from budding magazines for her to edit them gratis; one long letter from a young girl inconsolable because her favourite hero died, and ‘would dear Mrs Bhaer rewrite the tale, and make it end good?’ another from an irate boy denied an autograph, who darkly foretold financial ruin and loss of favour if she did not send him and all other fellows who asked autographs, photographs, and auto-biographical sketches; a minister wished to know her religion; and an undecided maiden asked which of her two lovers she should marry. These samples will suffice to show a few of the claims made on a busy woman’s time, and make my readers pardon Mrs Jo if she did not carefully reply to all.

- Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys

Think I’m giving an awful lot of screen space to Miss Alcott these days?  Yup.  I’ll admit it:  my interest in the woman who gave us Jo March has become somewhat of an obsession.  I’ll stop now lest I expose too much of my nerdiness up front.