Tag Archives: Entertainment Weekly

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‘Feeling’ Real

Last night, I was reading Rob Brunner’s review of The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson in Entertainment Weekly while watching the big football game (yay, Giants!) and came across this line:

Johnson has created such a convincing universe [North Korea] that it doesn’t really matter if he’s accurately captured every detail. It FEELS real, often terrifyingly so.

I thought to myself: That’s gotta be one of the best compliments a writer can get. What’s interesting, too, about Johnson is that he apparently put a lot of effort into researching North Korea and North Korean life, even traveling there in 2007. I thought of my own traveling to upstate New York in May 2010 in order to write Baby Grand to get a better feel for what I was talking about. I remember a colleague saying, “What does it matter? This is fiction, right?”

True. But I guess I’m the kind of writer who likes to see how things really are in order to imagine how they can also be — a mix of fact and fiction, which is how it appears Johnson has also crafted his book.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, an author-friend of mine Jeb Ladouceur doesn’t like to visit any city or location that he writes about. He feels it stifles, rather than enhances, his creativity.

Every writer has a different process, but in the end as long as we can all make it “feel real,” as Brunner says, we can all be successful.

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Writing Tip #59

All it takes is one person to believe… I took my kids to see The Muppets yesterday, a film which actor Jason Segal is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for getting made. If I’m to believe what I read in Entertainment Weekly (and why shouldn’t I?), Disney executives asked to meet with Segal in order to do a project with him and were surprised when the actor said he was interested in bringing back those furry little guys so many of us know and love. Segal cowrote the script and starred in the film, which I absolutely loved. I thought it was true to the old television series and nostalgic and sweet. I cried. I laughed. And from time to time I peered at my 12-year-old daughter who looked like she was having as much fun as I was. As I write this, it is estimated that the movie will earn a solid $45 million or so this Thanksgiving weekend.

For all those people who say that one person can’t make a difference, I give you Jason Segal. And as far as publishing goes, I’ve always said this: All you need is one person to take a chance on you or your work. Like the agent who picked up JK Rowling’s or Kathryn Stockett’s first book after numerous rejections. Or the editors at Little, Brown who plucked Stephenie Meyer’s first novel Twilight from the slush pile. As NaNoWriMo winds down for 2011, remember that not only can’t you please everyone with your writing, you don’t have to. Sometimes all you need is one person to believe in you. And sometimes that person is you.

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Writing Tip #38

Don’t fret over your first line. In Entertainment Weekly, write-ups of new books often include a blurb/sidebar called “First Line,” in which the first line of the novel, memoir or nonfiction book is quoted. And just yesterday, I read about this cool “paperback game” in the New York Times  in which players have fun with literary opening lines by trying to guess which is the correct opening line to a novel within a heap of totally made-up ones.

Although I do enjoy a good opening line and definitely plan on playing the paperback game with friends this summer, I think that there may be too much emphasis put on the first lines of books. As a journalist, hard news stories are all about the first line or lede, the who, what, where, when and why of your piece — the point being that if readers don’t have the time to read your entire article, they can get the gist of it only by reading the first paragraph or so. But when it comes to novels, people are in for the long haul. I agree that the first few pages should be engaging enough to hook the reader who might be standing in Barnes & Noble trying to decide if she is going to buy your or Snooki’s new book, but I don’t think anyone is going to make any rash purchase decision based simply on what may be a less-than-gripping first line.

Last fall, during the first revision process for Baby Grand, I remember staring at my computer, reading and rereading the first line and wondering, “Is this exciting enough? Would Entertainment Weekly consider this blurb-worthy?” The answer? Who cares. Entertainment Weekly also includes a blurb titled “Memorable Line” just as often as it does “First Line.” And my feeling is that if you’ve got enough of those, wherever they may be located in your manuscript, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

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Henning Mankell

So here I am reading an article in Entertainment Weekly about author Henning Mankell, a man who has had the sort of life we don’t tell our children they can lead if they drop out of high school — a wildly successful and satisfying one.

Yes, at age 16, in Latin class, Mankell decided, “Hey, I’m outta here” and told his dad he was off to live life and become a writer. Now, at age 63, he has had a career that many writers dream about, one that has spanned decades and launched the very popular Kurt Wallander mystery series, of which the final installment, The Troubled Man, is being released.

I don’t know about you, but I devour any article I can find about writers, their process and their roads to publication (more so than articles on how to write), which is probably why I profile debut authors on this blog every Tuesday. And there’s always a little somethin’ somethin’ worth gleaning, and for this article it was this quote:

“I am not that interested in police procedure,” Mankell says. “What really interests me is why things happen. For me, it is a very important challenge to let Wallander stand thinking in a room for 10 pages and make that read [well].”

Virtually any writer, particularly those who rely on plot to move their stories forward (thriller writers, etc.), who has ever tried to make “thinking” exciting knows what Mankell is talking about. For Baby Grand, I had lots of thinking going on, and I was always very aware of not having too much for fear of boring, and losing, the reader.

I am tempted to open the manuscript and see just how many pages I devoted to “thinking” in one gulp. I’m inclined to say it was quite a few. Whether or not I was able to “make that read well” remains to be seen.

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Portia de Rossi, James Franco Release Books

Portia de Rossi has released a memoir titled, Unbearable Lightness. I saw the headline in Entertainment Weekly and thought, “Great. Another celebrity memoir.”

For many aspiring writers, who live beyond the TMZ, trying to publish a book — memoir, novel, how-to book — is a rigorous, difficult, looong process, and, not to begrudge anyone, but it can seem as though they hand out publishing contracts to celebrities the way they do swag bags. Trust me, I get it — celebrities have a built-in fan base, millions who follow their Twitter statuses, and there is, indeed, the strong likelihood that if someone watches their show or buys their CD that they will plunk down the cash for the book as well. It’s one of those reality pills that we “regular people” writers just have to swallow.

Knowing that, I was going to turn the page and go onto the next article (which, coincidentally, was a story about actor Michael Caine’s new memoir), but didn’t. Instead, I read the short review of de Rossi’s book and found myself nearly in tears. Unlike other celebrity memoirs, de Rossi’s book doesn’t seem like it’s out there through happenstance, or ego. It’s not out to titillate, but to educate. She tells of a life driven by stardom, of starving, binging and purging in brutally honest and specific ways. It’s not pretty, and perhaps it’s because I’m coming off working on Good Girls Don’t Get Fat with Dr. Robyn Silverman, but I hope that her book helps young girls who are going through similar situations. When a memoir is authentic and honest — celebrity-written or otherwise — it can be so powerful and relatable.

As I set down Entertainment Weekly and picked up People magazine — yes, we writers have a tough life — I came across a story on actor James Franco’s new collection of short stories titled, Palo Alto: Stories. Now, you would think I would be just as perturbed to hear the news of the release of this book. Truth be told, I wasn’t. At all. How can I feel slighted by a fellow who is studying English and film studies at Yale, juggles his film schedules around his schoolwork, and just seems to be a hard-working, grounded, cool, multifacted — and yes, good-looking — kinda guy?

No way. Call me shallow, but he had me at Ph.D.

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Should We Blame James Patterson?

I was reading the latest Entertainment Weekly’s Books section yesterday — the time of the week when I spend 15 minutes with a knot in my stomach wondering (hoping) if Baby Grand will ever be profiled there — and it turns out that this issue’s column was a thriller roundup. Right up my alley.  The author of the article, Thom Geier, wrote that he blames best-selling author James Patterson for “spooking” everyone in the thriller writing business, saying that thriller writers are influenced by the prolific Patterson, who puts out a top-of-the-charts thriller every year, and what’s happening is that “ordinarily dependable writers” are turning out more schlock than shock in an effort to keep up the pace.

Of course, my husband was sitting next to me as I was reading and thought that Geier’s premise was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “No one is holding a gun to their heads telling them they have to write a thriller every year?” he said. (Ooh, wouldn’t that be an interesting thriller premise!)

Maybe not (although you never know what’s in those publishing contracts…), but as I explained to him, probably ineffectively, is that I can understand the pressures of having to “keep up.” All of us feel it in one way or another — as a parent, a blogger, an industry professional or just as a learned person. But I think that my husband’s right (don’t tell him) that despite those pressures of the outside voices we need to listen to our own voices first and foremost:

Am I ready for my next book? I mean, really ready?

As my AP just told me in an email, I probably am not. She agreed with me that I am a HORRIBLE AP (the capitals are mine), but that the reason I’m stalling and scattered is because I’m not through with Baby Grand, and that my thoughts are still with those characters that I nurtured all summer long who still need me. And she’s right. I haven’t closed the book, so to speak, on that novel yet. Everything is still up in the air.

Was it premature of me to start a new book? Not necessarily, although it was silly to think I could dive headfirst into a new story with a clear head. The better place for In the Red, for now, is simmering on the back burner of my life, until I get the urge to give it a stir every now and again.

Let’s face it: The last thing I want to do is put out schlock. But if I did, the fault would not be in our best-selling thriller star, but in myself.

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#in10years

There’s a hashtag floating around Twitter — #in10years — that’s got me thinking about what’s going to happen, what life’s going to be like, a decade from now.

My first thought was that my youngest son would be graduating from high school. Scary…

Actually, that’s not true. My first thought was about me, narcissistic writer that I am. Where will I be in 10 years as a writer? Will I be a successful published novelist? Will copies of Baby Grand be blissfully gathering dust in my bookshelves next to The Da Vinci Code and Good Girls Don’t Get Fat? Will I be agonizing over the name of my umpteenth book? Will I be penning a companion column to Stephen King’s “The Pop of King” in Entertainment Weekly? Will I be teaching writing at a prestigious university? Will I be happy?

Well, a girl can hashtag, can’t she?