ON BEING A WRITER
Am I Nuts - Parts 1 & 2, What Writing Has Meant to Me
AS A WRITER
When Magic Happens, Where Does a Story Come From? The Last Line
ON WRITING MY FIRST NOVEL
Parts 1, 2, & 3, The Final Chapter
Am I Nuts - Parts 1 & 2, What Writing Has Meant to Me
AS A WRITER
When Magic Happens, Where Does a Story Come From? The Last Line
ON WRITING MY FIRST NOVEL
Parts 1, 2, & 3, The Final Chapter
ON BEING A WRITER
Am I Nuts? Part 1
1/30/2013
I have often said that if I weren’t paid so well, people would put me in a looney bin, an insane asylum.
I don’t think like you do. Or anyone else I know.
I live in a world of make believe. No one in the entire universe lives in that space I inhabit, except me. No one else in the world knows the people who dwell there with me.
I live in my mind. That world I live in is more real to me than the real world.
When you were a little kid did you hear of someone who was ridiculed because she had make believe friends? I’m a big girl (and I seem to get bigger with each passing year), and I have a multitude of make believe friends. While I live with them I am quite obsessed with them. I stalk them. I crawl into their minds and think like they would think, though often they surprise me. I mean shouldn’t I control them if the only place they live is in my head? But I don’t. I have heard other authors say the same thing. Instead of my telling the characters what to do they quite often surprise me and do things I hadn’t expected. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, that figments of my imagination should control me.
When I was writing my first novel I sat down at my computer one day and stared at it. I sort of knew where I was going but looked at that blank screen and was slightly panicked to realize it was a reflection of my mind. I hadn’t a clue what to paint on that screen. And then, from nowhere, I wrote, without even thinking, “Anoka came out of the jungle.”
Where did that name come from? Who was he? Why had he suddenly appeared? I sat there amazed. I had, and have, no idea at all where he came from. He was not premeditated. I had no idea where to fit him into my already planned book. But now that he was there, alive on that page, I felt he would lead me to some place. And he did. Though he did not become a secondary character, he became what I shall call a tertiary character, and became important to me and to the others in the book. How did he arrive?
In my second book, The Moon Below, in my outline and about two thirds of the way through the book my heroine was going to end up with a doctor, whom she had loved for years. He was not her husband. Her husband had left her, to try to sell wool in England, half the world away and was gone for five years. I loved that doctor. But my heavens, after the husband returned from England he did unexpected things that made me start to fall in love with him. Well, if I was falling in love with him, my heroine had to too. What to do about the doctor? None of this confusion had been in my mind as I started the book. How the hell, I mean what on earth, made me start falling in love with the husband and thus upsetting the last third of the book.
I had to mentally rewrite my outline (the original was on the desk of my publisher in New York City). The book ended up being not at all what I set out to write.
In my next book about China, I was two thirds of the way through it when friends, a couple in my new town of Ajijic, Mexico, and a friend visiting from California, and I went to the coast for four days in December of 1990, my first Mexican Christmas. Bill, of the couple, had heard me griping that I had writer’s block, I couldn’t figure how to go on. So one night as we sat out on the balcony in the balmy evening air he said, “Okay, tell me the story so far.” I said no, I couldn’t do that. It was involved and no one could help me anyhow. He said, “Try me. We have nothing else to do.” So in about 20 minutes I caught them up to date. He said, “Oh, easy. She’s a dove. Doesn’t believe in killing for any reason. So you have to have her kill someone.
“Next, the bandit kidnaps her from a train in the first third of the book. He does not think women have very good minds and they are below him and he would certainly never give his life for a woman. Well, what you have to do at the end is have him rescue her from a train so it’s full circle and he dies trying to save her, giving his life for a woman.”
I stared at him. How had he done that so easily? How could I put his words into a complex plot? Right after Christmas I followed all his suggestions and it was, again, not the book I started out to write, but far better.
It takes months, sometimes as many as 9 months (like actually giving birth) for my characters to gradually come to life. It’s odd how often the color of their eyes change. On page 9 they have blue eyes and on page 311 they have brown ones. It’s like pulling teeth and sometimes the agony connected with that to fully realize a character. Then, by golly, she goes off and does something so unexpected I sit and think, okay, now that’s she’s done that I’ll have to change the entire direction she’s going. And the story I thought I was telling suddenly veers away to a new direction I hadn’t planned.
Years ago I read Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb. She’s written several autobiographical books. I like Shirley, but when it came to channeling, I thought, “Oh, Shirley, come off it.” She claimed that in Peru, high in the Andes, something or someone from the past channeled ideas through her that were relevant to her life or maybe our lives. It happened again when she was visiting Sweden. I thought she was a bit off, somewhat quirky I thought, perhaps too kindly.
But, my goodness, there I was channeling. I found myself sitting at my desk in Ajijic, Mexico, and I knew I was writing, but I was in a trance. I was in Shanghai, not a place to which I’d actually been, but I saw it and described it and felt that I was watching a little TV screen and simply writing down what I saw and heard. When I finished the chapter I sat back and sighed with satisfaction. Then I looked around and realized I was in my bedroom in Ajijic. I was not in the China I had been to but moments before.
I went and got some iced tea and came back and printed out what I’d written and took it and the tea out on the porch to read. I shook my head. I had not written that. Who had? Of course I’m sane enough to know that I really had written it, I had hit the keys and put the letters on the screen, printed it on the paper I had just read, but I swear I had not written it. And then I understood Shirley. I had been channeled. I simply do not know where it came from.
That has happened to me time and again. Sometimes I have to force the writing. Sometimes I have to drag the characters onto the page, force them to do the things I have planned for them. But often, at least half the time, I sit in trances, for I see and hear my characters talk and think and move. They are as real to me as....well, more real to me than real really is.
The main character is heroic, she grows to noble heights. She has great lovers, men who really and truly love her and who also happen to be great, inventive lovers, who take her to great heights, both physically and emotionally. Note I say lovers. I always have two and often three in a book. They are men as I’d like them to be. They are men I wished I’d had.
I go to countries where I want to spend time. Except for one book they have been warm countries because I want to spend the nine to twelve months it takes me to write a book in warm climates. And when I write about those countries I am there. I do not pretend that I am there. I am.
However, I am fickle. When I am through with the characters I discard them, quite completely. Can’t even remember their names a few years later, don’t recognize them even if someone mentions them. I have gone on to a new love affair and there’s nothing much deader than a dead love affair (if you are the one who has said goodbye, that is).
Am I Nuts? Part 2
2/2/2013
When I was in high school my teachers said to always write about things you know. That kept me from writing for years because my experience of life was so limited. But now I would say write about feelings and emotions you’ve had. You needn’t have been in war, but you have to have experienced fear. You need to have experienced pain, both emotional, physical, and psychological. You have to know what platonic love is, you have to know what deep and dear friendship is. You have to understand betrayal. You have to understand unrequited love, and how it feels to be loved when you don’t love in return. You have to understand how even the slightest touch from a loved one feels. I think you should also understand the feelings a parent feels. I know those feelings over and over again.
It helps, too, to have had music run through you, become part of you...to have watched a yellowed leaf slowly fall to the ground, to have known what the vibrant colors of maples in the fall do to your soul. It helps to have seen as many oceans as you can, and to watch palm trees sway in a marine breeze, to have been in a hurricane, to have walked barefoot through the sand and thus have known what it’s like to have sand squish through your toes or jump up and down because the soles of your feet burn so sharply. It helps to have seen red Emperor tulips push through the nearly still frozen ground.
It helps to have lost someone you have loved dearly. It helps to understand how a dog or cat can become part of you, or how you hate enough that you could want to put a knife through someone.
It’s good to have had to be in a hospital for something that is painful as hell and you are scared. It helps to have been scared for any number of reasons: to have envisioned your children torn limb from limb and their legs scattered across a Mexican desert. It’s good to have relied on police and to have been scared of them too. It is good to have painful things happen to you so you can recall those feelings, those emotions at will.
The first year I lived in Mexico, my Eugene doctor and his wife came for a visit. One night he got food poisoning and was in the bathroom vomiting all night. He told me he’d never been that sick before, never even vomited before. I told him it was good for him to be sick (wonderful hostess, huh?) Now he could empathize with his patients. Years later, he admitted it helped.
The people I create come out of my mind much as my children came out of my body.
In the last years of my life I have wondered if I have regrets at not doing some things that I’d have liked to do. Yes, being in the Peace Corps. Doing good. So I have done it in another way, I tell myself. My heroines always (well not in Deep in the Heart where my heroine is a business success) do good. As Hawaiians are wont to say, “The missionaries came to do good and did very well, indeed.” I write many books where my heroines are involved with medicine because I send my heroines around the world doing good for people. I’m a sucker for people who do not think money is the most important thing in the world. I love people who want to help others to better lives, to better health, who themselves grow in the process of helping. I would love to have more heroines be teachers, but I can’t have as many dramatic scenes for teachers as for doctors and nurses. I love people who have the virtues of nobility and integrity.
These and probably a hundred other things are good for you to have gone through if you are a writer. You may have to imagine war or being in a monsoon or remember having your eyes meet someone else’s across a crowded room but if you have really been scared or been in love your chances of being a believable writer are far greater than if you have led an Emily Dickinson type life. That’s why you are not ready to write a novel when you are in your teens or twenties. And if you have lived a perfectly normal life, the life that most people experience, there’s no way at all you can become a good writer.
I do not think it matters if you have actually physically been through experiences that force you to feel or read about them in a book or seen them in a movie. People who read a lot have much broader lives than those who don’t. I have worn Hester Prynne’s scarlet A, I have met Miss Jenny and Ben Varner in Yoknapatawpha County, I have discovered an unknown lake in the middle of Africa with Osa Johnson (I Married Adventure), Rhett Butler has kissed me, Humphrey Bogart asked his pianist to play “As Time Goes By” because it reminds him of me. He and I also rose to heroic heights in “The African Queen” because we were ennobled by love. I have communed with the stars in that little boat where the old man, Santiago, waits in The Old Man and the Sea. I have experienced countries and love and hate and heartbreak and have questioned beliefs of faith in books. So often I ask myself, “Did that really happen or did I dream it or read about it or see it in a movie?” I don’t think it matters. I have experienced the emotions these characters experience, and that is part of my whole being.
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is a writer doomed to leading a life that is not average, not what I call normal? I’m an advocate of that idea. I have always been a square peg in a round hole. Or rather not able to fit into the round hole. I started writing at age 7, and I now realize I did that because I could not communicate well with my peers. No writers whom I know - and I mean people who write a lot, not necessarily published, but those who are mentally writers anyhow - do not fit into any slots. When I am in the midst of writing a book I am in real places physically, but just because my body is there does not mean my mind is. My mind most likely is with whoever is struggling to life right now. I must tell you, for instance, that when you are talking to me you really don’t know whether I am listening to you or my mind is wondering if Dahlia Carlisle (my latest) is really going to turn down Max Schroëder, one of the nicest men I’ve written about but with a big flaw. Can you tell by my eyes? Do I answer any questions you ask?
Years and years ago, probably forty at least, I remember reading that Bennet Cerf, who was a famous editor at Random House, thought he was telling a funny story when he told that William Faulkner was in New York and they had lunched together and he thought it was so funny that in the midst of their conversation Faulkner reached over and touched Cerf’s arm and said, “Do you know what Flem Snopes did last week?” Flem Snopes is an unlikeable character in a trilogy of Faulkner’s.
Cerf thought it so funny because Flem Snopes was not real and Faulkner acted as though he were.
He was, to Faulkner.
I think that, as a writer, unless you believe your characters are alive they cannot come to life on a page. They cannot be alive to a reader if they are not alive to you. And if they are real to me, I belong in a mental institution.
Or I can be revered as an extremely creative and inventive author who makes a very nice living making believe characters believable.
What Writing Has Added to My Life and Thoughts
2/27/2013
Well, writing in large part has been my life and thoughts as much as breathing has been.
I have read and written all my life. I remember when I was teaching and once asked students what were 5 things they’d take with them if they had to be marooned on a desert isle. Then one of them asked me what I’d take and I said I’d have to have a pad and pencil. And some kid said, “No, you wouldn’t need that at all. You could always write in the sand with your finger.” Ever since, I’ve not feared being marooned on a South Pacific island.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write. When I had questions to which I could not find answers, or questions I was too embarrassed to ask, I’d write write write. When I was unhappy (usually over love affairs or prolonged relationships) I’d fill notebooks. Communicating to paper meant I didn’t have to bore anyone else with my thoughts, meant no one could treat the things I found important as frivolous and trivial. I think probably if I’d kept any of those notebooks with my mental searchings perhaps I could have answered a number of the world’s important questions.
I always knew no one would want to read my writings and so I never ever showed anyone what I’d written. Also, it seemed so narcissistic. When I filled a notebook, what did I do with it? I threw it out and started a new notebook. Of course, now I’m sorry I threw out all those thousands of pages.
I love to have a lined notebook ready and waiting. I always have one I’ve never written in around. When I begin to write in it I make sure I get another empty one next time I go to the store.
Funny thing is, I haven’t written in a notebook since this Memoirs group began. I’ve been given carte blanche to write about myself, about things long forgotten, about parts of me that were submerged.
All my life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a novel, I’ve dreamed of getting published, I’ve fantasized that what I had to say was important enough that someone would buy it, pay actual money to read what I had to say. It was make believe, in the realm of science fiction I suppose. A child’s fantasy carried into adulthood.
From about the fourth grade on I wrote short stories. English teachers always loved me. My parents encouraged me. My mother came up with titles for them and my father told me to invent words. I was always known to be “imaginative” and overly “dramatic.” Those words were like cancers to me, because I thought they meant I was so far from reality that there was no basis to any of my thoughts and ideas. So, when the time had finally come that I could no longer put off trying to write a novel I told no one. I did research and tried to come up with a story and characters, but I knew that even thinking of attempting it was overly imaginative and proof that I was living in a dream world.
Further proof that my always practical and down-to-earth brother was right (again?). In my twenty years in academia he, the business person of the family, always referred to me as “living in an ivory tower.” I took that to mean I lived in a world of ideas and idealism that was removed from reality, removed from the crass world of finance and practicality. I sort of have to laugh at this now, and with some pride. I’ve supported myself better than any woman I know and earned more than my brother did.
Why did I feel I had to write? I’ve asked myself this over and over. Do you remember “The Waltons,” a TV show of the 1970s? The main character was a teenager, John Boy, who spent a great deal of time up in his room, writing. Once someone asked why he wrote so much, and after he thought a bit he answered, “I don’t have any choice.” I’ve always remembered that. I think it has applied to me too.
I started to write because I could put down my thoughts on paper without anyone making fun of me. It seems to me I’ve always been a square peg in a round hole. Or is it the other way around? Anyhow I’ve seldom fit in, though I must say the world hasn’t known that. Only I have been aware of it. I haven’t been an obvious misfit, but more of a closet one.
Then in about the 5th or 6th grade I’d take some of the women’s magazines my mother subscribed to and write plays from the short stories in them. I devoured plays in the library. I loved reading plays. I loved acting in plays. My major was Drama. I didn’t pursue it after graduation because I knew I wasn’t attractive enough. In writing you could look like anything and be anyone and no one knew. Actually I graduated with honors in Drama, and living 25 miles from New York City everyone thought I’d immediately set my sights on Broadway. I didn’t. I got married and moved to a little town in upstate New York and began 20 years of being onstage with a captive audience. I taught.
I remember reading James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to a class once, and when I finished a girl in the back of the room said, “Oh, why weren’t you an actress?” Rather dramatically, I answered, “What do you think I am?”
Drama and writing. Both creative. Both overly dramatic, divorced from everyday reality. That’s me. I felt more at ease on stage than I ever did at any party I ever went to.
I had gone to college with the idea of becoming a writer, a journalist. I fancied being a foreign correspondent, being assigned to Buenos Aires (I’d just seen Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious”) or Rio or Shanghai or Cairo or even Paris. But one journalism course turned me off. I learned that it wasn’t facts I wanted to write about. I had my head in the clouds. I wanted to tell stories. Which, in retrospect, was vain of me. I really was out of touch with reality for I hadn’t even learned to think yet. I had hardly experienced anything yet.
And as the years have gone along and along and along I learned that what is really required in writing is thinking. I am fond of saying that writing is easy, it’s thinking that’s hard.
There are days when I sit down at my computer and stare at the monitor, and it’s a reflection of my brain. Blank. I am unable to think. Sometimes that lasts for too many months or even over a year. And there’s one of my worst fears come true. There is nothing but blankness in my head.
Since I felt I really couldn’t write I did what people do in such cases. I begged my principal to let me teach it as an elective. I’d give up my free period to teach Creative Writing, and I’d take no more than 12 Seniors. He said I couldn’t get 5 kids who would want to voluntarily take a writing class. Ha! The next year and the years after that I was given Creative Writing AND a free period! I taught Creative writing for years, to students who amazed me, who could write and think on such levels that I was in awe of them (they didn’t know I was in awe of them tho they knew I loved them).
How does that saying go? “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”
In 1968 I decided I wanted to take a full paid sabbatical and get my M.A. I lived in Rochester, New York then but the University of Rochester no longer accepted a thesis for 6 credits. They no longer required or would even look at a thesis. I wanted to get my M.A. because I wanted to write a thesis, and knew I wouldn’t do it on my own. I’d fallen in love with William Faulkner and wanted to explore his view of women. So I drove 20 miles away to the State University of New York at Brockport 4 nights a week and got my Master’s there so that I could write my thesis. The head of the English department was one of those who had to approve my thesis and he later told me that as he read it he didn’t think it was very scholarly until he realized I went into areas of research that no previous Faulknerian (not a word, I know) had. “It was so smoothly written and anything but dull that in the beginning I thought it wasn’t scholarly. How did you manage to put so many facts and ideas in it and still make it compulsively interesting reading!” Oh, my, that alone was worth the 9 months it took me to produce my fourth child (the thesis). I was floating on clouds to have that told me. On the basis of that he offered me a job in the English department, but I had to turn it down. I was a single mother supporting 3 kids and to teach in a university I’d have to take a pay cut of $6000. (When I taught at the U of Oregon years later I earned less than the clerks at Safeway - I learned that teaching college students was not nearly as rewarding as teaching high school students when I was still able to influence their thinking.
The year (2006) my son was killed by a truck driver who ran a red light and crashed into my son’s car. Also, I broke my arm. But I can’t even use them as excuses for not writing. I haven’t written a book in 2 years and the fact that I’m not writing and can’t think is depressing me. I’m getting blue about it. I realize I’m only really happy when I’m in the midst of a writing project. I write about what I believe, but I disguise it. I’m never blatant about the important ideas of my life. Yet I’m sure anyone who reads my books knows I’m against racism and that I don’t think money is the most important thing in the world, and that I’m pro choice, and I think independent women are admirable. I’m a feminist and an egalitarian who believes in helping the less fortunate of the world. I’m an atheist who’s a humanitarian. I have a finely tuned conscience that sometimes drives me wild. I reject the Puritanism that has shaped me. All of my political and religious beliefs are dotted throughout my novels, and that has amazed me. My publishers have let them stand. They haven’t diluted them or asked me to cut them out, and that pleases me no end. I really think that the real me is standing naked in front of hundreds of thousands of people. And as Sally Field said when she received her second Oscar, “People really like me!” What a glorious feeling!
My writing is the only place where I can bare myself and feel safe. I can’t say that writing has changed my life, because it is my life.
1/30/2013
I have often said that if I weren’t paid so well, people would put me in a looney bin, an insane asylum.
I don’t think like you do. Or anyone else I know.
I live in a world of make believe. No one in the entire universe lives in that space I inhabit, except me. No one else in the world knows the people who dwell there with me.
I live in my mind. That world I live in is more real to me than the real world.
When you were a little kid did you hear of someone who was ridiculed because she had make believe friends? I’m a big girl (and I seem to get bigger with each passing year), and I have a multitude of make believe friends. While I live with them I am quite obsessed with them. I stalk them. I crawl into their minds and think like they would think, though often they surprise me. I mean shouldn’t I control them if the only place they live is in my head? But I don’t. I have heard other authors say the same thing. Instead of my telling the characters what to do they quite often surprise me and do things I hadn’t expected. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, that figments of my imagination should control me.
When I was writing my first novel I sat down at my computer one day and stared at it. I sort of knew where I was going but looked at that blank screen and was slightly panicked to realize it was a reflection of my mind. I hadn’t a clue what to paint on that screen. And then, from nowhere, I wrote, without even thinking, “Anoka came out of the jungle.”
Where did that name come from? Who was he? Why had he suddenly appeared? I sat there amazed. I had, and have, no idea at all where he came from. He was not premeditated. I had no idea where to fit him into my already planned book. But now that he was there, alive on that page, I felt he would lead me to some place. And he did. Though he did not become a secondary character, he became what I shall call a tertiary character, and became important to me and to the others in the book. How did he arrive?
In my second book, The Moon Below, in my outline and about two thirds of the way through the book my heroine was going to end up with a doctor, whom she had loved for years. He was not her husband. Her husband had left her, to try to sell wool in England, half the world away and was gone for five years. I loved that doctor. But my heavens, after the husband returned from England he did unexpected things that made me start to fall in love with him. Well, if I was falling in love with him, my heroine had to too. What to do about the doctor? None of this confusion had been in my mind as I started the book. How the hell, I mean what on earth, made me start falling in love with the husband and thus upsetting the last third of the book.
I had to mentally rewrite my outline (the original was on the desk of my publisher in New York City). The book ended up being not at all what I set out to write.
In my next book about China, I was two thirds of the way through it when friends, a couple in my new town of Ajijic, Mexico, and a friend visiting from California, and I went to the coast for four days in December of 1990, my first Mexican Christmas. Bill, of the couple, had heard me griping that I had writer’s block, I couldn’t figure how to go on. So one night as we sat out on the balcony in the balmy evening air he said, “Okay, tell me the story so far.” I said no, I couldn’t do that. It was involved and no one could help me anyhow. He said, “Try me. We have nothing else to do.” So in about 20 minutes I caught them up to date. He said, “Oh, easy. She’s a dove. Doesn’t believe in killing for any reason. So you have to have her kill someone.
“Next, the bandit kidnaps her from a train in the first third of the book. He does not think women have very good minds and they are below him and he would certainly never give his life for a woman. Well, what you have to do at the end is have him rescue her from a train so it’s full circle and he dies trying to save her, giving his life for a woman.”
I stared at him. How had he done that so easily? How could I put his words into a complex plot? Right after Christmas I followed all his suggestions and it was, again, not the book I started out to write, but far better.
It takes months, sometimes as many as 9 months (like actually giving birth) for my characters to gradually come to life. It’s odd how often the color of their eyes change. On page 9 they have blue eyes and on page 311 they have brown ones. It’s like pulling teeth and sometimes the agony connected with that to fully realize a character. Then, by golly, she goes off and does something so unexpected I sit and think, okay, now that’s she’s done that I’ll have to change the entire direction she’s going. And the story I thought I was telling suddenly veers away to a new direction I hadn’t planned.
Years ago I read Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb. She’s written several autobiographical books. I like Shirley, but when it came to channeling, I thought, “Oh, Shirley, come off it.” She claimed that in Peru, high in the Andes, something or someone from the past channeled ideas through her that were relevant to her life or maybe our lives. It happened again when she was visiting Sweden. I thought she was a bit off, somewhat quirky I thought, perhaps too kindly.
But, my goodness, there I was channeling. I found myself sitting at my desk in Ajijic, Mexico, and I knew I was writing, but I was in a trance. I was in Shanghai, not a place to which I’d actually been, but I saw it and described it and felt that I was watching a little TV screen and simply writing down what I saw and heard. When I finished the chapter I sat back and sighed with satisfaction. Then I looked around and realized I was in my bedroom in Ajijic. I was not in the China I had been to but moments before.
I went and got some iced tea and came back and printed out what I’d written and took it and the tea out on the porch to read. I shook my head. I had not written that. Who had? Of course I’m sane enough to know that I really had written it, I had hit the keys and put the letters on the screen, printed it on the paper I had just read, but I swear I had not written it. And then I understood Shirley. I had been channeled. I simply do not know where it came from.
That has happened to me time and again. Sometimes I have to force the writing. Sometimes I have to drag the characters onto the page, force them to do the things I have planned for them. But often, at least half the time, I sit in trances, for I see and hear my characters talk and think and move. They are as real to me as....well, more real to me than real really is.
The main character is heroic, she grows to noble heights. She has great lovers, men who really and truly love her and who also happen to be great, inventive lovers, who take her to great heights, both physically and emotionally. Note I say lovers. I always have two and often three in a book. They are men as I’d like them to be. They are men I wished I’d had.
I go to countries where I want to spend time. Except for one book they have been warm countries because I want to spend the nine to twelve months it takes me to write a book in warm climates. And when I write about those countries I am there. I do not pretend that I am there. I am.
However, I am fickle. When I am through with the characters I discard them, quite completely. Can’t even remember their names a few years later, don’t recognize them even if someone mentions them. I have gone on to a new love affair and there’s nothing much deader than a dead love affair (if you are the one who has said goodbye, that is).
Am I Nuts? Part 2
2/2/2013
When I was in high school my teachers said to always write about things you know. That kept me from writing for years because my experience of life was so limited. But now I would say write about feelings and emotions you’ve had. You needn’t have been in war, but you have to have experienced fear. You need to have experienced pain, both emotional, physical, and psychological. You have to know what platonic love is, you have to know what deep and dear friendship is. You have to understand betrayal. You have to understand unrequited love, and how it feels to be loved when you don’t love in return. You have to understand how even the slightest touch from a loved one feels. I think you should also understand the feelings a parent feels. I know those feelings over and over again.
It helps, too, to have had music run through you, become part of you...to have watched a yellowed leaf slowly fall to the ground, to have known what the vibrant colors of maples in the fall do to your soul. It helps to have seen as many oceans as you can, and to watch palm trees sway in a marine breeze, to have been in a hurricane, to have walked barefoot through the sand and thus have known what it’s like to have sand squish through your toes or jump up and down because the soles of your feet burn so sharply. It helps to have seen red Emperor tulips push through the nearly still frozen ground.
It helps to have lost someone you have loved dearly. It helps to understand how a dog or cat can become part of you, or how you hate enough that you could want to put a knife through someone.
It’s good to have had to be in a hospital for something that is painful as hell and you are scared. It helps to have been scared for any number of reasons: to have envisioned your children torn limb from limb and their legs scattered across a Mexican desert. It’s good to have relied on police and to have been scared of them too. It is good to have painful things happen to you so you can recall those feelings, those emotions at will.
The first year I lived in Mexico, my Eugene doctor and his wife came for a visit. One night he got food poisoning and was in the bathroom vomiting all night. He told me he’d never been that sick before, never even vomited before. I told him it was good for him to be sick (wonderful hostess, huh?) Now he could empathize with his patients. Years later, he admitted it helped.
The people I create come out of my mind much as my children came out of my body.
In the last years of my life I have wondered if I have regrets at not doing some things that I’d have liked to do. Yes, being in the Peace Corps. Doing good. So I have done it in another way, I tell myself. My heroines always (well not in Deep in the Heart where my heroine is a business success) do good. As Hawaiians are wont to say, “The missionaries came to do good and did very well, indeed.” I write many books where my heroines are involved with medicine because I send my heroines around the world doing good for people. I’m a sucker for people who do not think money is the most important thing in the world. I love people who want to help others to better lives, to better health, who themselves grow in the process of helping. I would love to have more heroines be teachers, but I can’t have as many dramatic scenes for teachers as for doctors and nurses. I love people who have the virtues of nobility and integrity.
These and probably a hundred other things are good for you to have gone through if you are a writer. You may have to imagine war or being in a monsoon or remember having your eyes meet someone else’s across a crowded room but if you have really been scared or been in love your chances of being a believable writer are far greater than if you have led an Emily Dickinson type life. That’s why you are not ready to write a novel when you are in your teens or twenties. And if you have lived a perfectly normal life, the life that most people experience, there’s no way at all you can become a good writer.
I do not think it matters if you have actually physically been through experiences that force you to feel or read about them in a book or seen them in a movie. People who read a lot have much broader lives than those who don’t. I have worn Hester Prynne’s scarlet A, I have met Miss Jenny and Ben Varner in Yoknapatawpha County, I have discovered an unknown lake in the middle of Africa with Osa Johnson (I Married Adventure), Rhett Butler has kissed me, Humphrey Bogart asked his pianist to play “As Time Goes By” because it reminds him of me. He and I also rose to heroic heights in “The African Queen” because we were ennobled by love. I have communed with the stars in that little boat where the old man, Santiago, waits in The Old Man and the Sea. I have experienced countries and love and hate and heartbreak and have questioned beliefs of faith in books. So often I ask myself, “Did that really happen or did I dream it or read about it or see it in a movie?” I don’t think it matters. I have experienced the emotions these characters experience, and that is part of my whole being.
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is a writer doomed to leading a life that is not average, not what I call normal? I’m an advocate of that idea. I have always been a square peg in a round hole. Or rather not able to fit into the round hole. I started writing at age 7, and I now realize I did that because I could not communicate well with my peers. No writers whom I know - and I mean people who write a lot, not necessarily published, but those who are mentally writers anyhow - do not fit into any slots. When I am in the midst of writing a book I am in real places physically, but just because my body is there does not mean my mind is. My mind most likely is with whoever is struggling to life right now. I must tell you, for instance, that when you are talking to me you really don’t know whether I am listening to you or my mind is wondering if Dahlia Carlisle (my latest) is really going to turn down Max Schroëder, one of the nicest men I’ve written about but with a big flaw. Can you tell by my eyes? Do I answer any questions you ask?
Years and years ago, probably forty at least, I remember reading that Bennet Cerf, who was a famous editor at Random House, thought he was telling a funny story when he told that William Faulkner was in New York and they had lunched together and he thought it was so funny that in the midst of their conversation Faulkner reached over and touched Cerf’s arm and said, “Do you know what Flem Snopes did last week?” Flem Snopes is an unlikeable character in a trilogy of Faulkner’s.
Cerf thought it so funny because Flem Snopes was not real and Faulkner acted as though he were.
He was, to Faulkner.
I think that, as a writer, unless you believe your characters are alive they cannot come to life on a page. They cannot be alive to a reader if they are not alive to you. And if they are real to me, I belong in a mental institution.
Or I can be revered as an extremely creative and inventive author who makes a very nice living making believe characters believable.
What Writing Has Added to My Life and Thoughts
2/27/2013
Well, writing in large part has been my life and thoughts as much as breathing has been.
I have read and written all my life. I remember when I was teaching and once asked students what were 5 things they’d take with them if they had to be marooned on a desert isle. Then one of them asked me what I’d take and I said I’d have to have a pad and pencil. And some kid said, “No, you wouldn’t need that at all. You could always write in the sand with your finger.” Ever since, I’ve not feared being marooned on a South Pacific island.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write. When I had questions to which I could not find answers, or questions I was too embarrassed to ask, I’d write write write. When I was unhappy (usually over love affairs or prolonged relationships) I’d fill notebooks. Communicating to paper meant I didn’t have to bore anyone else with my thoughts, meant no one could treat the things I found important as frivolous and trivial. I think probably if I’d kept any of those notebooks with my mental searchings perhaps I could have answered a number of the world’s important questions.
I always knew no one would want to read my writings and so I never ever showed anyone what I’d written. Also, it seemed so narcissistic. When I filled a notebook, what did I do with it? I threw it out and started a new notebook. Of course, now I’m sorry I threw out all those thousands of pages.
I love to have a lined notebook ready and waiting. I always have one I’ve never written in around. When I begin to write in it I make sure I get another empty one next time I go to the store.
Funny thing is, I haven’t written in a notebook since this Memoirs group began. I’ve been given carte blanche to write about myself, about things long forgotten, about parts of me that were submerged.
All my life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a novel, I’ve dreamed of getting published, I’ve fantasized that what I had to say was important enough that someone would buy it, pay actual money to read what I had to say. It was make believe, in the realm of science fiction I suppose. A child’s fantasy carried into adulthood.
From about the fourth grade on I wrote short stories. English teachers always loved me. My parents encouraged me. My mother came up with titles for them and my father told me to invent words. I was always known to be “imaginative” and overly “dramatic.” Those words were like cancers to me, because I thought they meant I was so far from reality that there was no basis to any of my thoughts and ideas. So, when the time had finally come that I could no longer put off trying to write a novel I told no one. I did research and tried to come up with a story and characters, but I knew that even thinking of attempting it was overly imaginative and proof that I was living in a dream world.
Further proof that my always practical and down-to-earth brother was right (again?). In my twenty years in academia he, the business person of the family, always referred to me as “living in an ivory tower.” I took that to mean I lived in a world of ideas and idealism that was removed from reality, removed from the crass world of finance and practicality. I sort of have to laugh at this now, and with some pride. I’ve supported myself better than any woman I know and earned more than my brother did.
Why did I feel I had to write? I’ve asked myself this over and over. Do you remember “The Waltons,” a TV show of the 1970s? The main character was a teenager, John Boy, who spent a great deal of time up in his room, writing. Once someone asked why he wrote so much, and after he thought a bit he answered, “I don’t have any choice.” I’ve always remembered that. I think it has applied to me too.
I started to write because I could put down my thoughts on paper without anyone making fun of me. It seems to me I’ve always been a square peg in a round hole. Or is it the other way around? Anyhow I’ve seldom fit in, though I must say the world hasn’t known that. Only I have been aware of it. I haven’t been an obvious misfit, but more of a closet one.
Then in about the 5th or 6th grade I’d take some of the women’s magazines my mother subscribed to and write plays from the short stories in them. I devoured plays in the library. I loved reading plays. I loved acting in plays. My major was Drama. I didn’t pursue it after graduation because I knew I wasn’t attractive enough. In writing you could look like anything and be anyone and no one knew. Actually I graduated with honors in Drama, and living 25 miles from New York City everyone thought I’d immediately set my sights on Broadway. I didn’t. I got married and moved to a little town in upstate New York and began 20 years of being onstage with a captive audience. I taught.
I remember reading James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to a class once, and when I finished a girl in the back of the room said, “Oh, why weren’t you an actress?” Rather dramatically, I answered, “What do you think I am?”
Drama and writing. Both creative. Both overly dramatic, divorced from everyday reality. That’s me. I felt more at ease on stage than I ever did at any party I ever went to.
I had gone to college with the idea of becoming a writer, a journalist. I fancied being a foreign correspondent, being assigned to Buenos Aires (I’d just seen Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious”) or Rio or Shanghai or Cairo or even Paris. But one journalism course turned me off. I learned that it wasn’t facts I wanted to write about. I had my head in the clouds. I wanted to tell stories. Which, in retrospect, was vain of me. I really was out of touch with reality for I hadn’t even learned to think yet. I had hardly experienced anything yet.
And as the years have gone along and along and along I learned that what is really required in writing is thinking. I am fond of saying that writing is easy, it’s thinking that’s hard.
There are days when I sit down at my computer and stare at the monitor, and it’s a reflection of my brain. Blank. I am unable to think. Sometimes that lasts for too many months or even over a year. And there’s one of my worst fears come true. There is nothing but blankness in my head.
Since I felt I really couldn’t write I did what people do in such cases. I begged my principal to let me teach it as an elective. I’d give up my free period to teach Creative Writing, and I’d take no more than 12 Seniors. He said I couldn’t get 5 kids who would want to voluntarily take a writing class. Ha! The next year and the years after that I was given Creative Writing AND a free period! I taught Creative writing for years, to students who amazed me, who could write and think on such levels that I was in awe of them (they didn’t know I was in awe of them tho they knew I loved them).
How does that saying go? “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”
In 1968 I decided I wanted to take a full paid sabbatical and get my M.A. I lived in Rochester, New York then but the University of Rochester no longer accepted a thesis for 6 credits. They no longer required or would even look at a thesis. I wanted to get my M.A. because I wanted to write a thesis, and knew I wouldn’t do it on my own. I’d fallen in love with William Faulkner and wanted to explore his view of women. So I drove 20 miles away to the State University of New York at Brockport 4 nights a week and got my Master’s there so that I could write my thesis. The head of the English department was one of those who had to approve my thesis and he later told me that as he read it he didn’t think it was very scholarly until he realized I went into areas of research that no previous Faulknerian (not a word, I know) had. “It was so smoothly written and anything but dull that in the beginning I thought it wasn’t scholarly. How did you manage to put so many facts and ideas in it and still make it compulsively interesting reading!” Oh, my, that alone was worth the 9 months it took me to produce my fourth child (the thesis). I was floating on clouds to have that told me. On the basis of that he offered me a job in the English department, but I had to turn it down. I was a single mother supporting 3 kids and to teach in a university I’d have to take a pay cut of $6000. (When I taught at the U of Oregon years later I earned less than the clerks at Safeway - I learned that teaching college students was not nearly as rewarding as teaching high school students when I was still able to influence their thinking.
The year (2006) my son was killed by a truck driver who ran a red light and crashed into my son’s car. Also, I broke my arm. But I can’t even use them as excuses for not writing. I haven’t written a book in 2 years and the fact that I’m not writing and can’t think is depressing me. I’m getting blue about it. I realize I’m only really happy when I’m in the midst of a writing project. I write about what I believe, but I disguise it. I’m never blatant about the important ideas of my life. Yet I’m sure anyone who reads my books knows I’m against racism and that I don’t think money is the most important thing in the world, and that I’m pro choice, and I think independent women are admirable. I’m a feminist and an egalitarian who believes in helping the less fortunate of the world. I’m an atheist who’s a humanitarian. I have a finely tuned conscience that sometimes drives me wild. I reject the Puritanism that has shaped me. All of my political and religious beliefs are dotted throughout my novels, and that has amazed me. My publishers have let them stand. They haven’t diluted them or asked me to cut them out, and that pleases me no end. I really think that the real me is standing naked in front of hundreds of thousands of people. And as Sally Field said when she received her second Oscar, “People really like me!” What a glorious feeling!
My writing is the only place where I can bare myself and feel safe. I can’t say that writing has changed my life, because it is my life.
AS A WRITER...
When Magic Happens
5/15/2013
Something magical that happened to me. It was the winter of 1990 and a friend, Hazel, and I were spending 3 months in Mexico. I was writing an outline for my book about China, "Distant Star." I'd had writer's block for a few days. We'd been out to dinner with new friends and there was music at this lovely hotel where we dined, and we met another couple there and had a perfectly lovely evening.
My friend, Hazel, and I had returned to our rental apartment about 10:30 or 11:00, filled with warmth and pleasure at being in a foreign country and meeting pleasant people and drinking margaritas!
I was sleeping in the living room on the couch because Hazel snored terribly. I lay there sort of drowsy, hearing Mexican music from down the street (there is always noise in Mexico, I mean always) and suddenly images started coming to me. My characters jumped into life and began to do things...I was startled yet didn't dare move or stop it because I was aware something magical was happening. This went on, a story unfolding, conversation and what clothes they wore and new characters I'd never dreamed up. This went on for hours. I thought maybe I was dreaming but I knew I wasn't because I could hear a cat meowing out in the courtyard. Though I didn't want to open my eyes, through slit in my eyes I could see slants of light from the streetlight outside the window, sifting across the room. The air was warm (February in Mexico!) and soft and my characters acted as though they were in a movie. The second half of my book wrote itself that night. This went on for about 3 hours. I thought I ought to get up and write it down before I forgot but I was, by then, too sleepy to do that. I did get up and go to the bathroom and got back on the couch and slept until 8:30.
I awoke, filled with energy and excitement. I fixed some coffee, got out my laptop and started to write down what I had experienced. It took me all morning. When I finished I saw that the outline for over 2/3 of the book lay in front of me, complete with a heroic man I'd never even dreamed of before.
I've had this happen again, only once, when I was driving along in the back seat of a car in Australia and, pretending to be asleep as I let characters ingratiate themselves into my life so that I spent the next two days writing down the gift I'd been given. That was half of "Deep in the Heart," about Texas, though at the time I was in the midst of writing about Australia's flying doctors.
I don't know how to explain either of these mystical experiences except to say something magical happened. Books wrote themselves. I have felt guilty about these two because I don't think I really wrote the stories. They were given to me and I just wrote them down. I didn't think them up.
Where Does A Story Come From?
2/19/2014
Where does a story start?
All but two of my stories have begun with place. I don’t like cold grey climates, where I’ve lived all but 12 years of my life. I love the subtropics, where I’ve only lived 7 years of my life (all 7 were the happiest ones I’ve known). In warm sunny climates I am not only happy but most creative. I wrote 5 books in 7 years when I lived in a small Mexican mountain town. I’ve never neared that back in the continental U.S.
When planning to write, I choose a warm, sunny place and then decide what to write about. Two exceptions: Stairway to the Stars takes place in England, where it is disgustingly grey and rainy and chilly throughout the year. The Moon Below about Australia was an idea given to me by one of my daughters.
Once I have decided on a place, I do research and almost always stumble on an historical woman or two on whom to base my story. Then I let my imagination soar. Then I think of a person I would like to be, men I would like to love, goals I would like to achieve, friends I would like to share my life with. I think of ways to add tension, ways to screw up love, ways to think one is in love but it’s the wrong person. I want my heroines to achieve success on their own, battle the elements on their own, not have to rely on a man to do that for her. My heroines are always adventurous and intelligent. They love, not just a man (or men) but friends, children, land, ideals, ideas. They are always compassionate, resourceful, and hard working. There, that’s the definition of a Bickmore heroine. They are all like that, come to think of it.
My character development actually takes place as I write. Most of my secondary characters come to me from the story I’m writing. They appear often seemingly out of nowhere, not alive a second before they appear on my computer screen. I am surprised and excited to meet them and wonder where they’re going to lead me. I write chronologically so that I live the events as they happen and form the personalities as I go along. I don’t know how I make a story grow once it is planted. Those close to me, who have watched me write, tell me I go into a trance very often when writing and my characters and the storyline come from within that trance, that land of the imagination where I live more than I live in the “real” world. Something in there propels my fingers on the keyboard and I actually do not see my story unfold on my computer monitor. I do not see that or know just what I’ve written until I come out of that so-called trance and re-read it.
The Last Line
8/5/2014
The only book I’ve written that ended the way I planned to end it was The Back of Beyond. The others always surprised me. Between the start of a novel and the end, characters do things the author hadn’t planned for them to do. They take over somehow. I know I (the author) am the only one to give them life, but they take on a life of their own and dictate to me what they should do, which isn’t always what I’ve planned for them to do. They all really come full circle though I didn’t realize that until I sat down to write this. Writing is a magical and mystifying experience for me. I think that when I am writing I am in a trance, a Zen like time when I may be sitting in a chair in the present here and now, but I am really (really) somewhere else, wherever and whenever my characters are. I often say that if they did not pay me so well, I would actually be a candidate for a mental institution because when I am writing a novel I am not in my body…I am far away in some other time and place which is more real to me than the world’s reality.
Well, this has little to do with the subject at hand, which is trying to answer the question of how I know when the end is written, is it instinctive or planned. Well, when I come to the end of a chapter I suddenly know, okay, it’s time to stop. That’s it. How I know I don’t know. Not one single chapter ending is premeditated. They surprise me (and often please and delight me). I have to say it’s mostly instinctive.
I digress. You can see why I don’t know what the endings will be because I take circuitous routes. I never go in straight lines.
I’m also a painter and can’t draw a straight line. Straight lines are boring. Straight lines do not allow for growth. Straight lines do not allow for tragedy or ecstasy, and I think too many people fear to step too far from the straight line, so they exist rather than really live. So, through my books, they can live vicariously.
Well, back to endings. I do not have my books near me so can’t see what the last lines are. I do remember the one about China. As I was growing up, in a much less enlightened time than now, my father encouraged me, telling me “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough, except be president and maybe by the time you grow up a woman can do that too. Why not you?” Yes, why not? So I incorporated my father’s words as the ending of my China novel. My heroine, Chloe, tells her friend, “Your father told me I could do anything I wanted except perhaps become president.”
“Maybe he was wrong. Maybe you could do even that now.”
Who knows? Thought Chloe. Maybe I could.
The minute I wrote those lines I knew the novel was done. I printed it, boxed it and sent if off to my agent.
My first book, East of the Sun, is the life story of a young nurse who goes to Africa when she is 21, ostensibly to help the poor of Africa but really to follow a missionary to his station in the Congo. Sixty years later, and the end of the book, she has actually helped more Africans than anyone ever. And the ending of the book is the theme of all my novels.
“And I still make a difference.”
Once I wrote that I knew I had finished two years of work.
Every one of my heroines makes the world better because she has been in it. All of them live lives I wish I’d had the courage and opportunity to live. They have the courage to live their convictions even though they are not aware of it at the times they happen. They do not set out to “do good” or to change the world. But they do it. Some of them actually change the world, others change a part of it, their little world. They know what love is. Not just romantic love, though that is part of all their lives but not the be all and end all. It helps to make a full life, but that kind of love alone is seldom enough. They have a love of people. They care. They are passionate about life.
Well, there I go again, far from a straight line. Advice to writers about ending chapters and books? I have none. Reread some of your favorite books and study the chapter endings and see what the last line of the book has to do with the rest of the book so that a reader is satisfied.
Now, openings of books! First lines. That’s another idea. How do we authors find a first line that will galvanize a reader and make him buy our book? I remember three of them and have for about 60 years.
“It was the best of times and the worst of times” from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which bored me stiff as does all of Dickens.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again,” from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a novel I loved and a movie I’ve never forgotten.
“Call me Ishmael,” from Melville’s great novel, which I think is the greatest American novel ever written.
5/15/2013
Something magical that happened to me. It was the winter of 1990 and a friend, Hazel, and I were spending 3 months in Mexico. I was writing an outline for my book about China, "Distant Star." I'd had writer's block for a few days. We'd been out to dinner with new friends and there was music at this lovely hotel where we dined, and we met another couple there and had a perfectly lovely evening.
My friend, Hazel, and I had returned to our rental apartment about 10:30 or 11:00, filled with warmth and pleasure at being in a foreign country and meeting pleasant people and drinking margaritas!
I was sleeping in the living room on the couch because Hazel snored terribly. I lay there sort of drowsy, hearing Mexican music from down the street (there is always noise in Mexico, I mean always) and suddenly images started coming to me. My characters jumped into life and began to do things...I was startled yet didn't dare move or stop it because I was aware something magical was happening. This went on, a story unfolding, conversation and what clothes they wore and new characters I'd never dreamed up. This went on for hours. I thought maybe I was dreaming but I knew I wasn't because I could hear a cat meowing out in the courtyard. Though I didn't want to open my eyes, through slit in my eyes I could see slants of light from the streetlight outside the window, sifting across the room. The air was warm (February in Mexico!) and soft and my characters acted as though they were in a movie. The second half of my book wrote itself that night. This went on for about 3 hours. I thought I ought to get up and write it down before I forgot but I was, by then, too sleepy to do that. I did get up and go to the bathroom and got back on the couch and slept until 8:30.
I awoke, filled with energy and excitement. I fixed some coffee, got out my laptop and started to write down what I had experienced. It took me all morning. When I finished I saw that the outline for over 2/3 of the book lay in front of me, complete with a heroic man I'd never even dreamed of before.
I've had this happen again, only once, when I was driving along in the back seat of a car in Australia and, pretending to be asleep as I let characters ingratiate themselves into my life so that I spent the next two days writing down the gift I'd been given. That was half of "Deep in the Heart," about Texas, though at the time I was in the midst of writing about Australia's flying doctors.
I don't know how to explain either of these mystical experiences except to say something magical happened. Books wrote themselves. I have felt guilty about these two because I don't think I really wrote the stories. They were given to me and I just wrote them down. I didn't think them up.
Where Does A Story Come From?
2/19/2014
Where does a story start?
All but two of my stories have begun with place. I don’t like cold grey climates, where I’ve lived all but 12 years of my life. I love the subtropics, where I’ve only lived 7 years of my life (all 7 were the happiest ones I’ve known). In warm sunny climates I am not only happy but most creative. I wrote 5 books in 7 years when I lived in a small Mexican mountain town. I’ve never neared that back in the continental U.S.
When planning to write, I choose a warm, sunny place and then decide what to write about. Two exceptions: Stairway to the Stars takes place in England, where it is disgustingly grey and rainy and chilly throughout the year. The Moon Below about Australia was an idea given to me by one of my daughters.
Once I have decided on a place, I do research and almost always stumble on an historical woman or two on whom to base my story. Then I let my imagination soar. Then I think of a person I would like to be, men I would like to love, goals I would like to achieve, friends I would like to share my life with. I think of ways to add tension, ways to screw up love, ways to think one is in love but it’s the wrong person. I want my heroines to achieve success on their own, battle the elements on their own, not have to rely on a man to do that for her. My heroines are always adventurous and intelligent. They love, not just a man (or men) but friends, children, land, ideals, ideas. They are always compassionate, resourceful, and hard working. There, that’s the definition of a Bickmore heroine. They are all like that, come to think of it.
My character development actually takes place as I write. Most of my secondary characters come to me from the story I’m writing. They appear often seemingly out of nowhere, not alive a second before they appear on my computer screen. I am surprised and excited to meet them and wonder where they’re going to lead me. I write chronologically so that I live the events as they happen and form the personalities as I go along. I don’t know how I make a story grow once it is planted. Those close to me, who have watched me write, tell me I go into a trance very often when writing and my characters and the storyline come from within that trance, that land of the imagination where I live more than I live in the “real” world. Something in there propels my fingers on the keyboard and I actually do not see my story unfold on my computer monitor. I do not see that or know just what I’ve written until I come out of that so-called trance and re-read it.
The Last Line
8/5/2014
The only book I’ve written that ended the way I planned to end it was The Back of Beyond. The others always surprised me. Between the start of a novel and the end, characters do things the author hadn’t planned for them to do. They take over somehow. I know I (the author) am the only one to give them life, but they take on a life of their own and dictate to me what they should do, which isn’t always what I’ve planned for them to do. They all really come full circle though I didn’t realize that until I sat down to write this. Writing is a magical and mystifying experience for me. I think that when I am writing I am in a trance, a Zen like time when I may be sitting in a chair in the present here and now, but I am really (really) somewhere else, wherever and whenever my characters are. I often say that if they did not pay me so well, I would actually be a candidate for a mental institution because when I am writing a novel I am not in my body…I am far away in some other time and place which is more real to me than the world’s reality.
Well, this has little to do with the subject at hand, which is trying to answer the question of how I know when the end is written, is it instinctive or planned. Well, when I come to the end of a chapter I suddenly know, okay, it’s time to stop. That’s it. How I know I don’t know. Not one single chapter ending is premeditated. They surprise me (and often please and delight me). I have to say it’s mostly instinctive.
I digress. You can see why I don’t know what the endings will be because I take circuitous routes. I never go in straight lines.
I’m also a painter and can’t draw a straight line. Straight lines are boring. Straight lines do not allow for growth. Straight lines do not allow for tragedy or ecstasy, and I think too many people fear to step too far from the straight line, so they exist rather than really live. So, through my books, they can live vicariously.
Well, back to endings. I do not have my books near me so can’t see what the last lines are. I do remember the one about China. As I was growing up, in a much less enlightened time than now, my father encouraged me, telling me “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough, except be president and maybe by the time you grow up a woman can do that too. Why not you?” Yes, why not? So I incorporated my father’s words as the ending of my China novel. My heroine, Chloe, tells her friend, “Your father told me I could do anything I wanted except perhaps become president.”
“Maybe he was wrong. Maybe you could do even that now.”
Who knows? Thought Chloe. Maybe I could.
The minute I wrote those lines I knew the novel was done. I printed it, boxed it and sent if off to my agent.
My first book, East of the Sun, is the life story of a young nurse who goes to Africa when she is 21, ostensibly to help the poor of Africa but really to follow a missionary to his station in the Congo. Sixty years later, and the end of the book, she has actually helped more Africans than anyone ever. And the ending of the book is the theme of all my novels.
“And I still make a difference.”
Once I wrote that I knew I had finished two years of work.
Every one of my heroines makes the world better because she has been in it. All of them live lives I wish I’d had the courage and opportunity to live. They have the courage to live their convictions even though they are not aware of it at the times they happen. They do not set out to “do good” or to change the world. But they do it. Some of them actually change the world, others change a part of it, their little world. They know what love is. Not just romantic love, though that is part of all their lives but not the be all and end all. It helps to make a full life, but that kind of love alone is seldom enough. They have a love of people. They care. They are passionate about life.
Well, there I go again, far from a straight line. Advice to writers about ending chapters and books? I have none. Reread some of your favorite books and study the chapter endings and see what the last line of the book has to do with the rest of the book so that a reader is satisfied.
Now, openings of books! First lines. That’s another idea. How do we authors find a first line that will galvanize a reader and make him buy our book? I remember three of them and have for about 60 years.
“It was the best of times and the worst of times” from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which bored me stiff as does all of Dickens.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again,” from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a novel I loved and a movie I’ve never forgotten.
“Call me Ishmael,” from Melville’s great novel, which I think is the greatest American novel ever written.
ON WRITING MY FIRST NOVEL
First novel – Part 1
3/8/2013
For nine years in the 1980s I belonged to a women’s group that met monthly. I loved it. We discussed books and ideas. In fact, I don’t really remember all we discussed, but I never missed a meeting. There were usually twelve of us, sometimes fifteen. We met at the home of one of the women, and the monthly meeting came to represent coziness to me. I needed something cozy. I was going broke, stone cold broke, and I couldn’t make myself tell anyone.
I was living in Eugene, Oregon, and at the time of which I’m writing, January of 1984, Eugene had 14% unemployment. Downtown was boarded-up windows. Banks were closing. And the yarn store I had bought four years before was going down the drain. I watched it slip away day by day. I didn’t want anyone to know. It represented failure...my failure.
To escape having to think about how I’d pay the rent or put food on my table, when the shop was empty (which was most of the day) I began to write. Well, that’s not accurate. I began to write when I was 7 years old. As early as the 4th grade Miss Collins, my teacher, was reading my short stories to the class or having me read them. I enjoyed that. I was as much a ham as writer. I was painfully shy at parties, but put me in front of a group with something that I cared greatly about, and I came to life (the same is still true).
I’d gone to college to major in writing. I enrolled in Journalism, but by the end of the first year I realized factual reporting wasn’t for me. I played with a Spanish major my sophomore year. Then, in my junior year, I signed up to take a Creative Writing class with Dr. Mildred Martin, who was the only woman faculty member I ever had. We made fun of her because she was an old maid (nothing much worse could be imagined for a woman) and didn’t have a great sense of humor (at least that we could discern). We thought she gave Dick Abbot As because he was so handsome. I ended up getting a B+. So, throwing my hands figuratively in the air, thinking I was a failure, I changed from a writing major to getting my B.A. in Drama.
The only writing I did after that Creative Writing class was two fold: I wrote term papers.In fact, I eventually got my Master’s degree because I wanted to write a thesis and knew I’d never do it on my own. The writing, outside of academia, that I did was in lined notebooks. When I was unhappy I filled notebook after notebook, scribbling my misery onto pages, because I could never confide my feelings to anyone else. My mother had taught me to smile no matter what I felt inside. And rather than have the misery, whatever it might have been at the time, tear me apart, I scribbled it onto pages in notebooks. I never reread it, just sort of vomited out the crap building inside me. I wrote in notebooks all my life just for me, as catharses. It was tantamount to a confessional, but I didn’t have to burden anyone else with it.
Anyhow, I’ve written all my life, in the closet, so to speak.
I taught Creative Writing for years, and my students could write circles around me. My husband wrote circles around me. My two daughters, neither of whom enjoys writing, write more poetically and powerfully than I ever can. I used to say to my husband, “Let’s write a novel. I’ll come up with the idea and you write it.” He wasn’t enthusiastic.
So I had to be going for broke and 55 before I tried to write a novel. I knew it was to escape the doom that was threatening me, so I’d have something to think about other than what to do in poverty. I went to the library and studied all I could on how to get published. I don’t know why I did it because I knew that would never happen to me. I discovered the easiest way to get published was to write genre fiction. However, Science Fiction totally escapes me. I’m not clever enough to write mysteries. Westerns are for men. That left Romances. I went and read a few by Danielle Steele and Janet Dailey, who were the big wheels of the time. I could have vomited. I thought, “I can do that!” even though I no longer believed in Romance.
So I started, as most novices do in the writing area, by remembering an experience of mine that turned out quite terribly, but I could fictionalize it to be lovely.
I sat down and started a chapter. I didn’t even know where a chapter should end.
I was only halfway into the first chapter when it was time for my monthly women’s group. Before we started whatever we were to discuss at the meetings we went around the room and signed in with something personal. No one asked questions or prolonged it, and I remember someone saying, “My son’s going away to college in the fall and I’m already mourning, already experiencing the empty nest syndrome.” Another was wondering whether to have breast implants. That sort of thing.
Come this night and I had not a thing to say, nothing I wanted to share. So I said, “I’m going to write a novel.”
Yeah. Sure.
The next morning, Barbara Cheatham, the woman who had organized the group four years before, and whom I and others tended to put on a pedestal, phoned me.
“I loved what you said last night. I’ve been trying to write a novel for four years. Let’s start a writer’s group,” she said enthusiastically. “Get about six people whom we know like to write, and we can critique each other’s writing.”
Oh, God. I couldn’t let her know how superficial and vacuous I was. I hemmed and hawed and said writing was a solitary thing. “Come on,” she said. “Who else will we get?”
At the risk of alienating her with my lack of substance, I said, “Oh, I can’t. I’m thinking of writing a Romance.”
I could hear the glee in her voice.“Oh, what fun! That’ll be so exciting.”
I no longer had an excuse.
So we found four others who were closet writers. I was the only serious one, but we sure did a lot of laughing.
I remember reading that in a Romance one had to have an OSS by the first third of the book. OSS is Obligatory Sex Scene. There should be two other OSSes. It’s a formula. Romances are what keep the rest of the book world alive and well. Romances are best sellers the world over because women don’t have enough in their own lives and read to get vicarious thrills.
I couldn’t write a sex scene! The very thought of it petrified me. So, I’d write OSS on a little sticker and put on the empty page and go ahead with writing the rest of it.
After we’d been meeting about 3 months I sat down (we met every other Monday evening) and wrote three OSSes in one day. I had known these women for years but not at gut level. I went to the meeting that night determined to read my OSSes and see what they thought. But I was tied in knots. Were they going to ask, “Have you really done that?” Or “You think that’s great?” I had never talked about sex with anyone. I had no idea what was hot and what was not. What had they done or not done? Would they be so shocked that they would no longer want me in the group? Would they pity me for my lack of expertise? So, when it was my turn to read. I told them that I was going to read love scenes and started but couldn’t go on. My determination had turned to jello. One of the women tore the papers out of my hand and said, “I’ll read them.” I flew into the kitchen and pounded my fists on the kitchen table, beat my head as I heard them screaming with laughter.
But, you know what? They weren’t making fun of me. They thought all 3 scenes were great. From that ground-breaking moment we all became gut level friends and have remained so. They eventually went all through that book with me.
First Novel – Part 2
3/18/2013
In September I was in the Unitarian Church when some man I’d never seen came up to me and said, “I hear you’re a writer.”
I was embarrassed. As with most writers we think writing is an indulgence, somewhat narcissistic. Unless we’re published what we write is worthless. At least that’s what I thought.
I told him I was a “wannabee.”
“Have you ever heard of Con Sellers?”
I shook my head.
“Well, he’s a successful novelist, and he teaches a class at Rogue Community College called ‘How to Write to Get Published’.”
So?
“I just moved up here from Grants Pass and took his course for two years. You might want to go sit in on a class. Two students from the class have gotten published.”
Grants Pass was a three hour ride.
“The class is from six to ten, with a 20 minute break,” he said. “It meets Monday nights.”
Whatever made me write to this Con Sellers I have no idea. It wasn’t typical of me. But I did write and asked if I could come sit in on a class. Two days later my phone rang, and a gruff voice said, “This is Con Sellers. You Bickmore?”
I swallowed.
“You’re welcome to come Monday night. But if you’re gonna come so far, bring something to read.” And he hung up.
I phoned this man I’d met at church, whose name was Kent something, and asked how to find this Rogue Community College. He said, “I’ll drive down with you. Pick me up at 2:30 because we’ll have to get a bite to eat before the class starts.”
That Monday I remember, as clear as though it were yesterday and not twenty five years ago, as I took my first chapter and placed it in the car I laughed out loud. What if I got published by going to Grants Pass, a little redneck town in the mountains of western Oregon, 3000 miles from the publishing capital of the world, when would-be writers felt they had to go to New York City.
I don’t remember much about the trip down. I remember we stopped at a Denny’s and ate something, and then found Rogue Community College.
There were about 32 in the class. Kent and I found two seats in the middle of the 3rd row. The teacher strode in, a man in his sixties, with grey hair and mustache and twinkling blue eyes. He wore a bandana around his neck, a Western styled shirt, scuffed pointed high heeled boots, and a big square turquoise stone was set in his wide belt buckle. He looked straight out of Wyoming.
Someone volunteered to read. I listened. Pretty mediocre. Of course, we all were or we wouldn’t be there. He asked for comments, and the criticism flew. I would have cringed. Then, I didn’t understand how he could be so brave, someone else volunteered to read, and the same thing happened. This time Con Sellers talked about viewpoint, about the five senses. And then someone else read. Ditto re criticism which was hot and heavy.
He then called for a fifteen minute break and walked over to me. “You Bickmore?”
I nodded, having difficulty swallowing. “Okay. Hi, Kent,” but he looked directly at me. “You can read after the break.”
My hands broke out in a sweat. I rushed to the bathroom so I wouldn’t wet my pants in front of the class. I thought I couldn’t read, my voice was failing me. I’d creep back in there and grab my chapter and get to my car, leaving Kent stranded.
But when I got back nearly everyone was there and Con Sellers was saying, “We have someone who drove all the way down from Eugene tonight. She’s writing a Romance. Go ahead, Ms. Bickmore.”
I cleared my throat. I could tell my voice was trembling as I started to read, but as I got carried away with my story and forgot me, my voice stopped shaking. It took on some authority, some self assurance. The chapter was 9 pages long. As I was reading the 8th page Kent poked at my arm. I was irritated. I couldn’t pay attention to him and to my reading. I glanced at him, and he nodded towards the board where Con was writing something. He wasn’t even paying attention to me! I finished, however, and there was silence. Con just looked at me. No one said anything. I knew then that I was a failure. I was new to the class, and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
Then someone said, “If that’s a romance, I guess I’ll start reading them.”
Oh, that was nice.
Con nodded towards what he’d written on the board. Someone’s address. He said, “That’s the name of my agent. Send her your manuscript and tell her I think you’re publishable.”
Oh my God in Heaven!
I’ve no idea how much longer the class lasted or what was read. I sat in a dream like trance. I was publishable.
When the class ended Kent said, “He never was that nice to me.”
I turned a cartwheel in the parking lot.
For two weeks my feet did not touch the ground.
I sent my Romance off to Meg Ruley at the Jane Rotrosen Agency in New York City and eventually got a reply saying my novel was too complex for a Romance and too vacuous for anything else, but they all loved my writing and if I wanted to try a novel with more substance she would be happy to work with me.
That was ecstasy to me. Someone would read about something I really cared about writing, not an insipid romance
So I started going regularly to Con’s class, where I learned one does not write a whole novel. It won’t be read. Agents and editors are far too busy. One writes 100 pages so New York can see how well you write and if you can advance a plot and if you can write about characters readers care about. And you write an outline so they can tell if it’s an interesting story or if it’s just like one that was published or whether they like it. The outline should be at least twenty pages. And send that off.
First Novel – Part 3
3/29/2013
On New Year’s day of 1985 my daughter called me from Xian, China where she was teaching English to Chinese doctors at a university there. She was being given 6 weeks to travel and didn’t want to go around China alone, could I afford to come and go with her. If I could scrape together enough for the plane ticket, she could pay for the trip in China.
Off I went to China (and I hope that trip will be in another memoir) in late January. In our second week there on a 3 day train journey we met a young couple, both doctors, from South Africa, who were traveling around the world. We spent ten days with them. When they left I said to Debra, my daughter, “I’m going to write a novel about them.”
I started my first real novel about life in South Africa when I was in China. (I wrote my novel about China when I was in Mexico several years later.)
It took me until October to have 100 pages of the book and a 20 page outline ready to send off to New York. I didn’t hear from the agency and didn’t hear until I could stand it no longer, so on January 2nd I phoned this Meg Ruley. “Oh,” she gushed, “we were just talking about your book this morning. I’ll write you a letter this week.”
And she did. A 5 page single spaced letter, reaffirming that all the agents in that office (5 or 6) loved my writing, but something like it had just been published, and what really interested her was the grandmother. My heroine had a grandmother who had been a missionary in the Congo, which I mentioned in one or two sentences in my outline. Now, if I wanted to have this book published, please feel free to try another agent, but if I was interested in trying to write about this grandmother she’d be happy to work with me.
The grandmother? I had given no thought to her at all.
And so began my first really long journey, researching the Congo and South Africa, the politics and the streets, the weather and the scenery. I would send 5 or 6 pages off to her whenever I had them ready and she’d phone me and say things like, “Make me cry in this part.” Cry, indeed. I felt like crying.
Finally, by the end of May I said to her, “I’ve written this and rewritten it so much I’m losing interest.” She had my first hundred pages and a 46 page outline!
“Oh, okay,” she said, “hold tight.”
I had, during the year, gotten a job and was writing just weekends, 25 pages a weekend. On June 17, 1986, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a Tuesday, my phone rang at work, and it was my agent. She said, “Are you sitting down?”
“Of course.” I’d been hard at work on my computer.
“Ballantine is offering you $50,000.”
I screamed.
“I’m so glad you reacted that way,” she said. I could tell by her voice that she was smiling. “They offered $25,000 this morning but I’ve gotten them up to 50.”
I didn’t learn until this book, East of the Sun, was about to be published, two years later, and a reporter from the Eugene Register Guard phoned Ballantine and they said it was the most they’d ever paid for a first novel. No one told me.
To me it was a fortune. And I, who thought people at parties found me boring, was being paid to write a book that people would pay to read! (I no longer think people find me boring).
First Novel – The Final Chapter
4/5/2013
My little writing group continued to meet weekly, and they went through every bit of that first novel with me, telling me I used one word too many times, or that such and such wasn’t believable. They hauled me out of so many abysses. I could never have done it without them. Sometimes I didn’t know if an idea was mine or someone in the group had suggested it.
One night, when I was telling them how grateful I was, Bonnie said, “We’re expecting you to take us to Hawaii afterwards.” They all laughed.
I finished East of the Sun and sent it off in March of 1987. When the editor called to tell me she loved it, and I realized I wasn’t going to have to return the advance, I bought us all tickets to Hawaii for the end of April. We still talk about that week.
None of my other books has ever been as much fun to write as when I had the support, the laughter, the encouragement, the constructive criticism of our Writer’s Group. In fact, I found out that what they say about writing being a lonely business is true. But writing my first one wasn’t. It was wonderful, and agonizing, and ecstatic, and I realized how important friendship truly is.
3/8/2013
For nine years in the 1980s I belonged to a women’s group that met monthly. I loved it. We discussed books and ideas. In fact, I don’t really remember all we discussed, but I never missed a meeting. There were usually twelve of us, sometimes fifteen. We met at the home of one of the women, and the monthly meeting came to represent coziness to me. I needed something cozy. I was going broke, stone cold broke, and I couldn’t make myself tell anyone.
I was living in Eugene, Oregon, and at the time of which I’m writing, January of 1984, Eugene had 14% unemployment. Downtown was boarded-up windows. Banks were closing. And the yarn store I had bought four years before was going down the drain. I watched it slip away day by day. I didn’t want anyone to know. It represented failure...my failure.
To escape having to think about how I’d pay the rent or put food on my table, when the shop was empty (which was most of the day) I began to write. Well, that’s not accurate. I began to write when I was 7 years old. As early as the 4th grade Miss Collins, my teacher, was reading my short stories to the class or having me read them. I enjoyed that. I was as much a ham as writer. I was painfully shy at parties, but put me in front of a group with something that I cared greatly about, and I came to life (the same is still true).
I’d gone to college to major in writing. I enrolled in Journalism, but by the end of the first year I realized factual reporting wasn’t for me. I played with a Spanish major my sophomore year. Then, in my junior year, I signed up to take a Creative Writing class with Dr. Mildred Martin, who was the only woman faculty member I ever had. We made fun of her because she was an old maid (nothing much worse could be imagined for a woman) and didn’t have a great sense of humor (at least that we could discern). We thought she gave Dick Abbot As because he was so handsome. I ended up getting a B+. So, throwing my hands figuratively in the air, thinking I was a failure, I changed from a writing major to getting my B.A. in Drama.
The only writing I did after that Creative Writing class was two fold: I wrote term papers.In fact, I eventually got my Master’s degree because I wanted to write a thesis and knew I’d never do it on my own. The writing, outside of academia, that I did was in lined notebooks. When I was unhappy I filled notebook after notebook, scribbling my misery onto pages, because I could never confide my feelings to anyone else. My mother had taught me to smile no matter what I felt inside. And rather than have the misery, whatever it might have been at the time, tear me apart, I scribbled it onto pages in notebooks. I never reread it, just sort of vomited out the crap building inside me. I wrote in notebooks all my life just for me, as catharses. It was tantamount to a confessional, but I didn’t have to burden anyone else with it.
Anyhow, I’ve written all my life, in the closet, so to speak.
I taught Creative Writing for years, and my students could write circles around me. My husband wrote circles around me. My two daughters, neither of whom enjoys writing, write more poetically and powerfully than I ever can. I used to say to my husband, “Let’s write a novel. I’ll come up with the idea and you write it.” He wasn’t enthusiastic.
So I had to be going for broke and 55 before I tried to write a novel. I knew it was to escape the doom that was threatening me, so I’d have something to think about other than what to do in poverty. I went to the library and studied all I could on how to get published. I don’t know why I did it because I knew that would never happen to me. I discovered the easiest way to get published was to write genre fiction. However, Science Fiction totally escapes me. I’m not clever enough to write mysteries. Westerns are for men. That left Romances. I went and read a few by Danielle Steele and Janet Dailey, who were the big wheels of the time. I could have vomited. I thought, “I can do that!” even though I no longer believed in Romance.
So I started, as most novices do in the writing area, by remembering an experience of mine that turned out quite terribly, but I could fictionalize it to be lovely.
I sat down and started a chapter. I didn’t even know where a chapter should end.
I was only halfway into the first chapter when it was time for my monthly women’s group. Before we started whatever we were to discuss at the meetings we went around the room and signed in with something personal. No one asked questions or prolonged it, and I remember someone saying, “My son’s going away to college in the fall and I’m already mourning, already experiencing the empty nest syndrome.” Another was wondering whether to have breast implants. That sort of thing.
Come this night and I had not a thing to say, nothing I wanted to share. So I said, “I’m going to write a novel.”
Yeah. Sure.
The next morning, Barbara Cheatham, the woman who had organized the group four years before, and whom I and others tended to put on a pedestal, phoned me.
“I loved what you said last night. I’ve been trying to write a novel for four years. Let’s start a writer’s group,” she said enthusiastically. “Get about six people whom we know like to write, and we can critique each other’s writing.”
Oh, God. I couldn’t let her know how superficial and vacuous I was. I hemmed and hawed and said writing was a solitary thing. “Come on,” she said. “Who else will we get?”
At the risk of alienating her with my lack of substance, I said, “Oh, I can’t. I’m thinking of writing a Romance.”
I could hear the glee in her voice.“Oh, what fun! That’ll be so exciting.”
I no longer had an excuse.
So we found four others who were closet writers. I was the only serious one, but we sure did a lot of laughing.
I remember reading that in a Romance one had to have an OSS by the first third of the book. OSS is Obligatory Sex Scene. There should be two other OSSes. It’s a formula. Romances are what keep the rest of the book world alive and well. Romances are best sellers the world over because women don’t have enough in their own lives and read to get vicarious thrills.
I couldn’t write a sex scene! The very thought of it petrified me. So, I’d write OSS on a little sticker and put on the empty page and go ahead with writing the rest of it.
After we’d been meeting about 3 months I sat down (we met every other Monday evening) and wrote three OSSes in one day. I had known these women for years but not at gut level. I went to the meeting that night determined to read my OSSes and see what they thought. But I was tied in knots. Were they going to ask, “Have you really done that?” Or “You think that’s great?” I had never talked about sex with anyone. I had no idea what was hot and what was not. What had they done or not done? Would they be so shocked that they would no longer want me in the group? Would they pity me for my lack of expertise? So, when it was my turn to read. I told them that I was going to read love scenes and started but couldn’t go on. My determination had turned to jello. One of the women tore the papers out of my hand and said, “I’ll read them.” I flew into the kitchen and pounded my fists on the kitchen table, beat my head as I heard them screaming with laughter.
But, you know what? They weren’t making fun of me. They thought all 3 scenes were great. From that ground-breaking moment we all became gut level friends and have remained so. They eventually went all through that book with me.
First Novel – Part 2
3/18/2013
In September I was in the Unitarian Church when some man I’d never seen came up to me and said, “I hear you’re a writer.”
I was embarrassed. As with most writers we think writing is an indulgence, somewhat narcissistic. Unless we’re published what we write is worthless. At least that’s what I thought.
I told him I was a “wannabee.”
“Have you ever heard of Con Sellers?”
I shook my head.
“Well, he’s a successful novelist, and he teaches a class at Rogue Community College called ‘How to Write to Get Published’.”
So?
“I just moved up here from Grants Pass and took his course for two years. You might want to go sit in on a class. Two students from the class have gotten published.”
Grants Pass was a three hour ride.
“The class is from six to ten, with a 20 minute break,” he said. “It meets Monday nights.”
Whatever made me write to this Con Sellers I have no idea. It wasn’t typical of me. But I did write and asked if I could come sit in on a class. Two days later my phone rang, and a gruff voice said, “This is Con Sellers. You Bickmore?”
I swallowed.
“You’re welcome to come Monday night. But if you’re gonna come so far, bring something to read.” And he hung up.
I phoned this man I’d met at church, whose name was Kent something, and asked how to find this Rogue Community College. He said, “I’ll drive down with you. Pick me up at 2:30 because we’ll have to get a bite to eat before the class starts.”
That Monday I remember, as clear as though it were yesterday and not twenty five years ago, as I took my first chapter and placed it in the car I laughed out loud. What if I got published by going to Grants Pass, a little redneck town in the mountains of western Oregon, 3000 miles from the publishing capital of the world, when would-be writers felt they had to go to New York City.
I don’t remember much about the trip down. I remember we stopped at a Denny’s and ate something, and then found Rogue Community College.
There were about 32 in the class. Kent and I found two seats in the middle of the 3rd row. The teacher strode in, a man in his sixties, with grey hair and mustache and twinkling blue eyes. He wore a bandana around his neck, a Western styled shirt, scuffed pointed high heeled boots, and a big square turquoise stone was set in his wide belt buckle. He looked straight out of Wyoming.
Someone volunteered to read. I listened. Pretty mediocre. Of course, we all were or we wouldn’t be there. He asked for comments, and the criticism flew. I would have cringed. Then, I didn’t understand how he could be so brave, someone else volunteered to read, and the same thing happened. This time Con Sellers talked about viewpoint, about the five senses. And then someone else read. Ditto re criticism which was hot and heavy.
He then called for a fifteen minute break and walked over to me. “You Bickmore?”
I nodded, having difficulty swallowing. “Okay. Hi, Kent,” but he looked directly at me. “You can read after the break.”
My hands broke out in a sweat. I rushed to the bathroom so I wouldn’t wet my pants in front of the class. I thought I couldn’t read, my voice was failing me. I’d creep back in there and grab my chapter and get to my car, leaving Kent stranded.
But when I got back nearly everyone was there and Con Sellers was saying, “We have someone who drove all the way down from Eugene tonight. She’s writing a Romance. Go ahead, Ms. Bickmore.”
I cleared my throat. I could tell my voice was trembling as I started to read, but as I got carried away with my story and forgot me, my voice stopped shaking. It took on some authority, some self assurance. The chapter was 9 pages long. As I was reading the 8th page Kent poked at my arm. I was irritated. I couldn’t pay attention to him and to my reading. I glanced at him, and he nodded towards the board where Con was writing something. He wasn’t even paying attention to me! I finished, however, and there was silence. Con just looked at me. No one said anything. I knew then that I was a failure. I was new to the class, and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
Then someone said, “If that’s a romance, I guess I’ll start reading them.”
Oh, that was nice.
Con nodded towards what he’d written on the board. Someone’s address. He said, “That’s the name of my agent. Send her your manuscript and tell her I think you’re publishable.”
Oh my God in Heaven!
I’ve no idea how much longer the class lasted or what was read. I sat in a dream like trance. I was publishable.
When the class ended Kent said, “He never was that nice to me.”
I turned a cartwheel in the parking lot.
For two weeks my feet did not touch the ground.
I sent my Romance off to Meg Ruley at the Jane Rotrosen Agency in New York City and eventually got a reply saying my novel was too complex for a Romance and too vacuous for anything else, but they all loved my writing and if I wanted to try a novel with more substance she would be happy to work with me.
That was ecstasy to me. Someone would read about something I really cared about writing, not an insipid romance
So I started going regularly to Con’s class, where I learned one does not write a whole novel. It won’t be read. Agents and editors are far too busy. One writes 100 pages so New York can see how well you write and if you can advance a plot and if you can write about characters readers care about. And you write an outline so they can tell if it’s an interesting story or if it’s just like one that was published or whether they like it. The outline should be at least twenty pages. And send that off.
First Novel – Part 3
3/29/2013
On New Year’s day of 1985 my daughter called me from Xian, China where she was teaching English to Chinese doctors at a university there. She was being given 6 weeks to travel and didn’t want to go around China alone, could I afford to come and go with her. If I could scrape together enough for the plane ticket, she could pay for the trip in China.
Off I went to China (and I hope that trip will be in another memoir) in late January. In our second week there on a 3 day train journey we met a young couple, both doctors, from South Africa, who were traveling around the world. We spent ten days with them. When they left I said to Debra, my daughter, “I’m going to write a novel about them.”
I started my first real novel about life in South Africa when I was in China. (I wrote my novel about China when I was in Mexico several years later.)
It took me until October to have 100 pages of the book and a 20 page outline ready to send off to New York. I didn’t hear from the agency and didn’t hear until I could stand it no longer, so on January 2nd I phoned this Meg Ruley. “Oh,” she gushed, “we were just talking about your book this morning. I’ll write you a letter this week.”
And she did. A 5 page single spaced letter, reaffirming that all the agents in that office (5 or 6) loved my writing, but something like it had just been published, and what really interested her was the grandmother. My heroine had a grandmother who had been a missionary in the Congo, which I mentioned in one or two sentences in my outline. Now, if I wanted to have this book published, please feel free to try another agent, but if I was interested in trying to write about this grandmother she’d be happy to work with me.
The grandmother? I had given no thought to her at all.
And so began my first really long journey, researching the Congo and South Africa, the politics and the streets, the weather and the scenery. I would send 5 or 6 pages off to her whenever I had them ready and she’d phone me and say things like, “Make me cry in this part.” Cry, indeed. I felt like crying.
Finally, by the end of May I said to her, “I’ve written this and rewritten it so much I’m losing interest.” She had my first hundred pages and a 46 page outline!
“Oh, okay,” she said, “hold tight.”
I had, during the year, gotten a job and was writing just weekends, 25 pages a weekend. On June 17, 1986, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a Tuesday, my phone rang at work, and it was my agent. She said, “Are you sitting down?”
“Of course.” I’d been hard at work on my computer.
“Ballantine is offering you $50,000.”
I screamed.
“I’m so glad you reacted that way,” she said. I could tell by her voice that she was smiling. “They offered $25,000 this morning but I’ve gotten them up to 50.”
I didn’t learn until this book, East of the Sun, was about to be published, two years later, and a reporter from the Eugene Register Guard phoned Ballantine and they said it was the most they’d ever paid for a first novel. No one told me.
To me it was a fortune. And I, who thought people at parties found me boring, was being paid to write a book that people would pay to read! (I no longer think people find me boring).
First Novel – The Final Chapter
4/5/2013
My little writing group continued to meet weekly, and they went through every bit of that first novel with me, telling me I used one word too many times, or that such and such wasn’t believable. They hauled me out of so many abysses. I could never have done it without them. Sometimes I didn’t know if an idea was mine or someone in the group had suggested it.
One night, when I was telling them how grateful I was, Bonnie said, “We’re expecting you to take us to Hawaii afterwards.” They all laughed.
I finished East of the Sun and sent it off in March of 1987. When the editor called to tell me she loved it, and I realized I wasn’t going to have to return the advance, I bought us all tickets to Hawaii for the end of April. We still talk about that week.
None of my other books has ever been as much fun to write as when I had the support, the laughter, the encouragement, the constructive criticism of our Writer’s Group. In fact, I found out that what they say about writing being a lonely business is true. But writing my first one wasn’t. It was wonderful, and agonizing, and ecstatic, and I realized how important friendship truly is.