Here’s a thing you learn as a novelist: stamina. Revising a novel is often a lengthy process and a real test of motivation and dedication. When you’ve gone as far as you can with your own edits, comments from beta readers and editors can derail you all over again. Sometimes they’re revelatory – you knew something wasn’t working but you hadn’t figured out what.
Editing a novel is a complex and unpredictable process, and often hair-tearing. But it’s so necessary because few books come straight out in perfect form. So we all develop our own systems for getting a book from flawed to presentable.
In this post at Writer Unboxed, Emilie-Noelle-Provost, who is currently in the revision throes, shares her revision methods and interviews four others (including me!) about how we do it. And although we’re all heading in the same direction, we have quite singular ways of getting there. Do come over.
Earlier this week I took part in an event to showcase a few authors from Vine Leaves Press.
I’ve never done an online reading before so this was a first. Usually at readings, one can’t see the audience members’ faces so close. Sometimes what I saw wasn’t faces, but ceilings or thumbs or travelling ground. Or daylight, when outside my study the sky was dark. All of life, in little Zoom postage stamps from around the world, listening in while they walked or gardened or chilled.
Anyway, you get four readings – a piece from my travel memoir Not Quite Lost, two pieces from contemporary novels (Janet Clare and Annalisa Crawford) and one excerpt of a historical novel about Charles Dickens (Alan Humm). Do come over, and take us for a stroll if you wish.
This question has been bouncing in my brain ever since the digital revolution began and especially after working for various publishers that asked me to help them with social media and website text.
Do you think that being forced to focus on SEO when writing articles, promos, headlines etc can negatively impact your non-journalism writing? My sense is that SEO flourishes from a writing style that is different from the style I use when writing creative works, especially fiction. And I don’t want my brain to be steered down that path.
Good question! Short answer: yes, writing for SEO purposes will affect your prose style!
But don’t panic yet. It’s not all doom and there’s much more to say.
First, a brief explanation, so we understand the difference between SEO writing and the kind of writing we do in our books and other creative domains, the kind of writing that Mark is talking about.
What is SEO writing?
SEO (search engine optimisation) is writing that’s meant to be read by machines, specifically search engines. You do this with keywords and key phrases. Ideally, you imagine what words or phrases a reader might type into Google, and make sure they’re used a lot in your blogpost or article. And especially in your headline because that sums up the whole piece.
Here’s an example from a piece I edited for the Alliance of Independent Authors. If you’re writing about William Shakespeare, perhaps to promote a book you’re publishing, you might post a piece about the 10 best quotes for Valentine’s day. If you’ve got an ounce of soul, you’ll get creative with the headline. ‘When love speaks… Timeless lines from the Bard.’
Will that get the attention of humans? Yes. Will it get the attention of search engines? Probably no, so the humans won’t get to see it. You’re much more likely to get hits if you call it ‘My 10 top Shakespeare quotes about love.’ Dull but true. ‘Top Shakespeare quotes’ is what a reader will ask a search engine to find, so those are the words (the key words) that will get you the most hits. The searching person just wants an answer, and they won’t think of the many inventive or witty ways to enjoy expressing the question.
Here’s where I’m wholeheartedly agreeing with Mark. I want to live in a world of headlines that are intriguing, evocative, stylish, haunting. I love how language can do that. If I ruled the universe, we would all use our words with grace and panache.
SEO, though, isn’t about that. It’s about communicating with machines first, humans second. Labels rule; not a love of language.
So what are we to do about it?
Before I answer that (and I will), I want to talk about another example.
Book titles
These days, book titles are much more ‘on the nose’ than they used to be. They have to let the reader know exactly what they’re getting, otherwise they won’t be drawn to the book.
But you have a bit more leeway with titles, depending on how famous you are as a writer. I’ve been thinking about this as I work on the follow-up to my travel memoir Not Quite Lost. Several people – even people who’ve told me they loved the book – have told me the title is a tad hard to remember. Oops.
So, with my responsible head on, I needed to take care with the title of the second book. I wanted to call it Here Not There, with a subtitle to explain, which seemed perfect for many reasons, but when I polled my honest reader friends they said they needed something memorable. So now it’s called Turn Right At The Rainbow (plus subtitle), and they’re happy about that because it sticks in the mind.
Why is this relevant to SEO?
It’s about findability and keywords. The reader has to be able to remember enough specific words to ask the machines to find your book.
Here’s where your fame level is important (and helps us understand a little more about SEO).
If I was Bill Bryson, I could call a book Here Not There, and people would find it. (In fact Bill Bryson called a book Neither Here Nor There.) This is because readers don’t have to remember the specific title. They can look for the latest Bill Bryson. He is himself a keyword, and so he could call a book something really impossible to remember and even spell, like Wubberhumptimuph, if he liked. If your name is a high-scoring, big attraction keyword, you can do that. If not, you have to be canny with titles.
So that’s an illustration of keywords in action. Know what your reader will search for. And give them something they’ll be able to remember when you want them to find your specific book. This memoir about this subject, with rainbow in the title. Much easier to remember than Here Not There.
So titles allow you a little more panache, because they are meant to work on human hearts and minds, but other SEO-savvy writing is, as we’ve said, for the gatekeepers between readers and us, and they’re machines.
That’s why modern writers in the digital age have to play the SEO game.
But SEO will deaden my voice and my style
Mark said: do you think that being forced to focus on SEO when writing articles, promos, headlines, etc. can negatively impact your non-journalism writing?
First, let’s get this in proportion.
Anything we do with our writing will affect it one way or the other. And we use writing for more things than just our precious art. Texts, shopping lists, Christmas cards (if you still send them) are all writing, and they all require switches in our mental gear and tone. Even ordinary talking.
Indeed, on the subject of ordinary talking, I used to take singing lessons. My teacher was fanatically picky and if my sound was not smooth she’d ask if I’d done a lot of talking that day. She seemed to disapprove, as if I wasn’t taking sufficient care with my instrument.
The message is: ordinary life uses a lot of the skills we use for our art, and can mess our art up.
Here’s another example. I’m a keen dressage rider (more keen than skilled) and I keep discovering ways in which my body is wonky for riding, which I can trace to long-ingrained posture kinks from driving a car and using a computer mouse. How will I ever unlearn these, I agonised to my dressage instructor?
Her answer surprised me. First, unlike my singing teacher, she didn’t see it as a failure to keep my instrument holy and pure for my dressagey art. What’s more, she said she has problems with this too. And I hadn’t expected that because I thought she was several impossible levels of perfection above me.
No, she had to do a lot of ordinarying too. It was inescapable and she found a way to switch.
That’s the secret, Mark. You can switch. Find your switch.
This will be different for everyone, but here’s how it worked for my writing.
How to switch writing styles: a case study
When I was finishing My Memories of a Future Life, my first novel, I was also working on a medical news magazine. I was shuffling between two vastly different writing worlds, every day. In the early mornings, I was writing the poetic style of my novel. Then I went into the office and edited factual material full of figures and how-to advice and bullet points. It seemed offensively clumsy compared with the sensibility I needed for my novel. Indeed, I was discovering my style as I went along. A voice I didn’t know I had was emerging out of the material. It felt true. I didn’t know how I was doing it and I feared I would lose it, especially if I was also forced to practise something that seemed its complete opposite.
But I didn’t lose it. Somehow, every day, I switched between one and the other, dawn, day and night.
I developed tricks to help the transition. These will be different for everyone, but music worked for me. I kept music that would trigger the world of the book, or plug me back into a character’s feelings at a particular moment. When I felt the writing was losing its soul, becoming too plain and analytical, I opened a book of poetry to remind myself how to look at a moment sideways, through the shape of a word or an unexpected juxtaposition. I was able to write plain for the day job, and yet not damage the sensitive, unpredictable style I was discovering as I wrote my novel.
Conclusion
Mark said: My sense is that SEO flourishes from a writing style that is different from the style I use when writing creative works, especially fiction. And I don’t want my brain to be steered down that path.
You can steer onto that path, but you don’t have to fear it. You can also steer off again.
For me, the difference comes down to feelings. Feelings are the centre of the more creative styles of writing. We’re creating an experience for the reader. It is the exact antithesis of the facts, keywords and search-guesses of SEO. Tap the feeling, I found, put yourself in a receptive state, and the right words find their way to you.
Learning modern machine-friendly styles – for descriptions, headlines and book titles – doesn’t have to compromise our personal writing. So long as we practise both styles, or all our styles, they are always available to us if we find the switch.
That will be individual for everyone. but I’ll bet we all have a switch.
This is a massive headline, I know. A massive headline for a massive and far-ranging conversation about storytelling.
My host is Heath Robinson, whose YouTube channel has seen a stellar line-up of story nerds, including Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler, Matt Bird, author of The Secrets of Story, John Truby, author of The Anatomy of Genres, and Vic Mignogna, creator of Star Trek Continues. I’m honoured that he asked me to be his guest.
We discussed many important fundamentals of stories, including classic story structure, my admiration for the writers of Pixar movies, the reader’s trust in the author (a huge subject of its own) and squeezing the lemon.
Squeezing the what? You’ll see. Do come over. Bring lemons if you have them.
Heather Marshall’s novels are concerned with questions of family. In her first, The Thorn Tree, the characters are rediscovering who they are as family grows up and their life roles change. In her new novel, When The Ocean Flies, an adoptee comes to terms with long-held misbeliefs, seeded from her earliest days. This theme of leading an authentic life and discovering what that should be clearly runs deep for Heather. And she writes from real experience. Heather is herself an adoptee, and has traced her biological parents. I began by asking her about that.
When I found my biological parents, I realized that all that I’d believed about where I was from was false. Then that opened a window to the idea that I could re-examine all of the stories I’d believed about who I really was and what I was supposed to do or be in this life.
But we all grow up with beliefs about who we are that are partly formed by our own inner lives and partly by what family, community, culture tell us we ought to be. So many of us feel forced to shed some of ourselves in order to fit in. We get all tangled up in trying to live whatever our family or culture says is a good life, we get busy, we get lost. I certainly did.
As well as writing fiction, you’re a coach, in the field of writing but also beyond. You coach people through the adoption reunion process and you help teachers with mental self-care. I have a strong sense that you want to help us all be better to ourselves. How did that start?
I started my working life after university as a writer and editor and thought that was where I’d stay. Then one afternoon, a friend who was a teacher said, “You’re a writer. When are you going to come teach my students how to write?”
‘Whenever you like,’ I replied. I didn’t think she’d follow through. Surely she, of all people, knew that just because I could write didn’t mean I could teach. She phoned with a list of dates and told me about her students. She brought me their daily journals so I could get an idea of their writing level. They were hard to read, what these children had faced. The one thing they had in common was that they were at this alternative school because they had been expelled from schools all over our large district. But I’d said I’d do it, so I phoned a writer friend, got some pointers, and in I went.
I quickly discovered that, though I might be teaching writing on the surface, what I was really doing was opening a space for these children to find their voices, and to begin to understand that their voices are worthy.
I ended up working in education for 25 years.
Opening a space to find their voices, and to understand their voices are worthy. I love this.
The last eight years of my career, I taught in a small high school (English, creative writing, and yoga and mindfulness). What I loved about that work was less about content and more about helping people connect with their own inherent goodness, their talents, their potential, and then developing from there.
What I’m doing with teachers, adoptees and writers is similar: I’m meeting them where they are, we’re sorting out goals and blocks to those goals, and we’re using my experience, tools and skills in writing, yoga, meditation, teaching, to meet those goals. Having used these tools through my own anxiety, depression, limiting beliefs, the many adoptee challenges—identity, trauma, grief, loss, fear, shame, and so on—I have an extra window into how these tools can be helpful.
Let’s talk some more about your search for your birth parents. You say it took you until age 40 to gather the courage. What eventually made it possible?
Oof—that’s a big question. I do say it took until I was almost 40 to gather the courage, which is true, and which might make it sound as though I was consciously saving up little by little like you would for a wee holiday. This is not the case.
I was more like a horse who shies at a jump (repeatedly, and for a couple of decades). I had a look at my original birth certificate in Scotland (a thing most American adoptees are denied access to) when I was 18 or 19. I saw my mother’s name and my birth name, right there, side by side.
My adoptive parents did not keep any part of my birth name, so it felt as though there was this whole other self, this whole other potentiality that was separate to me but was also me, somehow. That and the fear of what I might unlock should I find my mother were more terrifying than the dark and big spiders, all the things that lurked under my childhood bed and the childcatcher on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang combined. So I ran away—didn’t even hang around to get a paper copy of the birth certificate.
Years later, I ran at that jump again, getting a paper copy of the birth certificate. It lived in a drawer for a few years, and occasionally I’d get up the gumption to look at it and consider whether I wanted to go further.
When I was 36, I decided I’d ‘just’ walk past the house listed as my mother’s on the birth certificate. I didn’t slow or stop. I told myself I just wanted a wee look at where I might have grown up if she’d been able to keep me. Silly me!
That did it. I was possessed by finding my mother.
I had two friends who had had similar experiences. They had run headlong into reunion, and it had not gone well. So that knowledge, my own instinct, and the practicalities of searching pre-Ancestry, social media, etc, allowed me to take the time to get myself ready to explore the unknowns of my birth and origins.
As I was searching for my mother, I was also searching myself so that I was clear about why I was looking, what I hoped for, what I might find that had the potential to devastate me, and who and what I’d turn to if it came to that. BirthLink in Edinburgh pointed me in the right direction to get the details—not just the birth certificate but also the social worker’s notes from when my mother was pregnant and in the weeks after my birth. They facilitated the initial communication between my mother and me, and they helped me again two years later, when I searched for, and found, my father.
Your Facebook pictures are full of wild places. Hiking in the heather, contemplating a view of the hills over your boots. How does the natural world inform your creative work?
Being in the natural world informs the process of creative work. In both cases, I’m immersing myself fully and exploring what’s there. In the process of drafting, I’m exploring, and there are no wrong paths. I start down a path and if I find I’ve gone awry—reached a boggy place or a cliff edge by accident, I can simply turn back and try another path. It’s not wasted time; each path, though it may not lead to the destination, offers its own beauty and wisdom.
I’m not sure if it’s time in nature or age or both that has led to the sense that I don’t have to be in such a hurry to get where I’m going, or to even get wherever I originally intended. I felt this a couple of years ago on a walk on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. There wasn’t a clear path and miles of wilderness stretching out ahead. I felt a frisson of fear (what if I got lost?) and then a deep settling: I had lots of time before the sun set, and the day was entirely my own; at worst, I could retrace my steps, and what did it matter if I wandered higgledy-piggledy and never reached the originally intended destination? The point was to be out there, in the fresh air, under a wide sky, squelching along this new terrain.
Speaking of freedom and new terrains, the pandemic was a time of reckoning and restriction for many of us. Many creative people found they couldn’t work as well in this period. Others found it a welcome refuge and were more productive. How was it for you?
It was certainly a revelatory time for me. I was still teaching high school English, creative writing, yoga and mindfulness and there was the whole turning-on-a-dime to teach online at first. It clarified the delight I take in teaching and also revealed fissures of discontent that I had been ignoring in our education system and my place in it.
To clarify—I felt a freedom to connect with students in ways that were more deeply resonant for me and for them. For instance, I had been teaching mindfulness in my classes and extended that work, making videos for students and families, teaching an online yoga class, making playlists for my classes each week. I enjoyed getting individual responses to every question instead of the smattering that you get in a classroom. I felt less constrained in this new environment. And because we were teaching asynchronously at first, there was more space on both sides for thoughtful response.
Partly because that was taking up a lot of my creative energy, my own creative work floundered a bit. That said, I did manage to continue to work on When the Ocean Flies, which I completed in late 2021.
Let’s talk a little more about When The Ocean Flies. It’s interesting that the central character, Alison, is adopted and when the adults try to explain it to her, they inadvertently set up a terrible psychological burden. They tell her she was taken from a bad place and brought to a better one, which gives her the feeling that she must have an internal core of badness. Where does it go from there?
It takes her to some dark places. She takes wrong turns to try to ease this, sometimes self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes and disordered eating while constantly feeling the need to prove she’s a decent person. She builds a whole life that is driven not by what resonates with her, but by trying to cover over what she believes is some inherent flaw by constantly trying to please everyone around her and prove her worth.
Is this a common emotional issue with adopted children?
The narrative around adoption, especially in the US, tends to be that adoptees are lucky to have been adopted and have ‘better’ lives than they would have had. Not only is this not always the case, it ignores the fact that adoptees have been severed from their mothers (and from their ancestry), which is traumatic.
For me, for Alison, and I think for a lot of adoptees, that creates a sense of self-doubt and thwarts our ability to trust our own instincts—the whole world seems to be saying I am better off and should be grateful, but I feel something utterly contrary to that, a grief that I can’t, as a child, name and that I feel wrong for even feeling.
Growing up, there is an understanding for many of us that we were not our adoptive parents’ first choice (they typically tried hard to have biological children); we were a last resort.
Then there is the question, usually unanswered or at least not satisfactorily answered: why was I not good enough to keep?
If there’s no space in the family or in the culture to say these things out loud and discuss them, they tend to fester and result in beliefs like the one that drives Alison.
Why that title?
I like reading a book and coming to some part of it, or the end, and thinking ‘ah, so that’s where the title came from’, and I don’t want to spoil that for any reader.
Fair enough! And this search is part of the journey for the reader.
Family ties are another strong element in both your novels.
When my son was around five, I was a single parent and my best friend and I had a house together. My son asked me: ‘Mom, what makes a person family?’
At the time, I couldn’t say: ‘Blood. Our genetic connection makes us family,’ because that would mean I was denying my adoptive family.
I couldn’t say, ‘the people who raise you or the people who you live with’, because that would exclude my biological family (wherever they were). So I had to think about how I do define family and then how I could say that clearly to a five-year-old.
I said family are people who see you as you really are, who love you, who have your back. He took it to heart. He has a huge group of people he considers family.
Being adopted has meant looking at family in a couple of different ways. From childhood, I looked at everyone as though they might be family. On the street, the bus, wherever, I had the sense that I could be looking at someone to whom I was related and not know it. (It turns out that I had a great aunt who lived in the same town as I and that I drove past my father’s house on the way to my grandparents’ without knowing it).
The gift of that is that it makes it harder to ‘other’ people. It pulls closer the sense of our interconnectedness. Through the decades, I’ve had moments when I think about my brother, also adopted and with no genetic connection to me, and that had things spun out differently for us, we’d be strangers, yet here we are, brother and sister, and we’re close.
At the same time, I felt like an outsider, as though I didn’t quite belong anywhere. So when I find people I connect with, who see me and who allow me the privilege of seeing them, I tend to think of them as family as well.
You’ve published several short stories. Aside from family and the sense of finding our natural roles, are there any other main themes in your work?
Coming of age is a main theme. Our culture thinks of coming of age as a one-time event, but really, to be fully alive is to be growing and changing all along. So coming of age in the various seasons of our lives is a theme, and I’m interested in how that manifests for women in particular, as well as the ways in which societal, familial and personal expectations thwart that and how we reckon with those challenges.
I’m also interested in migrations—what happens when we move or are removed from people and place? What happens if we return?
It sounds as though your coaching and fiction-writing inform each other.
In both places, I’m seeking to explore something deeply and to make connections that are revelatory.
In fiction, I’m immersing myself in character and place to uncover the story. I’m researching to see what connections I can make, however unlikely. I’m turning the story one way and then another—if I look at it from this angle, what does it reveal? How does that further or thwart its expansion and development?
I’m doing basically the same thing in coaching—seeing what’s there, how I can help you look at it in different lights as we see what allows expansion and movement in the direction of your goals and what is thwarting that development.
Another of your coaching roles is helping teachers to de-stress and feed their souls. As a coach myself, I can see the need for it. I get passionately involved in helping and giving, and that can be exhausting. School teachers must feel this about a million times harder, but it’s a peril for any teacher. What are three things a person in a teaching role can do to keep a healthy balance?
1: Take time every day (yes, every day) to check in with yourself. You DO have the time to do this, even if it means you have to hide in the bathroom. You can journal, meditate, just sit there and see what your body has to say. What do you feel—all of you, body, mind, heart, spirit. Look in the mirror and ask: how are you? really? What do you need? I know that at times in the year, the answer is that you need it to be the next holiday break. It isn’t. And what is one thing you can do today (not a margarita, though they are really nice) for you? This might mean setting better boundaries for yourself so you can have what you need. You’re entitled to them.
2: Do the thing(s) that you come up with in the first suggestion. Small things matter, like buying the good butter. You laugh, but do you know how many years it took me to convince myself that I was worthy of the butter I really love? It costs a couple of bucks more than the store brand, and somehow I’d convinced myself that it was too luxurious for the likes of me. Every morning when I put it on my toast, it affirms my right to some goodness in my life. If you’re not used to tending to yourself, it’s going to feel strange and wrong to do so. Please persist. BUY. THE. BUTTER.
3. Do reconnect with your ‘why’, but not necessarily in the way that your administrators might be exhorting you to. Sure, remembering why you were originally inspired and energised to enter the classroom can help with tough times, but if that question has started to feel like a kind of manipulation, ask yourself that ‘why’ and see where the answer leads. Not what’s in it for the students—what’s in it for you?
You’re also a longtime practitioner and teacher of yoga. What does that do for you?
It’s a moving meditation that allows me to practise being fully present, to notice the subtleties of what’s going on in my body and with my emotions.
I grew up thinking that intellect was the answer to everything. I was a brain being carted about by this body. But my body knows things and it has messages—when I learned to listen in, I could feel more clearly what was ‘right’, meaning nourishing for me, and what I needed to steer clear of, for instance, on the mat and in my life.
Teaching yoga in particular helped me be more accepting of my own body. In class, I noticed that the people who seemed the most ‘beautiful’ were no particular size or shape or age—they were at ease in their bodies, and it is truly lovely to witness.
Both of these are ongoing journeys for me. I have all the hang-ups about weight and age and so on, but yoga helps to remind me that this body is a gift and it’s wise and a middle-aged tummy is no reason to discredit it.
When did writing and creativity start for you?
Writing started for me as a child. I loved language—the feel of it as I spoke, the way masterfully arranged words on a page elicit feelings.
I tried to teach myself French in primary school. What a shock that my pronunciations were all wrong when I finally got to a teacher! I went to the library for fun, on my own, starting in elementary school.
Both my biological and adoptive fathers were engineers—very intelligent but not necessarily known for facility with language and creativity. I was quietly horrified by the Reader’s Digest condensed versions of books (they’d cut out the gorgeousness of the language) that were the only books in the house of one set of grandparents. And though I had my own bookshelf in my room, those were the only books in my house. In the other grandparents’ house, though, my grandpa reserved the bottom shelf of his bookcase just for me. I still have that bookcase. My natural mother is an avid reader and has been known to pen a poem or two. That has been one of many delights of knowing her.
You have an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. How did it change the way you wrote or the way you saw yourself in the writing world?
It was a life-changing experience. Before I was a teacher, I’d been a magazine writer and editor, I’d taken some community writing classes, had drafted a novel that will never see the light of day (it’s bad and I think it got lost on some old computer), as well as a draft of what would become The Thorn Tree, and the start of what would become When the Ocean Flies, though in very different form. Being accepted to the programme gave me an affirmation that I needed, that there might be something worth nurturing. It helped me to carve out regular time for it—I was no longer doing that wee hobby thing; I was getting a degree, so I had permission to take the time to write amid work and family. I don’t need those kinds of permission, in general, now, but I did then.
The teachers there were excellent—talented and accomplished and encouraging—and there’s power in being in rooms filled with people who love what you love, whose eyes do not glaze over when you talk about craft or what you’re working on—who are truly ‘with you’ along the path.
Why is editing so important for writers? Why is it publishing’s biggest – and best-kept – secret?
How do editors work with writers to ensure clarity and consistency – and yet preserve the writer’s unique voice and flavour? What if the writer disagrees about changes the editor wants to make? How do we keep a dialogue going throughout the editing process so the writer doesn’t feel they’re losing control of their ‘baby’?
I’m thrilled to be interviewed by crime writer and children’s book author Wendy H Jones at the magazine Writers’ Narrative. She devised the questions, which cannily unpeeled how we balance rules and art when we work with authors. Do come over.
I’ve seen dialogue tags discussed a few times recently on writing forums.
The discussion goes like this.
‘When writing a piece of dialogue, do you need synonyms for “said”? Doesn’t it get boring for the reader? What about words with a bit more expression, such as exclaimed or spat or shouted or yelled?’
‘Noooo,’ comes the reply, overwhelmingly. ‘Only use “said”.’
I agree, mostly.
I also disagree.
Yes, ‘said’ will do most of the time. It’s almost invisible to the reader, so it doesn’t get boring. You’re using it merely to convey who’s talking. And if you feel you’re overusing ‘said’, consider doing without it. In a conversation between two people, the order of speakers might be obvious by the give and take of the paragraphs. There are also other ways to slip in a clue to who’s talking. You can use actions. Eg ‘Molly began to peel the orange.’
On the subject of actions, don’t forget that other things are going on in the scene as well. A common problem with dialogue is that writers get obsessed by the characters’ verbalisations, so they forget to include other sensory details. The rest of the scene disappears, as if the narrative has become a radio play.
The solution? Write the dialogue, then go back and add other stuff. That’s what most of us have to do.
So remember your characters are also sitting or standing or walking or driving. All of these non-spoken ingredients can help you establish who’s talking.
Don’t forget, also, that any conversation will have reactions. These reactions might be companionable, hostile, surprised, shocked. You can show all this. You can also show reactions in characters’ thoughts. (‘She expected Sanjay would refuse outright. Instead he smiled.’)
Indeed, don’t forget to show reactions – this is another common problem with novice manuscripts. Get inventive with facial expressions, wobbles in the tone of voice, laughter, strange looks, uncomfortable pauses. So you have a huge repertoire to tell the reader who’s speaking, without getting repetitive. It will punctuate and enliven the scene too. And I haven’t even mentioned subtext, the important things that are left unsaid.
What if a character says something with special emphasis? Is that a case where you’re permitted a synonym for ‘said’?
Perhaps. Sometimes you can get away with ‘Lawrence whispered.’ If, up until then, you’ve been conservative with your dialogue tags, that ‘whispered’ will have impact.
Notice that; the synonym will have impact. Because it is very noticeable.
That’s the problem with synonyms for ‘said’. While ‘said’ is invisible, ‘spluttered’, ‘scoffed’, ‘asserted’, ‘demanded’, ‘barked’ are not. Why is that?
In everything we write, we’re steering the reader. Storytellers are always, always highlighting things for the reader to notice, guiding their attention, manipulating their expectations and feelings. Most of the time, we do it below the water line – with hidden structures, themes, atmospheres and parallels. If we make this visible, the reader feels more steered – and that’s why synonyms for ‘said’ are so very noticeable to readers. They tell the reader what to think.
So do adverbs in dialogue, such as “he asked hesitantly” or ‘he queried mildly”?’
Most of the time, you want the characters’ own words and actions to express everything. The wonderfully neutral ‘said’ allows that. In most dialogue scenes, the tag is there to tell you who, not how. You tell the reader how – in other ways.
So here’s the principle. Put the life into the characters and their words and actions and emotions. Don’t strongarm the reader to see it your way. Let them see it for themselves.
This holds for most dialogue situations. Except.
There’s one use of dialogue tags that’s missing from the discussions I’ve seen recently.
What if your narration is deliberately not neutral?
If you have a book where the narrative voice is commenting on the dialogue scene, for instance in a comic or first-person novel or memoir, elaborate dialogue tags might be very useful. This is because the ‘narrator’ is not transparent. They are overtly presenting the action.
The more you use synonyms for ‘said’, the more you impose a tone on the text and tell the reader what to think. If your narrator has a strong flavour of their own, you might use dialogue tags because they’re a form of comment, and a strongly flavoured narrator will comment on everything. (However, if you’re ‘commenting’ like this in dialogue, you must do it in other scenes too or the tone will look uneven.)
So intrusive tags can – sometimes – be exactly what you need.
Authenticity is a troublesome concept in the arts at the moment. There are things we’re ‘allowed’ to write, things we’re not ‘allowed’ to write. While this raises valuable debates, authors have always written about characters, places and situations outside their personal circumstances and experience, and made works that are honest and truthful. That’s our craft, isn’t it?
My interviewee today is novelist and creative writing teacher James Ladd Thomas, whose novel Ardor is a portrait, in vignettes, of a young woman between the ages of 18 and 23.
So my first question is:
James, you aren’t a young woman and there’s a perception now that we should only write about our own experience.
I think that perception is profoundly wrong and harmful to art.
The question is certainly legitimate. How can a middle-aged man know what a young woman experiences, thinks and feels? He can’t know, just not possible. I can’t know what anyone, fictional or real, thinks besides me.
And knowing what I think is a lifelong struggle to figure out, especially if I believe in personal growth, that I constantly push myself, question myself, open myself to new ideas, new experiences.
Once we admit that truth, how can any writer write authentically a character who is different from them? Wouldn’t we just have first-person stories from our own lives?
And somehow we DO write the experiences of others, authentically and convincingly. How do you think we do this?
The best a writer can do in creating a character is observe similar people, ask similar people questions about their lives, read articles about such people, and read and watch similar characters in books and movies. Basic research.
My wife says I’m an uber interrogator, relentless in asking questions. For me no character is off limits. The test is: do you pull it off, does it read as authentic?
What made you want to write this woman?
One of the most interesting aspects of the South is the women. Many people think of Southern women as mild, passive ladies who let the men run all over them. That’s an ignorant stereotype, completely devoid of truth.
Southern women are breathtakingly strong, very protective of their families. Many of my female relatives are warm, strong, compassionate, and supportive women. My wife, mom, sister, grandmother, great aunts, and many friends were and are female warriors.
With Ardor, I wanted to create a Southern woman who is not quiet, who isn’t demure, who isn’t afraid to express herself, who will tell you to go to hell. Her youth, of course, gives her a certain degree of fearlessness. And, perhaps more importantly, Ardor is a liberal in the sense that she believes in equality and fairness, is against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, and thinks the patriarchy is disgusting. Place such a woman in Huntsville, Alabama, which is where I grew up, and you’ll have a bounty of conflict and tension.
Ardor is full of piss and vinegar, lots of fun to write about. That book holds a special place in my heart because of her relentless fight for what she believes is right, which isn’t to say she is always right. She says and does things that she probably shouldn’t, but that’s what makes her so much fun as a character.
I wrote Ardor when I was in my late 40s and early 50s, and she is late teens to early 20s, so what did I do to make her seem authentic? First, I have lots of observations to use, such as the many girls I knew when I was that age. Also, I taught Freshman Comp for 30 years, so I have observed literally thousands of young women that age. I had several women give me feedback on various drafts of the novel. All that with my specific skills as a fiction writer gives me a chance to write from Ardor’s experiences authentically. Did I pull it off? You would have to ask specific readers that question.
The idea that you cannot write a character who is different from you is ridiculous and anti-art. Writing about characters who are different from us is what writers do. But we have to realise we might fail. I would tell my fiction workshop students to try anything in their stories, but the true test is the effect on the reader.
Many of the workshop students would write autobiographical stories, pulling experiences from their own lives. And many times, the workshop would reveal that the stories didn’t ring true, that the readers were not pulled in, because they were confusing, not plausible, not authentic.
I’ve seen this so many times, both in workshops and in manuscripts I’ve edited. Living the experience is one thing; writing it in a convincing way is quite another.
And many times, the writers would argue that the readers were not right, that the stories were autobiographical, that they wrote them as they actually happened, which, of course, had nothing to do with how the reader read the story. A story’s success hinges on how the writer writes the story, not whether the writer is writing from personal experience.
I want to underline this. A story’s success hinges on how the writer writes; not on whether it stems from personal experience.
Your personal experience gives you lots of insights into a character, a scene, a story, but success depends on the writer’s skills in creating the fiction.
I’ve had many readers tell me my character Ardor comes off as authentic, that her thoughts seem like they come from a woman. I take that as an incredible compliment, just over the moon. However, we are talking about creative writing, fiction, art, which means a reader’s response is subjective. I’m sure there are readers who do not think Ardor is an authentic female character. A reader’s response is not right or wrong because every reader has a different filter. And the more abstract the creative work then the more subjective is the response.
Sometimes in a workshop a writer will chastise readers’ responses – ‘That’s not what I’m trying to do in the story’. A writer’s effort to convey the elements in the story has nothing to do with a reader’s response, interpretation. A writer needs a healthy ego to write, but not to the point of being a god. Once you let go of the work, send it out into the world, then you have no control over how readers will react to the work.
The book belongs to the reader at that point. And that shows the wonder of reading, how powerful it is to spend time in another mind.
For me, that subjectivity is a big part of the beauty of art. I love it when readers read things in my work that I had never contemplated. I remember English professors becoming upset when students interpreted works very differently from the interpretations the professors taught, as if there is a right way. Of course, an interpretation is essentially an argument, so there can be an examination of that argument, but that’s stepping into the academic world, which is a small percentage of the total number of readers. I find beauty in telling someone I found a certain book wonderfully written, just a beautiful story, excellent characterisations, but that person finds the work weak, poorly written, just completely uninteresting. Two people with two different interpretations. Very nice!
You are a very good writer, so let me ask you: what are your thoughts on a writer being able to write outside her personal experience?
Experience is only part of the equation. Like you, I’ve seen classes where a writer presents a piece that is heartfelt and raw, and from their own life, but the class will say ‘I’m not experiencing it, you’ve left me behind’.
This is the work the writer has to do – to make the experience available to the reader.
To do this, I think we need the skills of an illusionist – the delicacy, observation, sleight of hand, technical precision. We have to create a truthful experience using our curiosity, our sense of humanity and our imagination.
That’s how we can write about things we’ve never done and people we’ve never been.
I’ve nearly always written about characters doing things I’ve never done. The most literal example is physical feats. In my last novel, I sent two guys up Mount Everest. I’m confident to do that because of my background as a ghostwriter of fiction, where I wrote novels in the guise of people who’d had adventurous lives. On the pages of those novels I’ve abseiled out of helicopters, tracked murderers across the Australian Outback, watched people die, felt myself fill with the red mist of revenge. I learned how to ask the questions to make those experiences real.
I also like to explore the psychological unknown – people who aren’t like me, who don’t have my rules. If a person behaves in a way I wouldn’t, I want to know what drives them. If they do bad things, I want to know why they’re not a monster in their own mind. I also want to know who loves them or is loyal to them, and why. And if they’re a lot more tolerant than I am, or unworried by things that worry me, I want to understand that too.
This brings me to your novel Lester Lies Down, which begins with the words ‘Lester Gordon is an odd man, just like everybody else.’ Superb. Where did it come from?
Lester is on the autism spectrum and I wanted to show how someone who is perceived as odd is really your everyday Joe trying to tackle life’s trials and tribulations like everyone else. I don’t think I’ve ever met a ‘normal’ person.
Neither have I.
The normal person doesn’t exist. When you get to know someone, get beyond their personas, you realize that everyone deals with their own issues, their own anxieties.
The people who seem ‘normal’ are the ones who have the ability to shape themselves, control themselves to not stand out, to blend in. There are a few people, many have autistic characteristics, who lack those skills of blending in, so they come off as odd.
Now, this isn’t to diminish the people who have severe autism. Their struggle is about survival, of functioning in their day-to-day world.
I’m glad you clarified that. I have several friends whose children have severe autism. Lester, though, is more a person who is not adept at ‘surface normality’.
Lester falls short sometimes of blending in. He’s one of those people who misses the cues of communication at times, not picking up on facial expressions, key words, tone, the tiny bits of the world that make his communications seem disjointed from the context of the situation. That doesn’t make him inferior, too odd to consider as a fellow human. His issues are just more visible.
I researched autism when it entered my life through family members. I came to realize that there are lots of people who have autistic traits in various degrees, myself included, many more than most people realize.
You’ve sent me a picture of you and the animal behaviourist Temple Grandin, who is also an autism spokesman.
Several years later Temple Grandin came to my school to discuss autism. Talking to Temple confirmed how knowledge helps one fit into this world. Learning about autism helped me learn about myself, how I process the world; and I learned how to accept people for who they are, not what they are not. Lester is a product of that knowledge and my experiences.
Where does the novel go?
As we learn about Lester’s characteristics, we begin to see his world, what he’s dealing with on a day-to-day basis. He lost his wife to cancer not long ago and is raising his three kids by himself. He has decided to change careers because of his experience with the hospice during his wife’s battle with cancer.
The only experience I had with a hospice was my mom’s use of it before she passed, which was incredible, just eye-opening to how the dying experience can be approached with the help of experts. Right after I began Lester, I ran into an old high school friend who was a hospice nurse. She answered my questions, sent me pamphlets, and gave me invaluable feedback on drafts. Nevertheless, I still had to use my skills as a writer to make Lester’s situation as a new hospice nurse seem genuine.
Also, he knows Ardor, from the previous novel. She’s now on the lam from a couple of guys sent by the marijuana farm where she and her boyfriend worked. So, the story is about Lester raising his two young sons and daughter while he begins a new career as a hospice nurse which is complicated by helping an old friend avoid a couple of thugs.
You originally studied marketing before you switched to English. What caused the change?
I began college in 1977 without any idea of what I wanted to study. A career survey revealed I should be in entertainment, television, films, music, publishing, which at first, I found bizarre, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I loved music, movies and reading stories. My dad thought I should major in business to get a job, so I chose marketing because it allowed a little bit of creativity. After I graduated, I was working for defence contractors and began to have an itch to write fiction. I knew I needed time to read and write, so in 1985 I decided to return to college and take undergraduate English courses. I began my first novel in the final year of grad school; Lester is my fifth completed book.
You taught creative writing for 30 years. What do you think can be taught? What can’t be?
I don’t think you can teach someone how to write fiction. You can teach the basic elements of fiction, but writing fiction is something you learn on your own by reading and writing fiction. And you need to read much more than you write to see how these published stories and novels were able to pull it off, to pull you in, to create these worlds.
Workshops give you the time to read and write fiction and discuss what you have read and written. You can do this all on your own, but the workshop will compress this learning by making you read and write in a 16-week term. Most say they hated the deadlines at the time, but those deadlines are what made them read and write for the class.
You’ve worked with people who have AIDS, encouraging them to write their personal experiences. Tell me about that.
I watched a report on the television news in the early 1990s, that interviewed people with AIDS in the San Francisco area who were involved in writing workshops. It was a type of therapy for these patients who were struggling with not just the physical battle of having the virus, but the emotional toll of fighting for one’s life and our culture’s reaction to their homosexuality. The patients wrote poetry, journal entries, letters, stories, declarations, anything to express their physical and emotional experiences.
I thought it was a wonderful idea to help AIDS patients, so I contacted Centaur, Central Florida’s oldest AIDS services organisation. The leader, a Catholic priest, liked the idea and 13 AIDS patients volunteered.
We met once a week for 12 weeks. They were a great bunch of guys, very kind, open, and completely honest. A few were angry at their situations, especially our society’s treatment of them, the homophobia. The classes were very emotional. All of them talked about dying, how people thought they deserved to die for being gay. There were tears. I remember a few wrote letters to their parents, not only informing them that they had AIDS, but that they were gay. That’s certainly a stain on our society, condemning people for their sexuality.
Of course, we still see the hatred today. I believe the class was very beneficial for the men. It helped them tell their stories, express their fears and anger, but it also broke my heart. I ran the workshop just that one summer.
Do you think you’ll ever write non-fiction, personal essays or memoir, as you’ve helped others to?
I wrote two non-fiction pieces that were published and garnered very positive feedback. The latest one was published just a few months ago in The Smart Set, “slaying the cruelty of life: Melissa Bank and the Art of Humor.” The piece is about the writer Melissa Bank, who was my workshop leader at the 2005 Southampton Writers’ Conference. Melissa passed away at the end of last summer. It’s a tribute to Melissa as a human being and the wonderful artistry of her humor. This is the only piece I’ve ever submitted and received an acceptance on the same day. That right there gives me incentive to write more non-fiction. I like writing non-fiction, but I love writing fiction.
What are you working on now?
A short story, which I feel good about. A few more passes and I’ll be ready to submit it to magazines. I’ve also started working on a new novel. It includes Ardor and Chuck from Lester Lies Down, and a few new characters. I’m not sure what happens, but that’s typical for me. I create the story as I write.
I’ve had an email from a high school student who’s writing an English assignment on careers he would like to follow. He said:
Would you answer a few questions about your job journey? I’m very interested in what you do.
His questions were fairly standard, and they made me realise how most creative careers are anything but. They’re unpredictable and weird. Here are my answers, and I’m really curious to see what other writers would say. If you’re game, do have a go in the comments.
What is your exact job title?
Author of fiction, creative non-fiction and writing craft books.
Though actually, I have several jobs.
I’m also an editor, producing books for publishers and individual authors, and magazines as well.
I’m a writing coach, teaching individual authors and also masterclasses.
I’m a ghostwriter, writing books for others.
And I’m a story consultant, working on computer games and indie movies.
You were probably expecting just one title and I’ve given you five.
Multiple jobs are the norm.
Many authors also teach, edit, run publishing imprints, contribute to the wider literary ecosystem. So do other people in the creative arts. I know actors who coach executives to be influential in meetings and interviews, and teach doctors how to give bad news to cancer patients.
Or they might have other jobs that are entirely unconnected with writing. Again, that’s quite usual. Recently I’ve interviewed an author who is also a rocket scientist and another who is a sheep farmer.
Why is this necessary? Primarily for financial survival – for most of us, writing books is not enough to make a living.
Also, this other work keeps you grounded. If you spend a lot of time in make-believe, you can lose touch with reality.
So if you’re considering this line of work, find a day job that will work while you inch towards your dream, or might help you get there. Look out for side hustles.
So here’s the first takeaway
Embrace diversification. It make your core art possible.
It will also make you a deeper human, more in touch with the world your readers live in.
What types of work do you do on a daily basis?
It varies. Not all of it is writing, by any means.
Most books are a cycle – research and planning (not much writing), writing and editing (lots of writing), publishing (not much writing).
If I’m researching, I might lounge on a sofa reading and taking notes, which will look very leisurely, but is essential to create a credible book. If I’m planning, I’ll sit at a table with index cards, which will look like a children’s game, but it helps me find the best way to use story elements and information. Then the writing and editing are a lot of time at the computer, creating the text, checking things. Here’s my writing process in pictures and here’s Nail Your Novel, which will guide you through the lounging, gaming and other stuff.
You have to love checking. There is more checking than you would believe. A wrong fact, an inconsistent description, a paragraph accidentally repeated can kick the reader out of the story. Other editors will usually be involved in this process, but it still creates a lot of work for you. After the book’s been checked to smithereens, there are other publishing tasks – formatting, writing copy for the back cover, proofing.
If I have a commission for another author or a publishing house, their deadlines take priority. Sometimes that’s a desperate rush – just before Christmas a publisher needed three books edited before the holidays. I shelved my plans and burned the midnight oil, but we all got everything done and were proud of the result.
Second takeaway
Although the main job description is writing, a lot of the work is not writing.
There’s another essential task that writers will do – networking. We’re constantly looking for ways to attract new readers to our books, so I write a blog and a newsletter. Writers network among each other too, to share opportunities and wisdom.
If a book is close to publication I do another kind of work – contacting reviewers, blogs, podcasts and radio shows that might be interested in featuring it. That’s time consuming and there’s a lot of silence – often you never get a reply, but you keep going. If a tree falls over in a wood and no one hears or sees it, it just lies there. You don’t want your book to be that tree. You keep going.
Third takeaway
You can’t survive if you don’t network.
What requirements/previous experience are necessary for a job like yours?
Boundless reserves of self-motivation and discipline.
You’re not in an office, surrounded by people who are also hard at work, or waiting for you to finish something they need. You could decide, if a book is proving difficult, to give up.
Online forums can provide supportive company, like an office, but choose them carefully. There are loads of ways to drag yourself further into a funk if you dwell too much on the frustrations. And online, distractions are just a click away.
So your writing and your books have to be a contract with yourself, a personal mission.
You might wonder about training. There are courses and qualifications, but not everybody does them. They make little difference to whether you get a book deal, though they might get you contacts. In that respect, doing a course is another form of networking.
And long before you ever think about taking a course, you’ll already be a writer.
You just find yourself writing, full stop. You also find yourself reading in a strangely alert way, dwelling on a sentence or a story twist, wondering why it electrifies your hairs, and the next time you write you will play with the words and place them more deliberately. Before you know it, words and stories are an instrument you are trying to master.
You might read craft books, go to classes, take a qualification, get feedback from a professional editor, and those are good because we all need to learn from other people. And there are definitely skills to learn. But most of the work is done by you, developing your awareness, practising on your own.
So here’s the fourth takeaway.
Writing is a temperament, a wish, a tuning of the mind to love language, and the shapes of stories, and the way words can enspell a reader, no pun intended (okay, maybe a little one).
Is it difficult to get a job in this field?
Yes and no.
Yes, difficult, because there aren’t many jobs writing books, especially fiction and creative non-fiction. There might be commissions, but you have to be already established.
But mostly you hack your own path. You become an author by writing a book, and seeing if you can get it published. Whether it is or not, you then see where that takes you.
The first book you write may not be the first book you publish. As I said above, there’s a lot to master.
Also, we haven’t talked about the luck of getting published and the option of self-publishing. Some people are lucky with publishing offers. Their work is exactly what a publishing house is looking for. Some get a deal for a later book after writing several.
Some self-publish. For that there’s no barrier to entry. You don’t have to pass any selection process. You just do it.
If that sounds easy-peasy, stop. Don’t ‘just do it’ unless you’ve had professional help. Remember I mentioned all the checking? Publishers, editors and experienced authors know what to check – and it’s stuff you never dreamed was important. You’ll also need help with the presentation – formatting, cover and sales blurbs – so that your book looks credible.
So although you can leapfrog the gatekeepers and start your author career completely on your own, don’t do it without help from experienced people.
Really important takeaway (number 5)
Take very good care of your reputation. Find out what the best people do and aim for that.
If getting into this field is difficult, how did you manage to land your position?
By trying the conventional routes, getting nowhere, and through that, finding the door.
I sent short stories to publishers and magazines, was told they were good but novels were more saleable. So I wrote a novel, and publishers and agents told me it was well written but too strange for the market. Meanwhile, I met various authors, all swimming in the same pool of luck/non-luck, married one of them (ultra-networking!), and got a chance at a ghostwriting job.
That was the door. A book came out, which I had made on my hard drive – my dream. More commissions came and I also discovered I was good at teaching other authors (another door). Then the self-publishing revolution took hold in the late 2000s and I was ready, with all the skills, to publish my own books and get good reviews for them.
Sixth takeaway
Expect a lot of false starts until something works, which will usually be unexpected.
Do you like/love the work you do?
Writing books is a vocation. A way you’re born and the way you grapple with the world. The page is my easy place, where I think and play.
An example. I had an idea about a man who fell into a glacier and was still there 20 years later, while his friends got older. It kept bothering me. It was saying something deep and sad about the human condition, about memory, about the great mystery of lost youth and the grand enigma of death. I made it into a novel, Ever Rest. It took a lot of work, but that work was also a personal crusade, to puzzle out why it was so powerful.
Seventh takeaway
I think this work is a personal mission, which is probably love.
Do you see yourself retiring from this job? Or is there another job you’d like to do next?
No.
Eighth takeaway
This is a way of life. I have to create. It’s how I fit into the universe.
Is there anything you wish someone had told you about this job before you decided to take it?
Not really. If they had, I wouldn’t have taken much notice. I was probably told all kinds of offputting things over the years, but I just kept going.
What makes a poem a poem? How is it a different beast from richly written literary fiction? In prose, it seems, we can do most of what a poem can do, beyond just telling a story. Creative expression, profound thoughts, metaphors. We can even control how the text falls in the reader’s mind through our use of cadence and line breaks. What’s the distinguishing difference with a poem?
Mike Maggio is amply qualified to talk about this. He has several poetry collections (DeMOCKracy, Garden of Rain, Your Secret Is Safe With Me, Oranges From Palestine, and Let’s Call It Paradise, which won the Intranational Book Award for contemporary poetry). He was nominated as the 2020 Virginia Poet Laureate and he’s a judge in the Oregon Poetry Association’s annual contest. He also has three volumes of short stories –The Keepers, Sifting Through The Madness, Letters From Inside (I love that title). And two novellas – The Wizard And The White House, and The Appointment.
So, Mike, the overlap between fiction and poetry – and the boundaries?
I guess I could write a book on this but what you say fiction does is not far off from poetry: creative expression, profound thoughts, metaphors and line breaks. But poetry is very different from fiction. Line breaks, for example, can have a huge impact on the meaning and movement in a poem.
I work in both forms and when I get an inspiration, I know immediately if it’s for a poem or a piece of fiction. Poetry tries to make the most use of language and, in a sense, a poet’s job is to renew the language: to use it in ways it’s never been used before.
Furthermore, fiction involves characters and plots. In poetry, there are no plots except in a narrative poem, but even then, the plot is not thoroughly developed.
Hmm. Character and plot are the novelist’s true environment, even though we might also use the devices of language. That could be the distinction.
I think we poets seek mood, but then that is true of fiction as well.
Perhaps the difference is how poets use language. Poetry relies on a sparsity of language and on, as a professor I had in college used to say, the use of language and metaphor that is richly ambiguous. It allows readers their own interpretations.
And novels are the opposite of sparse. A novel is vast; an ocean. A poem is a wineglass.
And, of course, poetry is meant to be read aloud: to be listened to. You can listen to a poem in a language that you do not understand and still enjoy the sounds and rhythms. You cannot say that of prose.
Is there a common thread in your work? What are your enduring themes and signatures?
I believe that throughout all of my work, there is one consistent voice. That voice is concerned with social and political justice. I have been a social activist all of my adult life, starting in my late teens with the ‘60s social revolution and the anti-war movement.
My novel The Wizard and the WhiteHouse approaches these concerns through the use of satire. The Appointment and Letters from Inside are less satiric. The Appointment is more absurdist, in line with Kafka, one of my most important influences, along with Nikolai Gogol. The title story in Letters from Inside is more dystopian. And Let’s Call It Paradise examines American culture through the lens of consumerism and how that masks any concept of justice and equality.
There are many influences in my work but the main ones are Kafka and Gogol. The absurdist point of view is one that captivates me.
You have a novel, Woman In The Abbey, coming out from Vine Leaves Press next year. What’s the significance of the title?
One of my main literary interests is gothic literature: novels such as Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula and The Master and Margarita. And so I set out, by chance really, to write one.
I was actually working on a different novel – one that deals with immigrants and acculturation, based on my own background as an Italian American – when I saw a clip on TV about a monastery which housed both nuns and priests in separate wings. In this most austere, reverent setting, all kinds of non-religious activities went on, and I was inspired to write Woman in the Abbey.
It’s a novel narrated by the devil and involves all kinds of evil. Like most gothic novels, there is a damsel in distress, but the purpose here is to expose the evil of violence against women. And in fact, there are two women in the abbey: the innocent damsel who gets lost in this haunted abbey and the evil nun who resides there. The title is meant to be ambiguous like Letters from Inside which can be interpreted in two ways (you’d have to read the story to understand). I will also say, as a side note, that, having gone to Catholic school, I believe I got out all my anger at the nuns in this book.
You collaborate with poets, novelists, musicians and artists. I wish I had time to ask you about all of these – but can you give me some highlights?
A while back, I became the Northern Region VP for the Poetry Society of Virginia. So I organised a collaboration called Springtime in Winter which involved poets, composers, artists and student musicians. We had two composers, a number of artists who I paired up with the poets and five high-school musicians who were conducted by the high-school music teacher and who got to play this original music which was later recorded and put on a CD. It was a wonderful mentoring experience.
Most recently, I travelled to Italy where I worked with four Neapolitans (a poet, a poet/actress, an actress/director and a cellist) for a bi-lingual production called La Guerra è Pace / La Guerra e Pace. We performed it live and filmed it with a cell phone. The piece can be viewed on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8n3x-8-82c
Is/was anyone else in your family creative? How have you ended up on such a creative life path?
Neither of my parents finished high school. But they had faith in me to follow my path. My maternal grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had a music store in Brooklyn at one point. Why, I don’t know. Whether he played music, I don’t know. But there was a piano in their house when I was growing up which, I believe, inspired me later to study piano. I had an uncle, my aunt’s husband, also an immigrant, who would listen to operas on his phonograph every Saturday. He would sit there and cry because, as you know, operas are tragic. I had an aunt who was a poet and editor though I think this came after I started writing. I had another uncle who was a one-time musician. So I guess you could say creativity runs in the family. My brother became a church organist and my son now is a serious student of the cello at Cleveland Institute of Music.
But perhaps the most important influence were my Italian grandparents. I remember as a child sitting in a room with them and their friends and hearing nothing but Italian, which I did not understand. So what does a child do? He sits quietly and listens. And what does he hear? The music and contours of the language he does not understand since he cannot make out any literal sense.
I believe that that experience influenced me to become interested in language (I’ve studied French, Spanish and Arabic and am now studying Italian), linguistics (which I have a degree in) and ultimately poetry.
And now, here you are. A charming origin story. Thank you.
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