Guest Post by Tatjana Solli: Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before Publishing a First Book

Your relationship with your husband/significant other will get worse.

Your relationship with your mother won’t get better.

You relationship with your dog will.
I remember attending a writing conference years ago and having some extremely successful writer tell us that the most important thing to him was the act of writing, that creation was where the pure joy of the profession was, that if we were all writing to the best of our abilities, every day, we should consider ourselves successful, publication or not.

Yawn.

I, and I’ll guess everyone else in that class, thought, easy for you to say. His books in every bookstore, reviews to die for, awards and more awards. We assumed we were getting the consolation prize speech.

Fast forward some _________ (cough, cough) years, and I’m on the brink of publishing my first novel, The Lotus Eaters. In my own limited, extremely miniscule way, I’ve learned a few things. Number one: Writing is the most important thing.

Don’t yawn yet.

In the beginning, I do think it’s necessary to be a little obsessed with publication, only because it’s so quiet those first years. No one is telling you, Yes! The first time you see your name in print, in my case a small quarterly long since out of print, is genuinely thrilling. Then it’s over. You push little journals on your friends and family to read, but after a while you have no choice but to shut up and go back to work. This is your refuge from the quiet, your refuge from the constant barrage of rejection slips that we all suffer through.

Once you publish a book, you have a different problem. Instead of silence, there is nonstop noise, and if there is no noise, you get nervous and make your own. Publication and promotion is a full-time business. If you don’t believe me, look at the thick shelves of advice books to aspiring and new authors. This last year I created a website, a blog, got on Facebook and Twitter. You are reading my guest blog here. I’ve dipped into the world of non-fiction essays and reviews. It’s a lot of noise for a quiet person to make.

Without peace and quiet, normal writer mode, I get irritable. Hence, my husband has been extremely tolerant of my rollercoaster moods. I’m busier than I’ve ever been —juggling writing novel two, teaching, and keeping up with my website, blog, readings, twitterings. I haven’t visited my mom in a while. Mom is not so happy with her debut-novelist daughter. But I’m happy to report my dog still is wild about me. Two meals a day, a walk, and a good scratch behind the ears, and he’s happy. He doesn’t much care about the novel one way or another. He did sniff it to see if it was edible.

All this is to say that as much as publishing changes your life, it doesn’t change it fundamentally. Writers write. Good times, bad times. The best part is that a few days ago I got my first fan mail. The woman totally got the novel, and said how deeply it moved her. I printed it out. All that exhausting noise, but some of it so beautiful. I’ll tell the truth at this stage — I’m itching to get back to my desk, itching to start new stories. That famous writer was correct: writers write.

A Reader is a Writer: Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters

I was recently tagged on facebook with a "What kind of Book Geek Are You?" list. Although I rarely do the things it appears one is supposed to do on facebook (determine what TV mom I am? give a friend a plant?), I’d been spending days on the same scene in my new novel without too many words actually attaching themselves to the story, and so … procrastination without calories! I thought a slightly shortened version might make a decent introduction of myself as a reader, and who I am as a reader says a lot about the writer in me, too—or the writer I aspire to be, anyway. And what are we, if not our aspirations? That is (I hope) what my latest novel, The Wednesday Sisters, is about. The novel, about readers, writers, and friends, comes out in paperback tomorrow!

I’ll post more later in the week about how I write and how I got published, but for today, without further ado, here’s the Inner Book Geek in me:

What author do you own the most books by?
I have six books by each of Jane Austen, Alice McDermott, Sue Miller, Ian McEwan, and Ann Tyler. I have ten novels by Tolstoy, but eight are in a single volume. Does that count as ten or three?

What book do you own the most copies of?
Aside from my own (I just got 36 copies of the paperback of The Wednesday Sisters from Random House), I have three copies each of The Mercy Seller and The Illuminator by Brenda Rickman Vantrease. She's my best writer-pal; we started critiquing each other's work long before either of us had published anything more than her one travel article, and we now together count six books published or about to be. I drew heavily on our experience together in a writing group for the writing group the Wednesday Sisters form.

Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
They did? I’m actually an ardent admirer of the rules of grammar, but my copyeditor at Random House assures me that the modern novelist needs to be comfortable bending them sometimes.

What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I do like Will Lasislaw from Middlemarch and Ray from Graham Swift's Last Orders, but my true literary loves are all spunky women: Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, and Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice.

What book have you read the most times?
Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice.

What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Since I know how very hard it is to write any book, I'm simply unwilling to trash someone's hard work on a public forum.

What is the best book you've read in the past year?
For the first time? Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl and Michelle Richmond's No One You Know. I've read some great nonfiction, too, including The House of Mondavi and Towers of Gold.

What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
The Wednesday Sisters. (Not for the obvious financial reasons, although I'd spend it wisely, but because movies sell books!)

What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Are any Shakespeare plays obscure? Obscure, from my dictionary: "relatively unknown." Where do I sign up for Shakespeare-level obscurity?

Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Russians.

Roth or Updike?
Roth.

Sedaris or Eggers?
Sedaris.

Austen or Eliot?
Both! I love Middlemarch better than any single Austen, but I like all of Austen put together better than all of Eliot.

What is your favorite novel?
Toss up between Middlemarch and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Play?
Les Miserables. Although I loved Avenue Q, too, and Wendy Wasserstein.

Poem?
The poem I return to most often is Elizabeth Bishop's “The Moose.” My favorite passage from it, ending with my favorite lines in the poem:

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses)…

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

The poem evokes the "sweet sensation of joy" I felt the first time I saw a moose, which was just like in this poem, through the window of a bus late at night when I was a teenager going to canoe in the Quetico. One of the characters in the novel I’m working on now, "The Ms Bradwells," uses it to describe one of her friends.

Essay?

Tim O'Brien's “The Vietnam in Me.” I carry a copy of it in my journal, which I take everywhere. Whenever I lose my courage as I'm writing (and I do), I take it out and reread it.

And... what are you reading right now?

The answer I gave for this one on facebook was Dead of the House by Hannah Green (for Molly's Kepler's Fiction Group), and Kate Brady's The Mechanics of Falling. I've since finished the Hannah Green (great discussion!) and moved on to Amanda Eyre Ward's Love Stories in this Town. I read about 75 books a year, and I keep a list of recent reads on my website. - Meg

Story Origins

Here's a question for my fellow writers.

How do you get your ideas for your stories?

Post a comment with your answer to my writing question. I'm curious to know what other writers use as the seeds for coming up with a story idea.

I went to an author event with Meg Waite Clayton last night. She talked about writing her book The Wednesday Sisters, sitting outside Tressider on the Stanford campus, having a "pity party" for herself, feeling like she'd never be able to write another word. A woman in a red baseball cap with a blonde braid sticking out the back walked by. And suddenly Meg started writing about a character in a red cap and blonde braid. And an hour or two later, by the time she was ready to leave, she already had a story outline and set of characters for what became her novel. Bam. Just like that.

The muse has never graced me so profoundly as it did Meg, though one of my short stories started with just a title: Imagining the Moon. I was in a writing class; we were told to come up with a story title, write it on a small piece of paper folded up and put in the center of the table. We each drew out someone else's story title, and had to develop a synopsis to fit that title. Imagining the Moon was the title I wrote on my piece of paper. The classmate who drew it had it all wrong; something about aliens and goofy stuff like that. I took my prize title home with me and wrote a story that I still love to this day. (There are no aliens in my story, just a single mother and her 4-year-old daughter who wants to go to the moon.)

Another story started with a friend's photograph of red rock country. You can read an excerpt from that story in my previous post. The story I'm currently working on came from yet another writing class exercise: a 1-sentence plot description. The plot description I drew: a man lives in Montana, 150 miles from the nearest body of water, and is building a sailboat in his backyard. I'll let you know how it turns out. If you're in the Kepler's writing group, you might get to read the draft this summer. We'll see.

Don't forget to post a comment with an answer to my question. I could always use some more great ideas!