Songwriters on Process

Jamie Ford, Novelist

Jamie Ford is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a novel that has been translated into 23 languages. Ford actually started out as a commercial illustrator; he has a degree in design and worked as an art director, so his comparison of the writing process and visual art process is interesting.  And like any good writer, he recognizes that one of the best ways to rid yourself of writer's block is physical exercise.  Read more about Ford's creative process after you listen to him narrate a tour of the Seattle neighborhood where the book takes place: 

 

Sean Ferrell, Novelist

After talking to novelist Sean Ferrell, author of Numb (Harper Perennial), I'm pretty sure that if he had his way, he'd move his family into a subway car.  Ferrell believes strongly in the power of ritual as the key to an efficient writing process. He needs a regular and methodical routine to keep the words flowing.  And for him, that means 40 minutes of writing each way on the New York City subway.  This is not a new idea; writers talk often about the importance of ritual to put them in the right place emotionally to be able to write.  I know the feeling: when I wrote my dissertation, I always wrote on my laptop, at our kitchen table, wearing the baseball cap of my alma mater (the only time I ever wore  a baseball cap, I might add. Men with shaved heads never look good with baseball caps).

So read my interview with Sean Ferrell.  You'll find out more about his rituals, how he wrote his first two novels longhand, and why he needs distance from "hot mistakes" in his revision process.

 

Susan Henderson, Novelist

If you happen to be walking one day in Susan Henderson's suburban New York neighborhood and you see her yammering into her iPhone, odds are that she'll be telling her husband she's coming home soon.  Whatever you do, don't bother her, because it's all a ruse.  She's actually channeling her inner Wordsworth and writing. She just wants people to think she's talking to someone, when instead she's actually composing. Of course, this part of her writing process is far less hazardous than the previous variation, when she really did write while walking, sometimes for as long as three hours. This created problems during those moments when she actually had to see where she was going; consequently, she walked into a lot of parked cars.

Henderson's new novel, Up From the Blue (Harper Collins), is out this week.  It's received a substantial amount of advance praise.  Some of you may know her as the founder of the literary blog LitPark, but her literary accomplishments are many.  She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a variety of awards and grants. Her work has been featured in several literary journals and popular press publications.

Henderson's writing process is a good example of one that actually doesn't involve a lot of writing.  Like any good writer, she sees the actual transcription of words as only a small part of the process.  She recognizes that her process involves thinking, blogging, brainstorming, conversing, you name it.  In fact, if she's actively engaged in the process for eight hours a day, only about ninety minutes of that is dedicated to putting pen to paper.

So read my interview with Susan Henderson.  You'll find out what she has in common with William Wordsworth, why her neighbors might think she's crazy, why she fought being a writer, and more about that iPhone.   And watch this teaser as well:

 

Marcy Dermansky, Novelist

 "The scene that scares you the most, that you don't want to write because it's the most difficult to write--that's the one you have to write.  So I think when people have writer's block, it's because what they have to write scares them. And that's usually the heart of the book."

--Marcy Dermansky

Marcy Dermansky is the author of two novels published by Harper Perennial, Twins (2006) and her novel Bad Marie, out this summer.  Both have received considerable critical acclaim. Among other accolades, Twins was a New York Times Editor's Choice pick and Kirkus starred review, while Bad Marie is a Barnes and Noble Fall 2010 Discover Great New Writers pick.

As you can see from the above quote, the process techniques that Dermansky advocates are those that all writers--be they novelists, attorneys, non-fiction writers, whatever--can apply to their writing.  I've long told writers that they should spend more time on crafting their introductions than they probably do, because if they lose their readers in the beginning, they've probably lost them for good. Audiences need something easy to digest as soon as possible, something short and punchy that doesn't overwhelm.  The first sentence of Bad Marie is a good illustration of that opening punch.

Once I finish this book, Bad Marie is next on my list. So I'll just lift the description of the book from Dermansky's website: 

In this standalone follow-up to her popular debut Twins, Marcy Dermansky spins a tale about Marie, a bad girl ex-con who has just been released for hiding her now deceased bank robber boyfriend. Not willing to marinate in rehabilitation, she hooks her up with her best friend’s French writer husband and absconds with him and the couple’s toddler daughter to Paris. Her new relationship fizzles quickly and even before landing in the City of Lights, our felonious protagonist has become a very strange single mother in a very strange land. Hip new noir novel.

If you live anywhere near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, put this event on your calendar: September 28 at the RIverRun Bookstore, a white-hot double bill night of literary fiction with readings from Dermansky and Jessica Francis Kane, author of the new novel The Report (read my recent interview with Kane here). Until then, read my interview with Dermansky.  You'll learn what it's like to live with another writer, what it's like to write with a baby, and how Scarlett Johansson helped her write Bad Marie.

Jessica Francis Kane, Novelist and Short Story Writer

Jessica Francis Kane's novel The Report was released this week by Graywolf Press.  In her words:

The story centers around a night in March 1943 when nearly two hundred people died seeking shelter from what seemed to be another air raid in East London. In all cases, death was by asphyxiation; there were no broken bones.

The incident is real. It was the largest civilian accident of World War II. My novel reimagines the story, following a handful of characters who are in various places in the crowd the night of the disaster: the shelter warden, a young clerk, a mother and her two young daughters. The government tries to suppress news of the accident, but when the devastated neighborhood demands an inquiry, the job falls to magistrate Laurence Dunne.

As Dunne investigates, he finds the truth to be precarious, even damaging. He works quickly, interviews dozens of witnesses, and hopes to write a good report in the belief that the document will restore the city’s confidence.But years later, when he is interviewed by one of the children who survived the night, Dunne is forced to consider whether what he did was right.

The Report has been shortlisted for the 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and is a Winter 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Kane and I talked recently about the writing process behind her new novel.  As someone who writes much shorter pieces and who can't envision writing a novel (my dissertation was enough), I was fascinated by Kane's journey while writing The Report.  I got a clear sense that it was exhausting, but the pride in her voice was even clearer.  This was, if I may drop all pretense, a very fun conversation, even if it's hard to tell from the interview.  Writers with children will find Kane's discussion of what it's like to write a novel with two small kids in the house particularly interesting.

Kane is also a contributing writer at The Morning News, whose founder, Rosecrans Baldwin, I interviewed recently for his hot new novel You Lost Me There.  She has also published in, among other places, Granta, Salon, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

So read my interview with Jessica Francis Kane. You'll learn why fifth grade was so important to her, why she loves to write in libaries, how she blocks out distractions while writing, and the importance of scissors in her revision process.

Charles Kipps

Trivia question: what do Aretha Franklin, Peter Criss (Kiss drummer), Chris Noth (of Law and Order fame), and Bill Cosby all have in common?

Answer: they've all collaborated and co-written with this week's interviewee, Charles Kipps.

You may not think you know Charles Kipps, but trust me, you know Charles Kipps, because he’s left his mark on so many genres.  In the 1970s, he had seven Gold records, working with such artists as Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and David Ruffin. He was one half of the acclaimed songwriting duo of McCoy/Kipps.  In 1980, disillusioned with the corporate direction that the music industry was beginning to take, he began writing for television and the movies. His TV credits include Little Bill (Nickelodeon), Fatherhood (Nickelodeon), The Cosby Mysteries (NBC), Columbo (ABC), and Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC). With Noth, he co-wrote the only Law and Order movie, entited Exiled: A Law and Order Movie. In addition, Kipps co-wrote with Bill Cosby the movie Fat Albert.

For that work, Kipps has won and Emmy, a Peabody, and an Edgar award.  But he has since turned his attention to books.  He is the author of two nonfiction books, Out of Focus and Cop Without a Badge. His new novel, out in September, is Crystal Death, the second in a series based on police officer Conor Bard (the first was Hell’s Kitchen Homicide).  Kipps counts law enforcement officers among his friends, and he hangs around them a lot.  As a result, his books have been lauded for their accurate portrayal of law enforcement, most notably their dialogue.

I talked with Kipps recently about his long and varied career across so many genres.  Before you read the interview, watch Kipps discuss how he develops his characters:

 

Rosecrans Baldwin, Novelist

“A ton of writers I know, and I include myself in that category, if you see them at a party texting someone, they are actually not texting. They are saving a piece of overheard conversation that they want to keep. Or they are noting down an idea.”

So says Rosecrans Baldwin, founder and editor of the website The Morning News and the author of the new novel that everyone is talking about, You Lost Me There on Riverhead Books.

Baldwin mentioned this last week when we talked about his creative process.  His words sounded familiar: Tim Jones of the band Truth and Salvage Co. told me in a recent interview that at his haunt the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, he’ll get on the piano, listen to conversations around him, and start playing off of what he hears (Baldwin and Jones are also friends). 

During our conversation, Baldwin also told me that the idea for You Lost Me There began with a single image, one whose origin remains unknown: a middle-aged man, sitting in his car late one night in a parking lot, watching a girl whom he cannot have.  He began writing around that image. And in this comment too, Baldwin reminded me of what the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon told my “Contemporary Irish Poetry” seminar in graduate school. (Muldoon has been hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English language poet born since World War II.")  Muldoon said that, at that moment, he was carrying around an image of some insect in his mind.  It wasn’t a poem yet, but someday it would be.  He just didn’t know when it would happen.

You Lost Me There revolves around the protagonist Victor, an Alzheimer’s researcher on Mount Desert Island in Maine.  His wife was killed in a car crash a few years earlier, and one day he finds a series of note cards on which she has talked about certain moments in their marriage.  Her version of their marriage is decidedly different from his, and not in a good way.  So Victor is forced to reevaluate the marriage, to think back and wonder if what he thought happened all those years really did happen in the way he imagined.  The book is an exercise in memory: specifically, how we construct our narratives based on what we think happened, which is often different from what really did happen.  Which, of course, makes the reader question the existence of reality. 

As I mentioned, the book is receiving rave reviews everywhere from Time Magazine to Entertainment Weekly to our own Tony Doerr.  So read the interview below, but first watch this trailer about the book, an excerpt narrated by Baldwin:

 

Anthony Doerr: Short Story Writer, Memoirist, and Novelist

This week’s interview is with Anthony Doerr, whose new book Memory Wall arrives in bookstores on July 13.  The book has been named one of Amazon.com's Best Books of the Month for July.  It is already garnering substantial critical buzz.

Memory Wall is Doerr’s fourth book; the others are The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome.  He’s won many awards for his writing, so many that I am going to just blatantly lift this paragraph from his website:

Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. His books have been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Washington Post, and a finalist for the PEN USA fiction award. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists.

Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons. He currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. His book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Der Spiegel, and he writes a regular column on science books for the Boston Globe. From 2007 to 2010, he will be the Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho. Fancy proclamation here.

One of the things that impresses me about Doerr’s writing is that he is a master of so many genres: short story, novel, essay, memoir, book review.  As you could imagine, I was very happy when he agreed to the interview.  And even happier when I read that the quirky part of his writing process is that he wears “chainsaw ear protection muffs” when he writes. As we would expect from a great writer, even his answers employ great metaphors.