Guest Post: Molly Cutpurse: Writing What Readers Expect

As a child, I possessed an unconventional and odious personality, matched only by my need to read and write. The problem was my education, which was hideous. Diagnosed with dyslexia, as a young adult, I wrote a novel; a rambling, self-indulgent and humiliating quarter of a million words.

With no guidance, I continued to embarrass myself, completely mystified as to why agents and publishers did not wish to take on my undoubted masterpieces. Eventually, I understood it was my lack of self-consciousness that was my problem.

 Stepping off my hedonistic high tower that prevented me from becoming that which I believed I ought to be was depressing yet illuminating. My feet only touched the ground when I was in my fifties, arriving at the conclusion that either I could write for myself or I could write for the pleasure of other people. That is, if I wished to earn a living from this writing malarkey.

Write what we know is common advice. However, it is more important to write as readers expect. Having little formal education, I wrote as I spoke, and that is not what publishers wish to read. If they want that, they can visit a pub and listen to people chat over a pint.

My task was to learn how novels with a proven history, the classics, were written. I choose authors whose works appeared in the top one hundred lists of the last century, and devoured them. I learned spelling, grammar and how to write. Not in the same voice as those whose work I admired, but at least with the same syntax and morphology. That was my first lesson.

Agents and publishers were still not buying my drafts though. What to do? I consider myself a little different. (Have a look at my web page!) It follows then that my writing is a manifestation of my experiences. And, I have written some strange novels. However...is that what the majority of the population want to read? I concluded, they did not.

There are not too many people who want to read about a peasant-devouring being called, Madgododa who comes from the starship, Plodgel and who possesses a magic shield called, Tersacal. I cannot identify with that.

I only began to sell in large numbers when I ceased to write what was a reflection of myself, and began writing what readers wished to read. You want to sell plenty of books? Then watch prime-time television. Those are the sort of stories the majority wants to enjoy. Producers have been in business for a long time, and they know what sells.

My life changed when I began a series concerning how a woman from the East End of London took her family through World War Two. Riding on that success, readers began to enjoy my other books. I am still unconventional, we must all possess a singular voice, but I have learned to play the game.

Molly Cutpurse

www.mollycutpurse.com

Sourdough - a poem (a starter and a loaf of bread...)

I wanted to blog about my sourdough starter, which is working beautifully, but as this isn't a food blog, and as I'm currently working on a food related poetry book with my writing partner Carolyn Howard-Johnson (that's the long awaited provisionally titled Persephone's Juicy Jewels), I figured I'd do better with my target audience (that's you) by making things a little literary and writing a poem.  So herewith, my untitled, freshly baked sourdough poem.  On the left is a little fresh bread - just flour, salt, water, and starter. Chewy, soft, crusty, and gone within the hour (an ephemeral loaf, but one that served its purpose). 

lactic acid bacteria
nothing to be scared of 
perking in anticipation

with all those excited 
microorganism queuing up 
all that potential energy

it seems wrong to 
curl fallow, soaked in inertia 
shivering below the covers

failing everything 
and everyone 
unfed and tasteless

wrong to keep 
this pot of kinetic joy 
unkempt and perfect

from its life’s purpose
to leaven, nourish, 
raise the lost.

Guest post: Second Acts by Koethi Zan

This is a guest post from Koethi Zan, author of The Never List

Pieter van Hattem  © 2012

A little over a year ago, I was a Deputy General Counsel of MTV overseeing the business and legal affairs for series production on shows such as The Hills, The City, Teen Wolf, True Life, Buck Wild, and Catfish.  Now, switching gears mid-career, I’m a full-time writer with my first novel, The Never List, to be published in the U.S. on July 16. 

The process of going from professional executive to a creative type has been a strange one.  In my eight years at MTV, I dealt with issues as various as suicide threats, stalkers, nudity, plastic surgeries, and sex tape scandals.  I negotiated and re-negotiated talent, production company, and rights deals with big-time Hollywood agents.  Before that I worked at a boutique law firm, two major law firms, and as head of business affairs for an independent film producer.  I went to parties, premieres, openings and festivals and represented writers, directors, actors, and playwrights.  From the outside anyway, it seemed pretty glamorous, and in truth it was about as fun as a legal career can be.  But last June, after sixteen years as a lawyer, I walked away from it all.

I grew up in a tiny rural Alabama town in a family of scientists.  I was the black sheep, obsessed with literature and film, not chemistry compounds and electrical engineering.  And I wanted to get out of there, so I worked hard.  I was on the student council, the math team, the scholar bowl team, and ended up Valedictorian.  But I was also a “Goth kid” who dressed in black, moped in my room, and listened to Morrissey, the Cocteau Twins, and Psychic TV.  I stood out in a high school that had a parking lot filled with monster trucks decked out with rebel flags. 

And then I went to college.  Estranged from my parents by that time (a whole other story), I supported myself with scholarships and a small “cow fund” from my grandparents.  (When I was three they’d given me a Charolais heifer named Molly.  Every year, her spring calf would be sold and the funds put into an account for me.) In college, I hung out with the art students and we spent weekends in New Orleans, partying in the gay clubs.  I wanted to be a filmmaker or a photographer.  But I didn’t quite have the nerve.  The cow fund was all used up and I was afraid I could never be financially stable in a creative field.  And so I ended up at Yale Law School.

But I had this brilliant idea:  I’d be an entertainment lawyer.  I’d be close to the creative process.  I’d be surrounded by artists.  It would be practically the same thing!  Ha.  It was just like my favorite New Yorker cartoon:  a picture of a boy dressed in a cowboy outfit, looking at his father saying, “Well, if I can’t be a cowboy, I’ll be a lawyer for cowboys.”

I didn’t get to start out as even a lawyer for cowboys, though.  My first stop was at a major white shoe law firm in Manhattan.  I was in the banking group.  I worked on secured financings and revolving credit facilities.  I spent nights sending out two hundred page documents to eighty banks for a syndicated loan transaction.  And I cried in the ladies room almost every day.

I made it into entertainment law after a year, and learned that the “lawyer” part of “entertainment lawyer” was definitely first and foremost.  But I can’t complain.  Over the years I worked with many wonderful people and I have a lot of great stories to tell.  Or at least I would have them, if it weren’t for attorney-client privilege.

Then two and a half years ago, I started writing a crime novel.  I had never written anything before except some pretty bad high school poetry, but I was a huge reader and I had an idea that was nagging at me based on my long-held obsessions with, and fears of, sado-masochistic dungeons (that’s yet another story).  I gave it a try, using the Graham Greene method, more or less.  I assigned myself the task of writing five hundred words a day, five days a week, with the caveat that if I finished ten thousand words in any calendar month, I could take the rest of the month off.  I kept finishing earlier and earlier each month. 

While writing the book I was working full-time at MTV and renovating a house.  I had to wake up at 5 a.m. every morning so I could squeeze in one hour of writing before my kids got up.  I believed that if I ever missed my word count requirements, I wouldn’t finish.  So I kept going. 

And then somehow the fairy tale came true for me.  My husband, a writer, gave my manuscript to his agency.  They liked it, gave me comments, I revised it, and then we sent it to publishers.   It sold and then there I was with a second career.   I still sort of don’t believe it.

Then I had to make a decision.  My boss, who was General Counsel of Viacom Media Networks,

overseeing MTV, VH1, CMT, Logo, Spike, TV Land and Comedy Central, was leaving the company for another high-powered job, and I was in the running to step into his shoes.  It was a major fork in the road.  I knew if I pushed for the top job and ended up getting it, my life would change completely.  It would be impossible to write a second book under those circumstances.  And yes, I could have stayed in the same position, writing books on the side, but this dilemma forced the issue for me.  The universe was telling me the time had come to choose:  was I a lawyer or a cowboy?

Lawyers, however, aren’t known for taking big risks, and I was scared.  Financially, I could justify taking a break from the law, but it meant I would have to make the writing thing work.  Would this book be successful?  And could I write another one? 

Only time will tell.  But I took the plunge.  I left MTV last summer and have been writing full-time ever since, finishing the edit for the first book, and starting on the second.  Maybe I’ve given up a lifetime of steady paychecks and employer-provided health care, or maybe one day I will go back to it.  But for now I’m just happy to be out here on the range.

Poetry Monday: Vox Americana on Poetica

Photo Credit: Inky Bob,
Flickr Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Melissa Zexter

This Poetry Monday I have to draw your attention to the amazing Radio National Poetica. Produced by Mike Ladd, himself a fine poet, the show is always full of rich poetry read beautifully and peppered with music, commentary, and sound effects to give that full body experience.  The show is aways a joy to listen to (and I'm not at all biased by the fact that they once read a poem from my book Repulsion Thrust on the show), but the current two part series is like an encapsulation of my late teen years and made me hugely nostalgic. Sitting somewhere between poetry and rock and roll, the show is a sensory overload of beatnik New York City, moving between Tom Waits, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop (didn't know he was a poet, did you?), Allen Ginsburg, Leonard Cohen, William S Burroughs and lots of others. I felt like I was back in the bleachers at the St Mark's Poetry Project. Grab your beret and a cup of black coffee and you're ready to go.

Here's Part One:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/vox-americana-part-one/4616170
Part Two:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/vox-americana-part-two/4616192

On reading out loud (especially to our children)

A recent article in The Guardian titled "Modern Life means children miss out on the pleasures of reading a good book" provided the rather bad news that reading for pleasure is declining among primary-age pupils.  One of the key reasons cited was "time-poor" parents were no longer reading to their children at bedtime. This really saddened me. I can't imagine a person so time-poor that they can't spend 15 or so minutes reading to their children before bed. It's not only a chance to demonstrate, in a very literal sense, how utterly pleasurable a story can be - setting up children for a lifetime of reading enjoyment, it's a few moments of closeness that might otherwise be hard to find in our busy lives.

This becomes increasingly important as children get older and time-poor themselves. Though my two boys now feel they're too old to be read to before bed, we read together until they were each about 12 years old (the decision to stop was theirs, and it happened pretty naturally).  By then I was reading them books like Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I read the entire series with my middle boy) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, which really challenged my ability (or lack thereof) with the Scottish accent. No matter how tongue-tied I got, we always ended up laughing.

Last night I finished Black Beauty with my 10 year old daughter - my youngest child, and I'm hoping that I can continue reading to her for at least another few years.  I have to admit that my reasons for this are partly selfish.  As we choose the books we'll read together, I can choose titles I've always wanted to read but never got around to.  I can also relax into the reading process, put on accents, get dramatic and end on a flourish ("tomorrow night we'll hear all about The Devil's Trade Mark.").  Sometimes I give my daughter a little massage after her reading.  Sometimes we'll talk for a bit about what happened in the story or about other things.  It's the best part of my day and something I look forward to greatly.

My mother always read to me too, for a long time after I was past my preschool years, and I still can conjure up that sense of safety, comfort and joy of hearing a story - even one that I already knew well, like Where the Wild Things Are or On Beyond Zebra.  Sendak and Seuss were mainstays of my childhood, and I didn't need Mem Fox to encourage me to read these, and other books, to my children - it just seemed normal to pick up a book and read to them (though I agree with every word of Fox's Reading Magic).

If you aren't reading to your children (and other people's children too), you're not only eliminating a potentially powerful tool for helping children understand the relationship between letters, sounds, words, and the magic of stories, but you're also missing out on one of life's biggest pleasures.  Of course, I know that whatever demographic The Guardian surveyed, it didn't include you!

Poetry Monday: Ellen Mandel does it again

Ellen Mandel has done it again.  She's released a new CD full of beautiful, mostly classic poetry set to utterly appropriate music. The Cat and the Moon takes its title song from the WB Yeats poem of the same name:

Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn. 

The CD contains works by Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heany and Daniel Neer's own Haiku series which takes us through a series of ordinary moments in the life of a NY actor that reminds me a bit of Frank O'Hara.  Daniel also provides the vocals for all the music on this CD, in his exquisite voice that melds smoothly with Mandel's jaunty piano.  Neer's own brief pieces are quite funny and light ("who needs a day job?") while the Hardy is intense and dark:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

The range of styles is well conveyed by the combination of piano and vocal and the arrangements are all deeply moving.  Nicely balanced, utterly listenable, and still pure poetry, The Cat and the Moon is another wonderful poetic offering from the maven of musical poetry.  Mandel's deep underlying respect for the poetry around which the music is built shines through this new CD.  To get hold of the CD, visit Mandel's site at  http://www.ellenmandel.com/

The Joy of Slow: Slow Writing and Close Reading

(I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because it's hard to proofread your own work and it's great to have an extra set of 'eyes'.)

I just finished reading Game of Thrones. Of course, I’m not really finished, but I’ve finished all the books that have yet been published. George R R Martin is still working on the last two novels, and by all accounts it may be a number of years before they appear. Along with millions of other fans, I will wait. When the next book is released, even if that is many years down the track, I will purchase it immediately, and read it hungrily. I’m part of a worldwide captive audience. My reading tastes don’t normally gravitate towards bestsellers. In fact, I tend to avoid them. There’s nothing quite like discovering and promoting a beautiful gem that others have missed. I was, however, heavily encouraged to read this series, and I’m not sorry. Nor am I sorry that Martin is taking his sweet time to complete the books.

Good writing is rarely fast writing. There is slow, hard work involved in creating complexity. There is world building (call it architecture if you want, or setting, or scenes), defining and developing each of the many characters, working up the extensive plot and all of the many threads that bind these people together – some overt and some quite subtle. In such a grand epic, weaving this kind of web can’t be done quickly. There is, of course, talent and skill involved, but above all, writing a rich, complex epic requires application – long, hard, brow-busting work. That Martin refuses to compromise on quality and rush his books out, even though his publishers will almost certainly be pressuring him to do so, is laudable.

Beyond this initial craftsmanship is the extensive, time consuming process of polishing. This ‘revisioning’ process includes ensuring that all of those subtle details are in the right places, foreshadowed correctly (or in a way that will undermine the reader’s expectations – one of Martin’s particular skills), that the underlying thematics are recognisable and that the story elements come together seamlessly. This can be a very time consuming process, involving working through every single word as if it were poetry and condensing, paring back and refining until there isn’t a superfluous word. When you’re producing seven novels, most of which have over a thousand pages, that kind of meticulous detailing is no small accomplishment.

None of this work is quick. There may be moments through the writing process when the author is ‘in the flow’ and things are moving rapidly, but mostly, and speaking from both personal experience and from what many other writers have told me, the writing of a novel is slow, difficult and often painful. Of course, it’s worth it.  At the end of the process, you’ve birthed (and the labour analogy is probably appropriate) something that is uniquely meaningful. Reading work like this is worth taking time over too. Paying close attention to detail or as Julia Alvarez says in her aptly named blog Slow Writing, to "listen patiently, to pay attention, magpie style, to the little details, left and right, to live, to read, to write slowly, the footprints making the path."

All this is to say, in a rather roundabout (call it slow) way, that, just as I’ll have to wait for the next book in the Game of Thrones series, you'll have to wait for my next novel, tentatively titled Tilda’s Song. It’s taking time! That’s time I can’t easily map out or predict, because every couple of paragraphs I’m back to researching. This is all part of the process of working out the story and delving deeper into the truth of my protagonists. It’s hard, slow, painful work, and though I’m not for a minute comparing what I’m doing to Game of Throne, nor do I think that my readers will be waiting as hungrily for my next work as Martin’s readers are waiting for his (in my dreams!), as a writer, I can certainly understand and relate to the difficulties and above all else, the time that Martin continues to put into his work.  Hopefully in the end, the outcome of my time will at least warrant pleasurable attentive reading from my wonderful readers who notice the little details and connect with me on that slow, but meaningful path towards the shared pleasure that only a good, slowly written book can provide.