A Rocket Misfires

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, Nice Paperweight

Does anybody remember the Rocketbook? No? There’s a good reason for that: the Rocketbook was at once ahead of its time, and a dismally clumsy product. But before the Kindle and Nook began closing bookstores, the Rocketbook was poised to take the book-world by storm. Only it didn’t.

I remember the day when, in 1998, working at the Doubleday as an assistant manuscript editor, the entire staff was called to a meeting, where  a prototype of a Rocket Book was passed around. Nobody knew what to make of it. We did know that our employers had poured a ton of money into its development. Some said that number was upwards of 100 million dollars. And all for what? It was clunky, like a heavy etch-a-sketch, the type was faint, and it just felt cold in the hands. It could hold a total of ten books (or three novels, if you like David Foster Wallace). The Rocketbook failed, and failed big. Authors who sold over 10 million copies of their books in print sold in double digits on the Rocket Book. After a few early adapters and curiosity seekers stopped buying, sales of the first e-reader went totally flat. Nobody wanted the thing.

I am not sure what tipped the scales in favor of an e-reader. I am guessing its weight was one primary factor. Once the e-reader became lighter than an actual book, it became practical and desirable. Or maybe the Rocketbook was just too far ahead of its time to make an impact with consumers. Amazon’s huge ability to dictate how books are sold and delivered also probably had something to do with the swift and sudden Kindle uptake. But there has been a sea-change in people’s acceptance of hand-held devices since the Rocketbook’s awkward debut.

I love the embedded video below, where the two gentlemen are talking about the Rocketbook as though it were some archeological discovery. I mean, it was only twelve years ago! I suppose this is valuable evidence of just how swiftly the publishing industry is changing; and it is ironic that the Rocketbook, funded by large publishing companies, helped contribute to their own demise.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance  manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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Rock My Socks Off: Erotica in the Internet Age

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Erotica has always catered to intelligent and imaginative souls: unlike porn, it does take some cerebral effort. But with so much porn out there on the Internet, one has to wonder why anybody would take the time to read erotica. On the Internet, imagination has been totally usurped, and every fetish or curiosity can be satisfied, so what does erotica have to offer anymore? The genre has long been in danger of becoming become quaint. Yet this hasn’t stopped people from writing and reading erotica. In fact, the genre is experiencing a revival through self-publishing, which is well-suited to writers and readers of racy literature. These days, you don’t have to duck into an adult bookshop – you simply press a button to have a titillating little story arrive on your reading device, and nobody is the wiser.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon a video of Jeremy Edwards, an American writer of erotica, on Twitter. Based on his compelling stage presence, I wasn’t surprised to find that Edwards’ prose is also worth attention. His writing is clean and clever, while his literary naughty bits are unstrained, original and smart. Edwards’ full-length novel Rock My Socks Off follows East Coast writer Jacob on an assignment in San Francisco, where he is supposed to be doing a feature on rocking horses for the sartorially titled magazine Hip Hip Horizon. He quickly becomes romantically entangled with an up-and-coming astronomer named Normandie (fortunately there were no ‘storming Normandie’ puns, or if there were, I repressed them). Over the course of their liaison, they manage to hump their way through any number of inspired locations and situations; and all the more power to them for doing so, because they are well-drawn and funny characters, exactly the kind of people you wish good sex upon.

As a prose stylist, Edwards is nimble as his protagonists. His scenarios, which include much heated frolicking between Jacob and Normandie, cater to both female and male fantasy. He manages to write dozens of sex scenes without contorting his vocabulary into awkward or hackneyed phrases that far more reputable writers fall back on when creating a sex scene. When a woman orgasms in an Edwards’ passage, she does so ‘wittily’ – which is quite a witty word choice in itself.

If his writing is any indication, Edwards, like Jacob, is one of those dangerous male feminists who is bursting with free-ranging libido. I don’t know how else to say this, but there is something so healthy about the novel’s characters and their sexuality, that I almost missed the repressed smuttiness of, say, a Penthouse forum letter. And if there some moments when the plot strains credulity, it is easy to forgive, if not forget, when Edwards deftly hustles his characters off to bed, where the G spot easily replaces the plot point.

I have to say, I appreciate erotica more than I crave it. That might be part if its point: erotica satisfies something more intellectual than blunt sexuality. If this is true, then the genre has a great representative in Edwards, who would be a fine writer in any genre.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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Petra K and the Blackhearts

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Matt Ellis

In the upcoming month I will be releasing Petra K and the Blackhearts, a YA novel I wrote a few years back when I was teaching a class of precocious teenagers. Almost everything for its digital publication is ready, from a bigmouth review list of book bloggers, to the product details, to the lovely cover, which I commissioned from Hungarian illustrator Eszter Kis Kovács. Still, I have been delaying doing a final proof-read of the text, because I still feel a touch of heartbreak when I consider the manuscript and the hopes I had invested in it.

 

The initial idea to write a story of a gang of orphaned children came from a visit to Bucharest, Romania, about eight years ago, while the city was still transitioning from Ceausescu’s dictatorship to its EU-ready democracy. At that time, in 2004, the city streets, railway stations, and abandoned buildings gave shelter to thousands of homeless children. For protection, the children banded together into small tribes. I’ll never forget when a group of homeless children boarded the subway I was on. They were unbelievably grubby, as if they had just been yanked feet first out of a mine shaft. None wore shoes, though it was October. One was naked but for the security blanket he was swaddled in. The smallest, who couldn’t have been more than four years old, stood in the middle of the car and gave a performance that was something between a dance and an epileptic fit, while the other two collected money. I believe I gave them a chocolate bar and the equivalent of five dollars. In all my travels, it was one of the most disturbing things I had ever encountered, more so because nobody else on the train seemed to find it notable.  At that time, Bucharest was also overrun with stray dogs, due to shelter closures and abandonment by owners who couldn’t afford to feed their pets. The dogs were everywhere. Mostly harmless, the animals were treated with indifference, kind of like cuter, more palatable rats. Every now and again, you saw a homeless child partnered with a stray dog. It was alliance that was mutually beneficial, and seemed like a good basis for a children’s novel.

The second unshakable source of inspiration was a book called Magic Prague by Angelo Maria Ripellino. This alternative history of Prague details the live of the mystics, alchemists and charlatans who took residence in the city when it was under the rule of Rudolph II, the Austrian monarch who had a strong interest in the occult. Combining Bucharest of the present and Prague of the past set the backdrop for Petra K and the Blackhearts. You will notice a small dragon on the above-posted book cover. Dragons are about the last thing I would think to write about. In the book, the dragons of Pava, my re-imagined Prague, were originally to be the stray dogs of Bucharest, but at some point in course of writing, under the influence of ‘Magic Prague’, the image of a stray dragon popped into my head. I liked the challenge and unlikelihood of its appearance, so I heeded it, and changed all stray dogs to tiny, abandoned dragons. Since then, I have discovered that readers of fantasy take dragons and their lore very, very seriously. These people will be just as disappointed in my dragons as vampire lovers were to discover Stephanie Meyer and her sparkling bloodsuckers (try Googleing “vampires don’t sparkle” to see what I mean). In fact, I chose my cover artist partially because her unique illustration style would differentiate the book from popular fantasy genre titles.

Petra K took about a year to write. I queried agents and was signed by Michelle Andelman at the Andrea Brown Agency within a week. Michelle helped greatly in strengthening the structure of the book and truly believed in its value and commercial viability. She submitted Petra K under the title Petra K and the Dragonka Fever, and though we received enthusiastic responses, only one editor was determined to buy the project. Unfortunately, this editor’s publisher demanded re-writes before she would make a final decision. I spent the next year re-working the manuscript. In the intervening time, Michelle moved agencies. I was contractually bound to stay with Andrea Brown, and was passed to an agent who had about zero interest in me and my tiny wayward dragons. I have learned that having an agent who treats your manuscript like an unwanted stepchild is worse than having no agent at all. Emails went un-replied to, direct questions about further submissions were dodged. When Petra K was finally submitted, the publisher declined the manuscript, citing a shrinking market.

It is not likely that the digital Petra K and the Blackhearts will find the same size audience as it might have via traditional publication.  Still, I can’t abandon it: that’s what they used to do to dogs in Bucharest, and from what I’ve seen, things you have presided over and cared for deserve better.

Petra K and the Blackhearts will be ready for Kindle publication in September 2011.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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The Comforts of a Pen-Name

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, The Character you Create May be Your Own

From Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and way back when George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans) was laboring through Middlemarch, pseudonyms have been employed by writers wishing to disguise their identity. Even Jane Austen originally published her first novel Sense and Sensibility under the assumed name ‘A Lady’. More recently Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman, and one of the best-known authors of YA shortened her first name to two letters: S.E. Hinton.

In the case of the women on the list, some did not want to be prejudged for their gender.  Female writers, like Hinton, were writing primarily about the lives of the opposite sex, and wanted to pre-empt resistance to the gender difference. Others, like George Sand (Lucile Aurore Dupin), were writing in a time when it was judged un-ladylike to write and publish. Men, like Dodgson, considered their writing personae to be different enough from their work-a-day lives to warrant an separate identity.

The curious thing about pseudonyms is that they are at once presumptuous and humble. It assumes that you are important enough to hide behind a cloak, yet it also disinherits you from any name-recognition your writing might accrue. Yet pen-names abound among indie writers. The amount of two-letter first names used by writers these days is overwhelming, and I am pretty sure one Joanne Katherine Rowling might venture a theory as to why.

Aside from keeping your after-hours pursuits out of Google search engines, a pen-name has uses long before you letter it onto your book cover. For one thing, it is a liberating device. It is easier for some people to explore boundaries within their writing when they know that it will be somewhat anonymous. Writers of erotica have known this for years: take the well-hidden identity of Pauline Réage, the pen-name name Anne Desclos, of who wrote the erotic classic The Story of O.

In my case, I used a pseudonym (Renton Praise) for Lumpen because it very much felt like an apprentice work, and I wanted to detach from it.  The M. Henderson Ellis comes from the fact that I was adopted at age sixteen by my stepfather, so for most of my adolescence I went by Henderson, and only in college became Ellis. As my memoir deals with that time period, it felt right to acknowledge both names. Plus, I did want the memoir to stay out of the hands of those involved – which is a bit silly, but made me feel more comfortable publishing it. Not that that stopped them from finding Strange as Angels. The more you put your writing out there, the deeper you have to dig to keep yourself hidden.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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Five Writers You Should Be Reading (But Probably Aren’t)

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, Four Tragic Deaths and a Barfly

Breece D’J Pancake: Pancake wrote short stories about the American rural south. The writing itself shows that he ingested plenty of Faulkner, but had a strong lyrical voice of his own. He was a dedicated and precocious writer – several of his stories were published in the The Atlantic Monthly while he was still in school. Before his book came out, Pancake pulled a Hemingway and shot himself. You can read National Book Award winner John Casey’s elegiac afterward to Pancake’s book of short stories, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, here.

Bruno Schulz: It is hard to describe Schulz’s writing. It is florid, like prose poetry, but filled with imaginative narrative risks: a boy’s father turns into a crab before his eyes, a neighborhood takes on a human personality. In his writing, Schulz plumbs the sub-conscious for images and a language that is that is at once unique but universal. He spent his short life as an art instructor at a high school in Drohobycz in modern-day Poland before being rounded up and forced to live in the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. He was shot at close range by a German officer who held a grudge against Schulz’s German protector. You can find translations of his stories here.

Sándor Márai: A prolific Hungarian writer and anti-fascist who forbid his work from being published in his birth country after moving to the United States. Though Márai is experiencing a huge revival in English, he was in danger of being forgotten until Carol Brown Janeway translated his novel Embers from German. Since then several of his novels have been translated and he has seen a stage adaptation in London of Embers. Márai – like so many other Hungarian writers – died tragically, shooting himself in the head. Check here for a blog dedicated to the life and writing of Sándor Márai.

Jane Bowles: Poet John Ashbery said “It is hoped the she will be recognized for what she is: one of the finest writers of modern fiction in any language.” Ashbery was optimistic: Bowles is still best known as the wife of writer Paul Bowles. But in addition to Ashbery, Bowles had fans in Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams. Though her writing was eclipsed by that of her husband and the spectacle of her public affairs with other women, Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies is a novel to be contended with. In a review in The Guardian, Lettie Ransley says: “Bowles’s spare, elliptical prose has a hallucinatory quality, pierced by moments of startling clarity and wit. Her characters retain a sphinx-like opacity, as unsettling as it is engrossing.”  For more on the life of Jane Bowles, which deserves a film treatment, have a look here.

Brohumil Hrabal: A Czech writer known for his love of smoky Prague bars. His strange, bitter-yet-beautiful tales, including the book that became the film classic Closely Observed Trains, were often taken from his own life experience. Hrabal’s writing was suppressed for much of his life by the Communist government, though his mercurial political allegiances made it possible for his work to eventually find publication. Since his death, Hrabal’s place in the canon on international literature has been firmly established, with translations into almost thirty languages.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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Why Print Publishing Will Live On

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, A Manuscript Editor who Works in Print and Digital Explains it All

There is a lot of hysteria surrounding the collapse of print publishing; some bloggers who focus on editing and writing are even predicting that all but a few publishing giants will remain, and those will only service mega-bestsellers when selling books in print form. While I, as a manuscript editor for lots of self-publishers, am a huge advocate of digital publishing, I can’t participate in this kind of gleeful doomsday speculation. What people have to remember is that a book’s digital version is only part of its life, and that printed books are too cherished as personal possessions to disappear from the marketplace. Books are an expression of the noblest aspirations of humanity: creativity, intellect, reason and morality. Don’t expect books to disappear and print publishing to die just because some self-published vampire paranormal writer sold a million digital copies. Below are a few reasons why books are here now, and will be around later, too.

Books are Great Gifts. Digital gift certificates are convenient but middling gifts. Books outsell almost every other object in the price range around the holidays and that is because a book shows respect for the recipient, while at the same time saying a lot about the giver’s thoughtfulness and intelligence.

Books Have Long Battery Lives: Sounds glib, but technology has yet to catch up with the simple perfection of a book. Portable, reliable, it is a perfectly designed object. A lot has been written about the ‘warmth’ of certain well-designed objects, and if this is true then a book is a raging fire, while a Kindle is but kindling.

Writers Need Approval: Despite the Rowling digital exit, don’t count on too many top-shelf names abandoning their publishers in favor of creating their own start-ups. Writers, established and new, crave, and even need approval to keep on writing, and there is nothing like the prestige a publishing company colophon confers on a manuscript and career. Most unpublished authors still see digital publishing as a stepping stone to a traditional print deal.

Publishing is in the Blood. Blogs didn’t kill ‘zines, did they? Indeed, the book arts (book-binding, that is, making a book with your very own hands) is making a comeback. There is, in many of us, a deep-seated need to publish on paper. Small, boutique presses will spring up to service the books that are being turned away by the ever-skittish publishing giants. Look to Jack White’s successful vinyl label Third Man to see how future publishing companies might look after the digital wave sweeps over them.

People Love Books: not just people, but readers. These are people with higher than average incomes, who can afford the upswing in the price of buying print. Bound books serve as trophies for people who don’t hunt. It is a source of pride, and a sign of a curious intellect to have a stack, shelf or library of books in your home. You get emotionally attached to print, and in this, handheld devices can’t compare.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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David Gaughran’s If You Go Into The Woods

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, Thanks for the Soapbox

There is no shortage of writers out there scrambling to get their work noticed in the digital self-publishing boon. The smart ones offer you a compelling reason to notice them beyond their presence on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, be it in informative blogs, book reviews, or even paid ads. This means delving into areas traditionally covered by publishing companies: marketing and promotion. One of the most savvy ways to seduce readers to your work is to offer advice to other writers on how they might sell their own work; to act as a tour guide for those who are a few steps behind them. I am wary of such voices: like tips on the craft of writing itself, there are reams of bad advice on the Internet for those who are gullible and unsure of themselves. That is why, when I stumbled upon David Gaughran’s site a few months age, I knew it would be one I would be returning to. He represents an intelligent voice in the fray, and his posts go far to offer valuable insight and information on the quickly evolving state of self-publishing.

With so much good information on offer it is actually easy to overlook that David is also a writer of fiction. So – as I am hoping to review books of a more literary bent than the average indie offering – I asked David for a review copy of his slim two-story volume If You Go Into The Woods. Like his blog, Gaughran has put a lot of effort into the details of his publication. The cover is evocative – not flashy but eye-catching; the text is formatted well and – in contrast to so many inde books I have tried, and failed, to finish – it is edited and proofread, leaving nothing between you and the clean prose but a screen. All this should be standard if publishing a book; unfortunately it’s not.

The first story, which shares the title of the volume, follows a local misfit on a fateful expedition into a the woods. The story has more in common with the absurdist works of Brohumil Hrabel than the dark, grueling writing of Lovecraft, as others have compared Gaughran to. It is a fine story that looms in the mind of the reader long after the last page. This is aspirational fiction, the kind of magic realism that reads deliciously, but like a delicate soufflé, is a difficult feat to pull off. If You Go Into The Woods penetrates beyond its immediate cerebral pleasure and is well worth the cover price. The second, and less successful story, draws more from stock of Irish countrymen Brendan Behan and J.P Donleavy. The protagonist, a dead-beat dad who is immediately forgotten by everybody he meets, might well be a metaphor for any indie writer: he does everything short of physical assault to get noticed, and only when his existence is finally acknowledged, does he find peace. One reviewer on If You Go Into The Wood’s Amazon product page expressed that they wanted more from this second story. I agree. The protagonist really wants to extend his boozy arms and make himself comfortable beyond the limitations of this short story. In fact, in both stories, the writer doesn’t give the impression that he has fully allowed himself the permission to demand too much of the reader’s attention. Gaughran’s protagonists are expansive, social misfits. These are characters that want a larger canvas, particularly in the second story. This surprised me because Gaughran’s daily blog posts are lengthy and develop on the chosen topic far beyond the average blog post. All in all, however, If You Go Into The Woods is a fine edition – I look forward to the writer’s forthcoming novel.

The question – and I ask this more to myself than Gaughran or any other indie author – is where does the marketing begin to interfere with the actual writing? It is easy to believe that because your title is being bought, you have talent. This, of course, is not true. There are people who are selling hundreds of thousands of books on-line who are bereft of anything new or interesting to say. Where does popular opinion sway you enough to say “My writing is good enough, as the market has proven,” and stop working on improving your craft? There seems to be the belief amongst indie writers that once you have a traditional book deal, the gates of heaven swing open, a wreath is placed on your head, and your divine reward of irrevocable acceptance is delivered. But most first-time novelists don’t see a second book deal. And only time will tell if the writers who are so popular with 99 cent offerings will be similarly embraced when their books are twenty times the price. My guess is that a lot of them won’t. These writers filled a previously unavailable niche, but now they will have to compete with far greater talents on the bookshelf. But despite my misgivings about a lot of what I see, it is a still a fantastic time in history for writers – and I look forward to answering these questions for myself, and following the promising career of David Gaughran.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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You Don’t Write Horror, Dystopia, or Paranormal Romance

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Or, Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?

Over the past few days – these first few of what can really be called summer here in Budapest – I have been sitting at home researching just what it takes to promote and market an indie book. While I am happy with the modest sales of Strange As Angels, I know that there is a larger audience out there for the title. The question is: how to connect with them? It does feel like an uphill battle.

There is no shortage of advice out there: the usual suspects like ‘build your own website’ and ‘use social media’ appear like a mantra. But it’s just not enough to join twitter, and when it comes to web sites and even blogging, my interest is limited, and that translates into an unvisited, static site. Book reviewers? If you go on some of the popular ebook reviewers’ sites, you will find that they tend to review books of popular genres like fantasy and horror. A review of a book about adolescent depression and 80s music by somebody who has no dog in that fight would not do the book any good, and might even generate some negative print around the title. Reviewers like bookslut.com, which are more likely to take an interest in a title like mine, simply don’t review self-published books as a policy. To be clear: there is no shortage of advice out there if you are self-publishing genre titles. But if your book does not fall into an easily identifiable category, you are going to have fewer options to promote it. Is there a cyber support group for memoir writers? Are there sites that solely review memoirs? Perhaps, but I haven’t found them. And don’t even get me started on literary fiction. What chance would Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections have had if it was a first novel and released as a digital indie? Who would have taken notice?

On a side note, it is my belief that the ‘self-publishing revolution’ will only really be given credibility by media outlets that review books like the New York Times and the London Review of Books when writers of literary fiction jump on board, and when one of those writers has a hit. I would love to see a story like that of a Hocking or a Locke happen to somebody who does not write genre fiction. Is it possible? Is there a small community out there on the web of literary fiction writers who self-publish and are promoting each others’ work – and I am just missing it?  Rather than finding this discouraging, I see it as a sign of good things to come. Of course genre books are going to be the first to benefit from the popularity of ebooks. They are ideal for the airport/bus ready format. Literary writers will catch up. I am sure they are starting to already. Now, if only I could find them.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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I’m a Best-Seller (Isn’t Everybody?)

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Matt Ellis

Strange As AngelsOr, why Kindle Rankings are Totally Useless

Early one morning, I went to check my email, hoping to divert my attention from the fact that I couldn’t sleep. On a whim, I also had a look at how my memoir Strange as Angels was doing. Much to my shock and surprise, it was rated in the top 50 bestsellers on the Amazon Kindle charts in the category of Music, right above a book about Bob Dylan, joining only a few other self-published books on the list. Of course I was elated. Trying to figure out what generated the jump, I Googled the title, to no avail. Nobody had reviewed it, nobody had mentioned it anywhere on the web. Over the following days it dropped back to its usual place: somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.

At the end of the month, when to sales figures came out, I discovered that it takes a mere two ‘units’ sold within, I am guessing, an hour, to push a title onto the bestseller list. I always know when somebody has bought Strange as Angels because its ranking surges a hundred thousand places or so, depending on how long it had been since it had been last purchased (I currently average about one sale a week). My other title, Lumpen, however, jumped over 500,000 places in the Kindle ranking on the strength of but one sale. This leads me to believe that almost all of the sales in Kindle books come from the top 5,000 or so titles. If one copy sold pushes a title into the top 50,000, that must mean that there are a lot of books that simply aren’t selling at all.

All in all, I still have bragging rights to my bestseller status, and will happily use it to promote the book further. Not to mention it helps my credentials as a memoir editor. I spent more money celebrating this minor achievement than I am likely to make back in sales any time soon. Heaven only knows when it will happen again. (Update: Strange as Angels is currently undergoing a revision. I love that about e-books: unpublishing is also a power.)

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Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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Happy Now?

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Matt Ellis

an interview with Katherine Shonk

Every now and again, a fellow expat makes something of their experiences abroad and publishes a book. In Katherine Shonk’s case, the collection of short stories The Red Passport stemmed from a post-collegiate patch living in Russia in the ‘90s. It has been a long time since she moved back to the US, but the book remains a closely observed, insightful testament to that unique period in history. Though I have yet to successfully negotiate a Shonk story for Pilvax, I was able to catch up with her over email, regarding her recently published novel Happy Now?.

Word Pill: How much did getting an MFA help you in your writing?

KS: My MFA (technically, it was an MA, from the University of Texas at Austin) was most valuable in terms of giving me a solid two years to focus primarily on my writing. I went at a good time, right after I got back from a year in Moscow and had lots of experiences to digest. I had some excellent, dedicated teachers and was with a great group of fellow students, but having the time to write was more important than anything else, and not having much of a social life helped too. For many years before my MA, I had studied fiction writing intensively in classes led by a great teacher in the Chicago area, Fred Shafer. That background has informed my writing practice—specifically, the importance of revision—more than anything else.

Word Pill: When living in Moscow, did you feel that residing outside the USA alienated you as a writer?

KS: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a self-identity, let alone a real identity, as a writer when I was living in Moscow. I was still learning to write stories, and in fact, I hardly did any writing while I was in Moscow. The awkwardness and lack of confidence I felt simply living day to day in Moscow probably translated into an overall lack of confidence in myself as a writer, which may have been why I didn’t write while there. I also felt as if I needed to get some distance on the place before I could absorb the experience of living there and write about it. Actually, it wasn’t until I returned home that I felt alienated from U.S. culture, which motivated me to start writing about Russia, a place that I suddenly missed very much.

Word Pill: Can you tell us a little about the experience of having your novel edited, once it was accepted by your publisher?

KS: I’m lucky to have a wonderfully sharp editor, Gena Hamshaw at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who felt passionately about my book. The editing process began with Gena writing me a long letter that suggested four fairly significant changes (as well as a list of smaller ones) to the book. Initially, I resisted each of Gena’s major suggestions, but the more I thought about them, the more I realized they were all spot-on. Most notably, she thought that I should have my main character, Claire, read her husband’s suicide note near the middle of the book rather than at the end, where I had originally placed it. Moving the note to the middle of the book ended up giving Claire more time to react to it and, I believe, deepens the mystery of her husband’s death.
After that first round of editing with Gena, we cleared up some loose ends, and then the book was copyedited and proofread a total of three or four times. It’s an exhaustive process that leaves you feeling pretty confident about not finding typos in the published version.

Word Pill: Are there aspects of autobiography in your novel Happy Now?

KS: I adapted a lot of incidents from my own life to Claire’s, such as dealing with a cat who eats a poisonous flower, driving on Lake Shore Drive in a blizzard, and Internet dating in my mid-thirties. Writing the novel was a little like building a nest, with some of the twigs taken from my own life and others imagined. Some of Claire’s personal struggles mirror my own, though I imagined her more traumatic experiences, such as her parents’ divorce and, obviously, the loss of her husband.

Word Pill: Any advice for beginning writers?

KS: Read a lot. Cultivate the practice of revision, and learn to enjoy it: Don’t be satisfied with your first draft or even your tenth. Find a community of writers who you trust to give honest, thoughtful feedback. Grow a thick skin, because you’ll probably deal with a lot of rejection. Find a day job that gives you time to write. Teaching isn’t always the best job for a writer because it can be so time consuming and exhausting, especially for introverts. Editing has worked much better for me.

Katherine Shonk’s latest book, the novel Happy Now, is out on FSG

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

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