Ask the Author: Thelma Adams
Answered Questions (4)
Thelma Adams
What's my advice to aspiring writers? Never ask anyone else if you are "a writer." If you write, then you are a writer. If you have that urge to lay tracks of ink (electric or otherwise), then you are a writer. Listen to your inside voice. You do not need to write every day to prove you are a writer, although it's good to write a lot of days because becoming a writer in the world is a marathon not a sprint and you have to train. You do not have to write an entire day: write for the amount of time that feels good to you. Find your sweet spot: mine is when I get up in the morning after a cup of coffee. When I smoked cigarettes, I would have two or three in front of the computer to get my focus going but I've had to give that up. Definitely read. Read some books that others recommend (it took me forever to read "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius" because I don't do biography but once I read it, it changed my focus). Read what you love -- so it's not DeLillo but it's Waugh and Wodehouse. It's not Dostoevsky but its Austen and Chandler. Read Scandinavian mysteries because they're fun. Live in a world of books. Experiment with your writing. Be horrible but sit your butt down in the seat and right until its good. At first, find readers that encourage what is good in your writing and our mindful of your feelings -- and then find people who will tell you the flat-out truth of what isn't working. Recover. And continue writing.
Thelma Adams
The absolute best thing is that being a writer (like being a marathon runner) exercises a muscle that I need exercised. Writing is the way I understand and filter the world. It's the way I get in touch with my feelings, and one of the things that cracks me up. I don't feel like I'm someone that can hold the whole world in my head so that writing a novel allows me to connect the dots, piece the big ideas together and understand the bigger picture by going deeply into specific characters, scenes, settings, themes and situations, completely fictional or based on my own experience.
Thelma Adams
There are a lot of different types of writer's block. My first defense is to write in my comfort zone as much as possible -- in the morning after a cup of coffee with my lovely husband dropping my daughter off at school. That way I can try to preserve something in my brain that is refreshed from dreams and sleep. I find just getting started the biggest hurdle and lately I've been setting my stopwatch for five minutes when I start so that I realize, when the alarm goes off, I'm already fully engaged. All I need is that five minutes. On days when I just cannot get a sentence, or a chapter, to move forward, I allow myself to stop. I try not to feel guilty. Because I know that when I hit that kind of wall, it's a fourth or fifth day after a lot of good work. And I try to be gentle with myself. Try: it's not easy. The best thing for me is to walk away. I often work on the weekends and I find that sometimes I grind myself down. So then I take a weekend off and the writing tap flows when I sit down again to write on Monday. So the first thing is to know how your writing flows for you -- and the second is to develop mechanisms that make you comfortable when it doesn't.
Thelma Adams
I was doing research and I noticed that Wyatt Earp, the gunslinger from the O.K. Corral, was buried in a Jewish cemetery. Why, I wondered. It was like pulling a thread. I discovered that for nearly half a century he was married to a Jewish woman, Josephine Sarah Marcus, and she buried him with her parents. I became obsessed: who was this woman, what was she like, and how did she end up in Tombstone attached to Wyatt? The more research I did -- whether it was in the few pages and paragraphs about her in the many nonfiction books on Wyatt and the historical characters of Tombstone, or her own deeply edited memoirs -- the more I wanted to bring her to life and get inside her head and heart. But it all started with that Wyatt's tombstone in a Jewish cemetery.
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