Janet Benton's Blog: One Writer's Path - Posts Tagged "janet-benton"

What kindness! I wrote to historical novelist Sandra Gulland out of the blue, because I love her diary novels. My novel, Lilli de Jong, will be out this May from Doubleday. It is also in diary form, and I wanted to share it with her.

She read the opening pages and welcomed me to send a galley. Then she read the entire book and offered these generous words:

"I LOVED this novel. Lilli de Jong is deeply moving and richly imagined, both tragic and joyous. Janet Benton has an exceptional ability to bring history to life. Meticulously researched, the details of the day-to-day world are startling and vivid. It's not only a compelling, beautifully crafted historical novel, however: it's also important. As a single young woman desperate to hold onto her baby, Lilli's life-and-death struggle is shockingly common to women even today. How is it that we know so little of our history? This will be an excellent novel for book clubs because there is so much in it that is relevant, so much to learn and discuss."

Big thanks to Sandra for her generosity and her ongoing work. Her next novel is about Anastasia, Josephine Bonaparte's daughter. I can't wait to read it.

xo Janet Benton

Do you keep a diary and/or like reading diary novels? I just wrote an essay on some reasons my debut novel, LILLI DE JONG, forthcoming tomorrow from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is in the form of a diary. Read this essay, just published on the book blog Read Her Like an Open Book (with thanks to blogger Bill Wolfe).

https://readherlikeanopenbook.com/201...

The best writing advice I’ve gotten came from my former professor Valerie Martin, and I’ve passed it along many times to those who work with me on their books. In one of the writing workshops I took with Valerie, she said something like this: If someone tells you that a feature of your story isn’t believable or isn’t working, don’t assume you need to take that part out or alter it greatly. Instead, consider how you might do a better job of convincing the reader that it does fit and is necessary.

For instance, she said, people don’t read the first line of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and say, “I don’t believe Gregor Samsa woke up and discovered he was a cockroach.” Why don’t they say this? Because Kafka convinces us immediately in concrete ways: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.” (Translation by Ian Johnston) As Valerie asked us, What’s not to believe?