Nancy Zaroulis's Blog: QWERTYUIOP: A Blog About Writing

“Write what you know” is a favorite mantra heard in creative writing classes.
But here is what a distinguished fiction editor at a major publishing house told me: “I’m so tired of reading undigested autobiography.”
She wasn’t talking about my work. She was talking about the endless stream of manuscripts sent to her by hopeful (or uninformed) agents, in which the client/writer, lacking a plot, tries to turn his own life experience into a novel.
Hemingway did that, and so did Fitzgerald, but it rarely works for less talented writers.
So how can those folks write a novel?
One author suggested that new, usually young writers should write about what they don’t know—people in history, people in fantasy worlds, creatures that never existed outside the writer’s imagination.
Here’s the thing: “Write what you know” can mean more than what you know about your own, probably limited experience: your family life, your high school years, your teenage crush on some unattainable popular guy or girl.
It means write what you know about human beings. If you are paying attention—and you really need to do that—you will have already acquired a pretty fair notion of how your fellow hominoids behave. You will have encountered love, hate, fear, jealousy—all the emotions that feed a novel, that make your characters come alive. You will have met people who are intelligent or not so intelligent. You will have seen kindness and cruelty.
That is what you know.
What you don’t know—what you lack—is an “idea” for your novel other than your own rather uneventful life story.
My first post on this site, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”, deals with this issue.
Something more to keep in mind: most published books are nonfiction. Most successful books are nonfiction. And you probably know something about some topic that will have a bigger audience than undigested autobiography.

As I have noted, for fiction I don’t get ideas, I get characters.

But sometimes I get some help, too.

And I really, truly believe that life is luck. It was luck that brought me to the publication of my first novel, The Poe Papers.

My Luck #1:

One day I was in the library, researching a novel I was writing about women in New England before the Civil War. The librarian handed me four pages of typescript written by a local historian. “This might interest you,” she said.

She was right. It did interest me, but I didn’t see how I could integrate it into the book I was working on.

Local historians know many fascinating stories. This one involved Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1848 traveled to the thriving manufacturing town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to lecture on American poets and poetry. While he was there, he met and fell in love with a young woman whom he called “Annie.” He wrote one of his most famous poems for her, “For Annie.” He also wrote love letters to her despite the fact that she was married. He often sent pages of in-progress stories or poems to her. He died the following year.

Eventually word got around that “Annie” had some of Poe’s papers. Biographers began to ask to see what she had, and some of them were quite persistent. She never showed the papers to anyone; if she thought the person was a legitimate scholar, she copied portions for him. She destroyed them all before she died.

I realized I had read this story before—not about Poe, but about another famous poet: George Gordon, Lord Byron. One of his mistresses was Claire Clairmont. After he died, in 1824, she was left with many of his letters and manuscripts. Although she was poor, she never sold any of them. She was hounded for decades by people who wanted to see them, to borrow them, to buy them—or even to steal them. One particularly bold and aggressive connoisseur was a sea captain from Salem, Massachusetts, who traveled to her home in Venice to confront her, without success.

Near the end of her life, in the 1870’s, she told her story to a young American writer, Henry James. Immediately he realized he had been given a terrific plot. He wrote a short novel, The Aspern Papers, changing the poet to an American, Jeffrey Aspern, and the location from Venice to Florence.

So that day in the library, I had been given the same real-life story that Henry James had been given—the famous poet, his beloved, his early death, her struggle to keep his papers from greedy collectors. At once a narrator/protagonist came into my mind: a wealthy young man from Boston who travels to Lowell to try to buy—or steal—Poe’s papers.

But I didn’t see how I could integrate that very interesting information into the manuscript I was working on.

My Luck #2:

Time passed. I came to a place in the long novel about New England women where I didn’t know how to proceed. I knew what the ending was, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. So I decided to let my unconscious do the plotting. I put the manuscript aside and began to write the Poe story.

At that time in my life, I was busy. I always went to the drug store on Sundays to buy the Sunday New York Times, but I usually didn’t get around to reading the Book Review till the middle of the week. On that particular Sunday, however, I had time to read it that evening. I saw an ad for a new memoir written by a vice-president at Putnam’s, at the time a more prominent publisher than it is now. I thought it looked interesting.

The next day was a library day. As I walked in, I passed the “New Books” shelf. The memoir was there. I checked it out. Over the next few weeks, I read it. When I got to the chapter where the writer described his visit to Thomas Wolfe’s mistress, I felt a slight frisson. (Not the Tom Wolfe of “New Journalism,” but an older writer, long dead, who had been popular in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.) He wanted to ask her if she had any of Wolfe’s papers, but he felt suddenly shy. He longed to have them, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. “I felt like the narrator of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers,” he wrote.

Wow.

Perhaps this man, this exalted figure in the publishing world, would be interested in my novel, based on the same true story as Henry James’s.

I ’d made a good start on the book. Now I had to finish it, which in the next few months I did.

Then I let it rest for a while. I made a few changes.

I knew I should send a query letter to the Putnam’s VP, but I hesitated. I was no one. I had never published anything. Why should an important New York publisher bother with an unknown like me?

A few more weeks passed.

My Luck #3:

Then one day it rained. Ordinarily I would have gone swimming (it was August), but the weather was chilly and unappealing. So I stayed home.

It was on that day that a neighbor did something she’d never done before, and never did again. She came to my door with a book.

“I thought you would like this,” she said, handing it to me.

As I began to look at it, it fell open to the acknowledgements page—the page where writers thank their husband, their wife, their parents, their teachers, and everyone else who has helped them.

Most of all, this author wrote, he wanted to thank the Vice President of Putnam’s, naming the man whose memoir I’d read.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. It didn’t come from my neighbor, who was standing in front of me. We were alone in the house.

Was it my Guardian Angel?

In my mind, I saw a door opening. Had my Angel opened it?

I had never believed in angels, but at that moment, I knew that someone, somehow, was trying to send me a message.

The next day I sent a letter to the man at Putnam’s. Yes, he wrote back, he would like to see my manuscript about Poe.

I sent it to him. He bought it and published it. It had excellent reviews.

The Poe Plot was a natural sequel.

So as I say, life is luck. And when your luck comes, be ready to take it.

A “Frequently Asked Question” for authors at Book Talks and elsewhere goes something like this: “I’ve just finished my novel/memoir/history of the Civil War/how-to book on car repair. Where should I send it?”
My answer is always the same: “Send it to your desk drawer. Let it marinate for a few months. Then take it out and read it as if you are an editor being asked to pay real money for it. You will be amazed at what you see that needs correcting, or deleting, or a total rewrite.”
Then do the necessary editing.
Do not ask your mother/husband/best friend to critique your manuscript. They are fond of you. They will not want to offend you by offering negative comments. On the other hand, what do they know? They do not read the genre in which you are writing. They know nothing about car repair. They just want to make you happy.
“But what about my book group?” my questioner might say. “Shouldn’t they have a look at it?” (I am talking here about book groups for writers, not book groups for readers.)
There is nothing wrong with book groups for writers. Lots of people belong to them. They offer moral support, tips, and probably the beverage of someone’s choice. But if you show your manuscript (or parts of it) to, say, five or six people, you are probably going to get five or six responses. Which one is correct? Even if you get a unanimous “Great!” verdict, what do they know? Or, worse, if you get a complete thumbs-down, the same response is true. They may all be wrong. They may all be right. How do you know?
You don’t.
I have written novels that took years to compete. That was not a bad thing. It was, in fact, a good thing. By the time I typed the final draft, I could see problems that I hadn’t known existed. So I fixed them.
Once, trying to place a very long novel of mine, my agent had repeated turndowns from publishers. “Too long,” they said.
My agent told me I needed to cut it.
I told her I had lived with that novel for five years. I had cut it by one-third as I typed the final draft. I wasn’t going to cut it any further.
How long should a book be? It should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story.
Finally my agent placed my manuscript with a major publisher. Readers loved it. I believe they would not have loved it as much if I had listened to her.
Of course, I could have been wrong, but I didn’t think I was. The manuscript might still be in my desk drawer, unpublished, unread.
But life is luck, as you know, and I had a little of it then when the right publisher came along.
So give your manuscript time to ripen. Read it with fresh eyes. Trust your gut.
Time is the best editor.

“Do you work in your pajamas?”
Someone asked me that once. My answer, of course, was “No.”
But I understood the question. It was a query leading up to the second most frequently asked question for writers, right after “Where do you get your ideas?” People will ask, How do you work? What they mean is, How do you work physically? The idea that we work (probably but not necessarily) at home has a curious allure. Not surprising, considering the difficulties of commuting, of actually getting to one’s workplace. If you work at home, people assume, you can have a leisurely life, almost like not working at all.
But no, I don’t work in my pajamas. I get up, get dressed, take the dog out if I have a dog at the time, have breakfast, scan the newspaper (print edition, please), and make my workplace coffee. Then, fully awake but not yet distracted by the outside world, ready to enter whatever fictional world I am dealing with, I go to my desk and work.
Pencil and paper?
Typewriter?
Computer?
Dictation?
I have worked in all these ways except the last. I wrote my first five published books by hand, in spiral-bound, lined-paper notebooks. I used old-fashioned yellow No. 2 pencils. I had six of them, replenished as needed. Every morning I would sharpen them. It was a little ritual to transition me into whatever fictional world I was creating. I remember the sensation I had when I wrote with those pencils. The scenes I saw in my mind were transmitted down through my arm, my hand, onto the paper. It was an intimate thing. There was no clattering machinery to intrude between me and the story I wanted to tell. I worked in silence. Some writers work to the accompaniment of music. I couldn’t do that, because music has its own rhythm. I needed to hear in my mind the rhythm of the language I was putting onto paper.
After I wrote my pages (about six per day) I typed them because a manuscript has to be typed for me to be able to correct it.
Then, after years of composing with pencil and paper, I faced the prospect of writing “Massachusetts,” which was going to be a long—very long—novel. By that time I had developed severe writer’s cramp. (Yes, it’s a real thing.) I was in some pain. I didn’t see how I could write anything, let alone a long manuscript, by hand.
My husband, through some feat of magic, conjured up a silent typewriter. At that point I owned an old IBM Selectric—a good machine, but noisy. I could not have composed manuscript on it. The silence of the new little typewriter was perfect for my task. It was almost as intimate as writing with a pencil. I wrote and wrote on it until, after I finished the manuscript and had a new one to write, I wore it out.
It was time to transition into the modern world. I acquired a computer. Confusing at first, but a nice, quiet keyboard.
Another book, another machine. At one point I had a laptop. Laptops are not made for people who type fast.
So that’s how I work now—computer and printer. Both laptops and desktops are quiet enough not to intrude, so I can still hear the language of my manuscript—the sound of the words on the page. I keep to a schedule. I drink a lot of coffee.
Pajamas? I haven’t worn them since I was eight.

The scene: Authors’ night at a bookstore.

The audience: Booklovers, of course—my kind of people!

The presentation: It goes well for my two fellow authors and for me, also. Nice audience, laughing at our jokes, interested in what we have to say. Each of us has a new novel to publicize.

The Q&A: I have a standing bet with a friend. At some point during this event, someone will ask: “Where do you get your ideas?”

And on this night, I win. Again.

It is as if the questioner thinks that if he knows where I get my ideas, he can go there and get ideas too. Then he can do what I do: write novels.

Not!

When people tell me they want to be a writer, I say, “You’d better like your own company, because you will spend your working life alone in a room.”

Some people (writers) like that situation. Most people don’t. Not even if they can get ideas.

Robert Parker used to joke that he got his ideas in Utica.
I answer with the truth: “I don’t know.”

Of course I do know. Sort of. My ideas come from my subconscious, and they can come to me at any time: While I’m planting a new rose bush; while I’m watching the news; while I’m making my favorite pie, chocolate chiffon with whipped cream topping; while I’m researching some topic that has nothing to do with the idea that comes to me.

I have ideas all the time. I can’t control them. I can’t summon them at will. I can’t stop them. Most of them end up in my version of something that all writers have: a massive “Ideas” file. Most of them will never be published, because the ideas I work with are the ones that nag at me the most, demand to be written the most, won’t-let-me-rest-until-I-deal-with-them the most.

Anyway, I don’t get ideas. I get characters. If I’m lucky, they come with a name, a history, a location, and at least the beginning of a story. Of those, I write the ones who are the most demanding.

Here is an example of a character whose story never developed: Many years ago, I saw in my mind’s eye the vivid image of a young woman running down the street. She was running away from me, so I couldn’t see her face. She had red hair. She was wearing a long, high-necked, long-sleeved black dress in the fashion of the year 1900 or so. The street was lined with brick townhouses. I think it was in London, but I’m not sure. The day was bright, with strong sunshine.

I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know her background. I didn’t know why she was running. Was she frightened, running away from someone? Or was she deliriously happy, running toward someone?

I had no idea. She never came to life beyond that one short snapshot. She never developed into a character who could be the heroine of a novel. She stays in my file on a single sheet of paper.

Where do I get my ideas for nonfiction? That’s another story.