The Carpe Annum Interviews Year End Round Up

We declared 2013 Carpe Annum—Seize the Year! It was our way of encouraging you as an artist/writer to find your own path, listen to your inner iconoclast, and to be set free to explore your true writer/reader/human self. We invited a handful of writers and other publishing industry folks on the blog throughout the year to talk about writing, not writing, publishing, not publishing, and everything that goes on in between.

We’re thrilled to have them all back today, visiting from all over North America. It’s a bit squishy in here (next time, we’re booking a larger space!), but no one minds. Let’s eavesdrop on the conversation:

Bonnie Grove: One more seat for Don Pape, please. Could we have Lesley and Tosca scooch together? Thanks. Mind Arthur Slade’s feet. He has enormous feet. Pizza’s here! Christa Allan, could you tip the delivery person? Everyone here? Great. Let’s get started. Are books dead?

Don Pape (Publisher): We have seen through digital a real devaluing of intellectual property. Once we would buy a project with a reasonable advance and sell it for $15 in the hopes of recouping your investment. Now that consumer is wanting that same property – nah they demand – at $2.99 or heavens, free! 

Nicci Jordan Hubert (freelance editor) I suggest that although the medium may change, the relationship between authors and readers will never change. There is no “end of books.” Books will live forever, of course, whether they’re read on paper, an iPhone screen, futuristic computer-glasses, or perhaps some kind of cool osmosis process.

Bonnie Grove: With publishing changing daily, how does great fiction happen? How does the great stuff get out there into the hands of readers?

Don Pape (Publisher): Nothing changes – a Really Great story!! Whether it is historical, contemporary – a really great story well told, amazing fully developed characters. And please, not another “in the tradition of Left Behind” or “Gresham-like” – let’s be original please!!

Chris Fabry: I can have a great publishing plan, a brand people recognize, and all the “right” industry choices made, but if I don’t have a good story, I don’t have anything.

Julie Cantrell: Characters. For me…it’s all about the characters. And I do consider the setting a character. 

Nicci Jordan Hubert: If you really want to be a successful writer, there are no short cuts. Okay, if you’re related to a celebrity, you’ll have an easier time getting published, but for the rest of you… There is only one path to becoming a good writer: Reading lots of good books. Studying the craft of writing. Practicing writing a lot. Self-editing ruthlessly. And seeking out honest feedback.

Bonnie Grove: Feedback. Okay writers, dish about feedback. There’s all kinds, the helpful feedback you can get while working on a novel (and unhelpful), and then there’s the painful feedback that comes after the book releases.

Tosca Lee:  You know, I remember my first one-star review. My heart started thudding. I felt anxious, defensive, and mortified. But my anxiety has ebbed with time. A few months ago I saw a one-star review that said Demon was "written with the deftness and wit of an inebriated three year old." And I remember thinking, "Who would give alcohol to a three year-old??"

Arthur Slade: I was more concerned about reviews at the start of my career and would take them more personally. But now, with the advent of Amazon and Goodreads, I actually get a kick out of the bad reviews. Sometimes they can be quite creative (my favourite had a line that went something like “I had to drink a Coke while I was reading Dust in order to stay awake”). The only time I am frustrated by reviews is when they say something that is truly false about the book. Oh, plus my mom always says the books are good.

Bonnie Grove: How does a writer move past bad reviews/feedback? Especially in this day of Amazon and Goodreads. Everyone is a critic.

Chris Fabry: I no longer see my stories as for some mass audience out there. Each story is for an individual reader. And each story is for me.

Julie Cantrell: “Whatever you do, don’t waste your scholarship to study writing. You’ll be lucky if you ever publish a greeting card.” –  My 12^th Grade English Teacher . It took me ten years to get her voice out of my head. I didn’t write a thing for an entire decade because I was foolish enough to believe what she said as truth.

Lesley Livingston: I was an actor for years before I was a writer. I’m so very used to criticism (good and bad) and rejection (yay auditions! Bleh.) that it all pretty much just rolls off my back by now. It’s not always easy and sometimes I read a review and mutter unkind things but the truth is, if you’re going to believe the good reviews, you’ve got to believe the bad ones, too. It’s just what you said—opinions. Once the book is out there, it’s no longer just yours. And everyone who reads it has the absolute right to there opinion of it. (No matter how wrong they are!! Ha!)

Chris Bohjalian: I don’t dare read the reviews on Goodreads or Amazon or BN.com. I used to. I wrote an essay once for the Washington Post about my old addiction to reading the way anonymous people would eviscerate my work. But now, in the interest of my mental health, I give the reviews as wide a berth as I can. They can really screw up a sunny day.

Tosca Lee: I think just realizing that readers’ responses are a reflection of where they’re at. It’s not about you. It’s about what resonates—or doesn’t—with them right now. For me, I know that any time I choose to get offended, I’m the one who suffers.

Bonnie Grove: What keeps you going on rough days? None of you have thrown in the towel, and you’ve all reached wonderful success as writers. Is it going according to plan?

Christa Allan: In the beginning of my writing life, my path reflected the opening of Genesis. It was without form and full of darkness. I doubt I knew a path existed or even cared. So delirious with joy over my first contract, I didn't think beyond it. Sort of like being more prepared for the wedding than the marriage, you know?

Chris Bohjalian: I was simply hoping to write a novel after (finally) selling a short story. I amassed 250 rejection slips before I sold a single word.

Arthur Slade: Long ago, a fellow writer said it’d take about ten years to get published. She was wrong. It took me twelve. 

Ariel Lawhon: The only things that matter right now, today, are the words on the page in front of me. That’s what I can control. And I will never find joy in this profession—much less write another book—if I can’t enjoy the actual process of writing. So I have to touch the story every day. Even if it’s just a word or two. The only way to stay sane is to write.

Bonnie Grove: Share a bit about your writing process.

Chris Fabry: Writing was the path to freedom. If I could write through this devastation, if I could allow the pain I was going through to inform the story, my readers would connect with the character on an even deeper level. And I would find a measure of solace in the process.

Christa Allan: My process: Hooray! NYT Bestseller idea, write reams of brain urp on yellow legal pads, write three chapters, call my BFF and scream, "I don't have a novel, and why the hell did I ever believe I was a writer?"; go back to legal pads, write to the middle, make charts and graphs and index cards while consuming coffee, Coke Zero, chocolate, popcorn, Mike&Ikes ; write, stop and make more notes and consume any combination or all of the above foods, write...continue until "The End." I doubt that process has a name or that I'll be able to turn it into a writing book.

Bonnie Grove: Advice to writers?

Christa Allan: If I didn't pursue my dream, regret would pursue me.

Julie Cantrell: I’m begging you… write as if no one will ever read it. That’s the only way you’ll find your true, original voice and feel free enough to reach the level of honesty readers really crave.

Lesley Livingston: That’s the whole thing with carpe-ing. The act of seizing is a willful act. You pretty much just have to do it. Write. You can’t edit a blank page. You can’t revise an empty screen. The lion’s share of writing is re-writing. Get the words down. Then put them in the right order. For me, it comes down to writing every day. As much or as little as I can, but every day. If I’m away from the story for a day, it takes me twice as long to get my head back into the game.

Ariel Lawhon: Everything changed for me when I realized that if I wanted to have this job—and I did, I still DO—then I had to sit down and write a novel. I knew that if anything were to come of this dream it would spring from a finished novel and nothing else.

Arthur Slade:  Don’t expect it all to happen overnight. It’s such a cliché, but write every day and always look for ways to improve your craft. Writing is like working out for a Triathlon. I’ve never done one, but they look hard and you have to train hard. Writing is the same. It takes training. And tea breaks.

Bonnie Grove: Thanks so much, everyone for sharing your wisdom with us this Carpe Annum year. Let’s all crowd in for a group picture! Mind Arthur Slade’s enormous feet.

No Yellow Brick Road in Writing

I love what Arthur Slade shared in his interview on Monday, especially his confusion about being a YA writer.  Discovering how prolific authors get headed in the right direction can help those who are just starting out or simply not making any headway.  YA, adult, genre, literary – how hard can it be to know what we write or which direction to go? As Arthur pointed out, it’s not always easy to tell.

Dorothy asked the scarecrow, "Which way do we take?"  His cryptic answers were  “Pardon me, this way is a very nice way,”  (points other way) “It’s pleasant down that way, too,”  and (points both ways) “Of course, some people do go both ways.” I’m surprised she didn’t leave him hanging in the cornfield.

We have to start somewhere, and there's no yellow brick road.  Some writers follow one road until it dead ends and their writing gets stalled.  Some branch off at the ‘Y’ in the road and add a few vampires or whatever is currently on the horizon.  Still others take the road less traveled and find success.

So, how far do you travel before you sit down in the dust and re-think your decision?  If you’re traveling alone, you may go far off course before taking stock and honestly considering your options.  It’s not smart to be a lone wolf in the writing community.  You can waste a lot of time trying to decide things on your own.  Writers are generally too close to their writing to see things clearly.  We all need honest feedback.

Sometimes we fall into a certain type of writing because we follow advice such as 'write what you know' or 'write what you read.'  The advice is neither good nor bad, just tricksy.  Sometimes the story gets a hold of us and we think it knows best.  Often a character will demand our full attention and we assume the story is theirs alone.  This happened to me when an insistent character, a 12-year-old girl, told me her side of the story and I bit.  Mean mommy + bad sisters X rotten luck = unjust circumstances.  I was sure I was a YA writer and that this was a YA story.  I read all the ‘how to’ books for YA fiction.  I read and dissected great YA fiction.  I was around kids every day and knew how they talked and what they cared about.  By gum, I knew what I was doing!

The story came together and stirred some interest at a conference, including an agent who went back and conferred with his colleagues about it.  His eventual response:  We don’t do YA.  If it had an adult perspective, we would be interested.

Great gnashing of teeth ensued on my part.  I railed to my family, "It’s perfect the way it is!" which translates to (a) I’m sick and tired of this story, and (b) I don’t want to rewrite it again and (c) how badly do I really want to be published?  I stamped and huffed and scowled, and when I was spent, my husband sagely said, “You know, it could really use the mom’s perspective.”

I stuffed it in a drawer for a week or more.  When I came to my senses, I realized he had something there.  The mom started talking to me.  And then the sisters.  And the grandparents.  Grief, like a spreading stain, had seeped into all their lives and done its damage.  How could I have missed it?  So, I picked it up again and told the whole story this time.

For my part, I had to set aside what I was so sure I knew and listen to what credible sources told me about the story and my writing.  It doesn’t mean I won’t write another story with a juvenile’s perspective.  Kids have such insight and tell it like it is.  But it will most likely be written from the standpoint of an adult reflecting on childhood experiences.

Some writers will insist that they have ALWAYS known what they were destined to write.  Oo-rah.  Good for them!  Even better if they have ever considered another way and had their original choice confirmed.

How did you come to realize what you were meant to write?  Was it a trial by fire or just the quiet affirmation of readers and colleagues?  Maybe you’re still in process.  We’d love to hear.

The Carpe Annum Interviews: Arthur Slade

Welcome to another Carpe Annum interview. Each year, Novel Matters handpicks authors who's work has intrigued, astonished, and inspired us to highlight on our blog. We're happy to have Arthur Slade with us today, the mulit-award winning Canadian author, and author of one of our favourite YA novels, Dust.

Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. He is the author of seventeen novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada. Visit him online at www.arthurslade.com

Novel Matters: Art, you write YA fantasy novels that are read by all age groups. What made you chose YA?

Arthur Slade: Fate. Well, not so much fate but a reading service provided by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. I sent one of my early books to the Guild to be “commented on by a professional writer” and that writer said, “This is a great book for young adults.” Alas, I thought I’d written a book for adults. So I was offended! I’d put my grown up words and thoughts into that book. But once I reread the edit letter several times, it dawned on me that it was a compliment (and the letter was basically saying that I was writing work that should be published…who doesn’t want to hear that?) 

NM: That’s the power of taking feedback and letting it inform your writing. How did you snowball that writer’s comments into your own sensibilities as a writer? 

AS: I tend to writer shorter books and don’t dwell on too much description so I realized that my style of writing was suited for the storytelling drive of fiction for younger audiences.

NM:  Tell us about your backlist.

AS: I have seventeen novels so it might be lengthy to do a dissertation on all of them. They do all appear on my website.  The first book, Draugr, came out in 1997 and is a lovely little horror book about an Icelandic man who comes back from the dead (becomes a draugr, that is). It’s the first in a series. I have several stand-alone novels, including Dust (2001) which is a happy little story about a mesmerist rainmaker who takes control of a small town during a drought. Then there’s The Hunchback Assignments series (2009) which is all about a young hunchback who has the ability to change his shape and becomes an agent for the Victorian British Empire.  That’s a few of the books, anyway.

NM: Some authors write one book a year and others write a handful over a lifetime. In the beginning, did you consciously choose to be a writer of multiple, multiple books?

AS: It’s more just the way it turned out. My first novel to be published, Draugr, was written in three months. 

NM: Gah? Three months?

AS: Yep, that’s all.

NM: I was just beginning to like you, Art.

AS: I thought I’d write three books a year with time off. But it turns out I was just lucky. Every novel since then has taken at least a year to write on average.

NM: What’s the take-away for that lesson, for all the writers and fans out there in blog-land reading this?

AS: Don’t expect it all to happen overnight. Long ago, a fellow writer said it’d take about ten years to get published. She was wrong. It took me twelve. 

NM: Twelve years. I’m starting to like you again. Does it make me a bad person to enjoy knowing other writers struggled too? Rhetorical question. The answer is: no, it does not. Tell us about those twelve years of in-between time. 

AS: In that time I wrote six unpublished novels.

NM: Ouch.

AS: Uhhh…they were good practice. And I had submitted those books to every publisher imaginable. I had hundreds of rejection letters (in fact I used to write letters to my friends on the back of my rejection letters…just so my friends could have rejection letters of their own).

NM: What kept you going?

AS: There were times when I came close to being published, and that was encouraging, but it wasn’t until my 7^th novel that I was published.

NM: And we're grateful you persevered. My twelve year old son is currently reading Dust, and he's loving it, and asking for more books by Arthur Slade. Tell us about your newest novel.

AS: My latest novel is The Island of Doom (2012) . It’s the final book in The Hunchback Assignments series, and it’s about how Modo and his fellow agents take on the evil Clockwork guild at their island stronghold. The novel features a Frankenstein monster and I must say I had great fun re-reading the original novel and watching the movies. Well, not all of them. Just the good ones.

NM: Just the good ones. Everyone is a critic. That phrase is more true today than ever with the surge in popularity of sites like Amazon and Goodreads where readers offer reviews. How do you cope with the volumes of feedback on your work? Can you separate yourself from opinions to give your creative self freedom to write and keep writing? 

AS: I rarely get too upset by a bad review. Everyone comes to a book with a different viewpoint and those viewpoints might clash. I certainly haven’t enjoyed every book that I’ve read. 

NM: That sounds like the voice of experience.

AS: I was more concerned about reviews at the start of my career and would take them more personally. But now, with the advent of Amazon and Goodreads, I actually get a kick out of the bad reviews. Sometimes they can be quite creative (my favourite had a line that went something like “I had to drink a Coke while I was reading Dust in order to stay awake”). The only time I am frustrated by reviews is when they say something that is truly false about the book. Oh, plus my mom always says the books are good.

NM: Huh? Oh, sorry. I was drinking a Coke while you answered that last question. Okay. Seventeen published novels. Here’s the burning question: outline vs. no outline. Plan it out, or go with the gut and let epiphany take over your writing?

AS: Who is this Epiphany person?

NM: A rare and deeply cool person who only visits writers when they are asleep.

AS: I rarely do a detailed outline. I have a few notes and a general idea of the first scene and perhaps a few sketches of other scenes. Then I just jump in the car and drive. Not a real car, I mean a “prose” car. It really is a journey of discovery and epiphanies for me. It makes the process more interesting…but can lead to a lot of rewriting.

NM: It seems like Epiphany visits you when you’re awake. Lucky guy. So, besides our friend Epiphany, what’s the one thing (be it a technology, a notebook, a wristwatch, or pen) that you can't be without as a writer?

AS: Scrivener. The writing program that I use. Hands down it is the best for writing prose and comic books. I know you asked for one thing…but I also can’t imagine writing without my treadmill desk. It sounds like the oddest thing in the world…but it keeps we awake, alert and active enough to eat several Turtles a day.

NM: Speaking of things you can’t do without, who, besides the obvious agent and editor, do you turn to for advice when things are rocky on your writing journey?

AS: My wife, Brenda Baker, is a fellow writer and very good at pointing out the faults (in my novels) in a gentle way.

NM: It seems more and more people are stretching their writer wings, and want to learn the craft of fiction writing, and navigate the world of publishing. What advice do you give to writers who are looking to seize the year and take control of their writing career?

AS: It’s such a cliché, but write every day and always look for ways to improve your craft. Writing is like working out for a Triathlon. I’ve never done one, but they look hard and you have to train hard. Writing is the same. It takes training. And tea breaks.

NM: Triathlon with tea breaks. Gottcha. Art, what are you working on now, and when will it be in reader’s hot little hands?

AS: A novel titled Flickers that is set in Hollywood in the 1920’s and is about the change between silent to sound films. Except in my book the first sound film is a horror film with a scream in it that summons a dark creature from another dimension…another happy story. It should be out by 2015.

NM: Happily, you have a long backlist we can read and reread while we wait for the new one. The theme this year on Novel Matters is Carpe Annum: Seize the Year! Tell us about a turning-point time in your journey as a writer when you took hold of your career. What did that look like? How did that moment change your trajectory as a writer?

AS: Honestly it would be back in 2001 when my novel Dust won the Governor General’s Award. That part was out of my control, but I did “seize” control by putting my very best book out there into the world. The award did help the general public learn that I actually existed (which is always nice as a writer) and led to a long list of invites to travel across the country and sales that paid the rent. And from there I just try to keep making each book a little better than the last one. I try not to repeat myself in my writing, so I’m always looking for a new storyline or way of writing a story that will be interesting to the reader (and to me).

NM: Art, thank you for dropping by today, for sharing a part of your writing journey with us. Lots of encouragement and wisdom, and good books to read. We so appreciate you, your work, and your story.