Writing for Glory or Something Greater?

What is so glorious about the literary life? Is it being picked up by Reese or Oprah? Landing on the bestsellers list? Winning the Pulitzer Prize? Or is it simply the pleasure of sitting in your book-lined study deeply imagining and letting words flow like water from your fingertips?

If you’ve been writing for a little or a long, long time, you’ve probably realized that most of these are fantasies. It’s no easier to land on the bestsellers list than to write with the ease of a flowing stream. Writing is difficult. It takes time, discipline, skill, and creative energy. Many aspiring writers peter out before they ever type “The End.”

I don’t blame or condemn them. It’s a tall order to pour out heart and soul, alone and undaunted, for hours, days, weeks, sometimes years. If you have managed it, I applaud you, even if your words never reach publication. Trust me, publication is an entirely different beast: often frustrating in the best of circumstances, demoralizing in the worst. In either case, there are no guarantees of success, assuming that “success” means glory, fame, or funds.

But if you set aside those more tangible objectives, you will find that the work of writing is a reward in itself. During those precious, incubatory hours, you get to live many lives simultaneously, becoming intimate with other beings of your own making whose challenges and opportunities both reflect and differ from your own.

Writing’s power is in allowing you to step into another’s shoes. You become more compassionate, open and understanding through both reading and writing. You can experience things that terrify or edify from the safety of the page. And you grow from those experiences. Not only the writer. Perhaps even more important, your readers are transformed, too.

In this time of deep division in our nation and world, perhaps a bit more fiction in our lives could help us comprehend what repels us and embrace what feels foreign, strange, or threatening. While it may not always bring tangible, personal rewards, writing might just have the power to turn enemies into neighbors and friends.

Artifact of the Month: The Bayeux Tapestry ANIMATED!

Anyone who recalls my first novel, The Thrall’s Tale, will appreciate my amusement at this fantastic animation of The Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when William the Conqueror essentially put an end to the Viking Age. Dated to the mid-11th century AD, it is actually not a tapestry at all but an embroidery made of decorative stitches on existing cloth instead of woven into the fabric on a loom.

In this animation, you get a sense of the narrative in action, including an ominous comet, seasickness, and plenty of battle and blood. As has been the case with fabric arts through most of history, the tapestry was most likely sewn by the hands of women memorializing the triumphs and tragedies of men. Perhaps there’s a larger story to be written of its making?

Fun Times at Book Festivals

If you’re a reader, a book festival sounds better than a trip to Disneyland. So many books to consider, panels and conversations to attend with authors you love or have never heard of before.

For an author, book festivals can feel like fun or torture, depending on how you get involved. If you are a featured author and there’s an audience full of excited readers, it’s terrific. If you are standing in the pouring rain under a barely adequate tent, trying to protect your precious books from completely turning to mush while desperately trying to draw attention from the meandering crowd of seven who have braved the elements to purchase… not your book! Well, maybe not so much fun.

I’m describing a dear friend’s experience at the recent Brooklyn Book Festival. Mine was slightly better, mostly because I was with my fellow Regal House author friends. Each publisher had their own table and ours was protected on three sides by a waterproof tent placed, luckily, away from the wind. So while our feet got wet and tired and there weren’t as many visitors or sales as we’d hoped, we managed to have a good day.

What was the most popular item on our Regal House table? The free chocolate!

Brooklyn wasn’t my only recent book festival appearance. I and several other Regal House authors drove up to Saratoga Springs, NY, for their annual event. This time, while the weather was gorgeous outside, we were stationed inside at the far end of a large municipal hall. To find us, you had to navigate a labyrinthine spread of other authors’ tables, but not before you managed to dodge all the kids’ authors and their fun and games.

Strewn across the central space were banners, posters, and eye-catching displays including gigantic Styrofoam skulls and coffin-shaped bookshelves at some of the horror authors’ tables. There were gimmicks and giveaways and twinkling lights, with everyone hoping to draw attention to their particular passion project—that perfect book that would make the passing reader pause.

It was fun. It was exhausting. I would not have done it alone. If I haven’t mentioned this before in this newsletter, the very best part of publishing AKMARAL has been the powerful new friendships I’ve made.

We’re a rare breed—those of us who spend our free hours writing. And rarer still, those who make it to a published book. Rarest of all, those who have the gumption to promote and know how to do it. I’ve been blessed with several of these singular specimens. (Can several be singular? Hmm…)

I’m not quite done with festivals, with the prestigious and humongous Miami Book Fair coming up. There I’ll be featured in an “in conversation” with one of my Regal House friends, Crissa Jean Chappell. (What would I do without you?) Please join us at 10 AM on November 23.

Books Bring the World Together

While AKMARAL may not be a household name in the USA, in Kazakhstan, it’s as popular as Olivia or Abigail. The name means “white deer” and has powerful significance in the region. As my novel’s title, it has brought quite a lot of attention from the other side of the world, including an invitation last month to the Kazakhstan Mission to the United Nations to be interviewed by Kazakh media. Here I am with a very tall and charming journalist. (Or maybe I’m just surprisingly short?) Thanks to everyone who made the interview happen, including Dana Vasabova, the Kazakhstan Ambassador to the USA and his wife who apparently enjoyed the book.

PROMPT: Write a Happy Story

I love this quote: "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page" from French author Henry de Montherlant. I believe that he’s saying that you cannot write a story without some sort of darkness. I can’t tell you how many of my students apologize before they share work that “gets kind of dark.” For me, there’s never a need to apologize. Writing is an opportunity to revel in both darkness and light. Writing is all about struggle and challenge—both with the work of doing it, and with the stuff that makes stories worth writing at all.

But seriously, try to imagine a story that has nothing difficult it in. What comes to mind are those soothing children’s books where every cardboard page turns to another reassurance about how much the child is loved. But if you dig more deeply, even there is hidden darkness. Why would the child wonder or ask or need to be reassured if, deep down, there wasn’t some fear or anxiety? Life is all about “growing up,” of course. And anyone who’s done it, even for a handful of years, will attest to the truth that life isn’t always easy.

But life’s challenges also bring joy and hope and triumph, which is the very stuff of narrative. Our characters search and struggle for their greatest wishes, desires, or goals. Along the way, if they keep their objectives in sight, they can overcome almost anything.

So, here’s my writing challenge: try to write a happy story, one in which nothing terrible happens at all. This is an exercise in inverse thinking. The goal is to demonstrate that we need conflict to write. As a dear friend loves to say, “Put your character up in a tree and throw stones at them.” Metaphorical stones, of course! (Though I’m thinking now of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.) If you give this a try, see if you can make a compelling story without any strife. If you do, send me a message. I’d love to read it!

AKMARAL: a nomad woman warrior of the ancient Central Asian steppes must make peace with making war

“A crackling novel”—Publishers Weekly

“A gripping saga”— #1 bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

4.8 stars on Amazon | 4.4 stars on Goodreads - PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN REVIEW!

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