Printable: Harper Lee

it's been a while since i uploaded a printable. and i happen to love this quote and the simplicity of the thought. obviously you need to know your audience when you write, but before it becomes anything worth reading, you have to have that reason to write it in the first place. if you start out trying to target an audience from the beginning, your audience will feel you out and move on quickly. readers and music listeners can sniff out that kind of stuff. so write (or create) for you first. it's amazing what it will turn into! 

i guess another way of putting it: be authentic. 

Click here for free printable!

sponge-ing: kristin hannah

kristin hannah. holy wow. i was absolutely overjoyed with my experience at this event. the place: parnassus books nashville, the time: 6:30 pm. the writer: well, i already told you. 

i'm not posting this the day after it happened because i saw two huge author events in two days...both brought in by parnassus i might add. such a mighty little bookstore. but, i will tell you...i am overwhelmed with the two experiences i have had. whew. while i went to this one, my husband and dog were at my parents' house eating dinner without me, which was the plan, don't worry. so, when i was done with the event, i went back to my parents' house. i was on cloud nine, i was jittery, i was delirious in a way i never get. my cousin even commented on it when i called her afterward to tell her how it went. she said "ash, you never get this way about anyone" and laughed. she's right. i don't. but last night i did. i totally geeked out. and i'm slightly embarrassed and thrilled by that geeking. 

my mom said "honey, you're like a teenager! bouncing around the house!"

my dad was sick in bed and he even commented. 

my husband chuckled. 

and i was delirious almost all night long. 

so, just like with paula hawkins, i will trudge through my notes and give you all i took from this amazing event, which is a lot, i will warn you. she's written 20+ novels, so it's kind of expected. 

here we go again! (and i'm sorry but this one is long. but if you're a fan or a writer, you won't mind!)

• first of all, kristin hannah is normal, charming, a little OCD (she says) about certain things, and thorough. and she was genuine, which isn't always guaranteed. 
• where she got the idea for The Nightingale: while she was researching world war II russia for my favorite of her novels Winter Garden (go read it), she came across a memoir of a 19-year-old belgian girl who documented an escape route fromnazi-occupied france. obviously, she couldn't use that memoir in Winter Garden, but still, it stayed with her. and she kept reading about the french resistance, and about the ordinary women who did extraordinary things throughout. 
• the voice of Winter Garden gave her the confidence to do another historical fiction project, since she usually wrote contemporary.
  
• wrote the first line of the book on page 450 originally...it's an amazing line. after editing and moving it around a few times, she realized it was the crux of the entire story. i always find these details interesting :) 
• her writing regimen (my question to her, of course): she is a rockstar basically because she writes/researches from 8-4 every day of the week and takes 1 month off a year for a vacation. she usually does five months of research, then writes a scene by scene outline, then writes the first 200 pages–then after that, she usually gets bored with it. at that point, she gives it to her writer friend sarah to rip to shreds. (i have a sarah, her name is lindsey!) they share a bottle of wine, and sarah tells ms. hannah everything that's wrong with the first 200 pages. usually there is one thing sarah likes. so then, ms. hannah goes back to work and starts over with that one thing in mind. another 200 pages, another sarah/wine day, etc...and once she gets to 400 pages without getting bored, she finally feels good. 
• she was going to be a lawyer, no doubt about it, until her mother (who was battling breast cancer) told her she would be a writer during her 3rd year. according to KH, she thought her mom was crazy, but then, they started writing a romance novel together to pass the time. her mom chose the genre. after her mom died, she simply put it away, and it wasn't for another couple years, when she was bed-ridden at 14 weeks of pregnancy, that her husband suggested she pull the box of research back out. that's when she really became a writer. she gave herself until her son was in 1st grade to get a writing deal...she got one when he was 3. and 27 years later...voila. 
• in early drafts of The Nightingale, the characters were very cardboard. once she got the history right, she went back to flesh out the characters and their relationships. 
• when asked what she liked to read: "as a writer, you can learn something from every book." amen to that. she reads everything but she loves thrillers and YA fantasy fiction.
• the way she creates fully believable characters is almost entirely through backstory. and it changes from draft to draft until she gets it right: in one draft, a character might be a medical student from a privileged family. in the next, that same character might be a janitor who grew up with nothing, and then the final might be somewhere in between. "i just keep changing who they are until they say what i want them to say. and sometimes i see it for the first time on the page." (paraphrased).  she did this in her latest novel. at one point, the two girls were twins, then best friends, and finally they became sisters, one younger and one older. KH said it took a while to find that perfect relationship. i'm glad to know i'm not the only one who takes a while with this whole writing thing.

• names of characters have to be exactly right or she can't go on. if that's the case, out come the baby name books until they are right.
• she says most of her characters are versions of her
• a character named brian has shown up in at least 6 of her novels, but he's never made it to the final draft (hilarious)
• another question of mine was how she writes (material-wise). she said she writes on yellow, college-ruled legal pads with the same 12-pack uniball pens from costco–which she makes her husband get every time he's there. she writes by hand (whoop whoop!) and her assistant types it into the computer.  oh, and apparently, one written page=one typed page. 
• she wrote 1/2 of Winter Garden sitting on the beach, so yeah, she prefers to write by hand. i concur. 
• my follow up to all this writing by hand stuff (since she writes draft after draft) was whether she ever got tennis elbow. she said the key was to rest your arm on something. and then another woman piped up from the audience and yelled "GET A BOPPY!" you know, the nursing pillow new mothers use? well, i got one the next day, and i love it. i even got a cute non-baby cover for it. see picture:) 
• in general she doesn't do sequels because she has already said everything in the original.
• two of her books made her cry in the copy edit stage: The Nightingale and Winter Garden
• the three books of hers that challenged her (and are her favorite): 

         a. Firefly Lane

         b. Winter Garden

         c. The Nightingale

     

sponge-ing: paula hawkins

i bought this book a few days before i heard paula hawkins speak at the nashville library on behalf of parnassus books in nashville, so i am not at a point in the story to even begin to spoil it. however, i want to share my experience of hearing her speak and read in person. it was divine. i don't use that word often, but it is the word that comes to mind. 

paula hawkins has the most divine voice. as is with most british accents, i could have listened to her for hours. 

here are the notes i took: 

-she was born and raised for a good while in zimbabwe.

-the original seedling of the idea of the train came when she was seventeen, commuting to university i believe into london. the train she road on was an underground, but it went above ground in a few spots, one being next to trackside houses in which she could see the inhabitants on a daily basis and seem to know them after a while. 

-later on (like years later), she randomly asked herself a question: what would i do if i witnessed a crime happening from a train? would i even be a helpful witness? would i even be able to identify the house? she called this the "germ" that really started the story.

-and then, the final piece: she had written another story (never published) with a character much like the main character rachel in The Girl On The Train and decided to give rachel to the story that is currently the #1 new york times bestseller. GOOD MOVE, girl. 

-it took ms. hawkins 12-13 months to write and edit the novel, and it has to be said, that it's her FIRST one! holy cow. 

-there were some word changes made for the US version. apparently she used UK-specific words that we wouldn't recognize like "fly-tipping", which means dumping rubbish on the side of a road or train track or something. 

-she was a journalist for 15 years covering finance and real estate, which she said obviously didn't help her too much in terms of writing. however, she said being a journalist did help her with the mechanics of deadlines and the economics of words (i.e. fewer adverbs and getting to the point). 

-the reason she didn't write fiction sooner was based on confidence. she always wanted to, but it was only when she was commissioned to write a novel for someone else (their idea, their name), that she even attempted it. after a few more of those, she had enough confidence to try...and i, for one, am so glad she did.

-the story is told from 3 different narrators. but ms. hawkins said she had originally intended on just one voice: rachel's. this was interesting to me because i always wonder about the original plans of writers. from experience in writing just two novels of my own, i am no stranger to changing plans along the way and developing new beginnings and bringing new characters into the story sooner, etc. but i am always curious if that's normal for other writers or if it's just my being an amateur. 

-she also said that the most challenging part of the story was getting the other two narrators right in terms of their voices. rachel was easy, the "loudest" in her head, but the other two took a little more work to establish. i think she did a fabulous job. 

-the book is in its 7th printing here in the US. again, holy cow. 

-another of my favorite questions asked was about her writing regiment. she said she gets up quite early and writes from the morning until mid-afternoon, when she then reads or does admin. she isn't a stickler on word count, but under a deadline, she sets loose weekly goals.

-her best ideas come when she is immersed in water in her bathtub with nothing to write with. i loved that she said that because my best ideas come during hot yoga when i have to wait for the class to be over to write it down. talk about discipline! :) 

-my favorite quote from her talk: 

"virtues aren't that interesting, are they? i'm much more interested in vices." 

currently reading: tempting fate by jane green

jane green is just so cute. i have been reading her stories for years, and i find that each one is charming in some way. tempting fate was no different. i read this story a few months back, but i fell off my blog game, so now i have a long list to catch up on. this one was first. 

i don't like to say anything about the actual book when i "review" them for one reason: i don't want to ruin it. i do, however, want to tell you if i personally enjoyed it. so take it or leave, but here are my thoughts. 

before i read this book, i was on janegreen.com watching the interviews she'd posted surrounding the release. why? i love her english accent! another reason why i love reading her novels (in my head, i'm reading them with her accent). ms. green mentioned something in one of her interviews that made me even more interested in reading the book i'd just purchased. 

she said something to the effect that the topic surrounding the novel was one that got mixed reviews. that it was definitely sticky, but that she knew that it was a real problem in her own connecticut town. you'll understand when you read it, but i know what she meant by it. it's not something women like to talk about or think that is actually happening. so with that said, go read it and get back to me. is this happening around you? 

oh, and something else she mentioned: twenty-somethings were more appalled by it because the story is about a middle-aged wife and mother. 

just keep those in mind when you're reading. i'm 29, so i'm still technically one of those twenty-somethings, and i was not appalled. i can't say i know exactly what the character felt, but i was certainly not appalled. i felt for her predicament and...oh i'll just let you read it.

i think novels should be about real life pickles. they shouldn't always be tidy or follow any invisible rules. and i commend jane green for picking a pickle that is the furthest thing from tidy. 

SIDEBAR:someone asked me why i read novels instead of nonfiction. or rather why i write novels instead of nonfiction. my answer: you discover so much more when you are a fly on the wall in someone else's life. in a novel, you get to go along with characters in real time and experience their thoughts and fears and watch them make choices, the right ones and the wrong ones. you don't know what you're getting into when you pick up a novel. and the writer doesn't necessarily know what he/she is getting into during the process of writing it either. that might surprise you, but i definitely can say i didn't set out to say many of the things that ended up in falling stars. in other words, i discovered it while it was coming out rather than it being on a list of things i wanted to cover. 

so, i think writers should read tempting fate to witness jane green's honesty on a difficult subject. and i think readers should go along on this ride, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with their lives. 

if you didn't have time(or the energy) to read my rant: THUMBS UP, go read it.