This weekend I went to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville for a reading and it was lovely. For many reasons:

1.Incomparably beautiful drive across the Cumberland plateau where early fall was just beginning to paint the hills rolling away under a blue sky.
2. I shared a room with friends from Knoxville: Melissa Brenneman, Emily Dziuban and Elizabeth Gentry. Books and pajama party with wonderful friends, hard to beat.
3. My friends coddled my little fantasy of a drink in The Hermitage bar after the reading so I was happy.
4. Maybe 50 people at my reading, varied and attentive, good questions and I didn’t jumble too much. Sold some books.
5. I learned that Kit Carson spoke French, Spanish and about 8 Native American languages. A photographic recall of landscape but could not read or write English. Speaking so many languages did not stop him from pioneering the scorched earth tactics against native peoples that Sherman so ably employed at Atlanta. However, Carson did feel guilty later.
6. I heard Lee Martin read from his new book, Break the Skin and it was very very fine. I just started his The Bright Forever: the calm, sure stroke of a master. Really a gift.
7. I heard Ann Patchett speak passionately for independent booksellers.
8. I thought some more about my next book, which it turns out will be set in the 19th, not the 12th century. More on this later.
9. The Tennessee legislative halls, so often the cradle of repressive and misbegotten laws, was for three days the host of wonderful written word.
10. A Sunday morning radio preacher announced that he’s never seen a hearse with a U-Haul behind it. So I guess the message is: enjoy these fall days.
 

I just heard from Amanda Bergeron, my indefatigable editor at HarperCollins, that When We Were Strangers has sold 3,100 ebooks, a record which she says means “confetti needed.” I’ve got none handy but tonight when our house fills up with local Italians and Italo-philes for our “Cinema Sotto Le Stelle” (cinema under the stars) home-made film festival with pot luck dinners and recent Italian releases shown on our deck, we’ll celebrate this.

But back to ebooks and writers, there’s the plus that the return is slightly more on ebooks than on “real” books (about 15 cents in my case). But there’s the minus that potential readers can’t read over someone’s shoulder or see the cover and ask if it’s a good book and (let’s hope) hear yes and go buy it. But the big deal for me is that there’s less chance in an ebook world for “sightings in the wild,” that electric moment when you are sitting at your gate at the airport and see someone actually reading your book, holding it in their hands, turning the pages, maybe (oh sheer delight) walking with it, reading. Naturally, there’s the down chance they toss it and pull out the National Enquirer, but still, you saw your work in a human hand. Now this probably happens to Stephen King every day, maybe even in checkout lines at the grocery, but the first time still must be something.

A friend told me she saw two (2) people in a Starbucks with When We Were Strangers, but darn, I don’t go to Starbucks. So I wait for my first “sighting in the wild” — seeing someone else following my Irma through her journey.

I’ve been asked to do a workshop on revision for the local Friends of Literacy group. So I’ve been thinking of Revision Tactics I Have Used. I remember my first creative writing teacher, Miss Vincent, repeating: “You can always revise something. But you can’t revise nothing.” That has been a life line so many times. Just get something down!

When you’ve got something but it doesn’t seem to do what you want, when, as another teacher of mine said, “It’s not close enough to the bone, it doesn’t draw blood,” you might try:

1. Finish this sentence: The main point of this piece is .  . .

2. Put away what you’ve got. Get a fresh screen or piece of paper and rewrite the whole darn thing in 10 minutes of non-stop writing. If you go blank, just keep writing a character name or major image. Finish, shake out your hand and read what you wrote. Your mind may have taken you to the bedrock. In any case, you only invested 10 minutes, but more often than not, a window opens.

3. If the story is being told from the point of view of someone who is not the one with the most at stake, change the point of view to the one who does have the most at stake. “Friend of main character rarely works” unless, as in The Great Gatsby, Nick becomes the main character.

4. Try writing for 10 minutes straight from the antagonist’s point of view. See what you get. This may be uncomfortable, close to your own dark side, but you’ll see what you hadn’t seen before.

5. If the writing itself drags, try this. Print out a page. Highlight every form of “to be,” “to have,” or “to seem” when these appear as the principle verb of the sentence. For example: The elephant is large. He had no teeth. It seemed like summer in January. Revise each sentence using a verb with action. Get rid of “seeming.” Get rid of “looked like” too. This is an amazing process. As one mercenary student put it, “worth the price of tuition.”

6. Go in a quiet room, close the door and read your work aloud. What comes up? Where do you get tired of hearing your own words? Where did you pull back and not go to the bone?

7. And finally, most powerful of all, give your work to a good reader. Listen, just listen to the reactions. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t think “yet” how you’ll fix a problem. Just listen. It’s amazing. Where you once saw a wall, thinking, “this is the best I can do,” a door may open. It may not be easy to go through, but it will take you to a new room.

8. Limit the adjectives and adverbs. They’re way overrated. Go for the nouns and verbs.

9. Other ideas? What works for you?

I’m preparing to give a workshop on research for writers generally and writers of historical fiction in particular. (Sept. 17, sponsored by the Knoxville Writers Guild). I got to wondering what this genre is anyway, I mean what do experts say about it? So I went to the best sources I know, my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates and editor Amanda Bergeron of HarperCollins. They generously wrote their take and said I could use their words here. I can’t imagine better descriptions of this rich, devilishly hard to write, but deeply rewarding (to me anyway) literary genre.

An agent’s view; Regarding a working definition of historical fiction, in the broadest of terms, it is a story set in World War II (or earlier) that’s written for a contemporary (now 21st c) readership, by a contemporary (now 21st c) author. Eventually that timeframe will get dialed forward to incorporate Vietnam, of course, but I think the idea is that it should not be a time period that most of the readers will have directly experienced. Good historical fiction offers a window to the past and allows the reader to feel that he or she is learning something about another time and place, but it also needs to feel modern enough to be accessible in terms of the issues it addresses and the stories it’s interested in telling. (We’re more interested in the Salem Witch Trials than in the nuanced religious and philosophical arguments the Puritans had about church doctrine; Calvinism is important but would probably make a pretty boring novel.)

An editor’s view: I think the best historical fiction authors are those who have done a tremendous amount of research, and yet the reader doesn’t walk away thinking “Wow, the author did so much research.” To be able to write about a time or place it’s crucial to fully understand what you’re writing about so that the characters and scenes leap from the page. To that end, I look for projects that are atmospheric, feel authentic, and tell stories full of rich, lively, engaging characters. The best fiction touches on universal themes, and so I find that the most successful historical fiction projects bring the past to life through ideas and emotions that are just as real now. But to be able to write great fiction in a way that feels natural, it is necessary for the reader to feel confident in the writer and writing. The second something unbelievable or anachronistic occurs, it’s a distraction that takes credibility away from the story and author. For those reasons alone it’s so important that an author become a bit of an authority on their subject (or at least know exactly where they can find what they need). At the same time, it’s never fun to read something that feels bloated with research to the point that it gets in the way of a story.  Bottom line: great storytellers use research as a foundation for their characters and story but nimbly avoid getting tangled up in it.