There’s more than one way to write a novel, a group of star-studded authors shared at the 2022 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library Saturday.
One by one, six accomplished authors took time to share with 250 people in the Hoover Library Theatre the stories of how they became writers and the processes they use to write their books.
On one hand, there’s Jason Mott, who won the 2021 National Book Award for a novel called “Hell of a Book.” Mott gets up every day at 5 a.m. and writes for a certain number of hours per day religiously, he said.
“That’s probably why I’m still single,” he joked.
Mott does an outline for all of his books before he actually starts writing and is a very big organizer, he said.
On the other hand, there’s Kevin Wilson, whose first novel, “The Family Fang,” was made into a movie starring Jason Bateman, Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken and whose latest novel, “Nothing to See Here,” was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Time AND Buzzfeed.
Wilson said he will go long periods of time without writing anything, sometimes as much as nine weeks. Instead, he collects ideas for a story in his head and repeats them over and over in his head as he goes about daily tasks, looping the story in his brain. The bad ideas fade away, and the good ones stay, he said.
“There’s a point where my brain can’t contain it anymore,” and he knows it’s time to write, he said. His wife also is a writer, and they take turns going away for seven to 10 days to write, he said.
“I write like crazy fast,” he said. “I wrote ‘Nothing to See Here’ in 10 days.”
Wilson said getting up early in the morning to write doesn’t work for him because he’s not very coherent in the morning.
“That’s not me. I can’t do it,” he said. “At first, I felt like a failure, and then it’s like, this is just the way that I work.”
Steve Berry, the keynote speaker for the Southern Voices Festival who spoke Friday night, shared that he, like Mottt, is very systematic in the way he writes. He tries to spend at least six hours a day each weekday writing at least 1,000 words to stay on schedule to put a book out every year. He’ll spend the afternoons doing research.
When he’s about halfway through writing a book, he’ll start doing research for the next one, he said, so each book takes about 18 months from beginning to completion, he said. He has penned 21 novels and 11 e-book originals and sold 25 million books in 52 countries.
Wilson, who has written two short story collections and three novels, said he takes a different set of strategies with each of his books. “It always feels brand new to me,” he said.
Mott said every book is a different creative experience for him, too, and his strategy changed over time. He continues to outline all his stories in advance to give him a roadmap, but he has learned to let the story evolve and sometime stray from the original outline, he said.
“It’s a very delicate balance of control and freedom, kind of like raising kids,” Mott said. “You’ve got to have a balance of like guiding the ship but also letting them be who they want to be. Books are a lot like that.
“There is no one path to writing,” Mott said. “There really is no right way to achieve the goal as long as the end product is to turn out pages. … It’s important to find what works for you.”
DIFFERENT WAYS TO WRITE
Rachel Hawkins, a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books for teens who also had her first adult novel, “The Wife Upstairs,” become an editor’s pick for amazon.com, agreed there’s no right way to write a novel.
“Nobody’s journey is the same,” she said. “It’s both a very cool and occasionally frustrating part of our business.”
She was very successful with her young adult novels, particularly the “Hex Hall” series, but after her 11th book was running out of ideas, she said.
Her agent sent her an email from a book packager who was looking for a writer to write a modern version of “Jane Eyre” for an adult audience, and she agreed to take on the task.
She wrote a 10-page proposal, and the book packagers loved it, so she went about the task of working with a team of people to write the book, which ended up being “The Wife Upstairs.”
Putting together a book with a team of people was a fascinating process, Hawkins said. She initially was worried whether the book would feel like her own, but by the end of the process, it absolutely did, she said.
“Every word of the book is mine. I wrote it,” she said. “They helped me plot it.”
Peter Swanson, who was written seven novels that made bestseller lists for The Sunday Times and The New York Times, said he typically will stew over ideas for books in his head for a long time before he ever starts writing anything down. It’s like a “daydream process,” he said.
The bad ideas end up withering on the vine, but “it’s the ones that don’t become books,” he said. “I’ll have enough in my head that I feel that I need to start writing it out.”
Sometimes it takes months or years to get to the point of writing, he said. The one exception was “Eight Perfect Murders,” he said. He plotted pretty much that entire book within an hour while walking around a lake and went back home and started writing immediately, he said.
STREAM OF CONCSCIOUSNESS
Jennifer Egan, who in 2011 won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” said her entire writing process is geared toward accessing her subconscious mind.
She doesn’t write directly out of her own life experiences or experiences of people she knows, she said. She also doesn’t start with an outline of a plot, she said. Instead, she starts with a time and place, a sense of atmosphere and writes spontaneously from there, she said.
She will choose a location to visit, see who shows up and watch what they do, she said. “Whoever shows up become my characters, and what they do becomes my plot,” she said. “That sounds insane until you think about the analogy of improvisation.”
She looks for material that feels alive and sees how far she can take it, she said.
“The joy of writing fiction for me is a sense of leaving my life behind and entering a different world,” Egan said. “Fiction for me is a portal into the unknown.”
She’ll typically handwrite five to seven pages of material a day and read over it once the next day to re-enter her stream of consciousness, she said. Often times, the names of characters will change, and their personalities will change, she said.
She usually ends up with “a gigantic mess” that leaves her feeling hopeless and overwhelmed and then works to mold the story into a more concrete form, she said. In the end, she typically only uses one-third to one-fourth of her original work, she said.
The end goal is to create something fun that allows the reader to experience the same escape that she experienced, she said.
Egan said she also views fiction as a way for people to explore the secret part of their inner lives with the way they present themselves to the outside world, which often are in direct contradiction to one another.
“Fiction shows us the inner life confronting the outer life and the ways they don’t match up and the misunderstandings that result,” Egan said. “Fiction is the best way, I have found, to feel connected to the sweep of human history, the radical ways that people have changed over the centuries, mostly because of technology, and the fundamental ways that we are still the same — interior creatures grappling with the way to present ourselves in a social world.”
AUDIENCE REACTION
Penny Hatfield, an audience member who came to Southern Voices from Tuscaloosa, said this was her first time to visit the festival. She came with friends who have been numerous times and primarily came herself because she loves Egan, she said.
Hatfield said she was perhaps most intrigued by Egan’s unusual and unplanned writing process. “I think it really shows through in her writing,” Hatfield said.
While she enjoyed hearing Egan, she also was happy to expand her horizons by hearing the other authors, she said.
Peggy Honeycutt, an audience member from Vestavia Hills, said the authors at the festival were so informative. “It was so fun,” she said. “It was just such a fantastic day.”
Author Signe Pike was the most interesting to her because Honeycutt has ancestors from Scotland and Pike has written a historical series that reveals the story of Languoreth, a powerful and forgotten queen of sixth-century Scotland.
Honeycutt said she has never read any of Pike’s books but bought two of them at the festival. “I love reading books about that,” she said. “I’m so excited.”
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2022-02-27 06:44:43Z
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