Category: other writers

The Teaching, the Inspiration, the Chupacabra, the Not-Writing

Nova Ren Suma

November 18, 2015

This has been my most public year, ever, in my life. It’s been wonderful… and it’s also been somewhat of an adjustment for a shy person like me.

So much of 2015 has been about teaching. I really made this goal a priority to have better balance in my life—the ultimate goal was to get a lot of experience so I could get a job at a low-residency MFA program, and I had a specific school in mind—and I’m astounded at how much I did this past year, and how, even before the year was over, I made my goal come true.

I’m going to talk about some of the not-so-good stuff, but first, let’s focus on the good…

Last week I was in Texas, at the Writing Barn, Bethany Hegedus’s wonderful retreat center in the heart of Austin, leading what was billed as A Week in Residency with, well, me. This was a weeklong workshop-retreat for YA and middle-grade novelists, and ten wonderful, enthusiastic writers signed up to spend the week with me. We workshopped, we did writing prompts, we talked, we got inspired, we had guest authors visit, we did readings, we had a real whirlwind… I was so thrilled by how well it all went, and I miss the writers now that it’s over. My TA Jess Capelle (one of my former Djerassi workshop writers!) helped me through the whole week and was rewarded one night by a visit from a possible chupacabra making noise on the rooftop of her cabin! I left the week feeling really inspired, really content and excited, and I hope the writers who worked with me did, too.

Here are some photos from the truly fantastic week (I am sorry to tell you there is no photo of the chupacabra):

The path from my cabin to the barn to lead workshop one morning…

Bethany Hegedus and me at the Writing Barn…

My lecture on Novel Openings at the Writing Barn…

Industry panel at the Writing Barn with local guest authors Cory Putman Oakes, Lynne Kelly, and Varian Johnson

The lights outside the barn at night…

Book event at BookPeople in Austin with my friend and fellow author, Suzanne Young (look at how much fun we had!)…

At BookPeople with Suzanne Young and my Writing Barn TA, Jess Capelle

The workshop group! Such a fantastic group of writers! Here we are all with my TA Jess Capelle and guest author Lynne Kelly

At the end of the week, we painted rocks with a word that symbolized the week for us… Here are our rocks…

I may as well take this moment to tell you that if you’re reading this post thinking it might be nice to take a workshop like this with me, I’ll have to calm down with the outside teaching very soon, because I’m now on faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. BUT, I am still committed to teaching this last weeklong workshop in 2016, at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California, quickly approaching in March. Apply now, before the deadline of December 17!

Here’s my latest newsletter with some more info and a FAQ, if you’re interested.

And I should tell you that Bethany has some wonderful programming upcoming at the Writing Barn in 2016, and keep an eye on the website!

Now a breath.

I do need a breath. It’s been a busy year of events, teaching, and coming to a great realization about the book I was writing, which meant shelving one thing and starting fresh on another.

I have one last thing before the year is out. In case you’ll be at this conference in Minneapolis, I’ll tell you:

This weekend I’ll be at NCTE/ALAN (I’ll be signing The Walls Around Us on Saturday, November 21 2-3pm at the Algonquin booth 525–527, and I’ll be on a panel at ALAN first thing Tuesday morning).

But after that I need to go quiet. The teaching and appearances have been important, but know what also is? The writing.

So what about the writing, you may ask? What about the writing…

I know I made the right decision about my next book. I know that in my heart and my gut. But what I don’t know is what’s ahead for me, for my writing career, and the weight of that has been pressing down lately, pressing down hard. Being online and seeing all the news of book deals flashing by makes me happy for the writers… and mad at myself for not being faster, more prolific, more career-minded, more smart. This ugly game of comparison is something that gets a lot of us down.

I’m worried my negativity is seeping out. Not to my students, no, not during my workshops—not when I’m talking one-on-one with another writer about her novel and wishing her all the great and lovely things. I mean when I’m alone with myself, in my writing corner, as I am today, when it’s just me and the page and my whole future is reliant on what I do there, what words come out, and how well they sound and how slow or fast they dribble onto the page.

Sometimes all those doubts and second-guesses and ugly thoughts get animated into a creature that follows you and wants to take you down: a chupacabra on your rooftop, and you’re huddled inside wishing it would go away.

I think what would help is some time off from social media (Twitter especially) and my bad online habits (Googling myself to see if there’s something I should know and seeing snippets of bad reviews of my novels by accident in the search results… Clicking away incessantly on distracting, unnecessary things… Comparing myself again and again to everyone else, when I have always and only been myself in all things and I need to remember that).

I may take off the month of December, apart from sharing the Djerassi deadline and book news, when/if I have things to share.

I may hide from the chupacabra for a while. I know so many of you understand.

I want to make real progress on this novel before 2016 gets here, so I can look at this year and see that I didn’t just make my teaching goal come true… I also moved forward as a writer. That’s what I am first and foremost. (Otherwise, why even bother teaching at all, right?)

For those of you feeling like you let this year slip away from you in some places… it’s not over yet. We still have time.

What if we wrote a ton of words that we felt good about to round out the end of 2015?

What if?
AWP: The Writer (Not Author) Conference

Nova Ren Suma

April 19, 2015

I remember my first AWP conference. It was in the winter of 2008, before I had my first book out, and around the time I had racked up dozens upon dozens of rejections from literary agents for my second adult novel and was feeling pretty low about my publishing prospects.

I still wanted to write literary fiction for adults, and I had not yet embraced writing YA. The AWP conference was in New York City that year, within walking distance of my office, but I took two personal days to attend. I went to as many panels as I could take and carried home as many literary journals as I could handle on the subway… There was one panel I remember distinctly, because it ended up sitting with me for months afterward. It was a panel about YA fiction, and the wonderful Margo Rabb was on it. I had written down an anecdote she’d said, which was when she told her writer friends that her novel—written from a teenage perspective and originally intended for adults—would be published as a YA novel they said, “What a shame.” She spoke about lifting those judgments and the readers she’s found in YA fiction in a way that made me think about doing this, and I do think she’s one of the reasons I’m here today. That was a transformative time for me, when my mind was open… a perfect moment to attend AWP.

Now, years later, I just attended my fourth AWP conference—this time in Minneapolis. My first time going, I was a quiet note-taker in the audience, but this year, I was on two panels of my own, speaking before crowded rooms full of people. (And then, after, quietly taking notes in the audience at everyone else’s panels. Some things never change.)

Photo: Claire Kirch, courtesy of Publishers Weekly. From left: me, Bill Konigsberg, Varian Johnson, and Jewell Parker Rhodes.

I was thankful to be sent to the conference by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, where I am an instructor and a YA mentor in their Your Novel Year certificate program. Our panel was in the first slot on the first morning of the conference, on Plot IS Character, Character IS Plot, with the glorious Jewell Parker Rhodes, the director of the Piper Center and an incredible writer and woman, along with some of the Your Novel Year instructors, including Bill Konigsberg, Varian Johnson, and me. We talked about plot and character and how the two intersect and inform each other… and our panel was even written up in Publishers Weekly!

The next day, I took part in a panel on Growing Up in a Magical Space: Magical Realism in Contemporary YA and Children’s Literature, moderated by the immensely talented Laura Ruby, one of my favorite authors!, and with wonderful fellow writers Janet Fox, Nikki Loftin, and Samantha Mabry. We had a great discussion about the blurry definition of magical realism in YA, and I confessed that, to me, The Walls Around Us is a ghost story, though I’ve seen it called magical realism all over the place and had to question my own understanding of the genre and my intentions.

So that was the official stuff. It was an honor to panel with these wonderful fellow authors, and I was thrilled at how packed each of the rooms were and by the great audience questions and the discussions we had.

However, for me, the AWP conference is about far more than talking on a panel, even beside some phenomenal fellow YA authors. AWP is the one conference where I can be a writer and not an author. This is so refreshing to me, it’s like tugging off an uncomfortable set of professional clothes and slipping on a soft pair of pajamas.

What happens when you get to an AWP panel late… You sit on the floor and listen. Here’s my view of the Young Adult Literature and the Female Body panel.

AWP is my favorite conference out of all conferences because of the main focus on writing craft. I like the sense of skill-sharing—that so many writers (was it almost 13,000 this year in Minneapolis?) come together to talk writing, and also do readings and see old friends and have parties and whatever else happens when so many thousands of writers get together in a borrowed city for three/four/five days. I like that I go to think only about writing, to talk only about writing, to gather inspiration and knowledge to make more writing and to teach writing and work with other writers. I’m not being my author-self, I’m being my true-self, which is a writer.

For someone who struggles with the public face of being an author—the online persona, the in-person persona, the competition, the comparison, the cliques, every last stitch of it—I found AWP reinvigorating and, well, refreshing. Probably because YA is still such a small pocket of the conference and so many other kinds of writers are there, too, and I know I’m not in their cliques, perhaps? Maybe the pressure is off because most of the literary magazines and small presses filling the book fair wouldn’t publish me anyway, so I don’t care as much? Maybe that’s it? The sense of freedom?

(Though I did gravitate to the One Story table… buying some issues to support them and sending a little silent wish into the ether that I would one day be published by One Teen Story, my current dream journal. Hey, I haven’t changed that much.)

The mayor (!) of Minneapolis introduced the keynote speaker, Karen Russell. p.s. The mayor of Minneapolis has an unpublished YA novel in her drawer… YA editors, get on that?

All I know is AWP is entirely what you make of it. What I like to do is attend select craft panels and readings and wander the book fair and support literary journals and small presses I admire. No pressure. No stress about networking, though it tends to happen naturally. I keep my schedule overbooked and always open, in case I change my mind, which I do, constantly. I let myself follow my whims.

And I take advantage of how gigantic the crowd is… and disappear to have introvert time in my hotel room whenever I feel like it.

At this year’s AWP, I came away with so much thinking and inspiration and challenges to myself, some I am still mulling over now, a full week later.

Some of my favorite panels included Young Adult Literature and the Female Body with Megan Atwood, Brandy Colbert, Christine Heppermann, Alexandra Duncan, and Steve Brezenoff… Women Writing Darkness: Villains, Violence, and Unhappy Endings with Michelle Hoover, Allison Amend, Sabina Murray, Sheri Joseph, and Kate Racculia… Young Adults, New Adults, & the Women Who Write Them: Navigating the Politics of Gender & Genre in Young Adult Literature with Cecil Castellucci, Laurel Snyder, Lynn Melnick, Marian Crotty, and Stephanie Kuehn… Politics of Empathy: Writing Through Borrowed Eyes with Lorraine Berry, Matthew Salesses, Prageeta Sharma, Tess Taylor, and Aimee Phan… Striving for Balance between Language and Prejudice in Teaching Writing with Alexander Chee, Danielle Evans, Christine Lee, Jennine Capó Crucet, and Mat Johnson… and Teen Sex in Fiction for Adults with Pamela Erens, Gina Frangello, Anna March, Elissa Schappell, and Julia Fierro.

Yep. I went to a good bunch of panels that resonated—and there were so many more I missed, which makes me hungry already for next year’s conference, if I can afford to go, fingers crossed. There is so much going on at once, so much happening at the conference and at off-site places surrounding the conference, that you will never ever feel like you’ve done enough or seen enough people… which I guess makes you all the more inclined to come back next year.

There were only a few panels on YA or children’s books when I attended AWP in 2008. Now, not so many years later, we’re very much a part of things at this yearly conference that you just can’t deny us. Here’s a small sampling of photos from YA and children’s panels this year that was featured in Publishers Weekly.

Some other cool moments: I won a week-long writing retreat in Los Angeles in a raffle! I ran into my oldest writing friend on the plane and ended up hanging out with her for much of the conference (hi, Erin)! I ran into my very first writing workshop teacher, from my first year in college, and she recognized me right away! I introduced myself to a literary fiction author whose books I love and she actually knew who I was! I saw so many colony friends and MFA classmates and summer workshop friends and authors I admire and lovely Binders and I read an intense and gorgeous book on the plane ride home that I’d picked up at the book fair: The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson.

I hope to be able to attend AWP in Los Angeles in 2016. And if I do, let’s try to run into each other there, okay?
The Book of Your Heart Series: Ryan Graudin

Nova Ren Suma

November 3, 2014
When an author says a book she’s written is the Book of Her Heart, what does that mean? In this completely irregular ongoing blog series, I’ve invited guest authors to reveal what they consider the Book of Their Heart—and share why this book holds a distinct and special place apart from all others they’ve written.

Here, to celebrate her book birthday tomorrow, I have Ryan Graudin sharing why The Walled City is the Book of Her Heart…

Guest post by Ryan Graudin

Whenever I try to describe what writing is like to my non-writer friends, I usually resort to Harry Potter references. “My books,” I tell them, “are like Horcruxes. All of them have little pieces of me inside.”

But some books/Horcruxes have a little more of me inside than other books/Horcruxes. Something about The Walled City was different from every other project I’d ever written. It felt… truer, deeper, rawer than anything I’d ever put to paper before. It was a book I wrote solely for me. I honestly thought, during those early months, that no one would want to read, much less buy a YA novel where the plot revolved largely around Asian street children and human trafficking. I’d never read anything quite like what I was creating, and the usual fears of No one will buy this. This is all for nothing. set in.

I wrote anyway. Because I had to.

People always ask me where my inspiration comes from. I tell them travel, which is almost always true. The heart of The Walled City was inspired by two very distinct trips I took in my college years.

When I was twenty-years old I went to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a summer. The purpose of the trip was to experience (and therefore understand) third-world poverty. I lived with a family in the slums, eating only what they ate, sleeping on the floor. I met children who lived in tarps. Children who had nothing to eat but what they could scrounge from trash heaps. Children who seemed to have no guardians to speak of. Children who deserved so much more.

When I was twenty-one years old I traveled to Bolivia, where my future sister-in-law worked (and still does) educating sex workers, providing them with health awareness, child care and (if they desire it) the means to learn the life-skills needed to support themselves if they wanted to leave the industry. Meeting these women, listening to their stories, eating a meal with them, was such a humbling experience. One that forced me to strip away all of my judgments and look at them in a new light.

Through both of these trips I came to realize that people are so much more than their circumstances. So much more than the passing labels or judgments I was so quick to give them. I wanted to help, and not just to help, but to understand. I wrestled and mulled and held these experiences inside. I tried to answer so many questions that seemed unanswerable.

People have many, many different ways of processing. The largest and most obvious of mine is writing.

So I wrote.

I wrote about street kids and trafficked girls. I wrote to try and understand their view, their world. I wrote to try—in some small way—to make sense of the pain and poverty I’d seen. I wrote to try and make sense of my own personal demons. I took all of the questions of my heart and crammed them into the form of a story.

Perhaps one of the reasons this novel has earned its place as my “heart book” is because it’s the most honest I’ve been with myself on the page. The Walled City is a book about trust, and how difficult it is to open yourself up to people after you’ve been hurt. It is a book about pain and isolation. But more than anything I think, it is a book about hope.

There are no simple answers when it comes to issues like poverty and trafficking. But it is my hope that by writing this book and inviting readers into my own search for answers, that I can help others see a world that is usually far in the shadows. A world my twenty-one-ish self only just brushed upon. A world that wrenches your heart, but deserves to be known about.

Ryan Graudin was born in Charleston, SC, with a severe case of wanderlust. When she’s not traveling, she’s busy photographing weddings, writing, and spending time with her husband and wolf-dog. She is also the author of All That Glows. The Walled City is her second novel. You can visit her online at ryangraudin.com.

Order a copy of The Walled City!

Thank you, Ryan, for sharing your Heart Book with my readers. Happy Book Birthday!

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
The Book of Your Heart Series: Amy Reed

Nova Ren Suma

October 15, 2014
When an author says a book she’s written is the Book of Her Heart, what does that mean? In this completely irregular ongoing blog series, I’ve invited guest authors to reveal what they consider the Book of Their Heart—and share why this book holds a distinct and special place apart from all others they’ve written.

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday for her new edgy, contemporary YA novel Damaged, I have Amy Reed opening up for the first time about the book of her heart…

Guest post by Amy Reed

All of my five books have a piece of my heart in them. My new book, DAMAGED, will always be special to me because I was in my first trimester of pregnancy when my husband and I embarked on the cross-country road trip that would serve as the basis of the story. I battled a combination of morning sickness, carsickness, and weird food aversions (including water), all for the sake of art. My daughter was with me, the size of a blueberry, as the story of DAMAGED was born.

But I think the true books of my heart will always be my most autobiographical. BEAUTIFUL is by far the most autobiographical of my books, based on my experience moving from a rural island to a suburb of Seattle in seventh grade, experiences I’ve been very open about in the past. I’ve been less open about CLEAN. It is also very much autobiographical, but I’ve remained vague in interviews about how close I was to the story. After publishing five books, maybe it’s time to open up about why CLEAN is the book of my heart.

CLEAN is based on my own experience in rehab when I was sixteen. I wrote it during my first year of sobriety after my second rehab, at age twenty-nine. I am now over five years sober and the happiest I’ve ever been, and I think my recovery plays a huge part in all of my novels since. I started drinking and using in much the same way as Cassie in BEAUTIFUL—I was thirteen, lonely, terrified, and I wanted to be cool. I fell in with a group of “friends” who were unlike anyone I had ever met, and I did whatever I thought I had to do in order to fit in. I had no foundation of self-esteem to help me say no, or to even ask myself what I actually wanted. I was addicted from the very beginning. I didn’t get high for fun like everyone else. I did it because I had to. It was the only way to keep myself from feeling all the horrible feelings that kept piling on the more I went in the wrong direction and the more I kept hurting myself.

By the time I was sixteen, I was exhausted and battling depression in addition to my drug abuse. I finally asked my mom for help, and after an evaluation, it was decided that month-long in-patient treatment would be the help I needed. I remember being scared, but more than anything, I remember feeling relieved. It felt good to let go of that secret, to ask for help, to stop trying to do everything on my own.

I learned a lot in rehab and I was clean for over a year afterwards, but I didn’t stay sober. To me, sobriety means much more than just being free from drugs and alcohol; it requires a whole shift in thinking, it requires growth and change and constant active effort to repair broken behavior and thought patterns. I did none of this. I was doing everything the same as before, just without drugs and alcohol. All the feelings I had been pushing away came back with a vengeance, and I was without the only tools I ever had to deal with them, and I wasn’t learning any new tools. I was miserable.

I relapsed shortly after high school graduation, and the next decade of my life was spent riding the downward spiral of addiction and alcoholism. I had gotten into the college of my dreams, but I dropped out just weeks before the end of sophomore year because of depression and an out of control cocaine problem that stole my soul. When I moved to San Francisco at age twenty, that’s when my drinking really took off, and I spent the next several years just barely getting by. Fortunately, I think some part of rehab stuck with me through these dark times, and I’d manage to pull myself out of serious trouble before it got too bad. But I’d always inevitably fall back into it again.

By the time I was in my late-twenties, I was exhausted. I decided to get help. Again, the feeling of relief that I didn’t have to do it alone. This time, I was serious about getting sober. I had too much to lose—a husband, a career, a home. This time, I knew I was going to have to change everything if I wanted to keep anything.

And so, CLEAN was born. I was able to access the raw vulnerability of the characters because I was going through the same things they were. I think of the main female characters—Eva, Kelly, and Olivia—as three parts of myself as a teenager, and it was healing to get in touch with them. I was Eva, the depressed poet misfit. I was Kelly, the pretty girl who didn’t know how to say no. I was Olivia, the perfectionist. In writing their stories, I got to let them go.

So now, five years and four novels later, I have a life beyond my wildest dreams. I am wife to an amazing partner who inspired me with his love to become a better person. I am mother to the most astonishing 18-month old girl who teaches me new ways to love and laugh every day. She has never seen me drunk or high, and hopefully she never will. I am blessed to be able to do what I love for my profession, to write books and reach teens who are a lot like I was, lost and scared but full of heart. I get the most amazing letters and emails from readers who are going through similar things as my characters, and I feel so incredibly honored to help them feel less alone, to inspire them to get help. Everything I have in my life now is a result of my getting sober and changing my life. It is an honor and privilege to share it with you all, and I am forever grateful.

Amy Reed is the author of the edgy, contemporary YA novels BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN, CRAZY, and OVER YOU. Her new book DAMAGED released yesterday, October 14, 2014.

Find out more at www.amyreedfiction.com.

Buy DAMAGED at your local indie, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon

Buy CLEAN at your local indie, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon

Thank you, Amy, for sharing the Book of Your Heart with my readers. Happy Book Birthday to Damaged, which is now on sale as of yesterday… everyone, go grab it!

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
The Book of Your Heart Series: Andrea Hannah

Nova Ren Suma

October 7, 2014
When an author says a book she’s written is the Book of Her Heart, what does that mean? In this completely irregular ongoing blog series, I’ve invited guest authors to reveal what they consider the Book of Their Heart—and share why this book holds a distinct and special place apart from all others they’ve written.

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday this week for Of Scars and Stardust, I have Andrea Hannah sharing the deep heartache that inspired her book…

Guest post by Andrea Hannah

Tomorrow, the book of my heart releases into the world. I’m thrilled and emotional and blissful and a whole bunch of other things that I expected to be when I’ve imagined seeing Of Scars and Stardust on the shelves. What I didn’t expect is the sheer terror.

Writing this book saved me from self-destruction in the same way Goosebumps saved me in fifth grade, and Speak saved me my senior year of high school. The only difference is I wrote this one. And now everyone can see it. Everyone can see me.

Growing up, my childhood was the definition of chaotic. My parents split when I was four, and my mom and I moved around a lot. As an adult, I can see my mom’s dependence on me was pretty unhealthy, but at the time I thought that this intense pressure to be what she needed—what everyone needed—was normal. Past Andrea didn’t yet realize that she spent hours and hours every single day devouring stories that were so unlike her own life so that she could escape the pressure of the one she already had. So in flooded the talking Chucky dolls and aliens and a team of rag-tag teen entrepreneurs documenting their adventures in babysitting.

In high school, my mom was diagnosed with a terminal illness. A different kind of pressure, this time to figure out how to navigate the world without my primary parent. More books, only these ones laced with themes of loss and guilt and grief and confusion and all those you’re supposed to feel when someone you love is about to die.

The thing is, I didn’t feel anything. Not yet. So while books gave me permission to feel terrified and heartbroken, I just…couldn’t. There’s a paragraph in Of Scars and Stardust that actually talks about this delayed reaction, right after Claire finds out her sister is missing. She says, “I waited. And I felt nothing.” That was true for me, too.

All of those things came years later, as a newly-married adult, and the guardian of my little brother. Only they didn’t show up right after I signed those custody papers when my mom got too sick to care for my brother and quietly passed away; they came about a year after that. Everything had been settled; my brother was stable, and everyone else in my family had done their grieving while I held space for them. That’s when I let myself lose it.

Only I didn’t have the emotional tools or supports to deal with the unexpected grief. I imploded, which translated into exploding all over everything I’d built up around me. I was angry, and I made sure everyone knew it. After a particularly horrible day, I sat down at my computer and began angry-typing out a story. No one was home for me to be furious with, so my only relief were the keys.

I wrote about two sisters, one who loved the other so fiercely that she would follow her into the mouths of wolves and past the depths of her own understanding and sanity. Claire wanted her sister back so badly that she would put herself and everyone else she loved in danger to do it. Her desperation was palpable in those first few pages, her sadness cutting. I cried for the first time in years. Then I kept going.

I fought through every ounce of grief to figure out how to live without my mom while I was writing this book. And at the end, I was less angry. Somehow more stitched together than I was before. It’s weird that a book about sisters was actually about processing my relationship with my mom, but Claire’s feelings of grief and undying hope all mixed together are what I imagine are part of the human experience when they lose someone they love, whether it’s through death or mythical wolves with snapping, yellow teeth.

This book will always own my heart because it’s the story that put it back together, that helped me figure out who I actually was when I wasn’t my mother’s daughter anymore, at least not in the physical sense. I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything that I cherish as much as this story (I haven’t yet), but I’m extremely thrilled this is the first one on the shelves. And even though I feel incredibly transparent and naked and terrified about letting the mass public in on Claire’s progression through her grief, I’m grateful that this story is out there for anyone who needs it, whenever they’re ready for it.

Andrea Hannah lives in the Midwest, where there are plenty of dark nights and creepy cornfields as fodder for her next thriller. She graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in special education. When she’s not teaching or writing, she spends her time chasing her sweet children and ornery pug, running, and dreaming up her next adventure.

You can find her at www.andreahannah.com and on Twitter @andeehannah.

Thank you, Andrea, for sharing the touching, emotional story of the Book of Your Heart with my readers. Happy Book Birthday to Of Scars and Stardust!

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
Writing in Retrospect and Talking in Front of People

Nova Ren Suma

September 13, 2014

This week I visited the Highlights Foundation in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which is a retreat center for children’s and YA writers, to be a special guest speaker at a Whole Novel Workshop. My task was to do a lecture on something craft-related (my choice), something hopefully inspiring, and then the next day read from my upcoming book The Walls Around Us, and soak in some of the good writing energy while there.

Just calling it a “lecture” made me unsteady. Doing a reading from my book is easier—all the words are already down on the page; I put them there. I can read them, make eye contact every once in a while, and just have the book speak for me. Talking about something smart is a whole other animal. Lectures are so very serious. Lectures are done by experts. What am I an “expert” in, distracting myself on Twitter and revising paragraphs 101 times before I can move on to the next paragraph?

I spent days trying to figure out what I would say. My topic kept shifting. Then, in a bundle of nerves, I asked for advice from Libba Bray, who a few years ago I saw give a talk at the annual SCBWI winter conference in New York City that made me crack up laughing and ended with me in tears. I felt so connected to her after she did that keynote, though this was before I had ever met her in person, and it was because she made us laugh with her and at ourselves, she blew our minds with brilliant writing advice, and then she brought it in close to herself and touched our hearts. She’s an incredible speaker… wise and eloquent and hilarious. I knew I couldn’t steal her away in my suitcase to Pennsylvania and have her pretend to be me up at the podium, but still I asked if she had any advice about how I could go about giving this lecture.

She told me that the best lectures about writing aren’t the ones just about craft. They’re the ones that combine a craft talk with something more personal. This gives the audience something to connect to—and it’s true, I think I connected to her talk years ago because of this. When it’s just writing advice coming at me, no matter how brilliant, I know sometimes I fade out and lose focus. (Rewind many years to me lying down on my aching back in the rear of the auditorium during Robert McKee’s STORY workshop, which I was forced to attend by my day job, and which I am kind of thankful for now, but that’s another story. Story, hah. Anyway, the point is, it was a lot of lecturing, and my brain shut down.)

I went home after talking to Libba and starting writing what I would tell these Highlights writers, hoping I had something worthy to tell them. I thought of all the books I’ve written, and not just the ones I published, and the craft lessons I learned through each one, because each book for me is a different beast. Each one put me through a new struggle, and gave me a new life and writing lesson along the way. …Even, possibly especially, the ones I never published.

I really do believe you grow from this process of writing, even when the end note isn’t your book on the shelf of a bookstore or library but in a box under the bed, where two of my unpublished novels still live, along with over eight years’ worth of my life spent writing them. These are not failures. It’s just a part of the process.

I’ve learned through the mistakes and missteps and I’ve learned from the glitzy successes and the high, high moments in which I felt like I was soaring and would never come down, until I came down. I learned a lot about having patience and listening to myself as a writer and trusting myself. And none of this came easy. Is anything worth doing ever easy?

The lecture went so well, and so did the reading, and I was proud of myself for making it through. The writers asked me so many wonderful, thought-provoking questions, and I felt very honored to be there speaking to them. (Special thanks to Sarah Aronson for inviting me to speak at her Whole Novel Workshop, and to the rest of the faculty: Nancy Werlin, A.M. Jenkins, Nicole Valentine, and Rob Costello. And thank you to the Highlights staff for being so helpful and accommodating! I only regret I didn’t stay longer.)

With that, my short visit to the Highlights Foundation was over, and I was being driven back home, to Manhattan, over the George Washington Bridge. I was wondering what possible life & craft lesson I’m in the midst of right now, writing this new novel that’s got me stuck, that’s challenging me, because I do want every new book I write to be a challenge, and yet that’s not always such a glorious experience when you’re deep in it tearing out chunks of your own hair. It’s impossible to know how best to handle myself at this point—nothing ever makes sense to me except in retrospect.

All I know is that if I look back on this year, this time in my life and in my career, I may just see it as the year I pushed myself, publicly.

Lectures and talks. Readings and more readings. Taking on every teaching opportunity offered me—and pursuing many more, some of which involve people never ever answering my emails and some of which involve people actually giving me a shot and allowing me to rise to the challenge, which is what I’m striving for right now.

I know what kind of working author I want to be. It’s just a matter of finding a way to get myself there.

(Oh and finishing my book, of course. Back to it.)

LATEST NEWS

If you are near Tempe, AZ, I will be at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on Wednesday, September 17 at 7pm. Author Elizabeth Fama is joining me! Please come.

My next workshop and retreat at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program will be in June 2015. Applications aren’t due until February, but if you’re itching to apply now, the announcement is now up and we are accepting applications!

The ARCs of The Walls Around Us are now available—and look for a giveaway through my publisher next week to get a signed ARC of your own!
The Book of Your Heart Series: Justina Chen

Nova Ren Suma

August 13, 2014
When an author says a book she’s written is the Book of Her Heart, what does that mean? In this ongoing blog series, I’ve invited guest authors to reveal what they consider the Book of Their Heart—and share why this book holds a distinct and special place apart from all others they’ve written.

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday this week for A Blind Spot for Boys, I have Justina Chen sharing with us the two books of her heart, and how they exposed different pieces of her heart in different ways…

Guest post by Justina Chen

“Attitude!” the legendary editor overseeing our weekend writing retreat intoned.

The word sizzled in the conference room the way scandalous ideas do when they’re brought into the light. An intake of breath. A nervous smile or two as the twenty-five writers around me all tried to decipher where we were going with this.

We waited for more, but Patti Lee Gauch, former editorial director of Philomel, fell silent. She twiddled a ruler in her hands while we tasted that word in our heads: Attitude! Was this the cryptic method she used when working with the likes of Eric Carle and Brian Jacques? As if in answer, Patti kicked off her flat shoes, stood before us in her socks: four-foot-ten-inches of life-crackling wisdom. Four-foot-ten inches of conviction that can only come from a lifetime of wordcraft. Only then did she wield the ruler to punctuate her main point as if it was a sword in her personal battle against boring prose.

“We need characters”—point!—“who sass”—slash!—“the world.” The ruler fell to Patti’s side, but the command might as well have been written in white, hot electricity.

Attitude! Sass! They were twined strands of a story’s DNA. They obviously catalyzed the writers around me who were tapping away at their keyboards, word-inspired. Unlike me. I set my pen down, defeated. How do you write with attitude when the world itself has sassed the sass right out of you? A few years ago, I found myself the unwitting co-star in a midlife cliché. Eight weeks into what was supposed to be a two-year move to China, my then-husband admitted that he’d been having an affair with his secretary in Shanghai. Hence, our move. Hence, my return to a full-time job after finding that our finances had been ravaged. Hence, a writing pace that had dwindled to a few halfhearted sentences a day. And that right there was the crux of my writerly problem: my heart had been ripped in half.

But far, far worse, I watched helplessly as my kids fell into emotional catatonia, prone and unmoving on the rug for days after they learned that their father was leaving us…in a country where we barely spoke more than ten words of the language and hardly knew anyone. Weeks later, when my pre-teen son grunted at his dad on the phone, no longer even deigning to form words, I knew then that the most tragic legacy of the ensuing divorce wasn’t a broken family. It was my children’s broken hearts.

So I did what I think any writer-mom would do: I wrote my kids a love letter. A long love letter that became Return to Me, a novel that illuminated the pain and upheaval of betrayal. A novel that detailed the power of true, abiding love. A mother’s love. It spilled over with love. Sass, not so much.

But attitude—that exhortation traveled from Patti’s lips to my ears. A sweet nudge to laugh again—and to make my readers laugh. A wise hand beckoning to me: Come, create with joy—so my readers would be filled with joy. Still, like Prufrock, did I dare disturb the universe? Did I dare sass again as I had in my previous novels filled with girls who sassed the world’s definition of beauty and success and racial identity?

Before the cataclysm in my life, I had confessed in passing to my agent how I went to thirteen proms. Yes, thirteen proms. (Boys from other high schools; a headstart in freshman year. It’s possible. Do the math.) He started laughing. Guffawing, actually, if you want to be perfectly accurate. When he finally stopped gasping for air, he said, “There’s your next novel.” But then the dark period washed over me, and Thirteen Proms sounded like a horror story. And sorry, I was already living my own. So the idea shriveled and was shelved…until those beckoning words: sass and attitude.

So sass I did through a major rewrite about Shana Wilde, a girl deemed a Wilde child just because she hit the gene lottery with the trifecta of blonde hair, long legs, and willowy figure. Sass I did for a girl who’s catnip for boys, the Helen of high school. Sass I did for a girl nursing a secret that no one—not even her best friend—knows: she’s been dumped by her much older and very much clandestine boyfriend. As a result, she puts herself and her stomped upon heart on a Boy Moratorium. Well, life cannot take attitude away forever, not for Shana who is a sassy girl at heart. And not for me.

Books, like life, have a reason and a season. So if Return to Me was the book of my broken heart written in a season of sorrow, then A BLIND SPOT FOR BOYS is the book of my joyous heart written in a glorious season of sassiness.

I dare you not to like the book.[1]

Sass, how nice to be reacquainted with you.

___

[1] That said, it’s cool if you don’t so long as you aren’t mean about it. Woman to woman, let’s make a pact not to dehydrate anyone of a single ounce of sass. Life will take care of that all on its own if we allow it to. We women, instead, need to sister each other.

Justina Chen is an award-winning novelist for young adults whose most recent book, A BLIND SPOT FOR BOYS, was called “an emotional and beautiful story” by Booklist. North of Beautiful was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and Barnes & Noble. Her other novels include Girl Overboard (a Junior Library Guild premiere selection) and Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies), which won the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature. Additionally, she co-founded readergirlz, a cutting-edge literacy and social media project for teens, which won the National Book Foundation’s Prize for Innovations in Reading. When she isn’t writing for teens, Justina is a story strategist for executives and leads storytelling workshops at companies like Disney and AT&T. She loves kicking back with her coconut black tea and hanging out with her kids.

Visit her online at justinachen.com or follow her on Facebook or on Twitter at @JustinaYChen.

Thank you, Justina, for sharing the Book of Your Heart with my readers! Happy Book Birthday Week to A Blind Spot for Boys!

If YOU are a traditionally published author and would like to write about the book of your heart, feel free to contact me.

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
- The Book of Your Heart Series: Camille DeAngelis
- The Book of Your Heart Series: Tessa Gratton
- The Book of Your Heart Series: Brandy Colbert
- The Book of Your Heart Series: Dahlia Adler
- The Book of Your Heart Series: Corey Ann Haydu
- And about my own Book of My Heart: Imaginary Girls

distraction no.99

Category: other writers

The Teaching, the Inspiration, the Chupacabra, the Not-Writing

AWP: The Writer (Not Author) Conference

The Book of Your Heart Series: Ryan Graudin

Here, to celebrate her book birthday tomorrow, I have Ryan Graudin sharing why The Walled City is the Book of Her Heart…

Thank you, Ryan, for sharing your Heart Book with my readers. Happy Book Birthday!

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:

The Book of Your Heart Series: Amy Reed

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday for her new edgy, contemporary YA novel Damaged, I have Amy Reed opening up for the first time about the book of her heart…

**Thank you, Amy, for sharing the Book of Your Heart with my readers. Happy Book Birthday to Damaged, which is now on sale as of yesterday… everyone, go grab it!**

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:

The Book of Your Heart Series: Andrea Hannah

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday this week for Of Scars and Stardust, I have Andrea Hannah sharing the deep heartache that inspired her book…

**Thank you, Andrea, for sharing the touching, emotional story of the Book of Your Heart with my readers. Happy Book Birthday to Of Scars and Stardust!**

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:

Writing in Retrospect and Talking in Front of People

LATEST NEWS

The Book of Your Heart Series: Justina Chen

Here, to help celebrate her book birthday this week for A Blind Spot for Boys, I have Justina Chen sharing with us the two books of her heart, and how they exposed different pieces of her heart in different ways…

**Thank you, Justina, for sharing the Book of Your Heart with my readers! Happy Book Birthday Week to A Blind Spot for Boys!**

If YOU are a traditionally published author and would like to write about the book of your heart, feel free to contact me.

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series: