Guests
by Selden Edwards, September 19, 2008 9:48 AM
With the sudden success of my 30-year novel The Little Book, many people have asked me what advice I have for fellow aspiring writers who might have a long-term (or short-term) project in the drawer. Well, first, of course, is "Never give up." But being more specific and practical, I have learned that there are really only two people you have to win over: 1) an experienced agent and 2) a senior editor at a major publishing house. In my case, the agent was Scott Miller. Scott presented it enthusiastically to my editor Ben Sevier at Dutton, and we had a deal. After the deal was made, still pretty much incredulous, I asked Scott how it happened, and he gave a number of reasons, but the main one was, he said, "You made me need to turn the page." After the deal was struck and the hard job of editing was begun, we started looking to well-known authors for cover blurbs. I had the extraordinary good fortune of having Richard Ford and Pat Conroy read the manuscript and contribute quotes. Because they, both extraordinary writers, are so different, I felt extraordinarily blessed and covered from all sides. Richard Ford, whom I consider, as well as a writer of note, a gifted student of the craft and a teacher, called my novel "richly inventive, woven tightly with incident, and fully engaging. It is also superbly humane and readable." I am deeply honored that these descriptors would be used on my novel. So, I would say this to aspiring writers with a project you have been working on for 30 years or 30 weeks, here are some thoughts, borrowed from Mr. Ford: Make sure that your manuscript is as inventive as it can be, that it stands out from the pack: spend time making sure that what you write is original and has zip, going so far as to be unconventional even. Write with lots of "incident" — I love that word. Description and interior monologue are great, but incidents or happenings are what make a story. And do all you can to make those happenings weave tightly together, even to the tour de force level. Be engaging. Use lots of old plot devices like conflict, suspense, and humor that have engaged readers for centuries. And start with page one. Go for "humane." It seems to me that much of literature today is emotionally despairing and cynical, violent even. Writing needs to be lively, realistic, and original, but don't be afraid to use genuine emotion and good old fashioned romantic connection. Above all, be readable. Don't forget the reader. Think of what makes a story compelling. Make the reader, as Scott Miller says, "need to turn the page." Above all, you want to hear four words: "I couldn't put it down."I don't fully understand how my story went from being rejected over and over to being in this position of success, and I am certainly humbled in the process. I feel extraordinarily blessed to have found a team who have supported and promoted my book in ways I had only dreamed of. And I do want to serve as an inspiration to all those aspiring writers out there who have a dream of someday having a book published. My message now and later will be, "Never give up." Keep working; it is not an impossible
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Guests
by Selden Edwards, September 18, 2008 9:23 AM
In a novel with a 30-year history, the evolution of the main character is worth examining. In 1974, I began writing the story of how a young man named Wheeler Burden from contemporary San Francisco woke up in a strange land, Vienna 1897. At that time, Wheeler was 33 years old, just the age of the author. And at that time also, the plot line was very simple: Wheeler had very little back-story, most of it based on the author's life. Over time, details began to emerge. He grew up on a prune and almond farm in northern California, as I had done, and traveled east to Boston for his last two years of high school, also as I had done. Like me, Wheeler had a strong interest in mythology and depth psychology, including much study of Sigmund Freud. In the late '70s, I developed a friendship with a college classmate named Doug Messenger. Doug told great stories about his personal life: he had been a baseball pitcher, was a compulsive conversationalist with a passion for Victor Hugo, and had dropped out of college to follow a music career as a guitarist. Doug told a charming story of calling the famous newscaster Chet Huntley one night after The Huntley-Brinkley Report and having a long conversation. In a second iteration of my novel I appropriated many of Doug's stories and attached them to Wheeler to give him some much-needed sparkle. "I'm going to make you famous," I told Doug back then, and for years he would ask when we ran into each other, "What's going on with my Vienna story?" Then, in the late '80s, while headmastering in Santa Barbara, I befriended another great real-life character, David Crosby. I attached some Crosbyesque details to Wheeler, and suddenly, in the 1988 draft, he appeared at Woodstock and Altamont with the Stones, grew a Wild Bill Hickok moustache and hair, and sang before thousands. When, however, Wheeler walked off the stage and away from public appearances for the rest of his life, it was an act entirely his own. By the 1988 draft, Wheeler Burden was 47 and pretty much fully formed, with a unique mind and will and some biographical details all his own: son of a famous dead war hero, student of a legendary old teacher, tutee of a beautiful Radcliffe student named Joan Quigley, author of his teacher's famous memoir Fin de Siecle. I could set him on his journey through 1897 Vienna, where he would meet a number of influential and famous people and encounter the love of his life, a beautiful and talented American woman named Weezie Putnam. Like any character in a complex novel, Wheeler Burden is a mixture of made-up characteristics and those borrowed from real life. However it is, the author has greatly enjoyed living with Wheeler Burden over the years, and now sharing him with the
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Guests
by Selden Edwards, September 17, 2008 10:02 AM
People ask me what are my influences in my 30 years of writing The Little Book. Phew! Because I was an English teacher by trade, I read, reread, and taught many influential novels. In a way, all of them entered my viscera and became part of my "style." The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stand out at the top of my list. I think one can see much of those two novels in mine. I would also add Willa Cather's My Antonia and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath to an appendage to that all-time list. I think you can find many Gatsbyesque elements and cadences in my story, and the narrative at times, it seems to me, reflects dear Huck, even though my narrator is a ninety year old woman. On a personal level, I absolutely love J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, "The Laughing Man" being my favorite. And, of course, The Catcher in the Rye is one of my all-time favorites. How could it not be? And Holden Caulfield is simply one of my favorite Americans, fictional or not. I consider Salinger one of the great craftsmen of our time, I must admit. For sheer narrative force and suspense, I absolutely loved John LeCarre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. As I was writing this novel, E. L. Doctorow, John Irving, Richard Ford, and Pat Conroy played big roles. I knew Ford from our times together as students at the first Squaw Valley conferences, so I read with pleasure his early and late writings. I consider him one of the great living American writers. And Conroy I discovered with delight later. I love all of Irving, but I guess Cider House Rules is my favorite. When I first read Doctorow's Ragtime I feared that people would suspect that I was borrowing, I found my novel and his so similar. Recently, I have read and loved Alice Sebold's Lovely Bones, Geraldine Brooks's March and The People of the Book. As far as time travel goes, I'm really not very knowledgeable about the genre. From its very inception in 1974, I was writing a story about a character who wakes up one morning in 1897 Vienna, inspired by Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," the story of how the main character Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a bug. There is no explanation given; he just wakes up as a bug. Mine is not really a science fiction story. It is just the story of someone who finds himself arrived in a strange land, with no means of identification or support, and has to make a go of it. However, on the science-fiction side, I also read and loved Time and Again by Frank Finney. What a great story that one is! When I was preparing my novel for publication, one of my best advisors called mine a cross between Finney's masterpiece and Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is. There is a zaniness to Joseph Hiller, Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut that I absolutely love and hoped to capture in parts of my portrayal of Wheeler Burden. Catch 22 completely enthralled me. And I had not really known Vonnegut until Slaughterhouse Five, which I consider one of the greats of the past century, so I read all his previous novels. What joy! And I read many of Robbins's novels with great pleasure also, his first, Another Roadside Attraction being my favorite. But in the final analysis, I must say that Conroy's The Prince of Tides is, in my mind, the pinnacle of the mountain I am trying to
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Guests
by Selden Edwards, September 16, 2008 9:42 AM
I chose the marvelous setting for my novel Little Book almost by accident. Although the story takes place in a number of other locations — the Sacramento Valley, Boston, London, San Francisco — the heart of the story takes place in Vienna, and in the year 1897. This marvelous setting came to me originally in 1974, when I was beginning a year of graduate study at Stanford University. A friend was reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and told me about the richness of the intellectual and cultural life of that city at that time. I began reading that book myself and really quite frivolously began hatching the plot of a suspense story of finding oneself in turn-of-the-century Austria-Hungary and searching for the child Hitler, to kill him. I moved on to other books, and since my novel kept being rejected by publishers, I had time to read and research more and more, which I began doing with relish. It wasn't long before I realized that I had chosen an absolutely wonderful setting. I had been introduced to the writings of Carl Schorske, first a historical journal chapter given to me by a Stanford professor in 1974, then his magnificent magnum opus Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture in 1980. Next came The Eagles Die: Franz Joseph, Elisabeth, and Their Austria by George Marek, then A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton, and then later The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile by Paul Hofmann. Over the course of the 30-plus years of this novel's life, I have collected a library of over 50 books, most of them either directly or indirectly about Vienna. Of all that I've read, the Schorske book is the most profound and the one I have read over and over. Schorske's main theme is that the generation of industrialists who created the wealth of the city in the second half of the 19th century raised their children surrounded by art, music, and aesthetic. These children, especially the sons, grew up with finely tuned aesthetic sense but also a sense of rebellion. The result was a revolt against the existing highly structured classicism of their fathers and a huge cultural push toward an individual expression. This fierce individualism became first the famous Viennese Secession of the late 1890s and the all-encompassing 20th-century movement we now call "modernism." At the forefront of this modernist movement were giants like painter Gustav Klimt, musician Gustav Mahler, architect Otto Wagner, and of course, Sigmund Freud, the details of whose life I absorbed through Peter Gay's marvelous biography. The coffee houses that proliferated in the city were indeed the gathering places and the centers of intellectual activity, and since the city was highly centralized, all the great characters knew each other. In many ways, in exploring my child-Hitler plot, I stumbled casually upon the setting and the period, but the more I read about it the more enthralled I became. The desire to travel there and participate in the rich culture drove me forward in my writing of my story, in spite of the years of rejection. It was Vienna that kept me going! Of course, part of the magic of that city at that time is the knowledge that it was grandness on the brink of collapse. In 1914, when Austria-Hungary became the center of world war tensions, the Emperor and his empire were in full form. Just a few years later, after the devastation of a horrific war, the Emperor was dead and the empire was totally dissolved. Vienna, which had once controlled a huge portion of Europe, was reduced to a territory not much bigger than the city itself. But that is not the period of my story. In my story, we see Vienna and its coffee houses in full greatness. The arts, music, politics, architecture, and the new science of psychology were in full flower. I discovered in 1974 and carried for four decades the practical knowledge that Vienna 1897 was a magnificent setting for a
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Guests
by Selden Edwards, September 15, 2008 9:23 AM
A most improbable thing has happened to me. On August 14, at age 67, I have published my debut novel, The Little Book. And not only is it my debut novel, but it is my first piece of commercial fiction ever, and after an entire adult life of trying. I began writing seriously shortly after getting my first English teaching job in the early 1960s. In the late '60s I paid out a lot of money to The Famous Writers School, which was later exposed as something of a scam. But it got me going and started me on a quest for my own novel. I began writing short stories and sending them out to magazines, with a few encouraging letters, but always rejections. In 1974, I started a graduate year in education at Stanford University, and it was there that I wrote the first draft of what I called "my Vienna novel." I had read an intriguing book about 1897 Vienna, and I fantasized about time traveling there and finding the child Hitler: Would you kill him? I asked. And that was the simple idea. A fellow from San Francisco named Wheeler Burden wakes up in 1897 Vienna and sets out to find the evil child, meeting a beautiful American woman in the process — pretty simple plot line. That manuscript was rejected unceremoniously, and I put it away, having been told that it was improbable, impractical, and unpublishable. Then, about five years later, I got it out again, having done quite a bit of reading about the fascinating fin de siecle period in the meantime. I wrote another draft, adding quite a bit of detail and complexity to the story. Same result — unceremonious rejection, near-terminal disappointment, and another five- or six-year hiatus. But the story wouldn’t go away in my mind. I kept thinking of new characters, wrinkles, and plot twists. In 1988, I got it out again, did a major overhaul, finished a lengthy draft, and sent it out to more unceremonious rejections and a deepening feeling of hopelessness: my story was just too unconventional and improbable. By this time I was fully invested in my career as a private school headmaster, so my writing time was reduced to holidays and vacations, and during the 1990s I also pursued an advanced degree in mythology and depth psychology. When I retired in 2003, I set about pulling my very complicated story together and finished a draft and sent it out. It was rejected nine times, and another feeling of depressed hopelessness set in, but this time I made the move that turned the whole project around. In 2006, I found a wonderful freelance editor in New York named Pat LoBrutto, and he — the first person to read the whole thing from cover to cover — made some excellent editing suggestions. Also, he had contacts in the publishing world. He began telling my story to a great young agent in NYC named Scott Miller, so when we finished the editing job, and I sent it to Scott, he accepted it immediately. Scott knew my editor at Dutton, Ben Sevier, and Dutton made an offer almost immediately. In February 2007 I had a contract, and a year and a half later, The Little Book appeared in bookstores, excellently promoted — I must add — by Dutton. In the past few weeks, my debut novel has been appearing on national bestseller lists, and I pinch myself daily. "My Vienna novel," the improbable story that I began at Stanford in 1974 of a '70s rock and roll star who wakes up in Vienna 1897, has become a publishing success. Who would have thought? Certainly not the numerous publishers and agents who turned it down, and certainly not the author who suffered through 30-plus years of the manic-depressive practice of trying to get a first novel published
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