The Divining Wand

[Danielle Younge-Ullman debuted in July 2008 with Falling Under (do read presentation/review) -- a book this Fairy Godmother described as painfully breathtaking and brutally exquisite. And it remains so in its Kindle Editon and NOOK Book format.

Today, in this guest post, the author focuses on her inspiration for the novel, and what makes the story passionately honest.]

It’s kind of a pretty word, a word that suggests something beautiful, like a butterfly landing on your fingertip, or a beam of sunlight bursting from the clouds.

But I was mad when I wrote FALLING UNDER. Furious, in fact. And the issues I was furious about are what sparked and drove the writing of the book.

Inspiration didn’t come to me like a butterfly, in other words, or even a beam of sunlight. More like a burning astroid, or a Mac truck.

The thing I was on about, and angry about, is what happens to kids when their parents divorce, particularly when those parents cease to function as parents, leaving the kids to navigate the world on their own…to essentially parent themselves.

Here’s a short excerpt from Chapter Sixteen that will give you an example. (My protagonist, Mara, has just been kicked out of her mother’s house.)

“The morning you arrive with your huge suitcase, Dad tries the heart-to-heart, but it’s not helpful to have him rant about what a bitch Mom is and then punch the wall beside the fridge, get hammered that night, and refuse to go to work the next day.

Certain kinds of support are worse than none at all.”

Sure, divorce is an everyday kind of tragedy these days. And yes, kids are elastic, adaptable, they survive. Sometimes they adapt so well on the surface that nobody sees how deeply and profoundly their view of the world has changed; how hurt they are, how alone they feel, how much more precarious everything seems to them, how much less they trust.

Mara, is a sensitive kid, a smart kid, a funny kid, and also a survivor. But the decisions she makes, as a result of having no stability and no parental figures she can trust or go to for guidance, are not often the best. The results are sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, often both. And Mara grows up to be a mass of contradictions and unfulfilled potential—so afraid of the world that she can barely leave her house most days, stuck in a horrible artistic and professional rut, and burdened by a past littered with disastrous romantic (and sexual) relationships.

Mara’s adult life is consistent with what studies and statistics say, which is that many of the effects of divorce become evident only when a child reaches adulthood and confronts adult relationships. These are conflicted people who’ve had to rely on themselves, and don’t necessarily know how to function in a trusting relationship. They are also (statistically) likely to be less educated, more substance-addicted, less financially stable, less emotionally and psychologically stable, more likely to marry early, more likely to divorce…and it goes on. Unfortunately these stats are true of the adult children of all divorced families, including the amicable and “good” divorces, though of course the more stability and support provided by parents, family and community, the better chances the child/grown-child has of thriving.

Think about what that means, in a society where 50% of people are getting divorced…

Now I want to be clear: I am NOT on an anti-divorce rant. There are people who shouldn’t stay together, people who can’t.

I simply wanted to tell a story that would pull people, as viscerally as possible, into Mara’s experience, so that they would understand it. I wanted to reach out to adults and young adults who have been through this and maybe wonder why they (possibly) feel screwed-up and are not coping, and let them know they’re having a normal reaction, and that they can work through it. And I wanted to reach out to parents who may have divorced, or be considering it, and give them a sense of how it might affect their children, how important it is for them to continue to provide as much stability and leadership and understanding as possible, so their kids can better cope with whatever happens.

And then, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d also like society as a whole to start doing a better job at supporting families in crisis. Because THAT would be inspiring…in the beam-of-sunlight-bursting-through-the-clouds sort of way.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter, friend her on Facebook, and download Falling Under on your Kindle or NOOK Book.

[The decision to reopen The Divining Wand was based on the goal of offering more diversity in both books and authors. For example, today's guest showcases other forms of storytelling to prove how a writer can transition between formats and highlight his natural talent. Enjoy!]

Daniel Pyne has been at home in the world of film, TV, and books for over 30 years. His long list of screenwriting credits include The Manchurian Candidate, Fracture, Any Given Sunday, and Miami Vice. Currently, he is a writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on JJ Abrams’ new TV show Alcatraz on FOX. He is also author of the cult noir novel, Twentynine Palms (which was also made into a feature film). His new novel, A Hole In The Ground Owned by a Liar was released on January 17th.

What I Write

I never really intended to be a screenwriter.

It was supposed to be a fallback position I would take while developing my prose writing skills, and in case I couldn’t make enough money to support myself writing the fiction I loved. You know. Serious fiction. Write one episode of television a year, a movie here and there. Imagine my surprise to discover that screenwriting was a career that people spent their lives mastering and that – initially, anyway – the skills required were hardly compatible with the skills required to write a short story, or novel. Not that they weren’t equivalent. Just different.

But as the literary magazine rejection slips piled up, it became clear to me that I might have to take a different path and, because my writing was always peculiarly visual, the shift to screenplays was, eventually, both gratifying and right for me.

I loved movies. I loved dialogue, and description – so much so that much of the early criticism of my scripts was that they were too literary, e.g. too many words. It’s a fair comment and a sin of which I am still guilty.

Oh well.

Screenwriting is the art of visual storytelling embellished by dialogue – one picture followed by another, and another, until the story concludes. Television (I’m sorry) is radio with pictures. Short stories are almost impossibly hard. And novels live in the imagination of the reader, requiring a kind of painting with words.

It hasn’t been that difficult for me to move between the different disciplines. I think, however, ironically that it took many years of screenwriting to prepare me for novels. The concision of a screenplay, the momentum, the architecture have all bled across into my prose storytelling more than I ever would have believed possible. Initially, the hardest thing was letting go of the rigid discipline of “showing and not telling.” The internal life of a character in a film, or on television, is the product of indirection and suggestion. You can never know what they’re thinking, you must express it with an action, or through dialogue, or in the spaces between the action and the dialogue, like a kind of bastardized free verse poetry with its own syntax and shorthand.

At first, it was a fitful process, in which my prose fiction characters would move and then think, move again, and then think again. It’s probably just that the underlying foundations of each form are so at odds: film is the art of discovering how much you can leave out and still tell your tale, novels are an endless process of discovering how much you can put in before your reader loses interest and falls out of the chair.
Using the past tense was also a challenge, strangely. You get so used to present tense writing screenplays that you forget how much it defines your style. Screenplays are inherently sloppy – sentence fragments, funky grammar, half-formed thoughts. Screenplays are a gesture.

And yet.

Writing screenplays has liberated me for prose writing. I’m no longer intimidated by the blank page, or the necessity of the perfect word, the perfect phrasing, the perfect idea. There’s a powerful momentum in a movie narrative, carrying you forward in the way that the great novels will, pulling you instead of pushing you.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work both ways. The more prose I write, the less patience I have for the blunt force trauma of movie and television storytelling where subtlety is generally discouraged, and the end product (a script) is just something transient to get everybody to agree to make a movie that may or may not, in the end, be what you wrote. And I’ve been so over-exposed to novels written solely with the intention of selling them to a movie company, that I am even more determined to take what I’ve learned as a twenty-first century screenwriter and bring it back to the prose form in a way that can tell stories in a new and dynamic voice without surrendering all that is unique about books, and that has stood the test of time.

The first time I saw my prose printed, and bound – and realized that it would never get changed, noted, revised, re-interpreted, spun, overanalyzed or subjected to audience testing – I was blown away.
People would read my words, and my words would tell a story, beginning to end, without mediation.

What a concept.

“Daniel Pyne’s A Hole in the Ground Owned By a Liar will put to rest any idle fantasies the reader may have of setting out prospecting for gold. A harrowingly funny story of brotherly strife, amorous misconduct, and small dreams blown disastrously out of proportion. I loved it.” –Scott Phillips, author of The Adjustment and national bestseller The Ice Harvest

“Smart, sexy, funny, and a brilliant storyteller. And that’s just me. Wait till you read Dan . . . ” –Eric Idle

Now a major thank you to Daniel Pyne for providing an excerpt that exemplifies his hybrid style between book and screenplay. Yes there’s (more…)

[ After 11 years as an independent bookseller and buyer Lauren Baratz-Logsted (most recent The Twin's Daughter, Sisters 8 complete series, The Bro-Magnet published in both Kindle and NOOK Book) decided to try her hand at writing and, as is known, discovered success. And, while a complete page lists what she writes, today Lauren answers the question of why.]

The Cliff Notes version? Because I have stories to tell.

The expanded version? The truth is, there are two different kinds of writing for me, best exemplified by how I approach drafts. The first draft of a book is for my own entertainment. That’s why I wrote THE BRO-MAGNET, a comedy about an ultimate man’s man who’s been Best Man eight times when what he really longs to be is a groom. Even though my writing career started with comedic novels for adults, in recent years my focus and success has been in YA and children’s books, so it wasn’t like the traditional publishing world was clamoring for more adult books from me. But I’d gotten the idea, it tickled my fancy, and I couldn’t help but write it because I needed to see how the story would turn out. Once I was finished, I decided maybe others would enjoy it too, so I decided I might publish it as an ebook. Then I started revising.

Remember when I said the first draft was for me? Well, all subsequent drafts are with the audience in mind. Flash-forward to yesterday. I was on Twitter when I came across people who I’d never spoken to before, trading tweets about what the funniest scene in the book was for each. That cat scene that had given me so much pleasure to write? They’d loved it. And the Barn Opera? They thought that was a hoot too. In fact, they thought the whole book was hysterical. Seeing that made it a good day to be me. So that’s why I write: to please myself and to please others.

Oh, and in case your wondering where the title THE BRO-MAGNET came from…

My husband, Greg Logsted, is a novelist by night and a window washer by day. One day he told me about washing some guy’s windows with his crew and how every time he goes to this guy’s house, the guy says, “Let’s go skiing sometime”; “Let’s do this”; “Let’s do that.” It occurred to me that this was not the first time in the 28 years I’ve known Greg that I’d heard something like this: some guy, barely even knowing my husband, wanting to bond and become buddies. This particular instance happened right around the time the word “bromance” entered the lexicon strongly – you’d hear people applying it to TV shows like “House” or films like the Sherlock Holmes versions Robert Downey Jr stars in. Suddenly my brain went poof! like it always does when I have an idea for a new book. Those ideas always begin with “What if…?” In this case, it was “What if there was an ultimate man’s man, a guy that other guys actually fight over to get him to be Best Man at their weddings, but he secretly longs to be a groom?” And of course the hero of this book would be THE BRO-MAGNET.

[Although Canadian author Catherine McKenzie's debut novel was a national bestseller in Canada, SPIN is finally being launched here in the U.S. on Tuesday, February 7, 2012. That's great news for all readers since it was praised by Publishers Weekly as:

“[A] charming debut…With fresh, fast-paced storytelling and a personable, self-deprecating protagonist, McKenzie whirls a perfectly indulgent tale.”

Arranged, the author’s second novel, will also have a U.S. publication on May 15, 2012.

Catherine was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, where she now practices law. An avid runner and skier, she also sits on various boards and professional organizations, and has taught part-time at the McGill Faculty of Law. However, in today’s guest post, she explains and shares why she writes.]

A while ago, an author friend of mine, who was feeling a bit of writing ennui, expressed the possibility of giving it all up. He was tired of the late nights writing after his day job, and since his books, while critically acclaimed, weren’t selling as well as Dan Brown’s, he wondered why he was putting in all this effort. “I’m not doing this for my ego,” he said, and those words have stuck with me ever since.

They’ve stuck with me though I admit that my first reaction was skepticism. My first book had just come out, and if I’m being honest, the month of January, 2010 was pretty full of ego. (In fact, I dubbed it “the month of me” and was thoroughly sick of myself by February). But at that moment, I remember thinking that the whole act of publishing a book—from writing, to getting an agent, to getting a book deal—had to be at least partially about ego.

And of course it is. But the more I thought about it, and the further I got past my own publication date, I began to understand what he meant. You see, that first novel, that first real novel that you get the agent and the book deal with, that novel isn’t written because of ego. I suspect it might be a little different in every case, but in my own, that novel was written because I couldn’t help myself. It was (often) all I could think about. What was this character going to do? How was I going to get from this conflict to the resolution? How was I going to get the images in my mind, seemingly so clear, down on the page when the link between my brain and my fingers often felt ephemeral. I was, in my own way, like Dylan, trying to capture “that wild mercury sound” in my head with words. And the effort, while sometimes trying and frustrating, was in the main fun.

Now it might have been hubris to think, once all the writing, editing, and endless drafts were done, that someone might want to publish this book. And I might have been seeking to gratify my ego (and have had that ego gratified) when I got an agent and a book deal. But in between those events (two years from finished manuscript to book deal, another six months to publication), there was lots and lots of rejection; lots of blows to the ego. And this mix of gratification and blows continued once my book came out. Because even if you’re Jonathan Franzen—which I make no pretension to be—there are people who dislike your book, who might even hate it. Sometimes those people are book reviewers with access to a large audience of readers. And because we live in the age of social networks and email addresses on author websites, readers can reach right out and touch you with their thoughts, negative or positive, as soon as they put your book down.

This might sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. I am aware of, and grateful for, the amazing luck I’ve had in getting not one, but two books published. But the further I’ve gotten into this process—the revisions, the worry about how the book will sell, the constant feeling that you should be promoting your book(s) somehow, all the time—it’s become less and less about ego.

And I think this trip away from ego is even more true if you’re lucky enough to have the chance to publish a second book (or anything past that first one really). Because those books often feel like they are more about contractual deadlines, and advances paid out, and expectations (real or imagined) about it being as good, or better, than your first book. It feels like it’s about justifying all of these resources being marshaled for you—the editing and marketing and publicizing. I mean, why did you get this chance, when so many others have tried just as hard, or harder, or longer, and failed?

Thoughts like these don’t feed a writer’s ego, but they certainly can destroy it, along with the will, or sometimes the ability, to write. Because, if I’m being perfectly honest, when you’re in the middle of that vortex, you sometimes forget why you even started writing in the first place. Wasn’t this fun once? Didn’t the words fly off the page, the ideas tumbling out faster than my fingers could keep up with them?

So why? Why do I continue to write? I, among the happy few, published writers?

I don’t have all the answers, but I can say this: I write because I see and hear people that aren’t there unless I write them down. Because the fun is there, you just have to look for it sometimes.

Because I must.

SPIN is available for Pre-order in print and ebook edition.

[Have you ever wondered why authors write? It's not the easiest, stress-free, or stable and secure career choice yet it remains a dream/goal shared by so many. Throughout the next weeks, months, and onward, The Divining Wand will have authors explain their personal reasons.

Introducing this series is Kim Arbor, the pen name of an award winning, New York published novelist who has both an MFA in Creative Writing and a serious addiction to gummy bears. Kim is the author of the new women’s fiction novel, His Wife and Daughters, about a congressman’s political sex scandal of twenty years ago and the effect it still has on his wife and two daughters today. His Wife and Daughters is available as an e-book on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.]

When I get asked the question, “Why do you write?” my first response is usually to say that I can’t not write. I’ve used the written word to express myself in some way or another since I learned to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. Letters, journals, songwriting, web content, tech writing, short fiction, novels, nonfiction—I’ve done it all and can’t get enough of it.

But although it’s some kind of addiction for sure and a never-ending drive to communicate (I am, after all, a Gemini—the great communicator of the Zodiac) if I continue to think about it, I suppose I write because I’m embarking on a constant journey to try to solve, understand and attempt to explain the puzzles and complexities of human behavior. Well, what else would you expect from a college psychology major?

Last fall a study conducted by psychological researchers at the University of Buffalo concluded that readers don’t read fiction for escape or fantasy, but to connect with others. The researchers asserted that reading novels provides “the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from being a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment.”

The mention of social interaction brings us to the e-word: empathy. And why shouldn’t this fulfillment of a need for a social connection also be the impetus of the fiction writer? I know it is with me.

It can be said that empathy is one of the great powers of fiction. I find it fulfilling and challenging to try and identify with a character, enter her consciousness, and explore her motivations. That’s one of the things that turns me on about writing long fiction and having the time and space to build characters that live and breathe. In attempting to make sense out of the world and the people in it through my characters, I need to fall in love with them and understand them as deeply as I possibly can.

When I create a character like Trina Brath in my new novel, His Wife and Daughters, I’m not drawing from my own life. I’ve always been puzzled and, frankly baffled, by wives of politicians who stand by their men after being humiliated by their husbands’ sex scandals. But instead of taking an exterior view of these women, throwing my hands up and stating “they’re crazy,” and feeling how there’s now way I’d ever do that, I go deeper. I look into how I’ve perhaps misunderstood these women; I try to get into their skin. I find an empathy, even a love, for my characters, which I hope will make them complex and empathetic to my readers even if they’re not necessarily the type of person we’d want to emulate.

And being empathizers in the fictional world hopefully makes us better people in the real world. Understanding others is important to everyone—readers and writers alike. And that’s a big reason why I write.

[Welcome fall! With the arrival of the autumnal equinox at 9:05 a.m. GMT this morning, summer's gone as is my vacation. Yes it was lovely, thank you, and one of its highlights was reading Dawn Tripp's (The Season of Open Water, Moon Tide) latest novel, Game of Secrets. This extraordinarily haunting story -- written in poetic prose -- unfolds through a game of Scrabble and tells of the secret games all her characters play.

In today's guest post, Dawn describes her inspiration, writing process, and true meaning of what's in a game.]

Game of Secrets has been called a ‘literary thriller.’ It’s the story of a murder that divides two families, a deep-seated feud that is overturned when a young man and a young woman fall in love. It’s the story of secrets played out through a Scrabble game. But it didn’t start that way.

Like my other novels, Game of Secrets started in pieces—on the page for months—fragments of character, story, scene. I write longhand—often first on scraps of paper—the backs of receipts, the leftover white space of a grocery list. There is a certain artistic freedom that comes when I write on throw-away things and, in the first stages of a novel, I crave this freedom. I might have a vague sense of the overall narrative arc, but I try to resist the impulse to pin everything down into place. I try to let those early fragments have their room to shift and grow, to let the twists and turns of the plot deepen and evolve. In those early months, I turn my back completely on the old adage ‘write what you know.’ I write what moves me, what I am impelled by. I start where I feel led to start. It’s like wind-marked ocean, this early work. Everything is possible. That doesn’t mean a structure isn’t there. It doesn’t mean some dark side of my mind hasn’t already mapped that order out. I have faith that there is such an order. And I write to discover it.

Game of Secrets started with four primary fragments—the real-life story of a skull that surfaced out of gravel fill with a bullet hole in the temple, and three images: a fourteen year old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway, two lovers meeting in an old cranberry barn, and two women playing Scrabble. I did not know their names. I did not know the details specific to their lives, but I could feel the undercurrent of tension between them as their hands arranged those blonde Scrabble tiles into words and laid them on the board.

The image of the Scrabble game hit me especially hard. Not just because the unfolding of the mystery in the novel mirrors the playing of a Scrabble game: clue after clue is revealed, the story comes together piece by piece, like a puzzle, as in Scrabble, disparate letters are arranged into words, which in turn are arranged into a larger cogent grid.

It hit me because I have always loved Scrabble. I grew up playing with my grandmother. She taught me cards as well—pitch, gin, poker, bridge. But it was Scrabble that I loved. I remember the thrill I felt when I was old enough to keep my own letters, to have my own rack. We would play with my father after lunch and, after a game or two, my father would drift off to something else. “You want to play again, Nana?” I’d ask. And my grandmother would nod, light another cigarette, and start flipping over the tiles. We would play game after game. Until it was time for her to fix supper. Then we’d eat, clear the table, wash the dishes, I would dry them for her, then I’d ask to play again.

The idea for Game of Secrets came to me years after she was gone. The story has nothing to do with her life; the women in the story are not modeled after her, but the sense of my time with her—generational, intimate, lost—is strung all through it. As I wrote, I remembered those long childhood hours: the stillness of the house, the light tick-tack as she lay down her tiles, the smell of her cigarette balanced on the ashtray, just resting there untended, dwindling down.

And I remembered, too, things she had taught me over the years as we played. She played Scrabble for the words, as many women in her generation did. I always played for the numbers. How we play that game can reveal so much about how we tick, how we live, who we are. In Scrabble, some play to keep the board open, some play to shut it down. Some play with an eye to the sum of the total scores of all players; some play, simply, to maximize their own score. Most players will look at the board and see the words that fill it. But a really good player, a canny player—and she was one of those—will also see opportunity in the skinny spaces still left open in between.

As I wrote the scenes for Game of Secrets, the game for me became the perfect lens for a story about two women and their families bound together and divided by unspeakable secrets—a brutal past, a murder, a love story. Because what are words if not a bridge—in a game of Scrabble or in a novel? Between one person and another. Thought and reality. Past and present, present and future. Words bridge silence. Words, and the stories they comprise, bridge time

Note: This Fairy Godmother has her own secret. Please return next week to learn what it is!

[]In real life there are at least two sides to every story and nothing is either black or white. In today’s guest post, Kristina Riggle (Real Life & Liars, The Life You’ve Imagined, and Things We Didn’t Say coming June 28, 2011) explains how this same fact applies to people — whether real or fictional.]

Early in my career as a novelist, I sighed with relief that my writing no longer had to hurt anyone’s feelings.

In my newspaper days, I had to print nasty things that Politician A said about Politician B, because both were prominent and that made such mud-slinging “news.” I remember interviewing a trembling mother about her murdered daughter, and the poor choices the young woman made which the police thought contributed to her slaying. More than once I remember interviewing someone and the person would raise their eyes to meet mine and ask, “Do we have to put in the part about (embarrassing yet newsworthy background) ?” And I’d have to say yes, we do.

Oh sure, like all journalists I reminded myself that the truth hurts but is necessary. That I was just doing my job. And I still believe this to be true. Obviously, journalists can’t sanitize their stories for the sake of protecting feelings.

But when I quit that day job and began the transition to fiction writing, I thought with great relief that those days of hurting with my words were behind me.

Or, are they?

When people ask what I write, my glib answer is, “I write novels about screwed-up people.” My characters behave badly, early and often. They fumble their way toward something better by the end (most of them, usually) but to say they are “flawed” is the least of it.

I write about screwed-up people because they are interesting, even if they are not always endearing. Some of the interesting-not-always-endearing characters in THINGS WE DIDN’T SAY include a divorced father named Michael, so wrapped up in his fading career and his ex-wife’s drama he barely notices his fiancée struggling to stay above water in his stormy household.

The young fiancée, Casey, has kept huge chunks of her life hidden from the man she claims to love, not comprehending how damaging her secrets would be when spilled into the light of day.

The ex-wife, Mallory, manipulates the other characters and ratchets up the drama the minute she arrives on the scene.

To me these people are just made up and the story is made up. What could be the harm?

My mother, reading an advance copy, told me she assumed that my kid sister’s childhood tummy aches must have inspired the stomachaches suffered by the youngest child in the story, Jewel.

Oh. I hadn’t even realized I’d done that. (Sorry, Kim).

I’ve learned by now, on book three, that people will read themselves into fiction (even if they didn’t grow up in the same household as the author). And if they see themselves in my characters behaving badly, my words might sting.

The only remedy I can imagine is for me to treat all my characters with respect and sincerity, even the ones that will make readers want to throw the book across the room. Sure, my characters behave badly, but they are complex and real and rounded. In other words, even the worst ones aren’t completely bad.

Just like my journalism subjects. In newspapers and novels both, I work in shades of gray.

Book Giveaway: The Divining Wand is giving away three copies of Making Waves by Tawna Fenske in a random drawing of comments left only on this specific post, Presenting Debutante Tawna Fenske and Making Waves. Comments left on other posts during the week will not be eligible. The deadline is Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. EDT with the winners to be announced here in Thursday’s post. If you enter, please return Thursday to see if you’re a winner.

[Good writing requires more than the ability to write a good story. In fact more often than not it's the author's voice and/or personal choice of genre that attracts and sustains a reader's attention. As a writer-by-trade, Tawna Fenske (Making Waves coming August 2011) knew this and -- in today's guest post -- she shares the journey of discovering her author's niche.]

I’ve been blogging at The Debutante Ball since last August, so I guess you could say I’ve become a familiar voice there.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about my early forays into fiction writing and how it took me awhile to figure out romantic comedy was where I fit best.

Based on commenters’ reactions, I might as well have confessed it took me 36 years to discover I had toes. How could I not know I should be writing humor?

Hey, I never claimed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Yes, I’ve been the class clown since I was old enough to string sentences together. Sure, I’m always the one to break up boring meetings by making sex jokes. OK, I’ll admit I could probably find the humor in a funeral if I tried hard enough.

But it really didn’t dawn on me in the early days that I could use that to build a writing career.

I’ve always written for my supper, but in a much different capacity than what I’m doing now with novels. I caught the journalism bug in high school, and used my experience as editor of the school newspaper to land college scholarships, work my way up to editor of the college paper, and to eventually find post-college work as a newspaper reporter.

Once the appeal of long hours and lousy pay wore off, I moved on to tech writing before transitioning to a career in marketing and public relations.

All of those jobs involved writing. A lot of it, in fact. But none involved making stuff up.

That’s probably why it was such a funny feeling the first time I sat down to take a stab at fiction writing in 2002. I kept checking over my shoulder, certain the word police were going to come and arrest me for lying.

In a way, I was disappointed that never happened. I really looked forward to those handcuffs.

Though the first novel I wrote was a romance, it was barely recognizable as such. Because I’d grown so accustomed to doing vast amounts of research in the writing I did for my day job, that’s what I did for the novel, too. Looking back, that book probably could have had footnotes.

Nothing says “sexy romance” like a bibliography.

Fortunately, my first couple stabs at writing fiction weren’t read by many people who weren’t either family members or drinking buddies (or both – hi, Dad!)

But my third book did sell.

I know we’re classifying Making Waves is my debut novel, and it’s true it will be my first published book. However, it’s technically not the first book I ever sold for publication. That honor goes to a book called Avalanche. I wrote it for a line of women’s action/adventure/romance novels published by Harlequin/Silhouette several years ago under the Bombshell label.

I sold the book, spent the advance check, and had already written two follow-up novels that hadn’t yet made it to contract when my editor called on my 32nd birthday to tell me the line was being cancelled one month before my scheduled debut.

This was also the same day my cat died. Oh, and the same day my employer said they’d fire me within a week if I continued to disobey the company’s hosiery policy (I did. They didn’t).

At some point near the end of that day when I walked out onto my back deck with a glass of wine in my hand, I thought, “this is really pretty damn funny if you think about it. What are the odds of all of this happening on the same day?”

I won’t say that was an epiphany, per se, but I will tell you that within a few days I sat down and began writing something new. Something different. Something funny. Something that screamed, “if I can laugh on a day like that, I can find the humor in damn near anything!”

And though that book didn’t actually sell, it did land me an amazing agent, who eventually landed me a three-book deal for my romantic comedies.

So that’s the roundabout route I took to find my voice. Do I wish it had been quicker? Absolutely! Was it worth it for the experience I gained? I think so. Does the slowness of my journey to finding my voice indicate I need professional help and perhaps a tutor?

Don’t answer that.

Book Giveaway: The Divining Wand is giving away two copies of Populazzi by Elise Allen in a random drawing of comments left only on this specific post, Presenting Debutante Elise Allen and Populazzi. Comments left on other posts during the week will not be eligible. The deadline is Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. EDT with the winners to be announced here in Thursday’s post. If you enter, please return Thursday to see if you’re a winner.

[Blank pages. At one point or another, most writers fear them. However, in today's guest post, Katie Alender (Bad Girls Don't Die YA, and Bad Girls Don’t Die: From Bad to Cursed YA coming June 14, 2011) describes two different blank pages and how one applies to us all.]

A lot has been said about blank pages. As a writer, you can’t escape them. They’re in your job description. A first draft is nothing but blank pages. And even when you’re revising and feeling good—coasting along with the confidence of a puppy—BOOM! One pops up, right in your face: a blank page.

The farther I get on a project and the harder I work, the more I notice a distressing trend: blank pages start following me around. They find me at Twitter, where 140 characters suddenly seem insurmountable. They find me at Facebook, where no phrase on earth seems sufficiently pithy/hilarious/relevant. And they lurk at my blog, where the “New Post” screen stares me down like the eye of a giant killer whale.

In these helpless moments, it inevitably hits me: “I can’t do it. I’m out. I literally can’t think of a single thing to say.”

And then I think, “Aaaaaaargh, I suck!”

But then, a few seconds later, something odd happens: I start to feel okay about it. In fact, I start to feel good.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: there are actually two kinds of blank pages. There’s the kind everybody thinks of: the kind that means you haven’t started yet. But there’s another kind, too: the kind that you earn.

And as a writer, I’m always in pursuit of the second kind.

Over the holidays, I went skiing in Colorado. To say I’ve never been much of a skier is an insult to actual skiers everywhere. (I’m better described as a “faller/cryer.”) But this time, I really wanted to learn. So I spent five hours a day, for all four days, in ski school. I suited up and headed out while the rest of the family was still drinking their coffee. I missed the ball dropping, went to bed at nine, and skied on New Year’s Day. I skied when it was minus twenty degrees and our hair froze into icy webs around our faces. I skied when my instincts told me to toss myself into the snow and cry.

At the end of every day, I felt like I’d earned something. By the end of the week… well, you couldn’t say I was a good skier. But I’d made a lot of progress. More importantly, I knew I’d given it every ounce of energy I had. And that felt amazing.

When I’m neck-deep in a draft or a revision, feeling utterly flummoxed, my five-day-old status update or my empty “New Post” screen is actually a tiny signal that I might be doing something right. Yeah, there are little boats waiting in the harbor, but that’s because the tugboats are out there in the open water, bringing in the tanker.

It’s terrifically bracing to work to your limit. Suddenly, the mythical blank page isn’t terrifying; it’s simply impossible. It’s not scary; it’s just a mountain to be climbed another day. And because you’ve conquered so many before, you stop associating them with terror and start thinking of them as a canvas for fresh starts and new possibilities.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever it is you love, whatever you’re committed to, do it until you’ve used yourself up. Then take a break, recharge, come back with a full tank…

And say good morning to the next blank page.

Book Giveaway: The Divining Wand is giving away one copy of The Art of Forgetting by Camille Noe Pagán in a random drawing of comments left only on this specific post, Camille Noe Pagán and The Art of Forgetting. Comments left on other posts during the week will not be eligible. The deadline is Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. EDT with the winners to be announced here in Thursday’s post. If you enter, please return Thursday to see if you’re a winner.

[Reading educates, enlightens, entertains and even allows us to escape from or clarify personal problems. In today's guest post, Camille Noe Pagán (The Art of Forgetting coming June 9, 2011) chronicles how reading also can be the ultimate lifesaver.

And, on that related note, please remember that from May 16th to June 1st, the author is donating $1 per pre-order of The Art of Forgetting to the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which provides resources and support to service members, including those who've suffered brain injuries.]

After I emailed Caroline Leavitt to tell her I loved her recent novel, Pictures of You, she mailed me a handmade bookplate. It was a photo of wings on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone. Beneath it, Caroline wrote:

“Camille, reading saves our life.”

Cute, I thought at the time.

But that saying burrowed under my skin like a tick; try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. While I was out jogging one day, I suddenly realized that Caroline was right. Reading had saved my life–more than a few times.

During my childhood, I followed in the footsteps of millions before me and escaped the misery and sadness of youth by losing myself in books. I became an Egyptologist while reading The Egypt Game; took on the White Witch alongside Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and let the green world bring me alive like Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden.

In my twenties, after despairing of my instinct to flee a relationship that was so good for me I didn’t know how to handle it, I read Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love twice in a row, then went around recommending it like a door-to-door evangelist offering free copies of the Bible. (Spoiler alert: I married the good-for-me guy. Thank you, Mr. Baxter, for that nudge.)

While a friend of mine was dying from terminal cancer, I dove back into my favorite novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, a story that illustrates, among other things, the way humans are interconnected with nature and every living thing. It was a sustaining thought in a time of internal chaos.

As a journalist (my other hat, when I’m not writing fiction), I cover health and wellness. I’ve written about depression and crisis more times than I can count, and the thing I hear from physicians and therapists time and time again is this: getting out of your own head can stop your negative, depressive thoughts and help you feel better. Our self-focus can drown us if we swim in it too long. But when we participate in activities that make us look outward–whether it’s exercising, volunteering, or being with friends–it breaks through those thoughts and offers perspective. Reading does this in the most primal way: it takes you out of your head and puts you in someone else’s.

The ability to leave my life and enter a fictional one—even for a few minutes—has kept me from sinking so many times (no surprise, writing fiction has a very similar effect). To me, at its core every novel is about redemption. When the characters we are reading about triumph, or even just survive, we cheer along side them because it reinforces the idea that we, too, can survive and triumph.

A month or so ago, a woman emailed me. It turns out that she helped copyedit my novel, The Art of Forgetting, which is about how two friends’ relationship is forever changed after one of them suffers a brain injury. She told me that while she was working on Forgetting, someone close to her had suffered a serious head injury. Your novel was a great source of comfort to me during that time, she wrote. Thank you.

It was then I knew that writing the novel had been a worthwhile endeavor; I had finally paid forward what Barbara Kingsolver, Charles Baxter and countless other authors have done for me. I may not have literally saved that woman, but my book had been a lifeboat during her flood. I’ve had some lovely early reviews–and, of course, some less-than-lovely, too. None of those words, good or bad, have meant nearly as much to me as the email that said, Your book helped me.

Reading saves lives. If you don’t believe me, crack open a book the next time you feel yourself starting to sink.

Book Giveaway: The Divining Wand is giving away one copy of The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore in a random drawing of comments left only on this specific post, Meg Mitchell Moore and The Arrivals. Comments left on other posts during the week will not be eligible. The deadline is Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. EDT with the winners to be announced here in Thursday’s post. If you enter, please return Thursday to see if you’re a winner.