January 2008 Archives

I’m from Boston, where one’s first thought on hearing the phrase “going green” is that it must be St. Patrick’s Day. That’s a big day around here – a holiday, actually. Oh, the holiday is formally called Evacuation Day, but it means that state offices are closed, so local folks can enjoy St. Patty’s Day parades.

But that’s not the green I mean. I mean the environment. And wow, am I bad about some things. I use paper towels like they’re going out of style. I buy bottled water by the case, drink those little plastic suckers dry, and toss them out. When I’m cold, I raise the heat.

That said, I’m starting to think green, which means that I feel guilty when I do the above. I was mystified last week, listening to a news piece about oil fields in west Texas that were abandoned twenty years ago but are now being reopened with new technology that can bring up oil the old technology could not. Hey, I’m thrilled for the locals. But when are we going to put our efforts into producing alternative fuels – renewable fuels?

In a recent speech, Hillary Clinton referred to “green collar jobs.” Now please. I am not endorsing Hillary Clinton, simply borrowing a phrase from her speech. “Green collar jobs” is a great term. I had never heard it before, but I do believe that we need to develop an economy around alternative sources of energy. Of course, that’s still a ways off. So what do we do in the meantime?

Well, I bought a hybrid last spring. Granted, it’s an SUV, but it’s still a hybrid, which means that instead of getting 18 mpg, I’m getting 27 mpg. That’s an improvement of 50%, which means significantly less gas used.

I’ve also purchased reusable supermarket bags. They’re nice green things with the supermarket logo on the front, good storage space inside, and long handles. I keep them in the trunk of my car – that’s my hybrid – and take them with me into the market. I get a nickle rebate each time I use one of these bags. That’s four bags totalling 20 cents, times five visits per month, equaling $1.00. Bingo. I’ve paid for one reusable bag in full.

My latest green endeavor is one I picked up while working out last week to the TODAY show. Do you get endless catalogues? How many do you read? Me, I toss half of them in the recycle bin (hey, there’s another good thing!) on my way into the house from the roadside mailbox. Think about the waste – of wood, paper, water, time, effort, muscle (my poor postman!) – I could go on and on. But that’s where www.catalogchoice comes in. Click on it and register, then start declining those catalogs. I registered right after the show, and now, each day, I take the catalogues as they arrive in the mail, go to my computer, pull up www.catalogchoice, and click “decline”. If you have a customer number, great, but it’s not necessary. You do have to be careful to enter the name to which the catalogue is addressed; some use my middle initial, some do not. But even adding names is simple, which means I can decline on my husband’s behalf as well. The TODAY show says it may take up to ten weeks for a denial request to take effect. But that’s better than nothing. And I feel good in the process!

Next up? Those spiraling, fuel-efficient light bulbs.

What do you do to help the environment? I’d like to hear.

I did the worst thing Monday night. Between a flurry of phone calls and emails with my web designer in anticipation of the launch of The Secret Between Us Tuesday morning – and a flurry of phone calls and emails with my agent and my editor about next year’s book – I was working at my computer for most of Monday evening. I went to bed late and woke early, checked my calendar for the day – and realized that I had completely missed a phone call that I was supposed to make to discuss Family Tree with a book group in Florida at 8 the evening before!

I’ve never missed a meeting before. Oh, I’ve worried that I would. I was raised to arrive places early and to pay bills as soon as they come, so I often call book groups a minute or two before the appointed hour. I love these groups. I’ve visited nearly 30 of them since last March, and while each one is different, they never fail to give me a boost.

I blew it this time.

What to do? I sat here horrified, drinking tea to ease a nascent headache, watching the clock, waiting until 9 AM to call the leader of the group, the hostess of the evening’s debacle. When the time finally came (actually, a minute or two early, as is my way), I put through the call.

“Hi, this is Barbara Delinsky,” I said, rushing on, “and I am so, so sorry. I was here at my desk all evening, dealing with two crises, and … just … blew it when it came to your group. This was my bad all the way.”

She could not have been nicer or, amazingly, given what I’d done, more enthusiastic that I had called her. But she did tell me (a) that she had hired a black-tie caterer to serve dinner at the book group meeting, (b) that the dessert was a special sheet cake in the shape of a book, (c) that she had bought a new phone to optimize speakerphone capability, and (d) that the group had rehearsed the questions they were going to ask me. Needless to say, they were devastated when I didn’t call.

She and I had a great discussion, agreeing, among other things, to reschedule the meeting. I hung up the phone and promptly signed copies of The Secret Between Us for each of the 12 members, then drove to Kinko’s to instantly FedEx them out.

Did I tell you that this woman had also sent me pictures of the members of her group in advance of our meeting? She had to have been one of the most eager, most generous, most comprehensive meeting preparers I’ve ever dealt with. And I let her down.

Why am I telling you this? It isn’t something I’m proud of. But it is part of the HOW TO of being a writer. It relates to the business part. Ahhh, for the day when all I had to do with my life was to write books! I would estimate that I spend 40% of my work time on business. There are lots of things to keep straight, and I don't only mean the crises of my current characters. I’m talking about things that have to do with that most precious commodity, my readers.

If you’re a member of the group I stood up last Monday, please accept my sincere apology. I look forward to talking with you in the near future.

If you’re a member of another book group, please know that I’ve now instituted safeguards so that this never happens again. If you want to test me out, send me a note through CONTACT and we’ll slot your group in.

Not in a book group? Just my average, prized reader? The message here is that I’m human. I'm hoping you'll love me, warts and all.

Today’s the day. The Secret Between Us is on sale in your favorite store! But of course, you’d have to be on another planet not to have already heard it from me. I’ve been talking about January 22 for months.

If you’ve read my recent blogs, you’ve had an inside look at the writing of The Secret Between Us. So what do I do in the one or two days before publication? You’re reading it. At this stage, with this book, it’s all about making sure that my website is perfect. That means changing every “Coming January 22” to “On Sale Now.” It means making sure that the links to online booksellers are functional, so that the book is easy for you to buy. It means writing copy for the eblast that went out to my mailing list this morning.

It means working with my brilliant web designer, Steve Bennett, to introduce several new things to the site – namely a Media Room and a new podcast. The Media Room is for – you guessed it! – media and offers a formal press release and cover photo for The Secret Between Us, plus an author photo. The podcast is for YOU. Have you listened to any of my podcasts yet? None of them run much more than three minutes, and you can select from things like the straightforward “My Niche” and “What is UPLIFT?” to the interesting “Writing About Daughters (When I Have None)” to the whimsical “I Hate Cooking.” To celebrate the publication of The Secret Between Us, we’ve posted a new one. It’s called “What I Would Do If I Wasn’t A Writer.” For a listen, click here.

Another important thing I’ve done in the last day to prepare for the pub of The Secret Between Us is to post news of a new contest at various points in the site. I’m asking readers to help spread word that THE SECRET is out. The contest part? Tell a friend about this book and have him/her send me a note through CONTACT mentioning The Secret Between Us and giving your name as the blabbermouth. Whoever blabs the most wins. The prize for the winner? A personal phone call from me, a signed copy of the book, plus a signed blow-up of this gorgeous cover. In order to qualify as the winner, you have to be on my mailing list, so sign up now. What’s in it for your friends? If they’re new readers who join the mailing list, they receive a signed copy of the book.

I'm also offering signed bookplates to readers who buy The Secret Between Us within the first two weeks of sale. If you buy it by February 5, send me a note telling when and where you got it, where I should send the bookplate, and how you'd like it inscribed.

Anything else today? I don’t think so. Whew. I’m exhausted already. And here I am, trying to focus on next year’s book, While My Sister Sleeps. Yes, I’ll be writing as always today. Wellllll, maybe I’ll spend a little while talking with my publisher or my agent, certainly with my web designer. But then it’s back to the grindstone. Hey, you all want a new book next year, right?

LEE? That’s Let Editor Edit. And it’s what used to be done all the time in publishing, back in the days when editors dared to edit. There was a great article about this in Publishers Weekly last June. Apropos of that, I’ve been writing for several decades now, and for the very first time, I have an editor who loves editing. Her name is Phyllis Grann, and she has a vision for my work, in general, and for each book I write for her, in particular.

Let’s talk about those particulars. I’ve already told you that when I turned in Family Tree to Phyllis, the manuscript was nearly 450 pages. By the time she was done with her red pencil, we had shaved off nearly 100 pages.

Is this good? Some authors would say no. They’re the ones who don’t want an editor touching their work. They’re also the ones whose books you start to skim after a while, because there's so much flab. Personally, as a reader, I want to be gripped by a book from start to finish. If my mind wanders over excessively wordy or unnecessarily repetitious segments, I’m not gripped. As a writer, I want my reader to be gripped.

So I believe in belt-tightening. Mind you, it isn’t easy. It isn’t fun when your editor summarily Xes out a sentence or a paragraph that you spent hours writing. But it is a joint effort, which explains the “we shaved off” I said above. The final word is mine. It’s always my choice whether to put her edits onto my disk or not. Occasionally, I veto a suggestion and stick with my original. But Phyllis is good. After I worked her suggestions into my Family Tree file, I read the book through. It moved. It was stronger for the cutting. If anything was lost in the process, I didn’t miss it.

I have this thing about learning. I’ve written lots of books and could easily rest on my laurels. But where’s the excitement in that? I want to grow. I want each book to be better than the last.

So, after Family Tree, I tried to find a pattern in Phyllis’s edits. There were several. I kept them in mind as I wrote The Secret Between Us, and I thought my writing was greatly improved.

At least, that's what I thought. And I did do better with Phyllis. This time, rather than cut 100 pages, we only cut 50.

Let me give you two examples of the kind of cuts we made. If you haven’t read the first two chapters of The Secret Between Us and want to, click here. If you haven’t and don’t want to, I’ll set the scene. It’s the morning after the accident, and Deborah is just beginning to see how upset her daughter is.

My original sentence read as follows: “She had barely returned to the office after making two more home visits, phoning the hospital for an update on Calvin McKenna, and, in the wake of that, feeling several moments of what she wished was sympathetic morning sickness for her sister but knew to be raw panic, when the school nurse called to say that Grace had thrown up in the girls’ bathroom and needed to go home.”

After cuts, the sentence read, “Deborah had barely returned to the office when the school nurse called to say that Grace had thrown up in the girls’ bathroom and needed to be picked up.”

Much better. Clean and to the point. I had described Deborah’s work day for the reader in prior pages. There was no need for repetition.

A second example comes from a scene in which Deborah is sitting in a wingback chair at her dad’s house, thinking how lovely it is to be contained by the blinders of the chair, so that she can think of only one thing at a time.

My original paragraph read, “Pushing the last three from her mind, she focused on Cal McKenna, reliving the accident for the umpteenth time, trying desperately to see something she might have done differently. She relived her time in the woods with him, wondering whether she might have done more then. She relived her talks with the police and, later, with Grace, but here there was no second guessing. Grace was her daughter, suffereing from her parents’ divorce and at a challenging time in her life. She was a hard-working student, a dedicated runner, a caring sister, a good daughter. She was also a good driver. She didn’t deserve a punishment that could limit her choices in life. Neither, given the facts of the accident, did Deborah. But she would gladly take it to spare her daughter. Parents did that, particularly ones who had caused their kids grief.”

Phyllis’s margin note said, simply, “Repetitive.” And she was right. Sure, Deborah might have been thinking all those things. But the reader already knew them and didn’t need to hear them again.

So the after-cut version became, “She relived the accident for the umpteenth time, trying desperately to see something she might have done differently. She replayed her talk with the police and, later with Grace, but here there was no going back. Grace was her daughter and she deserved protection. That’s what parents did, particularly ones who had caused their kids grief.”

Some difference, huh? Again, we have something that is cleaner and more to the point – and this happened throughout the manuscript. Once I finished my part in the cutting, I read through the whole thing as I’d done with Family Tree, and found it to be much, much better.

So now I’m writing While My Sister Sleeps, which will be out in early 2009. And I’m trying to incorporate Phyllis’s lessons. But it’s a process. For every two sentences I write, I cut one. I’ve probably written 200+ pages for my current yield of 100+ pages. Still, the final product is good. I like what I read, and, if I like it, my readers will, too.

Polishing a novel is like polishing a gem. You have to chip away at the detritus (how’s that for a word?) of the raw piece. You have to whittle away at anything that can detract from the finished stone. You end up with something that shines. Something that glows. Something that, in book terms, readers think is the very best you’ve ever written.

Right? Let me know …

Plotting is the worst. At least, for me it is. I have no shortage of story ideas and can easily come up with a premise that will make for a good book. Getting the details right is another matter. This is largely because my books are character-driven. If my books were action-driven, it might be easier. Dealing with personalities, emotions, and family dynamics, though, I have to pick and choose my action with care.

Blank screen syndrome. That’s what I call it when I sit here and have absolutely no idea what to write. Those are the times when I wish I wrote history and had established facts to report.

But I don't write history. I write fiction, which means dreaming up an entire book. So. Picking up where my last two blogs left off, I now have my publisher on board with my premise and my characters, and I even have their names. Now, I know what is supposed to happen emotionally. For instance, The Secret Between Us is the story of a lie gone bad. I knew that, after the lie was told, life had to become increasingly difficult for my two main characters, Deborah and her 16-year-old daughter Grace. But how?

It’s time to brainstorm. Deborah is a physician. What kinds of complications would a physician face in a crisis? Well, a patient could die. A patient could sue her. Her medical partner (in this case, her father Michael) could do something bad while Deborah is preoccupied with her crisis. As for Grace, she is a high schooler and a star on the track team. Complications for her? A failed test? A botched run? Fights with friends?

I make a list – like a shopping list. Need angst? Check out the list.

But it isn’t easy. If you add a complication at the wrong time, it messes up the pacing of the book. For instance, one of the complications in The Secret Between Us is an angry phone call from a patient's husband, who is complaining about Deborah’s treatment of his wife. Well, I can’t just have the phone call come in. There has to be a prior scene showing Deborah with the wife. Where to put that? Deborah has to be seeing patients (as opposed to, say, filing an accident report at the police station), so I have to flesh out a timeline for her work. This serves a double purpose, in that it gives readers a first-hand view of Deborah at work.

I actually put that scene with the wife in several places before it found the right spot. What would we do without cut-and-paste? Unfortunately, some of the cutting-and-pasting is done when the book is finished, perhaps at my editor’s request. That’s harder, because there’s a domino effect. Move one scene, and subsequent scenes are affected. At the very least, references to the moved scene have to be shifted or deleted.

How do I make those decisions about what to put where? That’s the angst of plotting in a nutshell, and, let me tell you, it keeps me up more nights that I can count. No, it doesn’t keep me up. It wakes me out of a sound sleep. I do keep a pad next to my bed for the express purpose of jotting down middle-of-the-night thoughts. But there's lots of awake time.

And it gets worse as I approach the climax of the book, because this is due-or-die time. When I start a novel, I generally know where I need to be at the end, but here, too, the devil is in the details. Again, take The Secret Between Us. Part of the plot involves a serious case of underage drinking. How to resolve that at the end of the book? I abhor underage drinking. But I didn’t feel that sending my fictional teenagers to jail worked. I agonized over this for weeks. In the end, I crafted a compromise – and let me say right off that I was criticized for it by a woman who read an early ARC of this book and wanted something harsher. But I can only do what works for me. And yes, it does reflect my view of life. I don’t see things in black and white, but in shades of gray.

I’ll be eager to know whether you agree with this particular shade of gray. Send me a note, or post a comment right here.

And tune back later this week for talk of belt-tightening. This will be the final blog in my run-up to the publication of The Secret Between Us – which hits stands -- whoa -- next Tuesday, Jan 22. Gettin’ close!

So you thought that a writer just sat down and wrote a book from start to finish, and it’s done?

Not quite. There are some days when everything you write is wrong. More often, it’s only a small part of what you write. Still, it’s painful.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Picking up where my last blog left off, once my proposal is approved, I start to write. In the case of The Secret Between Us, this meant writing the accident scene that opens the book. I was fun. I mean, it was horrible. But I knew what I had to write, which isn’t always the case. So I wasn’t staring at a blank screen wondering what came next.

Outtake Issue #1: Names. I picked Deborah as the name of my main character, and used it through Chapter 1, at which point I worried that it was too long. So, using my find-and-replace feature, I changed it to Sarah, a name I’ve always loved for its gentleness. That lasted through Chapter 2, when I decided that Sarah was too gentle for my family doctor. Not only that, but I had named her father Matthew, which fit him well – but a good friend of mine has children named Sarah and Matt. Since I have a weird aversion to naming characters after people I know, the pairing hit too close to home. So I changed every Sarah in Chapters 1 and 2 to Lisa and wore that name through Chapter 3, but just kept stumbling over it. I still loved the sound of Deborah, which felt properly strong and good. So I tried a shorter spelling – Debra. One more chapter of that, and I went back through now 80+ pages, reverting to the original Deborah. It may be long, but it’s perfect for my book.

I also agonized over the names of the accident victim and his brother. One of the original names felt too evil, the next too cutesy. And then there was the brother pairing -- I mean, you don't want Mack and Jack, or Tom and Dick. I called these brothers half a dozen names before finally settling on Calvin and Tom. What would I do without find-and-replace?

Outtake Issue 2? Point of view. My rule of thumb is that a particular scene should be written from the POV of the person with the greatest emotional stake. I knew that Deborah Monroe was my main voice in The Secret Between Us, and I knew that I also had to express the POV of her daughter, Grace. Their emotions were going to be the core of the book. As I got into the writing, though, I also felt that Deborah’s young son Dylan had a huge emotional stake and should speak. Same with Tom, the victim’s brother, who was heavily, emotionally involved. Same with the Chief of Police, who supervised the accident investigation that forms the backbone of the plot.

Well, 100 pages later, my editor suggested that the book would be stronger and more focused if written from two POVs only – those of Deborah and Grace. That meant my going back and rewriting scenes I had originally written in the three other voices. In most cases, such as Dylan and his love of the music of his namesake, Bob Dylan, I was able to express his feelings from either his mom’s POV or his sister’s. In some of the instances with Tom and the cop, I left material on the cutting room floor. So you’ll never learn about Tom’s first encounter with the sister-in-law he hadn’t known about. Does it matter for the plot? Absolutely not. My editor was right. Two POVs. That’s it.

Outtake Issue 3: Intrigue. You have to understand how tough it is sometimes trying to decide what comes next in a character-driven book. In a pinch, the default is intrigue. Toss in a mysterious character. Add the FBI. Let the reader worry about the Feds going after the protagonist whom we have already come to love. Well, I did have my mysterious character in the accident victim, Cal McKenna, whom Deborah’s car had hit. But somewhere around Chapter 5 or 6, I sent two government agents to Deborah’s house and had them grill her about the accident. I was thinking that Cal might be a secret agent, that the FBI was already worried that he’d been compromised and were now wondering if he had been deliberately hit.

My editor nixed that one real fast. "No intrigue," she said. "That isn't your niche." So a fabulous scene, three days in the writing, was deleted with the click of a mouse. "Your books don’t need intrigue," she insisted. And looking back at the finished product, I see that she's right.

Outtake Issue 4: SEX. Those of you who have followed my career know that I write good sex. But being able to write it is different from it being necessary to the plot. The more emotional and issue-driven my plots have become, the less it fits. So I was careful with the one sex scene that I wrote into The Secret Between Us. The way the words came together, I didn’t have to describe every little touch or moan, yet we felt the passion.

“Don’t do it, Barbara,” my editor said. “It’s a distraction.”

Out came the sex, which I had spent forever writing and had absolutely loved. But here, too, she was right. What I wrote in its place is far better.

And that’s the bottom line regarding outtakes. As painful as it is to cut scenes that you’ve sweated over, if they strengthen the finished book, they’re worth it.

BTW, if you’re wondering which characters may or may not have had sex in The Secret Between Us, you’ll have to read the book. My lips are sealed.

Coming up next? The angst of plotting.

There’s an argument to be made here. The birth of a book could refer to the date when it hits book stores and is available to readers for the very first time. Or it could refer to its conception in the author’s mind.

It’s kind of like the right to life debate – earliest conception versus ability to live outside the womb – but hey, we’re not going there. Two things I do not discuss here are religion and politics.

Let’s stick to books. And the birth I want to talk about has to do with the publisher. How do they first learn about my book and what do they do?

Writers reading this will be growing alert, wondering what I do compared to what they do. Some writers prepare a detailed outline to introduce the publisher to their book. Others deliver the first few chapters. Some give both.

I tried and failed at preparing the detailed outline. It took too long and required such a great investment of emotional energy that I felt I had already written the book – and in the instance I tried, the publisher rejected it anyway. Plan B (delivering the first few chapters) worked better for me because by getting into the actual book, I had something to show for my time and could go on with the book from there. Of course, if the publisher hates the premise of the book, she will hate the chapters.

So here’s what best does it for me. I come up with a premise. I write character sketches, suggest a setting, and jot down my plot themes. If I have at title or two in mind, I write them down. Same with sound bites. We’re talking a total of 4-5 pages, max.

Those of you who have followed my blog and surfed my site, particularly the pages having to do with The Secret Between Us, know that this book was inspired by the death of Grace Kelly and the perils of her daughter Stephanie. Reacting to that, I conceived of a scenario in which a mother and daughter are in an accident while driving home on a rainy night, and when the police arrive to investigate, they never ask who is driving. A lie is born. It festers and grows until the weight becomes unmanageable for both mother and daughter. What to do then? How to go back?

This was the premise I sent my publisher. I sent a character sketch of my mom, Deborah Monroe (family doctor in practice with her dad in their hometown; devoted mom to Grace and Dylan; still upset about her two-year-old divorce). I wrote character sketches for Deborah’s daughter, Grace (star athlete, star student, popular high schooler driving on a learner’s permit that night), and of the man they hit on the road (Grace’s history teacher, married but a loner, respected by students but far from beloved). I listed working themes – a lie goes wrong; the price we pay for being in denial; family responsibiity and expectation; the danger of trying to preplan a life. And I sent it off to New York.

What happened then was amazing. My publisher, who loved what I’d sent, had the marketing department write up a piece that they could use to start hyping the book – this, before I’d written a single page and when Family Tree was just hitting stands. Doubleday’s super-duper title person came up with The Secret Between Us, and though I still love my working title, Driving at Night, this one is immediate and personal. And the art department came up with a phenomenal cover, a home run right out of the box.

So the hype began. As Family Tree climbed the bestselling lists, the sales force had the ear of its major accounts and was also able to talk up The Secret Between Us. This is important, all part of the business of publishing – a propitious birth, if you will.

Later this week, I’ll tell you about outtakes – how I got into the actual writing of the book and the things that ended up on the cutting room floor – things that you’ll never see in The Secret Between Us, when it hits stands January 22. Check back, please.

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2008, I’d like to wish all my readers a very happy and healthy year. Funny, those are the words I always use – happy and healthy. I keep thinking I ought to try new ones, but ‘hearty’ sounds like we’ll be eating all year, ‘merry’ is for Christmas, ‘productive’ suggests all work, which is depressing, and ‘prosperous’ feels more mercenary than I’d like. So it’s happy and healthy for now.

That’s what I want for myself. Family is at the center of my life, and if my husband, kids, and grandkids are happy and healthy for another year, what more can I ask?

Professionally, ahhhhh, there’s another story. Happy and healthy don’t work here. What does? For starters, ‘creative.’ I’m always working on my next book, and if those creative juices don’t flow, I’m in trouble. So I wish for continued creativity. I also wish for productivity, because I am talking about work now and productivity implies completion. Creativity is all well and good when it comes to writing, but if I can’t finish a book, what good is it? So I wish for a productive year. Finally, success. That applies to my books coming out this year – The Secret Between Us in hardcover, hitting stands on January 22, and Family Tree in mass market paper this summer. I wish for large print runs for both, and that each hits high and stays long on its respective bestseller list.

You can help with the last. Mark January 22 for The Secret Between Us, and be one of the first to buy it. Over the next 2½ weeks, I’ll be doing a retrospective on the writing of this book. Keep checking back here for new entries.

And in the meantime, HAPPY NEW YEAR!