Posts by Meg Rosoff
There’s a lot of talk these days about getting yourself a presence on social media, upping your profile, selling yourself, marketing your work, using every angle and every connection in order to “get out there,” hustle your product, hit the bestseller lists, make a splash.
This post is just to remind you that none of this is what writing is about.
Writing is about finding out who you are, what you have to say that is not the same as what everyone else has to say, and how to express it in the strongest possible terms.
The point of writing is to tell a story with your insight, the perspective that only you have.
The point of writing is to think deeply and to inform, entertain, communicate your insight with your readers.
The point of writing is to seek truth. And it doesn’t matter how you do that, or whether you’re writing thrillers or detective stories or comedies, or picture books for children. Truth is what will give your work resonance and power and make it worth reading long after you’ve spent the money that someone may or may not have paid you for your work.
Writers are not marketing experts or salesmen. Although these qualities are required of nearly all writers these days, it is vitally important not to forget that the job is to write, not to get a high score on Goodreads.
What does this mean?
Read MoreThe truth can be told at last: I am the world’s worst dilettante.
In my life I have learned to rock-climb, ski, speak French (all badly). I was deputy press secretary for New York State in Dukakis’ bid for the presidency in 1988, a job I got through volunteering in hopes of meeting a nice single guy. I worked at The New York Times back when the presses were still in the basement of the building on 43rd Street, was fired from six ad agencies and spent two years at People Magazine. I went to horse camp, worked on advertising shoots so I know what gaffers and sparks do, how difficult casting is to get right, and how boring most of the time on set is.
I went fox hunting once and jumped a five bar fence. Terrified. With my eyes closed.
I didn’t meet my husband till I was 32 so I know lots about wild disastrous relationships (most of which I couldn’t possibly discuss in public).
I spent a decade racing 30-foot sailboats and flying in tiny Cessna planes with my best friend’s rich husband. I was never much of a sailor, but I could take orders fairly well. OK, slightly-below-average well.
I’ve crossed the Canadian Rockies in a helicopter, paddled a kayak next to a giant sea lion in Desolation Bay, picked oysters and mussels and clams out of the sea and eaten them that day (on an advertising shoot). I’ve been to book festivals in China, New Zealand, Germany, France, Italy, Armenia, Scotland, Wales and Texas.
I survived 18 hours of childbirth and conversations about drugs and sex and body image with my teenager.
I had breast cancer, chemotherapy and radiation, lost all my hair and didn’t know if I was going to die. I wrote most of a book that year. I inherited the family depression gene.
I’ve ridden a horse through the Black Mountains in Wales, seen a moose a few feet away, nearly passed out drunk at a Harvard “final club”, sang Monteverdi in Chartres Cathedral and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with the Boston Symphony.
I saw Talking Heads and Elvis Costello and the Clash in tiny clubs in NY and London. I played bass guitar at CBGBs in NY and miniature golf with David Letterman in his office.
I met with a Hungarian policeman at 10pm in his tiny bleak office while two teenagers explained in Hungarian that I couldn’t afford the bribe he required.
I watched a black foal born to a pure white horse at the Lipizzaner stud in Szilvásvárad, Hungary. I took up riding again at age 50. Since then, I’ve had five concussions and no longer jump.
I studied steel sculpture with Anthony Caro, but didn’t understand a word he said for the entire time I was on the course. It discouraged me from ever taking art seriously as a profession, which was no bad thing.
I learned to play the piano, badly.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
I’m not very good at most of the things I’ve done in my life. Except for writing. I’m a fairly good writer. I wrote my first book when I was 46.
Read MoreThere are precious few satisfying answers to the question above. I have gone to the trouble to list them for you here.
“Oh, I dabble in literary fiction, you may have heard my address at the Nobel Prize ceremony?”
“Joanne Rowling. Lovely to meet you.”
“Mainly plays. Probably nothing you know. Ah, you’ve read King Lear, have you?”
Or even: “Very few, actually. I’ve barely put pen to paper since dashing off Catcher in the Rye back in the 50s.”
What you don’t want to say is this:
“Well, I’m technically speaking a children’s writer, but not entirely, I mean, older children, some not children at all, many perfectly sentient adults, in fact, seem to like my books, which do, of course, feature adolescents, but often incorporate quite difficult themes, say, on the subject of life and death, so that about half of my UK readers are over thirty and many of my Finnish readers are over fifty…oh, and by the way, I’ve also written three or four picture books, and am kind of mulling over a middle grade series, just for a change of pace.”
And if you think it gets simpler, think again. I’m just finishing up my new book, with a protagonist who has graduated from art school which makes him at least 22 — a good two or three years older than many of my past protagonists.
Imagine that for a radical departure.
The new book is called Duck Zoo, and my hero has the wrong job and the wrong girlfriend, and two dogs who are trying to sort his life out for him. It’s pure Meg Rosoff territory, if you’ll allow me to refer to myself in the third person for a minute here (ala Gwyneth Paltrow). It’s a comedy, kind of surreal, all about love and work with lots of dogs.
But it’s a whole new genre because technically speaking, Jonathan is not a young adult.
And all I can think is, oh dear god, won’t someone save me from marketing departments.
I wonder if anyone said, “Hey, Harper Lee, whaddaya mean you’re writing a book for grown-ups featuring a six-year-old protagonist? What are you, nuts? Who’s going to be interested in a six-year-old other than another six-year-old?” Did anyone say, “Hey, Henry James, you know this What Maisie Knew book you’ve written, could you make Maisie thirty-six so your adult readers can identify with her more?”
Read MoreDear Jake
For the past five years I’ve joked about “my stalker” – the passionate fan who began following me when he was fourteen, telling me that Just In Case changed his life.
You, in other words.
Your early emails talked about a girlfriend (who never really existed) and were breezy and cheerful, but the truth soon began to emerge.
You were a self-harmer. You attempted suicide on numerous occasions. You were bullied at school. You lived with domestic violence. You were so ugly you could barely leave the house (a lie – you were rather beautiful). You despised himself. And had a secret so terrible, you could never tell anyone.
We talked a little about your secret. We talked a little about everything. I tend not to get too involved with people who email me; there aren’t enough hours in the day, for one thing, and for another, they usually disappear after a brief exchange.
But you didn’t disappear. And there was something about you.
Read MoreTHE WRITER’S FRIENDS
1. The World. Jump in. Inspiration lives out there.
2. Caffeine and sugar. Coffee. Tea. Brownies. Cake. Cookies. And wine. For reward and solace.
3. Pets. Nothing like the wuffling of a drowsy beast to make you feel less lonely as you work. Dogs, horses, lizards, birds and rats. Cats are OK too, but they walk on computer keyboards. Bad kitty.
4. Agents and editors who Get It. Not the other sort.
5. Depression, madness, disaster, elation, divorce, affairs, travel, flat tires, new friends, new lovers, ex-friends, ex-lovers, mid-life crises and children who want to drop out of school to become professional skateboarders. (Life=Material.)
6. The Book, for occasionally coming out right.
7. The book you wish you’d written. (For making you write harder.)
8. Children. Why else would you need to sell so many books?
9. The career from hell that pays the bills. So as not to starve.
10. The film. For making your family and friends think you might someday be famous.
11. Family, fellow writers, loyal friends. When they say “You can do it.”
12. The internet. (“What kind of shoes did they wear in France in 1780?”)
13. Time: Writing is a long game. It might happen next year or in a decade. You never know.
14. Your brain. Listen and it will tell you what you need to know.
THE WRITER’S ENEMIES
Read MoreIt’s been a busy few months.
The film of How I Live Now, my first novel, has come out in the UK and the US after ten years in development. It was directed by Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland) and starred Saoirse Ronan, who’s one of my favorite people in the world, despite her ridiculous amount of talent, perfect skin, mad sense of humor and general niceness (god, I hate all that in a person).
In the meantime, my new novel, Picture Me Gone, is out in the UK and the US. And it’s a finalist for the National Book Award (which is announced today, folks, fingers crossed if you don’t mind).
This is all good stuff. Fantastic stuff. Amazing stuff. So why do I feel like punching the next person who walks up to me and says, “Hey, Meg! So! Living the dream, eh?”
For the past two months I’ve been answering a zillion e-mails from lovely fans who really liked the book but want to know why the film is rated R. Or why the dog is different. Or why Piper has red hair. Ask Kevin, I say sweetly.
For the past two months I’ve spent hours speaking and writing and appearing at Q&As about a film I didn’t write, so that when people demand to know why Edmond is older in the movie than the book, or why he’s called Eddie, or why Daisy’s a blonde not a brunette, or why there’s a bird….I shrug. Ask Kevin, I say sweetly.
In my spare time, I’ve written about 650 articles for the British press. Articles about the book, about the film, about stuff vaguely related to the book and the film, about stuff not at all related to books or films, about stuff barely related to me. I’ve spent so many hours writing so many articles, I’d say I’m pretty much a household name in Britain these days. It hasn’t made the book a bestseller or the film a blockbuster hit, but still. “Really worth doing,” says my PR.
Of course there’s one thing I haven’t been doing for the past couple of months. You guessed it. Writing.
Read MoreYou’d think it gets easier to write a book after the first two or three have been published, wouldn’t you? Well, it doesn’t. Ask any writer — each book throws up a whole new set of problems and headaches and makes you feel as if you’ve never written anything remotely sensible or insightful in your life.
Sad, but true.
I’ve just published my sixth full-length novel, in addition to short stories, a novella and some picture books, and nearly all of them have been hell to write in one way or another. I console myself with the thought that if writing were easier, everyone would want to do it. After all, it’s one of the few jobs you can do without changing out of your pajamas. No wonder we love it so much.
The thing I find hardest is plot. Any story arc I manage to squeeze out of my walnut-sized brain is always an emotional arc – protagonist starts off selfish and sad and ends up altruistic and happy-ish, or at least a bit wiser. But as to HOW that happens – to be honest, I don’t really care all that much. This is when I need a team of James Patterson-style clone-assistants or James Frey’s writing factory drones. “Fill in the story,” I’d command imperiously, and then go back to sleep.
But they probably wouldn’t do it right. Which would make me cranky. And I wouldn’t be satisfied with the result. So I’d have to go back and think about it some more, tear my hair out, phone my agent and sound mournful, tell my husband I’ve lost my touch and we’re going to starve, phone up all my writer friends and ask if they have any plots they’re not using right now, and eventually, drag some miserable bit of story kicking and screaming into the world, slap it onto the pre-existent emotional arc and pray it works.
A fair amount of cutting, pasting, patching, invisible weaving, and airbrushing comes next, and at the end of months of agonizing misery, voila! A book crawls and scrapes and limps its way into the light.
“Wow,” says the sweet guy interviewing me for a literary festival some months later. “You make it look so easy.”
And I deck him.
Read MoreTherese here. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our newest WU contributor, novelist Meg Rosoff. Meg’s first book, How I Live Now, has won several awards including the Guardian Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Branford Boase Award; and has been made into a film, to be released later this year. Her second novel, Just In Case, won the Carnegie Medal. Rosoff’s other novels include What I Was, The Bride’s Farewell and There Is No Dog, as well as three picture books. Her sixth novel, Picture Me Gone, will be published this September.
Big thanks to community member Sevigne Sevigne, who recommended Meg to me originally as a potential guest. I did invite Meg to be our guest, and she graciously agreed, and submitted an essay. But once I read it, I knew we’d want her for keeps. Happily, she agreed. I think you’ll agree, too, that it was the right decision to ask her to join our ranks.
Please help me welcome Meg, who will be speaking to us quite a lot about one of her passions: Voice.
Finding a Voice
Do you have a voice? Can you recognize a voice when you hear one? And while we’re on the subject, what does “having a voice” actually mean?
Poetry is a great place to look for a strong voice. How about:
How to Kill a Living Thing
Neglect it
Criticise it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green
Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible
Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone
To keep the wound wide open
(Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh)
Do you hear a voice in those lines? (Despite being unable to pronounce her name, Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh’s voice is so clear to me, I’m tempted to offer her a chair and a cup of tea.)
Many would-be writers spend far too much time nervously scrabbling about for a voice, but the word itself is horribly misleading. “Voice” (unlike “power” for instance, or “presence”) suggests a superficial quality, one that can be manipulated by having singing lessons, or by changing the tone, volume or accent.
There is nothing superficial, however, about voice when used in the context of writing. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
So….what is the essence of your personality? What is the clearest expression of your DNA combined with a lifetime of experience? What does the combination of nature and nurture add up to?
In other words, who are you? Who are you really?
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