Branding

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

Yesterday over lunch at the Grotto, where I’m subletting office space, another writer (also finishing up her novel) and I got on the topic of branding.  You know, the “author brand.”  I resisted the first time I heard the phrase, but have come to see its helpfulness.  You’ve heard of the elevator speech?  The one where you describe your concept or idea in a limited amount of time—from seven seconds to three minutes—to garner interest from that busy person with whom you’re sharing a metaphoric or actual elevator ride.  The author brand is part of the elevator speech repertory—those succinct, articulate phrases or blurbs we can pull out when necessary, like a business card.  You’re sitting in 32B when the person in 32A asks, “So what do you write about?”  Or you’re pitching your book idea to an agent or editor—or answering a question about it on the radio.

It helps to have an answer at the ready. I’ve stumbled too many times through vague and embarrassingly rambling answers—uh, life? Relationships? People? Ideas?   Implied in the question “What do you write about?” is the notion that we write about one thing.  Which might be true in some large thematic way, but isn’t very helpful in seven seconds.  How handy to have at the ready a specific, non-limiting answer.  “My last book was about beekeeping, but I’m now researching the mating habits of seahorses.”

Seven years ago, when I was working on a book proposal, I struggled with the “book hook” for what would become The Water Will Hold You. What, in the juiciest, most precise way, was the book about?

Prayer.

Too vague.

Depression and loss.

Too depressing.

Coming back to life.

Too whoo-whoo.

I came up with “Coming to prayer as a skeptic.”  I had to get the word “skeptic” in there, to balance out the word “prayer,” to make it clear that I was not a fundamentalist.  From that, I got the subtitle and, in the seven years since, a way to answer questions about my memoir without having to mumble.  My own elevator speech.

So now, after years of watching people’s eyes glaze over when I described my novel-in-progress as being about responsibility and how we love each other, I say, “It’s about a mother who kidnaps her own child and moves to a new town to start life anew.”  This is exactly what I said at lunch yesterday, come to think of it.

So yes, having a brand is helpful, the other writer and I agreed.  But then she shared with me the advice she’d heard, that a writer shouldn’t change her hair style too drastically, should stay recognizable and consistent.

Take a woman’s right to change her hair, and what’s next?

Whenever I pick up a book, I look for the author photo.  What am I looking for?  Have I ever put aside a book because the writer looks too hip? Too square? Too fill-in-the-blank?  Actually, uh, I have…. But I like to think I’ve eventually come around and based my judgement on the words inside the cover.  Consider Mary Gaitskill, who went from prim dark pageboy bob (in contrast to what one might have expected from her edgy stories) to white-blonde Pixie cut for Veronica.  I doubt that doing so hurt her sales or reviews.

Last night, at a launch party for Louise Aronson’s terrific new collection of stories, A History of the Present Illness, I ran into another writer friend whose book will be out this fall.  Katy and I didn’t talk about branding, per se, but she mentioned that’s it’s time to get her author photo taken, to gear up for publicity (what to wear?), and she admitted feeling at a loss.  “This is dressed up for me,” she admitted with a grin as she gestured at her jeans, blouse, and leather jacket.  “I don’t do hair and makeup.”

My author photo was taken by my cousin, in a crowded food hall at the Ferry Building.  The shirt I’m wearing was slightly ratty at the sleeves, but you can’t see that in the photo.  Yes, I’d blow-dried my hair to better than usual and I’d stopped at the Nars counter at Saks to have someone who knows how put some makeup on me.  (Yes, it’s the one in the upper right-hand of this page.)

I’ll continue to use this photo for years, I imagine, as long as I’m lucky enough to have books coming out—until I go completely gray.  But I reserve the right to change the cut.  After all, the writer drives the brand, not the other way around.  Many brands change their logos.

Yikes.  Did I just compare writers to cereal companies?  Did I really refer to my physical self as a logo?

Not every book has an author photo, of course—nor does it have to.  In a world in which the writer is expected to put herself out there through social media, many of us prefer to let our books out in the world without joining them on stage.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Let the work speak for itself.

Wise, some say.  Career suicide, according to others.  Personal choice, after all.  Putting ourselves “out there” is a fraught, complicated venture.  Do what you’re comfortable with.  At the same time, making ourselves uncomfortable goes with the territory, doesn’t it?

Maybe, in the end, this is another benefit of having a brand:  We can answer the question quickly, we can reveal ourselves cogently, we can pull back the curtain on what matters and then duck back behind it, to re-enter the messy, inarticulate foundry where the real work happens.  And where we don’t have to fix our hair.

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Excitement, please

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

It’s that time of year for making resolutions or—as some prefer—setting intentions.

Don’t worry.  I’m not leading into a list of what I hope to achieve in 2013, at least not in terms of pages written, pieces published, books read, or pounds lost.  I am, however, going to write about what I want more of in 2013:

Enthusiasm.

I have a complicated relationship with the emotion, dating to an early humiliation on the schoolyard involving bunny ears.  Every since Halloween 1967, I’ve had to be careful, lest I show too much enthusiasm and wind up scarred by ridicule.  I’ll spare the details, but the event had lasting effect—I loathe costume parties—and racked up many dollars in therapy.

I don’t mean to sound flip; perhaps I’m just guarding against too much, well, enthusiasm.  But as I get older and perhaps wiser (or at least more resilient), I welcome the sheer pleasure of enthusiasm—in the best, most generous way.  When a friend gets an agent, and then a book deal.  When I see my husband’s face break into a smile.  When I help a student who brings his or her full self to the page.

And this week, brand-new into the new year, here’s my first big enthusiasm:  a TED talk about the power of verb tense.  A colleague forwarded the link, and I encourage all of you to click on it right away (well, not RIGHT away.  Finish this post first,please).  In it, Phuc Tran talks about the dark side of the subjunctive:

Any writer, any reader, knows the power of grammar—as Joan Didion famously says, “All I know about grammar is its infinite power.  To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”  Any writing teacher looking to show the weakness of the passive voice needs only point to “Mistakes were made.” Constance Hale, author of the recent Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, speaks winningly about how each sentence tells a story with the verb as the narrative engine.

Ever notice how, when you feel passionately about something, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve heard or read on the topic, you can always hear and read (and think) more?  Your friends and your partner and your students may roll their ears the umpteenth time you go into the redemption at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or wax rhapsodic about the structure of “Roman Fever” but that doesn’t lessen your thrill when the unbearable grandmother sees the Misfit for who he is or when Mrs. Ansley moves ahead of Mrs. Slade.

Phuc Tran’s observations about the subjunctive and the imperative (and how the usage thereof affects our ways of thinking and being) made me tingle with that kind of excitement.  Verb tense matters!  Words matter!

Most writers—most writers in English, that is, or any language rich in what Tran calls “the probable, the possible, and the contrafactual” (i.e., the subjunctive)—write out of a kind of subjunctive thinking.  Regrets, what ifs, second thoughts—these things find their way onto the page, into imagining alternate lives and scenarios.

Fictional doors swing open, but in our daily lives, subjunctive thinking can close off opportunity.  The imperative keeps us on track.  Instead of I’d have finished my novel by now if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked back in 2008, I’d be wise to lose the “if,” to drop the “should”s.  My novel—and my psyche—would be better served by “I didn’t finish it and here’s what I’m going to do about it.”

Oops.  I just used “would” twice.  Let’s try again:  I’m revising my novel. It is what it is.

I first heard this idiom—now clichéd—from a contractor, explaining some situation behind my walls necessitating more time, plaster, and billable hours.  The pipe burst.  The water created damage.  It’s happened.  Let’s deal with it.

Pipes aside, if, would, and should protect from the risk of too much unbridled enthusiasm.  Words like those, artfully placed, guard against the plummet of disappointment.  Maybe, back in 1967, if I hadn’t shown up on the playground as the only kid in costume, wearing pink bunny ears and a black leotard and pink tights and a little nosegay of cotton balls stuck together as a tail, the story would have gone differently.  But it didn’t.  My classmates laughed at me. It felt awful.  And if I hadn’t felt so excited beforehand,…

Ah, but I did.  And what joy to feel and share excitement, again and again.

What excites you, this first week in 2013?  What enthusiasms are you discovering or nurturing?

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Listening, Reading, Listening

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Write a blog long enough, and you start to repeat yourself.  I started this blog in April 2011 and have written about silence a few times since then.  As I sit down this morning to write the newest post, silence comes immediately to mind.  Silence, because I’m wearing noise-cancelling headphones due to the noise made by some kind of industrial-strength vacuum cleaner (or pump?) operating out of a white van parked beneath my window.  Silence, because I woke this morning to city sounds—cars, the bus.  There was a bird, but it sounded like a crow, and I found myself thinking, Crows don’t count.  Like pigeons, they’re easy to dismiss as city birds rather than the blackbirds, swallows, robins, and small brown juncos (or sparrows) that I noticed earlier this week, while on retreat.  Silent retreat, or I may not have noticed them as much.  For some time Tuesday afternoon, I sat in a chair looking out over the Russian River valley; an arm’s length away from me, a bush with purple flowers—from the shape of the leaf, I guessed a type of salvia—hosted several bees (I lost track at six) and one very busy hummingbird.  Have you ever noticed how much noise a hummingbird makes, swooping—or hovering—near your ear?  Almost like the white van outside my window, which just stopped.  Like that.  And now I hear only the noise-cancelling whiteness of my headphones.

Yes, it’s December and the Christian season of Advent, which means I’ve just returned home from an annual silent retreat at the Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg.  I spent a lot of time sitting and looking, walking and noticing, trying to just be—which is a difficult thing for me.  I get antsy, anxious, much too obsessed with what I could (or should?) be doing.  So it’s a good discipline to sit and hear a hummingbird.

On my third night up there, though, as delicious and rich and deep as the silence felt—in large part thanks to the community of familiar faces and strangers with whom I shared it, for on my own, I don’t think I would savor silence so much—I needed a novel.  I needed something to read other than the books on the dining room table about prayer and spiritual healing and the enneagram.  I went into the library.  I looked for spines with blue dots for Fiction.  Not many, but my eye stopped at a title I knew but had never read: My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.

It was familiar to me in the way that songs like “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” and “Seasons in the Sun” are familiar; I saw the words of the title on a mass-market paperback, the kind with pages tinted red along the edges and small type printed on paper that smells musty.  My Darling, My Hamburger.  The Outsiders.  Middle school—grades six through eight.  I associate Asher Lev with that era, but why?  I’d never read it.  Had it be an optional reading for my Language Arts class, one I passed over for Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack?  It might have felt too foreign to my suburban WASPy upbringing, with its mention of Shabbos and tzitzit.  (Not that shooting smack was familiar, but at least I recognized the reference.)

So I picked it up, I read the description on the back, I took it to a comfy chair and started reading.  I finished it the next day. I know there are people—some who read this blog—who read a few novels a week.  Richard Burton, according to a review of his recently published diaries, sometimes read three books a day.  As a writer, I’ve often felt that I should be a reader like that, someone who uses a few spare moments to read a page, a paragraph, but I’m not.  I love to read, but other than days on which I’m fighting a cold (or a mood), I’m lucky if I get in ten pages before falling asleep before bed.  OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but I rarely give myself the kind of time I did, in one 24-hour period, to read My Name Is Asher Lev.  It’s a terrific book.  I won’t say more, other than if you haven’t read it, I recommend it.

But most of all, my wish for you, whether you observe the season of Advent or not, is to find some silence, to carve out a quiet place in your daily life.  Don’t work on the gift list.  Don’t address holiday cards.  Don’t make your shopping list.  Don’t bake cookies, or surf for online deals.  You don’t need a view of a river valley, or a salvia (or any other) bush.  You don’t even need a hummingbird, or noise-cancelling headphones.  Just try being quiet for a while.  Practice silence.   And if you’re lucky enough to stumble across a book you didn’t read that book all those years ago, pick it up.

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The Next Big Thing: Her Current Project

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Today I’m happy to host my friend and colleague Monica Wesolowska on this blog.  Her answers show her gift for startling imagery, emotional acuity, and just darned good writing. Her book, Holding Silvan (publication March 2013), is gorgeous.

Also, today, I have some good news to share.  I have two short stories—“The Ruins” and “Moles”—that will be out in 2013 between the covers of Arroyo Literary Review and Pisgah Review. (No firm dates yet.)  After a dry spell of not writing (or publishing) much (or any) fiction, I’m thrilled to see these two stories find a home in print.

And, now, to Monica:

What is the working title of your book?

It’s no longer a working title but official: Holding Silvan: A Brief Life. It wasn’t easy for me to come up with that title. My first title was: Bird Grief. That title didn’t speak to my agent. My second title was In My Arms. That didn’t speak to my publisher. I went through almost 100 titles after that. Only after multiple people suggested Holding Silvan – from a chapter title – did I settle into it. Frankly, I was afraid that it would be too hard to say Silvan’s name over and over to total strangers, but in fact it has been an unexpected gift. I’ve since noticed that most parents, no matter how sad or conflicted they are about their children, love to say their children’s names. Our children’s names in the hollows of our mouths feel like love.

Where did the idea come from for this book?

Even as my son Silvan was dying, I knew I would have to put my experience into words someday. I was solely a fiction writer at that time so I didn’t know for sure what form the writing would take, but to understand it, I knew I would have to write about it. I knew, too, that since we had made the unusual choice to let our son die of the medical complications he suffered during childbirth, that I’d experienced something that society as a whole needs to talk more about.

What genre does your book fall under?

More than one person has joked when I’ve told them I’ve written a memoir, “But you’re too young to write a memoir. ” Clearly they weren’t avid memoir readers. This memoir dips back into my childhood, and forward to my current children, but mostly it takes place over the few weeks of Silvan’s life.

How long did it take to write the first draft?

In fact, I had just joined Lindsey’s writing group a few months before I wrote the first draft. I went from turning in a novel excerpt one month, to announcing the next time my turn came around that I’d written a whole new book. I’d been trying to finish various books to my satisfaction for almost 20 years when this book came out of me. I was in the middle of the third year, the middle of the third draft, of my second unfinished novel, when I literally turned from what I was typing on the computer to consult the diary I kept while Silvan was alive. By the end of the afternoon, I was 50 pages into writing my memoir. Three months later, I had a whole book.

What actors would you use for a movie rendition of your book?

That’s a scary thought. Scary because I always think first of how to cast Silvan. He was a beautiful baby, and even in his dying he was beautiful to us, but still…Whoever played us would have to capture the intensity of loving briefly. There’s plenty of precedent for brief love–think Romeo and Juliet— but this is brief love between parents and their dying child.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Doesn’t every writer want to say, “Just read the book?” I guess my one-sentence synopsis would be this: a mother explores the love and ethics behind her choice to let her newborn son die. That, of course, is not what the marketers might suggest. What’s interesting to me is how differently readers react. Some people almost turn away in horror at the subject, but far more perk up as if a book like this is just what they’ve been waiting for.

Will it be self published or represented by an agency?

How lucky I feel that the first agent to whom I sent the book said she had to take me on because the book had “changed her life.” What more can a writer hope to hear? She’s also a very reputable agent who worked tirelessly to sell the book even after all the major publishers turned it down for fear that it might be hard to market. We were thrilled when Hawthorne Books took it on.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My son Silvan inspired me, of course, and all the many, many people who said to me, “You should write this story down.” I feel strongly that this is not a narrative we usually hear in the media. Usually in the media, when a child is ill we read about how the parents go to extraordinary lengths to save the child. And that is a moving story. But my husband and I felt strongly that, for us, the best way to love our child was to go to extraordinary lengths to let him die. I know that that is a horrifying thought, especially for those who are doing their best to raise children who are severely damaged. This is a very personal choice. We made it but then we had to get approval from an ethics committee. It was very important to us that others agreed. I wanted to tell the story so that parents in similar situations would be able to make a decision for their own children based not just on one narrative but by choosing from multiple narratives the one that makes most sense to them.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Certainly there are some beautiful books about parents losing children – The Disappearance by Genevieve Jurgensen, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, Paula by Isabel Allende. But in some ways, I would compare my memoir to a book by Peggy Orenstein called Waiting For Daisy. Orenstein chronicles the emotional roller coaster of not being able to become pregnant. That’s not my story at all but the way in which she links her ethical doubts and sorrows to other women’s doubts and sorrows, and to the different ways different cultures deal with childbirth and child loss, reminds me of my book. I’d like to think that my book is large in that way, offering a way to think not just about my particular situation but about parenthood in general.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Recently, a friend who read the galley told me that the book had already affected her daily life. She said, “At dinner last night, my kids asked about your book and for the first time in their lives I felt totally empowered to talk to them about death.” That gave me chills of pleasure. I’d like to think that this book might empower many people to talk in a real way about death. Because ultimately, isn’t acknowledging death the best way to learn how to love and live well now?

And now Monica will keep the chain going by suggesting you check out Peggy Orenstein’s blog.

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The Next Big Thing: My New Project

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Thanks to Meghan Ward for inviting me to participate in this blog chain. Meghan is the prize-winning author of a memoir titled Paris On Less Than $10,000 a Day.  She blogs at Writerland.com and teaches social media classes at SF Writers’ Grotto.

“New” might be pushing it in describing this book, a novel I’m revising, but it’s certainly first and foremost in my writing mind these days.

What is the working title of your book?
Rincon People

Where did the idea come from for this book?
I had a dream, an embarrassing number of years ago, of a young boy standing in front of an elaborately carved door.  Who was he, and why was he standing there?  Those questions got me started.

What genre does your book fall under?
Novel.

How long did it take to write the first draft?
Oh, my.  I was afraid of that question.  I worked on it for six years, off and on, before I reached an ending.  I won’t tell you how long ago that was.

What actors would you use for a movie rendition of your book?
The actor who played Chris, the radio host, on Northern Exposure would play my Chris.  Jennifer Lawrence for Eileen.  Patricia Clarkson, wearing a long braid, as Naomi.  And for Jeremy, an as-yet-undiscovered fifth-grader.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Rincon People tells the story of four lives intersecting over two weeks:  Eileen, who has kidnapped her son, Jeremy, for a new start in Rincon, an affluent town on San Francisco Bay; Naomi, a fifth-grade teacher facing the limits of her self-proclaimed role as a shaper of young lives; and Chris, a thirty-four year old man forced to confront and move beyond the romanticized grief of his sister’s mysterious death.

Will it be self published or represented by an agency?
Agency.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I can’t stop forgetting the characters.  They’ve kept me at it, always bringing me back to Rincon after I’ve stepped away to work on other projects, including two published books.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, but only in a superficial way—it’s about a mother and son who change their identity and move away to avoid an abusive husband/father.  My novel tells the story of a woman who takes her son for other reasons.  Afterwards, by Gina Berriault, also comes to mind, in how it examines the impact of a death on the surviving family members.

To answer this question properly, I need to be in “marketing mode.”  All too necessary, yes—but not yet.  I need to finish writing first.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I hope that readers will be compelled by a mother who has her best child’s interests at heart but keeps getting in her own way.  Early readers have pointed out the compelling situation of rooting for a character even as we watch a her make bad choices.  The theme of loss is what compelled me in writing this book, but the more I’ve worked on it, I’ve come to see that while loss and regret play a role, it’s really a novel about how we care for those we love.

Next week, please welcome the following writers as they add more links to the chain:

Lana Dalberg is the author of Birthing God: Women’s Experiences of the Divine (SkyLight Paths 2013) and a contributor to several publications and anthologies. She also leads workshops that link creative writing with spirituality and social justice.

Elizabeth Eshelman has an MFA in fiction from George Mason University, which she uses to craft contemporary novels influenced by the nineteenth-century works she loves best.  Her novella was a finalist in the Miami University Press Novella Contest; her nonfiction has appeared in The Writers Chronicle; and her first novel manuscript is currently with her agent.

Callie Feyen is studying Creative Nonfiction through Seattle Pacific University’s low-residency program.  She writes for The Banner and Christian Home and School.  Her most recent essay, “Girl on a Bike” was published in Christian Home and School last month.

Monica Wesolowska’s forthcoming memoir, Holding Silvan: A Brief Life (Hawthorne Books, March 2013), examines the love and ethics involved in choosing to let her newborn son die. She lives, writes, and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Be sure to check out their work!

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