Guest Blogger Elizabeth Buchan on Becoming (and Staying) a Writer

Elizabeth Buchan is the author of 12 novels, including the New York Times bestseller, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, which was made into a 2004 film, and was called a "shrewd and mature observation on marriage." Elizabeth also writes short stories and contributes to several major newspapers in London, where she lives. Her latest novel, Separate Beds, goes on sale in the U.S. today.

Please welcome Elizabeth Buchan.

If I had a dollar for every time I’m asked: how did you become a writer? I would be rich beyond a lottery win.

Here, I should admit that, twenty years on from the moment I announced to my ashen-faced family, that I was going to write full-time, I still have to shake myself. Am I really a writer? It seemed such an impossible dream, such a distant goal. But, you know what? I did become one.

I used to work in publishing – first as a blurb writer for Penguin Books. Later, I worked as a fiction editor for Random House. As an editor, you might reasonably assume that you know everything there is to be known about publishing – I should point out that I was the editor who turned down the opportunity to publish the paperback of the Bridges of Madison County in the UK. Clearly, I wasn’t that hot. But even had I been, I realised within twenty-four hours of resigning that I knew nothing about being a writer.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that a reader is more intimate with a novel than with human beings, and that relationship constitutes the living centre of writing fiction. As the writer, therefore, your business is to strive to create, sustain and infuse that relationship and it has nothing whatsoever to do with publishing.

Writing muscles are different from publishing muscles and moving from one to the other is like changing your gym and being told to work on a whole new set of muscles buried deep in the midriff. Not easy and, at times, painful. I am not sure that anyone who isn’t a writer quite appreciates the depths of neurosis, paranoia and irrationality to which a writer can sink as they wrestle with this birthing process.

As an ex-editor, I also suffered from a disadvantage because I was an expert on publishing vernacular. I knew exactly what that tiny sucking in of breath denoted when I rang up my editor to ask what they thought of the manuscript or for a tally of the latest the sales figures.

It was a question of stripping oneself down and returning to the basics. I soon discovered it was necessary to rethink the mechanics of concentration, to pace myself and to find hidden reserves of courage to carry on when all seemed bleak.

There were plenty of surprises ahead on this journey. I had no idea that, far from choosing subjects, subjects would choose me, arriving in my head and staying there until I was forced to write about them. As a result, I have learnt patiently to wait out the fallow period between novels (when agents and editors agitate).

Other rules include: do not waste energy on envy. One of the quickest ways to leach vital writing energy is to fuss over bestseller lists and to make negative comparisons with successful writer friends (or enemies). Don’t.

Rather, cultivate the art of observation. I think of it as walking into a dark room, switching on a bright light and looking hard at everything in there. Curiosity is what fuels a writer and I reckoned that, unless I was prepared to devote time to raising consciousness about this process, and to become good at it, then the writing would suffer. After all, the material for novels lies – to quote Virginia Woolf again – "all about one, in the drawing room and kitchens where we live, and accumulates with every tick of the clock."

What are my novels about? Thinking about it, I have concluded that I am trying to ask the questions: how do we live well? What do we do with the time between birth and death? How do we give our lives meaning? Putting it simply, I am trying to write novels that I would like to read – novels which climb into the reader’s head and take up residence. That is what great writers achieve with their novels and it is an aspiration which preoccupies me daily.

Twelve novels in I have not one second of regret, however hard it is at times – and there are days when I feel I am labouring in the salt mines. Then I remember what the writer Red Smith once wrote: "there is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit at a desk and open a vein."

He was right. It could not have been put more clearly or succinctly.

Note from Lisa: Viking Penguin is offering free books to two readers of this blog. To be eligible to win a copy, please leave a comment on this post no later than midnight, Monday, Jan 31. You must have a U.S. postal address for shipment (not a P.O box).

Author Interview: Jane Green

Promises To Keep, released in the U.S. in hardcover last week, is the newest novel from Jane Green, a British author now living in Connecticut, who has been credited as one of the first to help carve the chick-lit genre in the mid 1990s.

But according to at least one recent review, that doesn't exactly describe her current work.. Alicia Rancilio of the Associate Press wrote, "Jane Green's books are often described as a beach read or chick lit, but don't mistake those labels as meaning frivolous or light. Green's writing has both heart and depth. Her latest novel, "Promises to Keep," is the story of Callie Perry, wife, mother, photographer — and breast cancer survivor."

Green took some time recently to answer just a few of my questions.

LR: If I’m counting correctly, this is your 12th novel. In what ways have you found the writing process has gotten easier, and in what ways does it get more difficult?

JG: Life gets busier and busier, so far more discipline is required as the years progress. It is definitely harder to make the time, but at the end of the day it’s my job, and whether I feel like it or not, I have to sit down at my desk and get those words on the page.

LR: Having begun your writing career in feature journalism and public relations, are there any skills you learned which are still beneficial to you now as a novelist?

JG: The discipline of journalism is the greatest gift I was ever given. When you have an editor demanding a thousand words in an hour, you do it. You can’t claim writer’s block, or lack of inspiration. You just write, because it’s your job, and I apply the exact same principle to writing novels.

LR: Do you have any atypical writing advice? Anything you’ve done as a writer, especially in the writing process, that is maybe a little bit unusual but which has worked for you?

JG: No Just keep writing. The only way to unlock the creativity is to write through it. You may think you have writer’s block, and it may feel like squeezing blood from a stone, but the only way to free the creativity is to keep writing until the block disappears.

LR: No matter who they are or what they are doing in the story, all of your female protagonists are so damned likeable. Any tips for developing characters readers will want to follow around for a few hundred pages?

JG: Like them yourself, and identify with them. The key to your writing resonating is to keep them emotionally honest, and I’ve always found it easiest to write about subjects I know, or am passionate about.

LR: On your website you advise aspiring authors, “Just keep writing. Don’t go to conferences and classes and workshops, because that is just procrastination. A little of that is fine, but the people who become professional conference-goers, are actually procrastinating, and just putting off the actual business of writing.” Can you elaborate?

JG: I meet people all the time who call themselves writers, but have not written anything. Instead of writing, they study writing. The only way to be a writer, is to write.

LR: While promoting this book, are you already deep at work on the next? Do you find that talking a lot about the just-published (or soon-to-be-published) book makes it difficult to switch gears and continue on another?

JG: I’m currently taking a break whilst coming up with the storyline for the next…I’m hoping inspiration will strike very soon.

LR: Any upcoming readings or other events on your calendar?

JG: A number of fundraisers for breast cancer, and several book readings around the country. Check the calendar on my website.