From a (looong) interview with Algonquin editor Chuck Adams, who was with Simon & Schuster before that, and who selected and edited Sara Gruen’s hit Water for Elephants:

What are you looking for in a piece of writing?
The first thing is the voice. If it’s got a strong voice, I’m going to keep reading. And if a story sneaks in there, I’m going to keep reading. To me, those are the two most important things. I want a voice and I want to be hooked into a story. I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they’re definitely not about editors—they’re about readers. You’ve got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you’re telling. You can’t just write down words that sound pretty. It’s all about the reader. You’ve got to bring the reader into it right away. If the writing is poetic and so forth, that’s nice. I’m reading something right now that has an amazing voice, and I’m only fifty-six pages into it, but I’m already getting a little tired because it’s so nice, if you know what I mean. It’s so pretty. It’s like every page is a bon bon, and I want a little break somewhere.

Dangit. I think I tend to write bon bons. No, seriously! I am a writer, and I laugh at my reputation for telling awful stories — you know, ones that I think are hysterical but no one laughs at and then I try to explain the punchline and kill it even more — but Andy, and this Chuck guy, are right: I need to tell a good story.

That’s something Nora Roberts (see yesterday’s post) does really well, and exactly why I always reread her books before going to bed at night whenever I come back to visit my parents in Houston.

More from the interview:

Look at Michael Chabon. He’s had success from the beginning, but it wasn’t until he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he took his formula of two guys and a girl and put it against this big panorama—the Holocaust, the Depression, World War II—that he turned the intimate little stories he’d been writing into a big story. It’s not that difficult to do. It’s not easy to do, either. But when you really look at what he did, you just have to come up with the right backdrop and put the story in front of it and make the story one that people really relate to and care about.

…

I keep saying, “Look, write Romeo and Juliet or write Jane Eyre or whatever. But put it against a big backdrop. Steal somebody’s else idea, but just make it your own.”

Last but not least, something I know I will have to overcome when my time (finally) arrives:

That is the one thing I don’t understand about writers sometimes. It takes so much work to write a book. It takes a lot of ego to write a book. And then they finish it and find a publisher and go, “Oh, I’d feel cheap trying to sell it.” Bullshit. That’s part of the process. You wrote the book for a reason: You want people to read it. Help us. Help us get it out there.

I dunno if it’s the Asian in me, or just a natural shyness, or what, but the idea of actively promoting my own work makes me cringe. I’ve never enjoyed being a salesperson. I always think, Shouldn’t the work/product/service speak for itself? But I guess I have to remember that work/products/services don’t have voices, so I have to lend them my own if I want them to be heard.

That said… PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF BABY PANDAS, IF YOU EVER SEE A BOOK WITH THE NAME KRISTAN HOFFMAN ON IT, BUY IT!

She may be “just” a romance writer, but my first ever favorite book was written by Nora Roberts (Honest Illusions — I skipped the sex parts when I was young) and frankly, what author wouldn’t kill to have her sales?

Q) Who helped to develop your talent as a young person?

A) I imagine every teacher helped. I joke about the nuns, but the fact is the discipline that they drum into education sticks. You can have all the talent in the world but if you don’t have the discipline to sit down and write on a regular basis, you’re not going to write or publish any books.

This past week has been chock-full of reading, and I’ve loved every minute of it. First I finished The Witch of Portobello, another wonderful Paulo Coelho book. I’ve realized that his style is essentially “fable meets self-help book,” and I like it. I don’t think it’s something I’d attempt to emulate within my own style, but imitating it might make a good exercise.

Last week I finished his book The Zahir, which is my favorite of his so far. The characters are very rich and engaging, and their plights are more “normal” than in the other two books. But The Witch of Portobello had a better (twist!) ending, like The Alchemist.

The rest of my reading consisted of excerpts from the 10 finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

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