Backstory

The NYT is Nothing Compared to Oprah

  

 If the rumor is true (and Publisher's Lunch just sent out this photograph that came from booksellers)...  then... brilliant book and brilliant book club pick or not ...

Since Jan 2005, Oprah has picked 14 books for her club

All of them have been by men! 

All of them for the last 5 years. 

If you go back, since 2003 she's picked 20 titles.

18 of them are by men. 

I'm not suggesting affirmative action here. I never am.I don't believe in it. I just continue and continue and continue to find it curious. Is it possible that in 5 years there has not been one title written by one woman that deserved to be an Oprah bookclub selection?

FYI: She has 2 million readers in her book club over 80% of them are women and  7-9 million viewers watch the show every week and the majority are overwhelmingly female. More than  80% say some searches.

Backstory is moving

Backstory where authors share the- secrets, truths, logical and illogical moments that sparked thier fiction or memoirs is moving to Likefire - a great blog for readers. If you have written a novel or memoirs tell us about your inspiration. Include your name, the book title, the pub date, a jpg of your book cover and a jpg of you. In the backstory be sure to include and your website address.  

Send it all to Lisa at

likefire.backstory at gmail.com

The internet is killing storytelling

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

via www.timesonline.co.uk

I'm not sure of this. What do you think? Is the net killing narrative?

Therese Walsh's Backstory

A Sweet, No-Bake Tale of Success

You are a lover of words. One day, you will write a book.

That fortune, cracked free of a cookie after eating my favorite Chinese meal of chicken and broccoli (extra spicy), resonated with me. I did love words. I did want to write a book. In fact, I’d been writing children’s picture book manuscripts for over a year. I wasn’t choosing the right sort of words for children’s books, though—words like “Go, dog. Go.” I liked words that filled a mouth with multiple syllables and a mind with interesting possibilities—words like unbounded and asymmetry and cryptophasia and hallucination.

So, with the fortune cookie slip before me, I began writing a novel for adults. The year: 2002. I intended it to be a romance, because I had a friend who loved the genre. But the story wanted to grow beyond the traditional bounds of romance; there were twin sisters here with something to say—about a tragedy and music and misunderstandings—not to mention a Javanese artifact, an antique dagger called a keris, bent on having a starring role.

Two years later, after hacking 40,000 words off the manuscript and polishing the surviving sentences, I queried agents, still not 100% sure of what I’d written. Turns out, I wasn’t alone.

“The premise of your book is compelling and the writing evocative,” one agent wrote in her rejection letter, “but the tone and set-up make this novel a bit difficult to categorize.”

“The scope of your novel is too broad for a contemporary romance,” said another.

Agent Deidre Knight took the time to explain why the manuscript would be a difficult sell: While the love story drove the plot, the relationship between the sisters provided the most intense emotional moments. “My gut tells me you probably have a part of you that either wants to write women’s fic, or that ultimately *will* write women’s fic,” she said. “My gut tells me you need to write something bigger than romance.”

This? Depressing. I’d worked on the story for so long, making time for it while mothering my two children and between nonfiction jobs (I’d been a freelance health writer). I’d given up sleep. Given up television. My fortune cookie slip hadn’t predicted failure.

I tried to work on something new, but the desire to do my already rejected story justice gnawed at me. Eventually, I committed to a rewrite. I tucked the first incarnation of the tale into a box, and focused on the twins, looking for more. What hadn’t these characters already revealed to me? I cast off my developed notions about who they were, what they wanted, even whose story needed to be told. I decided to interweave narratives to better explore Maeve and Moira Leahy’s unique, magical relationship. I added new characters, left old ones to molder on the cutting-room floor. I turned the plot on its ear. I studied my craft.

Three years and several gray hairs later, I finished writing my 400-page manuscript for the second time and editing it for the 100th. There was still a love story there, along with elements from other genres—mystery, suspense, even mythical realism. But this time when I submitted it, I knew it belonged in the emotionally honest genre that is women’s fiction. Luckily for me, an important someone agreed; Elisabeth Weed became my agent, and sold my story to Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of Random House, in a two-book deal.

After seven years, this word lover’s “one day” has finally arrived; I have written a book.

I credit the fortune cookie.

To learn more about Therese, please visit her website here.

Anna Elliott's Backstory

For me to say that the idea for my novel Twilight of Avalon came to me in a dream seems almost too fantastic a story to be believed.  But it really is true, and it happened this way:

It was an afternoon in the early spring of 2006, and I was four months pregnant with my little girl.  I'd been writing and trying to get published for a few years, always coming close but never selling a book.  I'd just weeks before been dropped by my first agent, who had decided to pursue another career--and that afternoon, I'd gotten my final-nail-in-the-coffin rejection on the book I'd been shopping around.  I remember sitting at my computer and thinking that maybe my career as an author wasn't ever going to be.  I had my daughter to think about, after all.  My husband was in grad school, I was the one planning to stay home with the baby, and maybe this was a sign from the universe that I needed to give up on writing and just focus on being a mother.

But at the same time, I did have my daughter to think about.  Even though she wasn't born yet.  Even though I didn't yet even really know who she was.  I was going to be a mother.  And I had to ask myself what I wanted my daughter to learn from me, to take from the example I set by my own life.  That if your dream doesn't come true easily or right away you just give up on it?  Of course not.

Any dream worth having is worth fighting for.  That was what I wanted my daughter to know.  And I decided that afternoon that I was going to write another book--though I didn't yet know what it was going to be.  Only that I was going to find a new and completely different story to tell.  And that this one was going to be "the one"--the one that made it off my computer, onto the shelves of real, actual bookstores, and into real readers' hands.

And a week or so later I had a dream.  A very vivid dream that I was telling my mom that I was going to write a novel about the daughter of Modred, great villain of the cycle of King Arthur tales.  I'd been an English major in college with a focus on Medieval literature, and had fallen in love with the Arthurian world then.  So when I woke up, the idea just wouldn't let me go.  And over the next nine months or so--with a brief break for my daughter's birth!--that same idea turned into the manuscript for Twilight of Avalon.

For more information, please visit Anna Elliott's website.

Emily Listfield's Backstory

My upcoming novel, BEST INTENTIONS built on this kernel of an idea: What happens when you think you know what the person you love is thinking – and you’re dead wrong? I think we’ve all experienced this in various relationships – you may act with the best intentions to make someone else happy but without real communication, the results can be disastrous.  

I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how well you can ever really know another person, no matter how close you think you are or how much you might love them. My last book, Waiting to Surface, was a fictionalized account of my husband’s real life disappearance while swimming off the coast of Florida. His body was never found. In that novel, I tried to gain some sense of understanding about him, our marriage, and what I once thought to be true. Needless to say, it was an intense writing experience and when I finished, I wanted to write something a fun, a faster-paced page-turner filled with observations of the particular corner of Manhattan I am privy to.

BEST INTENTIONS centers on the reunion of four old college friends as they examine where they are in their lives versus where they thought they would be. Of course, since Best Intentions is a mystery, one of the characters ends up dead. The narrator, Lisa, is left to wonder how well she knows her husband. Is he a cheater? Is he a murderer? And, how well did she truly know her best friend Deirdre? 

One of the aspects of writing BEST INTENTIONS that I enjoyed most was the social observation. I’m a downtown Manhattan single mom with a daughter in an elite Upper East Side private school. Trust me, these are very different worlds… and irresistible to a novelist, ripe for irony and humor! Needless to say, I gave Lisa two daughters in, well, an elite Upper East Side private school. She and her husband are struggling to pay their kids’ tuition as they face strained finances and the risk of job loss. The effects of financial stress on a marriage as well as money envy were always themes I wanted to explore but as I was writing, and the financial crisis was deepening around me, it become even more timely. To tell you the truth, each time I got the galleys back (throughout the fall) I was able to make the novel more and more reflective of what was going on in the news every day. 

Luckily, money isn’t everything: There’s a heady dose of sexual obsession, marital stagnation and rampant flirtation among the characters as well – which is always great fun to write. After all, sometimes even the best intentions go fabulously awry.  

I also have started my own blog called Brunch Babble, in homage to the weekly get togethers by the two main characters (Lisa and Deirdre). Over at BB, I share my stories, talk about issues affecting my daily life (many mirror the books main themes: marriage, motherhood, money, friendship), I ask questions, solicit advice from commenters, and post updates about the book. 

I am always looking for new girlfriends to gossip with over a "virtual latte!" so please visit the blog.

FInd out more about Emily Listfield and BEST INTENTIONS, here.

Lynne Reeves Griffin's Backstory

I began writing fiction in 2000. I needed an outlet for my thoughts and feelings following the death of my mother. At the time, I was overwhelmed with emotion and my work counseling parents was very intense. I was writing a monthly parenting column for a Boston newspaper and working on a nonfiction parenting guide. (Published in 2007 under the title, Negotiation Generation.) But it’s in writing fiction that I found my home. For me novel writing is a wonderful catharsis and a deeply personal means of creative expression. 

In the beginning, I dabbled with another novel when the idea for Life Without Summer came to me in its entirety. From day one, I knew the first line and the last line of the story, and they’ve never changed. I also knew right from the beginning who was responsible for the chain of events leading up to the tragedy. Though it was a difficult character to assign the role to, I’ve never wavered in my commitment to tell the story as it came to me.

Given my work with families and my desire to capture family life in authentic ways, there’s no shortage of seeds I use to inform my writing. I’ve been a family life expert for more than twenty years; I teach in the graduate program of Social Work and Family Studies at Wheelock College, and act as parenting contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News. There’s so much about my work counseling parents, observing children, and teaching educators about families that I use in writing fiction. All writers use bits taken from aspects of their lives. Anton Chekhov called them, little particulars.

Though I’ve never lost a child, I’ve had my own grief work to do over the years; I lost my father when I was fifteen and my mother when I was just forty. And as a professional, who’s taught classes and counseled parents and children about healthy grieving, I’ve always been struck by the choices people make related to the loss of a loved one—the healthy and unhealthy ways grief work gets done. 

In truth, Life Without Summer isn’t just a story about losing a child; it’s so much more than that. It’s about the choices people make when faced with unbelievable pain. It’s about what really holds a marriage together when it’s tested. What I tried to do with the novel was to examine what tragedy does to all kinds of relationships. If they start off strong—or don’t—what happens? Why do some people thrive after a loss, finding true purpose, while others don’t come out of it stronger?

Life Without Summer is told in two voices because I wanted to give readers an up close look at not one, but two, distinct paths toward grieving a loss. I chose first person accounts, by both Tessa and Celia, since this is the most intimate point of view for storytelling. I didn’t want to leave any distance between the characters and my readers. I also chose the epistolary format because I felt it would be very personal to look inside these women’s diaries. My point of view choice and the novel’s structure meant that at times the story became raw, yet it was very important to me to show an honest look at the process of moving into and out of the grief experience. I wanted to give readers a true sense of what it feels like to embrace or reject healing.

I’ve since completed another novel about family life. In it I explore the impact secrets have on the closeness family members can share. I’ve always been intrigued by the power of truth on healing and the complexities of grief work. Life Without Summer delves into these themes; I imagine all of my work will touch on them in some way.

For more information, please visit Lynne Reeves Griffin's website: www.LynneGriffin.com

Elizabeth Flock's Backstory

The X Factor or Why I Wrote SLEEPWALKING IN DAYLIGHT

I had it easy. Here’s how I came to write my new novel, SLEEPWALKING IN DAYLIGHT. All I had to do was surreptitiously take notes when my drunken friends shared their sometimes unbelievable tales of marital woe (and bliss). Here’s how it went down: one particular weekend, four of my dearest and oldest friends and I had a reunion – they had unwittingly fallen for my master plan. I plied them with wine. Served lots of salty food. More wine and presto! The stories bounced back and forth like the US Open and there I was in the center of it scribbling away and guiding the conversation like Dr. Evil.

Though the circumstances were exactly as stated (see above), I confess to taking some liberties with the story. I am a fiction writer after all. Yeah, no, my friends knew I was thinking about writing a story about this epidemic of stagnant marriages. They very graciously agreed to let it all hang out on the condition that none of them would be named or easily identified. No problem. And so the idea for my novel was born.

Little to no sex life: check. A marriage that is functional but passionless and, in many cases, sexless: check. Wondering is this is all there is to life: yes. Raising a teen you barely recognize? Yup. That too.

Welcome to a modern American marriage.

Let’s start with sex. It feels to me like sexless marriages are all women are talking about these days. One friend told me it had been a year since she and her husband had been intimate. Another said her marriage had turned into a functional relationship bereft of intimacy she’d been craving but finally gave up on. “I’m exhausted by the end of the day and he falls asleep in front of the TV every night – what can I do?”

One of my friends has not had sex with her husband since their four-year-old was conceived. Conceived. “Life got away from us,” she told me not so long ago.

Another friend (I swear these are real people) has sex with her husband three times a year. “If I could winnow it down to two, I would,” she said. “I mean, do we really have to ring in the new year with sex?” she half-joked. We were talking about how easily a lonely housewife questioning her marriage, her purpose in the world, and her parenting skills could tryst with an equally disenfranchised married man and get away with it. Not only would it be easy, it would be understandable, we agreed. And there it was: the plot revealed itself.

The book took shape without my realizing it. I have a five subject spiral notebook filled with snippets of thoughts, fragments of sentences, quotes, full paragraphs of prose that did and didn’t make the final cut.

One of the many things that surprised me while working on the book is the fact that one or both spouses – the ones married more than, let’s say, ten years – are just fine with the evaporation of sex from their lives. In many cases, one spouse wants it more than the other. But there are other couples numbly soldiering on without significant intimacy in their relationships and without a thought about it.
“That’s life,” my friend the veterinarian said. “That’s what marriage is, right? No one ever said it was a party.”

The disconnection, the lack of emotional availability, communication problems and the worry that comes with the realization that kids are grown and nothing is left to fill the vacuum – these are the calling cards of our post-boomer generation.

And that, my friend, is why I wrote the book. Because that yawn of emptiness is scary and lonely and I wanted to mark it. To “own” it, even though much of this book is not based on my own personal experiences. I wanted to take a snapshot of The State of Our Unions in 2009.

And what of the kids? Teenage years are of course notoriously tortured for both the teen and the parent. What would happen if a mother and daughter were each caught up in their own quests for self-knowledge at the same time?

I can’t tell you how many parents I spoke to about their teenagers and most proudly told me they knew everything that was going on in their child’s life. They were happy their kid came to them and still opened up from time to time. “I’m just relieved we have healthy dialogues” I heard from one stay-at-home mom friend of mine.

“She tells me everything. You wouldn’t believe the stuff she tells me her friends are all caught up in. I’m so lucky she’s a good girl,” another friend exclaimed.

And then I spent an off-the-record afternoon with the teenager I knew as a sweet child. The “good girl” who “tells her mother everything.” And you wouldn’t believe the stuff she is indeed caught up in. Let’s put it this way: if her mother knew half of what was going on “she’d freak,” according to my teenaged source.

The unavoidable questioning of what it means to be a middle-aged parent struggling to find purpose, grappling with a stagnant home life, while facing the empty nest they thought would be a relief – all of these are commonalities and that helped me in the writing of this book. I have no illusions that marriage is easy. On the contrary, it is the toughest thing you can ever do. I know. I’ve done it twice.

Learn more at Elizabeth Flock's website: http://www.elizabethflock.com.

Monica Carter's Backstory

I've always considered myself more spiritual than religious, so it's somewhat interesting that I've found myself in a Christian fiction book contract. I didn't really set out to write Christian fiction -- when I started, I didn't even know the genre existed. I just wanted to tell interesting stories dealing with choices and the people behind them. And because I write stories that draw in readers even without using explicit language, my agent saw an opportunity to find my books a home. A Christian home. 

I have a bit of dislike for labels, mainly because I've found that few of us fit neatly under whatever label we fall. And so I didn't know what this new "Christian fiction" label would mean. Would it spill into my personal life and require me to all of a sudden be some sort of perfect person? Would my books have to take on a different tone -- a preachy tone? None of that would work for me. I have faith and believe in God, but I'm certainly no perfect person. And as for my stories, they will never be preachy because to me, preachy is not fun. And I want to write what is fun. So I decided that I'd just keep doing what I was doing. It was -- and still is -- important to me to write stories that are interesting, engaging and yes, fun. And as it turns out, that's also important to my publisher. And readers.

When I wrote Scandalous Truth, I wanted to tell a story of real people dealing with real issues and making decisions the way many of us do, not as perfect "Christian fiction" characters. Nobody is interested in perfect people. I'm not. What's interesting about people are our choices, who we are when we'd rather be someone else, what we do when we're forced to be exactly who we are. Do we make the absolute right choice, or do we justify a wrong choice with a thought that it is right for us at the time? And then I added a bit of suspense to the drama that unfolded, and found that the mix worked. Faith is a backdrop to the story, after all, it is Christian fiction.

Choices are often anything other than black and white. Sure, if I asked you, would you stroll right under the video surveillance camera into your boss's office and steal the stack of money from his desk drawer, you'd say no. But what if I asked you what you'd do if you knew the camera was off, there was a good chance nobody would find out and the amount of money there was just enough to save your family of three children from the foreclosure bearing down on you now that your boss has cut back your hours and is threatening to fire everybody anyway?

Choices.

Yeah, Scandalous Truth is about the choices we make when we are forced to be exactly who we are. And who we are, no matter whether we proclaim to be Christians or not, isn't always pretty. But it sure can be fun.

From Monica Carter, Author of Scandalous Truth, in stores now (published in January) by Urban Christian/Kensington. www.monicacarter.com

Pam Jenoff's Backstory

Almost Home is the culmination of a vision I've had for more than a decade. The idea arose when I was still living in Europe in the mid-nineties. I was traveling through Spain with two friends, one Polish and one American. One night as we were lying awake in our hotel room talking, I began mapping out a story of a young woman whose boyfriend had died mysteriously years earlier when they were students at Cambridge. Many former Cambridge students, myself included, seemed to have complex relationships with the alma mater where they had enjoyed such deeply passionate experiences, and the death I envisioned was on some level a metaphor for those relationships. I didn’t know then that the young woman’s name was Jordan, or that she would turn out to be a diplomat, like myself at the time. 

A few years later, when I returned to the States and started seriously writing novels, I was working on two ideas: one for Almost Home, which was modern, and one for The Kommandant’s Girl, which was historical. I took samples of both to my writing class and my peers liked both, but were slightly more enthusiastic about The Kommandant’s Girl, so I pursued that project and ultimately published it and the sequel, The Diplomat’s Wife. Meanwhile, the idea for Almost Home was never far from my thoughts, and I was so glad to have the chance to finally return to it and learn the many secrets and surprises the story would ultimately reveal. 

There are some people who will look at the parallels between Jordan’s life and my own (Cambridge and State Department) and wonder, “How much of the story is real?” To those readers, I say first and foremost – it’s all fiction, the characters, the story, everything. But I believe that while real life makes terrible plot, it makes for wonderful setting. And I do think of the book as a tribute to two groups of people: first, the many Foreign Service Officers and other government workers I’ve been privileged to know, whose heroism, skill and sacrifice continue to awe me long after our professional affiliation ended. Ultimately, the book is a homage to the friends with whom I experienced that brief illumination of Camelot known as Cambridge, a time and place that left its mark on all of us and created a common bond that lives on. Beyond all else, Almost Home is a tribute to that real-life fairytale, and a love song to those who lived it.

I think that readers of my first two, more historical books will greatly enjoy Almost Home because it has so many of the same elements: a strong female protagonist, romance, international intrigue and adventure plus a compelling historical back story. Despite the differing time period, it really is a very similar type of book.