Women’s History Month is one of my favorite months of the year. I love March, because it’s my birthday month, because the daffodils are up, at least in Central Texas, and because we celebrate women. As a feminist, it makes me happy. Of course, I wish we celebrated women every month, but we’ve got to start somewhere.
The links below are a gathering of some of the best sites I’ve found and that have been sent to me by others. First up, sent in by a reader, is this fantastic online exhibit featuring my favorite authoress, you know her, you love her, Jane Austen.
How important is a room of one’s own? Virginia Woolfe was convinced that a writer would never be able to produce without a room and an income. This frees the writer from some of the distractions of life. Sometimes, I find myself wishing for a space that is mine, unshared, uninterrupted, and undivided.
I recently visited Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. It was in this location with the help of both her brother, who provided the house, and her sister, who took care of running the house, that Jane did most of the work of writing that we know about. She revised her earlier works and readied them for publication. She wrote new works. She blossomed as a writer. Is Virginia right? Does a writer need a space and some assurance of an income in order to really write seriously?
I read a lot. I am a librarian, and though there are those who fight the stereotype of librarians as readers, I embrace it. I read because I love to read, but I also read because I write. The best way to be a better writer, besides writing, is reading. I have recently begun reading the flaps about the writers on new books that I admire for their style, or their literariness, or the plot, or some other aspect of writing. I look to see what their habits are, how they work, what they do. I have found, much to my envy, that many of these writers live in beautiful places and are supported by a spouse, a trust fund, a former corporate gig from which they saved a ton of money, or some other means equally unavailable to me. I have also seen the occasional story about the writer who just decides to go for it. Live on Ramen and see how long it takes to make it—see whether their fortitude or their dream gives out first.
What’s a writer to do? I don’t have a room of my own, and I definitely don’t have a trust fund.
Here goes, and trust me, dear reader, this advice may not be what you want to hear, but it’s my job as a book coach to tell you hard things. Deep breath—in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Yep, I pulled out that chestnut. It may be a cliche, but that doesn’t make it untrue. I recently attended the History Quill Writers Convention and it was wonderful. One of the most memorable things I heard was from the author of Sisters in Arms, Kaia Alderson. She wrote the novel, her first full length one (her earlier works were mostly Novellas) in 10 and 15 minute snatches on her work breaks, lunch and after her baby went to sleep. One attendee asked her what I am sure we were all wondering, how was that possible? She replied that it was the time available to her and she organized her writing in such a way that she could manage it. She was able to get around 1000-1500 words per day that way.
So, think about your days, the rhythm of your job, your activities. Even without a room of your own, is there a way you can squeeze in an hour or two to write? Maybe not every day, but most days? If you want to be a writer, you will!
For February, we read The Anomaly. If you are interested in joining us for the next meeting, in April, please send Robin an email at readerlybooks[at]gmail.com
Background: This book was on several “best of” lists for 2021, including the New York Times. Here is a sampling of reviews and the publisher’s page:
We all agreed it was a beautifully written book, both Science Fiction AND Literary, with a touch of tongue in cheek humor that made some of the bitter pills of human nature a little easier to swallow.
What we loved about Le Tellier’s writing and want to emulate as writers:
His ability to weave the backstory in just enough to fill the reader in on the character. No infodumps here, just clean prose with a Goldilocks amount of backstory to make the reader keep reading and understand what is going on.
His ability to seamlessly integrate multiple POV characters AND make us care about them all. No easy task.
His use of foreshadowing was both elegant and subtle.
Some of our favorite passages:
p. 40-41 “THE FICUS is thirsty. Its brown leaves are so dry they’re curling up; some branches are already dead. Standing there in its plastic pot, it’s the very incarnation of hopelessness, if indeed the word “incarnation” can be applied to a green plant. If someone doesn’t water it soon, David thinks, it’s going to die. In all logic, it must be possible to find a point of no return on the continuous thread of time, an irretrievable tipping point after which nothing and no one could save the ficus. At 5:35 on Thursday afternoon someone waters it and it survives; at 5:36 on Thursday afternoon anyone in the world could show up with a bottle of water and it would be No, babe, sweet of you, thirty seconds ago, I can’t be sure, maybe, but now, what are you thinking, the only cell that could have set the whole thing going again, the final viable eukaryote that could have rallied its neighbors—Come on, guys, let’s see some motivation, let’s have a reaction, fill yourselves up with water, don’t let yourselves go—well, the last of the last has just left us, so you’re here too late, with your pathetic little bottle, ciao ciao. Yes, somewhere on the thread of time.”
p. 250 “ No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.”
p. 360 “But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.”
Legend has it that Jane Austen used calendars for the years in which her novels were set to make sure she was accurate about dates, days of the week, and also to help make sure she was making sense of her timeline.
Well, dear reader, you can do this too, whether it is historical fiction, or a modern mystery, try out this calendar making tool to get the dates right and even the moon phases. After all, if your antagonist is planning a murder, she won’t want a full moon!
Select “Calendar Creator” from the “Calendar” drop down menu.
Fill in the fields
Oila!
You can download it as a PDF and write on it the old-fashioned way, or make a spreadsheet by transferring the data. Then when you plot your story and think about story present, you will know what day it is, what season, etc. You could use this calendar to keep track of weather as well.
Infoplease has a perpetual calendar that will let you look at other types of date keeping and see what happened in a certain year between 1900-2014. https://www.infoplease.com/calendar
What other tools do you use to keep track of time in your books?
I discovered Wilde’s series by accident when I was doing some checking on Austen Fan Fiction for the JASNA Bibliography. What a fabulous pseudonym!
I mostly enjoyed this entry in the Cozy Mystery genre and found it delightful, except for one ENORMOUS Howler. If you are a fan of historical mysteries, female sleuths, and the Regency period, this series should perhaps be added to your TBR pile.
But wait, what was the howler? Well, dear reader, let me tell you. The action of the novel mostly takes place in February-March of 1817 and references something called the “Little Season.” According to the novel, the Little Season was the ramp up to the London Season and took place between the opening of Parliament in January and Easter week (p. 14). Unfortunately, this is not accurate. The Little Season actually ran from September or later to the Christmas Holiday and the opening of Parliament. It is true that the height of the Season was not until after Easter week, but the earlier portion of the Season from January to Easter was not called the Little Season. (Georgette Heyer’s Regency World and other sources confirm this, while this website questions the existence of a Little Season during the Regency at all, though says it did exist in Victorian times.)
Okay, now we have that out of the way, as historical cozies go, this one was fun. Our heroine, Rosalind Thorne (yes, Rose Thorne), lives on the margins of the gentry and titled classes. Her father lost all his money and abandoned Rose and her mother, though inexplicably taking Rose’s sister with him, years before.
The combination of the humiliation and impoverishment puts her mother in an early grave and ends Rose’s marital hopes to Devon, Lord Casselmain. Rose must now survive on her wits and her ability to manage difficult situations for London’s hopeful hostesses and marrying mamas. The plot revolves around Almack’s posh Assembly Rooms and powerful patronesses. When a dead son and heir threatens to wreak havoc among the elites, Rose is determined to find out the truth, whatever the cost.
She makes an unlikely ally in Honoria Aimesworth and meets a beguiling Bow Street Runner in the process.
A quick and entertaining read, I will give more in this series a chance, whilst hoping for no more Howlers!
The Read Like a Writer Book Club begins this month!
It will feature book discussions of great novels both past and present through the lens of a writer. We’ll deconstruct their work looking for lessons in craft, style, and story, so we can apply those lessons to our own works in progress.
Our first book Discussion will be about
The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier
The club meetings will be held via Zoom with a private forum on Tribe for online discussion.
Here is the framework we will use as we think about the novels we read:
Questions to ask as you read:
What are the basic “facts” of the book?
Genre
Characters—who is the central character?
Basic plot events—what is the most important event?
Character Arc
What does the MC want?
What stands in her way?
What does she do to overcome this block?
What is the POV used by the writer?
What is the beginning and the end—is there change over time?
What is this book trying to teach/show you about the world?
Do you agree with the message of the book? In other words, has the author done her job convincing you?
Choose a passage you find particularly beautiful and analyze it looking at things like rhythm, word choice, metaphors. What does it teach you about language?
What about the author’s writing did you find particularly enjoyable? What not?
I hope you will join me as we read both for enjoyment and enlightenment; and engage in spirited discussions along the way. For more information, write me at readerlybooks@gmail.com . Use the subject line: Read Like a Writer Book Club.
Full disclosure, I received an eGalley of this book prior to publication in exchange for a review.
Lucy Foley has a talent for a certain kind of Thriller. She collects a group of entitled, mostly unlikeable characters in an isolated location, makes sure there are plenty of secrets nobody wants revealed, empowers an unreliable narrator and multiple points of view, and sets the story in motion.
Sometimes part of the mystery is who is actually dead. Sometimes the location has a large role in the action. Sometimes the unreliable narrator turns out to be likable, sometimes not.
The Paris Apartment does not disappoint. Foley keeps the reader on the edge of her seat the whole way through and there are a few surprises which will delight fans.
Journalist Ben is living large in an apartment in Paris that his friend helped him get. His sister comes to visit and finds he has disappeared and that the residents of the building are more than a little strange. To tell much more would spoil the novel, so I won’t…
Here’s a handy tip that you may find useful when thinking about starting revisions. See if you can create a logline that encapsulates your story. If you can, it should hang together and you have the skeleton on which to assemble your draft. If you can’t, that may indicate that something is missing in the plot or character development that you need to tackle first in the revision process.
These 4 things MUST be in a logline:
Incident
Character(s)
Objective
Stakes
Try using this logline formula and in 25 words or less to convey the essence; WHY are we reading further? Make us want to read it.
FORMULA:
When a __[MC]__ does __[objective]___. __[stakes] ensues and ___[struggle/resolution]___.
EXAMPLE:
When a giant shark terrorizes the beach, a marine biologist, a fisherman, and the local sheriff must join forces to defeat the beast.
When Covid started and my in-person book clubs and groups started canceling, I went looking for something inspiring. What I found was the Chawton House Reading Group. For the uninitiated, Chawton House is the home of not only Jane Austen’s brother and in the same village as Jane Austen’s House Museum, but it is also the home of a special collection of early women’s writing, a collection that started with some of the books owned by the Austen family and read by Jane herself!
Chawton House used to host monthly book group meetings in person, but because of Covid, they moved to Zoom and invited anyone who was interested to attend, so I signed up. The group reads titles written by women from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. It has been a fabulous experience for many reasons. I have read a bunch of books I might not otherwise have read, and isn’t that the reason we like book clubs?
One theme that has recurred over the course of our discussions is how many of the female writers and their characters are “outliers” or who don’t behave as many people assume they would, given the time period. For a variety of reasons having to do with what gets saved, how the canon is assembled, what kinds of texts are privileged, these women writers and their characters have largely been forgotten, except by a few academics. Reading these books, and studying history a little more deeply, has opened my eyes to some problems with the historical accuracy debate among historical fiction writers and readers. Readers sometimes claim that a woman would never have acted in a certain way. But whose data are they relying on to make that assertion? The stories of real women are full of examples of women who bucked the system or tried to, and early women’s novels are full of aspirational characters who do things that women dreamed of doing, or who got caught and suffered the consequences of a male dominated world, while the author gives some side eye to her readers.
Clifford Siskin has written of the “Great Forgetting” and he is correct that when writing became professionalized, as with so many other occupations, it became gendered as male and largely unavailable to women. However, there were ways, and many women found them.
This is not a license to give 17th Century women the sensibilities of 21st Century women, but it is a call to reconsider what we mean when we say historically accurate. Historically accurate according to whom? The male writers of history who left women out? The men who sent their wives to insane asylums because they weren’t submissive enough? The literati with a vested interest in keeping themselves as the center of the academic world and for whom any competition, especially from women, could not be tolerated?
I encourage you to read about a few of these women and make up your own mind about what a woman would have done in year XXXX. Yes, they are outliers, mostly because we know their stories—somehow, they survived the Great Forgetting. But aren’t most books, history books included, about outliers? They wouldn’t be half as interesting otherwise…
Here are some of my favorites from last year’s reading list:
Isabelle de Charriere (trans. Caroline Warman), The Nobleman (1762)
Moderata Fonte (trans. Virginia Cox), The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (1600)
May I also recommend this title based on the life of a real woman from Georgian times who was basically kept prisoner by her vile husband. It was through the help of her maids and other household staff, that she was able to escape. I would love to see a novel based on the maids’ stories. They were especially brave, given they had less protection under the law, due to their class.
Wendy Moore, Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.
Are you looking for something to inspire you to write? Here is a list of favorite books and web pages about writing that I read in 2021. I am also including one about women’s history, since there were a bunch of inspiring women in it. Not least, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Alberts, Laurie. Showing & Telling: Learn How to Show & When to Tell for Powerful & Balanced Writing. Cincinnati, Writer’s Digest Books, 2010.
Brody, Jessica. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing That You’ll Ever Need. Berkeley CA, Ten Speed Press, 2018.
Collins, Gail. America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. Paperback ed., New York City, Harper Perennial, 2009.
Cron, Lisa. Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere). Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2016.
Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. New York City, Random House USA, 2019.
Carriger, Gail. The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture. GAIL CARRIGER, 2020.
“How to Write. Novel with Multiple Points of View.” NY Book Editors, NYBE, Series Eight, nybookeditors.com/2016/09/write-novel-multiple-points-view/. Accessed 22 Dec. 2021.
Klein, Cheryl B. The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults. New York City, W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.
Smith, Rebecca. The Jane Austen Writers Club: Inspiration and Advice from the World S Best-Loved Novelist. Bloomsbury USA, 2016.
Tobias, Ron. 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them. Cincinnati, Writer’s Digest, 2012.
