Fascinating Authors

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Tell us a little bit about your book.

Author: Letters Between Us is an epistolary novel about a troubled writer’s search to understand a friend’s mysterious death at a mental institution leading to her own self-discovery and transformation.

Writer Laura Wells attends a memorial service for her best friend from childhood, Katharine Taylor, whose body was found in a garbage dump near Santa Barbara, California. After she obtains some boxes of her own correspondence with Katharine and entries from Katharine’s diaries, Laura begins her 26-year journey back, revealing unimaginable secrets. As a result, Laura discovers a Katharine she thought she knew and didn’t.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What inspired you to create a work of fiction?

Author: Writing to me is like breathing I can’t imagine not doing it and being able to live.  And writing fiction is the next step to playing God, really, or shall I say Goddess in a writer’s world.  As a writer I can imagine, recall or take inspiration from events, and stories shared by acquaintances, friends, foes, family, even strangers and put them in any configuration I wish. And the fun is that none if it has to be based on truth… OR it does.  Of course that depends upon the place and the time I, as the creator of my fictive world, wish to place my pen, my memory and/or my fingers on the page/keyboard.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What did you do to prepare for writing your book?

Author: Well I went back to college at 41 years old after dropping out in my early twenties because I was working full time so many hours a week.  There just wasn’t time to attend classes and do the work required.  I had been a closet writer ever since I was pregnant with my son…who will be 30 this year (and being an artist at Disney Imagineering, he designed the cover of the book) and my daughter is turning 27 (she is the one who insisted I push to publish the novel).  And the act of motherhood — carrying life within my body — created a need for me to document my life as a young wife and the life of my babies as their young mother…I wanted to leave a written legacy for my children, their children and their children’s children.

Then one day I decided that just maybe what I was writing might work in a short story so I wrote about an adolescent girl growing up as a latch key kid trying to fit in where she really didn’t belong, and it ends with her entering womanhood unaware of what that even means.  It was published in a small college journal and that got me believing in my ability.  However, I felt I needed some polishing so going back to college to complete my BA in English was part of the journey —  if I can go back anyone can.  And I never left because over the last 17 years I completed an M.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing and still teach in the English department at California State University Northridge, my alma mater.  Even now I am still an academic junky as I will be attending my first summer as a PhD student at Lancaster University, just outside of Manchester, England.  I will be attending for two weeks in July for the next several years and working with my committee long distance….this in order to complete a novel quite different from Letters.  I guess I am probably trying to make up for all those years in school as a teenager that I wasted flirting with cute boys and passing notes to my friends in class about them.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How did you develop the plot?

Author: Funny, I didn’t actually, at first.  I worked on the characters — two young girls growing up together in Hollywood in the 1960s who liked passing notes in school. That was the driving image in my head.  Then I imagined scenes where one girl, despondent over the death of her friend, is privileged enough to come into possession of the dead girl’s letters in some way….and even peek into her diaries.   The whole idea of reading someone else’s private thoughts and yearnings creates a kind of intimacy that nothing else can.  It can feel uncomfortable even because it is looking at another’s life through her own self reflections — almost like reading someone’s mind.  From that stance I worked on writing diary entries of one of the characters and combining those two forms and giving the protagonist the ability to read all of them freely. That is how the novel grew.  It wasn’t an orderly process and I really didn’t figure out the plot until the letters and diaries progressed.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Are any of your characters based on anyone – or any type of person – you know?

Author: I was inspired by the early death of an old schoolmate.  We used to pass notes in school.  We had lost touch as we grew and went our separate ways.  However, I felt that part of my childhood and that history we shared as adolescents, even if only for a short time, died with her.  I became desperate about such a loss and felt compelled to recreate that part of my past and whatever childhood memories I could recall in order to not lose my adolescent self.  Although Letters Between Us is fiction so much of my youth was spent growing up in the turbulent sixties and so many of my schoolmates were participants in it….some survived and some didn’t, so much so that I just had to recapture those times.  Growing up in Hollywood, CA during that turbulent decade, I felt, gave me a quotidian insight into those times that historical texts about that period did not.  And the fact that the novel is revealed through diaries and letters, for me, captures the more human drama of that period — a world of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, against “the man,” which was how the police were referred to, against parents, teachers and the mini-skirted behavior of the time where incest was still kept in the closet along with mental illness.  A constant air of protest existed foregrounding a counterculture that existed in schools and college campuses….some of us were prepared for that, others were not.  The protagonists of Letters Between Us are desperate to fit into their environment the best way they can, but sadly, unable to rebel against those who are responsible for how ill-prepared these two girls really are.  They were never given a proper map from which to negotiate the so-called Swinging Sixties.

The mother character in the novel is completely based on my own mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s.  It finally killed her at 96.  While I was redrafting the book Mother was in the midst of her paranoia often brought on by the disease and she would call me to castigate me for being a terrible daughter.  Because of her state of confusion, Mother did not realize how much I was doing behind the scenes to make sure she was taken care of properly and kept safe.  All she knew was that I had forced her to leave her home and move into assisted living.  She raged and raged at me for doing that.  This would interrupt my writing process so much that rather than ignore it, I chose to give Laura, my protagonist, that mother as a character in the novel.  I took all that pain and gave it to Laura…I guess it was a way to deflect it from myself as the author.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How long did it take you to write the book – (was it longer or less time than you expected)?

Author: I began the novel thinking it would take 5 years tops it took 15 years.  I started writing it in 1990 and finished it 2005. Then I spent the next three years editing and revising with the help of a wonderful copy editor Gregory Wright.  At some point in the writing process typos became invisible to me and Greg caught a lot of my silly mistakes.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Did you seek the support of a writer’s group or class?

Author: Absolutely! At first I attended a private writers’ workshop run by a lovely woman named Lynn Stine who had edited many novels in various genres and edited magazines in the romance genre.  Friends of mine recommended her, but they were all writing romance novels at the time and it was not a genre I wanted to pursue.  Then I attended a UCLA extension class and I wrote early drafts of Letters there.  Phyllis Gebauer taught the course and she is still at ULCA Extension teaching and inspiring students! She was very helpful in guiding me to write the synopsis, which I used years later (with some updating) while marketing the book.

Later, I attended a workshop in Pt. Townsend, WA at Fort Worden, a beautiful historical place, where I took a workshop with the amazing Nahid Rachlin and the next year with the dynamic David Bradley who encouraged me not to stop working on it.  After that, I submitted an early chapter to the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference where it was picked as a finalist in literary achievement.  Then I put the manuscript away for a number of years.  I brought it out again in 1998 while attending a writing workshop at Southampton College on Long Island.  Then I put the manuscript away again for several more years.  Until, finally, as I said before, in 2005 I was determined to complete it.  I spent another two to three years editing and marketing it before it got picked up by Susan Bright at Plain View Press.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What surprised you the most about this process?

Author: How long and how hard it was.  How many hundreds of rejections I received.  How I didn’t give up even though I came close to chucking the entire novel in the trash.  How I knew I was going to get the novel published no matter how many agents and publishers told me it wasn’t right for them.  How I went back to college simply to complete my BA and to improve my writing skills and am now a professor of English.  How many people have taken an interest in Letters Between Us and it is now being taught in literature courses at colleges here in Los Angeles and in northern California.  How writing is something I would still be doing, whether I was published or not.  How hard it is still is to know when to stop writing a work and let it go out into the world.  And the most unexpected surprise was when Letters Between Us was selected as a finalist in Fiction & Literature: Chic Lit category in the National Best Book 2008 Awards sponsored by USA Book News.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What tips would you offer to anyone writing fiction for the first time?

Author: I have received emails from aspiring writers who ask me that all the time.  I just recall that when I was struggling to get published early on, whenever there was a writer’s conference nearby that I could attend or a writer who I admired giving a reading at a nearby book store — I would attend.  I always learned something different from each venue about the writing process or met others who were searching as I was and who could point me in a direction I might never have traveled.  Sometimes through these venues I would meet yet another important person who added to the benchmarks in my writing life.

Working alone and not being in a writers’ group can be very isolating.  I would encourage nascent writers out there to join such groups either private ones or go back to college and attend the creative writing workshops available, which can be so helpful in getting work peer reviewed.  In these types of workshops one learns how to grow a thick skin at the same time valuable criticism is given.  The thick skin I am talking about is what is needed when submitting work for publication…because the critiques sometimes can be brutal and if you can take it in a classroom setting and utilize the best of it in order to improve your work, then you can take all the rejections that come often before that moment of exhilarating acceptance. Mainly, to all who love their craft and want to be published — keep on writing, don’t stop, and remember writing is rewriting.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What can we look forward to in your next book?

Author: Oh my, well I am working on a sequel to Letters Between Us. The working title is The Katharine Stories.  One of the characters will continue on to the next stage of her life, and readers may be surprised just who that will be. However, I am also am working on a family saga — a fictional memoir really with an emphasis on ekphrastic narrative and that will take several more years to complete.  By ekphrastic I mean utilizing a genuine work of art for example — the art of a photograph (in my novel’s case a wall full of family photographs) — to flesh out or describe another work of art — a perceived family narrative, wonderfully full of contradictions.  In addition, I have a children’s picture book in the works.  I feel quite blessed.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you would like to include?

Author: I think that writers need to remember that the challenge: writing the work ends up being the easy part, ultimately.  All the time spent thinking about a work and then drafting and redrafting is not only frustrating, creative, exhausting, joyous, and wondrous but a passage — the major part of it becomes the marketing of that work.  Other writers I know have stated that 5% is writing the work and 95% is marketing.  I never believed them, but have found it to be completely true! In fact, much of the time I need to spend writing the next novel has been taken up with the marketing of this one.   I am not complaining, mind you, in fact, I am happy that my novel has created enough interest to warrant further marketing, I am just stating a fact that I really was unaware of.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Thank you for taking the time to be part of this interview!
To learn more about the Author and her book please visit -  http://lindaraderoverman.com/