Please give a warm Jaunty Quills welcome to Madeline Hunter — author of the wonderful Regency romance – DANGEROUS IN DIAMONDS, the final book in the Rarest Blooms series from Berkley.

 

Odd Truths that I Learned from Being a Writer

 

Readers often ask writers questions about writing, and about being a writer. I am used to explaining where I got the idea for a book’s story, or how long it takes to write one from beginning to end.

No one ever asks about some other things, though, like what are the most unexpected things that I have learned while being a writer?

I thought I would answer that question today, and share some of my surprise discoveries with you.

 

Here are a few of them:

1.  Writing a novel doesn’t get easier with practice.

The fact is, sometimes writing these books is easy and sometimes it is very, very hard. Nor is it possible to know which way it will go until I am deeply into the writing. I have had books pour out, and I have had books that fought me every paragraph of the way. Here is something even odder— the process, whether it is hard or easy, does not reflect on the quality of the book. The ones that flow are not always better. Neither are the ones that are torture. Doesn’t seem right, somehow, does it? There should be some predictability, it seems to me. (Which would you expect to be better?)

2.  Writing is physically exhausting.

This totally stunned me when I started writing a lot. I mean, I was sitting in a chair. My rear end was showing the total lack of exercise. Yet, after three hours of writing I was whipped. My husband gave me one perspective on this. He said that when he sees me writing, it is clear that I am tensed up. Apparently the mental intensity of the process creates a physical one, and I am one tight, wound up lady. I just don’t notice because I am in my book’s world.

This reality is what makes me so impressed with authors who regularly write most of their novels in two weeks. I can’t understand why their bodies don’t just collapse on them around day ten.

3.  Readers are actually part of the process of forming any novel, and any novel has multiple meanings as a result.

After my first book was published, and I began getting emails from readers, I realized something astonishing. Not every reader had “read” the same book. Oh, the same words were on the page, but a reader brings an individualized perspective, history, and interests to what she reads, and it affects how she reads and what she absorbs and what gets emphasized in her mind and memory. A walk-on character may fascinate her and loom larger than the author intended, for example, thus changing the story for her. That is a broad example, but this actually happens a lot, and often in more subtle and nuanced ways.

An author puts words down, and assumes they are static in meaning and will say to others what they said to her. But those words are actually somewhat fluid in the story they convey and in their interpretation, depending on who is reading them.

This means to me that the reader and the act of reading are actually part of the creation of the novel. Cool, huh?

(Can you think of cases when you realized that you and another reader remembered a book in two very different ways?)

4.  Writers are basically crazy people.

Until I met a lot of other writers, I had no idea how crazy they were. I certainly did not think I was crazy until I met writers who did what I did, and it looked crazy to me, which meant I was crazy too.

We obsess over things we can’t change or affect. We spend most of our time living in alternate realities. We collect strange things for our research, often on a “just in case” basis. We live with a type of internal intensity that probably is not sustainable for most other people, and may not be healthy. We isolate ourselves in order to produce, but get to like the isolation too much sometimes.

I see myself being crazy, and find it very interesting and odd. I have many roles in my life, but I am only crazy in my writing role. Otherwise I am one of the sanest people you would ever meet. Really!

(Do you think someone has to be a little crazy to be a good writer?)

One of the people who posts a comment today will win a set of signed copies of the first three books in The Rarest Blooms series, or, if preferred, a choice of another backlist title.

Madeline Hunter’s first romance was published in June 2000. Since then, she has seen 18 historical romances and one novella published, and her books have been translated into 12 languages, with more than six million of her books in print.  She’s a six-time RITA finalist and two-time RITA winner. Seventeen of her books have been on the USA Today best-seller list, and she has also had titles on the New York Times printed list, Publishers Weekly list, and the Waldenbooks paperback fiction list. She has received two starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, and Romantic Times has awarded 15 of her books 4 1/2 stars. Hunter is a Ph.D. in art history, and she teaches at the college level. Visit Madeline Hunter online at http://www.madelinehunter.com