MEET ELOISA JAMES/MARY BLY!
Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend the afternoon with my friend Mary Bly, who is also known as the romance novelist Eloisa James. Mary teaches English at Fordham, and I had a great time yesterday afternoon talking to her fantastic students.
I adore Mary. She's a super brilliant soul (Harvard, Oxford AND Yale — yowza) who is not only a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies, but also, under her pen name, is a slammingly successful bestselling romance novelist. She's pretty awesome.
She also saved me during a rough patch while I was writing THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS. I was about to write the first "binding closet" scene, and found myself balking. (Those of you who have read the book know what I'm talking about, but I'll try not to spoil it for others!) I knew that this element in Alma was essential to her character, but I didn't know how to describe it without humiliating her — as she had become very dear to me. I was afraid it would derail the book. But I also knew that if I didn't establish Alma's extreme sense of physical longing, then other aspects of the book would make no sense as we went along. I was stuck.
So I took Mary out to lunch to ask her opinion. (She has written A LOT of sex scenes in her life, people.) She gave me a simple piece of advice, which not only works for writing about fictional sex, but works for writing about nearly anything in the novelistic realm.
She said, "Just ask yourself honestly what your character would actually do. Then let her do it."
Well, I knew what Alma would do. Alma was a scientist, an explorer, a woman of earth and desire and body. Alma never left ANYTHING in her world unexamined. Yes, I knew exactly what she would do.
I let her do it.
Thanks, Mary/Eloisa!
Heart,
LG
via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall
Dear Ones –
A few months ago, I noticed that I was becoming irritable and scritchy and judge-y with my friends and family. I was doing a pretty good job keeping my thoughts to myself, but my thoughts were not kind. Nobody was good enough, everyone was annoying, and why can't these people get it together, for chrissake…
Such were my lovely daily thoughts.
When I finally noticed how negative I was becoming, I made myself stop and look around at what was going on in my life that was basically turning me into Mrs. Kravitz.
Then I figured it out: I hadn't written anything for over year — not since completing the final edits on THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS. I had a new idea for a novel in my head, but had zero time to work on it, since I was so busy traveling all over the universe, promoting Alma & Co. Looking ahead into my ongoing busy schedule, I'd decided that probably early 2015 would be a good quiet time to devote myself to working on my new book. And that had been my plan.
Which was crazy, actually, and seemed now to be making me crazy.
I am writer. If I have a story in me that I'm not able to tell, things will start going wrong all over my life. If I have a story in my head and I tell it, "I'll get to you in 2015," that story will start to rebel, start to act out, start to claw at the walls. That's when the shit gets dark in my world.
Because having a creative mind is something like a owning Border Terrier; It needs a job. And if you don't give it a job, it will INVENT a job (which will involve tearing something up.) Which why I have learned over the years that if I am not actively creating something, chances are I am about to start actively destroying something.
And that ain't good.
So I set aside 30 minutes a day — 30 tiny minutes — to devote to my new novel. And I've managed to keep that up for the last four months, even amid all the traveling, all the speaking tours, all the other business.
30 minutes to run my Border Terrier fast and hard, until it quiets down. Surprisingly, it works.
It's amazing how much progress I'm making already. Amazing how much time you DON'T need, to start making something. As John Updike once said, "Some of the best novels ever written were written in an hour a day."
There will come a time (2015!!!!) when I will clear out my schedule and retreat from the world and devote myself completely to the new book, but for now? I am already starting to create it, so it won't start to destroy me.
And immediately, like magic: I've been finding myself acting a lot nicer to my people.
Do you have some unattended creative work inside you, that is causing you agony? (Or even just causing you to act like a bitch?) Listen up: If it needs to be told, it will chafe at you until you let it free. Which is not good for ANYONE.
So start.
You may not think you have the time right now to attend to it.
Make the time.
30 minutes a day.
Love
LG
via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall
