Porter Anderson of Porter Anderson Media is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute, a producer and consultant formerly with the United Nations World Food Programme in Rome and INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He’s worked in journalism throughout the changes of recent decades at the network of CNN, the Village Voice, and the Dallas Times Herald. Now recently he’s begun writing his cutting-edge “Writing on the Ether” column for writers every Thursday on the blog of former Writers Digest publisher Jane Friedman.

And today he’s going to take us diving deep beneath the wave of writing—to discover the real power and sinew of this craft we all love.

Porter, it’s delightful to have you here. You’ve been very supportive of me on Twitter for such a long time, but we’ve only recently gotten to know each other. And, I have to say, you write some of the most intelligent, hilarious emails I’ve ever received in my life!

Thanks, Victoria, and congratulations on releasing your new book. I’m sure it’s here somewhere under all this white lace. We’ll find it before we’re done, don’t worry. Go on with your questions, I’ll just be digging through this pile of doilies over here. . .

Thank you! And don’t worry about the doilies—we keep the wine in this bottle right here on the desk.

That’s a Montipulciano d’Abruzzo. How did you know? This lace is looking better by the minute.

[Laughing] We’re celebrating! You’ve got some big news today, right?

Right, and you’re the first to have this, Victoria.

Scoop!

I just finalized things last week in New York: I’m issuing the Porter Anderson Q2 Music Challenge Grant to support one of the most important developments in worldwide music today—and it’s a way I hope to introduce writers, including your readers, to one of the best daily companions they’ll ever find.

Have you ever heard of Q2? It’s @Q2Music to your Twitter friends. And online, Q2 Music lives here.

It’s a free 24-hour Internet stream that focuses on—ready for my favorite slogan?—”the fearless and relevant music you crave.”

It’s really hard to jump with both feet into a writing career, without some palpable contact with the soul-reflective surfaces of art. I’m not arguing pop-vs.-literature. But if you want to rumble somebody’s world either in a pop or classical setting, then we’re talking vocabularies. The difference in knowing a few words or phrases of a language and being fluent in it are profound. And the more each of us who writes can grasp the muscular reach and breadth of artistic rigor, the better we become at the subtlest winks of rich writing.

Think of the most wicked film scoring you’ve ever heard. What today’s composers are doing—some of them actually in film—is what Q2 calls “living music.”

As in music-for-living, this is music that tells you something about your own life. Music that scores your characters’ lives in the bargain.

This is about the writer’s private world—as opposed to their public world, their published works. It’s the world of the act of creation. “What I’m listening to today.” I see it on agents’ blogs, too.

Most of these composers could no more write a book than you or I could write their concertos and tone poems. But the key is that they’re alive and working, they’re in the line at Starbucks, going for the same turnstile as you in the subway, trying to sort out software issues, putting on their pants one leg at a time. Not while they’re in the line at Starbucks. You know what I mean.

Seriously wasn’t going to ask. [Laughing]

As composer Grey McMurray put it recently on Q2, “Words are attempts to bridge the same gaps that music is attempting to meld.”

Yes. We’re all searching for a way to give expression to something that’s never before been expressed.

If Herr Beethoven were writing his 9^th Symphony today, Frau Mixon, there’s every chance the “Ode to Joy” would be something different from what he wrote in 1824.  And he’d get the planet-wide audience that Q2 is giving our composers today. Can you imagine what Mozart would have given for a way to have San Francisco hear the same music he was premiering in Vienna? Simultaneously?

So before I forget, the dates I want you to get down on that lacy calendar of yours, Victoria, are October 18 to 26. That’s when Q2 does only the second pledge drive it’s ever held. It’s that young.

And the Porter Anderson match will be the first challenge grant they’ve ever had.

Of course I’d really love it if writers felt they want to donate even a little bit—I’ll match them measure for measure—but I’m not pitching the pledge drive, I’m pitching new music for new writings: What I really hope to do with all this Q2-ing and fro-ing is get you and my other writing colleagues to listen.

Wonderful! Listening is actually a huge part of writing. I’ve seen novels dedicated to the albums that got the authors through them. There’s something about the link between the audible ambiance of your environment and hearing your characters’ voices.

I find that the last thing I need as a writer is “background music.” I actually need collaborative music. Something that gets me around emotional corners, explores dissonances with me, sorts out the rhythmic features of a character’s voice, and bolsters the complexity of a scene’s dynamics.

The beauty of a writer’s relationship with composers is that we’re rolling on parallel tracks. We’re coursing through the same lush culture on mutually supportive trajectories. Because music is moving in another language, I can let it “speak” to me about one of my character’s despair or about one of my article’s key arguments, and no words get tangled up with mine. I’m still conversant in my own vocabulary, even while a composer carries on in hers or his.

Something a composer “says” in a piece of music can help me “hear” something I needed for a chapter or an essay, it can even get me up out of my seat and send me searching for the phrase I didn’t even know I needed.

Yes! This is the dedication to language that’s so important. So many new aspiring writers are simply unaware of the enormity of what they’re attempting. Writing is such a wonderful craft, but it’s not literary air-guitar.

Everybody realizes now, I hope, that the advent of the Internet has made what seems like entire municipal populations think they were born to write and be published. We’re lucky that the honkings and squealings of those AOL dial-ups didn’t sound like instructions from God to “Go forth and remove gall bladders” or “Render thy service, my child, as an air-traffic controller.”

[Laughing]

Surgery and aviation? Few people would dream of scrambling down their driveways to get into the nearest operating rooms and control towers.

Somehow, millions of people did hear, “Get thee to thy kitchen table and scratch out as many books as possible.” As you know from your work taking in literary laundry, an awful lot of folks are finding it much harder than they expected to go from notes to novel, from “all those great family Christmas letters” to genuine memoir.

One of the main things we admire in great literature is that it holds its own in the arts world, it exists in the context of “arts and letters.”

In E.M. Forster’s 1927 Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge—which you can Whispersync onto your Kindle in a volume titled Aspects of the Novel—Forster said, “A novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and…a character in a novel is real when it lives in accordance with such laws.”

That’s what learning to create great fiction is: learning what those laws are—really just the techniques for speaking to a reader in the ways they’re most able to hear—and developing your skills at playing with them. Have you ever dabbled in storytelling yourself?

I wrote a one-person play based on Bernard Shaw’s religious writings, his theory of “creative evolution.” The Shaw Estate licensed it through the Society of Authors in London and Dan Laurence had it entered into the permanent Shaw Archives, which was an amazing honor.

Shaw wasn’t just a playwright but also a novelist and, even more importantly, a critic. And working my way through his logic, it was obvious that the elegance with which he wrote about faith—and anything else, for that matter—was fundamentally a product of his own immersion in the arts.

You started your career in writing through a different art, didn’t you? Just as Flannery O’Connor developed her writing craft through her paintings.

You know, it’s been like falling up stairs for thirty years. I was an Equity actor at the Asolo in Sarasota when the New York Times bought the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

In my day, we did a genuine English rotating repertory at our theater, three full productions running at a time. You pretty much looked at your costume to remember which show you were playing each matinee and evening. Tights: Othello. Spectacles: The Cherry Orchard. Tuxedo: Private Lives by Noel Coward, or maybe Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.

Imagine getting your Coward and Stoppard lines mixed up with the moment: “I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”[—Coward]

“Don’t quibble, Sybil.”

In fact, one of the trickiest thinks about doing so many repetitions of these scripts in rotation is that the last joke you’ve heard can make it onstage.

The actor playing Cassio in Othello has a line to Iago about Othello’s lovemaking with his wife: “Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms.” Well, our actor in the role at the Asolo one afternoon had just been doing the usual wrong-way-to-say-it gag with the rest of us in the dressing room, heard his cue, walked into the scene onstage and said it: “Make love’s quick arms in Desdemona’s pants.”  I actually think Shakespeare, or Edward de Vere, might have been tempted to revise if he’d heard it.

Went down like gangbusters in the mezzanine.

[Laughing]

To this day, I’m hooked on that awful moment in which you have the chance to “catch the conscience of the king.” To walk out onto a stage in the dazzle of stage light with hundreds of people waiting for nothing but what you’ll say and do? Such an exhilarating responsibility, I cannot tell you.

Frank Langella was talking about it recently on NPR’s Morning Edition with Scott Simon. Langella says his favorite description of the moment is “leap empty-handed into the void.” If you’re serious about the craft, that’s not overstating the risk-aversion you’re negotiating.

Exactly like the chance you have every time you go to the page—instead of the stage—to say something to your audience as a writer. Your readers are good enough to pause, to give you one precious, shuddering moment of their time.

You can either catch their conscience, seize them with a thought, grab onto them with those empty hands and arrest them with the sheer force of your mind’s beauty. Or you’ve lost them. Hesitate, and they’ll evap on you.

Oh, that gorgeous, earth-shaking first instant! Sometimes I get terrible stage fright on the page. Performing is even worse when the playwright doesn’t provide you with your words.

Or when your playwright provides you with lousy words. We won’t name names. Of course, I’d actually moved on to do something else, as all actors must do, to earn a living when the new administration at the Herald-Tribune asked if I’d like to try writing criticism. Huge boon for the audiences, of course, not to have to worry that I might turn up on stage again.

“I’m demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove that it exists.” [—Stoppard]

“Not to mention Darwin is different from the origin of the specious.”–that’s from Jumpers, not Travesties.

And so my start in journalism was as a critic and arts reporter at a succession of papers.

Tell us about professional criticism of the arts—that’s something about which aspiring writers are being taught really nothing these days.

Serious, legitimate criticism is fantastic training, especially in journalistic practice, because you’re paid to formulate and promulgate an informed opinion, which is not the job of standard reportage. It’s also not “Go” or “Don’t Go” stuff. That’s reviewing, a form of consumer guide, not authentic criticism.

In criticism, you leave it to the reader to decide for him- or herself. And you become extremely sensitive to fairness. I worked with some terrific people in the business, on the executive board of the American Theater Critics Association and as vice-president of the International Theater Critics Association. Covered both American and European theater. When I made the jump to the networks, the focus naturally went over to hard news. But I’ve never left criticism behind.

So that fortunate start—artful stumbling, really—was a double blessing. One: It gave me my entry into journalism via criticism; and two: it gave me my entry into writing via the arts. I came to this career through writing as an art.

Porter, what’s your take on the future of literature?

I guess I’m hoping that our suddenly bigger writing community doesn’t fall into the entertainment trap that’s so badly diminished journalism. A penny dreadful will always have its place.

But there’s nothing sadder than a writer who never tries to work in deeper water, at least once.

Know what I mean?

Porter Anderson is smart as heck and all over the Internet. Read his weekly column for writers, “Writing on the Ether,” and follow him around on Twitter. Join me, Jan O’Hara,and other industry professionals in the Free the Real Porter movement.

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She’s baaack!. . . Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter, owner of the popular Nail Your Novel blog, and author of Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence—back in my study, back in the interview chair, back in the news. This month Roz has been playing in the ebook arena with her first novel under her own name, My Memories of a Future Life. It’s an eerie and insightful exploration of reincarnation and past-life regression, which she’s been releasing on Kindle in four parts, one part each week throughout September, the final part to be released this upcoming Monday.

So Monday please join us, just in time to learn the secrets behind her debut spine-tingler, in what I like to consider The Making of My Memories of a Future Life. . .

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To herald the launch of my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, due out September 30, I’m starting a series of new interviews with some of the most hard-working people out there in our online writing community. In this first week, I’ll be interviewing Larry Brooks of Storyfix.com, author of Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing.

As you may recall, Larry and I traded guest posts last spring when we were both named Top 10 Blogs for Writers, with Larry’s Self-Editing at the Story Level here on my site and my The Bootstrapping Writer—The Secret at the Core of Competency on his.

Now he’s back, just in time for the recent re-release of three of his previously published, critically-acclaimed thrillers.

Please join us Monday for Story Engineering—the Larry Brooks Interview.

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I know. She’s absolutely hilarious, isn’t she?

And she’s got even more value-add than that! She’s also a ghostwriter, and on Monday she’s going to tell us how she got into that line of work, plus what she’s working on now, plus why she’s not going to have herself frozen after she dies, plus what happened the time she got hit by a train.

I swear to you. She said all this stuff.

Unfortunately, though, I got no pictures of her in a bulletproof vest. So that’s a little bit of a disappointment.

Join us Monday!

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Roz Morris goes by the online moniker @dirtywhitecandy, which all by itself is reason enough to interview her.

But on top of that she’s also a ghostwriter with eleven novels under her belt, eight of them best sellers, a critiquer for a London manuscript-critiquing agency, owner of the fiction-writing blog Nail Your Novel and author of her own self-published book of original, hands-on fiction-writing techniques, Nail Your Novel.

Plus she’s one heck of a hilarious human being.

So I went over to her blog and dragged her back here for an interview, and wouldn’t you know it, it stopped being interview almost immediately and became instead a wonderful, rollicking after-dinner ramble about our craft, this extraordinary work of editing fiction—all over not just email and my blog but also Twitter, where she challenged me to a brief wrestling match and promptly threw me.

Ow.

Please join us now for a trans-Atlantic date, as we guzzle wine and talk fiction editing:

Roz, what’s the one thing about writing that writers don’t know that makes them need editors? (I just wrote a guest post on this—I hope you don’t answer the same thing I did, or it’ll look like I’m plagiarizing you.)

Roz: Two reasons why writers need editors. One, because they can’t see their own blind spots. Even experienced writers have bad habits they don’t realise are jarring—such as blithe unawareness of POV changes and lapses into telling instead of showing.

Reason two is because all writers are too close to the story. We know it from the inside out, whereas the reader comes from the outside in. You can’t judge how well you’re drawing the reader in and what you’re drawing them into, any more than you can do your own cosmetic dental work or see your own bottom (unless you’re very talented).

Hope that isn’t what you wrote, too. If it is, at least leave in my bottom joke.

V: [laughing] No, it’s not—at least not enough for it to sound like I stole it from you. But it’s the general gist of my opinion, as well. I mean, it’s not even really opinion when you’re talking on this level. It’s just a reality of the craft, part of the creative process. Everything looks very different from the perspective of inside, but you can’t create anything if you’re afraid to step inside it. (This is starting to get back to your bottom joke, isn’t it?)

If you could, Roz, what kind of client do you wish you could take home with you forever, even if they can’t write for beans?

Roz: The kind who genuinely wants to learn how to communicate with a reader and finds it endlessly fascinating. Most of us can’t write for beans when we start. We learn because we can’t leave it alone, and we develop our awareness of what works and what doesn’t—and we’re ruthless with ourselves, being disciplined with our weaknesses and doing whatever we can to practice our art better.

The next question you’re probably going to ask is, Does that mean everybody can write well? Maybe some won’t have the facility that others do. But no one should think they don’t have room to improve.

I don’t ask for much, do I?

V: I’ll tell you, I don’t buy the business about some people being born to write and others not. I’ve read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early novels. He ought to have been banned from owning a typewriter. He ought to have been banned from walking past a typewriter. And yet he wrote The Great Gatsby and later proved the extent of his developed skills in The Last Tycoon.

It just goes to show anyone can do it.

So what kind of client do you wish you could launch off a tower over shark-infested waters?

Roz: The kind whose manuscript is deeply flawed and doesn’t want to hear any criticism. Most of us get a little grumpy when we see pages of criticism, especially when we think the novel was finished. That’s understandable, and I’m not complaining about that. But some people seem to imagine they are paying for an ego trip, to be told how brilliant their work is, and when you point out what isn’t working they tell you you’re wrong. Sometimes they will tell you they have friends who are writers or are in publishing—although they usually remain vague about why this reflects on the quality of their manuscript.

I had one client whose novel was promising but needed a lot of work. When I told her this, she proceeded to tell me she had friends who had ‘worked on Hollywood movies’ in a vague sort of way and thought ‘the novel sounds good’—which was probably supposed to have put me in my place. I also have friends in Hollywood, and I know darn well that book wouldn’t have been seriously considered or optioned. Her loss, I suppose—she paid all that money for a report that told her how to fix a book and refused to believe it needed any work.

Right, tell me who you’re throwing to Jaws.

V: Hollywood, hmm? I wish I were important enough to know writers in Hollywood. Hang on a sec—I do.

Yeah, I have to heave a pretty deep sigh when I get a client who takes umbrage with serious, detailed, constructive advice because it runs counter to their visions of genius. We all secretly believe we’re geniuses. And we’re all wrong.

Honestly, I think I’ve only had one or two of those in the two years I’ve been doing this work—which is in my opinion an excellent reflection upon the aspiring writing community out there.

But I had a lot of these people when I was a technical writer and editor, computer engineers who couldn’t tell a sentence from a side of fries but regarded writers as unnecessary obstacles between them and their adoring publics. By comparison, fiction writers are a real dreamworld of courtesy and humility.

Roz: They are, and what’s lovely about them is that most of all they believe in making a worthwhile book.

V: Yes. That wonderful belief in fiction that is the reason we all do this work. Of course, if you’re smart enough to hire an indie editor, you’re probably smart enough not to argue. Same goes for therapy, you know. Nobody’s listening to your protestations but you.

Roz: It’s interesting you should mention therapy. The writers who’ve written a novel as therapy are the most sensitive and potentially aggressive about criticism. It’s always hard for writers to learn the patience to disembowel a manuscript that is precious, but those who have written too much from the heart can easily feel that when you criticise you’re judging their life.

Editors need to develop special antennae for it.

V: It really is like practicing therapy, only with imaginary people. I love listening to clients talk about their characters. I love the process of discovering who they are. You are probably not as interesting as your novel—that’s a hard one for some people to swallow. But, you know, to serious writers it’s a godsend. I’m not as interesting, either, as my skills—what I bring to a manuscript.

Roz: I always feel I’m not nearly as interesting, brave or remarkable as the characters in my books. Mind you, I wouldn’t like to live their lives either. Characters I write about will be pushed in ways I would find intolerable.

V: That’s it, isn’t it? Fiction is about characters coping with things far worse than anything the readers will ever cope with. That’s how they reassure us we’re going to survive our own lives.

So, when you do a Developmental Edit on a new manuscript, what’s the first thing you look for?

Roz: First of all, I consider whether I’ve been grabbed by the story and the characters, as I would if I was reading any book. I always read analytically, whether I’m reading for a client or for pleasure—I can’t shut the crit goblins up. I make copious notes, and gradually strengths and weaknesses emerge so that my report arises naturally from these.

V: What’s the last?

Roz: When I’ve got to the end I mull over what the writer was trying to do, whether they’ve succeeded and whether that’s the right approach. The final thing I consider is the manuscript’s suitability for the market.

You, if I may be so bold? Oh, sorry. You’re bold.

V: [laughing] I just got that.

The very first thing I look for is a gripping hook. I read a 1966 mystery last night—by Lawrence Block and called rather preciously The Canceled Czech—and halfway through the first chapter I was sitting up shrieking. The next page made me shriek louder. By the end of the chapter, I was in convulsions, insisting on reading it to my (rather bemused) husband. That’s what you want in a hook.

As I read through a client ms the first time, I’m mostly, like you, just reading to see how hard the story grabs me. When I run across a rip in the fabric of the fictional dream, I jot down a quick note. Then I read a second time, outlining for proper plot structure, making sure all the pieces are in place. Discussion of characters grows out of that kernel. It takes me longer to mull over the characters, where they’ve been, where they’re going, what’s working and not working, what the writer has yet to bring to the surface. Character is a more complex issue than structure, which is why so much modern stuff gets published without being any deeper than the little puddle left in my wine glass right now. . .

I read everything I lay my hands on analytically, too. It makes me enjoy a good book more and allows me to bail early on crap I shouldn’t waste time on. I read a ton of fiction in this job, constantly developing my expertise. I simply don’t have the time to waste.

Roz: I am nodding so hard I’ll soon need to call an osteopath. Reading analytically doesn’t spoil books for me—it increases my pleasure. And I have no patience at all for a book that doesn’t grab me—unless there is a research reason for me to read it. Sorry, back to you.

V: [laughing again] I thought you were handing me the wine bottle.

Roz: Gerroff. Mine.

V: [laughing harder] Stop being so funny, Roz. You’re wrecking this damn interview—

Join us again next week for Part II of:

We can’t leave fiction alone—the Roz Morris interview
After-Dinner Wine-Induced Fiction Editors’ Wrestling Match

Roz Morris, aka @dirtywhitecandy, will probably also be silly with you if you just ask her. She likes smart-alecks, Scottish accents, and pulling suspicious faces. She can be found on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

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Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel and I have been bouncing nonsense tweets off each others’ foreheads on Twitter, while sharing behind-the-scenes fellowship in this wonderful craft of editing fiction, for some time now.

So when we both turned up as finalists for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers a few weeks ago, I knew my moment had come.

But her wit’s just too quick for me. She got me in a headlock and turned our ordinary interview into a hilarious verbal ramble, including a brief Twitter wrestling match.

Join us Monday for editorial talk of fiction, developmental editing, our favorite and not-so-favorite types of editing clients, Hollywood writers, how editing relates to therapy, and wine (plus a bottom joke—not mine):

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Chuck Sambuchino is the aspiring writer’s conduit to the world of literary representation. An editor and writer for Writer’s Digest Books, he edits two annual resources: Guide to Literary Agents and Children’s Writers & Illustrators Market, and his first book was the third edition of Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript. He is a produced playwright and freelance writer with more than 600 articles in national and regional magazines over the last decade, including recent articles in Watercolor Artist, Pennsylvania Magazine, The Pastel Journal, Cincinnati Magazine, Romance Writers Report and New Mexico Magazine.

And today we’re giving him a chance to sit in the interviewee’s chair.

Chuck, you’re the man with your finger on the pulse of that one industry aspiring writers most dream of and fear: literary representation. You have the opportunity to meet everyone. How did you get this great job?

I was working as a newspaper reporter in town when I saw a low-level position opened up at Writer’s Digest. I went in to the interview and basically told the editor that this was my dream job. I got the position. Later, a position on the books side of things opened up (editing GLA), and I vied for the position and got it. And you’re right—it is a great job.

What’s your favorite story about running your blog, the Guide to Literary Agents? Your most hair-raising?

Good question, but I don’t have many crazy tales. The blog is wonderful (and it’s getting scarily big these days), yet surprisingly drama-free.

You maintain several running series on your blog, including How I Got My Agent and 7 Things I’ve Learned, which you solicit from guest posters. What would you love to post in those series that you’ve never posted before?

I suppose any genre that you don’t see very often—such as sci-fi or memoir or picture books. Those are hard genres to publish, so hearing stuff from their perspective is more unusual. It also reminds writers that it can be done—they made it, and so can you!

As online resources outstrip print in keeping up-to-date, while literary agencies continue to grow and morph year-round, some pundits are wondering if you’ll eventually take the Guide to Literary Agents completely online. Is that where you’re headed?

Possibly, but as long as the print guide is still selling well, it will continue to appear in bookstores. A lot of people—myself included—still love holding books in their hands.

I’m one of those people, too, Chuck. Now, I know in addition to maintaining your blog and editing you also speak publicly on the topic of literary representation. Are you attending writers conferences this year? Teaching? Leading workshops?

Always. I’ll be at the following in 2010: Wrangling With Writing in Tuscon, Arizona (September 24-26); Surrey International Writers Conference in Surrey, BC, Canada (October 22-24); Vegas Valley Book Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada (November 6); and San Francisco Writing for Change in San Francisco, California (November 12-13). I’ll also be appearing at libraries and bookstores around my area—in Cincinnati, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Erlanger, Kentucky. I love meeting writers in person and talking.

Can you list for us a half-dozen or so of the most talented and hungriest agents right now looking for good manuscripts from unknowns, particularly those interested in new hot genres?

Your average new agent, which I alert people to on my blog, is usually hungry to build a list. But just because they’re hungry doesn’t mean they’re super-talented (but—who knows—they very well may be). “Hunger” can be spotted—but “talent” is in the eye of the beholder.

All this said, an excellent place to start is the October 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest, which has our annual awesome list of 27 agents actively seeking new writers. I would say check out that special list of agents and use your own decision on who to contact. (That issue will be on newsstands in mid-September. The article will not be free online for several months.)

What are the hottest genres selling these days? What new hot genres do you see coming up on the horizon in the next couple of years?

Paranormal never seems to slow down. Narrative nonfiction always sells. YA, in general, is doing well. Romance had a boost during the recent recession (because people needed an escape, I think).

Yes—the recession. As you probably know, the “Purge of ‘08″ has turned a lot of knowledgeable acquisitions editors loose in the independent editing and agenting sphere. How do you see that development panning out over the next year or two?

There do seem to be a lot of new agents popping up (and many of them former editors), but it is unclear whether that large number will last (i.e., agents will make enough money to continue agenting). In other words, it’s hard to say. I hear a lot of people around the Internet taking wild guesses with the future of publishing, and they’re just that: wild guesses.

How do you see the shift of the burden of editing from publisher to agent affecting agents these days? Aspiring writers?

Agents still lack the proper time to truly edit work, so I would say they will continue to demand excellence before they take on a project.

Still, there are agents who don’t like the idea of authors having their manuscripts professionally edited before submitting them. Some say it makes them nervous, and most say, “Don’t mention it in your query.” What is your opinion on what this issue is all about, from your broad range of experience with agents as well as your personal experience as a publishing author?

My thought is that you should certainly have your work edited by others, whether that means qualified peers or an amazing independent editor. That said, I never, ever advise mentioning in your query that “the novel was edited by so-and-so.” You don’t need to explain that it was edited—they assume it was, and mentioning such a thing makes you look amateurish. Avoid mentioning it, and you may just skip this problem altogether.

Good advice. You know, everyone says to the aspiring writer, “Write. Keep plugging away. Learn from good teachers. Do your research and follow the rules when querying. Always remember your manners.” But what’s the one piece of advice you find crucial to success as a writer that nobody ever seems to give?

Goodness gracious, I could talk for 30 minutes on this very question—and I have. This sounds like the exact morning keynote speech I just gave at a conference in DC. How about this: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you are only writing one novel or memoir, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Diversify yourself and give yourself the best chance for writing success.

Here’s a couple of really important questions that unpublished writers can very rarely ask of published authors, agents, or acquisitions editors without being awkward. You’re the one person qualified to give an honest answer, and I’m one of the people in a position to ask:

How much can an unknown expect to make from an average first-time genre novel? Per novel that follows once that first one is published?

The reason that this question never gets answered is because there is no answer. You could write a romance novel and get a $2,000 advance from a small publisher. Or you could get a $150,000 advance for a trilogy of thrillers from Random House. It varies so greatly. I would say a moderate estimate would be perhaps $15,000.

You know—I was once in talks with a small press to write a picture book, and the discussed advance was just $1,000. But then, after it was split with the illustrator and co-writer, it would have been $250! So the point is: who knows. The real money to be made on a book is on the backend with royalties.

How much does the average agent make annually?

Anywhere from $0 to $300,000, I would imagine. Established agents who have a variety of authors on the backlog can make little lump sums from dozens and dozens of books. A new agent, with no sales, would probably make nothing save some kind of base salary (if that even exists).

Chuck, aside from your work for Writer’s Digest you’re an independent author yourself, represented by Sorche Fairbank of Fairbank Literary Representation. In fact, your debut humor book, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, just came out on September 7th. Congratulations! I’ve read the sample and enjoyed how you handle such dark material in a deceptively humorous style. However I understand it is, under the humor, a deadly serious treatise. What was it that forced you to bring your knowledge of this terrible threat into the public arena? Were you—I hesitate to ask—attacked?

Regarding any theoretical attacks, those testimonies are sealed and I cannot speak of such things. That aside, I realized there was no guide out there on these little monsters and decided to fill the void. Hopefully, lives will be saved because of this book.

Do you see a link between garden gnomes and other supposedly-harmless garden decorations like sunflowers and pink flamingos?

Pink flamingos and sunflowers are both “Class-1” ornaments—the lowest threat. Gnomes, on the other hand, are “Class 5”—maximum danger! The connection between them is still up for discussion. Perhaps flamingos could have a silent alliance with gnomes.

What’s your single biggest tip to homeowners around the country to protect themselves from these dark invaders (besides the obvious: don’t own garden gnomes)?

Buy a big %#&! dog!

What’s something your readers would be amazed to learn about you?

“Amazed”? That’s pushing it. If they want to be “surprised,” I’d say perhaps that my favorite thing to do when on the road at conferences, save meeting new friends, is sitting down to a piano and playing. I rarely feel more at peace than when I’m playing music. And if booze is flowing somewhere, big writer singalongs have been known to manifest.

Chuck Sambuchino can be found on his Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents blog, Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents newsletter and Twitter.

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Weronika Janczuk, Independent Editor and writer of YA, literary and historical fiction, just signed on as a literary agent with D4EO Literary Agency. Weronika’s been a reader and commenter here for some time, so when she announced her recent promotion, I realized this is a perfect opportunity to bring the real, human experience of becoming a literary agent straight to all of you aspiring writers out there—all of you just as hungry for excellent representation as she is for excellent fiction.

Sit up straight, folks, and grip your pens. This is your chance! What’s it like to move from one side of the fence to the other? You’re about to find out.

Weronika, congratulations! How fun to be able to announce such a great promotion.

First off, I just wanted to extend my thanks, Victoria, for your time in putting together this interview. I appreciate it!

You’re very welcome. We really appreciate you sharing your experience with all of us. You’ve been a literary agent now for several weeks. How’s it going?

Incredibly busy. I’ve been kind of trying to create a routine for myself, but it’s little early to make any predictions. Right now I’m editing & agenting, both. It’s just natural for me to be able to balance those things—I’ve always been a multitasker.

Where do you find enough hours in the day?

I’ve always been a very, very, very quick reader. People ask me, “How did you get through this in five minutes?” Well, I read it in five minutes. [laughing]

I limit myself in terms of what I request to see, I ask people to send me ten pages with their query letter, and I absolutely have to be able to—if I can’t reject the email and forget about it, if there’s something that just pulls me, then I’ll request an ms. It brings me down to a very, very, very small request rate.

It’s a matter of, do I want to be one of those agents who replies in twelve hours or in one month? Right now every single writer who has queried me has received a response within twelve hours. I know as a writer I hate waiting, so I want to get writers a response. I also know most writers will go with the first agent who offers.

So it’s always a balancing act, because of course I put my clients first, even before queries.

It can get really hectic, can’t it? You’ve been in the publishing industry for a number of years already. What’s your background?

In terms of writing, I consider myself fairly self-taught—I’ve never taken a structured fiction writing class, and my experience with critique partners has been limited to a few constant mentors and fellow writers.

Publishing-wise, I began as an acquisitions intern at Flux, where I worked with Brian Farrey, in addition to a few editors at Llewellyn, the New Age non-fiction imprint. That internship has been the most defining experience of my career so far. Soon thereafter, I began to work with Jenny Bent at The Bent Agency and Bob Diforio at D4EO; I also worked in different capacities for Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary Management, Mary Kole at Andrea Brown Literary Agency and myself as an independent freelance editor. Bob promoted me to associate agent at the end of July, 2010, and I now work solely for D4EO.

So you’ve worked with a wide variety of agents in various cities. How did that happen?

I was proactive. Once my time at Flux drew to a close, I began to suffer from withdrawal, so I sent out a few emails to agents and inquired if they needed any assistance. After I scored my first remote position, after a phone interview and a query reading ‘test,’ the others came faster—I’d networked and demonstrated I was capable, so I just kept adding to my workload.

What work did you do for agents?

Briefly, in my time as an intern, I’ve: read submissions, analyzed the quality of writing in manuscripts, written reader reports on manuscripts, researched manuscripts’ potential placements in the market, edited manuscripts, kept records of submissions, sent rejection emails, worked with contracts, followed up on submissions, networked, dealt with foreign and subsidiary rights and more.

You’ve done everything! So what’s special about D4EO Literary Agency?

We’re a small agency, first of all, with four agents, three of them fairly new—most of us are very hungry for clients, so there is a lot of room for debut authors and writers whose manuscripts might need some work. Mandy Hubbard is an agent dedicated exclusively to YA/MG work, I represent an incredibly broad range of commercial fiction and non-fiction, and Joyce Holland also has narrow tastes and a background at D4EO.

In addition, the head agent—Bob Diforio—has been in the business for decades and represents some of the most well-respected contemporary literature out there. I’m honored to have the opportunity to work with him.

What is it about being a literary agent that makes you want to do this all the time from now on?

I am fascinated by the dichotomy of agenting—there is both an artistic and a business aspect to my role: I develop projects, I represent their authors and I am an advocate for that duo. I thought originally I would want to be an editor, but I’ve found that larger publishing houses can be very political, and small houses don’t always have the resources to properly launch debut authors. As an agent, I can sell books to the big houses and then push for maximum publicity and marketing.

It’s also nice to work in pajamas.

[Laughing] Boy, ain’t it. Is this your dream job, or do you have even higher aspirations?

Agenting in terms of role is my dream job, yes, and I am thrilled that I figured out early on it is the position I want to hold. As for higher aspirations, I know without a doubt that I will want to start my own agency at some point in the future, for a multitude of reasons, one of the larger ones being the opportunity to give back to the publishing community by mentoring young aspiring agents and editors. I owe a lot to those with whom I’ve worked—they opened the doors for me.

What a great attitude, Weronika. So what genres will you be representing, as you start your career as a literary agent?

I don’t have a favorite genre, and there is no way that I can pick and choose between different genres, as I care far less about the type of story being told and far more about the writing. Good writing is a drug for me.

As a result, I represent pretty much everything—single-title romance, women’s fiction, literary fiction, commercial fiction, thrillers/mysteries/crime fiction, horrors, fantasy/sci-fi, memoirs and nearly every kind of commercial non-fiction. I have a list of editors to whom I submit different genres.

If I had to choose, I tend to like more fast-paced fiction—a good thriller or fantasy, for example—but that means a huge chunk of my favorite novelists and books are thrown out of the loop. I’ll read anything as long as it’s written well.

What kinds of queries are you getting?

I think there’s a growing romantic suspense genre that is really interesting for readers, and I’m seeing a lot of those kinds of queries now. Romance continues to be the genre that fuels the industry.

I’m seeing a little bit of thriller, a little bit of romance with a thriller subplot, fantasy with a mystery subplot, where you see the female lead starting to kind of detour from that traditional household role. I’m not sure why it’s happening now, because it seems kind of overdue since women have been part of that for a long time—but probably eighty percent of the queries I get have that kind of subplot in it. Maybe it’s because I look for thrillers and mysteries.

Janet Reid has a great blog post saying, “We’ve terrified the wrong half of y’all.” Do you see a clear dividing line between writers who are really taking their time to learn their craft, doing their research, following the rules of querying conscientiously, and people who are just oblivious?

I absolutely agree with you about, “Don’t rush.” You might have a very wonderful book done and ready to go, but there’s always a question of how much are you willing to work and how much time are you willing to spend working on it.

I’ve dealt with the crazies. I’ve been a bit shocked. But I think it’s very easy to pick up the ones who are working on getting published very hard—that’s their number one goal, their one aspiration, and they’ve been hacking away for a long time. The query letters—you know, despite all the resources available now, and there are a lot of resources, I still see some poor query letters. Some people are just a little too sloppy. It’s not anything explicit, it’s just this subtle feeling that they’re not trying as hard as they could.

What about the situation where you’ve worked on your query letter so hard for so long that it kind of winds of garbled? You’ve tried too hard?

For me, I think those are the queries and page samples that make me the saddest. They’re trying so hard because they don’t believe in what they do have. They’re not completely one-hundred-percent comfortable with what they’re sending. That level of comfort takes a long time. It took me maybe six years to pull back enough not to go over the top. If someone’s trying too hard, they’re still in that middle ground where they’re not comfortable enough.

If I see that and am personally drawn to the voice, I have said, “Yes, if you don’t find an agent or you’d like to do a rewrite, do query me again.”

So, how do you make your decisions on what to accept and what to reject?

There are different factors that come into play. First of all, I’m hands-down an editorial agent. All three of the clients I have so far are in the middle of huge revisions and even one rewrite because my goal is to present to publishers the best possible product.

I’m more than willing to do structural development because I’ve found over the months I’ve been editing it’s very easy for me to convey instructions on structure. So if there’s a voice there, but there’s not enough tension or there should be an addition or subtraction—that’s no problem. It’s a little more difficult for me when it’s anything that’s not structure. Plot and structure are the easiest because they’re so formulaic. So character and voice—the factor would be how much I would need to work on it, how many suggestions I’d have to make—how much, really, would I be teaching the writer.

I’m not just throwing suggestions out there. I’m helping ground the writer. If there are a lot of other agents I might have reason to believe would offer representation if I don’t, if it would be easy to sell once it was fixed—if I were intrigued enough—I would definitely put in the time. If the writing is mediocre, though, I’m going to have to pass.

What do you just fall in love with?

That’s an impossible question for me to answer. It depends on the genre, but I guess the most important thing is the voice. So that’s going to be how an author puts sentences together, how they structure the pacing, where they choose to begin and end the story. It’s a very unique blend. If the author manages to surprise me, that’s a really good sign. Because I read so much these days I can almost always pick up an ms and tell what’s going to happen on the next page. I have to be surprised multiple times as I re-read the ms and notice things I didn’t before.

I absolutely hate it when there’s poor grammar. I’ve found there’s definitely a correlation between poor writing and poor grammar. It can be one of the most random things. That’s why I’m repping different genres. The books I love are all different. They can be very dense, or challenging—anything challenging stereotypes, I really like.

It can be anything, just a story told from a fresh perspective, a character I would not expect to be put into such a situation. I’m already drawn to younger narrators, really smart narrators, underdogs, those kinds of characters. If the voice grabs me, the writing grabs me, the plot isn’t that important. As long as it’s something that people would love reading.

I’ve had writers come to me and say, “An agent told me my novel doesn’t have a hook.” And I’ve read it, and there’s been a great hook. A fabulous hook. But it wasn’t the hook that lead to that particular novel. What do you do in such situations?

I’ve seen that to a degree. The one I remember most was an ms when I was reading queries for an agent, and this query comes through, and it’s romance, and it’s absolutely the most captivating concept ever. I forwarded it to the agent, and we got the ms, and we were on it. But the writer didn’t follow up on it. And that’s the toughest decision on what to do about that, because we were drawn to the writing, and we felt a little betrayed because we’d been set up for a story we didn’t get.

If I loved it so much I couldn’t stand to think of another agent touching it, I might ask for a second novel. Directing a total rewrite, though—I would not be able to handle that.

What if you have suggestions about just tweaking the plot?

I always ask for a chat, and the first thing I do is I want to talk over my editorial suggestions and things I saw that were a problem. Even people who have decided to sign with me, we’ve already had disagreements about what can be the most effective story. I want to be able to justify what I think would be more readable or more marketable.

So what’s selling these days?

Everything that’s really mainstream. Of my first three clients two of them are fantasy writers. Fantasy is selling very well now. As long as there’s something fresh in the book.

With romance & women’s fiction it is really trendy. If I find something it needs to be very very well-written. Single-title romance are still selling, Regency, Victorian. I do expect to be able to sell romance very quickly. Romance is crazy, and there are so many venues for romance writers out there.

I also took on a client who has a piece of literary fiction, and I think that’s going to be far more challenging because of the nature of the genre. People have different perceptions of what they expect. Literary fiction has its niches, and some publishers will publish only in certain niches. Literary fiction is less-read than other genres.

A really good thriller should sell pretty easily. There aren’t a tremendous amount of venues.

I really would like to find a literary horror novel, but there aren’t a lot of people actively looking for horror. Horror is kind of a pre-established genre. You have to be a pretty big name.

Writers are hearing a lot about platforms, as in: get out there right now and build yours. What is your opinion on the issue of the author building a platform for their book, nonfiction and fiction?

I figure it’ll be awhile before I take someone with a nonfiction proposal, because they need a pretty big platform. I hope I get lucky and find someone.

What do you suggest for fiction authors?

Quite a few things—and I think all of these things are kind of proactively helpful. I don’t think there are any requirements for debut fiction writers. I think at the very minimum fiction writers should have an easy-to-find web presence, even one page (her blog).

In terms of building an actual platform, publication of short stories, maybe even some nonfiction articles as long as they’re relevant to the subject area of their book. For example, if you’re writing about someone Jewish and that plays an integral role in your book, publishing articles on Judaism helps get your name out there. As long as you’re talking to the right people.

I think writers think a writer-to-writer community is all they need. And it absolutely isn’t. For instance, on Twitter I’ve seen communicating with booksellers do wonders. That can result in book-signings and hand-selling, the bookseller showing your book to someone who comes into the story. Integrate yourself into your genre community. For example, if you’re writing YA having a presence on teen web sites, teen literature, teen circles online is always very helpful

And then I guess having access to a variety of different venues in the town or nearest city that the writer’s coming from. Sometimes I get the feeling that setting up book-signings in your area is kind of an afterthought to writers, and that surprises me. If a writer sends out press releases to local newspapers saying, “Hey, can I have an interview?” the foundation can all be started before the book deal.

But I think that promotion is most effective in those three months before debuting and in the months right after. You put in some time every week with radio and newspapers, touching base with them to let them know you’re there.

Authors who want to be seen more have to go beyond what the publishing house gets them. That may be just one or two signings in their local area, but they should go autograph copies around the state if they can. There’s always a draw to books with signatures or to bookstores where there are signings.

What’s something really important you want to say to writers out there querying?

Oh, how to phrase this. . .I would tell those writers that they should put themselves into the shoes of—I don’t know what the career would be—unless you are a literary agent, it is absolutely impossible to understand the kind of—the weight of the decisions I make every day about queries and ms’s. It makes me sad that I have to sometimes pass a very quick judgment and send a very informal non-personalized rejection letter to maybe 150 or 200 writers a day, if that’s the number of queries I’m getting.

I would tell writers to never, ever take a rejection personally. I don’t think, “Oh gosh, this person is a terrible writer, they should never be published.” I think, “This person isn’t there yet, and I hope from the bottom of my heart that they find out how to fix it.”

There are just only so many hours in the day. I’m also living my own life, and I have my first dedication to the clients I’m working with. It’s just unfortunate that there are a limited number of agents out there who are able to help.

I think writers can underestimate how much work we put in and how much I wish I had all the time in the world to help fix everything.

What’s your favorite thing about working with writers? Your least favorite?

No one has asked me this before, but it’s a great question.

My least favorite thing? I think a lot of writers have egos. They aren’t necessarily huge egos, but they are egos of enough size for writers to flinch when, after they’ve been told often that their book rocks, they are still asked to revise. A good friend of mine from the blogosphere and I have talked often before about the authors who cease any communication with us if we criticize too harshly as critique partners or freelance editors. I have never been able to wrap my mind around it—why are writers driven so much toward publication that they don’t stop and pause to ask themselves if this is their best work, if they would show this writing to their favorite writer and be proud of it completely?

My favorite thing would be the magic of creativity and the passion for writing. I am a writer, too, and I understand what it’s like to feel that adrenaline, and more than anything I love it when that adrenaline transfers into a willingness to work hard. To kick butt. And to come up with stronger projects in the end.

Weronika Janszuk can be found on her blog and Twitter. To query her, please send a submission email and the first ten pages of your manuscript in the body of the email with QUERY in the subject line to Weronika Janczuk.

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On Tuesday, August 3, Independent Editor, author, and A. Victoria Mixon, Editor commenter Weronika Janczuk made a big announcement: she had become a literary agent.

Actually, I didn’t even see it on her blog. I saw it on PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY. So this is a pretty darn big announcement!

And I know the very first thing that pops into all your heads is: “And will she be representing ME?”

So I went straight on over to her blog and asked her. And she told me. Yes, she did.

Join us Monday for The Drug of Good Writing: the Weronika Janczuk interview.

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Millicent Dillon is the world’s expert on Jane and Paul Bowles, one of America’s most extraordinary and puzzling literary couples—both cutting-edge literary geniuses, expatriates in Tangier before and after WWII, both gay and yet devoted to each other for 35 years, even throughout Jane’s terrible 16-year illness after her stroke at the young age of 40 until her tragic death.

Dillon’s biography, You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, explores the life and charismatic character of the man who is, arguably, single-handedly responsible for today’s mega-popular “edgy” dark literature. Among other work, Paul wrote his four frightening and beautiful novels, The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House, Up Above the World, and the shockingly realistic 1940s stories of violence, sex, and alien culture, “A Distant Episode,” “The Delicate Prey,” and “Pages from Cold Point,” (collected in A Distant Episode and The Delicate Prey: And Other Stories), which long before dark literature became popular or even acceptable in the mainstream “opened the world of Hip,” Norman Mailer said later, “and let in the murder, the drugs, the incest. . .the end of civilization.”

Even more fascinating is Dillon’s wonderful A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, the only biography of Paul’s brilliant wife Jane, author of one Broadway play, In the Summer House, a handful of stories, a puppet play, and the 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies, all published in My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, and of which Two Serious Ladies has just been reissued by Sort of Books in the UK. Jane, even more than Paul, was a writer of such unique talent and vision that even those literary experts who embrace experimentalists like James Joyce and William Faulkner have never known what to do with her.

For much of the past year, I’ve corresponded and talked with Dillon about her work on the Bowleses. Although Jane died in 1973 (rumored to be poisoned with love potions by her Moroccan lover, Cherifa), Dillon knew Paul well, up until his death only ten years ago.

Millicent, I must credit you with my entire bibliography on Paul and Jane. I knew nothing about them when I picked up A Little Original Sin fifteen years ago, and they have both been enormously influential to me ever since.

So let’s talk first about Jane’s life as a writer, because it was not easy. Jane published before Paul did, and it was his work with her on Two Serious Ladies that inspired him to try his hand at fiction. Yet she sank rather quickly into literary obscurity and put her energy into assuring Paul that she didn’t mind if he was the more successful or if people at her publisher [Knopf] pretended not to know whom she was. What do you think her real feelings were about being overshadowed in the world of literature by her (very talented) husband?

The relationship between Jane’s work and Paul’s work was as complex as the relationship between the two of them. In that relationship she looked to him for support (including economic support) as well as early on, as with Two Serious Ladies, with shaping the work in terms of form—so that he suggested taking out the third serious lady, and she readily agreed. In her early letters, when he does start publishing, stories at first, and then getting the novel contract, you can hear the anguish in her voice. She admits to jealousy and then tries to smooth it over, but it’s obviously there. In the same way she suffered from his relationship with [his long-term lover] Ahmed Yacoubi.

As for Paul, he continuously encouraged her to work, and even said once that he would not see her if she did not work. I would guess, though of course, it is only speculation, that it was not his publishing his own work that made her own work so hard for her, it was a whole host of problems that she had to deal with. The rivalry, the jealousy could have been overcome. But the forces within her that she was fighting were never appeased.

Incidentally, Jane’s play was produced several years after Paul had been publishing. He wrote the music for the play. She anguished over that play for years, tried one version, then the next, and could not ultimately make it cohere. There are wonderful things in it, but it too suffers from her anguish about her own decisions.

If Jane had been a man, do you think her fiction would be more widely-known today? Do you think she would have been classed with the more famous male experimental writers, whom she in many ways completely surpassed?

Jane, as you may know, has never been taken up by the feminists. In fact, I don’t think you can strictly speaking regard her as a feminist. If you remember, she thought in very conservative terms about marriage, her marriage to Paul. He was to provide for her, and she was to take care of the house, etcetera. She never seemed to have any objections to that. Here again I am speculating, but I don’t think feminist ideas as such play a large role in her work. She did not think in general terms, in any case.

You ask if a man who wrote as she did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.

As for fame, Victoria, think of the many wonderful writers who have fallen into obscurity in this time of no-lasting impact.

How did she do it—how did Jane achieve such economy, insight, and sheer comedy, while simultaneously giving the impression she was an amateur simply playing around with words? Have you ever tried to imitate her work to see how it’s done?

Once Jane got into the writing of Two Serious Ladies, she never thought of herself as an amateur. In some strange way, she knew how good she was, compared herself favorably to Carson McCullers, for example. Yet even though she knew how good she was, the anguish was always there. I was not and am not into literary psychoanalysis, but she opens herself up in the work and in the letters so that you can see all these forces within her. And at the same time, her terrible anguish about any decision.

No, I have never tried to imitate Jane’s style. I am not into imitation. I’ve spent forty years trying to find my own style.

It seems to me the forces within her were based largely upon her relationship with her mother—with her role as Claire’s “million-dollar baby.” Jane’s work appears to be about exploring that relationship from myriad angles: from that of the daughter who retreats in submission and longing; the daughter who rebels and runs wild; the mother with an iron will; and the mother blind to her own extreme dependence. In much of her work these relationships appear as intimate relationships between peers—even sisters—yet the grappling with the power imbalance is always there.

Yes, it does seem clear that was a very powerful force for her in the way you describe it. Yet I also feel that the struggle in her, as in any human being, is more complex than any single issue. This is where literature begins to depart from psychoanalysis, which is after all a therapy intended to bring the patient into a greater adaptation to the world.

I cannot speak of this in very simple straightforward terms because of the complexity of human emotions. That is what I see so strongly in Jane. It is as though multiple forces assail her, and she is continuously buffeted by them from all sides. What makes her different from others, in a certain sense, is that she has no defense against the multiplicity. If she could have said, “My mother did this to me or that to me,” it would have been simpler for her. But instead, I suspect, she would think of herself as assailed one way and then by another.

Jane’s work is replete with insight into paradox. Whenever she finds a fundamental truth, she immediately progresses beyond it to its antithesis. I think the basis of this must have been in the overwhelming duality of her feelings about her mother—the pampering that gave Jane, ultimately, her faith in her abilities, along with the blatant use of Jane for Claire’s emotional well-being.

My immediate response, with respect to Claire, is to recall the strangeness of Claire taking Jane to Switzerland for treatment in the sanatorium [when 13-year-old Jane contracted tuberculosis of the knee shortly after her father died] and then going off and leaving her there while she went to Paris. In Paris, Claire was pursuing her own version of finding a new life, romantic and otherwise. I could bet she didn’t see anything wrong with this, though it is difficult for me to reconcile that choice with Claire’s constant expression of devotion for Jane. No doubt there was something in Claire that could deceive herself easily.

I do think about Jane that her relation to her family of women and its authoritarianism makes her a figure that is in some way incomprehensible to young women now. I remember giving a talk about the book to a group of women, many of whom were irate because she did not break away, they thought, from the constraints upon her, and, in fact, blamed her.

What did they think she was doing in Morocco in the 1940s, making excuses to Moroccan women [as she described in "Everything is Nice"] when they asked, “Why do you not sit in your mother’s house?” I remember Paul saying that they got married partly so Jane could travel, as she could not have traveled alone in that era. She went to enormous lengths to escape, to the extent that she eventually died of her extremist life in Tangier, suffering terrible pyschiatric handicaps due to that stroke and ensuing difficulties, many years before her time.

When I would talk to Paul about Jane in her later years when she was so ill, I would say, with a certain hubris, “But she was still Jane, wasn’t she?” Paul would deny it. Now, so many years later, after going through experiences with friends who suffered from conditions similar to Jane’s, if not exactly the same, and after being torn by grief, anger, etcetera, etcetera, I think I was both wrong and right.

I would like to think some more about Jane’s physical vulnerability, about her relationship to her own body, or at least try to speculate about it. Jane at times seemed almost oblivious to her body. When she called herself “Crippie Kike Dyke,” did she think it was funny? Or was she being more bitter than funny? Think about what it would be for a teenage girl to be in bed in traction for months upon months.

I think she was both fearless and very fearful at the same time, and this would result in her paying no attention to her body at times and at other times being obsessive about it, worrying about it and how it could be damaged.

Why was writing so terribly hard for her? She was pushed to do it and yet pushed not to do it. She is always, I think, subject to opposing forces and cannot choose what side she is on. Decisions of any kind are a torment to her. So in some way, I suspect, despite her anger at her mother, there also existed in her tenderness, if not love, rage, despair, maybe even sympathy.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the multiplicity is there for all of us, but she could not placate it, keep it quiet.

There is also this about Claire. She seems to have been of ordinary—even limited—sensibility, someone interested in clothes, propriety, middle-class values from her family, a family that she never escaped from, maybe never even knew the impulse to escape from them. One of the ways I see it is that Claire was not an equal antagonist, and as a result Jane had to build her up more and more in her mind to create a true antagonist. This she did with her imagination, and by so doing, was more of a prisoner of that imagined Claire than the real one. But how could Jane fight her own imagination? It is in this realm—the realm of her own imagination—that Jane had to fight out her most serious battles. And no one could help her with that.

And yet, despite all that was so dark in her life, it is important to turn again to her work. Reading it, one sees how remarkable and how innovative it is even after all this time, how funny and surprising it is and profound. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing of all, how profound it is.

Millicent Dillon is the winner of five O. Henry Awards, as well as being a PEN/Faulkner nominee for her fictional biography, Harry Gold, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and a residency at Yaddo artists working community, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California. She is the author of three other novels, The One in the Back is Medea, The Dance of the Mothers, and A Version of Love: A Novel, a collection, Baby Perpetua and Other Stories, and three biographies, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, and After Egypt: Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, a Dual Biography, all of which are available through Amazon’s Millicent Dillon Page. She is also the editor of two collections, Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970 and The Viking Portable Paul and Jane Bowles. Her own papers are archived in the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Austin, Texas. She lives and writes in Northern California.

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