Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of The Jane Austen Book Club which spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Novel Kicks caught up with Karen Joy Fowler……

Describe your typical writing day?

Author Photo: Beth Gwinn

On my typical writing day I don’t write.  Sad, but true.  I answer my email, I check out various blogs I like, I answer more of my email.  Then it’s lunchtime.  I believe I’m going to start to write at any moment, but after lunch I have more email and all the blogs have updated.  The dog needs to be walked and it’s time to start dinner.  Besides, by late afternoon I’m too tired for the sustained concentration of writing a book.  I’m disappointed, but strangely optimistic about tomorrow.  Which may or may not be a rinse and repeat sort of day.

Where do you find your inspiration?

Anywhere and everywhere.  I eavesdrop when strangers talk – very easy in this day of the cell phone.  I misunderstand the lyrics to rock songs in a fruitful way.  I get ideas from reading other people’s fabulous stories and poems.  And history books, of course.  Especially inaccurate history books – history books with attitude and agenda.  Scientific studies, especially if I only know about them because of eavesdropping (see above.)  I find that a little bit of information about something is much more inspiring than a lot of information about it.  Though if the story I want to write needs a lot of information, I’m happy to go and get it.

What’s your editing process like?

I love rewriting – much more pleasurable than the first draft – so I do a ton of it and I do it everyday.  I’m always polishing the language, moving the scenes about, changing the location, changing the time period.  Tinker, tinker, tinker.  It’s the best part.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Going to work in your bedroom slippers.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt since becoming a writer?

Apparently I haven’t learned it yet.  I have no idea.  The biggest surprise is that it doesn’t get easier.  It feels like every book is harder than the last, but my husband assures me this isn’t true – I am always in despair that I won’t be able to finish and this is the way I always have been.

Had you always wanted to be a writer? What was your journey to publication like?

I had wanted to be a writer on and off since I was a child, but it’s an ambition I lost track of for long parts of my life.  More persistent was the desire to raise and train dogs though I’ve never had a well-behaved dog in my life.  Some dreams cannot be realized.

The road to publication was muddy and serpentine.  I collected 23 rejections on my first novel alone before it was purchased.  I have weighty files of rejection letters for poetry and short stories.  It’s actually immensely satisfying to me now, how many rejections I got.

Ideal Dinner Guests (Dead or Alive)

Julia Childs and Meryl Streep pretending to be Julia Childs.

Is there a book by another author that you’d wish you’d written and why?

To answer with recent books only – I wish I’d written Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but Susanne Clarke did instead.  I wish I’d written Jedidiah Berry’s The Manual of Detection.  I can’t articulate exactly why – only that both books made me enormously happy when I read them.  Big happy.

Top five tips for new writers?

1)  Read.

2) Read more. Go into parts of the library you never go and read some books from those shelves.

3) Think about setting.  The most common lack I see in student and early work is the absence of a good sense of where we are and what is around happening around our protagonists.  Try to set your scenes in places where the setting has an impact on what people do and say.

4) Listen carefully when people critique your work, but be cautious about taking advice unless you feel that you understand how you are making your piece better by doing so.

5) Keep it fun.  If you find that you’re losing the pleasure you once had in it, figure out what you can do to get it back again.  None of the rest – the publishing, the readings – is reliably fun (though it may be), so try to keep loving the doing of it.

To find out more about Karen Joy Fowler, click here for her website.

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Laura

I’m Laura. I started Novel Kicks in 2009. I wanted a place to post my writing as well as give other writers like me the opportunity to do the same. There is also a monthly book club, a writing room which features writing prompts, book reviews, competitions, author interviews and guest posts.

I grew up by the sea (my favourite place in the world) and I currently live in Hampshire. I am married to Chris, have a cat named Buddy and I would love to be a writer. I’m trying to write the novel I’ve talked so much about writing if only I could stop pressing delete. I’ve loved writing since creative writing classes in primary school. I have always wanted to see my teacher Miss Sayers again and thank her for the encouragement. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything I can get my hands on, I love reading, dancing like a loon and singing to myself very badly. My current obsession is Once Upon a Time and I would be happy to live with magic in the enchanted forest surrounded by all those wonderful stories provided that world also included Harry Potter. I love reading chick lit. contemporary fiction and novels with mystery.