Did you always want to be a writer?
Could you name a few writers (and which books) whose work interests you at the moment, or who have influenced your work?
Have any of your books ever been turned down by a publisher? What was that like and in what ways did it affect your writing?
Have you also written nonfiction and, if so, explain how the process is different for you?
What was the moment the led you to begin writing fiction?
How did you arrive at the idea for this book?
When you wrote the book, was there a specific plan for how the story would progress or did you let the story direct itself?
Is there something of an autobiographical element in your work?
What do you want readers to come away understanding from your book?
How do you think your readers view your work?
Do you enjoy readings and tours, and hearing from readers?
What advice can you give to aspiring authors?
Are you working on anything new and, if so, what can you tell us about it?
a discussion with M.A. Harper
No. I started out by compulsively drawing pictures at age two and demonstrated enough talent at it over the years to become pegged as a future artist. Almost all of my artwork was done in the service of some unwritten narrative of mine, however, and I was criticized in art school for being too "illustrative". I eventually got a clue and began tackling novels in my twenties.
I wish I could've written Cat's Eye, but Margaret Atwood beat me to it and I loved that book. I've read every word Walker Percy ever wrote---particularly enjoying Lancelot and Love In The Ruins---and I'm also quite taken with The Virgin in The Garden by A.S. Byatt. Other and more recent favorites are Don Delillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and a sci-fi tetralogy by Tad Williams titled Otherworld. I'm a huge John Irving fan (A Prayer for Owen Meany, especially), but my all-time favorite book is Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings. Comparing my own work to these, I'm not sure if I detect any influences, though. Readers might.
My first novel, For the Love of Robert E. Lee, was turned down by every publisher who ever looked at it over a period of thirteen years. Rejection is part of the game. You have to grow a thick skin and learn to lick your wounds, and then rewrite. Had I not been forced to rewrite Lee over and over, I would've never developed what talent I had, because the book became better with every pull through the typewriter. Serial rejection and the detailed critiques that sometimes came with it, taught me my craft. There's also an element of luck involved. One publisher may fall in love with a manuscript another publisher thinks is toilet paper. This novel of mine that Hill Street has published and done so much for, The Worst Day of My Life, So Far, was rejected by the first house that read it. There are also three other rejected manuscripts in my attic that'll never see the light of day as is, nor should they, because they're bad.
The only nonfiction I've ever published has been feature writing for local newspapers, that kind of stuff. Somebody asks me to write about something, and then I do. The major difference, for me, is that my novels just bubble up from somewhere in my own personality---nobody else imposes a plot line on me---and so I approach them with much more enthusiasm. As a result, I'm probably much better at novels. I don't go out of my way to even solicit any other kind of writing jobs.
When I was age fourteen or so, I began to write stories to go with the pictures I was drawing, of pretty girls falling in love with handsome boys and wearing gorgeous dresses and being witty and cute. I guess it was a way of compensating for what I most emphatically was not. Nobody at all wanted to read them, so I'd lock my younger sister in the bathroom with me and force-read them to her.
I was marooned in a house with an Alzheimer's patient, my mother, for twenty-four hours a day, and was trying to follow up my first published novel with a second. Alzheimer's is a very demanding disease and it takes a lot out of you emotionally, and as it slowly took over my real life, it began to take over my writing as well. "Here's your next book," my friend Marcia remarked to me during a long-distance phone conversation, and I remember thinking "No! No!" But she was right.
I never have specific plans about anything. If something is all planned out and I already know what's supposed to happen, I lose interest.
Of course. But I try to keep it to a minimum because I treasure my friends and family members. None of them, living or dead, deserves to have his private life laid out naked on a page just because he's met a novelist. I do use whatever I've personally learned about a subject or place or situation, and I plug in real experiences of mine from time to time if they fit neatly into the story line. But if not, I just invent. I'm pretty good at creative fibbing.
That the word "love" isn't always a noun; sometimes it's a verb. It's not always an emotion that you feel. In fact, what you might be feeling at any given moment might be more like hate, but it's a way of behaving decently and performing what used to be termed your duty. Even unwillingly, kicking and screaming and cussing, a person can still act out love and give their lives some meaning thereby.
I'm told they find it funny, an actual laugh riot. Maybe I'm unable to speak about anything without verbally goofing around, going off on tangents, saying stuff out loud that perhaps should have been censored. I entertain myself, daily, by what conclusions I draw as I observe all else around me. Writing a book is my way, I guess, of letting other people in on the ongoing, perpetual joke.
Very much. I get to stay in some nice places where somebody else has to make the bed, and I can eat out every night without feeling guilty. As for readers, they balance the equation. All books are written to be read. Whenever I hear from a reader, even if they've hated what I've written, I have the deep satisfaction of knowing that the necessary link of communication has been completed, I have communicated. This is what I used to lock my poor sister in the bathroom to get.
As somebody once said, "If anything can stop you from writing, let it." But, if not, two words: rewrite and read. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Don't get hung up on trying to sell a book you think is perfect as is. After a rejection, go live your life for a while, work at your day job, read other authors, fall in love, read other authors, fight, eat, read, move to a new apartment, read, so that when you can stomach another look at your own book, you'll be able to really see its weaknesses and where it doesn't work. Once you can genuinely see where it needs work, if you really love it, nothing will hold you back from trying to improve it. And the more you improve it, the more its chances of attracting a publisher improve. Also, accept at some point that it might be a dead horse, begin writing a new work, and stop flogging it. You can always go back to it one day and re-examine it for signs of life.
I've signed a contract with Hill Street for another novel, scheduled for publication on Halloween, 2003. Its working title is Louisiana Ghost Story, and that pretty much says it all. I don't know if anybody's going to find this one funny, but what with me being me, it's probably chockablock with enough inappropriate moments to at least raise a few eyebrows.