Channelling Sophie: Patricia J. DeLois on Bufflehead
Sisters
Author of the YouWriteOn.com Book of the Year talks about
the publish-on-demand industry, the online peer-reviewing process, and
the role libraries play in selling books.
In addition to being the true author of the prize-winning
Bufflehead Sisters, Patricia J. DeLois works in the audiovisual
department in the Portland Public Library. Bufflehead,
her first novel, won the British Council sponsored YouWriteOn.com
2007 Book of the Year Award. It was then published by YouWriteOn
on a publish-on-demand (POD) basis.
The Maine Sunday Telegram called Bufflehead Sisters,
"The most stunning work of imagination published by a Maine
author this year...heartbreaking, hair-raising, painful, perverse,
and redeeming."
James Whyle: What do you make of that assessment of your
work?
Patricia J. Delois: I'd say that's
the assessment of the ideal reader. The fact that this particular
reader was in a position to publish his opinion is a dream come
true. Publish on demand doesn't come with any mechanism for
publicity or promotion, and except for the promotion done by YouWriteOn,
no one would have heard of Buffleheads had this reviewer not taken
up the cause.
JW: You've kind of sprung this one from nowhere, or do
you have a secret history as a writer that no one knows about?
PJD: There was a time when I wouldn't have started
a novel for fear that I would die before I finished it.
Many years ago, I was in a writing group led by a local author.
There were ten of us, and one was this guy, Fred, who was writing
a truly dreadful novel about a professor at Columbia who is falsely
accused of sexual harassment by a sexy student whose advances he
rejects. He loses his job, or maybe he quits, and he flies his Cessna
up to Maine to recuperate, and he meets another sexy woman who throws
herself into helping him clear his name because she believes in
him. Or something. Fred claimed to have an agent waiting for a complete
draft.
Anyway, this novel was Fred's raison d'etre. That's the phrase
he used, and he said it a hundred times at every session.
I left the group after six months, and didn't hear any more about
Fred until he showed up in the paper one day--he'd been run over
by a bus. My first thought was, "He's never going to finish
his novel."
JW: What a tragic story.
PJD: In library school, they taught us that in
collection development, there's selection, and there's de-selection,
which is what you'd call weeding.
Fred was deselected by God, and what if it was because his novel
was so bad that God didn't want to see it published?
I didn't have to worry about it, though, because I was never going
to write a novel.
JW: Well, you have now. And you've written Sophie, an extraordinary
character, leaping from the page from the moment, just after her
arrival in Buffleheads, when she tells the narrator's parents
the she also had a "pi-nano," but her mother killed it with an axe.
How did you find this person?
PJD: I don't know. All I know is that I
wanted to write a story about a teenage girl who has an affair with
an older man, and Sophie showed up for the casting call. I knew
this was a character I wanted to work with, and as it turned out,
the story was entirely different from what I expected to write,
because of Sophie.
JW: Sophie dictated things, so to speak.
PJD: This is typical of her. She's quite
wilful. For one thing, she wasn't the least bit interested
in older men. That presented a problem, obviously, because she wasn't
at all attracted to the man I had in mind for her. But then I cast
Janet as the narrator, and along with Janet came her family, and
as the cast grew, I saw that there was one particular man to whom
Sophie might be attracted for very particular reasons. It was all
these particularities that dictated a novel rather than a short
story, and this came as a surprise to me, since I never intended
to be a novelist.
JW: A bit of a shock.
PJD: I took it pretty well. I remember the exact
moment when I said to myself, "Well, I'd better get
started," and I just started writing. I had no idea what I
was doing, and I think, honestly, that was an advantage, because
I wasn't encumbered by any ideas of what I was or wasn't
supposed to be doing.
JW: How long did it take you?
PJD: Two years.
JW: What was the process like, day by day?
PJD: I wrote scenes here and there—I decided
early on to tell the story chronologically, for the sake of simplicity,
but I didn't write it through that way. I wrote scenes as
they came to me, and developed them into different parts of the
story.
I wrote pretty much every day after work, late at night on the
weekends. When I wasn't generating new material, I was revising.
Once in a while, there were feverish bouts of writing constantly.
You ever have those, where you're so wrapped up in it that
you forget to eat?
JW: Every now and then. Buffleheads complete,
how did you come to realize that Sophie had to be the next step,
and you had to go 1st person, inside her head?
PJD: Again, that was Sophie's decision and
not mine. While I was writing Buffleheads, there were several
occasions when I was so glad I wasn't writing her point of
view, because I didn't think I could sustain her voice.
When I finished, I had no idea what to do next. Since I'd
had no plans to write one novel, I certainly didn't have a
backlog of ideas for other novels. Things were very quiet in my
head for a couple of weeks, and then Sophie started talking. She
wasn't finished with me. I thought up a situation to put her
in, just to try writing a scene in her voice, and found myself writing
a second novel.
JW: How far are you?
PJD: I had put it aside for some time while I
wrote a couple of short stories—I like how that sounds, like
it was a strategic move, a part of my process, rather than
the lapse that it actually was. When I picked it up again, I realized
that my entire second act was unnecessary, and what I thought was
the start of the third act was actually the second. So it turns
out I'm further along than I thought, maybe half to two-thirds,
although any estimate I give you could be wildly inaccurate. I've
instructed my agent to say, "It's well under way,"
and leave it at that.
JW: Who is your agent?
PJD: Diane Freed, with FinePrint Literary Management.
She's mostly dealt with nonfiction, so this is kind of new
to her. It's all new to me, too, so we're in it together.
When you consider that a year ago I didn't expect to get published
at all, this has all happened pretty fast. Suddenly I'm a
writer.
JW: I'm interested to hear you talk about "acts."
Is this a way of thinking structurally that you picked up from writing
courses?
PJD: Not so much writing courses as other writers,
who may have picked it up from their writing courses. I don't
normally think in terms of acts, but for some reason this story
seems to be structured that way.
JW: I messed around with a band once, and one of the cleverer
things we did, I think, was get out of the garage and start playing
in public. What made you finally make the change, the decision to
get your stuff out into the world?
PJD: It wasn't so much a decision I made,
as it was something that happened to me, but I know what you mean.
There's something about putting yourself out there under the
label of "writer" or "musician" that really
calls your bluff. You put yourself in a position of having to perform,
and you do it, and it's amazing what that does for your confidence
as an artist.
JW: One has, if you'll excuse a male metaphor, to
put one's member on the block. How did it play out with you?
PJD: I made one or two half-assed attempts at
publication, but I wasn't really interested enough to pursue
it. Writing pitch letters just seems like homework to me. It takes
a lot of time and energy, and it distracts you from your writing—I
just didn't have the patience for it.
I read something about this YouWriteOn peer review site, sponsored
by the British Council for the Arts. I took a look at it and was
very impressed. Writers critiquing each other, with professional
writers and editors getting a look at the best work—everybody
wins, right? It's a great idea, and it's a very well
run site.
So I posted the opening chapters of Buffleheads, just
to see what would happen, and at the end of the month I got the
Big Professional Review. I was passed along to the big agents and
editors, and someone requested the full manuscript, but in the end
no one wanted it, and I probably would have left it at that had
I not won one of the Book of the Year Prizes.
So I guess you could say I pursued publication, but only in the
sense that it was always one step ahead of me and I was following
behind. I feel like I'm always waiting to see what will happen,
and it's already happening. I won the award, I've been
published, I'm being invited to libraries and book groups.
I've got an agent trying to sell my work. And I'm still
waiting to see what will happen next.
JW: How does the YWO publishing deal work?
PJD: It's pretty simple. They have a contract
with Lightning Source (the POD company) the purpose of which is
to publish and distribute Buffleheads. My contract with
YWO gives them permission to publish the book in this way. YWO keeps
20% of the royalties, and I get 80%.
JW: Such a good deal has to have a down side.
PJD: The disadvantage of POD to the author is
that you get no editorial assistance—you're responsible
for your own editing, your own formatting, your own proofreading,
your own artwork—and you get no promotion or publicity. Bookstores
don't like to stock POD books, not only because they would
have to mark up the price to make a profit, but also because they
can't return any copies that don't sell. So unless you
can attract enough publicity to create a demand for the book, you
won't find it in bookstores.
This is where I was lucky with Buffleheads.
JW: Is luck not created by the lucky?
PDJ: I think it's true that we create our
own luck, insofar as we work hard and we're ready when opportunities
present themselves. But examine any successful author story, and
you'll find an element of pure luck. Sometimes it IS who you
know, but it's not necessarily the person you'd expect.
Because I work at the library, I happen to know another woman who
works at the library. She happens to work part time, and she has
a second job where she happens to work with John Robinson, who writes
reviews for the Maine Sunday Telegram. She offered to pass
along a copy of my book for him to review, and he wrote the review
you quoted earlier, and that had an enormous impact on book sales,
especially because it appeared a few weeks before Christmas.
JW: God bless libraries. And librarians.
PDJ: God bless us every one. Some writers think
that libraries cut down on their sales because people are borrowing
your book rather than buying it, but keep in mind that libraries
actually account for a lot of book sales, not only in the books
they purchase, but also in the books they inspire patrons to purchase.
Some patrons will buy a book rather than wait on a waiting list,
and a lot of patrons will buy copies of books they like, if not
for themselves then as gifts for other readers. Not only that, but
librarians are readers themselves, and they're networked like
you wouldn't believe.
It behoves us, as writers, to be generous to libraries, and to
treat librarians with the respect they so richly deserve.
JW: Given that you deal with readers in your work, what
is your sense of the state of the publishing industry?
PJD: It seems to me that the publishing industry
is always looking backwards at the last thing that sold. The reason
you hear of so many "surprise" bestsellers is because
the industry is always looking in the wrong place for what readers
want.
The most consistent advice I've received from people in the
industry is to choose a genre and write for it, because agents can't
sell your work and editors can't buy it unless it comes prefabricated
for the marketing department. You and I both know that there's
a lot of great writing out there that isn't being published
because the industry doesn't want to take a chance on something
unfamiliar.
But the readers I know don't want to read the same book over
and over. They want something original, something that's well
written, something that expands their experience.
JW: Would you recommend peer review sites to aspirant writers?
PJD: I would recommend YWO to anyone who writes
fiction. You learn a lot from other people's mistakes, and
you learn new tricks from writers who are better than you. The site
encompasses a wide range of writers, experienced and otherwise.
I hear complaints that some people review as readers rather than
as writers, but there's value in that, too, because ultimately
your goal is to put your work in the hands of the reading public,
and you might as well start learning how to handle their responses.
One of the most valuable things we can learn as writers is that
you can't please everyone, and an online group has the advantage
of allowing you time to absorb the criticism before you respond
to it.
JW: Can we just come back for a moment to this channelling
thing?
PJD: Yeah, sorry about that. It must have been
disappointing to get me into the Shed and discover that I wasn't
really Sophie after all.
JW: I'm afraid I'm in two minds on that one.
I've still got a suspicion you might be.
PJD: I often find writing to be a Zen thing, something
you get lost in, something that dissolves your ego and engages you
completely, but with Sophie it sometimes goes a step further. Almost
like Voodoo, in that you not only empty yourself but you actually
clear out to make room for someone else to take over.
JW: Verging on spooky.
PJD: Yes.
_______
Bufflehead Sisters is a available through
Amazon. You can get a taste of where DeLois is going with Sophie
(or where Sophie is going with DeLois) at StoryGlossia.
DeLois and Whyle are founder members of The
BookShed, a peer review and networking site which welcomes damn
good writers, published or not.
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