Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Authors are Human

by 4 Comments

There are times in this indie author’s life when I feel quite professional—usually when I’m doing professional things like formatting an ebook or creating an Amazon listing or designing my own business cards. But there are other times—such as when I’m sitting on a piano bench in a dining room full of bedroom furniture, wearing paint-splotched old clothes and a dollar-store baseball cap and trying to do book marketing on my laptop—when I suddenly look around me and feel like a monstrous imposter.

Me, a professional author? Oh, no. I’m just some starry-eyed little girl who makes up stories and thinks they’re good enough to be called Fiction, who is kindly humored by retailers that allow her to offer her books for sale on their websites.

And then I begin to remember. Authors are human. Authors, with a capital A, even those who have the emblem of some prestigious publishing company on the spines of their books, actually exist in real life, beyond the glossy covers and literary journal reviews. Authors paint their houses, and presumably look like frights while doing it. Authors have to take their dogs out to play, and cook dinners, and probably wonder while they’re doing it why anybody in their right mind would want to buy a book written by someone as ordinary as them.

And then I don’t feel quite such an imposter anymore.

Extracts from the Diary of an Author

by 4 Comments

book-1502805_640“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
~ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

A few days ago I started a new blank journal. When I went to put the last filled one away, I naturally paused for a minute and flipped back through a few old entries…and ended up reading more of them…and before I knew it I was digging out the journal before that and reading it, too. These journals of the last few years don’t make me writhe the way the ones from my early teenage years used to (until I burned them this summer). I’d say ramblings about my writing make up a good two-thirds of the entries. It’s really helpful to be able to muse and brainstorm and speculate in my journal when I’m stuck with a story—not to mention a relief to have a place where I can just write, without any demands of consistency in style, plot or believability. I’ve been making a conscious effort to make it more a journal of life in general, but writing is so big a part of my life that you know it’s going to get in there somehow.

Anyhow, in the course of re-reading these past journals, I came upon a number of variously funny and thought-provoking entries, and I thought it’d be fun to share a few excerpts of them here:

July 20th, 2011
I haven’t the faintest idea what to make for lunch today. I know I’ve used the words “eyes,” “moved,” and “turned” about a million times apiece in [this] story [it was “Delayed Deposit”] and I’ll have to find other ways to say it about half a million times.

November 19th
The side-effects of successful writing are backaches and absent-mindedness. My back hurts more consistently even than my head, and I’ve been forgetting everything. I broiled some cookies instead of baking them last weekend, and this morning at eleven o’clock I found myself trying to remember if I had eaten breakfast. I had to go count the bowls in the dishwasher. Turns out I hadn’t. What I’m still trying to figure out is how I stayed on my feet that long.

March 8th, 2012
I was thinking today about my experience reading Hay-Wire. Much as I loved it, a certain thing kept happening to me. A lot of what Lynn learns in the course of the book is never stated in so many words; it’s left to the reader to observe in him. Similarly, when the author shares his early thoughts she doesn’t point out the fallacies; she leaves it to the reader to recognize them. Even though I caught on all right, I caught myself saying mentally, “Yes, but when are you going to explain? Explain, or the reader won’t see it!” But the thing is, I was the reader, and I was seeing it. I was just thinking like an author, and treating the book like one of my own. This makes me think: I’m probably so over-careful and over-concerned about my readers “getting” it. That’s the questions I always ask everyone after they read one of my stories: “Did it make sense? Did you understand such-&-such a part? Do you get what I was trying to say?” Maybe I underestimate the reader. But then again, is it riskier to overestimate?

January 23, 2013
I’m reading The Little Regiment & Other Stories. Is it a bad thing that I see similarities between Stephen Crane’s writing & mine, & yet find things to criticize in Crane’s? Yet if Crane’s considered a good writer & I do write at all like Crane, then wouldn’t people think my writing was good…? Conundrums!

Someone’s Words

by 1 Comment

I’ve become very fond of novels that open each chapter with a quotation (something that I wrote about once before on this blog, quite a while ago). The last two good novels I read that used this method were Hand and Ring by Anna Katharine Green and Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart. That last one made particularly superb use of them, with sources ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and more, each perfectly suited to the events within the chapters.

I’ve always wanted to do this myself, and I’ve finally happened on my opportunity. Last summer I came across a passage in a book I was reading that perfectly fit the underlying theme of a Mrs. Meade story which was then in the planning stages. The thought of what it would be like to use the quotation at the beginning of the story briefly crossed my mind, and then flitted away. But later on it came back to me, and I thought—why not? Since then, apt opening quotations have popped into my head during the outlining of the next few stories, so I’ve delightedly decided to make them a feature of the series. I’m even going to go back and insert a quotation at the opening of The Silver Shawl—I think I’ve nearly settled on something from Shakespeare.

Going back to pick one for The Silver Shawl has taught me one thing, though. It’s much better and easier to have apt quotations pop into your head and suggest themselves than it is to go looking for one on a particular topic. And for that to happen, you need to have an underlying familiarity with poetry, plays, etc. for your memory to fall back upon. I’ve started making a little conscious effort to improve myself in that respect. I recently put the complete works of Shakespeare on my Kindle (for $1.99!) and I’ve been reading a Sonnet here and there over the last few weeks. It’s a funny thing about Shakespeare—you can plow on for a while through a tangle of unfamiliar phrasing and obscure meaning, and then suddenly happen upon a line that expresses some familiar feeling almost perfectly. The man certainly knew how to put things. Good poetry is like that—as the narrator of Nine Coaches Waiting puts it, “One always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone’s words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture…Poetry was awfully good material to think with.”

In short, I need to read more poetry.