Best Behavior
Page 29
Before beginning your writing career, you were a book editor. How does your experience as a book editor inform your writing? What do you love most about writing? And what is your least favorite part of the process?
For me, the hardest transition from editor to author was resisting the temptation to immediately edit everything I wrote. I had to give myself permission to write clunky sentences in order to get a story down on the page. Otherwise, it would take me all day to write a paragraph! Being an editor taught me about overall pacing and character development, but it also taught me that it takes a whole team of gifted folks to make a good book. The fresh perspective that my own editor brings to each new manuscript always amazes me—and improves every story. The part I love most about writing is when the characters start to flow naturally and follow you around everywhere—to the grocery store, to the hockey rink, into the basement to do laundry. That’s when I know I’m truly absorbed in my work. The hardest part is starting again, confronting a blank page.
What are your favorite books about families? Which authors capture the feeling of family for you?
There are so many! I’m just reading Mary Beth Keane’s wonderful Ask Again, Yes about two families forever bound together by a tragedy. Lynda Cohen Loigman’s The Two-Family House is another sweeping saga across generations that I devoured. I also love novels about, for lack of a better word, dysfunctional families, probably because they feel so real and so true. Anything by Emma Straub is on my list, as are Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest and Stephen McCauley’s very funny My Ex-Life. I’m a huge fan of Sally Hepworth and Liane Moriarty, and then there’s Elin Hilderbrand for delicious stories about summering families. Elizabeth Strout’s intricately drawn worlds always feel achingly true, and her characters, vibrantly alive. As for the classics, George Eliot’s Middlemarch would have to be my all-time favorite that touches on the dynamics of marriage and family ties.
What are you writing next? And can you tell us anything about it?
My new novel takes place at a tony Boston hotel on the water, where four separate guests’ lives collide after a tragedy occurs on the premises. Stay tuned!
ISBN: 9781488056420
Best Behavior
Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Francis
Quote from “Parents Are The Real Graduates” by Erma Bombeck printed with permission from the estate of Erma Bombeck.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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