by Lisa Unger
6. You mentioned in an earlier interview that you don’t outline or know the end of a story when you start writing. First, would you say that process still holds true for you? And do you write from beginning to end or do you write out of sequence and paste everything together later?
When I sit down to write, it’s usually just with a voice in my head, a feeling, an essence. No, there can’t be an outline or any real idea about how things will turn out. I have no idea who will show up, what they will want to do, what will happen to them. And plot always flows from character; until I get to know the people I’m writing about, I can’t know what’s going on in their lives, how they will react in any given circumstance.
When we wake up in the morning, we might know what we plan for our day. But we don’t know really what happens until we’ve lived that day. Story is just like that. But I do start from the beginning and write through to the end. I have never written out of sequence, just in the same way I can’t live my life out of sequence.
7. What else distinguishes your personal writing routine? I’ve heard some authors say they have pictures of who their characters are pinned up in their writing rooms. Others have note cards taped up to visualize the plot. Recently I had someone say they use large 2 ft. post-it note sheets. What does your environment look like/feel like? When is your preferred time to write and when do you actually write? Do you find that you have to do a lot of revising at the end because you don’t have detailed plans at the beginning?
My golden creative hours are from 5 AM to Noon. I don’t always get those hours because I have a little girl and she always comes first. Unfortunately, she also likes to get up at 5 AM. So that can be a bit of challenge. But I generally get some of those hours, working in the morning while my daughter is at preschool. But I like to be present for her when she gets home. So there’s often more writing after she goes to sleep at night.
I don’t really have any props, pictures, or note cards. It’s usually just me and my computer, or my notebook. I often write longhand. I do have a very comfortable office where I am surrounded by books and little objects that make me happy and a wall of pictures of my family. But I suppose because of so many years writing in the little spaces of my life, I can write anywhere, in any environment—train, bus, car—wherever. I often write with headphones and music blearing. But I don’t need that. I guess I’m low-maintenance in this regard. Give me a pen and a blank sheet of paper and I’m good to go—even a napkin will do the trick.
When the book is finished, I do a lot of revising, honing, fine tuning. Usually, the first draft is about 100,000 words. The second draft is generally about 110,000 words or more. It’s not a matter really of having to go back to correct or change plot structure, I do very little of that. Generally, the bones are pretty strong. I do a lot of flushing out of character, working on my prose, word-choice, clarifying my meaning.
8. Publicity can be a touchy subject with some writers. I’ve heard many grumble about the various things they “have” to do to promote their books when they’d just rather be writing. Having been in publicity before starting your full-time writing career, do you share that sentiment? Do you have a different viewpoint? How do you strike the balance so that you’re putting in the (as Gregg Hurwitz would call it) “butt in the seat time” and still getting the word out about the new books?
People who know me well, know that my favorite piece of advice about this is: Nose to the keyboard. Which basically means, it’s all about the writing. As authors, that’s all we can control. But, of course, we also have a responsibility toward getting the word out there about our work, connecting with our readers, and maintaining our important relationships with booksellers and the media. Writers usually grumble about this, I think, because most of us are naturally introverts. The publicity and promotion work goes against our natural inclination, which is to be in a hobbit hole somewhere making up stories. But I’m just glad that people want to hear from me enough that there’s a demand for me to be out there connecting with people. And I view it as a part of my business, secondary to being the best writer that I can be for my readers.
The balance I try to strike on any given day is 90% craft, 10 % publicity and promotion. Sometimes, you have to be more vigilant to the publicity and promotion of your work—usually as publication approaches and into the month or so after. And throughout the year, I do a lot of speaking. But the main thrust of my efforts is in the writing every day, trying to get better, to create the most vivid world and get to know well the characters I have met.
I see a lot of authors very caught up in the publicity and promotion of their work. And usually those who are the most concerned about it are the most unhappy. They have been told—by their publishers, by other authors—about all the things they have to do, not just to succeed, but to survive. And they labor under the illusion that they can create demand for their work, that their efforts will determine whether or not they become bestsellers. While I believe that you can increase exposure for your work through the channels available these days, I believe that demand is an unknown factor, one that cannot be controlled. And that demand occurs regardless of our individual efforts toward publicity. People demand your work because you’ve done your job as a writer, not because you’ve done your job as a book publicist.
9. And then you also have to juggle those responsibilities with your Mom responsibilities. Now that you have some pre-baby books and some post-baby books under your belt, how (if at all) do you feel motherhood has changed you as a writer?
Motherhood has changed everything about me. Therefore it has certainly changed me as a writer. In motherhood, I am more patient, more empathetic, more loving than I was before. My daughter, Ocean, has made me a better person. I think empathy is one of the most important characteristics of a writer. If you don’t empathize with your characters, you can’t know them. If you can’t know them, you can write about them well. Finding more empathy for the human condition, I think has made me a better writer.
Certainly, I never knew what a gigantic space in my creative heart Ocean would occupy. Never before her has anything rivaled my desire to write. So I felt a tremendous fracture in the first year of her life. When I was writing, I just wanted to be with her … and often she was sleeping on me or near me as I wrote. And when I was with her, I was worrying about finding the time and space to write.
But we have found our balance, I think, on most days. Ocean, who is now four and a half, has a desk in my office. She often colors or draws when I’m writing. She knows that I work while she’s in school, and that most days, I belong to her by the time she gets home at noon. I start my day at 5 AM to make this possible. I take her pretty much everywhere with me. She has been on several book tours, as well as to Paris, London, Prague, Frankfurt, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney, to name a few. I stopped counting at 70 flights.
One thing about the mommy-writer balance is that there’s no procrastination … or less procrastination. If I miss my hours, I don’t get them back until much later in the day or not at all. So I don’t waste the time when she’s in school. It forces me to be very vigilant to my writing time.
10. As we mentioned in a previous question, Fragile still contains the theme of deception, of hidden secrets, but this book has its origins in an event that’s more personal for you. Can you talk a little about that? And why this book was twenty years in the making? What about now [2009/2010] made this the right time to write this book?
This book is very loosely based on an event that took place in the town where I grew up. A girl I knew in high school was abducted and murdered. It was a stunning and tragic event that impacted me tremendously and changed the way I thought about the world. This book is not about that event, per se. I did not research the past in order to flush out the foggy memories I have, or to create a real time line of events. I didn’t want to write that kind of book, mainly because I didn’t want to hurt people who had suffered terribly or to exploit the memory of the murdered girl.
I also think it’s notable that the voices who wound up telling this story are older than I am now, and older than the characters who have tried to tell it before. Which leads me to think that maybe I needed to grow up a little to write this book.
11. Setting plays a very important role in Fragile. The idea of the small town; everyone knows everyone else; everyone grew up together, went to school together, etc. It’s hard to be different in a town that small. Several of the characters don’t “fit”; they want to get out of the small town and go to “the city”—”the city” being New York City. And Maggie actually does live in New York for awhile but circumstances pull her back. You’ve described yourself as feeling like you didn’t exactly fit in. Are we seeing an element of you in these characters?
I think this is the curse and the blessing of the writer. A writer is first, before anything, an observer. And you cannot observe unless you stand apart. I have never felt particularly as if I belong anywhere, except in my immediate family with Ocean and Jeff. So I suppose I have particular empathy for the misfit characters in this book and all my novels.
I grew up in a town not unlike The Hollows. And, you’re right, it is very hard to be different in a place like that. But we moved there from elsewhere, after having lived overseas, so I don’t consider myself of or from a place like that. I sort of arrived there with a different idea of the world than most of my classmates. That place wasn’t the whole universe for me; it was one of many stops on the road. And I always knew I’d be gone from there as soon as I was old enough to leave.
Certainly, this feeling of being on the outside looking in was a prevailing feeling in my adolesence. I did hate the small town life and dreamed always of running away to New York City, which I eventually did. So I suppose I can relate to Maggie in that way.
12. The other way I thought I heard echoes of you in Maggie’s character was Maggie’s occupation. She’s a psychologist. And she observes. She observes her patients, trying to see into their minds. Not only is she observing in her job but in her family. She’s on the outside of the relationship between her son and her husband, observing, not being able to do anything about the constant battles between them. That outside observation is what you’ve acknowledged is one of your own traits. Does Maggie’s character come from your experiences that way or did you have to research elsewhere to understand Maggie?
I did quite a bit of research into her occupation, education, and just the particular challenges of, as a psychologist, having an office attached to the home. I wondered about those boundary issues, and how one separates from patients who are suffering and looking to you for help and guidance.
But I think being a psychologist is, in some ways, not unlike being a writer. One has to have a great deal of empathy, understanding, and yes, a bit of distance from the human condition. Much like the psychologist, you can’t be rolling around in the muck with your characters. You have to be able to see them clearly, hear them, know them to tell them well. But none of my characters necessarily come directly from my own experiences. And, of course, all of them do in their way. So, Maggie, like everyone is some compilation of my own traits, people I have observed, experiences I have had an imagined.
13. Closely related to that is what I think may be a bit ironic. While you say you are an outside observer, you have a real strength with writing the psychological, what’s going on inside the characters’ minds as they look out. And with Fragile being a third person point of view, you’re examining the thought processes of multiple characters, multiple genders, multiple ages. How do you jump into the minds of all these different characters and make it all work and balance? Do you find any type of character harder to work with than others?
The most important trait of the writer, after the ability to stand apart and observe, is empathy. If we are living authentically, if we are seeing clearly, if we are truly open to different experiences and people, then the whole world is before us to see. Every experience, every emotion, every personality is on display for us to observe. And if we are open to it, not closing ourselves off with fear and prejudice, really allowing ourselves to understand the full rainbow of the human experience, then it is not very difficult to stand in another’s shoes, to imagine their life.
All my characters are different from me—male, female, disturbed, evolved, teenager, old woman. But are any of us so different? Don’t we all experience love, grief, loss, anger, fear, joy, triumph on different scales. Can it really be so hard to have empathy and understanding for people living totally different lives than we are? Maybe as a writer, I am uniquely tapped in, always wondering what is it like to be this person or that, what is it like to experience this circumstance or that? And in writing, I allow myself to answer those questions.
I am thankful that you say it all works and balances; I am not sure I can say how I accomplished that. I have a ferocious curiosity about the human condition, a fever to know and understand why people do what they do, are who they are. In the writing of my novels, I am satisfying that hunger. On the page, I can answer the questions I have about people. I am driven to do this.
14. Let’s go back to the setting a minute. The pace of the novel is also affected by the setting and it reflects this small town. It isn’t the pacing of a thriller, like your previous books. That pace wouldn’t be appropriate for this book. Did you find yourself having to make adjustments in your writing style with this change of pace? Or did it just kind of naturally flow to the page for you?
Because so much of my process feels unconscious to me, I’m not sure I give much thought to pacing. But, of course, that’s not the whole truth. Each book has a natural rhythm, a certain way the story evolves. In Fragile, I was so interested in the layers of my characters that it seemed important to spend more time with them, getting to understand them better, showing more of them to my readers.
It was the curiosity of character that drove this book for me, even more so than the plot. Character has always interested me more than plot, because plot flows from character. But, of course, in all fiction, movement is important. Certainly, Fragile does not have the pace of a thriller. But I never lost sight of the progression of the story, the importance of advancing it along with getting to know the people I was writing about.
15. There are a number of powerful themes in Fragile, but if your readers could take away only one thing from this novel, what would you want that one thing to be?
We are all connected in small and large ways that we can’t possibly understand in any given moment. That our choices influence our lives and the lives of others, and that often the consequences are impossible to predict.
16. Where to from here? What’s next for Lisa Unger?
I have some ongoing obsessions. The themes of memory, identity, and family secrets continue to loom large. In Fragile, I touch a little bit on the idea of psychic phenomenon and its role in crime solving. In Faith, I explore that a bit more. And I’m still in The Hollows. I’m a little obsessed with that place, too. I think there’s a lot going on there and it won’t let me go.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Beautiful Lies: Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Unger
Sliver of Truth: Copyright © 2007 by Lisa Unger
Black Out: Copyright © 2008 by A Room of My Own, LLC
Die for You: Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Unger
Excerpt from Fragile copyright © 2010 by Lisa Unger
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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