Amanda Cockrell

Author Interview:

When and how did you start writing?

My parents, an uncle, and an aunt were all writers and I started writing in high school. It seemed to be the family business. Then I got sidetracked (or chickened out) and didn’t finish my first novel until I was thirty.

Can you remember the first book that made an impact on you? Who were your childhood storytelling heroes?

Rudyard Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOK made a huge impression on me. The wonderful original Mowgli stories, not the horrible thing that Disney did with it. I desperately wanted to be raised by wolves. I loved my parents, mind you, but wolves are so cool.

I also loved Kipling’s Just-So Stories. ‘Them that takes cakes what the Parsee-man bakes makes dreadful mistakes’ and ‘very warm and greatly astonished’ (for someone who has just got a comeuppance) were, and still are, family catchphrases.

Can you talk us through the writing of WHAT WE KEEP IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT WILL STAY? What were the key moments?

This is why you never throw anything away: The germ of the plot was my college senior thesis, which was a historical play in verse, heavily under the influence of Christopher Fry. It concerned a girl who has been praying to the statue of a saint, which suddenly comes alive, claiming that God has de-sainted him for not being holy enough. I don’t write blank verse nearly as well as Christopher Fry did, and there is not a lot of market these days for historical plays in blank verse.

But years later I thought the premise still had possibilities, and the war had been on my mind, and I thought the saint probably had some old battle scars of his own.

Was it hard to get an agent? Can you talk us through the process?

I have had three agents at various times. The first was my mother’s agent, who took me on out of kindness and did actually sell my first book, and then promptly retired.

Several years later, when I had written a book that my screenwriter father thought had cinematic possibilities, he sent it to a Hollywood agent who was an old friend of his. This one handled screenplays, not novels, but he sent it to the only book editor he knew, who, by a stroke of luck, bought it. Then he handed it over to a guy in the book end of his huge mega-agency who promptly made it clear to me that I was a very small fish in his ocean, he hated my next book, and would I please go away. Sarah is the third, and the third time has definitely been the charm.

I knew Sarah because she had given a talk at Hollins, and I liked her approach, so I emailed her and said that I had finally finished a YA novel and would she be willing to take a look.
She would.
I sent it to her.
Hmmm, she said. It had possibilities but needed work. She gave me some guidance as to what kind of changes would make it stronger.
I did a really awful revision.
She turned it down.
Agony.  Rethinking.  Light dawns.  Reluctance to tackle the tough stuff had done me in.
Timid plea for another shot at it.
Gracious assent.
Five months of taking the entire middle apart and reassembling with new parts.

Nerve-racking but well worth the agony and I learned something crucial about revision from it.

Describe your writing day. Where do you write? How do you organize your time? Where do you look for inspiration?

I try to write first thing in the morning, in the office, before anything else falls out of the sky on me. I am the director of a graduate program in children’s literature at Hollins University, and I have a lovely office full of other people’s terrific books for inspiration. There is just too much to sidetrack me at home, and I am bad about deciding that I really need to bathe the dog or turn the compost pile so I won’t have to buckle down and write.

Can you tell us about your next book?

I’m still working on what it’s going to be, trying to get my focus on the teenage protagonist and not on the adults surrounding her.

Are there any tips you could give aspiring writers who are looking to get published?

Pay attention.  In her wonderful book on writing, TELLING TIME, Nancy Willard quotes Gabriel García Márquez on the absolute necessity of the small detail to the believability of the story:

‘When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house...My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it.’

The other thing I have learned, which goes hand in hand with that, is that anything you write, and put your best effort into, will improve your craft. My heart’s blood is in the work that has been published under my own name. But I have also done my share of pot-boiling. I have written pseudonymous historical fiction and fantasy series and other works-for-hire, and been a newspaper reporter and a copywriter for a rock radio station. All of those projects too have made me a better writer. Every single piece of pot boiling has taught me something that I still use.

When I was at that newspaper early on, I knew a reporter who was always saving his best stuff for the novel he was going to write eventually. If he thought of a great metaphor, he didn’t put it in his story, he jotted it down in a notebook instead. I believe he thought there was some finite amount of good stuff that we are given, and that if we use it up on trivial works, we won’t have it when it comes time to write the Great Novel.

The opposite is actually true. The more you write, the better your writing grows. There is economy to be learned from fitting your message into thirty seconds. The power of a fresh turn of phrase or an interesting word choice is made clear when you write your thirtieth wedding announcement of the week. It takes some skill to make a reader believe in a giant squid, and love a Viking hero whose job requires him to steal other people’s silver.

I have published occasional magazine pieces, and pitched more that nobody bought. I write poetry that I mostly haven’t had the nerve to send out yet, but I am screwing up my courage. I make collages and sculpture out of things I find at Goodwill. Every single bit of creative activity does something for my writing, even if I don’t know what it is at the time.

You simply salt all this stuff away in a sort of mental attic. Every once in a while you pull something out and think, ‘Aha, that’s just what I need’. But you can’t know ahead of time what you’ll need. So you save everything. The journal that can’t be published because your mother would have a fit. That poem with the two good lines in it. The plot from your college senior thesis. Oh yes, the writing is awful, you know that now, but the plot is still serviceable. Turn its hem and take out the sleeves, and it will be a whole new literary device.

And this includes things you haven’t written about, because you never know when you might. Stuff it all in there… Funny-looking people on the beach; deadly inter-office memos that could put a rhinoceros to sleep; a bug on a flower; the way that light hits a stained glass window; your drunk neighbor shouting at his wife in the street; the man holding a stuffed monkey on the airplane and the way his lower lip trembles when he looks out the window.

Watch. Observe. Pay attention.

All of this will have something to say to you later.

In the bug and the toad who eats him is the universe in microcosm.

In the drunken voice in the street is all the agony of loving someone who doesn’t love you.

In a restored mission church, bright with gilded angels and haloed saints, where an entire people were enslaved, in the lesson that beauty is dangerous.

The couple on the beach...have just murdered their eighty-year-old mother.

The man on the airplane...is a priest’s secret lover.

That inter-office memo...should have been shredded, and it’s too late now.

It’s all grist for your mill. The devil is in the details but so is the prose. So take a good look. There will be something you can use.

Remember the butterflies. And don’t throw anything out.

Can you describe three aspects of writing craft that have been most important as you’ve developed as an author?

Paying attention to detail, the believability of the butterflies, is probably the first.

Followed by being willing to revise. To embrace revision.

Followed by going after the hard things to write about. Not dodging because something makes you uncomfy.

Or you could stack those three in reverse. Or sideways. They’ve all been equally important.

Which favorite authors would you invite to a dinner party? What fictional character do you wish you’d invented?

Rudyard Kipling, Barbara Kingsolver, Francesca Lia Block, Terry Pratchett, and Thorne Smith are all in the stack on my bedside table just now. They ought to make a lively guest list.

I wish I had thought of the dragons in Jo Walton’s TOOTH AND CLAW. Think Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer, if only society was composed of dragons.