Is Santa Barbara still a hotbed of writers, a community of authors and a robust resource for American literature?
This past spring and summer months indicate that all of the above continue strong and impressive. Over the spring and summer, nine Santa Barbara-connected authors have had or are having books published.
What follows are the spring’s published authors — Lee Wardlaw, T.C. Boyle, Ross Macdonald, Meg Gardiner and Gayle Lynds. My August column will feature the summer releases.
Instead of focusing on book descriptions, these five authors with multiple works each talk about the joys and woes, the high and lows of writing.
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As a starter, Ross Macdonald goes back the furthest in time since he would be 100 years old this year. In April, a collection of his novels were reprinted, Four Novels of the 1950s: The Way Some People Die / The Barbarous Coast / The Doomsters / The Galton Case (Library of America, April 28, 2015).
Macdonald, known locally by his real name, Ken Millar, wrote hard-boiled detective novels, deepened his characters by revealing dark family secrets and raised the mystery genre to greater literary heights. Some were made into movies and book sales have continued into this century.
Since Macdonald died in 1983, I found comments about writing from his chapbookm On Crime Writing, put out by local publisher Capra Press in 1973.
“(Raymond) Chandler described a good plot as one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole,” he said. “I see plot as a vehicle of meaning. It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it.”
Macdonald was not shy about sharing some of the hard parts of writing.
“The plans for a detective novel in the making are less like blueprints than like travel notes set down as you once revisited a city,” he said. “The city had changed since you saw it last. It keeps changing around you. Some of the people you knew there have changed their names. Some of them wear disguises.”
“The character holding the pen,” he said in another section, “has to wrestle and conspire with the one taking shape on paper, extracting a vision of the self from internal darkness — a self dying into fiction as it comes to birth.”
Another Macdonald book is being released this month about one of the most unique literary correspondences of the century, Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.
Biographers of each author, Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan, have co-edited the book. Nolan was a part of the Santa Barbara Book & Authors Festival in the early 2000s and helped create the Ross Macdonald Literary Award given to authors such as Dean Koonz and Sue Grafton.
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Just as spring began this year, children’s author Lee Wardlaw came out with Won Ton and Chopstick: A Cat and Dog Tale Told in Haiku with illustrator Eugene Yelchin (Henry Holt & Co., March 17, 2015). This sequel book deals with an adopted cat that must cope with a newly adopted dog, sibling rivalry from the start.
Wardlaw emailed thoughts on what her joys and the downsides of writing are.
“It’s easier for me to write ‘bad’ first drafts,” she said. “I used to feel irrationally anal about needing to make my first sentence/paragraph/page/chapter PERFECT before moving on. I was literally revising while writing, which is a lot like a comedian heckling himself. (Not conducive to creativity!)
“Now, I allow myself to just bang out the story, no matter how ‘bad’ my Inner Editor tells me it is. All first drafts are bad. It’s during the revision process that they become better and better …”
She also talked about the difficulty of writing a follow up book or sequel.
“Readers (and editors and reviewers) tend to judge sequels more critically, especially when the first book has done well, she explained. “Won Ton — A Cat Tale Told in Haiku (2011) received close to 50 honors and awards, so the pressure was ON. Ultimately, I realized that I was creating an obstacle for myself by trying to make Won Ton and Chopstick not just as good as the first book, but better. Talk about impossible!
“So I ended up sharing Won Ton’s latest adventure as if his first one had never existed. I don’t think of Won Ton and Chopstick as a sequel; it’s more a companion title. Fans of the feisty feline can enjoy it — but so can others who’ve never read his first tale.”
Click here for more information about Wardlaw.
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One of Santa Barbara’s most prolific authors, T.C. Boyle recently had his 25th book published, The Harder They Come: A Novel (Ecco, March 31, 2015).
Boyle’s work runs from short stories — one of the most successful such writers in America — to novels covering a large range of topics. This latest novel is about a family living in the woods of Mendocino County when outside forces and violence threaten their way of life.
In a 2009 talk at USC, he reflected on how he finds subject matter.
“The joy of a story is that anything you tell me, I read about, anything that I am interested in can become a story,” he explained. “The downside is that in between stories you realize you’re completely worthless, you’ve never written a story, will never write again.
“In a novel, the tough thing is that you’re locked into a period of a tome and a voice. That is the touchiest thing to sustain over a year or two of good writing. I like to alternate between the two (short story and novel).”
Boyle also revealed that he shows his work-in-progress to no one except “Frau Boyle,” his wife, Karen.
“I read to her every day, not so she can say good or bad, but so I can hear it out loud, hear the rhythm of the story,” he explained. “In reading it out loud I can make leaps of what it’s about, where it’s going and what the themes are.”
In a 2013 inteview with The Paris Review, Boyle talked about what often drives writers.
“When I’m done for the day — dragged out, dumbed down, exhausted, beat, and depleted — I look over what I’ve done and make a mental leap into the immediate future of the work if I can,” he said. “Sometimes, though, it’s just a mystery until you get there.”
Click here for more information about Boyle.
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A featured speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in June, Meg Gardiner was raised in Santa Barbara and graduated from Dos Pueblos High School.
Her latest mystery novel, Phantom Instinct (Signet Paperbacks, June 2, 2015) deals with protagonist Harper Flynn’s efforts to find the third, elusive murderer who gunned down her boyfriend.
For Gardiner, the difficulty of writing for starts at the beginning.
“The first draft,” she said. “Sketching ideas is simple. Turning those ideas into compelling scenes is like pulling my own teeth with pliers — slow, painful and messy.”
Much like Boyle, Gardiner gets her ideas from almost any source. She discussed the seed for one of her most popular novels, The Dirty Secrets Club, about a forensic psychiatrist consultant, Jo Beckett, for the San Francisco Police Department.
“I observe, take notes and shamelessly appropriate things my friends and family say and do,” she continued. “I’m also a news junkie. I found out about Jo Beckett’s kind of forensic work while reading an article.
“This kind of work analyzes the mental state of somebody who has died. In these cases, the cops and the medical examiners are stumped about what kind of death — natural, murder, accidental or suicide.”
Gardiner’s first career as a lawyer led to writing.
“The intellectual rigor prepared me for a lot of things, but I learned not to write in legalese,” she said. “I learned how to tell a story and take a position.”
She also discussed topics that present difficult choices.
“No subject should be off-limits,” she explained. “That road leads to timidity and repression.
“However, I think certain approaches to subjects are repulsive. Gratuitous, protracted explicit violence is sometimes offered as a feast, and portrayed with such lurid and eager detail that it becomes almost pornographic. We should argue about such approaches, not forbid them.”
Gardiner provided hints about her approaches to storylines.
“What’s the difference between rough justice and revenge?” she added. “I try to explore the boundary between morality and wrongdoing. When is it justified to go outside the law to right a wrong? When can you use ruthless violence to defend somebody you love? When does self-defense cross the line into anger and vengeance?
“These are the kind of issues I like to write about.”
Click here for more information about Gardiner.
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For nearly 30 years, Gayle Lynds, along with her late husband and well-known author, Dennis Lynds (aka Michael Collins), was a big part of Santa Barbara’s writing community. They met years ago at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, where he taught writing workshops.
After his death in 2005, Lynds remarried and now lives in Maine. She has since been a featured speaker at SBWC. Dennis, by the way, was long-time good friends with Ross Macdonald.
Lynds’ latest thriller novel, The Assassins, (The Judd Ryder Books, St. Martin’s Press, June 30, 2015). While attending the International Thriller Writers Conference in New York, AKA ThrillerFest, she emailed about the pleasure of getting another book published.
“The process of publication has become a real joy,” she said. “In the beginning, much was mysterious and nerve-wracking. For instance, the length of time needed before one sees a cover, reads the proofs and actually holds the first hardcover in one’s hands.
“Now I treasure the path to the moment of the book reaching stores and libraries. In many ways, it’s an elegant dance, with a few missteps here and there to keep it lively.”
Then she talked about hurdles to overcome.
“I found balancing the lives of six master Cold War assassins a real challenge,” she explained. “They were real to me, and came from fascinating backgrounds: ex-KGB, former Islamic Jihad, retired Mossad, part-time La Cosa Nostra, former ETA Basque and ex-London East End gang member. No matter how exciting, they were a handful. Throughout the book they interact and face off in a battle of wits and skills that by its nature is going to leave only one alive.
“What made it workable for me as the writer were the hero and heroine — Judd Ryder and Eva Blake. Judd’s retired military intelligence, while Eva, his former girlfriend, is a new CIA recruit.
“Because they’re caught up in the competition among the assassins, they also hold the story together and of course come out in the end, understanding not only what it was really all about, but also what their personal destinies are now.”
Click here for more information about Lynds.
— Noozhawk columnist Susan Miles Gulbransen — a Santa Barbara native, writer and book reviewer — teaches writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and through the Santa Barbara City College Continuing Education Division. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.
