If you’ve ever thought about writing novels, you might want to think about envying Sara Zarr’s career.
Her first, best-selling, young adult title,
Story of a Girl, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Awards. Book two, just released this month, is
Sweethearts. It has earned glowing reviews and -- even better -- excellent sales.
I interviewed Sara a couple months ago, the morning after the 2007 National Book Awards. She was a delightful guest, even in the face of disappointment, and I made her promise to come back when
Sweethearts was released.
You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!Click to open separate windowBOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Happy Valentine’s Day. How are you spending Valentine’s Day?
SARA ZARR: I am spending Valentine’s Day unpacking from my little
Sweethearts tour, and then I’m gonna help a friend move, and then I’m gonna watch “Project Runway,” which was recorded last night. So if anyone calls in and gives it away, I’m going to have to hang up. So that’s my romantic day.
ANDELMAN: That’s it, huh? No plans?
ZARR: Valentine’s Day doesn’t figure hugely in my life or my marriage. What I think about Valentine’s Day is that it’s a good excuse if you have a crush to let someone know. And so when I first met my husband, I did send him a little Valentine’s card to kind of let him know that I was thinking about him, and then, 17 years later, here we are.
ANDELMAN: And he’s still waiting for another card?
ZARR: Probably, yes.
ANDELMAN: Let’s talk books. How different is it publishing the second novel compared to being the first-time author?
ZARR: It’s really different. Well, the writing process was a lot different because
Story of a Girl was out while I was kind of finishing the last few drafts of
Sweethearts, and
Story of a Girl was doing well, and it was hard not to feel the pressure of feeling like there’s something at stake now, whereas before, there wasn’t. And the nice thing is with the second book, now I kind of understand what to expect in terms of what the publisher does, of what I do. Because when you get into publishing and publish your first book, there’s no sort of guide for new authors telling you how everything works and what to expect practically and emotionally and all of those things. Now that I’ve been through it once, I’m a lot more relaxed this time and just enjoying it a bit more and not obsessively reading every single thing that every single person says about the book. That’s probably healthy.
ANDELMAN: Sara, I have to ask you because, as you know, we share an agent. Are you telling me that Michael Bourret, our extraordinary agent, did not give you a copy of “Book Publishing for Dummies”?
ZARR: He did not, and if he has one somewhere in his office, I’m going to find out about it, and he’s going to pay.
ANDELMAN: I don’t know whether to feel bad for you that he didn’t give it to you or feel bad for me that he did give it to me, and he didn’t feel you needed it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m going to have to think about that.
ZARR: Try not to take that for “Dummies” thing personally.
ANDELMAN: One of the other things we talked about last time around was the possibility of the sophomore jinx. I think you were a little nervous about it then. I imagine you’re feeling a little better about it now.
ZARR: I
was very nervous although, at the time we talked, the editorial process was finished. It was completely out of my hands so there was nothing I could do about it anyway. But I have to admit that it was a relief to see the first couple reviews from
Publishers Weekly and
Kirkus and get positive reviews. After that, I just kind of breathed out and figured well, some people will like it better, some people won’t like it as much as a different book, and I’ll get some new readers, and that’s great. I’m very relaxed and, of course, having that nice National Book Award finalist sticker on my first book is kind of good for the self-esteem, if ever I’m feeling a little low.
ANDELMAN: We spoke the morning after the National Book Awards. You didn’t win. My favorite story about that was that you had your speech that you had practiced and got down to the right amount of time. It had never occurred to you to practice your reaction if you did not win, which I thought was wonderful.
ZARR: Right, the game face.
ANDELMAN: But I’m thinking, since then, and I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but as a first-time author, maybe they did you a favor by not naming you the winner because it just seems to me that anything you would do after that would be so hard to live up to having that tag, “National Book Award Winner,” that it would be tougher. “National Book Award Finalist” gets to follow you around just the same, and you don’t have to produce the greatest novel on the face of the earth to live up to that the rest of your life.
ZARR: I think you have a point. Definitely being a finalist was absolutely the best thing that could happen for my career, but at the same time, it’s just an award. I have kind of mixed feelings about awards. Of course, if you get them, you think they’re great, and they mean a lot, and if you don’t get them, you’re like, “Ah, it’s just an award.” Now I have that experience behind me, and I like having the sticker on my book, but I also think writing is still hard. Every book feels like I’m doing it for the first time. I want to do a lot of different things. And I know that when I read award-winning books, I don’t always like them so it’s just the opinion of that particular group of judges for that year, and it’s great for one’s career, but it’s not any kind of final verdict on your ability as a writer or your value as a person.
ANDELMAN: That’s true. I remember -- it’s been about 20 years -- but there was a period of time when I was doing a lot of magazine work, a lot of investigative stuff. Much to my surprise, this magazine had entered my work into a competition, and I actually won awards. I think I won like five awards, which was amazing, because I’d never in my life won anything for anything, and so I was excited. And my editor at the time just decided to bring me back down to earth, and he said, “Hey, listen ‘Pro’” -- that’s what he called me, Pro – “Listen Pro, awards are like assholes, everybody’s got one, get over it.” I was just like, “Ooooo-kay.” From then on, I never cared again.
ZARR: Somehow, I’m glad I don’t have someone like that in my life, but yeah, that’s true.
ANDELMAN: Boy, sometimes we romanticize in the crusty old bastards in the business.
ZARR: Yes.
ANDELMAN: Sometimes we could really live without them, I have to say.
Story of a Girl, which was a wonderful book, one I really liked that a lot…
ZARR: Thank you.
ANDELMAN: …and you had the luxury there of keeping that book in the oven a long time. Wasn’t that a couple years to gestation?
ZARR: Yes, it was a few years.
ANDELMAN: And then this one, my sense is that you popped this one out, and I don’t mean that in a deprecating way, but you kind of popped this one out, I’m thinking, in about a year, right?
ZARR: Yes. During the time I was writing
Story of a Girl, there was a lot of waiting. There would be periods of four to six months of waiting to hear back from editors and agents, and so it wasn’t like I was literally working on it every day for three years. Now that I’m writing full-time,
Sweethearts just happened in a more compressed amount of time, but there was no waiting. I was working on it pretty much all the time. The waiting time is good. It helps you get distance from the work, and you don’t really have that luxury when you’re writing under contract to just sort of let it marinate and stew and then go on with the rest of your life while you’re waiting for magic things to happen in your subconscious. It’s definitely different and faster, and we’ll see if I can keep up that pace with future books. I’m not sure about that.
ANDELMAN: I know you have a contract for the third book. Where are you in the process on that?
ZARR: I hope my editor isn’t listening.
ANDELMAN: No, it’s just me and you.
ZARR: Just me and you.
ANDELMAN: It’s just me and you, yes.
ZARR: Page-wise, I’m probably like a fourth of the way through the book, but it feels really rough to me, and I have to turn it in in December. I’ve got a little while, but this year already feels like it’s going by fast so I definitely need to get cracking now that the
Sweethearts promotional stuff is dying down.
ANDELMAN: Certainly, the book’s not written yet. You don’t want to give it away, but tell me a little bit about the process for you on working on the book at this point. You’ve gotten past that first book and the elongated period of time, and now you’re doing this professionally. This is how you’re making a living. So as you approach it, tell me about a typical day. Are you a first-thing-in-the-morning person? How do you approach actually doing the work of the writing now?
ZARR: I have tried a lot of different things in hopes that I hit upon something that is the magic key to making work easy and enjoyable all the time. And what I’m discovering is that there is no such thing, and so I don’t get up at the crack of dawn and start writing. One of the benefits of the self-employed lifestyle is having your own schedule, and so I like to ease into the day and sort of see my husband off to work and have my coffee, and then, ideally, before lunch, it’d be good to get started and then maybe wrap up at three or four. Sometimes that’s just a lot of staring into space and procrastinating, and sometimes it’s three or four hours of actual writing. It just really depends on where I am with the book. Sometimes it’ll really go pretty quickly in the beginning, and then you hit the middle. And you know how it’s going to end, but meanwhile, you have to fill up 150 pages with stuff. Not just “stuff,” but my writer friends and I joke about how we’ll have sections of drafts where we write, “stuff happens here.” We don’t know what, but it’s to remind us that something has to happen in the middle.
ANDELMAN: That’s the way I’ve always read it happens. I’ve always heard that that was the plan usually, that “something” goes in the middle…
ZARR: Something happens, yes. It’s a good sort of rule of thumb for fiction: “Something happens.”
ANDELMAN: Have you found that there’s a particular room that you like to work in, any kind of music, or do you shut off the phone? Really take us inside the process for you.
ZARR: I have a little work area in my house that I share with my husband, and then I also rent an office away from home because offices are fairly cheap where I live in Salt Lake City. It’s nice to have a place that’s just mine that I can go to and get out of the house is the main thing because sometimes you can realize you haven’t gone anywhere for three days, and that’s not a good way to live. Sometimes I’ll work at home and just kind of sit at my computer. I used to work with music a lot, but I’m finding with this book I’m working on now that silence is working better for me. I don’t turn off the phone, but I don’t answer the phone, but that’s nothing new. I never answered the phone before. I just let the machine get it. And I try and keep myself off the Internet for like an hour at a time so that I can get a consistent thought process going. I don’t work in my pajamas, generally. I’m one of those people that I don’t really feel like the day has started until I shower and dress and put shoes on so I’m not lounging around in my pajamas and robe like some writers do. I don’t know if you’re expecting me to tell you something really exciting about my lifestyle. That’s pretty much it - sitting at a computer.
ANDELMAN: Sara, now I’m concerned that you’ve secretly got me on video, and you know I’m sitting here in my robe and underwear conducting these interviews. I thought the green light was supposed to come on if the video was on. I’m trying to get a handle on that.
I don’t do fiction, but I work on a lot of books, and it seems to go through periods where it swings. Right now, I like to get everybody out of the house. I like to get started early, crank up whatever I’ve got in iTunes lately, usually something ‘70s or ‘80s-related because I’m an old man, and I block everything out. You mentioned the Internet, and I wondered about that. It is one of the most fascinating things in our lives, and it is the biggest time-killer around. I’m curious if that is a problem for you at all. You do wind up devoting too much of your workday to it, and before you know it, you’re into the next day.
ZARR: It
is a problem, and the problem with it is just what you’re describing, that it is work. As you know, you have to promote yourself, and if you want people to come back to your website, you have to have dynamic content that’s changing, hopefully daily or at least a few times a week, and then there are emails to deal with. You feel like you’re working, and you are working, but that work never actually ends, and so you have to end it and just say, “I’m stopping this now for a few hours.” It’s definitely a challenge. It’s something that will be the number one thing that keeps me from being as productive on the creative front as I want to be. It’s a positive for my career because a lot of the success that I’ve had has come from word-of-mouth and people who have followed my blog, and I feel like they know me and want to support me and then tell their friends. And that’s really good, and it’s been a positive for me, but at the same time, there does come the moment where you have to say, “Okay, I’m done with this now,” and I have to write. And that’s definitely difficult because writing, as you know, is hard, and for some of us, writing blog posts or answering fan mail or dealing with publisher stuff is easy, and so what are you gonna do? You’re going to take the path of least resistance, which is the business side of it, at least for my type of personality. The creative work is the part that’s hard and scary, and so, of course, I don’t want to do it so I delay that as long as possible. So it’s a good thing I have deadlines.
ANDELMAN: Is there a caller with a question for Sara?
MICHAEL BOURRET: Yes, there is a question for Sara.
ZARR: Oh, hi, Michael.
BOURRET: Why isn’t she working now?
ZARR: I’m busy doing publicity!
BOURRET: Oh, so that’s that “other” kind of work you were talking about.
ZARR: Exactly.
BOURRET: Very good.
ZARR: And, hopefully, we can stretch this out all day.
ANDELMAN: We have a limit because I’ve got book work to do, too, Sara. Folks, this is Michael Bourret with Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. He represents Sara and this other loser, me.
BOURRET: It’s true.
ANDELMAN: Michael, do you have any stories you can tell us about Sara? You want to take us back in time a little bit to maybe when her work first crossed your desk?
BOURRET: Yes, she was a wee lass before she’d written anything of substance. No, Sara’s an amazing success story, obviously, of her own and for her own reasons, but for me, as a writer who did come in through slush with a very attention-catching query letter that referenced
Freaky Friday. Whether or not I had liked the original or the Lindsay Lohan version better. If anyone actually cares, I think they are both very different, different films, but they both have their merits.
ZARR: Okay.
BOURRET: It’s important. But anyway, then she sent me her material, which was really great, and it was immediate from the first few pages and obvious that Sara’s a terrific writer. And in reading the novel, it was 90 percent there and really didn’t need much work because she’d been working on it for so long and really honing her craft and doing all of her homework and obviously approaching the right agent, which is so important.
ZARR: So modest.
BOURRET: I know. Well, the right agent isn’t necessarily some sort of number one agent on the list. It’s about getting the right fit. Obviously, I think it’s been a good fit.
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