I keep hearing: “You can’t be a good writer unless you read.”
It opens up worlds to you.
Do you have any favorite younger, contemporary writers? Anyone with a writing style that you or I might not be used to in terms of innovative story structure or…?
I read everything. That’s my entertainment. How young? There are young storytellers who have found a more vibrant way to do it. I’m thinking of Rachel Kushner. She’s written a novel about Cuba [Telex from Cuba], and it was very successful. Ann Patchett, she’s about 50 – I think that’s still young. She’s best-known for Bel Canto, and her State of Wonder is completely imagined, the whole thing. And, oh, a young Marine named Phil Klay who just won the National Book Award for Redeployment, a story from the point of view of an American soldier and from that of Afghans and Iraqis.
Given the tumultuous state of publishing now, you write that it’s never been steady and solid for you.
No. Just when I got in the door…it was just a gentleman’s career. Publishing companies were mostly family-owned. Of course, they wanted to make money, but they weren’t connected to a big corporation. Then it changed so fast. Publishing still hasn’t decided what kind of creature it is. The thing that is paramount that you have to fight every day is fear. Everyone, unless they own their own company, is afraid. The very top president has to answer to some corporation, and even they can go.
In fact, that’s how I got started with Publishing. I wrote a piece called “The Life and Death of an Editor/Publisher,” which is now way into the book. I wanted to tell a horror story about thwarted vocation. In this case it was about my publisher, who was also my editor at Random House. She had always wanted to be a high school teacher…she got her degree and something horrible happened, and she dropped out of school.
That’s discouraging, but for writers and anyone who is struggling to find their way, it is kind of encouraging to realize that many people have not made a straight shot to success.
No. And so she went home, and her father wouldn’t speak to her all summer. In the fall, she entered publishing on the lowest lever, which was in the stockroom. She worked her way up, just had a knack for it. When I met her, she was president and publisher. Then within a single afternoon – the day of my book being published – my agent called and said she’d been fired. That’s what started [my book]: I decided I wanted to write a whole book about publishing.
Isak Dinesen gave some advice to writers: that if you keep working even to the point that you lose all hope, if you can go on without hope, you’ll be all right. It made me so happy. Without hope: It’s just down, dirty, no euphemism. That’s what makes the difference between someone who goes on and someone who doesn’t.
Someone’s failure can be inspiring, when you watch them pick themselves back up… I’m sure you’ve been associated with lots of people who have done that.
I’ve also been associated with people who didn’t get up again – one such person who was pretty much at the top and just fell. He said to me, “Sometimes things don’t get better,” and they didn’t for him. Even those stories are helpful, because we’re all just one big patchwork. We’re all part of something, doing our best and worst.
Who is your audience for this book? Sometimes you speak directly to the reader in first person.
I address readers who’ve been in publishing, and others who are just readers. It’s for anyone who wants to write, does write or is interested in the book world. It’s going to be so interesting in, say, 50 years. I wonder: I don’t think books, physical books, will die. I think some things have to happen in the business part of publishing. It’s one of the few retail industries that lets you return [merchandise]. In clothing, you buy your stock for the year, and if you don’t sell it, you mark it down again. Have a fire sale.
And everything doesn’t have to be published first as a hardback. I’d be quite willing to have my books come out in paperback. These funny old-fashioned gents still in there say, “Oh, no, we have to let the bookstores return their books.” There are things that can be changed, and there are small publishers who don’t have to answer to anybody but themselves. Unless you own your own company, you are bait for the bottom line.
What do you think of the self-publishing movement?
My assistant Ann Benson is a very good writer who wrote a novel and self-published. It made a difference to her. If the point ever came that I could not get for a work that I finished what I thought it deserved, I would self-publish. You can get all kinds of package deals. I really love having an art department, publicity department and all that.
If I regret anything in publishing, it’s that I caved with the title of my book The Red Nun [which the publisher changed to Unfinished Desires]. If I had only stuck up for my Red Nun! But it taught me that I’m not invulnerable, that I can make huge mistakes and regret them.
I can remember that moment of caving. I was so tired of being nagged at, and I was also afraid they wouldn’t do as much for it. As it turned out, I think it would have done much better, because there are many middle-aged and older women who went to Catholic schools who would have snatched it up – whereas the title Unfinished Desires sounds a little bit like something very different. That was a hard lesson to learn; it’s in a chapter called “Skirmishes and Capitulations.” Usually I’ve won in my skirmishes, but not that time.
Writers have to develop a whole other skill: You hone your craft, and then you have to learn how to deal with…
It’s the introvert/extrovert thing. You’re in your little shell, making something out of nothing. Then you have to switch gears and try to convince somebody. You have to be a diplomat and drive a hard bargain. One day, maybe [Unfinished Desires] will go out of print, and I’ll buy the rights back and put the parts back in that were taken out – and call it The Red Nun, period. Sometimes publishers just won’t give it to you forever. But it’s usually negotiable. There used to be a stipulation that if a work was out of print for six months, you could start legally getting it back. I’m doing that right now with Heart. I want it back. People use it in seminars and things. It’s available in England, but not here.
Godwin will read and sign copies of her latest book at Oblong Books and Music in Rhinebeck on Tuesday, January 13 at 7 p.m. Publishing is graced throughout with black-and-white line drawings by architect Frances Halsband. You can also hear Godwin interviewed on WAMC’s Roundtable on Monday, January 12 at 10:10 a.m., and on The Book Show with Joe Donahue later in the month.
Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir book launch with Gail Godwin, Tuesday, January 13, 7 p.m., free, Oblong Books & Music, 6422 Montgomery Street, Rhinebeck; (845) 876-0500, www.oblongbooks.com/event/book-launch-gail-godwin.
