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Authors dread fan feedback of the type Southern California author Linda Palmer recently received. In Love is Murder, the first book of her mystery series, she wrote that one of the main characters had his appendix removed via arthroscopy. “AHHHGGGHHHH!” she says. “I should have said laparoscopy. A reader wrote to ask, wryly, if the character had had his appendix taken out through the knee.” Most authors experience regret or remorse. It is the collateral of a singular, internal craft. So many things that can go wrong, both internal and external—a slip of the hand, the brain, someone else’s tongue—so many things, big and small, that in hindsight might seem preventable. We empathize, especially after asking dozens of Berkeley and California authors a simple question: “If you could redo your book or reshape the experience, what would you change?’’ My so-called nonfiction life After her second book, the autobiographical An Italian Affair, Laura Fraser, who taught magazine writing at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, was unhappily surprised to hear from readers who now “knew her.” I might slap “fiction” on the cover of An Italian Affair, because it’s been weird to have people think they know me so intimately. When you’re writing a memoir, you become a character who is both true to who you are and to your experience, but also distanced by the story. I think of my character as “Laura” instead of “me.” And I have no idea what “Laura” is going to do next. A hidden affair A. Scott Berg leaves no stone unturned in his research. That helped earn him two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his biography of Charles Lindbergh. But he subsequently learned of a gaping omission. I got a call from a New York Times reporter telling me a German woman and her three children had emerged claiming they were Lindbergh’s other family. There was never any inkling of an affair in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s letters or diaries or any of the family’s records—and they turned over everything—though there were entries in Anne’s diaries in which she noted missing Charles. He was gone a lot. Still, no one I had encountered had a clue. I’ve since met the German family. But I’m hard-pressed to come up with personal remorse. Manuscripts are living organisms; they might change every day, even nonfiction. Trouble in the family Joe Loya’s memoir, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, about remaking his life after years of bank robbery and prison, has received high praise in The New Yorker and from other reviewers. I revealed that one of my now-pious aunts used to be a lesbian when she was younger. This caused her pain and for that I feel bad. If I had it to do over again I would certainly change her name. (On the other hand, I wrote many bad stories about my father. This caused a major rift between us, and yet I wouldn’t delete one word of those episodes.) I would also talk more about my boyhood friend Danny Shaw, who supported me for the entire seven years that I was in prison. Twain, unmet Twenty years ago, former Berkeley student David Carkeet, the author of five novels, including the recent Campus Sexpot, bit off more than he could chew. Imagine this for a premise: Mark Twain was born in a year Halley’s comet approached Earth (1835), and he died in the year of the next one (1910); ergo, write a novel in which he comes back to life with the return of the comet. Brilliant! But I wrote a novel that was too academic, too much an insider’s book, and its chief triumph—my imitations of what Twain would have written had he actually returned—I now see as merely clever stylistic exercises. It was a pure repellent to purchasers. The outcome led me to reassess my performance early on. Something had definitely gone wrong when a reviewer praised your book and you thought the reviewer was an idiot. Agonies of birth Catherine Brady owns a 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction for Curled in the Bed of Love. When my first book was accepted for publication, it had an astonishing, galvanizing effect on my writing. For all that people might say about art for art’s sake, this validation suddenly gives you confidence in your own judgment. Once the book is printed, though, you get the wind knocked out of you. I’m usually devastated that my work is not as perfect as I had hoped it would be, and keep a running list of things I would change. Then the book begins to get reviews, and so often reviews, even good ones, are bewildering because other people see things in the work that you do not see yourself. It’s really the reviews that make me grasp the reality that the book is in the world, an entity unto itself. Don’t ask me to change a thing—just a whole new universe For former UC Berkeley student Danyel Smith, a postmortem on an intensely personal first novel, set in 1980s Oakland, opened the gates to an entirely new realm of thinking. Thinking about the book romantically—it’s my first novel, and very close to my heart—I’d change not one thing. Thinking pragmatically (or magically, as if I could go somehow back to the future), what I’d do with passion is create a parallel narrative set in 1920s Oakland, one that has connections to, and somehow illuminates, the ’80s story, one that would allow me to utilize even more of the histories of Oakland and California. My own worst critic David Ewing Duncan’s seventh book, Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year, has been published in 19 languages and is a best seller in 14 countries. For others, that might be enough. Calendar, I would liven it up more. I think in places it reads too much like an academic text. And in my investigative book, Residents, about how doctors are trained, I would be even more hard-hitting because in the nine years since it came out, little has changed. The author as a maturing man In Astronauts & Other Stories, published in 2002, San Francisco author Matthew Iribarne focused on diverse West Coast people for whom the world seems to be literally caving into the sea. One area I might have explored had the book been written now: what it means for a son or daughter to see his or her parents get older. I’ve gotten a little older, and I’ve come to understand that the idea of family isn’t a fixed notion, that it changes and flows over time. Parents die, babies are born, there’s a motion to things. I’ve certainly become reacquainted with these ideas as my once so independent father has become more and more in need of assistance in his advanced years. Not so stiff Mary Roach writes regularly for Discover and Readers Digest. In the first few months after my book Stiff came out, I was hypercritical of it. But as the book caught on—particularly after it hit the best-seller list—I began to feel differently. Readers wrote to say they liked the tone, the humor, all the things I had two or three months earlier questioned. Never-ending story Dave Eggers authored You Shall Know Our Velocity, How We Are Hungry, and the best-selling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly. I pretty much rewrote my first two books already. There are four fairly different versions of Heartbreaking out there, and five versions of Velocity. Every time I happen upon a page in anything I’ve written, I find something I want to change. I thought I was finished fiddling with those first two books, but I recently had an idea for rewriting Velocity (this time as more of a nonfiction account of the trip I took to research the book), so I might do that. But I might not. You know what was a good movie? Tron. Will the dread ever leave? Diane McWhorter spent 17 years researching and writing her nonfiction epic Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. I open myself up to the possibility that someone will one day find I had the wrong church bombers. Preparing for a judge and jury A former trial lawyer and liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor, Richard North Patterson is a risk-averse fiction writer. Author of 13 novels, including the recently released Conviction, he conducts at least 100 interviews for each book chapter. My process is linear and thoroughly thought out. I don’t experience the story as I go. I prepare. I write the book I intend to. The architecture of my books is very carefully designed. This may sound smug, but I almost never have regrets. —Compiled by Patrick Dillon and Amy Louison |
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