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Chris Bohjalian, THE RED LOTUS

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Chris Bohjalian, THE RED LOTUS

Chris: I will ride 3,500 miles a season in Vermont on my bike. When I decided that I wanted to explore a novel in Vietnam, it seemed natural to research it on my bike. I do my best work, in some ways, on my bike. I don't recall who said this, but someone once said the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it's a bike ride. I do so much thinking about my characters. Who's going to live? Who's going to die? What are their anxieties? What are their dreads? What is their heartbreak? I've pulled over on the side of the road on my bike so often and written whole scenes on my iPhone.

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Malcolm Hansen, THEY COME IN ALL COLORS

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Malcolm Hansen, THEY COME IN ALL COLORS

Malcolm: I have a very quirky relationship with the whole -- I wasn't an early reader. My father, I felt, was a very heavy-handed father. Both his activism, his politics, and his ideas about schooling were things that I resisted, I think, by nature. I'm a very resistant person. I have to kind of come to certain realities on my own. Early on, I resisted them. Then sure enough, I came around. Then I began to see the light in its ways and then became quite a heavy reader. I always felt like I had something that I wanted to write, but I lacked the courage to do it. It took me going on a professional route after I graduated college and seeing the flesh and blood of what the realities of the professional life looked like, even for a business or a profession that was valued and supposed to be exciting and new. I'm referring to internet and software in the mid-nineties. I was very disillusioned with it and didn't find much meaning in it and figured that if I was going to be miserable, I may as well be miserable pursuing my dreams. I think that was the first step.

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Jenny Lee, ANNA K: A LOVE STORY

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Jenny Lee, ANNA K: A LOVE STORY

Jenny: Anna K is a novel that is a reimagining of one of my favorite books, which is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I took the same sort of plot structure, but I moved it to modern-day using New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, instead of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 2012, I was in New York City for Christmas with my mom. The Joe Wright version adaptation of Anna Karenina came out with Keira Knightley as the star. We went to see it at the Ziegfeld. It's so sad it's closing. We went to see it. We had this magical time. My mom had read the book in Korean and in English. I had read the book twice by then. We were talking about it. We had this great discussion about it and how tragic it was for the ending of Anna. Then I just kept thinking what it would be like in modern day. Then later that night, I couldn't sleep. I snuck down to the lobby of the hotel. I just was like, oh, my god, Anna Karenina is a book about first time, major time, that you're in love. If you wanted to translate to modern day, it needed to be teenagers now because obviously in the late 1800s in Russian society, they were all in their twenties and thirties. Now the first time you usually fall in love is when you're a teenager.

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Jan Eliasberg, HANNAH'S WAR

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Jan Eliasberg, HANNAH'S WAR

Jan: Hannah's War started with a very, very tiny inspiration but an amazing story that I read in The New York Times on the headline on the day that we bombed Hiroshoma, read "Truman vows rain of ruin. Atomic bomb explodes." In that issue of The New York Times, they basically had to explain the whole history of this project because it had all been developed in secret. Under the fold, I saw a paragraph that said the key component that allowed the allies to develop the bomb was brought to us by a female, non-Aryan physicist. That was The Times's way of saying Jewish, which they couldn't say at the time. I read that and I thought, how is it possible that I haven't heard of this woman? Who is it? She's clearly critical to this, to the atomic bomb. Yet there was no name, nothing. It was just that sentence. It sent me into basically ten years of research, not to find her. Once I understood that there was this woman, I actually found her fairly easily.

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Kate Elizabeth Russell, MY DARK VANESSA

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Kate Elizabeth Russell, MY DARK VANESSA

Kate: I started writing it when I was a teenager. What drew me to this story then, though it took a very different form back then, but that was around the age I started to become aware of how teenage girls were sexualized in our culture. That was confusing, being a teenage girl myself. Writing fiction was my way of making sense of that. That was sort of the seed of it, how it started. Then over the years, draft after draft has evolved. I had a real breakthrough around my thirtieth birthday which coincided with starting a PhD program in creative writing. It was then that I figured out this present-day plot line of another student coming forward and accusing that teacher. Once I figured out that plot line, it gave me the answer to this question of, why tell this story now and what is propelling this story forward? It gave the whole narrative a sort of urgency. Then after that, Me Too started to happen, which is I guess a whole other conversation. That was one of the most surreal things about the writing process, was arriving at this plot line and then seeing something really similar play out in the real world at the same time.

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Brenda Janowitz, THE GRACE KELLY DRESS

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Brenda Janowitz, THE GRACE KELLY DRESS

Brenda: The Grace Kelly Dress is about an heirloom wedding gown and three generations of women whose lives are influenced by this dress and changed by the dress. It takes place in three different timelines, which is something I've never done before. In 2020, we see our modern bride. She's under pressure from her mom to wear this heirloom gown. In 1982, we see the bride's mother who's really excited about wearing the dress herself. She's gearing up to wear the dress and make it her own. Since it's 1982, you know that means Princess Diana sleeves, of course. [laughs] Then in a little twist in 1958, we see the dress being made. We see the seamstress's life and what she's going through as she creates this dress. It's really a look at an heirloom item and three generations of women and how things have changed throughout time.

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Caitlin Mullen, PLEASE SEE US

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Caitlin Mullen, PLEASE SEE US

Caitlin: Please See Us takes place over the course of a single summer in Atlantic City. At the beginning of the novel we learn that the bodies of two women are hidden in the marsh behind this seedy Atlantic City motel. No one knows they're there, even that they're missing. Then we meet Clara. Clara is our first main character. She is a recent high school dropout. She's working as boardwalk psychic. She and her aunt run this shop, but they're having trouble making ends meet. The casinos have been shutting down. There haven't been as many tourists in Atlantic City. Clara also starts having these disturbing, violent, powerful visions. She doesn't understand what they mean or where they're coming from. Then we meet Lily. Lily's our second main character. Lily has recently moved back to Atlantic City after starting her career in New York City in the art world. That all fell apart in one disastrous, ill-fated evening for her. She's working as a receptionist at a casino spa. Lily and Clara set out to try and figure out what Clara's visions might mean. What is happening to women in Atlantic City? Is there any way they can possibly help these women?

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Laura Zigman, SEPARATION ANXIETY

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Laura Zigman, SEPARATION ANXIETY

Laura: Separation Anxiety is about a couple who can't really afford to get divorced, and so they have to live together and stay in the same house. They live in separate parts of the house. The cover for their newly teenage son is that one of them snores. Of course, it's Judy who snores, but she claims that it's Gary who snores. He sleeps in the basement in a spare bedroom. It's also about Judy who has gotten to a point in her life at fifty, where a lot of us get at that age, where loss seems to be the prevalent thing. She's lost both of her parents. Her career has gone downhill. She can't seem to get things going. Obviously, her marriage is challenging. Her son is now a teenager who becomes the typical quiet, secretive, kid that she can no longer snuggle. In that emotional space, she one day looks at the dog and decides to start to wear the dog in an old baby sling that she never even wore her son in. She was cleaning out the basement to try to declutter and suddenly finds a sling and thinks, oh boy, I'm going to put the dog in there. That's her form of self-comfort.

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Jewell Parker Rhodes, BLACK BROTHER, BLACK BROTHER

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Jewell Parker Rhodes, BLACK BROTHER, BLACK BROTHER

Jewell: I had this policy that when I was writing as the kids were growing, that I would leave my office door open. I actually got this from Toni Morrison because there's a picture of her trying to write and edit at Random House and her children are toddling and crawling along the floor. My theory was that any task of mine writing that couldn't withstand the interruption of a child, then the idea wasn't good anyway. You know what I mean? [laughter] The kids would come in and out. True enough, the ideas that really had legs would stay with me. I would continue writing them.

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Meng Jin, LITTLE GODS

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Meng Jin, LITTLE GODS

Meng: Little Gods is a story about migrations, migrations through time, place, and class. It is centered around a Chinese woman physicist named Su Lan. The seed of the idea, which was in the opening scene, came to me maybe six years ago. That was the idea of a child being born on the night of June 4th, 1989 in Beijing and her father disappearing that night. Very much like the reader, I didn't know what had happened to this child, who she was, and who her father was, and why he had left. I spent some years trying to figure that out through many abandoned drafts. [laughs] Then the book really came together for me when I realized that Su Lan was going to be this intentional absence in the narrative and that the narrative would revolve around her.

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Sara Shepard, REPUTATION & PRETTY LITTLE LIARS

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Sara Shepard, REPUTATION & PRETTY LITTLE LIARS

Sara: Just keep at it. Try to crash a Christmas party if you can. [laughter] Try to get in there how you can. I just think persistence. I have been rejected many times. Even as an author of many books, I will pitch ideas to editors and they will reject. You have to kind of get used to rejection because it's going to follow you through your life. Also, read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Don't be afraid to show your work to people. For so many years, I was afraid to show anybody what I would write. A critique is a good thing. It helps you learn. Just keep at it. A lot of people ask, you're sitting down, and do you ever get writer's block? What is that like? To keep from writer's block, you just have to keep going. You have to keep writing. Even if it's bad, just get something out. Just type something. You can always fix it later. I have many, many days where what I write, I feel like, is terrible. Then I come back the next day and it's like, oh, well I did at least write five pages. That's something. I think a lot of people just sit down at the computer and think, my first sentence needs to be perfect. My next sentence needs to be perfect. They don't. They can be terrible. You just have to get something there. That's kind of how you build a book. It's not always fun. You just have to keep doing it.

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Lee Matalone, HOME MAKING

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Lee Matalone, HOME MAKING

Lee: The novel follows these three characters who are on these individual yet intersecting journeys, if you could call it that, to figure out how they fit into the world. One of those characters is Cybil who is born in occupation-era Tokyo to a young Japanese woman and this French solider. They have this brief affair. This child is produced. Then this baby is subsequently adopted and brought to the United States by an American general and his wife. One thread of the novel follows Cybil from childhood to adulthood. The next major character is Cybil's daughter, Chole, who the narrative follows as she's trying to remake a home in the wake of her marriage dissolving. I'll try not to give more away than that. Then there's Beau who's Chloe's best friend. He's shepherding Chloe through this period of time in which she's grieving. At the same time, he's trying to reconcile his own romantic failing and rekindle this relationship with a man from his youth. All three characters are really united is this quest, I suppose you can call it, to isolate some sense of identity or belonging, however romantic that notion may be.

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Alice Berman, I EAT MEN LIKE AIR

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Alice Berman, I EAT MEN LIKE AIR

Alice: The story has seven main characters. You find out on page one that one of them is dead. You follow that thread back in time through what happened to bring him to that moment in time. There's a traumatic event early on that affects all of these seven people. They are working through that while you as the reader are also trying to figure out what happened to Alex, who is dead. It's all centered around a wedding party and a wedding, which was always something I really wanted to do because I've been a bridesmaid a few times. I think it's really interesting to be in this combination of people where you're really close friends with everyone else who's a bridesmaid, and you don't know any of the groomsmen. You're thrown together over and over again for a year, year and a half. Then you never see each other again.

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Emily Nemens, THE CACTUS LEAGUE

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Emily Nemens, THE CACTUS LEAGUE

Emily: My dad grew up walking distance from Yankee Stadium. I think he had a real itch to get back into baseball when he moved out to Seattle. He moved there a year or two before the Mariners showed up. Basically as soon as I was old enough to sit through a game, we started going. It was a great time to be a little kid excited about baseball because Ken Griffey Jr had just arrived in Seattle. He was this teenage phenom. He went straight from high school. I don't know how many years I had the Sports Illustrated for Kids cover with Ken Griffey Jr blowing this great, big bubble gum bubble. He was just the cat's meow for me. That, plus it was a chance during our day and our week that I got to spend time with my dad alone, was really nice.

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Ann Napolitano, DEAR EDWARD

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Ann Napolitano, DEAR EDWARD

Ann: [Dear Edward] is about a twelve-year-old boy named Edward who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. There's two storylines in the book. The book starts with Edward and his family, his brother and his parents and several other passengers that we get to know, boarding a flight in Newark Airport which is bound for LAX. At the end of the first chapter, the flight takes off. Then the second chapter starts later that same day after that plane has crashed. Edward wakes up in the hospital. He's the sole survivor. For the rest of the book, I alternate the two timelines. We do the arch of the fight and the crash, and the arch of Edward's life after the crash and how he figures out how to go on.

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Michael Frank, WHAT IS MISSING

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Michael Frank, WHAT IS MISSING

Michael: Typically, I need to see a place in order to inhabit it and then inhabit it with language. I knew I wanted to start the book in Florence, somewhere I had lived in my twenties and which has been a very central place in my imagination and in my heart ever since, as has the whole country of Italy for various reasons. Quite honestly, I had an image of a woman walking away. Her walking away, in a sense, pervades the whole book because she's often somewhat difficult to understand by the people around her. She's difficult to understand even to herself. That idea that you don't always read someone because they have their back turned toward you, whether it's actual or figurative, is another missing element that compelled me. I wanted to discover who she was and why she would do some of the things she does in this book. I don't know if I succeeded, but I tried. That's the role of the novelist, is not to have answers, but to pose questions and to do his or her best to try to find stories that will answer them.

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Teresa Sorkin and Tullan Holmqvist, THE WOMAN IN THE PARK

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Teresa Sorkin and Tullan Holmqvist, THE WOMAN IN THE PARK

Tullan: We're both very empathetic and can feel a lot and at this stage in your life when you have kids. This [character] Sarah Rock, she's married. She has two kids. The kids are getting a little bit older, time to move on in some ways. You find yourself looking at your own life. Who am I? What did I want to do? Where do I want to go? You're at a different stage in life. You're still the same person inside in some ways, but in other ways not. There was actually a woman that we used to see in the park that sparked our imagination, let's put it. That was the seed. She was always by herself.

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Rochelle Weinstein, THIS IS NOT HOW IT ENDS

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Rochelle Weinstein, THIS IS NOT HOW IT ENDS

Rochelle: I ended up getting rejected by agents across the board. I decided I was going to self-publish. I dealt with the stigma and the lack of credibility that was associated with self-publishing. I made a decision and what my goals were for my writing and what I wanted to do with my writing. I put the book out there. It hit the USA Today best-seller list, not right away. It built traction. My second book, I self-published as well. Then I parlayed that into a book deal. Some authors, it’s really easy and it’s a straight shoot. I'm here to tell you that it’s not that way for a lot of authors. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort. It’s a lot of thick skin and being resilient. That's the message that I give to all aspiring authors.

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Kiley Reid, SUCH A FUN AGE

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Kiley Reid, SUCH A FUN AGE

Kiley: What makes Iowa so special is they are the school that invented the workshop process where you turn in work the week before, everyone reads it. Then you sit there silently while everyone gives feedback. It’s not easy. I think it’s really important. It’s difficult when everyone's going around talking about what's working or what's not working. Then you have to go to dinner and show a brave face right after. I went in knowing that I wanted readers who would extend my time there. I came out with three women who are my people and my readers of everything. I probably took eighty-five percent of the edits that were given to me. That was a great workshop.

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Rachel Barenbaum, A BEND IN THE STARS

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Rachel Barenbaum, A BEND IN THE STARS

Rachel: I am just a lover of science. One of the big questions that I struggled with, and still struggle with, is what is time? What is this notion of time? A second, an hour, a calendar, it’s something we have invented. We've all agreed on it. It’s really important to have schedules to organize, for example, train schedules, but it's just made up. What is time? I really came at it and Einstein from this philosophical perspective. He wasn't even really a very good mathematician. He was better than me, but he was a not a genius mathematician. He was more this genius thinker. He had genius mathematicians help him.

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