Recycling--the Literary Version

Sandra Parshall

I was happy to hear Ian McEwan on the radio last week, describing his habit of saving deleted passages from his novels because they might contain “nuggets” he can use in later work. I don’t have much in common with this renowned writer, but we’re alike in one way: we both practice a literary version of recycling.

I don’t reuse only the nuggets, though. I recycle characters, subplots, whole scenes. Like one of my cloth tote bags, many elements of my books used to be something else.

When Disturbing the Dead was published, I wrote about the transformation of a character who first appeared in a manuscript titled Outside Agitators, a story about young antipoverty workers and the Appalachian people they tried to help during the War on Poverty. I worked on that novel for years and never turned it into a coherent story with a proper ending. But I’ve been carving away chunks ever since and using them in other books.

One of those chunks was a teenage mountain girl with red hair and freckles and the unlikely name of Lana Turner. She longed to leave the poverty-stricken hollow where she grew up and move on to a better life. When I wrote Disturbing the Dead, I kept Lana’s dreams but made her a little older and gave her a Melungeon – mixed race – heritage, which meant changing her coloring to olive skin, black hair, and bright blue eyes. My agent told me I would also have to change her name, because some editors disliked characters with famous people’s names. Lana became Holly Turner.

I wasn’t finished cannibalizing my old unfinished manuscript. In the original, I wrote about antipoverty workers as young idealists, well-intentioned but naive about their power to effect change in a region where gigantic energy corporations control the economy and politics. When I began working on Broken Places (released in February), I asked myself what some of these people would be like decades later, if they had stayed on after their government service ended and tried to continue their activism on behalf of the poor. Maybe they would have had some small successes over the years. Most likely, they would have experienced far more failures and been forced to swallow a bitter dose of disillusionment.

I plucked Cameron and Meredith Taylor from the pages of Outside Agitators, fast-forwarded to the present, and made these two disappointed idealists my murder victims. Meredith, I learned for the first time, had a secret ambition to be a writer, and her final – unfinished – manuscript was titled (ta da!) Outside Agitators. In its pages, Captain Tom Bridger of the Mason County (VA) Sheriff’s Department discovers clues to the motive behind the murders.

Mrs. Lily Barker, the self-educated woman from Disturbing the Dead who believes she has “the sight” (that’s what Appalachian natives call the ability to see beyond the tangible world), wasn’t lifted from any earlier work of mine, but she was inspired by a minor character in Outside Agitators who was too colorful to discard. Mrs. Barker proved popular with readers, and a woman who attended one of my library events made me promise to bring her back, so she returns in Broken Places and also shows up in the book I’m currently writing.

Mason County, my invention, is similar to the mountain community in the original Outside Agitators, but it’s in southwestern Virginia rather than West Virginia, and even the coal companies have largely deserted it by now. In my work in progress, though, Tom will pay a visit to a mountaintop mining operation. Other writers may favor idyllic small communities, but I’d rather write about places where sudden gashes of ugliness mar the natural beauty and decades of lies and rivalries and betrayals simmer just under the surface, ready to erupt and bleed all over the present.

All those years I poured into Outside Agitators, with no end in sight and little hope of ever seeing it published, have paid off richly, and I suspect I’ll use still more chunks of it before I’ve exhausted its possibilities.

When I delete a passage from a work in progress, I’m careful to stash it in a file rather than throwing it out. There must be some reason I wrote it in the first place, and if it doesn’t seem to fit now, it might be just what I need to fill a hole in a future story.

The Life of an Audiobooks Narrator

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

I couldn’t live without audiobooks, and one of my dreams has been to have my own work recorded. That dream has come true with the Blackstone Audio edition of my new mystery, Broken Places, narrated by Tavia Gilbert. Tavia is a stage and voice actress who also produces, directs, and narrates books, full-cast recordings, and documentaries. She has won the audiobooks profession’s Earphones Award and been nominated for an Audie. Recently she agreed to satisfy my curiosity about the way books are recorded and how audiobook narrators work.


Q. How long have you been an audiobook narrator? How many books have you recorded in that time?

A. I've been narrating books full-time since September of 2007, when I got my first contract with Blackstone Audio. I was, truthfully, a bit lost before that gig. I had left my day-job the year before, and I was really struggling to make my way, half-heartedly auditioning for commercial voiceover work and dreaming of really meaningful narration work. After my first job with Blackstone, I continued to get assignments monthly, and now it's a rare week when I don't have a book to record. I've worked on more than 70 books? 80, maybe? I'm losing count.


Q. How does someone get a job as a narrator? Did you audition?

A. I did audition for my first Blackstone title, after I met Grover Gardner, a veteran narrator and the studio director for Blackstone, at the Audiobook Publishers Association Conference in New York in May 2007. I gently but persistently followed up with Grover after that initial meeting, and he finally sent me an audition piece. He cast me, and the following day he called me back. I was sure he was going to fire me before I even started - realize his mistake - but he gave me a rush title to work on, so I had my first two gigs. Every book I do I have a moment of a crisis of faith, and I think that it will surely be the very last book I ever get to do, but so far I'm adding new publishers and new projects fairly steadily.


Q. Who decides which reader will record which book? Do narrators specialize in certain genres, or in fiction vs. nonfiction?

A. A publisher's studio director or casting director is in charge of choosing the narrators for projects. From time to time an author will have the right to approve the reader assigned to their book, so a few samples may be sent to the author to review before a final casting decision has been made. There have been a handful of projects I've hoped for, and it's thrilling when I've been chosen and heart-breaking when another narrator gets the job. One gig was already assigned to another narrator when I heard about it, and after campaigning for about a year, I was finally given the assignment. The book was Sing Them Home, by Stephanie Kallos, who is a dear friend of mine and one of my college instructors (voice and speech for the theater), and the book won my first Earphones Award and got great reviews, so my determination to land the project paid off.

I think yes, some narrators have their niche, and I imagine that every narrator has a genre they are most fond of, but no matter what the material, the job of the narrator is to serve the vision of the writer with the most authentic voice. What I mean to say is that it's imperative for the narrator to fully inhabit the narrative voice and serve as a medium between the printed word and the listener. So no matter the genre, the process is the same - get out of the way of the work - let the work flow freely through you - and humbly embody the author's voice and vision.

I've done everything from children's and young adult titles, mystery & suspense, contemporary fiction, sociology, biography/memoir, full-cast theater, philosophy, religion, historical fiction, and science fiction. I'm not sure there is a genre I've not had a chance to do yet, but my favorite projects are literary fiction, meaningful memoir, philosophy, and creative non-fiction. I am never so fulfilled as when I get a project that is about social justice and equality. I've been really fortunate to do projects that I think are important, most recently, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, which inspired and infuriated me.


Q. Have you ever been asked to narrate a book that you hated? How do you handle that kind of problem?

A. Yes! And it's painful. It's got everything to do with the quality of writing. If the writing is masterful, there is great pleasure in narrating. If the writing is poor, it's an uncomfortable process. There is a vulnerability in great writing - a revelation of the author's heart - that is rich and beautiful in its idiosyncratic truth no matter what the subject matter or genre. Knowing that there are gorgeous books to be read, it's disheartening to get a book that relies on trendy cliche, author egotism, or cheap formula. The worst for me is reading books with female characters that are stereotypes, or books that use sexual violence to titillate. I have turned projects down if I feel that I can't commit in good conscience to the work. I've used a voice name to distance myself from a piece of work that I am uncomfortable with. But if I do a project, I am committing to embodying it and believing in it during the whole of the performance. Whether I'm working on a book that is gorgeous and transcendent or just pretty okay, I want the performance to be enjoyed and appreciated by the listener and the author, and so I endeavor to stay present moment to moment and not judge the material in the process of recording it.


Q. Do you read a book more than once before you start recording? Do you mark it up, check pronunciations, make notes on characters, etc.?

A. I read the book in full once before I read. Ideally, I would read the section the night before that I will be narrating the following day, but most often I am reading and prepping next week's project at night. I don't mark my script much at all, though each book is different and so it may require its own marking. I do always try to mark paradox, because to bring those juxtapositions to life requires mindful intention and inflection.

I am responsible for the research for my projects, so I look up a lot of the language in a dictionary or encyclopedia, call hotels or city halls or embassies to double-check pronunciations of geographic locations and proper names, call librarians for assistance. When I'm reading fiction or narrative non-fiction, I note each character and what they say about themselves, how the author/narrator describe the character, and how they are described by other characters in the book. That's exactly how I would prep a theatrical character, and it helps me make specific acting choices. I will also note how I think the character's voice sounds - i.e., low, laconic, whiny, halting, bright, strained.


Q. Recording a book must be like appearing in a play or movie in which you play all the parts. Writing a novel is a lot like that too. Broken Places has characters from different levels of society and different places, and many are natives of the mountains, so when I was writing I heard various accents in my head. How do you prepare to do different voices and accents?

A. I would LOVE to have a lot of time to prepare dialects and character voices, but a full-time audiobook recording schedule is pretty tight. I have a stock of characters that I can pull from ("Ok, he'll be my low, slow Southern guy, and I'll use my bright, breezy snob for her"), and I continue to explore and challenge my vocal instrument and my acting specificity to create new people to play. I use my friend Paul Meier's International Dialects of English Archive, which is an invaluable resource, as well as his dialect training materials, and I use the International Phonetic Alphabet as a shorthand to transcribe the key sounds of a dialect.

I constantly soak in the way people speak, listening critically to how people express themselves with sound and language, tone, pacing, rhythm, volume, pitch, placement. I have started finding clips of interesting and idiosyncratic speakers that I can imitate for a particular character, from YouTube or NPR or movies. I also just work on the fly and I try something out until it works. It's very challenging, and I've gone back through an entire book and rerecorded the dialect of a character (a very manipulative Eastern European criminal) because I just wasn't satisfied with my first interpretation.


Q. How long does it take to record an average-length book? How many hours a day do you record?

A. It generally takes me about two hours to record one finished hour of narration, so a book that totals 10 hours will take 20 hours to record. Sometimes I get down to an hour and a half for one finished hour, but that's a rare, victorious, shining star recording day. I record for five hours a day, at most. I used to do seven, but it's really hard on my body, especially my neck and shoulders.


Q. Do you work with a director who is on hand while you’re recording?

A. Unfortunately, many audiobooks are no longer being directed. With digital technology transforming the publishing world, budgets have been cut, and audiobook narrators are often self-engineering and self-directing. But I love working with a director, and have frequently paid out of pocket in order to bring one in for the duration of the recording. I've worked many times with a wonderful director and long-time theater collaborator, Stephen, and we are close enough that we've had great disagreements and debates about character, language, word emphasis, and tone. It's great to have someone to pay attention to the long arc of the story, and it allows me to relax a little bit and trust that someone else is in charge. For the first year and a half I narrated I always paid for a director, and it was a great investment. I am successful self-directing because I've had such a great director to work with. When audiobook publishers are willing to invest in a director, it really pays off with the best possible performance.

I produce, cast, and direct as well, and I've found that when the budget doesn't call for a director for the entire process, it can be very valuable to work with the actor on the narrative voice at the beginning of the recording. The narrative voice is SO important, and I enjoy "sculpting" with an actor the voice they use. I'll sit in on a book for the first couple of hours and then check in later to answer questions, give support, and remind the audio engineer what they should keep in mind creatively as they're running the session. Later I'll give the actors feedback about phrasing, breath, relaxation, paradox, pace.


Q. How do you fit this in with your other work?

A. I do some theater, commercial voiceover, and on camera work, but audiobooks is my main gig. (How lucky am I? Reading for a job! It's pretty great.) But it's going to get exponentially more complicated and challenging when I start a two-year, low-residency masters program in creative non-fiction this summer at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'll be reading and narrating for work and reading and writing for my MFA. I have a business in development, Talkbox, which I believe will be the key to my sustainability as an artist, and where I can weave together the inter-related passions of my life - theater, photography, writing, sound design, story-telling, and activism - and produce and publish work. I want to keep paving my own way in the world, and I'm open to wherever pursuing risks and joy may lead me.


Q. What do you enjoy least about narrating audiobooks?

A. What do I enjoy the least? Days when I have persistent mouth noise. My own reluctance to get the work done on a book that's not a lot of fun to read. Tension and tightness when I want to be so relaxed. Jaw tension. Oh, this is my biggest frustration. Some days I feel like I have lock jaw, and that's a real sign of fatigue and the need to do some body work - get into the pool, do tai chi or qi gong, or talk a walk on the beach. Very aggravating to feel these things when I'm on a tight deadline.


Q. What do you enjoy most?

A. I love the moments of work when I am filled with joy and delight with language. Language is the most beautiful gift, and an enchanting phrase, a complex idea masterfully unfolded, the brave exposure of a terrifying truth - all these awaken me, make me more fully alive, engaged, and present. Sometimes when I'm reading a book I will gasp and tears may come to my eyes because something the author has written is so true, or because I've just learn that I've truly not been alone in thinking or feeling something all my life, or because the writer has been so delightfully playful with their words. I love narrating a book that I wish I myself had written. I love that I am a better writer because of this very intimate, intensive exploration of language through audiobooks. I appreciate that I have an opportunity to tell a story that someone will absolutely love, as I adore stories voiced by narrators like Davina Porter, Barbara Rosenblat, and Norman Dietz.
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Learn more about Tavia and hear a sample of her work at www.taviagilbert.com.

What's my subgenre?

Sandra Parshall

I’ve heard that some editors no longer want to label a certain type of mystery as a “cozy” because they think it’s limiting.

Publishing is a label-loving business, though – everything must be categorized for marketing purposes – so if “cozy” goes, something must take its place. “Traditional mystery” seems to be the preferred substitute. It’s a broad term that covers everything from talking animal puzzles to Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache tales.

At first I thought it was okay to apply the traditional mystery label so freely, but I’ve changed my mind. The trouble with lumping diverse books together is that readers won’t know what to expect. A true cozy is a far cry from the darker traditional mysteries I write. I wouldn’t want a dedicated cozy reader to pick up my books expecting to find recipes or knitting patterns in the back. I don’t want readers who enjoy darker mysteries to avoid my books because of the “traditional” label.

Maybe we need more categories, not fewer. Cozy is a time-honored label and shouldn’t be abandoned, and readers are directed toward their favorite type of cozy with the kind of taglines Berkley uses: a coffee shop mystery, a cheese shop mystery, etc. Sensitive readers won’t get any unpleasant surprises when they sit down with one of these books. It’s trickier to label the darker mysteries, the stories with an edge that lean toward suspense but don’t have the degree of violence and gore found in thrillers. I place my second and third books in that category.

I still consider my first published novel, The Heat of the Moon, psychological suspense. I was surprised when it was nominated for an Agatha Award, and shocked when it won, but I wasn’t about to refuse the honor on the grounds that my book wasn’t a traditional mystery. For that matter, it isn’t a murder mystery either, but Rachel, my protagonist, does solve a mystery, so I don’t feel guilty about that teapot sitting on a nearby shelf as I write this.

When my second book, Disturbing the Dead, came out, some reviewers called it suspense, others called it a thriller. I was interviewed about it by the International Thriller Writers newsletter (fantastic free publicity for which I am grateful). But I thought of DTD, and still do, as a traditional mystery.

MY third book, Broken Places, out next month, is also a traditional mystery. But like DTD, it has little in common with cozies. The small community where my characters live may be in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, but it’s not the quaint, picture-postcard setting found in so many cozies. My fictional county has its wealthy citizens and its middle-class, but it also has poverty, ignorance, meth addicts, and racism. Everybody knows everybody else, but that familiarity is as likely to breed hostility as goodwill. Relationships are complex, with more hidden threads than you’re likely to find in cozies.

If editors are claiming the term “traditional mystery” for books-formerly-known-as-cozies, how do I label my novels to set them apart?

After my editor read the manuscript of Disturbing the Dead, she called it a gothic. That startled me at the time. However, when a Publishers Weekly reviewer described it as “a lethal gothic drama” I began to see that the label fit. Now, with Broken Places, I’m comfortable with the idea that I write gothic mysteries.

And what elements distinguish a gothic mystery? This type of book has often been set in the past, with a female protagonist who is in danger, but in its modern form neither element is required. John Hart and Thomas H. Cook write gothic mysteries, set in the present or near past and featuring male lead characters. What’s always required is a sense of dread and growing menace. In this respect, The Heat of the Moon could be labeled gothic too — it has a lot in common with Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a classic gothic (yes, I thought of Mrs. Danvers when I created Rachel’s mother) that is labeled these days as romantic suspense.

Tangled relationships and dysfunctional families, long-buried secrets, lots of twists and surprises — you’ll find all of these in gothic mysteries. That’s the kind of book I enjoy reading and the kind I enjoy writing. It may well be the only kind I’m capable of writing. I suspect that if I set out to create a light, humorous mystery, it would go dark on me by page 10 despite my best efforts. I can’t help it. Broken Places includes a scene with Rachel and a goat that would be hilarious if Donna Andrews had written it, and I intended it to be comic relief, but I think it feels more threatening than anything else.

So: I am an author of modern gothic mysteries. I can live with that label.

...a book by its cover

Sandra Parshall

Have you ever been so entranced by a book’s cover that you bought the book on the spot? Or so revolted that you put the novel back on the shelf without so much as opening it to the first page?

Writers dream of having the first kind of cover and live in fear that they’ll end up with the second. Tales of bad covers abound – writers gnashing their teeth and sobbing to sympathetic colleagues, “I hate it! And I can’t get them to change it!”

Yes, believe it or not, those wise, all-knowing folks who run publishing houses sometimes insist on covers that anyone with functional eyesight should be able to see as awful and off-putting. If a writer is well-established, fans won’t care; they’ll buy the book regardless of the mess on the cover. If an author is a first-timer or someone still trying to break out of the midlist, he or she may worry that a bad cover will hold down sales. Seeing your beloved baby dressed in an ugly frock can take a lot of the pleasure out of promoting the book.

I’ve just been through my own nail-biting wait for a final cover for Broken Places, the third Rachel Goddard mystery that will be published in February. If you’ve already looked for the book online (bless you for that!), you probably think the cover will look like this.


But that’s a dummy cover, put forth by the distributor before I had even finished writing the novel. These days information about new books goes out long in advance, while final covers may not be available until just before the books are printed. There’s nothing wrong with the dummy cover, and I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have it on the book, but it seems too pretty and sedate for a novel that is, I promise you, intense. The book will go to the printer soon, and I learned last week that the final cover will look like this.


It still needs tweaking -- my name will be made more visible, and a review quote will be added (fortunately, it's had some nice pre-publication reviews; snippets are now posted on my web site ) -- but this is pretty much what the published cover will look like. I think it’s scary and perfectly tailored to the story. (Yes, a fire plays a vital part in the plot.)

While waiting for my own cover, I was obsessed with the whole subject of mystery covers and looked at hundreds, both on my bookshelves and online. Some are hauntingly beautiful. Some are truly awful. Some are simply bland, doing nothing to sell the story. What I find most fascinating are the differences between covers on various editions of the same book. If you go to my web site, you can see the US cover of The Heat of the Moon (which I like), along with the radically different UK cover (which I don’t like), and the Japanese cover (which I love).

Karin Slaughter’s books not only have different covers in different countries, but often the title is changed. These, for example, are covers for the same book.


Tana French’s covers are markedly similar from country to country. These two remind me of the cover of my second book, Disturbing the Dead (on the sidebar to the left).


Lee Child’s cover designs in different editions often have similar graphics, although the colors are different.


Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has had many looks in many countries, but this is the one that captured the Anthony Award this year for Best Cover Art. It's on the US hardcover edition from Knopf.


I think it's rather blah compared with some of the book’s other covers, especially the third one below.

When Laura Lippman wrote paperback originals, all her covers had a variation of this design, with the picture sandwiched between two blocks of text.


On her first few hardcovers, the designs bore little similarity to one another, but now her covers have settled into a pattern, with the title in a box overlaying the art.



Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine has published so many books that she’s probably keeping an army of cover artists in regular work. Her covers, like Larsson’s and French’s, look strikingly different on different editions.





Some publishing imprints, primarily those that put out cozy and humorous mysteries, have distinct styles they use for all their authors’ books. An Obsidian mystery often has an uncluttered look with a woman as the focus, like this Elaine Viets cover.


Berkley Prime Crime, a Penguin imprint like Obsidian, usually puts extremely detailed and realistic art on its cozies, depicting the inviting environment of the story rather than characters. The cover of my friend Avery Aames’s first Cheese Shop Mystery, to be published next July, is a good example.

Some writers are one of a kind, and their covers often reflect that. Megan Abbott, for example, writes hardboiled mysteries set in the first half of the 20th century, and you know when you pick up an Abbott novel that you’ll be transported back to an earlier era.


Returning to my original questions: How much does a book’s cover matter to you? If you haven’t read the author before, will an enticing cover draw you in? Will an ugly cover make you put the book down without giving the story a chance? What are the elements that make a cover work for you? What’s the most striking book cover you’ve ever seen?

Writers, share your own bad cover stories!