Who: Janet Fitch

Claim To Fame: Janet Fitch is the author of the #1 national bestseller White Oleander, a novel translated into 24 languages, an Oprah Book Club book and the basis of a feature film, Paint It Black, also widely translated and made into a 2017 film, and an epic novel of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution of Marina M. Additionally, she has written a young adult novel, Kicks, short stories, essays, articles, and reviews, contributed to anthologies and regularly teaches at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Where To Find Janet: Her Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Janet:  “Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest order.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

I write at home, in my home office, where I have written all my books.  Sometimes if things aren’t going well, I’ll take my computer into another room, or even to a coffee house, but mostly I sit at my desk and work.  It has a view into some bamboo and the neighbor’s wall.  I’ve taken out the closet and put a daybed in there, sometimes I sit there and work. I work in the morning into the afternoon, starting around ten. I’m generally a creature of habit.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I try not to. I think writing rituals push you away from just sitting down and doing it. We make a work of art out of the ritual, and then we have a feeling of having accomplished something when really we’ve accomplished nothing.  I do my reading in the early morning, an hour or an hour and a half, but it’s important that when I’m ready to write, I stop and immediately get to work. I usually don’t get dressed for a while, not until near lunch time.

Have you ever experienced a prolonged creative rut or a spell of writer’s block? How did you get through them?

Few writers have not experienced difficulties with their work. I have a million tricks. I try a different voice, a different character’s POV. I do self-hypnosis and interview the character.  I try writing a different place in the book.  But I have also put an entire novel aside.

Deciding on an idea to pursue writing about can be the most challenging aspect for a writer. How do you generate and capture ideas? And how do you come to the point of ‘this is something I want to write about’?

Ideas are the easiest thing.  It’s finding what you need to express, something that feels rich and urgent and big, that takes time. I start with short short stories—based on a word, an exercise I learned in a long-ago writing group. Then I see which of those short shorts wants to be a longer story. And then something will not be contained by a short story, it screams out for a longer form. We come with all the ingredients inside ourselves—so its handling that material until you discover the thing that hooks into who you are.  Not your external biography, but your internal drives and obsessions.

During your career, what have you found to be your least favorite parts of the writing/publishing process?

The long stretch before you begin to publish is pretty sucky. Also there is a time when you get the typeset galleys of a book and you just see everything that’s wrong with it. You forget how much of yourself you packed into every sentence.

Do you consider writing to be easy? Would you say it comes to you naturally?

No. Writing is not easy when you’re doing it right.  But if it were easy, I’d be bored to death already.  I like it because there’s no upper end of how good it can be.  You just keep striving to be better.

Certain aspects of writing came to me naturally, other aspects I had to learn. Character was always there, conflict, story. But language I had to learn, landscape, sensuality of the prose, good compressed fictional dialogue.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

Wow… well, I’d say Dickens, and Poe. Doestoyevsky learned from Dickens and Poe, and Doestoyevsky had a huge impact on me. I loved those long-sentence dark, big-emotion writers, inheritors of dostoyevsky, like our “Gothics” Faulkner and Joyce Carol Oates.  I was also profoundly influenced by the internal writing of Anais Nin, the seams-showing hijinks of Henry Miller, and the lyricism and sensuality, the human understanding of Lawrence Durrell.  The imagistic propulsion of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.  Noir is also a big influence, Chandler specifically. My teacher, Kate Braverman and her feverish lyricism. Robert Stone, Joan Didion…Poetry has played a big part in the sound of my prose, especially Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton, Eliot, even Pound. Joseph Brodsky. Tennessee Williams has been really important to me, the lyricism and romanticism of his fragile characters. And Carl Sandberg, his elemental respect for the common man. Also the ancient Japanese writer Sei Shonagon and her pillow book, her astonishing aesthetic.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

Read great writers and try to figure out how they accomplish their effects. Really tear their stuff apart. Try writing a paragraph of theirs, using their style and syntax but your own words.  Read to grade level. Push yourself. Ask yourself “how is this book affecting my writing?” If it isn’t, you’re reading the wrong books. Write a lot. Keep a notebook. Use better verbs. Vary sentence structure. Learn to write in scenes. I talk about a lot of these things in my Writing Wednesday videos on my Facebook author page—take a look. And never give up.

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