The Femmes Fatales welcome S.J. Rozan!

SJ Rozan, a life-long New Yorker, is the author of thirteen novels and three dozen short stories.  She's an Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero and Macavity winner, as well as a recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon award. SJ has been Guest of Honor at a number of fan conventions and in 2003 was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  She's served on the boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and as President of Private Eye Writers of America.  She leads writing workshops and lectures widely.  Her latest book is Ghost Hero.  S.J., take it away! 

Hi, there, Femmes fans.  I'll be guest blogging at you a couple of times over the next few weeks, and what I'm going to do is muse about the public side of the writing life.  Which is, as the Victorians used to say, a vexed question.

Many of us became writers precisely because we hoped to make our livings sitting in rooms alone.  The creatures of our imaginations, and their stories, retreat in the face of the demands of the physical world.  Even those of us who can and do write in cafés use the coming and going as comforting white noise.  Writers who work in the kitchen with their children running under the table and their nearest and dearest clattering the pots do exist, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

However, as with so much in life, the good news is the same as the bad news.  Solitude permits work, but it's lonely.  The reason I work in cafés at all is that sometimes I look up from my desk after a morning's writing in my quiet, sunny apartment and realize everyone else in the world could have been beamed up to the mothership and I would have no idea.  (I listen to classical music radio when I write, rather than playing CD's, for a subtler version of the same reason: to connect to a bunch of other people, unseen and unknown, but all listening to Bartok at the same time.)

In my case this is complicated by the fact that I live alone.  It's a choice that by and large I'm happy with, but it means that while I'm sitting here writing I don't have the comfort of knowing that a significant other will be walking in the door at six, bringing the world with him.  Besides which, unless he were also a writer, there'd still be an issue.  Some things, only other writers understand.  (Some things, no one understands, but that's another conversation.)  So I, like so many of us, seek out the company of my own kind.

Like the other night, when I did a NY Public Library gig.  Triss Stein moderated a panel where Peter Blauner, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stefanie Pintoff, and I discussed NYC in crime fiction.  The NYPL does a good event; about 75 people showed up.  Which, considering one of the great things about NYC is how many things there are to do at any given moment, is damned impressive.  The discussion was thoughtful, occasionally funny, and I learned some things about my fellow panelists and their approaches.  But mostly, I accept requests to do this kind of event for the reassurance of hearing my own language spoken.  Like when you're in a foreign country and you hear English on the street.  I think writers are always in a foreign country.  Or maybe I'm only speaking for myself; but I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why people do what they do.  Ultimately it's my subject, it's what I write about.  People interest me endlessly largely because I don't understand them.  Us.  The closest I come is when I'm talking to another writer.  No writer I know understands other people, either.  But every writer I've ever met understands, at least to some degree, the process of trying to understand.

Comments

[Jeffrey Marks]

SJ, how nice to see you here!

I don't know how other people feel, but I have to say that reason number 1 why my relationship works is because he *isn't* an author. Spending so much time in my head and in the business would be multiplied if he was an author too.

[Laura Jones]

Hi SJ,
I enjoy your books very much, and I love what you wrote here. My mother always said a person's greatest need is to be understood. Only writers or and certain other artists understand the process of trying to understand. You put it so well. Thanks. Cheers.
Laura

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

Ah, SJ...so lovely to see you! Someone once described writers' conferences as a meeting of 200 people who'd rather be alone.

In my day job as a reporter--I'm surrounded by noise and chaos and people. When I write at home, I much prefer the quiet. But whether I'm reporting just-the- facts, or making it up, I still am searching for the "why."

Your Bartok notion is fascinating..thinking about that now.

[krisneri]

Welcome, SJ. Thanks for blogging with the Femmes. You've captured something here that's true for so many writers. Years ago, when I lived in CA, there was a screen/tv writer strike. Once, on the news, they interviewed a man on the picket line, who said he didn't mind spending a little time on the picket line because it allowed him to catch up with friends he rarely saw, and he described writers as "friendly people who live monastic lives." He either said nothing more about it, or his other remarks didn't make it on the air, but I've always remembered that quote because it resonated so strongly with me.

[Marilyn Yanke]

SJ "The process of trying to understand." is trying to understand how someone "sees." This "seeing" is what throws you a curve ball just as you think you've got it.
My solitude, can't do without it, but interaction with a "process" person is the balance... Internet connection is filling a big gap for me. Thanks for a great post.

[Dana]

SJ, thanks so much for blogging with the Femmes Fatales!

I think you nailed it: since we so often come to writing from other disciplines, conventions and panels might be among the few moments where writers can get immersed in our own culture. We learn, yes, that is a common problem, and here's how to solve it; yes, there are words to describe what you're trying to do; or, I don't know--ask the elder if she has that lore. Those moments of community are welcome, because sometimes the artistic and analytic gaze we work so hard to develop emphasizes the aloneness of this job.

[SJ Rozan]

Thanks for the warm welcome, all! Glad to know the problems of trying to understand are understood. I think this tension between being alone and being with others will never be resolved for any of us. It's no doubt one of the many facets of the artist's life Martha Graham, the great choreographer, was referring to when she said, "No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time."

[Charlaine Harris]

I feel that way in church, SJ, though that may sound odd. I'm an Episcopalian, and I know that in churches all over the world other Episopalians are saying exactly the same words at nearly the same time I am. It's community of a different sort. For someone who spends most of her time alone, it's a great feeling. After I come home from a convention, I realize how many times I don't even talk about what I do because it would entail too much explanation before I could even start.

[Mary Saums]

Thanks so much for being with us today, SJ. I like writing in coffee shops too. Maybe it's the caffeine but I get more done and have better focus than at home. I'm more out of myself when surrounded by strangers and so the work is more its own self, if that makes any sense. I do love the idea of group Bartok listening. :) Some of those BBC programs, when ordinary people are interviewed about birdwatching or strange weather in the village, give that community feeling too.

[SJ Rozan]

Charlaine -- not odd at all; I think in large part, that's what religion's for. I'm not observant, but I get that same feeling at my sister's house on Passover -- that people all over the world, connected to me by five thousand years of history, are doing the same things at the same time. It's comforting. We're hard-wired to need community, from our days on the African plain, when to be alone was not to survive.

I know what you mean, too, about not even starting to talk about what you do. Sometimes it's not so much a matter of people's understanding as of something larger. Often people who aren't writers have this picture of us and how we spend our days that's really part of their own fantasies about what their days would be like if they weren't trapped in their mundane lives. That our lives are mundane, too, in different and not-so-different ways; that our work is WORK, not effortless, continuous, creative joy; that we feel bored, fed up, anxious, and unsatisfied -- that being us would not rescue them -- is something a lot of people don't want to hear. For which you can't blame them, really.