Sara Zarr, "Sweethearts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2 (Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Michael, we probably have some people listening or maybe reading the transcript later who are wondering how did she get that separation from the slush pile, which is, for those who don’t know, the slush pile is basically all the writers who send in stuff unsolicited, and it just piles up, and eventually, the agents look at it. How did she get separation from that big pile of manuscripts to become “Sara Zarr, National Book Award finalist”?

MICHAEL BOURRET: There were two things. One was that her query letter was well constructed and direct. Was it the most brilliant pitch for a book I’d ever heard? Honestly, Sara, no, but it said what the book was.

SARA ZARR: I know.

BOURRET: It said what the book was about so I understood. It also mentioned her qualifications, which were that she had won an award, the Utah Council of the Arts Award for 2005, is that right?

ZARR: 2003.

BOURRET: 2003, geez. Time really flies. That’s scary. So the fact that it mentioned she had won an award, and then she really did add this personal note asking about Freaky Friday, which I reference on the website in an essay or something. And it had that little bit of a personal touch. So between those three things I thought you know what? I need to take a look at this, and then, of course, like I said, the manuscript spoke for itself.

ZARR: And then I did, and I tell this to aspiring writers who are on the search for agents, I did follow up with him. A period of time had passed, and I was curious what was going on so I sent him a very brief, courteous email to just follow up.

BOURRET: I actually found that email the other day.

ZARR: Did you? Well, yes, we extensively save all our communications.

BOURRET: We do.

ZARR: And that, I think, helped move it to the top of the stack, too, because I had experienced in the past with a magazine piece I’d done that sometimes those little follow-up notes or calls just remind people yes, that’s around here somewhere, and they pull it out. But you can’t harass them. You have to wait a reasonable amount of time and be brief.

BOURRET: It was a very appropriate email that just said, “I haven’t heard from you in a little bit, you requested my email on this date, and I’m curious to see what you have to say.”

ANDELMAN: Michael, when you took Sara on as a client and when you started taking her work around, do you remember some of the response that you got early on? How did that go?

BOURRET: The response was fantastic from the first person who read it. I sent it out, and I think it was three days later that someone said they really loved it, had read it, and was sharing it with other people. And we did wind up selling it at auction. It’s very rare for a literary novel for the kind of fiction that Sara does to sell at auction just because, usually, you find that one editor who really connects with it, but yes, everyone did. There was no question that Sara was gonna be a star.

ANDELMAN: I remember when you told me about Sara, and I was kind of like, “Young Adult literature? I don’t know, Michael.” And you said, “Let me send you the book, read the book,” and I read the book, and 20-25 pages, I was thinking, “This is pretty good, but I don’t know if I’m going to read the whole thing.” And then somewhere, and I’ve told this story before, somewhere around 30-35 pages, I was just hooked. And I think that that was something that happened with the second book as well. There is something, and maybe someone smarter than I can put their finger on it, but there is something in the nature of the way Sara writes that just grabs you, and you’ve gotta keep turning those pages.

ZARR: My goal is to have that happen closer to page one. Thirty is a little far, but yeah.

ANDELMAN: But I’m not the target audience either so it’s a little tougher sell that way.

BOURRET: And you do have to keep hooking people, which is, I think, the difficult thing. The thing about books is you typically don’t read them in one sitting, though I’ve had several people tell me that they read Sara’s work in one sitting. Most people don’t because you can’t. It’s too much time, and most people, unfortunately, don’t sit down with a book the way they do with a movie or episodes of a TV show on DVD. So you really do have to keep hooking them over and over and over again, and I think that’s, in constructing a book and the editorial process, that’s part of the challenge is to keep that momentum going so that every time you finish one page, you want to know what happens on the next.

ZARR: And I can comment a little bit just on sort of a technical craft level of how that happens, I think. I do sort of think in scenes. I’m a big movie lover, and I’m from the TV generation and always before the commercial break, there’s something, “Ooh, I gotta keep watching that show,” or in a movie, each scene leads to the next and makes you want to keep watching. So when I end a section or a chapter, I try, whether it’s an emotional note that makes people want to read what’s going to happen next or an event, I do think in those terms. I don’t know if I started out doing that super-consciously, but I think because of what I like about books and movies and TV and stories, it sort of happens organically in the way I write.

ANDELMAN: Michael, coming back to this, how easy was it to go out and sell that second novel, and at what point in the process did that happen?

BOURRET: Well, actually, when we had the auction, we wound up getting an offer for two books. So the second book was under contract before it was even a twinkle in Sara’s eye, which, you can ask Sara, was both a blessing and a curse, I think. And since then, obviously, selling books three and four, which we just did in December, was much easier even though the first time it was pretty easy. Her publisher was quite interested in working with her again.



ANDELMAN: So you’re back with Little, Brown for three and four?

ZARR: Yep.

ANDELMAN: Oh good, good.

ZARR: Very happy to be so.

ANDELMAN: Except for the actual having to write the book.

ZARR: Yes, as I mentioned, that part’s hard.

ANDELMAN: What was the line? “It’s always easier to have written than to write.”

ZARR: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Yes.

ZARR: When I look at Story of a Girl or even more so when I look at Sweethearts, I look at the physical finished book and listen to people talking about it. Part of me just doesn’t even know how it happened. There’s something about the writing process that’s somewhat mysterious, and when you’re in it, you just can think this is never going to work. And then through revision and the natural process of evolution, you come out with a book, and it’s somewhat miraculous. I can still hardly believe it myself. As Michael mentioned, writing a second book under contract, having a contract for it before I even really had the idea of what the second book would be, was different from the way I’d written before because when you don’t have a contract, you can kind of start a book and be with it for a while and decide is this really the book that I want to write? And when you write it under contract, you sort of turn in maybe 50 pages or so and a little synopsis, and then the publisher says, “Yes, this does sound like the book that we want you to write.” And so if you change your mind kind of through the process, it’s not impossible to alter that course, but when you start feeling insecure whereas when you weren’t under contract, you might just move on to something else. Once you’re committed to that book, you have to work through the hard part. You’re kind of married to it, and you just have to, since it is Valentine’s Day, you have just like a marriage or relationship. You have to work through the hard times, baby, so that you can come out with something that you love.

ANDELMAN: Come try jumping over to the non-fiction world. We’ll have that conversation in a whole ‘nother way. Michael, I know that your two favorite writers are on the phone with you.

BOURRET: That’s true.

ANDELMAN: And we are both…

BOURRET: Except for all the other favorite writers of mine who aren’t on the phone with us.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, and, of course, Sara and I are both committed to projects for the short and long-term.

BOURRET: Yes.

ANDELMAN: So I don’t know if you have time to stay with us, or if you want me to let you go.

BOURRET: Actually, I’m in the middle of negotiating a deal right now, but I wanted to call in and talk to my two favorite people who happen to be talking on this radio show right now.

ZARR: Thanks for calling in, Michael.

BOURRET: Of course. I told you I would, and I did so there you go.

ANDELMAN: Thank you, Michael.

ZARR: A man of his word.

BOURRET: Enjoy the rest of your talk, and I’ll be in touch with both of you soon.

ZARR: Thank God he’s gone!

ANDELMAN: I have a question for you from the chat room from Coll. She would like to know how you got into writing in the first place.

ZARR: It’s funny. I’ve been asked that a lot while I’ve been out promoting Sweethearts. And I’m just realizing that I barely even remember, but what I tell people -- and I don’t even know if this is true or just a construction of my imagination after the fact, but…

ANDELMAN: You’re a writer. Make something up.

ZARR: This is true. My mother read to us almost every night. I loved books growing up. I didn’t buy a book until I was probably in my twenties really. I had a few books around the house, but my go-to place for books was the library, and we always had stacks and stacks of books. So I was just really tuned in to stories from an early age, and I don’t know if it’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but either as a result of all those stories or if it’s just something in my personality and that’s why I love the stories, I had a very active imagination.

My family was on the poorer side growing up, and so we didn’t have fancy toys, just books and a few stuffed animals and board games, and so my sister and I would play imaginary games all the time, and that was my favorite thing to do with friends. We’d play “Little House on the Prairie”-oriented games, wagon trains, and orphanages with mean school marms, all sorts of crazy stuff. And so I guess it’s just sort of a natural progression to want to tell stories, too, but in terms of writing as a career, I didn’t meet any writers till I was 24 or 25. And I’ve been telling this to kids when I’ve been doing school visits. I never had an author come to any of my schools when I was a kid. To think of being a writer as a career sounded to me a lot like saying I want to be an astronaut or I want to be the President. I knew people did it, but they must be special people, not normal people, and I didn’t realize it was something I could do for a job. And then when I started meeting writers, I thought, “Oh, they’re normal people, and they’re just normal people who actually cared enough to finish books and re-write them over and over again until they were publishable.” I just decided that’s what I wanted to do, and I started doing that and thought my first book was great, and it would be published right away, and it wasn’t. And then I thought, “Well, I’ll write another one,” and then that didn’t happen. Then I wrote a third one and lost my agent over it. I had a different agent before Michael. And then I wrote Story of a Girl. So it was a process of failure and rejection for ten years and then triumph.



ANDELMAN: Sara, we’ve got another call here for you.

ZARR: Great.

ANDELMAN: I think this is Coll from the web chat.

COLL: Hi. You use a lot of your childhood memories and your experiences in your books, and it’s Young Adult fiction. Do you have any other interests that you do that help you to write, and is it completely different from your writing career?

ZARR: I probably don’t have as many interests as I should. Sometimes I feel like my life is a little narrow right now with so much focus on writing. As I mentioned, I love movies, and I feel like that sort of cross-pollinates my imagination in an interesting way. If I see a great movie, it makes me feel like I want to go write a story or write a book. I’m really interested in computers and cooking. I don’t think there’s a lot of direct influence on my writing, but anything you can do to have a full and interesting life and have friends and social interaction just all goes into that well of experience and imagination that you can draw on when you’re writing a book.

COLL: And do you think you have to have a certain level of literary experience like doing a writing course or education in order to achieve what you want?

ZARR: I think there are a lot of different ways to approach having a writing career. I didn’t study writing in college. In fact, I was an English major when I started college, and then I hated it so much that I changed it to Speech Communications. And then I never really took any official classes or workshops or anything like that. It was kind of learn by doing. I read a lot and wrote a lot, and as I mentioned, wrote three novels before my first published one so I had sort of the practice of finishing a novel. I think the best thing for me was I was in a writers’ group where most of the people in the group -- all of the people in the group -- were a lot better and more experienced than me, and I learned so much so quickly being in a group like that and reading their work and seeing what worked and having them read my work and comment on it.

I think, from what I’ve heard, people who do end up enrolling in creative writing and essay programs and things like that, it sort of accelerates the learning because you, by necessity, usually you’re spending at least 25 hours a week writing. And when you’re in school, you feel like you have to do it because it’s homework, and so it validates the time that you spend doing that, and it can accelerate the process whereas if you’re sort of starting on your own, and your friends and family are like do you even know what you’re doing, and why are you spending so much time with this, and you’re not making any money? Being enrolled in school kind of is a signal to them that this is what I’m doing, but I don’t think there’s any one right way to approach a writing career. The main thing is to write.

COLL: How easy or difficult was it to get your first book published?

ZARR: It was difficult. Well, I should say, I focused a lot of energy on finding an agent. I don’t know if you heard when my agent called in, but I always…

BOURRET: Yes, I did.

ZARR: I always knew from the beginning that I would not be good at the business part of it, not because I’m not organized or smart or anything like that, but I knew, emotionally, I’d have a lot of doubts about what I was doing, and I would be satisfied with a lot less in terms of attention or contract details, things like that, because I’m just kind of insecure. So I always knew I wanted someone to be kind of a business partner with me, which is what an agent really is, and so I focused virtually all my energy on finding an agent rather than a publisher. That was a really long, difficult process. I had one agent, and that didn’t work out so I fired her, or we ended our contract, and then I found the agent that I have now. That whole process was three or four years, but then once I had the right agent, you can do everything right, but then still timing has to work out, the market’s in the right place in terms of the kind of stuff you like to write, and then it ends up on the right editor’s desk, and you have the right agent. In order for those things to converge, to work out for you, you just have to be patient. I have a writer friend who likens it to standing in line for a movie or something. You just stay in line. You eventually get up to the counter, but if you get out of line, then you’re not going to get a ticket. There are a lot of people who want to be writers. You just have to stay in the game and keep going, and you have to make sure that it’s really something you want to do because if you lose that enthusiasm, you’re not going to put up with years of waiting and rejection.

COLL: Brilliant. Thank you very much for that.

ANDELMAN: Sara, you mentioned your blog before, and I want to give that out. It’s www.sarazarr.com. How has that worked for you in terms of promoting your books and interacting with your readers?

ZARR: It’s been great. I actually started blogging the second I heard the word “blog.” I think it was 1999 or 2000. As soon as I heard about this thing called a blog where you could just spew your opinions all over the Internet free of charge, I signed up. I had actually been blogging for a long time and read other writers’ blogs, and a year or so before I even sold my book, had kind of gotten into a little bit of a blogging network with people and already starting to meet other writers and aspiring writers. I will say that when I sold Story of a Girl, and I knew I was going to be a published author, I deleted my old blog, my whole one from like 2000 to 2005 because it was pretty personal. And I just all of a sudden felt uncomfortable thinking I could be this public person and have so much personal information, not details about where I live or how people could find me and stab me to death, but just personal feelings and experiences and talking about friends and family and things. So I deleted that. I still get personal on my blog, but it’s personal with boundaries.

Click Here to Keep Reading!

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Technorati Tags:
Sara Zarr, Sweethearts, Story of a Girl, Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, Valentine's Day, Project Runway, Young Adult novels, National Book Award finalist, novelist, Young Adult novels, slush pile, Lindsay Lohan

Labels: Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl, Sweethearts

  ¶ 2:54 PM