Edan Lepucki is the author of the novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me, originally published by Flatmancrooked, and recently re-released by Nouvella Press. The Los Angeles Times named her a Face to Watch for 2014.
Her debut novel, California, was published by Little, Brown on July 8, 2014. California debuted at #3 on the New York Times Bestsellers List and has been the #1 bestseller on the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestsellers lists. It’s also been on the IndieBound and Publishers Weekly Bestsellers Lists.
California was a fall 2014 selection of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. Edan and Stephen Colbert are now besties.
Follow her on Twitter at @edanl.
Buy California here or here or here!
Five Questions
What is most difficult about writing?
What’s most difficult about writing is…writing itself. There are challenges at every stage. After the initial bliss of daydreaming about a story or a character, after thinking of an image that makes the world sparkle, the work begins. Where to start? How to get the anything to happen? How to provide just the right amount of information to get a reader interested? How to withhold? How to adjust the pacing? How to calibrate the voice? How to make a series of scenes add up to something bigger and deeper than, well, a series of scenes? There is always a new question, a new challenge. And once that work is done, the work of revision begins. How do you know what needs to be changed? How can you implode this paragraph and rebuild it so that it works the way it’s supposed to? Where can you add exposition without it seeming obvious and intrusive? It’s all very difficult–from start to finish. But this work is also fun…maybe precisely because it’s so difficult.
Sometimes it’s not the craft of writing that is so hard for me, but the sustained focus it requires. There are some days when it’s so impossible to get “inside of” my work–I’m staring at a string of words on my computer and I can’t fathom how I ever got swept up by it. It’s the easiest thing in the world, not writing. It has to be the first thing I do when I get to my office, and I have to ply myself with coffee, music, maybe chocolate, to get going. Otherwise, I will put it off, and put it off.
Once the book is written and revised and revised again and edited and edited again, there’s a new hard part: sharing the book with the world. There are wonderful aspects to this–readers!–but it’s harder than I imagined. The world is occasionally dismissive (if not downright cruel), and it can be difficult to see your book–this private world of characters you’ve spent years with, alone–judged by others. A mean blog post about my book, or a pissy review on Amazon…man, those aren’t easy to read, and I’ve learned the hard way not to seek them out.
What is your philosophy of failure?
I suppose my philosophy regarding failure is that you should, in fact, strive for it–it’s what happens on the way to growing up, to being human, to being an artist. Babies fall all the time when they’re learning to crawl. That’s what the skull is for.
What is the biggest mistake you have made as a person?
Oof. At this moment I’m feeling great relief, because I don’t have an answer. There isn’t one huge mistake that has haunted me–and thank goodness for that, because I don’t like the idea of living with regret. Mostly, I experience the opposite of that: I’m happy to have made certain decisions in my life: going to Oberlin even though it was in Ohio of all places, far from my hometown of LA; marrying my husband even though I was suffering from anxiety about marriage for nearly all of our engagement; starting my book California the same week my first agent dumped me over my first, eventually-unpublishable book; having a kid before I sold a book, despite my fears that motherhood would wreck any chance of being a writer–it didn’t, only made me more efficient, and hungrier for success; having a second kid despite feeling uncertain if I was truly up for the challenge of taking care of two humans–turns out, I am, and she brightens every day, as babies tend to do; starting my new book, Woman No. 17, as a sort of little secret for myself, even though I knew it was different from California. So far, I feel like I’ve done okay. Of course, there are tiny mistakes following me, as they follow any person living in the world: something uncharitable I said or did to a friend; that one mean thing I can’t take back, not ever; those times I wasn’t being cruel, just clueless to the feelings of others; not being grateful enough to my parents when they did something nice for me; throwing away certain old photos or letters; not paying more attention in math class; forgetting my security blanket, at age 19, in a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona; wasting time on the internet when I could have been reading a novel, or writing one; not flossing in my twenties; yelling at my son when I should have shown him patience and empathy; not keeping in better touch with certain friends…the list could go on forever. But, you know, there is nothing huge that follows me around. So far, I’ve been lucky. But now you’re making me nervous that my luck will change–!
What is your best failure story?
I wrote a first novel and it didn’t sell. It was a terrible experience–the months-long rejection, the “I really wanted to love this but didn’t” rejections from editors, the silence from other editors, who didn’t even bother to read the submission, the depressing emails from my agent. I felt like my career was over before it started. I was pissed, hurt, resentful, scared, and deeply disappointed. I felt like I’d wasted four years of my life. Except I didn’t, because I wrote a book, and those hours alone with that book, wrestling with the character’s voice, the retrospective gaze, the pacing, the imagery, were useful to me. Sometimes, too, they were magical–I am still proud of sentences in that book, and it doesn’t matter that no one will read them, because I did. I couldn’t have written my next book (California, which did get published), had it not been for my first book and the lessons it taught me about storytelling and characterization and everything else that comes with novel writing. And writing a book that didn’t sell taught me that I was doing it for myself, first and foremost, for the sake of making art that interests and entertains and moves me. Once I realized that, I felt free to write any kind of book. That was a revelation.
