Little Free Library
I was just walking by the Little Free Library in front of the historic Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. I usually do - just walk on by. But I didn’t. I stopped.
Through the little window in the library’s door, I spotted a copy of E.L. Doctorow’s 1989 novel Billy Bathgate which I have never read even though the author’s name appears on my list of “influences” somewhere on this site.
So I did. I started reading Billy Bathgate. I found out Billy Bathgate isn’t really my type of story - except for one unavoidable thing - the voice of the narrator - adolescent. No question.
The narrator’s voice pulled on me.
Recently, Phi Architect had read LOSTINE and looked at me steadily and said seriously, “I don’t think this is for kids.”
In 2017, I had been to a Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference in Seattle and pitched LOSTINE as middle-grade and got some nifty feed-back, but only one full(and generous) read and that by Samantha McMahon at Soul Mate Publishing - a Romance publisher. Subsequently, anyhow, I queried LOSTINE quite a bit as a middle-grade novel.
But Phi Architect had now got me thinking again about LOSTINE’s genre and I am reading Billy Bathgate in the street in front of the Sylvia Beach Hotel and seeing LOSTINE’s similarity and I look Billy Bathgate up and find out it is historical fiction. The only specific criticism(words too big for middle-grade - like “interrogation”) I had gotten previously about LOSTINE as middle-grade doesn’t matter in historical fiction!
And since E.L. Doctorow has stepped in now and cleared something critical up for me, I want to explain here exactly how he influenced me.
About the time Billy Bathgate originally pubbed, I read an E.L. Doctorow article in a magazine called “The Writer”. This was pre-blogging(as far as I know), so he would word the following quote slightly differently now. He said,
“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”
Since those days, I have kept that quote in a little, cheesy, black plastic frame, the quote and matte carefully protected by saran wrap. I am touching this relic now.
Nowadays, Mr. Doctorow probably would mention that posting or blogging is not writing.