She runs 10 miles a day. She has written 198,987,789,976,346 bestsellers (ok, a few less, but you get my point). She’ll never “sell out to those Hollywood thugs!” She is absolutely macabre and interesting and fabulous. She is Sue Grafton. (Please click “more” after the pics to read more about her talk!)
Greta was right when she said that it is an absolute pleasure to…well, be exposed to someone who is not only a wonderful, amazing author, but one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard. Sue Grafton is FUNNY. She is smart, she is original, she is many things and personalities…and last night, she was simply excellent company.
The room was packed and overflowing into the hallway. It was standing room only, but everyone was so excited that they squeezed in anyway. Greta Chapman introduced the Mayor, who introduced Ms. Grafton. She began by telling us that “I was never a good student.” Some of the best advice she received from her father: “It is not your job to revise the English language. Spell correctly, and use punctuation.”
She spent what she calls her “ten to fifteen in Hollywood.” She learned action writing, how to get into a scene and to get out. She also learned that she is “one, not a team player, and two, not a good sport.” She left Hollywood and wrote three novels that remained unpublished. Then, she wrote “A is for Alibi.”
Mystery writers, she said, are “the last great moralists.” They are interested in honor, goodness, and revenge. “We’re also magicians.” She pointed out that the mystery genre is interesting because “it is the only form in which the reader and the writer are pitted against each other.” She described the 3 elements of a mystery novel: 1: What really happened, 2: What appears to have happened, and 3: How the detective figured it out.
She keeps a journal for each book that she writes, logging what her feelings were that day, if she had a headache or her cat was sick, etc–it effects her writing, and I thought it was really interesting that she kept track that way. At times the journals have been longer than her books.
She talked about “ego vs. shadow” and that shadow is the creativity side–you shouldn’t hide it, and that women in particular try to hide it to “be nice.” She pointed out that “most people in life just want to avoid criticism.” She’s “scared every day,” but she nurtures her “shadow.”
She took some questions from the audience, including a question about how to get published after your first novel. She talked about how a lot of writing is just suffering, and that your first one, two, three, etc novels might be flawed, and you have to be willing to recognize that. “Most people don’t publish their one, first book,” she said. You have to keep writing and writing and maybe put those books away and then look at them objectively.
She stayed and signed books for the long, long line that waited to meet her. I think the audience felt that they were all so much the better for having seen her. I know I did.
September 21, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Thanks for the great pictures.