Writer UnBoxed

Writing Through the Years

The other morning at my desk, fifty pages into writing a new novel, I found myself inventing a scene set in Central Park in the mid-1980s, a time when I had lived in New York with my boyfriend (now husband). I was reminded that in the early ’90s, after moving to Philadelphia, I had drafted a whole novel set in New York during the mid-’80s. I hadn’t thought about that book in years. But here I was again with a fictional setting I had first explored thirty-five years earlier. I clicked out of my new manuscript and went to search my files for the long-forgotten book.

Back then, even with computers widely available, I still penned the first draft of that novel longhand before typing it onto my Dell laptop. I then approached an agent friend and received a tepid response. I wasn’t too deterred. I felt confident there was something to this book and wanted to improve it. But I soon lost interest when our first child arrived. It was a difficult birth and I needed months to recover. When I returned to the manuscript, something had changed. I had changed. The story seemed impossibly far from me. Motherhood and regaining my strength took all my attention.


Writer UnBoxed

How Writer Friendships Improve Our Craft

My last Writer Unboxed essay discussed the impact of reading on the process of writing. Now, I’d like to celebrate the importance of the creators of the books we love, that is, fellow writers. They are, I believe, in part responsible for the words on my page. They aren’t seated beside me at my desk when I write, but they are in my mind, cheering me on, challenging me, and making my books better through their friendship.

In each of the five cities where I’ve lived since graduating from college, I’ve sought out writers. While getting my MFA at Sarah Lawerence, I lived in New York City and made friends through the writing program, as well as after graduation when I worked at a literary agency, and then as an adjunct writing instructor at New York University. Being around other writers who were striving to pen and place their first books made it easier for me to take myself seriously and write my own first novel and find an agent.


Writer UnBoxed

To Be a Serious Writer, Become a Serious Reader

In my last essay for Writer Unboxed, I made a case for not sharing early drafts. For ignoring other voices, especially critical ones, and blocking out the constant noise of everyday life to protect space for the imagination. I encouraged fellow writers, especially newer ones, to listen to the tentative, inchoate voice within. In this essay, I pitch another approach to the writing craft: reading. Finding one’s voice as an author can only happen when we unplug, turn off our phones, shut down our screens, and not just write, but read. Reading is my number one recommendation for how to improve as a writer.

In today’s cacophonous world the goal of sustained reading is harder to achieve than ever and, I would argue, more important. Before the pandemic and farther back, before constant iPhone use, I read fifty to sixty books a year, mostly novels. Post-pandemic, I can’t seem to finish thirty to forty. Those numbers might still sound large, but not if you consider that novel writing is my business. To write good novels, I need to read good novels, and sometimes bad ones. A key part of the practice of becoming a serious writer is to be a serious reader.


Read Her Like An Open Book

Virginia Pye on Seizing the Day in Words

At dawn on a surprisingly snowy day in May, I sat at my family’s breakfast table and tried to fill an empty page in my journal with what I felt and knew. This was no small task as the wind outside shook the grey branches with their tender new leaves and tightly closed buds. Snowfall in springtime New England happened from time to time, but never so late. May 12? May 15? It was getting close to the end of the school year and yet here it was a snow day. I had woken early and come downstairs quietly to sit in the dark to watch the shadows form and then disappear on the white platen of our lawn. There wasn’t much out there to see besides wind and gentle snow. The footprints of pheasants that had passed by in the night filled with the dusting. But my heart brimmed over as I longed to describe the surprising and beautiful sight with all the passion and sorrow that it evoked in me. I was a teenager with powerful feelings, and I wanted to write about them powerfully. To write in a way where there’d be no mistaking my voice. I wanted to reveal myself on the page.


Writer UnBoxed

Time for Feedback? How to Get the Most Out of It

Please welcome our newest contributor, Virginia Pye, to Writer Unboxed!

Virginia is the author of four books of fiction, essays, and short stories. Her latest historical novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, was published in October 2023. Her collection, Shelf Life of Happiness won the 2019 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Short Fiction and one of its stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, River of Dust, was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, was named a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Virginia has taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania and, most recently, at Grub Street Writing Center’s Muse and Marketplace Conference in Boston.

You can connect with her here, on her website, or at the social media sites links listed below.


Publisher’s Weekly

Women Writers Face an Imbalance of Power

Mary Abigail Dodge (1833–1896), known by the pen name Gail Hamilton, was hailed in a national newspaper after her death as “the most brilliant woman of her generation.” Author of numerous essays and more than 25 books on religion, politics, travel, rural life, and the rights of women, Hamilton also played a key role in the evolution of publishing when she sued her publisher, James T. Fields (of the house Ticknor & Fields), for underpaying her. With the issue of how writers are valued and paid still raging today, the legal battle waged by this writer is a reminder of how little things have changed.

At 23, Hamilton had an essay run in National Era, an abolitionist magazine edited by Gamaliel Bailey, best known as the editor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She began to write regularly for him, and he invited her to move to Washington, DC, to be governess for his children. While this arrangement would be considered inappropriate today, it afforded Hamilton opportunities to rub elbows with politicians and thought leaders that fed her writing. (Later in her career, however, she was a vocal critic of paternalist publishers.)


Writer’s Digest

How the Dime Novel Created Women Readers and Writers

Author Virginia Pye shares her research into how the dime novel created women readers and writers and helped transform publishing.

Fiction book sales have increased by over 22 percent in the past five years, and it’s commonly assumed that women are fueling the surge. They read more than men and prefer fiction to nonfiction. In fact, the great fiction boom has been led by romance novels. Women’s fiction has become a $24 billion dollar industry and the dismissive term “chick lit” has faded.

This isn’t the first time, though, that women writers and readers have served as a cornerstone to the publishing industry. One striking precedent is 19th-century ladies’ dime novels. These and other highly successful commercial novels of the period by women authors helped publishers not only survive but evolve into today’s publishing industry.

By the mid-to-late 1800s, women writers in the US were on the rise. Books by women and for women began to take over the marketplace. Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves, published in 1853, was the first best-selling novel in the history of publishing, selling 75,000 copies. Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold a staggering two million copies in its first five years. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne sold at most a few thousand copies of their books a year.


Literary Hub

Trying to Find My Voice on the Page: On Self-Doubt and Finding the Confidence It Takes to Write

I’m twenty-two or twenty-three and sitting at the table playing cards with my father and brother. When it’s my turn, I admit I need the rules explained again. My mind is so distracted by self-doubts and worries about the family dynamics swirling around me that I can’t retain a simple game. My father says, as if stating the obvious, “You aren’t very bright, are you?”

My brother hears him, and I think my mother across the room does, too. But none of us contradicts this statement of family fact. I’m the youngest and therefore least intelligent, meaning least able to express myself. And I’m determined to be a writer.

Starting back in middle school, I retreat to my journal, hoping that in writing I’ll express the thoughts I can’t say aloud. It never occurs to me that the age gap between my siblings and me—seven and ten years—might explain my disadvantage. I want to be older and smarter than I am.


Writer Unboxed

Finding Your Process and Trusting It

Every novel requires its own writing process. Over the years, I’ve distilled that process down to certain elements, even if it varies with each new book. The key thing my process shares across the many drafts is what I bring to the work as a long-time reader. Reading helps me know what’s needed in terms of story, character, voice, and plot. Each writer must find what helps with the excavation of each novel—because that’s what we’re doing: digging out from rock the gem that will finally be a book.

But how to start? Many authors find the inspiration for a novel in a nagging question. An idea they can’t stop chewing over. My thoughts can coalesce around a place, a setting—real or imagined—and a character in trouble. I let my imagination dwell there with no urgency to begin writing. I read novels, non-fiction, and watch movies set during the same time or place as the story I’m considering. Many writers avoid this, thinking they’ll be overly influenced, but I’m curious what my reader will expect from my story based on what they already know. I want to understand our common assumptions, including the stereotypes, so I can avoid them, but also play off them.


Shepherd

The Best Novels About a Woman Writer Finding Her Own Voice

Why am I passionate about this?

I love novels that show female characters finding their way in life, and especially women who use writing to help themselves to grow and evolve. Finding my own voice through writing has been my way of staking my claim in the world. It hasn’t always been easy for us to tell our stories, but when we do, we’re made stronger and more complete. The protagonist of my novel The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann fights hard to tell her own story. I know something about being held back by male-dominated expectations and Victoria’s situation could easily take place today. But when women writers finally find their voices, the works they create are of great value. 

The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

By Virginia Pye

What is my book about?

Victoria Swann is a successful author of popular romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women’s rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria when she abandons writing the pulp fiction her publisher expects from her in order to tell her own authentic story. She loses her publisher’s regard, her income, her husband, and her home, and joins the legions of hard-working women who have been her most faithful readers in their fight for better pay and better working and living conditions. And in this LGBTQ-inclusive tale, her new, young, Harvard-educated editor becomes her unexpected ally, mentor, and friend, while he himself finds the courage and freedom to love who he wants.

Writers & Lovers

By Lily King

Why did I love this book?

Lily King’s Writers & Lovers is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997, where my own novel takes place a century earlier. It’s a fictional coming-of-age story of a young woman who tries to write her way into adulthood.

Casey Peabody works as a waitress in Harvard Square, spends time with her aspiring writer friends, walks along the Charles River, and sits for hours at her desk trying to write, all of which I did in those same places at her same age and often with the same sense of longing—and which, incidentally, Victoria Swann does, too, albeit while wearing a floor-length skirt and using a fountain pen.

Casey, Victoria, and I, (and I assume Lily King herself), were not alone: so many people I’ve met over the years have spent time in their twenties hanging out around Harvard Square, anxious and waiting to become the grown-ups we hoped to be. This novel spoke to me because it shows the daily doubts and dreams of a would-be writer who hits the jackpot eventually. 

Little Women

By Louisa May Alcott

Why did I love this book?

The much-loved American tale Little Women tells the story of four sisters in Civil War era Concord, Massachusetts, and their quests for love and happiness.

Based on author Louisa May Alcott herself, the character of Jo March, the second daughter, is headstrong, independent, and loves to read and write. Many young female readers have taken Jo as a role model because she speaks her mind and pursues her goals—writing first among them.

Much like my own character Victoria Swann, writing helps Jo forge her independence and it becomes clear as the story progresses that it’s her voice telling the family’s tale. Many bookish girls—me included—can thank Jo for encouraging the dream of becoming a writer. 

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Why did I love this book?

A complex, deeply researched epic, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois spans multiple generations of a Southern Black family, from slavery to the present.

The story takes place in several different worlds: an African village, the experience of Southern sharecroppers, sorority life at a Black college. Author Honoree Fanonne Jeffers creates a huge cast of sympathetic characters, especially the protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield.

I loved how Ailey’s character evolves through the years and settings until we understand that she has taken the many stories passed down to her and is using them in her PhD thesis, and that we are essentially reading her research. It’s such a clever way of weaving a woman writer’s tale into the story of many generations of a heroic family.  

Yellowface

By R. F. Kuang

Why did I love this book?

Everyone has been talking about Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, and for good reason. This is the story of a young white woman with a mediocre debut novel who steals the manuscript of a highly successful Asian American woman friend who died, finishes it, and publishes it to great success, thereby changing the course of her life as a writer. Morally repugnant, June Hayward ends up being somehow relatable because she shares her writerly insecurities, jealousies, and the deep loneliness that seems a necessary part of this solitary art.

I didn’t want to feel for her, but I did, even though I felt more for Athena Liu, whose work was taken while in her grave. No one comes out looking good in this novel, most especially the publishing industry, which shamelessly encourages this extreme example of cultural appropriation. Still, the protagonist woman writer certainly learns to use her voice—for better or worse.

The Wife

By Meg Wolitzer

Why did I love this book?

This novel, by Meg Wolitzer, offers such a twist at the end, I’m not sure how to write about it as an example of a woman writer finding her voice without giving too much away.

The Wife is the story of a Noble Prize-winning author, Joe Castelman, and his wife, Joan, who have kept a terrible secret for all the years of their marriage. Because you know the topic of my selections here, you can surmise that Joan is also a writer, though she hides that fact. Her character tells the story, and we only slowly see the facets of their strange and deceptive marriage. It becomes clear that Joan is a very good writer indeed, and she’s tired of keeping her secret.

This clever tale will make you think about what it means to invent a life both on and off the page. And that there’s no stopping a woman writer when she finally has her say! 


Cleveland Plain Dealer

Because My Georgia Forebear Wasn’t Stopped, His Racist Legacy Carries Forward to This Day

PHOTO: Ric Feld, Associated Press

PHOTO: Ric Feld, Associated Press

I was happy to have the essay below published by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer online at Cleveland.com and accompanied by this photo and caption: “In this 2006 file photo, visitors to the Rotunda at the Georgia State Capitol walk past the portraits of George Washington, clockwise from top left, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Toombs and James Edward Oglethorpe. In a guest column today, author Virginia Pye, the great-great-great-great-half-niece of Toombs, a Confederate general and the first secretary of state of the Confederacy, writes that Toombs’ efforts during Reconstruction to suppress the Black vote have had lasting impacts in voter suppression today.”

One of my ancestors should have been stopped. Because he and others like him weren’t, those fighting voter suppression have a more difficult battle, and one of the worst chapters in U.S. history seems to be repeating itself.

In 1865, Gen. Robert Toombs, former senator from Georgia and the first secretary of state for the Confederacy, went into political exile in Europe, unrepentant and unwilling to accept the outcome of the war. Like many Confederates, he still clung to a false belief that President Abraham Lincoln’s victory at the polls had been stolen. Toombs had distinguished himself on the Civil War battlefield and as a Confederate firebrand, but his most lasting legacy came after the war, when he did all he could to restrict voting rights in Georgia.


Literary Traveler

Boston’s Book Eden

Everyone knows that Boston is a book-loving city, but since moving back to the area after more than thirty years away, I’ve been amazed by the thriving literary life of my hometown. On a recent evening, I was torn between hearing Alexander Chee and Laura van den Berg at the Brookline Booksmith, Rebecca Makkai and Jennifer Haigh at Newtonville Books, or Amber Tamblyn and Aclyn Friedman at Harvard Bookstore. In the end, I opted to hear another bestselling author, Katherine Howe, at the Cambridge Historical Society, speak on a topic relevant to a novel I’m currently researching. The array of book events in this town can make a reader dizzy.  

The largest of the indies—the Harvard Bookstore and Brookline Booksmith—host their biggest name authors off site at nearby churches and theaters where readers wait in lines that snake down the block. Advance purchased tickets can be bundled with the cost of the book being launched. For Michael Pollen, each and every ticket had to include the book. I first balked at this practice, but realized that the event itself was the enticement. A couple attending would end up with an extra book in exchange for taking part in a cultural happening. 


Women Writers, Women[’s] Books

Letting Go of Kids, and Characters

Mothers and fathers of young children can think they’re dealing with the greatest parenting challenges they’ll ever face. I remember feeling that way. For close to a decade I wandered through my days in a fog because I’d been up at night nursing or tending a sick child. But even the exhaustion and numbness that comes from caring for young children can be emotionally less fraught than what parents feel as our kids enter adulthood.

Instead of sweaty, crying babies pressed against our chests at 3 am, parents of young adults are wide-awake with worry, and most noticeably, alone. During this stage, we have to change every bit as much as our children do. It takes every scrap of self-confidence, faith, and optimism to stop steering their lives—to let them be who they’re going to be. 

Strangely enough, a similar process of letting go must happen when creating characters in fictional stories. In both life and in writing, our babies grow up and leave us. They become themselves, often in spite of us. 


Ron Hogan’s Beatrice

Black Tickets and Feminist Poets of Another Time

When I was twenty, Black Tickets, the story collection by Jayne Anne Phillips, with its hard-edged prose about hard-edged people, hit me hard. I’d read Hemingway’s short stories. Fitzgerald and Chekov, too. Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that one about the yellow wallpaper that everyone had to read. Unlike novels, short stories seemed the place to start for an aspiring young writer. Stories were like small sculptures, carefully shaped and refined, seemingly comprehensible with a single walk around. 

But when I tried to write them, mine tended to sprawl into an unruly mess. My pages grew dense and overwritten as I attempted to say too much. Then I read Black Tickets and saw that when you used restraint, you created meaning in a more powerful way. If you kept it minimal, you could leave your reader aching for more, at least that was the hope. But it wasn’t just Phillips’ style of writing that I admired and wanted to emulate. Her stories hit home because they were about women and girls, not unlike me. 


Literary Hub

A Woman Alone in China

THE STORY OF A MISSIONARY WHO STAYED

missionaries.jpg

In the summer of 1937 in Shanxi Province in North China, my grandmother, an American widow and the mother of a teenage son, swept invading Japanese soldiers off her front porch with a broom. I’ve tried to picture it: the soldiers in their khaki uniforms, sabers and pistols tucked into their belts, and my grandmother with her weapon of choice, a broom. Nothing could be more fitting than her use of that tool of everyday domesticity, which in the end would be the death of her.

In 1909, at the young age of 25, Gertrude Chaney traveled to China where she met my grandfather, the Reverend Watts Orson Pye, and they married in 1915. On the inhospitable plains and in the mountain hamlets of North China, the Reverend founded churches, built a library, a hospital, and roads, and converted thousands of Chinese to Christianity before his untimely death in 1926. He left behind his young widow and a five-year-old son, my father, Lucian Pye.


New York TImes | Opinionator

China of My Mind

When I tell people that I have recently published a novel set in China, one of the first questions they ask is whether I’ve been there. My response seems to be a letdown. The expectant look on their faces shifts as they wonder why I chose to write about a place I’ve never visited. Sometimes I sense incredulity. What makes me think I can write about China? 

My grandfather, Watts O. Pye, was one of the early missionaries to return to China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In Shanxi Province, he oversaw the building of a hospital, schools, a library and roads that brought famine relief. The Reverend Pye died young, but my father, Lucian W. Pye, remained in Shanxi with my grandmother, living in the mission compound under Japanese occupation. He finally left China for college, returned with the Marines at the end of World War II, and went on to become a renowned Sinologist and the author of over 20 books on Asia, and China in particular. 


The Rumpus

A Zealot and a Poet

WOP Hankie.jpg

A Mule, a Map, a Man and a Miracle: such is the quaint, alliterative and suspect title of an article written about my grandfather, a Congregational missionary in the nineteen teens in northwestern China. I have no quibble with the first three M-words: the Reverend Watts O. Pye was among the first white men ever to roam that desolate countryside, and he did it on mule back. He sketched a map of previously uncharted territory on linen fabric and kept a tally of his converts in a tattered leather notebook. These two talisman-like objects sat on my desk and haunted me as I wrote my novel, River of Dust, and tried to make sense of a legacy that prompts both pride and shame. It is the final M-word with which I disagree: what miracle and for whom?

Watts O. stood six foot four, had flaming red hair and wore round gold-rimmed glasses that John Lennon would have liked. He saw himself as a Renaissance man, raised on a farm in Minnesota and then educated at both Carleton and Oberlin Colleges. Later as he rode the rugged plains of China, he read aloud the Romantic poets to his trudging mule, shared the wisdom of Shakespeare with his probably baffled manservant, and waxed poetical about the purple hills in the distance.


The Quivering Pen

Writing is a Marathon Sport

Today marks the official publication date of Virginia Pye’s second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, and so I thought I’d share a few of her thoughts on the payoff of patience in a writing career. As a late-bloomer myself (Fobbit was published when I was 49 years old), I could relate to a lot of what Virginia had to say. Dreams of the Red Phoenix tells the story of Americans in China at the onset of WWII when the Japanese attack and Communism is on the rise. Kirkus says: “There’s a comparison to Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but this unflinching look...shares truth in its own way.” Virginia’s highly acclaimed first published book, River of Dust, is also a historical novel set in China. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and her essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Rumpus and elsewhere. 

At the age of twenty-seven, I sat in the impressive 57th Street office of one of New York’s top literary agents and listened as she described how Meryl Streep should play the mother and Judd Hirsch the father in the movie version of my first novel. As we stood to shake hands, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening so I asked outright if she was going to represent me and oversee my book’s publication. She smiled, because how my future was intended to unfold looked apparent to her. As I left the shiny chrome and glass building and walked up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park, I let it sink in that my life’s dream was about to come true, right on schedule. I would soon be a young star on the literary scene. I felt elated and satisfied and it all seemed too good to be true.