Virginia Pye

In Philadelphia, where my husband and I moved for his career, I taught at the University of Pennsylvania and found fellow writers who also taught writing, as well as neighbors who were poets and novelists. Those friendships kept my writing alive after I gave birth to our two children. I no longer had time to write novels but could work with other women writers to create a journal called Mother Tongue that captured our experience as new mothers.

In Richmond, Virginia, where we moved when our children were two and five years old, I found fellow authors through a fledgling literary non-profit called James River Writers. After attending one or two meetings, I was coaxed into becoming Secretary of the Board and before I knew it, I was chairing the organization. For the following ten years, I helped establish the reputation of the annual James River Writers Conference and substantially grow the membership. Working with other writers to build a strong, vibrant organization that encourages all writers was hugely important to how I saw myself as a writer. My role as a champion for other writers meant I necessarily had to champion myself.

The effort it takes to organize and support other writers takes time away from one’s desk. There are tradeoffs between making art and building a life that supports that art. But I’ve found that putting in the volunteer hours to connect with other writers, interview published authors, publicize other people’s books, all helped me in my career. Each time my books have come out, fellow writers who I’ve helped were happy to spread the word. But I didn’t do my volunteering for that end. The reward was in the conversations about writing that took place along the way: how to make the words sing on the page, how to deal with rejection, how to find time in our busy lives to create, and every other conceivable angle on the best ways to make a writing life.

Most recently, my husband and I moved as empty nesters to the Boston area, where I grew up. We live in Cambridge, the most bookish city I’ve ever known. People here read on the subway, while walking down the sidewalk, and when stopped in cars at intersections before the light turns green. The density of writers here, in particular women writers, far out numbers any other city where I’ve lived. There seems to be an unwritten rule in Cambridge that every block must have at least one woman novelist. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to know many of them.

I didn’t know hardly any when we first arrived, so went about deliberately seeking them out. If a local writer was having a book launch at one of the wonderful indie bookstores, such as Porter Square Books or Harvard Bookstore, I attended, bought their book, and introduced myself when they signed it, sometimes asking if they might have time for coffee or a drink. I attended hundreds of events in my first years here, and before long I was invited to post-launch gatherings or other parties where I met more local writers. All this socializing might make you think I wasn’t doing any writing, but I’ve written two books since moving to Cambridge and am well into the next one.

I feel fully a part of the literary scene in my hometown now. I frequently attend book events or take part as a featured speaker or as an interviewer of other authors. It seems obvious that having fellow writers as friends and colleagues helps with the business of writing. Many of my new writing friends have connected me to their agents or publicists or other publishing contacts and I’ve connected other writers to mine. I’m immensely grateful to those who’ve written blurbs for my most recent novel as I’ve now written blurbs for new writer friends when asked.

Knowing that fellow writers are at their desks every day, moving forward with their process, creating books, landing deals, seeking representation, speaking at literary events—all the ways we build an author’s life—inspires me to do the same. They provide brilliant examples and encouragement that I can do this, too. We may not together put words on the page, but we are together as we share our work in the world. Having fellow writers as friends makes writing less lonely. And less loneliness makes for better work and, of course, a better life.

The reality of a waning attention span, though, looms over my, and perhaps your, literary life. Recent studies suggest the average undivided attention span for adults today has shrunk to just eight seconds. Eight seconds! Against a statistic like that, novels haven’t got a prayer. More and more people are listening to audio books as a cheat against distraction. You can drive, wash dishes, and walk the dog all while narration reaches some other part of the brain. Listening to a novel may require less concentration than reading a text, but I think still ‘counts’ as reading.

Still, there’s nothing as rewarding and engrossing as deep immersion in a book. It’s a complex experience that can be magical, taking a reader out of the present moment and their own body and into another world. Some people find listening to music transporting. Or watching a film. To my mind, those experiences don’t require the same meeting of imaginations that takes place between a reader and a writer.

But what does this have to do with crafting our own work? I’d say everything. As Margot Livesey has put it, we must “learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend.”  As we absorb the written words of others, we not only learn about structure, character development, and all the other choices a writer must make, we also develop a crucial ear for language. So much of good writing is the shape and rhythm of sentences. By reading well-structured syntax, we internalize it and more easily make it our own. Familiarity with the vast array of written voices paradoxically offers a better chance to be innovative and original. How else to know what’s already been done so we don’t repeat it–or are at least aware when we do? In reading broadly, we position ourselves within the literary conversation that’s been carrying on for not just years, but generations.

So, what sorts of books should you read if you want to become a better writer? I’d say read in your genre. Read outside your genre. Read the classics, however you define them. Read experimental writing. Read poetry. Read dialect-driven work. Read in translation. Read zines and graphic novels. Read what you love and what you don’t yet love.

When in the midst of a project, some writers avoid books set in a similar place and time to their own story. Not me. For my latest book, set in Gilded Age Boston, I read novels from that era and novels set in that era. I immersed myself in Henry James and Edith Wharton, and more recent books, such as Katharine Howe’s The House of Velvet and Glass. Because my protagonist is a romance and adventure writer, and I knew I wanted my novel to play with romance tropes, I even watched Bridgerton and The Gilded Age, as well as reading romance novels from the 1800s. My goal was to see how this historical period has been portrayed and to learn the vocabulary—and the well-worn clichés—that my readers would bring to my story. By knowing the territory, I could borrow what was useful while forging my own way.

I would classify this type of reading as research. But I would recommend that the bulk of reading be unspecific and wide-ranging. I’m not part of a book group because I like following my own instincts when choosing a next book. One author may lead to a different author, or to another book by the same author. One subject may warrant reading several relevant books. To determine what to read next, I consult book reviews and listen to recommendations, especially from writer friends. There is some logic to how I choose the novels I read, but it’s intuitive and non-linear.

A top priority are well-crafted novels, where the language entices and seduces. The pleasure of reading beautifully honed sentences is gratifying in itself, separate from the story. I just finished How to Build a Boat, by the Irish writer Elaine Feeney. This 2023 Booker Prize longlist finalist moved me and offered valuable lessons. It shifts primarily between two main point-of-view characters—a mentally different teenage boy and his special ed teacher—each with their own arc leading them toward happiness. I admired Feeney’s deceptively simple sentences, so packed with specificity to create fully realized characters.

“Tess had indeed been planning her whole life, even as a kid how to get to school, how to make a lunch, where to buy a uniform, how to set alarms, to cook meals, to fill out forms, to have two keys at all times, to have some runaway money , to have emergency money, to water down the spirit bottles at home, to make excuses, to all of the excuses why friends wouldn’t come over, in the end it is easier not to make friends, to be guarded, to self-protect at all costs. To keep going, to keep going. She started crying hard now.”

And here’s an altogether different paragraph from the author Paul Bowles, whose elegant and dramatic 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky, I return to from time to time to be reminded that setting can dictate the very language of a story—in this case, the hot, dusty, mysterious city of Fez shown in languorous, winding sentences.

“The street lights were very far apart now, and the streets had left off being paved. Still there were children in the gutters, playing with the garbage and screeching. A small stone suddenly hit him in the back. He wheeled about, but it was too dark to see where it had come from. A few seconds later another stone, coming from in front of him, landed against his knee. In the dim light he saw a group of small children scattering before him. More stones came from the other direction, this time without hitting him. When he got beyond, to a point where there was light, he stopped and tried to watch the two groups in battle, but they all ran off into the dark, and so he started up again, his gait as mechanical and rhythmical as before. A wind that was dry and warm, coming up the street out of the blackness before him, met him head on. He sniffed at the fragments of mystery in it, and again he felt as unaccustomed exaltation.”

I feel enriched by reading two such masterful, stylistically different writers and would love to write as well as they do. Saul Bellow describes a healthy envy when he says that “every writer is a reader moved to emulation.” The range of literary styles we encounter when we read widely helps our internal, writerly mind stay flexible and open to the possibilities of language. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are our raw materials. It’s important to be familiar with the many ways they can been used. There’s no end to the cleverness of past writers of all backgrounds, ever creating, ever reinvigorating language.

I’m curious to know what types of books you like to read as you write. Do you read in your genre or avoid it? Do you read stories that take place in the setting or time where your work is set? What stimulates not just your imagination but your writerly skills? What reading have you done that makes you a better writer?

But what could I make of a wet, white day like that one? Despite my determination to see the morning as significant and my desire for the day to unfold like a book, with love appearing by the end of chapter one, the truth was nothing special would happen that day. Nothing could meet the literary high hopes that a May snowfall promised. I didn’t yet understand that a story is a construction, and life isn’t a story. It has no author, even when the life belongs to a writer.

Now, on a snowy day some fifty years and four published books later, I’m still trying to capture that same feeling in words. An urgency about life. A desire to share what it means to be human. A longing to convey something real on the page.

The closest I’ve come thus far, as far as I can tell, is my most recent novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. It’s about a writer who struggles in her own unselfconscious way with inventing a life both on the page and off. Victoria is a dime novelist, a hack writer of romance and adventure tales in Gilded Age Boston. But from the very first scene, we learn that she wants more as a writer. She wants to write novels that convey what it’s like to be a real woman, not one of the heroines of the moralistic, frivolous tales that her publisher demands she pen.

Victoria is not a young woman when we meet her, and she looks back on her childhood and twenties as times of great loss. Her marriage hasn’t panned out well. Her dreams of being an author have turned into drudgery as she churns out predictable stories, much like, as she says, “a sausage factory or a brick works.” Instead, she wants to write novels about young women who, like her, have faced actual challenges, whether from poverty, lack of opportunities, or the sexism of an earlier time. She wants to explore the true story of women of her day.

Thanks to industrialization, the young women of the mid- to late 1800s were the first American women to leave their family farms. They moved to the city and lived independently. Cared for by neither parents nor husbands, they came together in boarding houses and worked in shops, factories, offices, and as domestics. The public school system had democratized reading. The cost of books came down as the price of paper and production decreased. The delivery of books via the railroads allowed for easier distribution. All these factors fed the voracious reading appetites of young women. Starting in the mid-1860s, the dime novels and longer novels for women began to sell in the hundreds of thousands. Women readers and women writers quickly transformed publishing from small family-run businesses into the companies that were precursors of the industry we know today.

Women read during their lunch hours, on the trolley to and from work, and in the evenings in the sitting rooms of their shared homes. I can picture them doing up their hair like Gibson Girls and emulating the latest fashion on meager budgets. But I especially love to imagine them poring over printed stories of girls like themselves who faced near catastrophe but were saved time and time again by men who arrived, sometimes quite literally, on a white horse. Familiar tropes of romance novels have come to us from these earlier books and my character Victoria Swann is an expert at using them.

And yet, like me on that snowy morning, she aches to say more. She’s not well educated. She has a distrust of respected literary authors, such as Henry James and Gustav Flaubert, whose novels delve into the minds and hearts of their female characters. Irritated that those gentlemen of letters had garnered such praise, Victoria says, “…women are crushed under the weight of the world’s disregard. All my life, I’ve known I wasn’t much. Every girl knows it in her own way. But those gentleman authors seem to believe they’re the first to have discovered the absolute torment of being an intelligent woman in this day and age, or any other. To be unseen and unheard is a tragedy of the first order, yet women routinely endure it.”

At the back of the dime novels are published letters written by actual readers, young women asking for help. Many of their complaints describe “me too” moments at work, instances of domestic abuse, and other forms of exploitation. Following those letters are advertisements for women’s health, predominantly thinly veiled abortion-related products—potions, monthly pills, apparatuses, and the post office box addresses of doctors who would discreetly, and no doubt lucratively, provide such services. The real life of the young women of that earlier era was far different from the romanticized version in the novels they loved.

When Victoria attempts to tell the true tales of young women, we sense that her skills as a writer are better suited to her romances. Purple prose remains her forte. But the impulse is there. As it was for me as a teenager, and as it is to this day. I’ve written novels and short stories that tell different stories set in different lands and eras, but they all try for the thing that Victoria wants as well: to convey things as they really are. To accurately portray the struggles faced by the determined young women of the late 1800s. To reveal the passion of a woman writer who wants to say more. To capture the mystery and longing of a snowy morning in May. My character and I—and I believe most writers—do our very best to bear witness to life as it appears out a window at dawn with all the surprise, heartache, and beauty of being alive.

A question faced by all writers, no matter their level of experience, is how and when to solicit critical feedback. How can you know when your work-in-progress is ready to be seen and who should you trust to respond both honestly and constructively?

The decision is different for short stories. A critic reads them in full and can respond to a writer’s overall intentions. With a longer work, when a reader may respond to only part of the whole, comments can feel less useful. Novel workshops are often structured to offer feedback one chapter at a time. It works for some writers, but in my experience, piecemeal criticism, especially of an early draft, can miss the mark or even lead the writer astray.

The most useful feedback, in my view, responds to the manuscript as a whole. This requires greater commitment from a friend or colleague, of course. And from the novelist, it requires more patience with the process. We can’t rush to finish if we’re waiting to hear back from a reader who’s evaluating the book from beginning to end.

This slowing down can often work in the writer’s favor, a “forced” breather from a manuscript can create much needed distance, even before hearing any comments. More than once, a break from a novel-in-progress has helped me prepare for a critique that’s coming my way.

But when should we ask for this gift of time and insight from our first readers? It’s time to seek out first readers when you’ve done enough self-editing to not feel embarrassed by our effort, and yet still know the manuscript needs plenty of work. A first reader needs to see the big picture, assessing the novel in its entirety and not focusing on the sentence level.

The writer should guide their reader with basic questions, such as what works in my manuscript and what feels weak? What did you want more of? What did you find extraneous? An early reader should be someone whose literary tastes you trust. Not everyone is skilled at giving literary feedback, so you’ll want to avoid anyone who’s too prescriptive or insistent, as their opinions may undermine your confidence or constrain your imagination.

Even with the value and necessity of a first reader, I try not to share a manuscript until I’ve completed a full draft. For me, that really means two drafts. In a first draft, I stake out the storyline and my characters start to come into focus. But it isn’t until I complete a second draft that I know my characters well and the novel’s themes become clear to me. While writing a second draft, the novel can also surprise me with its own logic, which is one of the greatest joys in writing. It’s crucial that I allow for those moments of inspiration before anyone else weighs in.

In my most recent novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, the love story of the first draft is not the one that readers enjoy in the published book. It wasn’t until well into a second draft that the true love story emerged. I couldn’t yet tell how my story needed to unfold in the first draft. Critical feedback at this phase might have thrown me off course and derailed the discovery that became the crux of my story. I needed time and space to find it for myself before hearing what others thought.

Even so, once comments come back on a full manuscript, how exactly do you process them and extract the most useful and relevant points? For me, the best approach is to sit with them, let the criticism settle on the manuscript, and wait a while—meaning days or weeks. If a comment keeps popping up in my mind as I walk the dog or do the dishes, or, most especially, if I wake in the night turning it over in my mind, then I know there’s something to it. This can happen with the most considered suggestion offered by a reader, or from a comment tossed off by a friend.

Recently, over dinner at a friend’s house, I described my next novel, one I hope to send out soon on submission. It’s more-or-less finished—at least I thought so before our conversation. After hearing my description, my friend’s husband got excited. He liked the drama, the action, which reminded him of other memorable novels he’s read. As he spoke, I began to feel the novel he had in mind was more engaging than the novel I’d drafted. A disturbing, familiar sensation began to take over: doubt.

We all feel it. Every time we share our work-in-progress, we make ourselves vulnerable and the potential for doubt increases. We’re no longer the sole authority as others start to weigh in. By asking what readers think, we’re saying we need help. Whatever confidence we might have can become muddled as voices from the outside infiltrate our process.

Given an invitation to read a draft, a reader logically assumes it’s open to change. They may be eager to show their literary acumen, or maybe they’ve offered to read out of generosity, intending to show their care for the writer and the work. Sometimes though, they come at it from an unexpected angle, offering insights based on information or experience the writer has no way of knowing in advance. In other words, when a writer shares a work-in-progress, there’s no telling what they’ll receive.

For this reason, it’s important to be as discerning as possible when choosing who to trust with a work-in-progress. Who do we know well enough to ask for this labor of love—and to read a full-length draft is just that. Writers with established critique groups have a ready-made arrangement and it can be especially valuable to share with someone who’s already familiar with our work. But if a reader knows your writing too well and has made peace with your quirks, you might not be getting the objective feedback your book deserves.

I suggest choosing a reader with an affinity for your genre or style of writing. Fellow writers make the best readers because we share a critical vocabulary. But it can also be useful to share with someone who simply loves reading and has the capacity to discern and articulate their response. That person can let you know if your draft reads well, and which sections caused them to grow impatient or bored.

At later stages in the writing process, it’s also sometimes crucial to bring in another reader or two whose background or expertise informs their reading. These sensitivity or authenticity readers can help confirm or correct an author whose characters are unlike themselves in terms of race, ethnicity, class, regional background, or other differences.

I have found it helpful to ask more than one reader to critique the same draft. If several readers agree that something isn’t working, that’s a strong indication it’s something I need to address. But what to do if the readers differ in their responses? This has happened to me any number of times, especially when hearing back from literary agents, who often seem to focus on different aspects of a submission. When feedback isn’t unified or doesn’t point the writer in a clear direction, it’s time to take a breather and mull things over.

Over dessert, my new friend and her husband playfully tossed around title suggestions for the novel they thought I’d written. Their suggestions weren’t right, but I woke this morning wondering about my current title. No doubt I’ll ponder it again before bed tonight. The idea is worth pursuing because it’s insistent. It sticks in my craw and can’t be ignored. That’s a sure sign there’s something there.

It takes practice gained over years of sharing manuscripts to know when to let a comment sink in and when to dismiss it. There’s no real way to teach that. But listening to your own voice and returning to the vision you have for the novel is the best guide. Does the suggestion truly fit the book you’re writing? Is it organic, even though suggested by someone else? Does it add depth or clarity to the characters and story? This type of scrutiny can take an idea out of the realm of any defensiveness and into more neutral and useful territory.

The goal is to be as critical of the feedback as the feedback is of your novel. To be discerning about the voices you invite into your project. And to never forget that it is, first and foremost, your project. When you hear a chorus of insights, listen to those that work in harmony with your own voice, for that’s the one that matters most.

In her essays and books, Hamilton urged women not to conform to societal expectations and instead become what she called “androgynous,” by which she meant they should develop the side of themselves she felt most resembled men, giving up any tendency to remain ignorant of, or above, worldly, commercial dealings. She felt that women’s spiritual and artistic tendencies should be tamped down in favor of male decisiveness and firmer attitudes. She especially advised this for women writers, saying, “a certain prejudice against female writers ‘still lives.’ It is fine, subtle, impalpable, but real.”

Her assessment that women writers weren’t treated as equal to men was confirmed when she discovered that her publisher, whether by accident or design, had cheated her out of her royalties. Fields published Hamilton’s first book in 1862 and subsequently published seven more. Theirs was a friendly relationship until 1867, when Hamilton learned that most beginning authors received a 10% royalty, while she received only 6% and 7%. For her subsequent books, Fields had convinced her to accept 15¢ per copy. When they sold for $1.50 each, the arrangement was fair, but as the price of her books rose, her earnings didn’t.

Hamilton and Fields had no written contract, merely a congenial relationship that benefitted the publisher more than the author. When she approached him about the discrepancy, instead of acknowledging the error, he dismissed her complaint, calling her “aggressive” and “unwomanly.”

Hamilton pursued legal arbitration, gathering a sizable amount of data from other publishers and authors in an attempt to prove that the entire royalty system was arbitrary and capricious. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s widow shared that at the start of her husband’s career, he had received 15% from Fields but was later knocked down to 10%. Other authors received 20%, while Harriet Beecher Stowe received a full 50% of the profits from her highly successful books. It galled Hamilton that writers seemed grateful to accept whatever rates publishers chose for them.

Though she worked with a lawyer, Hamilton presented her own case in the hearing and petitioned for the 10% she had never received, plus an additional 7%, and legal expenses of $3,000. In their ruling, the arbitrators determined that neither party had intended to defraud the other—a decision that treated the two parties as equals, when clearly they were not.

Hamilton was awarded only $1,250, not even half of her legal costs. Though defeated in court, she continued to publish with other houses, and in 1870, she self-published a novel that contained a thinly veiled account of her legal fight titled A Battle of the Books. It received mixed reviews, including some scathing ones, and although it sold moderately well, she still lost money on it.

But the literary community took notice, and the veneer of gentlemen publishers was forever tarnished. Hamilton successfully warned writers to be wary of the supposed benevolence of the gentlemen’s business. Her case made it obvious that authors assigned too much importance to publishers’ reputations and not enough to their own financial interests.

In Hamilton’s opinion, a writer’s relationship to his or her publisher was too much like that of a submissive wife in a traditional marriage. An independent, self-defined woman, she refused any such constraining roles. Her outspoken, principled stand on this matter still offers an important reminder and model for writers today.

By 1872, due to the enormous popularity of certain women authors, some 75 percent of books were written by women. That’s a remarkable increase from almost no women authors at the beginning of the century—a change prompted by the rise of women readers, and largely because of the popularity of the dime novel.

What must it have been like to be a female author in that earlier time, especially in a literary setting such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city overrun with gentlemen of letters? Longfellow’s impressive mansion graces Brattle Street, and the ghosts of Henry James, Robert Frost, George Santayana, and W.E.B. Dubois still seem to roam the streets, not to mention Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, who visited often from the surrounding towns. A handful of women writers, such as Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott, are placed by historians and readers in the same company—but what about the others?

And what if, as a woman author, you wrote popular novels and dime store romances that aimed less for the intellect of your readers than the heart. Wouldn’t that put you at odds with the snobbish elite of such a high brow place? As I mulled over these questions, the protagonist of my novel The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann began to emerge.

Sleuthing for historical details about a woman author of romance and adventure tales in the 1890s, I hit the motherlode with the American Women’s Dime Novel Project, the work of historian Felicia Carr at George Mason University. I also discovered that Brandeis University has a treasure trove of dime novels that I could hold in my hands. These pamphlet-like publications have elaborate covers showing young women in distinctive hats or holding flowers, looking alluring and dangerous or wide-eyed and innocent. They have titles such as A Reckless Romance, A Fatal Past, A Dark Marriage Morn, or, perhaps most threatening of all, A Will of Her Own.

As the titles suggest, these flimsy “novels” (which we might today call long short stories or novellas) were criticized as lurid and trashy. In purple prose, the plots describe sensational romances or murder mysteries in which young women are led astray and even to their ultimate demise. The purpose of dime novels, besides helping the publishing industry expand from family run businesses to full-fledged companies, was to uphold the mores of their time.

Marriage is the primary, and often only, goal of their female protagonists. Wedding someone with wealth is a young lady’s highest achievement. Modesty and preserving oneself for a future husband are the means. Young women who go off the rails, lured into disreputable society by flashy young men, pay the price. The dangers of sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage are clearly illustrated and punished.

Despite these stern warnings disguised as fiction, the backs of dime novels reveal a different story. After the morality tales come the Letters of the Lovelorn, written by real women seeking advice about abusive relationships, harassing bosses, and unwanted pregnancies. Advertisements offer thinly veiled abortion services by doctors who can only be contacted via PO boxes because abortion was illegal. Potions and strange apparatuses also address an unnamed problem, though presumably everyone understood what they were for. The back pages of the popular fantasy tales of that era exposed the true story of women’s lives for what they really were.

The cost of books overall had come down since the mid-1800s, so that more working people could afford them. The readers of the dime novels and senders of the lovelorn letters were primarily working-class women. But dime novels for men were also wildly popular, especially among soldiers in the Civil War, because they were inexpensive and easy to carry.

The newest and most dedicated book buyers were the young women who migrated from the farms into the city starting in the late-1800s, becoming known as “New Women.” They worked in factories, sweatshops, as domestic help, and in white collar offices. They lived together in boarding houses. Their work was often dangerous when not drudgery and always required long hours. They saved their pennies to purchase dime novels, where they found escape in the tales of young women, like themselves, facing terrible challenges, albeit of a more fanciful variety. A renegade prince or evil aristocrat could help allay, or distract from, the pain and confusion of dealing with a rough boyfriend or disrespectful boss.

Dime novels flourished into the 20th century, even though middle-class moralists decried them as “degraded literature.” The most vocal objection came from Anthony Comstock, whose Society for the Suppression of Vice called them “vile books and papers [that] are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell, and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul.”

But as I read them, I thought of the many young women readers, new to a city and alone, who must have turned to these stories for solace. It seems unlikely that they actually believed the far-flung plots, but instead might have clung to them for company and courage. Much like soap operas or telenovelas, or certain lighter beach reads—the former “chick lit”—these stories entertained, diverted, and gave a sense of hope. They, quite reliably, offered happy endings, something not guaranteed in their own lives.

As silly and sentimental as dime novels might seem today, they brought joy to a vast number of new women readers, creating an astounding expansion of literacy in the US. They were also crucial in transforming publishing into the thriving industry of today.

In high school, novels with teen protagonists seem sophomoric to me though I’m barely a sophomore. Hemingway’s short stories fascinate me with their adult infidelities and whispered tragedies. I write a first short story about a woman named Morgan who drinks too much in an unnamed foreign country with an unnamed man who doesn’t love her.

Trying to find my voice in writing leads me to steal from not just Hemingway but my brother, too. Some years after he leaves the house, I find a copy of the literary magazine he helped run when he was in high school. It contains a story about an older brother and younger sister who come upon a bird trapped under branches in a snowy wood and try to decide if they can save it. With sparse dialogue, the siblings leave the dying bird behind and do the difficult, inevitable task of being children, not saviors. I want to be the younger sister and to have that unspoken connection with my brother.

I love that story, and so I do what I’d done with Hemingway. I take it and write a new story around it. In mine, a younger sister comes upon a story written by her older brother and appropriates it. There’s a conflict, maybe about the parents, and the kids don’t run back through the silent woods together. They end up separated and disenchanted from one another. I swipe my brother’s voice to jump-start my own and for the first time manage to express something that interests others. T.S. Elliot said, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” But I steal because I’m not even a good writer, not yet anyway.

It takes chutzpah to write. A certain arrogance to think others want to hear your stories. I can spot writers—often men—who’ve been taught from the start that what they think is interesting and worthy. They carry themselves in life and on the page with confidence. Then there are writers like me—perhaps more often women—who write to prove that we do in fact know something. We may stumble in person but can summon the words on the written page. Our type of writer will win in the long run, we think. We’ll have the last say.

In high school, I continue to follow my brother’s footsteps, falling in love with a poet he admired. Denise Levertov wrote powerful anti-war poems, but it’s her love poems I memorize. I carry a copy of her New Directions paperback, Footprints, in my back pocket until it’s bent to my shape. Summer in the folds of your dress / mysterious fabric / and in the disturbing gentle grace of your neck. Anne Sexton’s love poems, ripe with sorrow and regret, also speak to me. Climb her like a monument, step after step. / She is solid. / As for me, I am a watercolor. / I wash off. I’ve had boyfriends by then, but nothing in my experience adds up to the passion in the lines I love.

I write constantly, reaching for something deeper and more transcendent yet with no idea how to get there. What a struggle to tell a fictional story with any truth to it and even worse to compose a personal essay for college applications. Draft after draft of rambling, empty words. My parents don’t even bother to fake a positive response. One night, with an application due the next day, I overhear my father whispering to my mother in the next room, What’s wrong with her? She can’t think straight. She can’t write!”

I’m mortified, found out for the hack that I am. But the arguments I never allowed myself at the dinner table, the retorts frozen on my lips, make me quietly determined. I might not be good yet, but no one’s going to stop me from trying. In the end, I submit a short story inspired by an experience while traveling overseas. To my surprise, I’m accepted where I want to go, a college that values creative writing.

At Wesleyan, I find a mentor, who, for our year of study together, is tough but doesn’t dissuade me from my dream of being a writer. In her comments at the bottom of my final short story, Annie Dillard says that I will write books for the rest of my life; I have what it takes to turn terrible first drafts into works of art. Her surprising words keep me going for decades, though I know I have what I always had: a quiet determination and, as yet, little skill.

Annie tells me to read Black Tickets. In her stories, Jayne Anne Phillips uses restraint to create powerful meaning. Keep it minimal. Leave your readers aching for more. Phillips’s sentences are as tough and clean as Raymond Carver’s, but she writes about girls and young women, people like me. Her short story Home is one I had wanted to write for years. Soon, I carry a paperback of Black Tickets everywhere I go. When I sit down to write, a copy is splayed open on my desk, as if Phillip’s words, her wisdom, can transfer onto my page.

At Sarah Lawrence for my MFA, Allan Gurganus and Joan Silber, brilliant writers, teach by sharing the works of other great writers—Chekov, Bable, O’Connor, Trevor, Monro. Reading well is the best way to learn to write, though how exactly that happens remains a mystery. I complete a first novel about a family mired in regrets and misunderstandings between parents of the Greatest Generation and children of the 60s and 70s. It gets a top agent and comes close to publication, but I don’t have sufficient distance on such personal terrain. I also don’t have any confidence I’ll do it better next time.

Still trying to find my voice on the page, I remain tongue tied with my family. I assume their thoughts are critical, so part of my mind is caught up anticipating their slights. I start a sentence with one idea and veer off into parenthetical clauses. A renowned political scientist and author of more than twenty books on Chinese politics, my father says, “There’s nothing more beautiful than a simple sentence. Just say it straight!” Hard to do with commands running through my brain to be forceful when feeling anything but.

It takes years to free myself from my tangled, inarticulate thoughts around others. Almost as long as it takes to find my voice on the page. After writing numerous short stories and five more unpublished novels, in my early fifties, my imagination carries me to historical rural China where my first two published novels, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, are set. By removing any shadow of myself from the narrative and telling a story in a distant place and time, I’m able to speak through my characters in a new way.

Inspired by my minister grandfather’s journals and Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, my China novels tell imagined versions of my father’s childhood as the son of American missionaries. By inventing characters based on my grandparents and my father as a boy, I’m able to feel sympathy for them and break free from my father’s censure. I wrestle not only with him on every page, but also my family’s colonial legacy as Christians sent to convert the Chinese. Delving into that mired past, I take a stand against any presumed authority my family once held. It feels right and good to speak up through fiction.

The words flow more easily now. I loved writing my latest book, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. A lady in Gilded Age Boston, Victoria couldn’t be further removed from me, yet as a woman novelist, she and I have a lot in common. An author of romance and adventure tales, she longs to tell her own true story but is thwarted by the men in her life—her publisher, who wants her to continue her lucrative series and her husband, an addicted ne’er do well, who sponges off her income. When she goes against their wishes, she loses everything and must rebuild her life, mostly with the help of other women who understand her predicament.

I use a light tone, playing on romance novel tropes, to create a nineteenth-century world of flowing dresses, feathered hats, and characters who I came to love. I also try to tell a serious story that could easily take place today.

Like my own story, it centers around a woman who hasn’t been taught to appreciate herself. Though a success, she’s kept in her place by low expectations and the sexism of those closest to her. But she has a hidden determination to prove them wrong. Far from a hack, she’s a spokeswoman for others who struggle to be seen and heard. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that by the end of the novel Victoria has found her true voice.

When I sit down to write now, I feel her same sense of confidence, purpose, and joy. I may not know exactly where I’m going when I start a piece of writing, but I’m sure I can find my way. I trust that the words will come. I know I’ll speak my mind, both on and off the page.

I start to invent challenges that my main character might face. This is where the fun begins. I love making up crazy plot ideas. I jot them down in a notebook or on scraps of paper. I wake at 4 am with a wild twist in mind. I imagine my protagonist encountering all sorts of difficulties, most of which will never appear in the final novel. Her personal qualities emerge as I throw her into dangerous waters, whether actual or emotional. I’m still not writing scenes, but notes-to-self. I decide she would fight back if her husband said he’s leaving her. She would stay behind with her son as the last boat leaves the harbor.

On three-by-five cards, I mark chapter numbers, just the first few, not a whole book’s worth. On each card I write a rough idea of what might take place—the basics of setting and the movement of the story. An opening scene has bubbled up in my mind and through a process of elimination, it outlasts other wrong ideas. It’s time to finally put fingers to keyboard and write.

What does this have to do with how you should start writing your own novel? Possibly very little. But I offer these details of “my process”—which I put in quotes because it’s inevitably different with each book—to show the imprecision of the practice of novel-writing. If I stumble on a great idea while brainstorming, the book will veer off in that direction until it’s no longer the book I thought it was going to be. I’ll turn over the index cards and start again.

The notion that I know what I’m doing because I’ve written other novels seems laughable—though in a way I do, because what I know without a doubt is that this is how it goes: with each novel, I must find my path through the thicket. And yet, with each book comes greater confidence that the task can be done, though how exactly remains unclear.

I’ve read writing books that suggest novelists should follow a similar roadmap to screenwriters, making our stories conform to a shape everyone agrees is successful. We’re to create arcs that fit into set page allotments and build structure in expected ways. Those sorts of suggestions may work for some writers, but for me, the creation of a novel is organic.

But I do think that both writers and readers have expectations of how we should feel by the end of the first section, in the middle, at the culmination of a story, and finally, its denouement. Such shared understandings come more from reading novels than from writing them. When writing, I try to follow my readerly instincts, which rarely lead me astray.

In the end, each novel is a culmination of all the novels a writer has read and all the many drafts she’s left behind. When I hold one of my published books, I know what I’m really holding is the result of deleted scenes, characters who were cut, and storylines dropped. After each finished novel, I have packing boxes full of typed drafts and innumerable computer files that were crucial in making the final story. So many pages written and edited alone, and with the help of fellow writers and publishing professionals. My novels that weren’t accepted for publication probably should have jettisoned more and been revised more thoroughly. I didn’t hang in there long enough with those books to finally get them right.

It takes a great deal of patience and fortitude to engage in a living process such as novel writing. I hope you find your way to a finished book whatever your process may be. And while you’re trekking alone on your unique path to your finished novel, pounding away for days, weeks and years, just know that other novelists are alongside you on their own novel’s mysterious path. Stay with it. Trust it. Make it your own.

The myth of the Lost Cause gave us not just Civil War monuments but also hagiographies of so-called Confederate heroes. One published in 1892 by a sycophant named Pleasant Stovall was passed down to me. By my generation, Toombs was a persona non grata in our family. I remember my grandmother cringing at the mention of his name. She was a well-educated Southern white who supported civil rights in the ’60s. And yet, half a century earlier, she and my grandfather had clung to Toombs’ prestige when they saddled my mother with the compound first name of Mary Toombs, the second half of which she jettisoned as soon as she moved up North as a young woman.

On his return to America in 1867, Robert Toombs was granted, as Stovall writes, “a long interview with his old senatorial colleague, President Andrew Johnson. He went home from Washington and was never again molested.”

Never brought to court, never held fully accountable, never stopped. Like other Confederate leaders, Toombs was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and barred from seeking public office, but wasn’t shunned or silenced.

Instead, he became more emboldened than ever. In 1875, when Republicans in Congress put forward a General Amnesty Act with a single provision excluding Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs, the Democrats refused to accept the amendment and the bill was never passed. When asked why he didn’t seek a pardon, Toombs replied, “Pardon for what? I haven’t pardoned you all yet.”

He continued to fight for white supremacy and in July 1868, Stovall writes, “a memorable meeting was held in Atlanta. It was the first real rally of the white people under the new order of things. There was much enthusiasm, and crowds gathered from every part of Georgia.” The rally was reported to be the largest in state history and Toombs its most rousing orator. “Leaders deprecated his extreme views, but the hustings rang with his ruthless candor,” Stovall reports.

Toombs’ populist Jim Crow rhetoric appealed to white farmers and workers afraid of a changing society and who were harboring a deep resentment of federal authority. But Toombs was respected at the highest levels of society, too. In 1872, the University of Georgia invited him to deliver the commencement address. Far from being ostracized, he had multiple platforms from which to rail against the rights and rules put in place during Reconstruction, declaring, Stovall writes, that they were “the product of ‘aliens and usurpers,’ and that he would have none of it.”

At the Georgia constitutional convention of 1877, Toombs argued that “a new and ignorant element had been thrown in among the people as voters,” and as Stovall quotes Toombs, “We must not only protect ourselves against them but in behalf of the poor African, I would save him from himself ... [since] their previous condition ... was such as to disqualify them from exercising the right of self-government.”

The racist views of Robert Toombs and others like him continue today in Donald Trump and those Republicans desperate to limit voting rights in order to hold onto power.

We must do all we can to prove the late American writer William Faulkner wrong when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” We must make it past. We must not allow our era’s Robert Toombses to dominate. He belongs in the dustbin of history and with him those who are trying to take our country backwards instead of forward into a fairer and more equitable future. 

Newtonville Books runs events practically every night of the week, including their popular Friday Night Book Club. They often create unexpected pairings of authors, creating lively conversations. In general, the level of questions at all these events has struck me as noticeably sophisticated. Though generally well past college age, the Boston audiences haven’t forgotten their Advanced Lit. classes, and some may still teach them. 

The staff at Porter Square Books, which I’m happy to call my local store, is also deeply knowledgeable about books. If you don’t know a title or author but just the subject, there’s a good chance one of them won’t give up until they’ve tracked it down. And as model for other indie bookstores, PSB has devised a way of rewarding their dedicated senior staff with eventual ownership of the store. When the current husband and wife team retire, they’ll sell fifty percent equity to a group of nine management-level employees. Over the following ten years, the group will use their profits to pay back the loan and come to own the store outright. 

PSB also cultivates its community by encouraging local writers. In the coming months, they’re launching a Writers-in-Residence Program. Two writers will serve a nine-month term, during which they’ll enjoy a staff discount, access to advance reader copies, and a key to the store’s offices on nights and weekends to provide a quiet place to work. 

Over in Jamaica Plain, JP Papercuts has also created a strong following among readers and writers.  The charming five hundred square foot shop is stacked high with perfectly curated books. In addition to hosting events, they’ve launched their own publishing imprint, Cutlass Press, which features New England authors. And everyone is relieved that Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street has just reopened after closing because of a fire, their café and reading series up and running again. 

On the main street of the suburban town where I grew up, recently opened Belmont Books attracts children with a sunny, upstairs kid’s area, and for adults a great selection of books and the Black Bear Cafe on the first floor. Welcoming and beautiful, the store is already a hub of community activity. 

There are other ways to explore literary Boston besides the indie bookstores. There’s the Boston Literary District—one of the only such dedicated historic districts in the country; the Boston By Foot Literary Tours—which takes you in the footsteps of Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Fuller; the impressive public libraries in Cambridge, Boston, Brookline and the other nearby towns; plus the innumerable universities, all of which offer book-related lectures open to the public; the literary journals, such as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, and the new Pangyrus, each hosting their own book happenings; and the close proximity to that great nexus of nineteenth century authors in Concord—home of Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, and more. 

But, ultimately, it’s the living writers who make a book-loving/bookish/well read town. Many local writers at all stages of their careers find one another through the GrubStreet writers organization, one of the largest literary non-profits in the country. Throughout the year, they run over six hundred workshops, intensive classes, consultations, and other programs for adults and teens on every aspect of writing and the business of writing. And every spring, they put on the impressive Muse and Marketplace Conference, which has been named best literary conference by The Writer magazine and is attended by aspiring writers from across the country and globe.

I feel fortunate to have met fellow writers not just in the bookstores or at Grub Street, but simply around Cambridge. Knowing that dozens of novelists are hunkering down at their desks nearby gives me comfort and encouragement. I’m convinced I’ve landed in a literary Eden and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that way. Often I pass strangers on the sidewalks who hold a book in hand and read as they walk, unable to pull themselves away from the page. For this reader and writer, that’s my kind of town.

I’m frequently surprised by the motivations that propel my characters forward. But I’ve learned that even if I didn’t anticipate an action, it needs to be respected and explored. In my story White Dog, the elderly artist raises a rifle and before I could foresee what was going to happen next, he aimed directly at a target that would ruin him. As the gun goes off, I sensed he’s making a colossal mistake, one that will forever define him. I would have liked to change his course, and obviously I could, but his life story (some of which is known, but most of which isn’t, even to me) has led him to this. The guy is who he is, god help him, especially since that god, ostensibly, is me. 

Many parents feel that way about their children when as young adults they become involved in relationships we sense aren’t right; they drop out of school, even though we think they shouldn’t; or they head off for the other coast, imagining things will be more exciting there, when we’re sure they won’t. At least, we think so. Because the truth is, we don’t know how things will turn out any better than they do. We don’t know for certain which is the path to happiness and fulfillment any better than I, as a writer, know all the implications of that cocked rifle. Will it make my character more loved, though flawed? Will it help him to find peace, though he’s created havoc? Will it set him free? I can sense the consequences of each choice but the nuances remain complex and mysterious and ultimately up to the reader to decide. 

In other words, the old saw about fiction writers playing god with their characters only makes sense if we believe that god has a hazy idea of things. I can set my characters on a path and push them forward, but I rely on others to grasp the full meaning of their fates. Maybe some writers are more systematic. Writers post on Facebook the methods they use to chart character motivations and outcomes, employing index cards and spreadsheets. But for me, the process of understanding my characters is much the same as it is with my children: I get them through and through, but after a certain point, they mystify me. 

As parents we can’t help trying to nudge our young adult children toward happiness. We follow their paths closely, elbowing them gently to the right or the left. In the same way, I set up my characters in situations where they can show themselves. I encourage them to take road trips to reveal their bravery. I send them spinning on the dance floor, shimmying ever closer toward love. And, because this is fiction, I even have them crash and burn, better to rise from the ashes. When a bruising accident takes place on the asphalt, my young skateboarder hobbles forward, straight into adulthood. 

On a sunny, spring afternoon not long ago, the boy skateboarder in one of my stories and my real life child crossed paths and left me behind. I had asked my twenty-one year old son to read a story I wrote years before, back when he was a pre-teen and learning to skateboard. He had worked day after day in the driveway, trying to get his board to rise up off the ground. His young, short legs didn’t have the strength to make it happen, yet he stayed out there in the cold of winter and heat of summer. I think it took him two years to do his first kick flip and I often tried to save him from that frustration, but he wasn’t to be thrown off course. 

At a certain point in those years, I realized that he was doing what I did each time I sat down at my desk: he was trying to perfect his art—even though he would have groaned at me for framing it that way. Admiring of his efforts, I wrote a story about a kid who is rude to his father, but who is as dedicated as any serious artist. The boy in my story isn’t my son, but he’s inspired by him.

So when I asked my twenty-one year old if he’d read that story and offer corrections to my skateboarding terms, I knew I was asking him to make the adult leap to understanding the complex relationship between fiction and life. As he sat with his head bent low over the manuscript, I couldn’t help noticing how he had grown into a handsome, competent, and good-hearted young man. He tossed off helpful edits and improved the boy’s dialogue by deleting outmoded slang. 

But what touched me most was when he shook his head and snickered quietly, saying, “Oh, Mom, this is definitely me.” I laughed a little, too, embarrassed by the way I had stolen from him to make a new, fictional life. But before I had a chance to reiterate that the boy in the story really wasn’t him—my son had never been as obnoxious as my character—my now adult boy interrupted my thoughts by saying, “I know, I know, I get it. The kid is his own person.” 

I know, I know, I get it. Maybe that’s as much as we can hope for from our readers—a confirmation that a story makes sense on a visceral level and exists without explanation from the writer. The characters and the choices they make have a certain, inalienable logic. The path they follow seems right. They are who they are. 

And yet, it still remains hazy how to achieve that understanding, in much the same way that it’s never entirely clear how a parent can go from thinking we know what’s best for our children to understanding that they know what’s best for themselves. It’s a process of letting go, trusting them and the story that is now theirs to tell, because it’s their lives after all, not ours.

Even before Black Tickets became my anthem and guide, I had tucked poems by Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, and Adrienne Rich into my backpack and carried them like talismans with me wherever I went. In high school, I memorized their lines and copied them out into notebooks for what reason I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I loved those poems, loved the many lines that revealed the secret, passionate inner lives of women.

From Anne Sexton’s “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife”:

Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

Denise Levertov”s “The Good Dream”:

Rejoicing
because we had met again
we rolled laughing
over and over upon the big bed.
The joy was
not in a narrow sense
erotic—not
narrow in any sense….

It was the joy
Of two rivers
Meeting in the depths of the sea.

And Adrienne Rich’s “Natural Resources”:

“The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,
the lost brother, the twin—
for him did we leave our mothers,
deny our sisters, over and over?”

These women wrote about many subjects, often political, but what captured me most was the way they teased out the tangle of love that I both longed for and feared. Stoked by their fury and sorrow, and as importantly, by the precision of their words, I prepared myself for the battle for selfhood I sensed every woman had to endure. 

Their feminist ideas resonated because they were expressed so potently through poetry. I was learning from them not just about life, but about the power of words and their careful doling out. I sensed that a killer line—one that resonated deeply, even though I might not fully understand it—was armor against a difficult world. The urgency of their language took my breath away and made me want to someday write something as forceful and real. 

It was no wonder then that when Annie Dillard, my writing teacher in sophomore year at Wesleyan, praised a powerful collection by a young woman writer, I quickly tracked down a copy of Black Tickets. In Phillips’ pages I soon discovered the powerful combination of story telling and poetry that I had been searching for. Her sentences were as tough and clean as Raymond Carver’s, whose work Dillard had also recommended, but Phillips wrote about girls and young women in narratives that suggested lives far beyond the page. I felt a thrill of recognition in these tales that unmasked the struggle of ordinary female lives. 

Phillips’ “Home” felt like one I’d been trying to write for years without knowing it. The story lacked sentimentality and yet was full of nostalgia for a stolen childhood. It showed a grappling with growing up and a recognizable tension between a mother and daughter. She said so much by saying so little. The short, declarative sentences left room for the reader to fill in the blanks with emotion, in a way familiar to me from the poetry I had long admired. 

Soon Levertov, Sexton, and Rich were replaced in my backpack by Black Tickets, which I then carried with me everywhere. When I sat down to write a short story for that first-ever fiction writing class with Dillard, I had my copy splayed open on the desk, as if I could somehow will Phillips’ smarts and style over to my pages. 

In looking back, I feel grateful to these women writers for exposing female lives with such fierceness and brilliance. I’ve spent the years ever since trying my best to follow their example.

Gertrude and her family had experienced another loss only a year before: her first surviving child had died at the age of seven. Little Mary Elizabeth and her father were both “sent home to Jesus” and buried out in the dusty, desolate countryside of North China. Her family back home in Ohio expected Gertrude to return to civilization post haste after these two tragic deaths, but instead, she decided to remain in China, not just for months, or years, but decades.

Gertrude raised my father in North China under the Japanese occupation. With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, when foreigners were strongly encouraged to leave, she stayed. When Lucian went off to college in America in 1939, she stayed. Only after Pearl Harbor was she forced to relent and finally return to the U.S. Why would a single American woman stay in a war zone, I have asked myself? Why would she remain long after her entire family had gone on to the other side or stateside?

In my novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, I try to answer that question in the way I know best: through the imaginative lens of fiction. I believe she stayed because of moments like that one when she swept the Japanese off her front porch with a broom. I picture her standing firm, a stocky, sturdy, strong woman who pulled back her shoulders, tucked in her chin, and faced the foe. She had survived extreme famine and drought during the year my father was born in 1921. She had survived the loss of several babies to miscarriage and death in childbirth, as well as the loss of her beloved young daughter, whose golden locks she preserved, and which sit in a bowl on my desk as a reminder of our family’s history. And she survived the loss of her much-admired husband, the man whose long stride had led her and so many others forward for a time. Those Japanese soldiers must have seemed like so much flotsam and jetsam to her when they stood on her floorboards. Sweep them off, she must! Such is the imperative of the heroic woman I imagine my grandmother to have been in that faraway place and time.

She stayed because she had led a purposeful life there, teaching Chinese women to be schoolteachers and educating Chinese children with firmness and affection. She had a reason for being and felt a great sense of belonging. According to her writing, they came to her with every sort of question and problem. She oversaw not just daily lessons, but personal issues of the heart, and often hygiene and medical concerns as well. When she finally returned to America, my grandmother came to live with us, but she always longed to return to China.

I imagine that she longed to go back not just to that fascinating, though difficult, landscape, but also to a version of herself that was powerful and needed by others. Her life in China had meaning and significance, while her years in the US must have seemed dull and inconsequential by comparison.

As history would have it that return was not to be. When China closed its doors to outsiders in 1949, her heart must have seized up with sorrow and frustration. The country she had come to think of as home was forever outside her grasp. My father, meanwhile, went on to become a professor of political science for over 40 years and a renowned Sinologist, writing dozens of books on the subject of Asian politics. And yet, according to him, it was his mother, more than himself, whose “whole life was China.”

My recollections of her, while vague, are uniformly rosy, though my father, mother and older siblings necessarily had more complex feelings about her. By their accounts, Gertrude was domineering and meddled in our family’s business. As she aged, it became more apparent that she belonged to another time. As a former missionary, she remained a teetotaler, putting a damper on my parent’s cocktail hour. She felt they were too lenient with her grandchildren and too materialistic overall. The woman who had once managed by her wits and will power against dangerous odds in a foreign land was now reduced to sniping about the domestic habits of her son and his brood. She and my mother locked horns over the decorating of the house—the placement of the Chinese furniture and objects that had once belonged exclusively to her and now belonged to the family. She had been far too bold a younger woman to be relegated to such a superfluous life. The contrast must have been maddening to her.

When she died in 1966, I was only six years old, but I still have a clear impression of her. Leaning into the embroidered pillows on the antique Chinese sofa, she let her youngest grandchild crawl into her lap. I pulled on her ears and with a child’s innocence asked why they were so long. In an adult voice—for she never took on a babyish tone—she explained that Confucians believe that long earlobes are a sign of wisdom and sagacity. I was instantly awed by the idea and knew with certainty that it must be true, especially about her.

My grandmother had a wry sense of humor, but she was not a light-hearted person. I am told that she favored me and was at her warmest when she brought down her fine Chinese porcelain for us to use in tea parties. I suspect my love of Chinese objects dates back to those special moments when I could sense how precious they were to her. She had left the country behind, but still had these treasures to carry her back in her mind. And she was willing to share them with me. I felt she was offering me an unspoken gift that I have only now repaid with my novel.

Years later, when my father was an old man, he shared another astonishing anecdote of hubris and heroism by my grandmother. Out at the family’s country cottage in the Chinese foothills, bandits had swooped down in the middle of the night. They came to rob the mill nearby and break into the small cluster of missionary homes. My grandmother threw her shawl over her nightgown, stepped out onto the porch in the moonlight, and shouted at the bandits. She told them that their evil intentions were wrong and very bad. The masked men seemed astonished by this white woman who raised her voice and scolded them in their own language. They turned their horses around, shamed and perhaps even a bit frightened.

Like many women during WWII, my grandmother’s full self was only allowed to emerge under dangerous circumstances far from home. Now we take for granted the range allowed in women’s lives, but at that time the choices were stark and limiting. Her narrow, domestic later years took their toll on her, and robbed our family of a role model far more dynamic than others available to us at the time. I wonder what it would have taken for us to realize we had a hero in our midst, and not simply a cranky old woman, forgotten by time.

My grandfather and father’s accomplishments, though, don’t make me an expert by inheritance. And yet, I’ve always a felt strong tie to China. I grew up in a house crowded with Chinese paintings, ceramics and furniture. My best childhood friend and I invented rituals with a tiny white Ming cup that we thought possessed special powers. I spent countless hours lying on a deep blue Oriental carpet covered with cherry blossoms, staring up into a painted scroll along whose ribbons of clouds I imagined traveling into the distant, shrouded mountains.

When the time came for my parents to move to a retirement home, I sat on that same rug and went through boxes of onionskin pages with faded blue type on which my grandfather had recorded his impressions of the eerie beauty of Shanxi. His journals captured my imagination in the same way the Chinese objects had when I was a girl, but now there was the specificity and poetry of a Victorian-era gentleman’s language to further embellish my sense of that distant land. Although I had always felt pride about my grandfather’s humanitarian work in China, I was ashamed of his religious zealotry and colonial perspective. Now, the arabesques of his prose conveyed his love of those rugged plains and rolling foothills covered with loess, a yellow dust that blew in from the Gobi Desert, as well as his respect for the Chinese people — thus deepening my grasp of his contradictory position there.

But impressions from childhood confirmed years later as an adult still don’t make me an expert. My father, on the other hand, was a recognized one. His colleagues at M.I.T. and at the John K. Fairbank Center at Harvard were called “China watchers.” For decades, in fact, that’s all they could do since China was closed to American visitors. 

When he did finally visit in 1972, he brought back trinkets and clothing — cheap red and gold Mao buttons, quilted jackets in workman’s blue, olive green caps and the most ubiquitous souvenir of the time, Mao’s Little Red Book. My father spread his loot in our living room amid the Chinese antiques, stark reminders of Communism’s rejection of the delicate, evocative artistry of the past. I sensed from him that these strange new items now served as reminders that China, while suddenly open to Westerners, remained beyond the grasp of our understanding. Being permitted finally to see it firsthand had not brought outsiders closer to true understanding. 

My first writing mentor, Annie Dillard, once told our college class that if you ever have the choice between visiting a far-flung place or reading a book about it, choose the book. She had just returned from a trip to Alaska and said that the only thing she hadn’t known about already from her reading was the sunflowers. Apparently, in midsummer, as they work to follow the sun circling tightly overhead, their stalks twist until their bright, oversize heads break right off their slender necks. She offered a quirky, maniacal smile and said that a book containing that tidbit would be worth reading. 

This is how I feel about the China in my mind. My favorite books have always been those of far-off lands. The Middle East shimmered in Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, and while I didn’t necessarily understand Egypt any more precisely after reading all four volumes, that exotic landscape imprinted itself upon my teenage mind. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Maugham’s Painted Veil and Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, each revealed colonialism’s inherent flaws through the trials of unforgettable characters. These books gave me a first glimpse that there were countries resistant to Western understanding and that any presumption otherwise was an act of supreme hubris inevitably ending in the white man’s deserved downfall. 

The exoticism of those novels that I was taken in by turned out to reveal a complexity of culture that doesn’t easily yield to an outsider’s — and perhaps especially not to a Westerner’s — worldview. I believe those books helped me understand my family’s complicity in a corrupt and confusing past. The layers of meaning about oppression and injustice brought on by colonialist racism were like the dust that covered everything in my grandfather’s descriptions of Shanxi — layered, dense and impossible to sweep away. 

My father once said to me, only half in jest, that “political scientists are all failed novelists.” I suspect he meant that academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture. His deference to art was a kind gesture toward me, a young writer aspiring to create it, but also an acknowledgment that art provides the transformative vision that turns a place on a map into a deeply felt world. It offers the reader hope of redemption and a new path — a way out through human understanding. 

Aleksandar Hemon says that “expertise is the enemy of imagination,” and I can’t help but add that imagination, in the end, is our most profound and surprising teacher. It reveals truths we couldn’t otherwise believe.

What I know of China I have inherited from my family who lived there, and also from a white Ming cup, cherry blossom rug and a Little Red Book. These talismans have spoken volumes to me over the years. They helped create a land that inhabited, and even haunted, my imagination. The China of my novel is a dusty, rugged and exotic place that is not exactly on any map. Travelers, scholars and the Chinese themselves must explain the real China. I have tried to create an altogether different country that I hope will provide another landscape for the truth. 

Virginia Pye is the author of the novel River of Dust. She plans to go to China in 2014 for the Shanghai Book Festival and perhaps to visit her father’s hometown and her grandfather’s grave.

By all accounts, he made friends easily with the Chinese and was wildly successful at spreading the Gospel. Under his watch the Congregational mission in Shansi Province grew many times over. He built a hospital, schools for the Chinese children, a library and roads that proved useful for decades. He enlisted Red Cross aid for Shansi and raised needed funds for famine relief from congregations back home. The Reverend Pye’s efforts were tireless, although his journals reveal an exhausted figure. At the age of forty-eight, he was thrown from a mule out on the trail, his chest stomped upon by the animal. Soon TB filled his weakened lungs and he died. He left his wife, Gertrude, and a five-year-old son, Lucian (my father), and a compound of missionaries in search of a leader. Most of all, he left behind those Chinese out on the plains and in the mountain hamlets who would no longer be visited by the surprising white giant of a man.

I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I can almost forget why he was there. But then there is the fact of the small leather bound tally book. In cribbed penmanship he catalogued the Chinese names and numbers. On a “good day,” the totals reached the twenties or more; on a “bad day,” a mere one or two. He gave sermons to famine-starved citizens at windswept crossroads. He stayed up late into the night listening to potential congregants weep about their fallow fields. He ate paltry meals at their tables, and in return for his kind and attentive ear, they accepted his offer of salvation.

It was then that the miracle ostensibly occurred. And although he had offered relief to some hearts and minds, the fields remained withered and famine was widespread. The country he left behind in 1925 when he died was rife with turmoil caused by internal battles and external invasion. The presumption that Chinese souls needed saving and that an outsider’s religion could do so was soon held up as yet another example of colonial arrogance. The Communist Revolution began the process of eliminating Christian chapels in cities and distant enclaves as China headed in an altogether different direction.

During my childhood as the war raged in Vietnam and conflict tore apart campuses and cities, I did my best not to think about the missionary side of my family and certainly never boasted of the Reverend Pye’s successes. For me, he was a blatant example of American imperialism. I was ashamed to claim him.

That is, until our parents were moving out of the family home and several generations of possessions had to be dealt with. From a dark corner of the attic, I pulled boxes that held my grandfather’s journals and hunkered down to skim the faded onion skin pages. I unfolded the linen cloth and studied the intricate, carefully drawn map of a rural China from long ago. Out of my grandfather’s traveling Bible fell copious notes for sermons, and when I opened his tally book, the leather made an audible crackle.

And here is what I found that day: a writer. In his journals, the Reverend effectively described camel caravans climbing mountain trails, orchards laden with exotic fruit, foul-smelling village streets and the many voices and attitudes of the Chinese around him, as well as the remarkable beauty of a place unspoiled by industry. He also recorded in more clichéd language his Christian beliefs and assumptions, but it was in his descriptions of every day life that I found him not only genuinely appealing, but also not naïve about the complexities of his position there.

“If the Orient seems strange to us,” he writes, “we should remember that we are seen just as strange to the Orient. The Chinese think us dirty, lazy and superstitious in the west. Dirty, because although we bathe, they detect a very decided odor. Gertrude had a sewing woman last winter who had never been near foreigners before, and after three or four days gave up the job, as badly as she needed the money, and the reason was that she simply could not stand the foreigners’ odors. Mr. and Mrs. Gilles were asked one spring not to walk into a neighbor’s peach orchard where they had been accustomed to walk, for it was thought that the crop failure was due to the odor of their bodies. They think us dirty, too, for the way we use the handkerchief and replace it in our pockets. To a refined Chinese, the sight of a person blowing his nose in the handkerchief and then putting it back in his pocket is actually nauseating. The point in dispute is an excellent example of how the different races may regard the same matter differently and each consider themselves innocent and the other guilty of the same offense. We think the Chinese wanting in cleanliness because, though they do not expectorate into their handkerchief, they will dust their shoes with it and wipe out the tea cup before pouring your tea. Exactly the same distinctions are made to show that we are lazy and superstitious.”

Reverend Pye expresses his intent to be open-minded and unbigoted and seems amused when he senses the Chinese judging him based on his race. One late afternoon, he wrote in his journal as he sat outdoors at a rough-hewn table in a poor village: “A crowd of about thirty watchers is pressed about me as I write, discussing the typewriter, the mysteries of foreign letters, my filled tooth, and what it can ever be that makes me ‘white,’ instead of brown or yellow. They have come to the universal belief that since we drink milk or use it in our food that is the explanation. One man has with great satisfaction just informed the rest that anyone of them could very shortly become just as white as I am, were he to use milk for a few months. They think our color is only artificial. I have heard tell of the story of a Chinese school boy in class when asked the color of the Negro replied, ‘black.’ And the American Indian? Copper color, was the reply. And the Englishman? White was the reply. And what color is the Chinese? Man color, proudly answered the youth. And so it should be.”

In other journal entries, he used the ornate, poetic language of his time to capture the transporting qualities of the countryside: “We lay around, letting the old sound of the mourning doves and the sight of the hills sink in. They sound and look just as they did when we were youngsters back home. Man and his language change while nature and the birds remain. We do miss the dear home faces. But will rest and get new visions for the days to come. There are lots of visions you can’t see, but just feel them, and after all, feeling is perhaps only the soul’s way of seeing. Something that comes to us as light as melody and as color, thrilling us with the sentient harmony that we often hear ripple from the throat of the music-made bird: that same thing that came to us times without number in childhood, and that comes to us now on run-away days like this one, under blue skies and green woods, and despite all that has gone before, and all that may come afterward, and it makes you take off your hat to the joy of living.”

My grandfather’s words revealed him to be a more complicated and nuanced person than the single-minded zealot I had presumed him to be. Before I knew it, he was transposing himself into a fictional character in my mind, because fiction is the best way I know to explore the contradictions inherent in being human. Through odd twists of the imagination, the Reverend Watts O. Pye became The Reverend in River of Dust—a man who is both foolish and wise, witty and overly serious, all seeing and yet blind.

But because The Reverend in my novel is ultimately an invention, I have him experience a crisis of faith that my grandfather never had. The real Reverend Pye died believing in his own convictions. And yet, for me, it is his written words that suggest a more honest and startling miracle—one of a heart and mind revealed across both distance and time. His was never actually a simple story of a man, a mule and a map. And the miracle he promised remains dubious at best. But if one does exist for me, it is buried in the fascination of getting to know an ancestor so long dead and in coming to terms with the moral complexities of his mission.

And it was. Because neither that agent nor anybody else could have told me that I would be lucky enough to write books for the rest of my life, but I would have to wait until I was fifty-three years old—almost precisely twice the age I had been when the impressive agent took on that first manuscript—until my debut novel was finally published. 

Writing is a marathon sport. It’s not for sprinters. Nor is it for the faint of heart. If the act of trying to get the words right on the page isn’t enough of a trial, then there’s the marketplace to take you down a notch or two. As it turns out, my trajectory as a writer isn’t uncommon. Many successful authors have first, second, third, and up to six, seven or even eight unpublished novels in their drawers. I know authors who had three or four agents before finding one who worked out well. The key strategy to achieving success in the face of such set backs and discouragement is to keep writing: to finish one book and start on the next. To write with the faith that someone will read and cherish the work someday, but probably not according to a timetable the writer has in mind. 

When that New York agent tried a dozen publishing houses, but failed to place my first novel and returned it to me six weeks later, I was stunned. The narrative of myself as a successful author had quickly taken up a central place in my mind. 

After a period of confusion and mourning, I started in on another novel, which I finished when I was pregnant with my first child. The agent who had represented my first novel was gun-shy about me and declined to see it. Although I worried my career would be tainted by that first failure, I found another agent who offered editorial comments on the second novel. I was to make revisions and then she would send it out to publishers. 

But I had a baby on the way. After my daughter arrived, my writing desk became her changing table, replete with diapers, wet wipes and baby powder. As my computer accumulated dust, I remember thinking that was just fine with me. Worn out with the difficult business of trying to get published, I threw myself into mothering and three years later gave birth to another child, a son. The second novel became a distant memory. With a baby or toddler crawling on me, feeding off me, waking me in the night and generally taking over my every thought, I didn’t have the necessary distance on life required to write a novel and I even convinced myself I didn’t mind. 

But finally, when my son went off to nursery school and the house was mercifully quiet in the mornings, I found myself returning to my desk. I wrote the next novel with great urgency, as if my life depended on it. A new agent tried to sell it, and came close, but the moment still wasn’t right. I tried to contain my disappointment but also realized that my battle with getting published was becoming secondary to my battle to simply write better. 

In the new city where we had moved, I joined a writer’s organization and quickly became active, and then ended up leading it for seven years. It was easy for me to encourage other writers who were also struggling to improve our craft. I became less preoccupied with my own publication than with connecting to fellow writers as we shared the many ways we strive to gain wisdom from books—our own and others. 

Despite my discouragement, I began to grasp that no matter whether my books were published or not, I was still living a writing life. I had my family, the students of writing who I helped with their manuscripts, the short stories I sent out with regularity, (though many of them were returned), my work with the writer’s organization, and always the larger projects evolving in my mind and on the page. 

For me, it took a long apprenticeship to write a novel I ultimately feel proud to have published. In retrospect, I’m thankful that the high-powered agent didn’t place the first book that I wrote. It wasn’t nearly as good as my debut, River of Dust, which found itself between hard covers a quarter century later. And I think my new novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, might even be stronger still, because we improve with practice as writers —at least that’s how it’s worked for me.

Once I put aside the worry about publication and focused instead on writing well and helping other writers to do so, too, I started to achieve greater success. And I see now that the greatest reward of all isn’t the way my novels feel in my hands—though that’s pretty terrific—but that I have continued to use writing to make sense of my life. I’m grateful that a writer’s way of seeing the world, more than being identified as a published author, defines who I’ve been all along.