Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

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What are some best practices that can help a writer succeed both artistically and professionally?

March 19, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


Writers fight a battle on at least three fronts: their personal artistic struggle, the challenge of creating good work, and the need to find a place in the market.

On a personal level, self-doubt can be the cancer of a writing practice. Look your doubt head on: you choose to be a writer. Make peace with the doubt monster as best you can. Find support: family, fellow writers, an editor who gets you, agents that support you. Create a supportive community. Block toxic naysayers.

Face your fears and write through them.

Writing is among the most accessible of arts — all you need is a pencil, paper and words. You don’t need a cast and crew. Writing, in the creation phase, is a very intimate art form, some would say lonely. I find it less lonely — because the words are the company I keep.

Whether writing fiction or criticism, practice is everything. Don’t stop. Find the rhythm that suits you — up all night, early morning brain. Coffee. Music. Cigarettes. You must write through those early days. You may be brilliant at school and, yet, when you write that first short story, or the fifth, it’s so much less than the books that you read, whether V. S. Naipaul or P. G. Wodehouse or Elena Ferrante. Continue, find your voice, find your format: short stories, poetry, novels, blog posts. For most writers, this requires great patience. To survive you must find joy in the process.

So: Write as if you were practicing for a marathon.

Finding a place in the market is the challenge most beyond your control. In some ways, it’s easier now with platforms like Quora, where you can write and connect without a gatekeeper. However, if you want to earn a living, as Dickens had to, then you must pursue a form for which there is a market.

While working a day job, I wrote hundreds of film reviews for a free Manhattan weekly before I kicked open the door at the New York Post. As a novelist, I wrote beyond rejection. I toasted the purchase of my first novel, Girl Empire, when it appeared to have publisher interest. It fell through. The book exists, I kid you not, on a floppy drive. My second novel, Playdate, got a prestigious publisher. I waited for the book’s publication to change my life. It didn’t. It wasn’t until The Last Woman Standing that I found a union of voice, subject, audience, agent and publisher.

By that time, I had learned my lesson. Keep writing. Keep finding subjects that fascinate. Change the world — as a creative individual, as a writer in the world, and as a professional — one sentence at a time.

So: Persistence.

To be a successful writer in the current environment, build confidence in your self, embark on the marathon that is a writing career, and be persistent. And, if you can, find joy in the creating.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Best Practices, historical fiction, Novel, novelist, Quora, Writing

What is essential for a person who has just started writing his first novel?

March 6, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The most essential element for a person who has just started writing his or her first novel is passion and commitment. This is a marathon not a sprint.

There are a number of ways to look at this question — let’s begin with subject matter. Do you know what you want to write about. Try — it’s hard! — to write what your book is about in one or two sentences making sure you compress the plot and emphasize the juice of the book. Here is an example from my novel that I crowd-sourced for the cover letter that went out with the galleys: “The first biographical novel about Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp’s wife, the gutsy Jewish beauty who captured the lawman’s heart in 1881, the year he fought the legendary Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

Who are your characters? Pause and write down as much as you know about the two to five main players. What do they look like, what is their personal history — what is their sign even. What do they like to eat? What aggravates them? Do they suffer from headaches? Prefer dogs or cats? Oldest child or middle? Ethnicity?

Begin the first chapter — does it have a unique voice? Will you tell it in first person or third, will your third person be omniscient or limited. Meanwhile, you can begin to outline. Not every novelist outlines their books. Some know the shape or the starting point. A picaresque, like my first novel or Don Quijote or Moll Flanders or The Diary of a Chambermaid, is a journey that meanders from adventure to adventure. I like to know at least three chapters ahead.

In the case of The Last Woman Standing, I wrote the first three chapters, knew where I wanted the entire book to land, and then talked out the progress of the chapters with a trusted editor. There were points where the map changed as I wrote but that was alright because I knew my destination: that my characters Josie Marcus and Wyatt Earp would reunite on her stoop in San Francisco (even though originally I had her sitting with her brother and she ended up there with her sister).

While I had an outline, one of the most ecstatic thing that happens to a writer who commits to a novel is the moments when the characters begin to act of their own free will. You have created them, you have put them in a situation — and then they begin to tell you how they behave in a way that’s true to their natures not yours. I call this hydroplaning because suddenly I feel that I am free from the road and flying — my fingers are still on my keyboard but they are channeling the fiction rather than forcing it. When you experience that as a novelist you’ll know you have arrived.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: historical fiction, history, Josephine Marcus, Novel, Romance, Tombstone, Western, Wyatt Earp

Book Review: Paula Bomer’s filthy yet fabulous ‘Inside Madeleine’

May 31, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Inside MadeleineInside Madeleine by Paula Bomer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Paula Bomer’s collection of stories and a novella is fierce, funny and filthy. The author of “Baby” and “Nine Months” is not your people-pleasing fiction writer. Her prose is crisp and clear and propulsive but she never pauses to ask: is it pretty? Do you like me? Some of her characters may be doormats seeking and thwarting unconditional love but, as an author, Bomer is brave, often mortifyingly so. Some of these stories are so naked emotionally that they cry out to be covered up with a towel – but Bomer resists, documenting every stretch mark, every gooey sex act, every human hunger. The stories and novella are about adolescents and young women who screw, drink, smoke and suffer toward some sense of identity, and a final nugget of unexpected emotional truth, but they are never blamers. They are fat girls and slim, workers in halfway houses and inmates, college girls tied at the hip to the party keg and Friday night ice skaters slugging back peppermint schnapps, daddy’s girls and mommy’s enemies. They sometimes echo each other, circling geography in South Bend, Indiana, or Boston, Massachusetts, or the East Village of Manhattan, struggling with anorexia and love-drug addiction. My favorite story is called “Pussies,” about a doormat of a young college graduate, all angles and jangly limbs and drunk more often than not. Her relationship with a trust-fund fueled girlfriend goes south when an apartment building catches fire and she rescues the girl’s cats but in a desperate survivor’s way that alienates the vegan rich girl (but spares the animals). The Madeleine of the title, and main character in the novella that concludes the slim volume, is a Midwestern “Precious,” a fat girl whose folds of skin both fascinate her and protect her from a world that continually serves up rejection. These are not dainty stories to be read one at a time. Instead, binge-drink them for the shock value – and stay for the awe.

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Baby, Inside Madeleine, Nine Months, Novel, Paula Bomer, Sex

Book Review: “The Empty Glass” by J. I. Baker

August 26, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Empty GlassThe Empty Glass by J.I. Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

J. I. Baker makes a muscular debut in an L.A. Noir that twists and turns around Marilyn Monroe’s murky last days. Terrific research. Crisp prose. Hats off to Hammett and Chandler.

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: "The Empty Glass", Book Review, J. I. Baker, Marilyn Monroe, mystery, Novel

Book Review “Nine Months” by Paula Bomer via Goodreads

August 25, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Nine MonthsNine Months by Paula Bomer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Paula Bomer writes about pregnancy as if she were a man: bold, transgressive and overtly sexual. There have been countless road novels, but none about a hormonally-driven pregnant mother in search of her soul. Eye-opening! Shocking! Satisfying!

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Filed Under: Books, Criticism Tagged With: Nine Months, Novel, Paula Bomer, Reviews

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