Q&A with Novelist Belinda Acosta

Early this week, I wrote to you about Belinda Acosta’s debut novel, Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on August 11.

Full disclosure, gentle readers:  I feel particularly invested in and curious about this project because I was initially involved in conversations with the book packager Ellen Jacob of jacob packaged goods, which brokered the deal.  Writing a chica-lit project seemed like a fun, safe, structured way for me to learn to write a novel, and it also lured me with the opportunity to smuggle some of my political views into entertainment literature.  I was really attracted to the idea, but I ultimately chickened out.  So imagine my surprise when I learned, after the fact, that Belinda had taken on this project.  I was todo excited that she had decided to go for it.

Since most of you are writers with strong interests in writing and publishing, I thought I’d ask her about the publishing process. 

Me:  What was useful about working with a book packager?

Belinda:  Ellen was the one who pitched the idea to publishers and did that leg work. If you don’t have an agent and your own project brewing, and you like the packager’s project and can play with the palette they provide, then working with a book packager may be perfect for you.

Me:  How much guidance did you receive (on issues like plot and character) from the packager, and how much freedom did you have to write exactly the book you wanted to write?

Belinda:  The idea of the book started from a very different place than where it ended up. Ellen’s original idea was for a young adult novel set in Los Angeles. Not having any experience with LA Latin@s, I asked if the book could be set in San Antonio, a place where I’d spent some time and was more familiar with. Ultimately, the book became an adult novel, centered on the women and mothers but I insisted on keeping the story of the teenagers in there, mainly because I thought it was more interesting. Ultimately, I came up with the story, the plot, etc. Ellen and Selina McLemore (the editor at Grand Central Publishing) requested an outline of the book. Once Selina approved that, I started writing but even with an outline to work from, the book veered and changed as it took shape. I ultimately had a lot of freedom to write the story I wanted to write.

Me:  Can you tell us about your process?  What kind of timeline did you have, start to finish, for Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, and how did you organize your writing time while still working (full-time? part-time?) as a journalist?

Belinda:  Honestly, I’ve blotted it from my memory. Meeting the deadline was the most challenging aspect of the whole thing, mainly because it was extremely compressed. I think I turned the thing around in a few months. All together, from start to turning in the last, edited galley—maybe eight months? I don’t recommend it. Essentially, Sunday through Tuesday were TV Eye days, the column I write for the Austin Chronicle, and the rest of the time was spent on the novel. But I also had some features due in there. It’s hard to have a regular schedule when you work for a newspaper. TV Eye—that happens like clockwork. It’s due Tuesday mornings. But of course, I still have to watch and read about TV, so saying I worked Sunday through Thursday on my column is misleading. Really, my whole waking life was consumed with some kind of writing—the book, or the column, or some assigned feature. I didn’t get much sleep during that time.

Me:  What surprised you the most about the process of writing your first novel?

Belinda:  I had been writing my own novel off and on since I finished graduate school, but it was stalled. The main reason I took on the jacob packaged goods project was because I wanted to experience writing a complete novel, beginning to end, with the idea that there was something about the process I needed to learn. If I could learn that, I assumed I could then return to my own work and finish it.  What surprised me the most about actually writing and finishing a novel was what an intimate process it is, particularly since I was on a tight deadline. Writing a novel is like having this perpetually nursing child who always needs you, is always there. You can’t forget about it because you can’t ever let it go. You sleep with it and eat with it. It’s there when you’re trying to relax. It never leaves your consciousness. It always needs something from you—it’s working itself out in the background when you’re doing something else. Some of my “break-through” moments came when I awoke in the morning and, for some reason, while grocery shopping! Part of the reason I didn’t sleep much during that time was because my brain wouldn’t shut down. I was an insomniac for part of that period—an experience I never had before and never understood until I wrote this book. I sleep like a baby, now!

Me:  If literary chisme has got it right, you’ve just completed your second novel for the Quinceañera Club series.  Serious respect!  How has your process been different the second time around?

Belinda:  Yes, I turned in the manuscript for the second book in the series on June 1. That was after asking for two extensions. The process was essentially the same, except I lost the month of March because of SXSW, the music, film, and interactive conference I help cover for the Chronicle. I thought I might get some writing in during that time, but after the first few days, I had to put the book aside. When I had time to worry, I really feared I would lose momentum, lose the groove. Thankfully, the break from the book was useful. And after working SXSW, working on the novel was almost relaxing!

Me:  You also report on film, TV, media, and literature for the Austin Chronicle.  Were there narrative aspects of particular shows or movies (structure, dialogue, characterization, etc.) that you learned from in writing the novels?

Belinda:  One of the reasons I insisted on the kids’ story and the mother/parents’ story being parallel to one another was because I liked how it worked in several popular TV series. In The OC, in particular, I liked how the parents were not just “waa-waa” voices in the background, clueless to the lives of their teenagers, and how the teenagers were kids, but well-developed characters. Parts of the adult lives and the kid’s lives were always separate, but their lives intersected. I liked that. In the case of Damas, it was convenient that the intersection came with the departure of Esteban and the breakdown of the family. Everyone, the kids and the adults, had a stake in that change.

Me:  You have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin.  How much of what you learned in grad school was applicable to writing a project for a popular audience?  Did your skills translate easily, or was there anything you had to unlearn?

Belinda:  I deeply appreciate the fact that I got a MFA on a full fellowship. I loved that I had three years to write and read, explore and experiment. But ultimately, what I learned about writing I learned as a working journalist. I met a lot of great writers and teachers in grad school, but I think I spent a lot of time playing with my “precious prose.” When you work on deadline for a newspaper or a magazine, you learn very quickly how to trim and edit. Suddenly, all those words aren’t so precious anymore when the clock is ticking. Another part of your brain kicks in when you’re on deadline. I can’t quite articulate it, but I love it when things rhyme—when good prose is accomplished with an economy of language and time. It’s the most satisfying thing.

I think the thing I had to “unlearn” from grad school was this other voice I adopted. I think I went into the program with a very distinctive voice that got, well, squashed. It took me five years to recover from that. I was using some Spanish in my work while in the program and there were a couple of classmates who rolled their eyes at that, sighing that they didn’t understand, and since they didn’t understand, they stopped reading. At the time, I was flabbergasted. I mean, no one worried if I had to struggle to get through Faulkner’s interminable sentences. Some of his colloquialisms may as well have been in Greek. I didn’t understand them—and yet I never heard a discussion anywhere about his use of those colloquialisms as “hard” or “difficult” for the reader. They were simply accepted. The unspoken message was that if I didn’t understand and accept, it was my fault, not the writer’s. In my graduate class, where the student complained about the use of Spanish—which wasn’t that much, by the way—the unspoken message was that since he had to work at understanding, I, the writer was at fault. Nowadays, if and when I get a complaint about my use of Spanish, or the criticism that the words are too “foreign,” my response is, “You mean like schlep, toochas(sp?), verklempt, or schmuck?”

I figure if Latin@s are the fastest growing ethnic minority in the states and Spanish is still in use, even among those of us not strongly bilingual, the rest of the world is going to have to catch up. My use of colloquialisms or Spanglish is used to reflect the way my characters think and talk. American English, by virtue of our immigrant base, is a highly dynamic language. It is not static. And I think that the words and phrases that seep into the larger vocabulary (like schlep, schmuck, etc) are because we respond to the music of the language—it says something in the musicality of the word. It sings! It strikes at the core of its meaning. I mean, can you think of a better word for “schmuck” or “mamasota” or my new favorite, “hombrazo”?

I like what Lorraine López (The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters) told me recently: she said that she thinks readers should have to work a bit. I don’t think they should have to labor over every word, or graph, or idea, but there is some satisfaction to be gleaned from putting some work into reading a text (unfortunately, I didn’t have that experience with Faulkner, but maybe I need to return to him!).

I know this may all sound surprising coming from someone who has just written a popular novel, and I think I went far afield from your question, but asking about graduate school made me consider that experience in all its intensity.

Overall, I’m glad I went to grad school but the writer I am today is because of who I read, working as a journalist, and my own stubbornness.

Me:  Who are your own favorite writers?  Are any of them particularly influential on your own style?

Belinda:  My two sheroes are Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee. I have great respect for Lorna Dee Cervantes, Wendell Berry, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Helena María Viramontes, Lorraine López, Alex Espinosa, Luis Alberto Urrea, Manuel Muñoz, and many others. When I was younger, I was trying to mimic O’Connor, which is hilarious—a Midwest Chicana going southern gothic? But I love that I tried. Ultimately, what I take from all the writers I admire is an appreciation for the beauty of their prose. I revel in a well-written sentence, a lovely image, and words that make you want to lift them from the page and examine them like tiny stones. I like to think that all of them influence me in some way, but that somehow, I’ve happened upon my own style.  I hope I’ve outgrown my mimicking days. For one thing, I don’t have time! But I also think it’s a common thing among young writers. Except for those few savants out there, I think writers spend a long time in their journeyman years, experimenting, mimicking, reading, writing, failing, waiting, giving up and finally learning what kind of writer we want to be.

Me:  With these two novels, do you see yourself as working within a Latina/Chicana literary tradition?  If so, in what ways?

Belinda:  Well, Manuel Muñoz told me this funny story once about Lorna Dee Cervantes. Someone once asked her after a reading what made a book a Chicana or Latina book and her response was: “It’s a Chicana book because a Chicana wrote it.” I love that because for most of my life, I was not even considered a “real” Chican@/Latin@ in other parts of the nation because I grew up in Nebraska. People actually told me, “There aren’t any Latin@s in Nebraska,” or, “I don’t know what you are, but you’re not Chican@.” I found that very hurtful. How can you look at me, as big and brown as I am, and tell me I don’t exist? The Latin@ experience that was most written and talked about in the media and in literature is in the southwest, California, and the east—and those were not always Mexican. As you know, the Mexican American experience is very different from the Puerto Rican experience in New York, the Cuban experience in Miami, or the Mexican American experience in Chicago, Indiana, and yes, Nebraska.

In the earlier piece you wrote, you mention the scene with Bianca responding to someone who didn’t think she was Mexican because she was light-skinned. That scene came specifically from a conversation with someone who didn’t believe that a light-skinned Mexican co-worker was really Mexican. Bianca’s line in the book, “We come in all flavors,” actually came from my mouth. That scene is also inspired from my experience of having to prove that my experience in the Midwest was real. Today, when someone flips out about me being from Nebraska, I say, “Yeah, I grew up in the breadbasket of Aztlan!” If they’re still looking at me blankly, I say “Nebraska is the CORNHUSKER State. Put it together.” Sometimes you have to mess with people’s reality.

Me:  In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, were there any stereotypical motifs or attitudes of Latina/Chicana culture or psychology that you deliberately avoided, and why?

Belinda:  There were two things I was especially conscious of. One, that I didn’t want Esteban to be “the bad macho.” Second, that I didn’t want Ana to be the all good, saintly, all suffering mother—though she does suffer, doesn’t she? But I didn’t want her struggle to be tied to the fact that she was a mother or a Mexican American woman, but to the fact that she was in a dying relationship and the pain that comes from knowing that, but being unable to let it go. That was the real heartbreak of her character for me—the fact that she knows what she has to do, but that it’s so damn painful to just end it. It’s the hanging on, not the letting go that is killing her.

As for the kids, another reviewer said she was pleasantly surprised that there were no pregnant teenage girls or boys in gangs in the book. The kids in Damas are pleasantly ordinary, good kids. I realize that teenage pregnancy and suicide are alarmingly prevalent in our community (especially among our Latinas), but I had no direct experience with that. I guess I was a boring kid. All I did was go to school, be a theater geek, read, write, and not get into trouble.

Me:  Yes, I really liked the relentless middle-class normalcy of the teenagers in the novel.  They do have problems, but they aren't tragic figures, aren't in crisis.  It's a welcome break from how Latin@ youth are often depicted.  Do you currently plan to write additional books for the Quinceañera Club series?

Belinda:  I’ve only been contracted to write two. I have no idea what’s next, though there’s been some cursory mention about book three.

Me:  What advice would you give writers who are considering working with a book packager?

Belinda:  Spend some time getting to know the packager. Find out how they plan to work with you as a writer and if that suits your way of working. Find out what kind of freedom you have. I was lucky, I think, in that I was given a few suggested character names and the quinceañera as the backdrop. From there, I was on my own. I don’t think I could have worked on the project if there were more guidelines imposed or more direct intervention in the writing process. I am not, nor have I ever been on a writing team and the idea does not appeal to me. I’m not interested in being a ghostwriter. Think about your time and your projects. Time spent on a packager’s project is time taken away from your own. For me, the project came at a good time. I learned what I needed to learn, and hopefully, will be able to translate those skills into my future work.

Me:  Publicists, editors, and agents talk frequently about the need for writers to have/build a platform—even before a manuscript is accepted.  Can you talk about how you’ve built yours?

Belinda:  I’ve just barely started thinking about promotion and platform building. Fortunately, because of my 10 years as a working journalist, I have a wide network of contacts. I am a member of Macondo, the writing collective started by Sandra Cisneros, and that has been helpful. I know that I can call a Macondista in nearly every part of the nation and get leads on ideal places to read—places that are not necessarily on the publisher’s p.r. list. I started a fan page on my Facebook profile, which I will link (after I work out some bugs) to my blog. Here are the links:
Facebook fan page
My blog.

Me:  What kinds of publicity plans do you have for the book’s launch?  Have you hired a publicist, or are you working with GCP’s publicity department?  How has that been?  Has jacob packaged goods participated in marketing and publicity discussions? 

Belinda:  Locally, I and a few friends are planning a book release party on August 18, 2009. It’s patterned after a quinceañera with actual quinces in their gowns, a slide show featuring quinceañera photos, music, a manicurist and a “presentation” ceremony preceding a short reading. It’s going to be fabulous. I’ve been working with the GCP publicist to arrange readings—apparently, all the publishing houses are cutting back on book tours overall. So, I’m looking into doing an online tour and exploiting social media to get the word out. I haven’t hired my own publicist. I have a friend who is a fabulous publicist who I would hire in an instant if I could afford her. She’s Elaine Garza of Giant Noise, based here in Austin. She used to do publicity at Random House, I believe. So, she knows that world. She’s helping as much as she can. She’s in high demand, with high profile clients like Spin, Latina, and others, and she and another friend in town, Rose Reyes of the Austin Convention and Visitors’ Bureau are throwing their support behind the book release party. Nora Comstock, who started the Las Comadres network, will help me get the word out through her powerful listserve. I think there are Las Comadre’s groups in nearly every state now. I am fortunate to be surrounded by many well-connected Latinas who have literally come forward to ask how they can help me, knowing that I have nothing to offer except my thanks. Oh! And my home newspaper, the Austin Chronicle, is helping me, too.

It’s hard trying to explain to those who are still trying to crack the Latin@ market that so much of the promotion involves relationships. Sending a press release to Borders in San Antonio, for example, is not enough. The approach has to be targeted and hit multiple bases at once—community and commercial—and knowing which venues are Latin@ friendly. If I had all the time and the money in the world, I could organize and plan a tour of Texas, California, and the Midwest—upper and lower. But alas, there are only so many hours in the day and I still have a day job.

Me:  What launch and publicity advice do you have for first-time novelists?

Belinda:  That’s a question I can’t fully answer at this time. I’m still in the thick of it. But the first thing I would suggest is making sure you get to see all the publicity copy that goes out on behalf of your book. I’ve heard too many horror stories of factually incorrect press releases and cover letters going out. There’s no excuse for that. But also realize that you are probably not the only writer the publisher’s publicist is handling. Be kind, be understanding, be diplomatic, but don’t let factually incorrect information of your book go out.

Me:  In your heart of hearts, who do you most hope will read Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz?

Belinda:  I would die a happy woman if I got on the bus and saw that one Latinita on the bus, the one who always has a book in her backpack, reading Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz; that one copy that has gone through several hands. I know the goal is to sell books, but the idea of the book being passed from sister, to mother, to aunt, to daughter, really makes me happy.

~
Belinda also has a Q&A with Marcela Landres, who also asks about working with book packagers, available on Latinidad.  Dale gas, Belinda!