Authors presenting at the festival included award-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, antiques impressarios Leigh and Leslie Keno, and authors of "The Rule of Four," Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. - Michaela McNichol, George Stevens and John Harrington
Writers connect quietly and privately with readers during the act of reading, through the thoughts, emotions, imagination and intellectual curiosity evoked by the words on the page. But at the National Book Festival, the connection is public, noisy and exciting, with writers talking about their craft as eagerly as readers (writers in disguise?) ply them with questions: Where do you get your ideas? How do you research your topic? What is your writing process? How many drafts do you write? Do you outline your story first? How did you learn to write?
There was one universal answer to the aspiring would-be writer, ages 6 to 60: If you want to write, read, read, read. Then write. Then read some more.
"Writing is blue-collar work. It's hard work," said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at the University of New Orleans and author of four biographies, about Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Jimmy Carter and John Kerry.
"Jack Kerouac's diaries show how hard he studied the classics and the discipline with which he wrote," Brinkley said. The author of "On the Road" (1957) did not write "through an alcoholic haze and osmosis," he emphasized.
Household hints expert Heloise broadcast her weekly radio program from the festival; Anna Quindlen brought literary London to life; and Joyce Carol Oates discussed her recent novel about the Niagara Falls area. - John Harrington
Brinkley said he was inspired by the "Band of Brothers," a World War II story about the men in E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, to write a book about a band of Senators who all served at the same time in Vietnam. As he did his preliminary research, he narrowed his topic to Kerry and the band of brothers he led in Vietnam. Kerry returned to Vietnam some 20 times to search for POWs and men missing in action, Brinkley said.
Of great help to his research was a trove of diaries that Kerry kept throughout prep school, college and, in great detail, during his Vietnam service. "Kerry is extraordinarily brilliant when he writes," he said.
Discussing diaries as windows into a person's private thoughts and feelings, Brinkley said that although Kerry couldn't complain about the war to his men, he expressed his misgivings about their military missions in his diaries. "He used the diary as a confessional," he said.
Discussing her new book, "Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City," Anna Quindlen said she drew on her lifetime of reading English literature to carry out her National Geographic assignment to "write about any place in the world."
"I wound up writing about reading," she said. "It's a book about a little girl who started reading at age 4 or 5" and never stopped. "My most enduring memory is being stuck in a book and my mother standing in the doorway, saying, ‘It's a beautiful day outside.'"
The festival offered a broad range of authors and experiences, from Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, to civil rights titan Dorothy Height and best-selling thriller author (and former broadcaster) Sandra Brown. - Michaela McNichol, John Harrington and Gail Fineberg
The first time Quindlen visited London, it was in the pages of a mystery novel by Patricia Wentworth. "I have since been to London too many times to count in the pages of books, to Dickensian London rich with narrow alleyways and jocular street scoundrels, to the London of Conan Doyle and Margery Allingham with its salt-of-the-earth police officers, troubled aristocrats, and crowded train stations," Quindlen writes.
By the time she finally visited London, in her 40s, she knew it "like the back of my hand." Hers was the London of Shakespeare, Defoe, Pepys, Thackeray, Galsworthy, Amis, Wilde, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers, to name but a few whose words had brought the city to life on the page.
In a closing comment about the importance of reading and access to books, Quindlen said, "Books are the most important tools of democracy. ... Cutting library budgets is a greater threat than cutting defense budgets."
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates drew on a family experience to write her most recent book, "The Falls," which she said, "I've wanted to write for years." The contrast between the natural beauty of Niagara Falls and the ravaged, polluted city of Niagara Falls and the nearby "Love Canal" appealed to her, both on a personal basis and because of her interest in American history.
"I wanted to write a novel about work-related disabilities and premature deaths," she said, because her grandfather had suffered an early death as a steelworker in Tonawanda, just south of Niagara Falls. Her book focuses on factory owners and how their money and power "utilize people" in their ventures; how families are caught up in disastrous situations over which they have little control.
Oates fairly bristled when asked whether she knows where a novel is going when she sits down to write. "I would no more start writing a novel without knowing where it is going," she said, "than I would take off on a hike without knowing whether I was going to Antarctica or the North Pole." She said she plans everything, has the first and last lines written before she even begins, and does much of the "writing" in her head.
Another audience member questioned Oates about her prodigious productivity: 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Oates said she writes so much because she doesn't like to disturb her cat. "I have a long-haired cat, Christabel, and she sleeps and purrs in my lap. I would stay working for hours because Christabel wasn't ready to get up. And there you are; another day gone, another novel begun."
After reading a chapter from his 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Known World," a lyrical, nuanced study of slave-holding, Edward P. Jones said he had read a one-line footnote in a college textbook about black slaveholders that kept nudging his curiosity and imagination until he finally wrote his story.
Discussing the "craft of writing," he said he read an exceptionally poetical version of the Bible during graduate school and decided "writing should be beautiful." He said he revised his manuscript at least five times, and every time he reads his book, which was published in August, he sees something he would change if he could.
"What would you say to somebody who found he likes to write but is not very good at it?" asked one member of the audience.
"Read. Then write. Read and write, read and write," Jones advised. "If you have a writer you like, try to imitate him, and eventually you will find you have your own style."
