Interview with Patti Hill and book-launch giveaway!

Today we welcome Patti Hill, one of my all-time favorite voices in Christian fiction. When you pick up one of her books, you’ll see why. She has a fresh, beautiful voice – lyrical without being ostentatious, heartfelt and whimsical and easy to read and emotionally complex all in one. Oh, and did I mention funny? It’s no wonder she’s multi-published and a Christy award finalist. Not only that, she’s just the sweetest person you’ll ever meet. I’m so thrilled to have her with us at the Alley on this extremely exciting day!

What’s that? Why is today exciting? You mean you didn’t know? Today – drumroll, please – is the official launch of Patti Hill’s newest release, Goodness & Mercy! To kick off with a bang, Patti’s novel will be FREE on Amazon in e-book form for three days only, starting today! If that’s not enough, Patti will also be giving away a paperback copy to one lucky commenter – all details at the end. Without further ado, here’s Patti:

Bio: Patti Hill is an unlikely novelist. Books played only a small part in her life until her high-school years. And she only remembers her mother reading to her once. Her mother’s voice flowed like water.

Always resistant to sleep, young Hill created stories to entertain herself until stories of galloping Arabian stallions and pirate ships segued into dreams.  That was the beginning. Then she discovered people enjoyed hearing her stories—real or imagined. She loved having an audience. Still does.

She didn’t think to write a story until she read a novel so beautiful that when it ended, she was bereft.  A passion to orchestrate words, characters, and stories consumed her. Fortunately, she’d married a man who thought leaving a good-paying career to write novels was a splendid idea. In other words, she is a kept woman.  Happily so. In Colorado. She is the author of six novels. Writing is one way she worships Papa God.

Welcome, Patti! We’re going to pick your brain a little today. Goodness & Mercy is your first historical fiction. What challenges did you face in this new genre?

I had a terrible time stopping the research phase. I interviewed people, picked peaches, spent hours in the oral history department of the local museum, anything to get into the skin of the people who lived during WW II and insert myself into their lives of the people of Palisade, Colorado. I met the most amazing people, like a 95-year-old man who ascended Mt. Belvedere with the 10^th Mountain Division.  Everyone was generous. The bonus was learning so much about my own valley.

I can just about smell those sun-warmed peaches. You actually make research sound like fun. (Can you tell I’ll never be an historical fiction author? Love reading it, but phew – hard work for the author!) Why did you decide to try historical fiction?

Over the years, my mom had asked me repeatedly to write her story. Writing my family’s story, including six siblings and all of their children, scared me to death. There were too many perspectives on what had happened. So, I borrowed the premise of my mom’s story.

In 1946, my grandmother was declared an unfit mother, and my grandfather was institutionalized for a mental breakdown. At sixteen, my mom quit school and set about being breadwinner and caregiver to her six siblings, ranging in age from 2 to 14. The state eventually stepped in and took her siblings to orphanages.

Although dispersed, Mom managed to keep her siblings a family. I have relationships with all of my aunts and uncles. Thanks to Mom, we are a family.

I love the tenacity Mom demonstrated, and I put that quality in my main character, Lucy. She has twin siblings, Goody and Mercy, a boy and girl, when her parents are killed. Lucy tries to be all the twins need, but the state steps in and the 8-year-old twins head off for an orphanage. When a farmer and his wife decide to adopt Goody, the question becomes: How far will Lucy go to keep her shrinking family together?

I love your premise. The fact that it’s based on a real-life story is goosebump-worthy. What a rich vein of family lore you have to mine. Okay: let’s get down to the nitty gritty. What is your writing day like?

Since I work in my home, I like to have my ducks in a row before going to my desk. For me, that means time with Papa God. I talk back to Him daily in my journal. It’s a great time. Then I take my Australian shepherd, Tillie, for a long walk. We both need to work out the kinks. Once I’ve cleaned up, I do a household job, and then it’s off to work. I unplug the phone, look at the pages I wrote the day before, and write three more. It’s amazing how quickly the pages add up. When I reach my writing goal, I’m out the door to meet a friend for a cold drink or spend time with my dad. This is how I regenerate.

Sounds like you’ve achieved a great work/ life balance. Did you always want to be a writer?

Heavens, no! I told my 8^th grade math teacher I didn’t need to solve for X because I was going to be an entertainer. I left my ingénue stage in time to marry and have two sons, so I stayed home with the boys for most of their growing-up years before I returned to college for my literature degree. I was born a teacher, so I taught elementary school for a while.

But I’d read that beautiful story. And I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. I quit teaching—the original plan was for a year—but I hadn’t even written the first page after one year. I was discovering that writing was hard work. I buckled down, got the first chapter written. Within months, I had a book contract for Like a Watered Garden.

You realize we all hate you right now. Or at least, we would if you weren’t so completely loveable. Seriously, it’s a credit to the caliber of your writing that you snagged the attention of a publisher so quickly. I’m impressed. What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Don’t make publication your goal. Make writing God-honoring stories your goal. Be willing to put the time and sweat it takes to be a good writer. Take classes at your local college or attend writers conferences to hone your skills. Keep learning. Never be satisfied, but never go safe either. Above all, persist. Persistence is the secret ingredient to being a good writer. And one more thing I wish someone had told me: Start small. Write short stories or novellas. They’re a great way to experiment with ideas, and if your experiment tanks, you haven’t lost all the time and effort a novel requires.

Great tips, Patti. There’s a lot to chew on there. I’m so pleased you could come and hang out with us today.

The best to you!

***

Isn’t she lovely? So here’s the lowdown. To win a SIGNED paperback copy of Patti’s novel, please comment below with why you would like to read Goodness & Mercy. One winner will be announced in the weekend edition.

Then after you’ve commented, skip right on over to Amazon and click yourself a FREE copy of the e-book. (Don’t forget – it’s FREE for three days only! Help spread the word!) 

If you win, you can keep one and give the other as a gift to a book-loving friend. Or keep it just to sniff the pages (I know you still love the smell of paper and ink, even if you ARE a Cool Kid with a Kindle). Or leave it casually lying around on your coffee table, open to the autographed flyleaf, so everyone can be suitably impressed by your authorial connections.

Whatever the case, we are determined to get Patti’s newest novel into as many hands as possible, so get commenting and get clicking! And if you read it and enjoy it, please help spread the word by writing a review or recommending the book to a friend!

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Write What You Know (And Love)

Karen here. So thrilled to introduce you to another of my extraordinarily talented crit partners, Jennifer Rogers Spinola, a multi-pubbed author who was a 2012 Christy award finalist. I'll hand right over to her and you'll soon see why. (This gal sure can write!!) Please make her feel welcome!

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Writing is something that's caught me - and held me fast - my entire life. I remember the little house where I turned five, in a rickety old Virginia coal-mining town close to the West Virginia border. Clifton Forge smelled like paper mill, sickly sweet, and it was there my younger sister was born. I planted my first geraniums and sang “My Country Tis of Thee” before lunch in my first-grade classroom. And it was in tiny Clifton Forge that I wrote (scribbled/drew) my first books, stapling them together in crooked lines.

Ever since those days writing has been my constant companion. I wrote during summer vacation, on reams of green-and-white computer paper stapled and then glued together, on the school bus on wintery Shenandoah Valley days, in high school in between tests. I loved writing. I still love writing. It is one of the glues that holds all my memories together, my years, my moments.

And until I sat in front of an ancient computer screen in our hot apartment in Brasilia, Brazil, a zillion years later, trying to craft out a story to ease my homesickness, I didn’t get the “magic wand” that made the light come on in my head. It was just that: for the first time, I was writing from memories. From places I missed. From things and places that I loved and longed for, and the rush of nostalgic emotion they poured out when I tapped them into black-and-white words.

You see, all my life I had chosen writing topics that required research – lots and lots of research. Historical novels from the 1800s. Modern stories about places I’d never been (like India). Topics requiring weeks of research about adoption law.

While there’s nothing wrong at all with these topics, I realized, as I sat there with the brilliant Brazilian sun glimmering on our gray tile floor, that I’d missed the *life* of my stories. I’d chosen topics that interested and excited me, picked exotic settings, and crafted narratives that were hard (I thought) to put down. But I’d missed one important factor: emotion. The stories excited me, but they didn’t move me—because I didn’t know them.

This whole idea of “writing what you know” was brought home to me by a novel I had just read—a novel of dubious quality about a female cake decorator. I had a hard time working through the clichés and trite plot, and the whole story just felt… wrong. When I read through the dedication and acknowledgements, there was a clue: “Thanks to all the people who taught me about cake decorating.”

And… that was it! I felt like a bright light had just beamed upon the whole thing: the author wasn’t a cake decorator. She didn’t know anything about cake decorating. She got people to show her about cake decorating, which she replicated in the book—but it didn’t evoke any emotion for her or her characters. The text was accurate, but flat. It had no heart.

Right then and there I got out a sheet of paper and decided to make a list of the things I knew well, determined to come up with something I could write about from experience.

And I sat there. And sat there. With a sad little 1) and a blank line.

What did I know about? And know about well enough to craft a story and draw on my emotions? Unfortunately, not much. And when I finished the list, it had simply two items: 1) Japan and 2) rednecks. I kid you not.

While my exercise was a bit humbling (humiliating?) it did narrow down my search for topics quite a bit. Could I possibly combine the two and create a story using my (ahem) vast expertise?

I doodled on the paper, brainstormed ideas, got a flash of inspiration, took a walk, wrote a hastily-scrawled outline, and…  the “Southern Fried Sushi” series was born. Shortly after that I sent chapters to a published friend, and he in turn submitted them to his publisher (Barbour). The women’s fiction editor contacted me directly, and within a few months she’d offered me a contract for the series.

Why? Because my prose was so poetic and polished, or my plot so riveting? Hardly. Actually I think it’s because you can see my heart in the locations I wrote about—the memories and the stored up emotion. The longing for places I had once known and left, and the marks they’d left on my soul.

Please don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying you can’t ever use research or chose a topic you don’t know much about. All of those things are fine, if the topics evoke emotion in you. If that is the case, then you do “know” them—from a lifetime of study or focused research or some sort of experience. But they’re not foreign to you; blank; lifeless. They are not simply crafts to be studied; they are long-lost loves. But to write about topics simply because they’re interesting or worse, trendy, can leave readers smelling a “rat.” Even a carefully crafted “rat.”

Pay attention to the emotion in these paragraphs by John Steinbeck in his wonderful book “Travels With Charley” as he describes the Dakota Badlands as barren, unworldly, uninhabitable, and even unfriendly:

“I went into a state of flight, running to get away from the unearthly landscape. And then the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled, the buttes and coulees, the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look and glowed with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver-gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black. It was so beautiful that I stopped near a thicket of dwarfed and wind-warped cedars and junipers, and once stopped I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light… and the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought, for the stars were close… And I thought how every safe generality I gathered in my travels was canceled by another. In the night the Bad Lands had become the Good Lands. I can’t explain it. That’s how it was.”

I don’t know about you, but I read that section over and over again, devouring Steinbeck’s descriptions and words, and the change in his tone. I am not even a Steinbeck fan, but his description here moved me, made me see, made me thirst to read again. Why? Because he saw the Badlands first-hand—and he was moved by them. And thus I am also moved.

Writing from experience, or love (or even hate, so long as it evokes emotion in you) is the singlemost thing that, in my opinion, makes a book or a story authentic.

Even if we can’t identify from our own experiences, we are moved by his (or her) presentation of the events, and it often strikes us as dearly as if it were our own.

Another example I love is from a book called “The Sacred Romance” by John Elderidge. He opens the book by recalling nights on his family’s childhood farm—the feel of soft sand between his toes as he visited the river at dusk, the scent of hay and grass, the crickets and stars, and the feeling that everything was all right. He writes about returning to the same spot years later as a cynical young college student, hardened, in the beginnings of winter, and standing on a bridge looking out over that same stream on that same farm. The water was muddy and cold, choked with dead branches and leaves, and the friendly “haunting” he previously described had disappeared. His cynicism was right; the farm was lifeless and had always been. He had been fooled, cheated—everything never was all right, and would not be.

This chapter brought tears to my eyes. I read it so many times I lost count; I felt Elderidge’s pain, his disappointment, the feeling we all have of cynicism and wounding. I could not put the book down, all the way through his woven stories until we realize, in the end, that all is not lost—the farm and the river at dusk were not lying but speaking greater truth than we can ever realize. It moved me profoundly, and it remains one of my favorite books of all time. Not because of his poetic words or descriptions—although he is poetic—but because of his heart.

I would encourage you as writers to take stock of several things:

1.     What do you know (and love)?

2.     What do you hate?

3.     What moves you?

4.     What are your areas of expertise?

5.     What do you miss? (This one was key for me!)

6.     What are some of your most emotional memories or experiences?

This is just a rudimentary list of beginning questions to make the writer think and probe—I’m sure you can come up with more. Ultimately, though, remember—your writing is not just for practicing craft and selling books. It’s about YOU—your emotions—your disappointments and triumphs in faith and walk with the Lord.

Apart from that it’s just a book on the shelf, sterile and cold, that readers will praise but put back, unmoved and unconvinced. And even if we sell a million copies, we will have still failed, for our hearts know the truth and cry out to be heard.

Jennifer Rogers Spinola lives in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, with her Brazilian husband, Athos, and three-year-old son, Ethan. She has lived in Brazil for nearly eight years and served as a missionary to Japan for two years. Jenny is the author of Barbour Books' "Southern Fried Sushi" series (first book released in 2011) and an upcoming romance novella collection based on Yellowstone National Park (also with Barbour Books). Her first novel, “Southern Fried Sushi,” was a Christy Award finalist in 2012.

You can purchase "Southern Fried Sushi" here.

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Jenny, thanks so much for being our guest here today! Make sure you check out her books - they are all wonderful reads!

Karen Schravemade lives in Australia. When she's not chasing after two small boys or gazing at her brand-new baby girl, she spends her spare minutes daydreaming about the intricate lives of characters who don't actually exist. Find her on her website, on Twitter or getting creative over at her mummy blog.