Published Jan. 12, 2006, in the Waukesha Freeman

Story by Matthew Webber

WAUKESHA – The topic of the workshop was dialogue, yet most of the participants seemed content to listen to only one voice: that of Jacquelyn Mitchard, the workshop’s instructor and the author who found fame as the first novelist chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

Mitchard, the author of The Deep End of the Ocean, The Breakdown Lane, and the forthcoming Cage of Stars, spent a snowy morning in December at AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop, 804 N. Grand Ave., sharing dialogue tips with a roomful of fans and fellow writers.

Calling dialogue “a story’s connective tissue,” Mitchard explained how dialogue works to advance the plot, flesh out characters and engage readers’ interest.

As the Madison resident admitted after class, the writer’s life may not be glamorous, but having the opportunity to discuss that life with other writers and readers is what makes it so rewarding.

The Freeman: A lot of people seem to think that the life of a writer who is somewhat known, like yourself, is kind of glamorous. How would you debunk that myth?

Jacquelyn Mitchard: That would be kind of not true. It’s like being a carpenter, in that you get up every morning and you pound nails and try to cut things so that they fit properly, and there’s nothing glamorous about that.

When you’re on television shows, on book tours, you spend the whole night before worrying about whether your eyes are going to be red and staying awake so that you can guarantee that they will be the next morning.

There’s nothing glamorous about traveling from place to place (and) eating a Caesar salad at every Marriott in the United States, but meeting readers is really cool.

Every time I set out to do an event, I moan and complain the whole way there. “Oh why, why, why did I agree to do this?

I’m not getting paid and oh my god I could be home and I could be watching Law & Order and taking care of my kids.”

And when I get there and I am with readers, that all changes, and I feel like we’re having a conversation, and it’s an important conversation.

What do you find are some of the most common comments you get from readers?

Your book was very honest, that’s the primary one. That the people in the book were very real. ...

I don’t write about glamorous figures. I write about people who would be over there in that office (the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program office, across the street from AllWriters).

And I guarantee you, if I went over there to that office, at the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, and knocked on the window, and talked to the person there for awhile, that person has a novel within him, and I could write it.

It really is true that cabdrivers always say to you, "If I wrote down all the stuff that I knew all my life, you can’t believe this stuff," and they’re right. They’re writers without hands. They don’t have the tools to be able to tell those stories, but they sure have the stories.

Everyone does. Every time you go running and you go past somebody’s house and you see the light behind the window, you don’t know if that house, if there is abuse there, if there’s alcoholism there, if there’s a magnificent love there, if someone’s sick.

There’s been a big push in the industry since your book -- and I’m not saying it’s because of your book -- toward a trend of women’s fiction. How would you explain that trend?

Because most books are purchased by women and they always have been. Eighty-four percent or more of all books, whether or not they are for the women, are purchased by women.

So they’re writing to an established market. You can see men browsing in bookstores lots of times, but the percentages are far smaller in terms of them buying fiction. Mostly the men will buy nonfiction: history, how-to, periodicals, sports, that kind of thing.

And women are the primary consumers of fiction, whether or not the fiction is by men or by women, with the exception of the spy-thriller-type book, you know, the Tom Clancy-type book. But what there’s a trend away from now, and that we saw for a long time, is what you would call the stilleto-shoe book.

Candace Bushnell, that kind of thing?

Not so much anymore. It’s slowly drifting away, but people are, "Enough of that now.” That was a sort of confection in writing and people enjoyed it for awhile, the slogans and the books about women’s friendship, and not so much anymore. Now they’re looking for something else.

What do you think Oprah’s contribution has been to literature?

I think it’s been thrilling, because, though it didn’t really, people believe that it had a big salutary effect on the publishing industry, that it revived publishing. It didn’t.

Publishing is still in very bad shape. And Oprah Winfrey’s book club didn’t do anything to change that.

It helped the careers of about 54 people. Tolstoy was all right to begin with. So it didn’t really change publishing.

What it did was change the attitude, I think, of people who consume television toward reading, that it made it OK to read a book that was a not a romance or a mystery, though I love mysteries, and there are some that are extraordinarily literate.

It made it OK to have fun with a quote/unquote "good book."

She gave people permission and said, “You know, you’re going to have just as much fun reading this book as you would reading a book by Danielle Steele.”

In the workshop, you mentioned your upcoming book, Cage of Stars, and you said it was kind of a thriller, so why go in that direction at this time?

The story that it’s loosely based on has been a story that has obsessed me for a long time, and I wrote it that way because ... I don’t want to be pigeonholed as the woman who writes about mothers and children.

So, while there are elements in this book about family and about the importance of family as a force in our lives, it is also a book in which the themes are very different. It’s about morality and about whether there can ever be morality in revenge.

Not only do I not want to bore readers, I don’t want to get bored either. So I always have to find something that’s exciting enough to absorb me for a year of my life.

And my ambition, I have said this before, but my truest ambition is to write a wonderfully elegant ghost story. Not a monster story. Not a slasher story. But a really wonderful ghost story. That’s something that I hope to do in the not-too-far future.