About Ellen Pall:
ELLEN PALL is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Among the Ginzburgs, Corpse de Ballet, and Slightly Abridged. She has also written many features about people in the arts for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and published numerous personal essays, most recently in The New York Review of Books. Ellen grew up on Long Island, went to college at U.C. Santa Barbara, then moved to Los Angeles. There, she wrote eight Regency Romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. (Not to be confused with the former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill. Very different person.) After ten years, she left California for New York, where she promptly began work as a journalist, wrote novels under her own name, and met her husband, the international human rights advocate Richard Dicker. She now divides her time between New York and L.A.
What inspires you to write?
I am addicted to fiction, have been ever since I started reading storybooks as a very little girl. Writing is a way of extending my life inside the fictional world. Reading other people’s books is like visiting other people’s houses. Writing my own books is like being in my own house. And I love being at home.
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
Oh man, there are so many wonderful authors, writers whose works and voices I carry around with me always! Here’s a very partial and random list: Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Geraldine Brooks, Ruth Ozeki, Paul Murray, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Thackeray, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Eudora Welty, Kate Atkinson, Marcel Proust.
Tell us about your writing process.
Ideally, I wake up, drink a cup of coffee, and go directly to my desk. If I can do this quickly enough, my unconscious is still awake and my inner critic isn’t. That often results in a beautiful flow of writing. That’s my day to day process.
But month to month and year to year, each book gets written differently. I wrote an entire novel and set it aside before writing the book that became Among the Ginzburgs. Only much later did I realize that discarded manuscript was a kind of precursor to it, emotionally setting me up the quite different book that was published.
Long ago, when I wrote Regency Romances under the penname Fiona Hill, I plotted them out chapter by chapter before writing even the first sentence, because they were written in the 1970s (!) on a typewriter (!!) before personal computers existed (!!!). So any changes that had to be made after the first draft involved a whole lot of work.
I wrote my mysteries front to back, but only after figuring out who killed whom, how and why. The idea of getting to the end of a mystery and finding I didn’t know whodunnit chilled me to the bone.
Must Read Well started as a gigantic, shaggy novel with a dozen major characters and got whittled down to its swift, lean final form over a period of five years. So—every book is different!
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I listen very hard! In fact, many of my books have started with voices that seemed to be coming into my ears from somewhere else in the universe. Often it’s two voices, two people having a conversation. Or an argument. Those two people become characters in the book. I’m an ear person, not an eye person—auditory more than visual. I remember what I hear much better than what I see, so listening to characters is key for me.
What advice would you give other writers?
Don’t reread what you’ve written until at least a few days have gone by. Keep moving forward. Tell your inner critic to take a hike. Keep in mind that writing is a very low-stakes activity. If you write a chapter doesn’t work, you can recycle the paper you used the next morning, sit down again, and take the material in a different direction. Compare that to what it might be like to build a house! If you build a room that just doesn’t work—like maybe you forget to put in a window—walking that back would be a whole other thing.)
How did you decide how to publish your books?
My first book, The Trellised Lane, came out in 1974, so it never crossed my mind to publish it except by finding a publisher who would buy it. It was a Regency Romance written under the penname Fiona Hill. (I ended up writing nine of these early in my writing career.) I was very, very lucky. The boy who’d been my date at our high school junior prom had just gotten a job as a literary agent, and his friend from college had just gotten a job as a book editor. We were all three of us just six months out of college.
Back East, my first book under my own name, came out in 1983 and was published by David R. Godine. Again, I never thought of trying to bring it out myself—although that is what Walt Whitman did with Leaves of Grass in 1855, and Beatrix Potter with The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think people love to read books—thankfully, they truly do—and book publishing of all kinds will continue as long as that’s the case. Of course, self-publishing is flourishing, but hybrid publishing is also growing, and traditional publishing is full steam ahead.
What genres do you write?: Psychological Thriller, mainstream literary, Women’s Fiction, Mystery and Regency Romance
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print, Audiobook
Website(s)
Ellen Pall Home Page Link
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
