I always assume when I am writing I am just writing down these common sense thoughts, or feelings. It isn’t until I have space that I realize how deeply engrossed I was in the emotional world of the book. I literally in some weird ways become the story, and one person’s hardships become doorways and tunnels into me expressing my own.
Suzanne Steinberg – 15 February 2015
The Back Flap
This is about Freud, his life, his disappointments, his inner design as he constantly created constellations of hope and mystery within the universe we all found our self re-discovering and ranking in the dark scientific eye of plausibility, a fixed atmosphere of time and space, a world of broken promises changed through authority, logic, one word answers and the endless control of madness.
About the book
What is the book about?
The books is about Freud’s life and the interesting people he lived and learned from as well as his personal reflections and musings that turned him into the man he became.
When did you start writing the book?
Three years ago
How long did it take you to write it?
Two years
Where did you get the idea from?
My mother was diagnosed with bipolar and schizophrenia when I was 12, and there was no cure for her. I was very angry that there seemed to be answers to mental illness but my mom was in risk of ending up homeless and in a permanent state of confusion. I felt that she fell through the cracks of the government’s mental health system and I wanted to understand why no one seemed to notice. So I wrote to understand how the illusions and magic of psychology worked, where it was progressing and if there really was a cure for mental illness.
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
I think the hardest part writing the book was confronting the loss and abandonment of my mother’s emotional and spiritual support in my life. Freud had a very interesting and deep understanding of the relationship with his mother so that really was helpful and perhaps challenging in making me confront my own relationship.
What came easily?
The easiest part for me were the days when Freud was happy, because when he was happy I was happy.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
The characters have mostly been inspired from Freud’s real life. But the parts of them I elaborated on came from a weird place inside of me. I can’t say they are people I have ever met but more like caricatures of myself in different uncomfortable situations. Like if I could take myself and flatten it out it, they would all be different sides of me. They always make me laugh though, how stupid and ridiculous they all seem, which is what makes writing so fun and helps me be a little less uptight and serious. Though in rare cases sometimes I think I channel my angry step mother or angry father, and those character are still funny because they are so absurd, but it strikes a much more emotional and sinister note.
We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?
Margret Atwood is one of my favorite novelists, I don’t know if I will ever be as thought provoking and insightful as she is, but I love her. Syliva Plath, because she is so emotional and helps me embrace the more emotional dark side of myself. Charles Dickson for his whimsical characters. I know he was criticized for some of his characters not being deeply profound but I always found his descriptions to be very cute and endearing and light. If you are going to spend your life writing you have to have a few playful moments. Tolstoy, because he had moments of great clarity about the big picture but then could turn around and be incredibly intimate and detailed with the day to day life of a character.
Do you have a target reader?
Probably over 18.
About Writing
Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?
When I am writing a novel I sit down for two-four hours a day and write. Writing is one of my favorite things to do. However in that four or five hour time span I spend a lot of time staring at the wall, reading biographies, re-reading and crying. Despite how dry some of my moments in my novels may seem I spend a lot of time regularly crying and staring in deep thought about my personal life. The novel almost becomes this intimate experience of my own growth and insights. I am also surprised after I have had space from a novel to re-read a moment I captured and to realize it was as fleeting as it was, I always assume when I am writing I am just writing down these common sense thoughts, or feelings. It isn’t until I have space that I realize how deeply engrossed I was in the emotional world of the book. I literally in some weird ways become the story, and one person’s hardships become doorways and tunnels into me expressing my own. I think that is why I have to write biographies than my own personal story, I wouldn’t have the courage to go to those places without a character to help carry me through it.
Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?
No I never outline, a lot of people felt with fictional biographies there should be an outline or some organization, but I think that is the beauty of writing it has no timeline or real structure. I write screenplays and time is very important in the product of screenplay, but writing novels is a very special because how much time you spend on one thing versus another thing is very personal and there is no real right and wrong or any limitations. With a fictional biography the entire thing if I felt drawn to it could be about his childhood with one or two pages about his adulthood and that would still be a good book.
Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?
I have had a love and hate relationship with editing. It made me very insecure in the beginning. Grammar was never something that came naturally to me and I agonized over it with my first book. I was so insecure I decided I did not understand the real purpose of a comma so I was going to delete every comma in the book and only keep the most meaningful and clearly defined commas. That really pissed off my friend who read the book. So I have learned through somewhat of a self-hating process that grammar can be an art too and not to really take the rules as seriously as others do. So I don’t really edit myself with grammar, I re-read a million times for my own perspective, but I don’t let people who are going to use grammar as a superficial ranking system about the depth of writing get to me as much as they used to. At the end of the day grammar is fixable but the quality of your ideas are not.
Did you hire a professional editor?
I did that with my memoir I wrote at 25, before I began writing fictional novels. I was disappointed with the service. I felt that I paid a lot of money and the most I got out of it were nice compliments. Not to say hiring a professional editor is a bad thing, but you have to be a contributor as well, to expect someone who doesn’t know you and who doesn’t know your writing style and doesn’t even have the grounds to see the big picture of the book, catch all of the simple small mistakes is just inhuman. You have to know what you are paying for and for me that was someone telling me the book was good. I can belittle it today, having some more confidence and having more than one person compliment me, I no longer believe a few compliments are worth 500 dollars but on my first very personal book having someone I looked up to think it was a good meant more than I am giving it credit. And I still stay in touch with that editor today.
Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?
I do, I enjoy listening to indie music. There is nothing more healing to me than crying, listening to my indie artist and writing all at the same time. But as a warning you do receive some odd looks from the coffee barista who you just had a very bubbly conversation with. Not everyone in the coffee shop is in tune with the power of writing but if you do it enough times, I have found a subtle sense of acceptance from others.
About Publishing
Did you submit your work to Agents?
I don’t even know how many Agents I have submitted to. So many agents, more than one know me personally and in this case it is not a good thing. You do not want to be remembered as the person they rejected last time. I even began having personal relationships with them in my head, thinking this book will really blow that agent out of the water, or they will be really surprised to see this query. Don’t do that. Agents are very impersonal with the queries they read and it is mostly about money to them. Once you begin feeling like you have to prove yourself to an agent, who really is working in very shallow water, you will only be disappointed even if they like you. I have learned the hard way and from living with a sense of failure as an artist, that feeling appreciated by those who are not trying to profit off of you but because you touch them spiritually, is much more meaningful.
What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?
It was dramatic. I went to writing conference that was mostly for a romantic genre, but you know they accepted all types. I paid all this money to go to these lunches and these meetings with literary agents and these contests, only to feel isolated and taken advantage of. There is nothing wrong with going to a conference or meeting a literary agent face to face, but if they are not accepting my queries it is unlikely those same people will like me in person, even if I am in my prettiest dress and being a fascinating conversationalist. The sad truth I realized about these conferences was that it was not my way. My books are very artfully done and very thoughtful and it takes me years to write just one. Some people write a book a month, not that there is anything wrong with it, but that is a completely different market.
My biggest dream is to be up with the greatest writers. I don’t want to be the paperback you read because you are bored on the airplane. But there is a niche for those kinds of books and the conference I went to was for people who wrote quickly and wrote to fulfill an already established niche. So I was deeply depressed after the conference, I wanted to give up writing because I felt no one was ever going to read anything I wrote. I wandered around old town Scottsdale for it felt like days but more like a few hours, completely lost nibbling on a sandwich. I felt like the biggest loser in the world and that everything I did was worthless. It was a real low point in my life. I had waited for this biannual conference for two years and I had a lot of expectations. Coincidentally at that time I was a part of a psychic group who is learning to tap into their psychic skills, I am an eccentric at heart, and we do these deep meditations and that night at the psychic group I had a vision of myself as Dorothy with her red shoes on. And Dorothy traveled to all these places in Oz to find her voice or her power just to realize she had it all along and it was always inside of her and she never had to leave her front porch, and it gave me hope to believe in myself. And then I found the courage to just self-publish.
Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?
I feel like all my stories are beginning to sound similar, but this one is similar. I paid a bunch of money, 1,000 dollars, for my first real book cover, A World within a World: A fictional biography about Carl Jung. I really thought people would see this beautiful art and buy the book, which didn’t happen. So afterwards I began doing them myself and I really like my self-made covers just as much as the over-priced one.
Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?
At this point in my life, and I am crossing my fingers that this changes, but my biggest marketing strategy is just to have people read the books. So I post segments of the books on Facebook. Sometimes you get some cranky moderators who don’t like their groups being used for book promotion and they want their Facebook groups to be people who should be writing but are bored to talk to each other about their angst and worry. I believe personally that some of those groups are power trips for people who are just waiting for someone who isn’t as far along as them to ask them for advice. Not different from this interview, but I guess we all take advantage of one another by taking our experiences out of context and trying to slap them on to someone else’s intimate journey. Unfortunately I guess it is unavoidable in our common day atmosphere of judgment and compassion. But I am hoping the way we guide and help others will become more sincere in the future. Anyways I hope that answered the question.
Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?
I didn’t even read this question, what an odd world it is. The best piece of advice I ever received that I took to heart was, believe in yourself. Because no one on this planet can ever write like you do, not even if they tried and tried and tried. Believe that even if your book is not for everyone that it will be for someone, and those someones matter. And even in the most extreme cases you area complete failure and you don’t change anyone but yourself, you matter in this world and no one, not even the complete unknown author who not a single soul has read, wrote in vain.
About You
Where did you grow up?
I was born and grew up in Arizona.
Where do you live now?
Arizona.
What would you like readers to know about you?
That I try to be honest and passionate. Not everything I write is easy to read, but hopefully it is truthful and I believe the truth is more powerful than always being right, socially right or privately right.
What are you working on now?
Thank you for asking this question. I am taking a break from novels. I wrote for almost seven straight years so I needed a break. I became a real hermit, and I felt I could grow more from re-learning some of those social skills I forgot, as well as finding new food to write about later. So currently I am writing and directing screenplays, which is similar but the social side of it is exhausting. I long for the days when I can write again. I plan to start a new series of fictional biographies in two years. I am going to write about Syliva Plath, George Eliot, and James Joyce, or Edgar Allan Poe. I am also looking forward to writing about women in my upcoming fictional biographies, I am a feminist at heart.
End of Interview:
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