Jenna Blum

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and # 1 internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family; memoir Woodrow on the Bench; audiocourse “The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction” and original podcast The Key of Love. Blum is CEO and co-Founder of online author interview platform A Mighty Blaze and one of Oprah.com readers’ Top 30 Women Writers. She earned her MA in Creative Writing at Boston University and has taught workshops for Boston University, Grub Street Writers, A Mighty Blaze, and numerous other institutions for over 25 years. Blum interviewed Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and is a professional public speaker, traveling nationally and internationally to speak about her work.

Her new novel is Murder Your Darlings.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Great question. I think a title needs to be both memorable and applicable, and I hope Murder Your Darlings is both. Most readers know this phrase means to cut things from a manuscript that are beloved but not essential, but what they might not know is that "murder your darlings" is the original advice to writers, given by a gentleman named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in 1914....and then it was appropriated, and changed, by Faulkner to "kill your darlings." When I learned this, I knew my title had to be the original Murder Your Darlings, since my thriller is after all not only about ruthless writers behaving badly but about the most extreme form of appropriation.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

She probably wouldn't be surprised at all. We love to write about sex and death and dark things, and what makes people tick, and there's plenty of all of the above in Murder Your Darlings. I do think she would absolutely love reading it, probably would devour it in one sitting in her attic bedroom, smoking out the window.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings! I hate them. I rarely change them, but I don't enjoy them. The first chapter of a novel is such a workhorse: it has to draw the reader in, introduce character, main conflict, atmosphere. The exception is prologues: not all of my novels have them, but the prologues I wrote came in a lightning flash of inspiration, and they've been included in my novels verbatim from the first draft, unchanged.

An ending is a reward. I always know what the ends of my novels will be, even the last lines, and I write toward them like a swimmer pushing through choppy seas (which is all that murky middle stuff). Reaching that last paragraph, that last line, is dragging myself up onto the beach and lying in the sun.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I do, alas, see myself in some characters. The closer a character is to me, the harder she is to write. The characters who give me the most joy are the ones who are completely unlike myself, who appear out of nowhere and demand that their stories be told. They are to me living people, and it's my job to get them out of the ether and onto the page where others can know them as well. I got lucky with Murder Your Darlings in that not one but two of the narrators, The Rabbit and William, are those out-of-nowhere characters. (Sam Vetiver, the heroine, is pretty much an alt-me. But I love her, too!)

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My friends. All my friends, pretty much, are writers, and even when we're not talking about writing, when we're hiking in the woods with our dogs or working together on A Mighty Blaze (our online author interview platform) or on paddleboards, it's a constant inspiration to see how they arrange their lives in order to nourish creativity.

Also nature. Writers, including myself, are often impatient creatures. We want our books to be done now, instantly, perfectly. iI you've watched anything in nature grow, you know it doesn't work like that. Often it seems as though nothing is happening--but a seed is cracking beneath the earth, a bud forming within a tree. Things take as long as they take. I try to honor the process and accept that.

Visit Jenna Blum's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lost Family.

--Marshal Zeringue