With Paula Paul, author of the novels Crazy Quilt, The Barefoot Girl, and 21 other books

 

July 17, 2006

READ THE SHOW NOTES FOR PAULA’S INTERVIEW HERE

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The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. On today’s show, we continue our fiction binge with the fabulous Paula Paul, author of twenty-three novels spanning a variety of genres: mystery, the historical novel, children’s stories, and the novel.

Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I am your host, Paula B. Today, my guest is Paula Paul, an award-winning novelist who usually writes mysteries, but her current novel, Crazy Quilt, is a literary novel. The main character is a woman whose body, marriage, and spirit have been ravaged by cancer treatment but who fights her way back in a most unconventional way. Paula is donating one-third of the royalties from her book to cancer research.

She was born on her grandparents’ cotton farm near Shallowater, Texas, and graduated from a country high school near Maple, Texas. She earned a B.A. in journalism and has worked as a reporter for newspapers in both Texas and New Mexico. She has been the recipient of state and national awards for her work as a journalist.

Welcome to the Writing Show, Paula. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Paula Paul (PP): Well, thank you. I appreciate your having me.

WS: I absolutely could not put down Crazy Quilt and The Barefoot Girl, and I would love for you to tell us a little bit about both of those books.

PP: Okay. Well, most books–actually each book–was born in an entirely different way. Crazy Quilt is a book I wrote after I had breast cancer. I didn’t really want to write that book, and people kept saying, “Well, you should do this, you should do this,” so I finally decided, well, I will give it a try, and I found it very difficult to write. I wrote it several years after I had breast cancer. I had a very serious form of breast cancer. It was a 50% chance of survival, so it was hard for me to relive that, some of those thoughts and some of those experiences, but I couldn’t stop writing it, so it is somewhat autobiographical, although this is about a woman who runs away from home, and I didn’t run away from home. But it was hard to write. I would have to stop occasionally and just get away from it, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop writing it. I couldn’t keep from going back to it, and when I got it done, I felt as if it was very cathartic.

Now, on the other hand, Barefoot Girl was a book, it’s written under a pseudonym, it’s written under the name of Catherine Monroe, and the editor asked me to do a series. The editor at New American Library, which is part of Penguin Putnam, asked me to do a series on female saints. I at first didn’t want to do it, but she and my agent more or less talked me into it. She wanted it done under a pseudonym in case I got tired of writing the series, and she could get somebody else to do it. Now, I don’t think they are going to have anyone but me do it now at this point, but anyway, she said, “We want this to be about female saints,” and I said, “Well, I am not sure I can do this, because I am not Catholic. Anything I do about female saints I’ll have to research,” and she said, “That’s good, because you will come at this without a prejudice or any particular feelings about the saints.”

So I set out to research the saints thinking that I would do some to start with that were a little bit obscure, and Margaret the Barefoot caught my attention as I was going through the Catholic encyclopedia and several other sources, many of which I found on the Web. She caught my attention because she was the patroness of abused women, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a topic that I am interested and a lot of people are interested in right now,” so I pursued the research for her. The information available about her was really pretty skimpy, so I had to make up a lot of stuff, which pleased me because, after all, I am a fiction writer. But it is true, the outline of the story is true. She was a peasant girl. She was married to this rather wealthy gentleman. It’s not clear how she came to be married, how she, a peasant girl, came to be married to this wealthy merchant, so I had to make up the circumstances. And it is true that she was abused by her husband, and it is true that she sought escape from this in ministering to the poor. So that part of the story is true, and the rest of it I had to put on the trimmings, I guess you would say. So, that’s how that book was born, in a very different way from Crazy Quilt.

WS: Can you tell us a little more about the stories, particularly Crazy Quilt, because you did touch on a few of the things that happened in Barefoot Girl. Just for our listeners just to give them a little idea of what the plots are and who some of the characters are?

PP: Okay. Crazy Quilt is about a woman who has finished her treatment for breast cancer and feels that her life has been changed and doesn’t plan to run away, but she is going to visit an aunt in Lubbock, Texas. She is leaving from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she is going to Lubbock, Texas, to visit her aunt, and on her way, she passes through the part of the country where she grew up. That much is autobiographical in that I grew up in that part of west Texas. And she stops just to have a nostalgic look at her old home and becomes involved with these characters there and doesn’t leave. She stays there. She has a husband at home, her marriage is a little bit rocky, and as she becomes involved with these characters–and one in particular is this sort of an old codger named Mac–she learns a lot about herself and about her outlook on life. And as the story progresses, she learns that Mac is dying. I can [tell] that much, I think, without giving away too much of the story. And she helps him die, helps him through his process of dying while he teaches her how to live and how to live without fear. So that’s the outline of that story. As I said, I didn’t run away from home, but I did have to learn how to live with fear, because after one has had cancer, there is always this worry. I am not the only one who feels this way, because I have discussed this with other cancer survivors. There is always this worry that it is going to come back because doctors can never assure you that the cancer won’t come back, and you have to learn how to live not just with that but to live beyond that. So that’s what this book is really about, how to deal with fear.

WS: And a little more about The Barefoot Girl, then?

PP: Okay. Well, The Barefoot Girl is the story of Margaret, a peasant named Margaret. They didn’t always have last names. This is set in the 1300s, the 14th Century, and she is in what later became Italy. She is a peasant, and she attracts the attention of a wealthy merchant, and he buys her from her father to become his wife and takes her away to live in the city. He criticizes her for her peasant ways and tries to make her over into someone else and is very cruel to her, and she seeks refuge in the servants in the household as well as in the poor beggars on the street, and she becomes very involved with helping.

This much is true, this part is true according to the Vatican records. She really did become involved with these beggars on the street and tried to help them, and she became known as Margaret the Barefooted because she would dress as a beggar and not wear shoes in order to make herself more acceptable and a less suspicious kind of character to these beggars. [She] felt that would enable her to get to know them better and to be able to help them better, and, of course, her husband criticizes her for that and physically beats her for that.

In the meantime, she falls in love with a priest, and he falls in love with her, but they… So this is a forbidden love affair that they have to deal with. But the story is really about a woman who, in spite of a man and a society trying to put her in her place, learns how, through her own strength of character and strength of will, has to learn who she really is and what she thinks her mission in life really is. And she also has to learn what it means to love on several different levels, not just romantic love but love on a lot of different levels, with friends, with children, and with her religion, her faith and that sort of thing. So I would say this is a book about learning about love.

WS: You said a minute ago that you didn’t want to write the book. Can you tell us why?

PP: Well, when I got into this book, I really got into it and really enjoyed the story and really got into writing it. But I thought it would put too many strictures on me, that I would just have this narrow, sort of formulaic path laid out for me when I was told it has to be about female saints, and I was also afraid that they would want it to be religious. And I said, “Well, if I write this book, it’s not going to be from a religious standpoint,” and they assured me that was all right. Of course, religion has to play a part in this kind of story, but it is not a “religious” book, it is not preachy, it’s not even orthodox, I would say.

But anyway, because I thought that I would have those kinds of strictures on me, I didn’t want to do it, but as it turned out, the editors did give me the freedom that I needed in order to tell what I felt was an effective story, so I really got into it. And I followed it up with another book about a saint. It’s called The King’s Nun, and it will be out in January. That is the story of St. Amelia, who Charlemagne was in love with back in the 8th Century, so I enjoyed that one, too. So my reluctance and my fears were ill-founded, I would say.

WS: Well, that’s good. I’m glad, because I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a real page-turner, and as a matter of fact, I thought both of your books were real page-turners. I want to ask you about that aspect of your writing in a second, but first, these books are very different. What is common to the way you approach the writing of your books?

PP: Well, I think the thing that is common to any book that I write, and I have written a lot of different kinds of books–I have written mysteries, I have written romance novels, and I have written children’s books, as well as these historical novels and this mainstream novel–and the thing that is common to it, I think, is I want the story to present a character who learns something in the course of the plot. And I want to have a plot that is not only engaging to the reader in that you want to know from one page to the next what’s going to happen next–in other words, a well-paced novel, a well-paced plot. Not only that, but I want it to engage the reader in a way that the reader can learn something about himself or herself.

So that’s what I start out with. I start out with this kind of mission when I am going to write a novel. Sometimes I start with a character. Sometimes I start with a setting. It depends on how the idea comes to me, but it all boils down to the character. It’s eventually the character, and that character has to hold the reader’s attention and has to be a character that the reader can identify with. Now, that’s not to say the character has to be perfect in any way but has to have some redeeming qualities so that the reader is more or less rooting for the character, and the character has to learn something. It has to be presented with a problem that he or she overcomes. And I don’t want it to be just some sort of a physical problem, how to get from here to there or how to find the buried treasure or whatever. I want it to be an internal kind of problem, because that’s the kind of thing that the reader… Well, I always say I want to change people when I write a novel, and that’s the only way to do it, to work from the inside out, I think. So that’s what they have in common, although the plots are different.

WS: You said that you want the reader to learn something about themselves. And I know that you have said that you like to have the person overcome something and have some good qualities and everything, but how do you take what happens to the character and translate that into the reader’s experience?

PP: Well, you can’t always do that, but you can always hope that that will happen. So what I do, I sort of learn my lesson from books that I read that I think are…and when I say change the reader, of course, it doesn’t have to be a dramatic turnaround in your life but at least in some small way change you or give you a new insight. So I look at those books that have given me new insight and that have maybe in some way changed me, and I really analyze them. I really want to see how this came about, and then I try to apply that to the books that I write. I think personally that that can’t happen unless it changes you, the writer, as you are writing, unless you gain some kind of insight or have at least small change in your life, so that’s kind of how I go about doing it. It’s partly a very studied and intentional way, and it’s partly just instinctive as I write.

WS: What are some of the books that have changed your way of thinking that you could recommend to our listeners?

PP: One of the books that always really sticks out in my mind, and this is not one of the greatest books ever written in some sense, but I thought it was a wonderful work, and that was Shogun. That book, okay, the guy just recently passed away. Now what was his name?

WS: Was it Clavell, James Clavell?

PP: James Clavell, that’s right. I have read almost all of his books, if not all of his books, but this one, I think, is his masterpiece. Because what he did, he started out with this English character on a ship, and most of us in America are Anglo-Saxon–I mean, at least a large majority of us are Anglo-Saxon, or at least western European in our background, in our ancestry–so that we identify with this man, we understand what he is going through.

And then he ends up shipwrecked in Japan, where the culture is completely alien to him, and we began to see this western European character through the eyes of an Asian culture and how shocking it can be and what a difficult time he has adjusting to it, he and his sailors. But as the story progresses, before you know it, you are completely immersed in this Asian culture, and you are equally appalled and shocked at some of the habits of the western culture, so that in some magical way, he transforms an American/western European reader into the mindset of an Asian character. And not just superficially but very much internally, you begin to understand this character or these people, or this culture.

So I felt when I finished reading that book that I had a much better understanding of the Asian culture. In fact, I felt almost as if I were a part of it because he had immersed me in it so perfectly, so wonderfully, and as the character changed, I changed as I read that book. And one thing I noticed when I did read that book–this was back in the ‘70s when the book came out–right after that, I put that book down, and I picked up the novel Catch 22, in which this is now completely western civilization from the viewpoint of what was a completely modern mindset of these people in the Army.And I had a real hard time identifying with those people because they were so different from this Asian culture that I had been immersed in. So I think that’s one of the books that has had a most profound change on me.

The Winds of War, both volumes of The Winds of War were the same way. I felt transformed, and I felt a better understanding of the human factors of WWII. Another one was Prince of Tides, which I think is another masterpiece. Well, I guess the surprising thing about that book is that he presents these very flawed characters with all of these faults and all of these warts and imperfections that you learn to understand, you learn to sympathize with, and you learn to forgive. And I think in the process of reading that book, I learned how to forgive, not just other people but myself as well. So I don’t know, maybe I approached these books a little different from other people, but I approached them with this kind of hunger and a sort of willingness to be transformed, and that’s what I want my books to do. I hope they will in some small way do the same thing.

WS: I think they do. I would love to pursue your thoughts about those other books, but actually, even more than that, I would like to talk about your books. So maybe some other time we can talk more about the books that influenced you, but I really want to talk about these books, because they are such page-turners, and they are just so skillfully done and so enjoyable.

I know that you mentioned Crazy Quilt has a lot of heavy stuff in it, and it does, but it is still such a pleasure to read, so let me ask you some questions about these books. How do you manage to keep the reader’s attention so beautifully, because you do? I couldn’t put them down. What are you doing to make that happen?

PP: I am not sure I know. I once heard Tony Hillerman, the mystery writer, Tony Hillerman speak, and he said, “When I write a book, I keep in mind all the things I am competing with. I am competing with playing golf. I am competing with watching TV. I am competing with going to the movies. I am competing with eating a good dinner and with making love and everything else that is pleasurable, so I have to make my book better than all of that.”

So I think that’s what I do. I try to keep in mind what I am competing with, and that is that I want to make this story so interesting and entertaining that I am a good competitor against all of these forces. Other than that, I think I approach it thinking, okay, if I were a reader, what would keep me interested? Now, I have to re-write sometimes. The way I write is to just let it come out. I don’t censor myself or anything. I just put it on the page without censoring because I always feel that I can go back and fix it, and sometimes I do have to fix it. Sometimes, it gets bogged down with detail or description or something like that, and I have to just re-write it to make it more interesting. So I guess what I am saying is I sit down with this plan in mind, with this idea in mind that I am going to make this an interesting book, one that a person can’t put down, and I just start writing. I am using what is at the right side of my brain, that sort of intuitive side of my brain, and then when I get it done, I go back and use the more logical left side of my brain to make sure that it holds together right in a much more logical way. I hope I got those sides of the brain right. Sometimes, I get that mixed up, but it’s the right side that is intuitive and the left side that is more steady and logical. Yeah. So anyway, that’s how I do it.

WS: When you talk about making it interesting, what specifically are you talking about being interesting? Are you talking about plot developments, are you talking about details of character, what things a little more specifically would you call interesting?

PP: Okay, that’s a good question, because what I do, before I start to write, I always try to have a plot in mind, sort of like a road map. I am going from here to there. And as much of the half as I can do, I have to leave some of it to just let it happen, but I know that I am going to go from point A to point B, or I should say maybe point A to point Z, and I know that some of the B, C, D, E that has to be covered and has to be dealt with is in there, so I very consciously write that down. I write myself a synopsis to begin with of where it’s going, what’s going to happen, and a little bit of detail about well: this is where the plot is going to take this turn or that turn, and this is where she is going to encounter this person who is going to make her change in some way or make her adjust her path or something.

So I have this sort of an outline in mind, and then I do physically outline it. I say chapter one, this is going to happen, chapter two, this is going to happen, chapter three, this is going to happen. Now, when I say that, it’s often just one word. Sometimes, it’s just visit marketplace or something like that or marketplace, sometimes, and then as I write, I have to fill in the details. So I work this out in a very skimpy way, I guess, before I start writing, and then I begin to write down more details as I write, and sometimes I have to change.

Let’s say that in chapter four I say that my heroine in Crazy Quilt is going to learn about Mac’s illness, but she has already learned about it, so then I have to change what happens in chapter four and maybe have her quarreling with him because he hasn’t told her about the truth. So I have to be flexible. But I have this idea in mind–Flora is going to run away from home or actually sort of forget to go home, and here’s who she’s going to meet while she is there, this is how this character is going to affect her, and then she is going to meet James Willie, the sheriff, and this is how he is going to affect her. Now, as I was writing that novel, I did not have that character Jill, the teenager, in the story, but she just appeared so naturally and so appealingly that I just left her in. She just kind of showed up there, and she actually had a very important part of play in the plot. So while you can be somewhat regimented, I guess you would say, in planning your book, you also have to be very flexible in letting it sort of go where it seems to need to go. So I do both.

WS: Just for our listeners’ sake, could you just explain who Jill is?

PP: Jill is Mac’s great-granddaughter who shows up and says she is going to live with him just sort of out of the blue. She’s a punk rocker, great-granddaughter who shows up in this west Texas small town and tells her great-grandfather that she is moving in with him and upsets everybody’s life and changes the plot of the story.

WS: I would like to talk about your dialogue because I find your dialogue so compelling, particularly Mac’s lines, but all the dialogue.I mean, he really blew me away. How do you approach your dialogue?

PP: I hear voices.

WS: Ohhh. Well, let me ask you, before you answer, can you just read a little for us so our listeners know what I am talking about?

PP: Okay. I had a spot picked out here for Mac. Let me get this set up just a little bit. Flora has driven off into this pasture. As I said, she is looking around at the place where she grew up, and her car, she has flat tires, and she can’t go anywhere, and it’s getting dark, and Mac, who lives nearby comes walking across the pasture to meet her, and they begin this conversation, and they are talking about the stars. Now, we begin here in Flora’s mind:

I can smell the same faintly spicy scent of mesquite that comes with the breeze and the not unpleasant dusty odor of the corral, horse smell mixed with cow smell. I can hear in the distance a coyote howl a brief, mournful serenade to the wind, and I can almost hear the windmill creaking as it turned its metal face to the breeze and the wooden sucker rod dives deep into the earth in search of water, and I can see the heavens. I used to wonder if God was really up there the way the preacher said he was, but I couldn’t grasp the concept of a God-king in the sky then any more than I can now. Back then, I felt that I was the only one who knew God was really the stars. God the universe.

‘There ain’t nothin’ like it,’ Mac says, drawing on his cigarette, his eyes still on the sky.

‘No,’ I say, ‘nothing.’

‘I met an old Indian in Oklahoma that told me all them stars is the spirits of dead ancestors. You reckon that’s true?’

‘Captain Kirk wouldn’t think so.’

‘You think Star Trek is true?’

‘No,’ I say, my earlier wariness stirring. I am wondering if he’s crazy, crazy enough to think Star Trek is real, crazy enough to kill me.

He laughs. ‘Well, I’ll tell you somethin’. They’re both true. That old Indian and Star Trek, both of them. There’s enough stars up there to accommodate more than way of looking at it.’

‘That makes sense,’ I say.

‘You think it does?’

‘More sense than anything I’ve heard in a long time,’ I say, and mean it.

‘Then you’re a damn smart woman,’ he says. He points to something high on the horizon, a streak of light. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘one of em’s falling.’

‘Say money three times before it’s gone, you’ll be rich,’ I say.

He laughs. ‘Too late. It’s done gone to hell. I gave up on that old superstition a long time ago. I ain’t never goin’ to be rich. I just never did want it bad enough, I reckon.’

Okay, should I read another selection?

WS: Sure, sure. I just love that. Yes, please do.

PP: Okay. This is after Flora and Mac have gone to his little house that he has built out sort of in the middle of the pasture, and when someone approaches in a car, he goes and gets his rifle and shoots at them and tells the person to get out of here.

‘Don’t you take another step toward me. I won’t miss next time,’ Mac says with real menace in his voice.

(This is the foreman of the big ranching concern where Mac has built his house illegally, so he says)

‘Now Mac…’

‘You get out of here. I’m entertaining a lady.’

‘You’re what?’

‘You heard me. Now git.’

‘Isn’t that Flora something? That one from Albuquerque? She was trespassing, too.’

The rifle goes off again. Shorty, the dog, whines pitifully. My hand goes to my mouth to stifle a scream. I think my heart has stopped, and I am afraid to look afraid of what I will see lying in the dirt on the front yard. At almost the same moment, I hear Harley, the foreman, shout, ‘God dammit, Mac,’ and then his pick-up door slams, and the motor roars as he drives off. There is another shot from Mac’s rifle, another whimper from Shorty. I am standing in a daze and shaking when Mac comes back inside. He gives me a concerned look.

‘Now, don’t let Harley upset you,’ he says. ‘That poor kid was just doing his job.’

I can’t speak. I keep thinking I should get the hell out of here, but I don’t move. I watch as Mac goes to the cupboard and pulls out a bottle of Jim Beam. He pours a couple of inches into a glass, then raises the bottle toward me.

‘Care to join me?’ he asks.

I shake my head, eyeing the door.

‘You don’t look so good.’ Mac sits on one of the kitchen chairs, sets his glass on the table.

‘You scared the hell out of me.’

‘I never meant to scare you. I was just doing my job.’

‘Your job is to shoot at innocent people?’

‘Harley ain’t innocent. He was trying to run me off.’

‘Well, he has a right to. You admitted you don’t own this land. He said something about a court ordering you off.’

The old man takes a swallow of the whiskey and breathes an appreciative ‘ah.’

‘Nope, don’t own the land, but I own the house.’

‘But you built it here without the owner’s permission. You are trespassing.’

‘So was you.’

‘There’s a slight difference. I am not…’

‘Oh, now, don’t go getting into all that technical stuff,’ he says. ‘You’ll start sounding like one of them lawyers. I told you I had a good reason for building here.’

‘There’s water here, and you like the view,’ I say.

‘I think you’re beginning to understand.’

WS: I love those passages. Actually, I have to say one of the things about Mac in particular, I think all of the characters, but Mac in particular is, he surprises me. Everything he says I am surprised at.

PP: That’s good, because I could have made him–I am very aware of this–I could have made him a very stereotypical character. When he shoots at Harley, the foreman, he could come back in swearing at Harley, but instead, he comes back in acknowledging that he is doing his job and telling Flora that he’s a good person, so I think that makes it more real. More surprising, maybe, but at the same time, more real.

WS: It does. Tell us more about how you put that dialogue together. You said you hear voices. Is it that simple?

PP: Well, you know, it helps to have grown up there and to have met people like this, so I think in a sense, I say I hear voices, I do. I remember those voices, and I remember the inflection. Well, my father was like that. My mother and father both were very much west Texans, but my mother had a little bit more refined way of talking, but my father was very much like any other man from west Texas with those inflections, and my grandfather, my grandfather was even more so. He was a very, very interesting man who ran off to join the circus and would come back from time to time to see us, and he had these wonderful sayings, so I guess that’s it. I am just remembering. I am remembering what it was like to hear those voices and how they speak. I guess you would say that’s my mother tongue.

WS: So even the things they say, the type of personality that you are revealing, the complexity of the personalities, is that what you also are just remembering, or where is that coming from?

PP: Well, to some extent, but I also work on my characters quite a bit because I want them to be multi-faceted. I want them to seem real, and I want them to not come across as stereotypes. Now, I have a technique for doing that, and that is that especially if I can’t make them seem to come alive, I will have what I call a conversation with my characters. What I do is, let’s say that I am having some kind of problem with Mac, that he seems wooden or something, he doesn’t seem real while I am writing. Then I will just clear my computer screen and start out by saying, “Okay, Mac, what’s going on? Why won’t you respond the way you will?” And then Mac would come back and say something like, “Well, you don’t understand me. How can I respond to you when you don’t understand me?” And I would say, “Well, I want you to have this relationship with Flora.”

“How can I have a relationship with anybody when you don’t understand my background?”

“Well, tell me a little bit about your background.”

“Well, I was born here or there, and then my mother died at the age of twelve.”

And on and on and on and on until I sometimes end up with twelve or thirteen pages of this conversation with a character, single-spaced, in which they tell me who they are, what their background is, and what their mother was like, how they feel about religion, how they feel about sex, and all that kind of stuff. And I can’t use all of that in the book, but I know the character now, and I know how the character will react to a given situation, and I know what situation a character would avoid and why this character might not be doing what I want that character to do. So that’s my technique. I have conversations with my characters, computer conversations on paper. I don’t stand up and talk, I sit there and type.

WS: Do your characters ever come out with contradictory things about themselves, and if so, what do you do about them?

PP: By contradictory, do you mean…

WS: Well, they are internally inconsistent in some way.

PP: Inconsistent.

WS: Well, or not believable somehow. I love the technique, but I think if I did it, I am not sure that it would add up to a real person, it might just be all these weird ideas that don’t go together.

PP: Well, okay, what would happen in my case if I did that, if Mac said, “I always wanted to learn to play the cello,” which is really out of character for him, I would say, “You’re kidding. You don’t even know what a cello is.” And whatever his response might be, he might just laugh and say, “I was just seeing if you were alert,” or “No, I have this side of my background I need to reveal.” I just let it happen. I let it happen while I am doing that, and if it’s contradictory, then I would call their attention to it and ask them to explain that.You know, my background is a newspaper reporter, and it’s as if you are interviewing somebody, and you are forcing them to tell you things they don’t want to tell you and being able to sort of guess when they are not being truthful with you, so it’s that kind of thing. And this sounds schizophrenic, but it works.

WS: No, I don’t think it sounds that way at all, but I think you just said something really important, which is that your background as a newspaper reporter probably helps you to do this a lot.

PP: It might, yeah.

WS: Because you get a real feel. I mean, you must have interviewed a lot of people, so you must get a real feel for personality that way.

PP: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s another technique for a writer, too, is to analyze personalities, to sort of be a people-watcher in that way, to kind of understand their psyche, and I do that all the time not knowing whether I am going to use that character in a book or not, but I might. I just want to understand the human condition and all its variations, I guess.

WS: Your story—well, both of them–I am referring mostly to Crazy Quilt right now, but really, both of the stories, The Barefoot Girl and Crazy Quilt, are very rich in setting. Your details are very vivid, and you really get a very concrete sense of place in the stories. I am wondering if you use your settings in symbolic ways, or are they purely literal?

PP: Well, both. I use it both ways, and I used it in symbolic ways in Crazy Quilt, I think, to a greater extent than I did inThe Barefoot Girl because that vastness of the west Texas prairie seemed to lend itself to some of the symbols of this story.

I always felt, having grown up there, that all of that emptiness, that vastness of the land and sky made a person feel that they had no limitations, and that was what I was kind of trying to do with this character Flora was help her relearn that in her crisis and in her adventure, and I think that was easier for me to do because of having grown up there. It was sort of in my blood and bones to understand that landscape better, although I can still do it with other landscapes.

I fell in love with Italy the first time I ever visited there. I think it was mostly the people, but it was also the landscape and the ancientness and that feel of ancientness in the land. When I was writing Barefoot Girl, I was very aware of the fact that that part of the country, that sort of middle of what is now Italy, was in the process of becoming, and I felt that was what Margaret was doing, as well. She was, of course, just a child when the book starts out. I think she’s fourteen, and she is in the process of becoming, and that part of Italy was the same way. It was just beginning to become an important agricultural area, and, of course, now they call Italy the garden spot of Europe, and it was just becoming. Well, so much had not yet happened there. All of the wonderful churches and the art that came to dominate that part of Italy had not yet happened, and, of course, the popes were still in Avignon and hadn’t made that transition back to Rome yet, so there was all this stuff. It was a young land, and the landscape was young, and it just hadn’t happened yet, and that was Margaret’s story. She hadn’t happened yet, and she had a rough way to go, but she emerged, I think, as a beautiful character, just as Italy is a beautiful land.

WS: That’s just such an amazing way of looking at settings to me. You obviously have a natural gift for that. Can you explain how you [do that]? I wouldn’t know where to start if I wanted to look for settings that were paralleling my characters. How do you think about that? How do you choose something and think about what its characteristics are?

PP: I don’t always set out with that on purpose, but I almost always evolve into that, and I think it’s because…well, one of my neighbors once said to me, you’re from west Texas, and you grew up out in the country in west Texas, and I can see how that shaped your personality. So I started thinking landscape probably shapes everybody’s personality.

So I think that her comment awakened me to that and made me think it does shape our personality. And you can see, if you start watching for that, you can see that in people. People who grow up around the mountains, and Albuquerque, of course, where I live is surrounded by mountains, and they grow up with a different feeling for life than I did. I grew up on the plains of west Texas, as I said, no limitations, and I can see people accepting limitations who grew up around mountains. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule, I can see that happening, and I can see people who grew up in the mountains with the idea [that] there’s a lot to overcome.

Now, I know this sounds crazy, but I think if you start watching, you will see that in people. And people who grow up in cities have, they lack a sort of primitiveness that those of us who grew up in the country have, and I mean that literally, a primitive feel for the weather, for the land, and for the turn of events. It sounds crazy, but I …

WS: I don’t think it sounds crazy at all. No. Please continue.

PP: Well, I can look at birds and animals and tell when the weather is going to change and that sort of thing by the way they act, and I don’t think people who grow up in the city notice that. I don’t think they notice that kind of thing, the way insects react to the seasons, all of that stuff.

That’s not important to my life any more, but it’s still there. I think it’s an awareness. It’s a primitive awareness of your surroundings, whereas a person who grows up in the city has a much more sophisticated awareness of surroundings that I lack. For example, my husband, who grew up in the city, he can navigate his way through a city much easier than I can. It just looks like a bunch of tall buildings to me. I become confused, whereas he’s more confused out in the country, especially in west Texas, where there is nothing on the horizon. He can’t tell east from west or north from south. But beyond that, it’s this awareness of people and motives and that kind of thing that go on in the city that I lack. Still, at my age and after having lived in the city for as long as I have, I still don’t have that wariness that most city people have under certain circumstances. If you watch, you’ll see that in people. You have a much more sophisticated awareness of yourself and your surroundings than I do, I think. I am stumbling with this, because it’s hard for me to articulate something that seems instinctive to me, but I think that’s, I think if you just watch people, you can sort of figure out how their surroundings have affected their personality.

WS: But obviously, each person has certain observational skills that, let’s say, a writer could use to put things together. I mean, you are aware of natural things, and your husband is aware of people, and each of you could bring that to your writing and your characters and all that.

PP: That’s right, and you have to learn to develop those skills that you lack, of course, and human beings are pretty good at doing that. So I think we do that. I think we learn to do that and especially if you want to be a writer, you become sort of a sponge and just soak it all in. But when you asked me about how landscape affects people, I can see the way that it does, although, as I said, we are adaptable, and we can become aware of other things.

WS: Let’s skip to another subject. You have been a journalist for some time, and obviously one of the skills that a journalist develops is a knack for writing great leads. What is the secret of writing a great lead or a beginning?

PP: Well, I guess, simply put, the lead has to grab you. It has to be something that when the reader reads it, he wants to read the next sentence. So you don’t start at the beginning of the story usually, you start in the middle of the story. That’s true for a news story as well as a novel, because you don’t want to say, maybe, let’s say, oily rags were left in the basement of the courthouse, you want to say, flames leaped from the roof of the courthouse, threatening the city hall next door, and then later on, you can get to the cause of the fire. So you want to get to what is the most eye-catching or attention-getting part of the story to get the reader’s attention and entice them to read more.

WS: That is a great description. It’s just start in the middle, in medias res, I guess, is the classical way of putting that. So would you say that you wouldn’t want to start with any kind of once upon a time sort of openings, or can you even do that and make it interesting?

PP: Well, I’d rather not. I guess you could, but I think once upon a time in a land far away, those words in and of themselves have become so classic that they draw you in, but for a modern story, there is a better way to start, I think. It was a dark and stormy night.

WS: Right. What about endings? How do you decide how you are going to end the story or a chapter?

PP: Well, the end of the story, you know, is not too hard to do, usually. You can go beyond the ending, and that’s something that I think writers have to watch for is the end, that when it needs to be ended to not go beyond that.

For example, in Barefoot Girl, I ended it before she becomes a saint, and we don’t know if she is going to become a saint or not. In Crazy Quilt, I ended it with Flora having this idea that she wants to change her life, but we don’t know if she really changed it or not. But the way you want to end it is at the point that the character’s lesson, so to speak, has been learned, and then what the character does with that later is part of what keeps that book alive in the reader, wondering what happened after that. Was it better or worse, or did she mess that up, too? Or maybe I would like to read the next book or something like that. It’s like in show business, leave them wanting more. But ending the chapters, I think that’s kind of tricky, because you can end a chapter with a cliffhanger, but if you end every chapter with a cliffhanger, that becomes a little bit, well, it dulls the reader, I think, so you need to use those cliffhanger endings judiciously and maybe end a chapter now and then with just a hint of something being unsettled but not with the heroine tied to the railroad tracks every time. So I think it’s an art. You just kind of learn to pace that the way it needs to be for the story.

WS: What about ending too soon? You still have questions that are unresolved. How do you know if you are ending too soon?

PP: Well, I think you don’t know. I think you feel it instinctively. I think, okay, you are going to write a story about hunting for the buried treasure, as I mentioned a while ago, so you go out, and you hunt for the treasure. And let’s say for the purposes of this story, after you overcome, oh, wild animals and fierce competitors and earthquakes and so forth, you find the treasure. Then, is that when you end the story, or do you end the story after you go spend some of the money and you are helping the poor or it has corrupted you or whatever? The way to know when to end that story is, you ask yourself, are you writing a story, am I writing a story about a man who is corrupted by money, or am I writing a story about a man who accomplished his goal after he overcame all of these horrible obstacles that were in his way, or am I writing a story about a man who is completely selfless and wants to help all these people with the money that he gained? So you decide what your story is about, and that helps you with your ending. Or maybe you decide that the story is about the man never finding the treasure, and why would he not find the treasure? Well, because he has to learn a lesson that there are other things that are more valuable than buried treasure. So that’s how you know when to end is by asking yourself, what’s the story about?

WS: Oh, I love that. That is so helpful. Thank you. How about reading some more for us?

PP: Okay. Just for a change of pace, I will read the beginning, the opening of The Barefoot Girl:

If God or Satan had not willed it differently, I would have remembered the day as the one on which I gave up my maidenhead to Augustino. As it happened, my virginity was not all that was sacrificed that summer day in the year of our Lord 1340, when I was fifteen. A contract was drawn up between my father and a certain gentleman. That meant I had to give up all that I held dear. I am Margharita, a San Severino known as the barefooted one, an old woman now, and I will tell you this story in the best way I can, but you must understand that it is another who writes it down for me, since I am not a learned woman. My words will not be woven together in the way that will make a rich tapestry of your senses. It will be a rough swath of a story, as coarse and unadorned as my beginnings, smelling of the earth and sweat and blood and tears and all of the secretions of humanity. It is my confession, my prayer for atonement.

Okay, now. I have to tell you that when I did that, I wanted to use those words like coarse and unadorned and sweat and blood and secretions of humanity because I wanted to get across the idea that this was a very rough-hewn kind of woman who had come from this very primitive kind of background, so I did that on purpose. And then another thing that I did was, I wanted to just start out with something that is really grabbing, and this young woman losing her maidenhead I thought might work, and then I stuck in this sentence, ‘As it happened, my virginity was not all that was sacrificed,’ letting you know that something else is going to happen, something sacrificial is going to happen, and then, ‘That summer day in the year of our Lord 1340’ sets the time, so I wanted to try to bring in that in kind of a natural way. So all of that was a little bit studied as I did that opening.

WS: But that is so rich. You have all those sensory details, and you have the foreshadowing, and you are setting, you almost have like in a movie, an establishing shot, and it’s just, oh, it just makes you want to keep going and find out, what is all this about? What’s going to happen to her? This is such a rich setting. Wonderful. Did you want to read some more?

PP: Okay. This is after Margharita, or Margaret, has been taken to the home of this man who has bought her, the rich merchant who has bought her, and he wants to sort of turn her into a more refined kind of person, and he turns her over to his aunt, who is named Lorenzia, and he says, here, work on her. So this woman, Lorenzia, says:

‘Follow me,’ she said, and turned aside. I followed her for no other reason than I didn’t want to be left alone. She led me into a room hung with tapestries. There was a bed in the room such as I had never seen before. It was enormous and had some sort of purple covering on it.

‘Take off your clothes,’ she said.

At first, I thought I had misunderstood her, but she said again, ‘I said, take off your clothes. You are going to have a bath.’

‘A bath?’ It was the first time I had spoken since I left my home, and I might not have spoken that time except that I was shocked. I had heard of the bath houses in town. They were said to be places of sin. I had been told men visited the women’s bath houses for indiscriminate coupling, which was far different from what Augustino and I had done, since our coupling was done for love, not just lust. Besides, we were to be married.

‘Yes,’ the signorina said in her sharp, cutting tone. ‘You have never had a bath?’ She pulled out a large wooden vat. I had no idea the purpose of it.

‘Well,’ she demanded, ‘have you?’

I finally managed to answer her. ‘Twice that I remember.’

WS: That’s wonderful. I just love that. What is the hardest part of writing for you?

PP: Oh, getting started, I guess. I guess getting started every day, looking at that blank screen every day, day in and day out and knowing it has to be filled and not [being] sure that I am capable of doing it. Once I get started, I am okay, and my confidence returns, but it’s sort of a dreadful feeling every day, and I always think, and this has never failed, when I start a book, I always think, oh, I can’t do this. This is when the world is going to find out that I am not really a writer, that I am just faking it. I can’t do this, I can’t do this. So I have to deal with that all the time and force my way through it, I guess. It’s just really kind of an agony. I don’t know. Sometimes, I hate being a writer.

WS: I talked to Elizabeth Buchan yesterday. She is also a novelist, English novelist, and she said pretty much the same thing. She said looking at that blank screen is just agony for her. How do you deal with that?

PP: It is agony. You know, it just makes you wish that you had chosen some other profession. If I were a nurse or a doctor, I would see patients and figure out how to cure them, and you don’t have that blank page in front of you.

WS: Figure out how to cure them; that’s an easy thing, right? But do you have a way of easing yourself into it, or do you just sort of, what do you do when you face that blank page?

PP: Well, I just write. You know, I just tell myself, just put something on that screen. It doesn’t matter what it is. You can change it if it doesn’t work. So it’s just kind of like holding your nose and jumping in the water. You just do it. And you know, some days, when you’re lucky, some days it feels good to get back to it because you know where you left off yesterday, when you had to finally quit and go to bed, that you knew where you were and you know where you can go from here, so that happens sometimes, but all too often, it’s just a blank page.

WS: But it must be worth it, because you keep doing it.

PP: Yeah. Yeah, I like having written, I guess.

WS: You like having written. Well, let me ask you something about having written. How do you feel about the having written part when you are out there promoting your work?

PP: You know, I don’t like that very much. I am not good at that. I am not good at promoting myself. What I like is for someone to do what you are doing, to ask me questions that I can try to answer, but I really don’t much like book signings or going around telling people, this is my new book, why don’t you read it? I feel kind of uncomfortable doing that. But what I like as far as that goes is when people ask me questions, because then I can sort of see what they got out of the book and if it’s what I wanted and hoped that people would get out of it or if I missed the mark, so I kind of enjoy that part of it. But I am not a good promoter. You know, newspaper people are never good at public relations.

WS: I think a lot of them go into it, actually.

PP: They do, they do. But I think they are the ones who aren’t good at newspaper [inaudible], but I am sure not good at it. I am not good at that kind of thing.

WS: Well, I think questions and interviews and things like that are part of promotion, actually, so….

PP: Well, they are, and that’s the part that I can do easier than I can making talks and book signings. I can do that, and I do a lot of it, but I am less comfortable doing that, I think.

WS: What’s the best part about writing?

PP: Well, I think the best part is when the editor says, “Oh, I loved this book.” Or anybody says that, not just the editor. The editor is the first one you hear say that, of course, because the editor says, “Oh, I love this book, I want to buy it.” But when you hear anybody say, “I loved this book and this is what I got out of it and how did you do this or that,” that’s talking about the book. It’s like talking about your children, you know. You want everybody to know what a cute kid you have, and you want everybody to know what a wonderful book you have, so when they are asking you questions about it and telling you it’s wonderful, then that’s very rewarding.
WS: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention to our listeners?

PP: Well, I think we have pretty well covered it. I do want to say, and I said this in a way, that I love feedback. I love hearing from readers. Even if you don’t like the book, I like to hear. I just was at a party last weekend, a wedding anniversary party, and there was someone there who had read one of my books that is about this young woman who was what they called a wildcatter. In the 1920s, that meant that she was searching for oil, going around with this crew looking for oil, and this woman who had worked in the oil fields had told me that she liked the book but that there was one part that I had gotten wrong, and it had something to do with the way they check the mud that comes out of the ground to see if they are in the right spot for oil, a real technical aspect of it, and I was just delighted to hear her say that, because that let me know that she had read the book, so I was pleased with that. Any kind of feedback, I always want to hear that. It’s just a way of knowing that somebody has read the book.

WS: Well, let’s just segue right into your contact information, your Web site, so people can get in touch with you and tell you about how they feel about your books.

PP: Oh, good, okay. Yes, my Web site is paulapaul.net, and there is a place there to ask me questions and also to send me an email, so it’s paulapaul@paulapaul.net, so if you do that, I would love to hear from you.

WS: How many books have you written? You have written a lot of books.

PP: Yeah, I have. I have written a lot, and I have published, my twenty-third book is coming out in January.

WS: Wow. I can’t wait to read all of them. I guess that will keep me busy for a while.

PP: I hope so. And another one on the way.

WS: Thank you so much for being with us on The Writing Show today, Paula. This has just been such a pleasure, and I wish you the best of luck in all your future stories and in your back list.

PP: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

Purchase Paula Paul’s books at Barnes and Noble:

Crazy Quilt

The story, set in desolate west Texas, is peopled with a patchwork of interesting characters including Mac McIlhaney, an old man who both aggravates and mesmerizes Flora; James Willie, the sheriff who wants to rekindle his old love affair with her; Jillian, a young punk-rocker who thinks she has all the answers; Shorty, the dog with a fondness for wigs; and Lucy Martinez, who is willing to risk everything for Mac and Flora.

These people lead Flora through a labyrinth of emotions that seems to her at first to have as little cohesion as an old-fashioned crazy quilt until she finds that both love and healing can turn up in the most unexpected places.


Crazy Quilt

The Barefoot Girl: A Novel of St. Margaret (writing as Catherine Monroe)

San Severino, Italy, 1340.
Fifteen-year-old Margharita is toiling in her family’s meager field when a handsome gentleman rides in with a proposal of marriage. After only a few words with her father,Master Domenico Vasari tears Margharita away from the family she cherishes and the farm boy she loves-and hauls her off to a foreign, violent life, full of strangers and strange customs.

At the Vasari castle, she is given powders, perfumes, and gowns of silk. But for these fineries Margharita pays a dear price. Vasari beats her, viciously and without warning, even when she becomes pregnant. So Margharita begins to pray, fervently and furtively, to the Blessed Mother and Saint Mary Magdalene. For her safety, for her unborn child, and for the starving masses surrounding the castle walls. Only then does the Virgin Mother reveal Margharita’s fate to her-and why she will forever be known as the Barefooted One.


The Barefoot Girl: A Novel of St. Margaret, Patroness of the Abused