I'm so pleased to continue my series of author interviews this week with another wonderful author and editor/writing instructor, Wendy Nelson Tokunaga (at left is the cover of one of my favorite of her books which she talks about in the interview). As well as being a great teacher and editor, she is the author of a number of novels and other works with an emphasis on cross-cultural romance. When I asked her a little about her approach to writing, teaching and the publishing industry, here's what she had to say ...

KC: You have written several cross-cultural (U.S./Japan) novels. What are the greatest challenges of writing a cross-cultural story, particularly if it involves romantic relationships, as yours do?

WNT: All novels are challenging to write, but I guess with cross-cultural themed books, the challenge is to not succumb to stereotypical behavior. In Midori by Moonlight I write from the third-person point-of-view of Midori Saito, a woman born in Japan who feels she doesn’t fit in there and becomes obsessed with moving to the United States. What I did was take a bit of my Japanese husband’s story and give it a sex change. So it was a bit easier to see things from his vantage point and put that in the book. In Love in Translation I write about an American woman who finds herself in Japan and ends up falling in love with a Japanese man. While this isn’t my story, I certainly have been in romantic relationships with Japanese men. Often there’s a nice combination of my interest in Japanese culture dovetailing with their interest in American culture. Each person kind of wants what the other has. For me, personally, it was seeking more order and consistency in life, and with them it was looking for more individual freedom to live the life they wanted to live.

KC: You have set your novels in both the United States and Japan. Which setting is more fun to write? Why? And have you ever been to a love hotel?

WNT: I’d say it’s more fun to write about the U.S., actually. I generally write about the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was born and raised. Since I still live in the area I find it natural to write about where I have such a familiarity and this is a place that still attracts a vast number of people. Unfortunately I’ve spent less time in Japan than I used to and the reasons for more recent visits have had to do with illness and funerals. When and if I do return to Japan for more of a pleasurable visit, I might get the spark to write about it again.

Yes, I’ve been to a love hotel but not for the reason most people go (for some privacy!). My husband and I needed a place to stay at the last minute and chose one. They’re not really comfortable places to stay overnight—the constant Elvis music piped in throughout the hallways didn’t make for a restful sleep.

KC: As well as being a writer, you are also a developmental editor and writing instructor. What advice do you most often give to aspiring writers? What is the one thing you wish someone had told you when you first started writing?

WNT: I’m not trying to sound self-serving here, but I do advise people to have their work professionally edited, especially for big-picture issues such as plot, characterization, pacing and structure. For me, I was long told by my peer writers how good my writing was, but I couldn’t seem to get any interest from an agent and couldn’t figure out why. Once I found professional writing instructors and editors who knew what they were doing and could point out my weaknesses and show me how to improve, then I was able to move forward in my writing career. Still, there’s a lot of hard work and plain luck involved in this business and it’s getting more difficult all the time. It’s not for the faint of heart. That being said, there’s so much more very useful material on the Internet on how to write novels and what to do than there was when I was starting out writing in the 1990s. Of course there’s a lot of bad advice out there too and the sheer overabundance of data can be overwhelming.

KC:  Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? What inspired you to start writing?

WNT: I always knew that I wanted to be creative and I started out doing music, performing in my own bands as a singer and bass player and writing songs. I was inspired to write fiction when I got a job as a technical writer in Silicon Valley and was surrounded by frustrated fiction writers at my job. They’d meet at lunch and critique each other’s stories. Eventually I took some creative writing courses and got some short stories published in small journals and went on from there.

KC:  What are you reading now?

WNT: There are two novels I’ve enjoyed recently. One is Dietland by Sarai Walker, which is referred to as Fight Club for women. It really turns the whole “chick lit” genre on its head and is both funny and chilling. Another novel I liked is Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick, which could be called a literary page-turner, with deep characterizations about family dysfunction and a mysterious nanny/housekeeper.

KC:  What are you working on now?

WNT: I’m currently working on a mystery/suspense novel about a film scholar who finds himself in a real-life mystery situation that rivals any movie.

Thanks so much for your time and thoughts, Wendy!

I'm so pleased to bring readers this interview with Angela Pneuman, writing teacher extraordinaire, and author of the recently released and critically acclaimed Lay It on My Heart.

Here's what Angela had to say when I asked her about the book, her other work and her approach to teaching and writing ....

KC: Your debut novel Lay it on My Heart beautifully combines humor and tremendous sadness. How did you go about balancing the protagonist's (Charmaine's) emotional journey? Was it something you consciously focused on as you drafted?

AP: I had some difficulty finding my way into this character, as strange as that feels to say since she ended up sort of close to my younger self. I started the book from five points of view, in third-person, and switched it up halfway through the first draft. Even when I landed on Charmaine, though, early readers of the early pages said they felt a cold disconnect, a reluctance on my part to delve into her interior. So I worked hard on that...and I'm still not sure why it felt so hard. I do think that I'm drawn to characters who are a little bit alienated from themselves--where the things they feel are still sort of dictated by what they think they're allowed to feel, and I think earlier work of mine has held characters who struggle with breaking out of that. Charmaine is a little more internally articulate, maybe? I also wanted her to be able to register Phoebe's struggle for the reader, so that the reader sort of gets Phoebe's point of view through Charmaine, without Charmaine necessarily fully understanding the position her mother's in...

KC: Charmaine and her mother have a complex relationship with religion in the novel. You handle the issue sensitively, but were you afraid of how people might react to the portrayal of religion in the novel? How much do you think about reader reaction, if at all, as you're drafting?

AP: You know, I was probably more worried about whether or not mainstream readers would be interested in evangelical characters. I tend to think that unless you're a practicing evangelical, or a recovering evangelical, then that segment of society seems pretty easy to dismiss. I'm a recovering evangelical--if that term applies? I wanted to highlight the conflict among these well-meaning people, and where the ruptures occur that allow someone to begin to experience an alternate perspective. I wasn't sure readers would be interested in the community beyond a kind of "oh yeah, those people, in the red states, who go to church all the time and protest abortion, etc" response. I wanted to explore in the story, with the conflict, what I feel are more questions of faith and love--the spiritual questions--than questions of religion, yet those questions are raised by a closer look at any religion, I think. And I wanted Charmaine--and Phoebe--end up wrestling with both the specifics of their religion and the more universal questions of how we deal with what we can't understand, where that intersects with human frailty, and how we hurt or help each other out along the way.

KC: Prior to this novel, you've published a lot of short stories, including the collection, Home Remedies. Which do you find more challenging to write - novels or short stories? Which is more rewarding?

AP: I think they're both pretty hard to write, though with short fiction there's often a different time frame. With a novel you have this awareness of spending days, weeks, years on something that for me, in a first draft, lacks all confidence. With a short story you can say to yourself, if this one doesn't go anywhere I've lost a month. With a novel...you have that "life is short" cloud at your back. But of course part of the deal is not knowing where something's going to go--guarantees and/or too much planning are deadening, I believe, to a first draft. Like relationships, if you're going into something thinking "don't waste my time" then it's not the right spirit. You have to kind of re-envision the time investment. Exploratory time is never wasted, etc. That's not to say I don't waste plenty of time on other things!!
And which is most rewarding, stories or novels? Stories are more immediately satisfying, of course, and they're easier to get out there one at a time. With a novel I feel like it's tied to a span of my life that I'll forever identify with the book, which is also satisfying and a little distressing, but just feels sort of different than the other. I'm working on both again, now--a story, with a new novel coming at me in glimpsed moments and snippets of voice, mostly in the shower!

KC:  As well as being a writer, you've also been teaching writing for a number of years now. What is the most rewarding thing about teaching aspiring writers? What is the one piece of advice you most often give to new writers?

AP: Once writers have some practice under their belt my biggest advice is to develop thick skin. It's not original advice, for sure, but it's one of the hardest things about the writing life. As an unpublished writer, collecting rejections, you wonder what's wrong with your work, or if you're feeling grandiose you wonder what's wrong with the system. As a published writer you have the new challenges of reviews, or worse than reviews, poor review coverage, or a poor marketing investment in your book--things entirely out of your control in traditional publishing. You watch the trajectories of other writers' careers--you shouldn't, but you can't help it--and on bad days you compare yourself with the most successful or most appreciated of them, no matter how much you try not to do this. Some of the most widely successful writers I know still deal with this horrible feeling, and if you can't get up the next day and get back to the work, this feeling, or set of feelings, will take you down. The only anecdote seems to be keeping yourself fascinated with your own work. That, and genuinely celebrating the success of others--it actually never comes at your expense, though it is easy, especially starting out, to believe it's a zero-sum game. It's just not.

KC:  Who are some of your favorite authors? What are you reading now?

AP: I have recently discovered Michelle Huneven, whose work I'm enjoying a great deal. I've also been eagerly gobbling up Ross Macdonald over the past year. I'm trying to put together a course on crime/mystery writing, and he's very interesting to me, especially as I'm living back in California. What a writer--a genre practitioner with these lucid, emotional moments that cut deep into a page, and these absolutely stunning, concise visions of the West Coast. Other favorites: Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Junot Diaz, Nathaniel West, Tessa Hadley, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee--the list goes on!

Thanks for sharing your time with us, Angela!