“The guys that wrote the best songs were the guys that wrote the most songs.” That was said by the daughter of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? If you want to be good at writing, you need to do as much writing as you can. And there’s a corollary to that—you need to read as much as you can too. That’s the way to find out how other people have done it. Read the things you like best to learn how to write things you will like. And train yourself the way an athlete does. I spend time every day practicing being able to sit down, pick up my pencil and go, before the fear and doubt have a chance to make me timid. I also spend time writing without knowing what I’m going to say or where my story is going to go. I find that when I write that way, I stumble upon interesting ideas that I didn’t know I had, directions I couldn’t have planned for. But that’s what I do. What you should do is figure out what it is you want to write, what kind of writing you want to get good at, and then practice that a little every day until you train yourself. That seems much more useful than going to writing workshops where you write something and then have other people tear it apart. Quentin Tarantino said, “I didn’t go to film school. I went to films.”
If You Want To Write
A Writer of Vermont
Until I moved to Vermont I thought I would always be a reader of other people’s stories. But after I had lived here for a few years, I began to want to show people what late twentieth century Vermont was like in all its wonderful complexity. What I try to do is to write the story so that you feel as though it’s something that’s happening to you, that you are there in the place I have described. I take Hemingway as my model. No one would guess that, because my subject is so different. But the method is the same. It’s what people mean when they tell you to show not tell. I try to get myself out of the middle, so there’s nothing between the reader and the events that are unfolding in the story. That’s what Hemingway did. He said that after you finish reading, you feel “that all that happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” That’s what I try for.
I sent THE SIMPLE LIFE out to agents and to publishers and got no response. I sent it out perhaps fifty times, and I probably should have sent it out five hundred times. I stopped when an agent said that I would never find a commercial publisher unless I had a book that would sell 50,000 copies. Clearly a quiet book about rural Vermont wasn’t sensational enough to do that. A small university press might have taken it, but I was afraid the book would have to be changed in ways I didn’t want it to be changed, and I knew small presses hardly ever had budgets for marketing. So I decided to publish it myself, not with a vanity press, but through a company that Bill and I started for that purpose. If we had realized how much more difficult it is to market a book that is self-published, we might not have taken it on. But we made a beautiful book, so I guess I’m glad we did it. And we did all right. We sold more than a thousand copies and came close to getting our money back. So when I finished ORDINARY MAGIC, we never really considered publishing it any other way. But by that time, there were e-books on the scene, and it was much harder to sell print books.
I feel as though I have learned how to do every step in the making of a book, from the writing to the distribution. There is one thing I still need to learn, and I hope I can, and that is how to get people’s attention for my book. Everyone who reads my books seems to like them a lot, but how can anyone read them if they don’t know about them? Almost all reviewers have a policy of never reviewing self-published books. There is one wonderful exception—Vermont. I have gotten great reviews in lots of Vermont newspapers and in Vermont Life Magazine. It’s just one more example of the independent-mindedness of Vermonters. It’s one of the things I love about Vermont and one of the reasons I want to write about it.
Free Books
Would you like a free copy of one of my books? I want to get them in the hands of readers, so I have decided to send them to people who would like to read them. I haven’t decided how many to give away. I’ll decide that later.
I published THE SIMPLE LIFE in 2006. It was distributed by Baker and Taylor and by Amazon. I put it out at the end of January, and by May so many books had sold that I had to get more printed. During the summer I got a contract with another distributor that sounded wonderful. It was 
an exclusive contract, so I had to stop selling books through Baker and Taylor and Amazon. That contract turned out to be a disaster, and I was left with most of the books I had printed the second time. Still, it looked as though I was getting close to breaking even.
I finished ORDINARY MAGIC and published it in 2009. Seeing how successful I had been with THE SIMPLE LIFE, I had two thousand books printed. (It’s much cheaper per book if you get a lot printed at once.) But by that time, everything in publishing had changed. People weren’t buying books the way they did just a few years before.
So here I am with an attic full of books. Well, it was never about the money anyway, but I would like to get my books into the hands of people who would read them and perhaps be moved by my stories.
Would you like a copy of either THE SIMPLE LIFE or ORDINARY MAGIC? 
Send me an e-mail with your address, and I will send you whichever one you would like to read. If you read that one and want to read the other, send me another e-mail, and I’ll send you the other one. It’s as easy as that. If you are pleased or grateful, you can return the favor by putting a comment on my website about the book, and especially what you liked about it. Maybe your comments will inspire someone else to ask for a free book. You could give the book to someone who would like to read it. You could tell your friends to e-mail me and ask for their own copies of my books.
I write because I love to write, and because I want to describe the world I live in and share it with other people, the beauty and the pain and the joy that is around me. I never set out to become well known or to sell a lot of books or even to turn a profit. Considering how hard I worked on writing and rewriting and how many years it took me to produce two novels, it would be pretty silly to think in terms of making any profit at all. So send me an e-mail and ask for a free book, no strings attached. I would love you to have my books. 
A Good Chicken House
The Chicken House
Fresh Eggs
It’s the best chicken house we have ever had. It has electricity. It’s quite warm in the winter. The chickens roost and lay their eggs in the little cubbyholes where the medics used to keep their medicine.
Inside the Chicken House
An Idea of How to Publish a Book
View from the Porch
However, I made two serious miscalculations. The first was that I thought the book wouldn’t be perceived as a self-published book if it was produced by its own press. The second mistake was just as dumb. I had no idea how important and how difficult the marketing part would be. So, although I’m not sorry I did my books the way I did, I couldn’t recommend that anyone else take the same route. But it doesn’t matter how you publish your book, if you aren’t a celebrity, you still have to learn how to do your own marketing.
Apple Tree
The other day I had an idea of a much more sensible way to publish a book. When the book is finished, get it done by a print-on-demand publisher. I don’t think it’s very expensive. The publisher, if it is a reputable one, would get the ISBN and copyright and other numbers the book needs to have. Then get the book produced as an e-book for the Kindle, the Nook, and whatever others are around, because that’s where the sales are these days. After that, I would concentrate on internet marketing. Later on, when the book has got a large enough audience, it might make sense to do a beautiful hardcover version.
Reading To Mother
Mother has always loved to read more than anything else. That’s not surprising since she is the daughter of Max Perkins, the book editor who published Hemingway and Wolfe and Fitzgerald. He said, “Nothing is as important as a
Max's drawing of Mother reading
Mother listened to audio books, but about six years ago I began to read to her over the telephone every afternoon
Mother when she could still see
Sometimes we stop and talk about what we are reading. Sometimes when we are reading one of her old favorites, she will say the next sentences before I can read them to her. Sometimes she makes surprising comments. We read Alice In Wonderland and then Through The Looking Glass. She said, “Looking Glass isn’t nearly as good as Wonderland. He was trying to do the same thing over again. It’s forced.” Well, she’s Max Perkins’ daughter, after all. Now at ninety-six, her memory isn’t as good as it was. But she doesn’t forget the books she has always loved so much.
Is The Score Even?
On a beautiful May evening last year, the beaver dam in Adamant village broke open letting a wall of water pour through the town. It destroyed the road and flooded the basement of a woman’s house, ruining her furnace.
The Flooded Beaver Dam
The Village After The Dam Broke
The Beaver Dam After Irene
A Week Later
It’s a steamy, overcast day, a week after Vermont’s disastrous floods. You might think we were back to summer, until you looked around. Then you see that the green is not so green, that there’s starting to be some yellow in the leaves and grass. The air seems different. The crows are gathering into groups. I haven’t seen a robin for days. Hurricane Irene blew us, or maybe washed us, into a new season, out of summer and into the beginning of fall.
It’s supposed to rain hard tonight and tomorrow. I hope the weather people are wrong. It must be awful for people whose places got damaged by Irene to think they might get hit again. We were very lucky. The only damage we got was that there was a foot-deep gulley in the middle of our road, but it was passable if you straddled it with the wheels of the car. My corn got beaten down by the rain, but I was able to stand most of it up again.
The news is full of examples of how the people of Vermont are managing to cope with what has been thrown at them and how generous they are about turning out to help the ones who need help. It reminds me of the essay William Faulkner wrote called A Guest’s Impression Of New England. He says, “It is not the country which impressed this one. It is the people—the men and women themselves so individual, who hold individual integration and privacy as high and dear as they do liberty and freedom;” And later on in the essay he says about the New Englander, “Because he is free, private, not made so by the stern and rockbound land—the poor thin soil and the hard long winters—on which his lot was cast, but on the contrary: having elected of his own volition that stern land and weather because he knew he was tough enough to cope with them; having been bred by the long tradition which sent him from old worn-out Europe so he could be free; taught him to believe that there is no valid reason why life should be soft and docile and amenable, that to be individual and private is the thing and that the man who cannot cope with any environment anywhere had better not clutter the earth to begin with.”
It’s easy for me to say since I haven’t been hurt by the flood, but it’s still so. It was true in 1954 when Faulkner wrote it, and it’s still true today. And bravo to the tough people of our state.
Cutting Hay
Cut hay
Of all the farm-related jobs we do in a year, getting the hay in is probably the most fun. It’s hard work, and it can be dangerous, but we need lots of hands to help, so it’s a social occasion too, an outdoor party with a guarantee of good weather, although there have been times when we were racing a thunderstorm.
Not very many people make hay the labor-intensive way we do any more. We use machines that are thirty or forty years old. We cut fields all around Adamant that our neighbors would like to keep open, and we haul the hay back to the barn in an old dump truck.
The weather is the tricky part, because to get the hay dry enough to be compressed into a bale and stacked in the barn, we need three days in a row that are sunny, or at least dry. It’s not easy to find that many days of good weather in a row in Vermont and especially not this year.
Raking
We started a couple of weeks ago with a very small piece of a field to see if the machinery was ready. It wasn’t. We had breakdowns, but we managed to put in 60 bales, before the weather changed. It was a very small beginning since we need 2000 for the winter.
The first two days of work are almost all Bill’s. He cuts the grass with a big machine that he pulls behind one of the tractors. After it has been cut, the hay has to lie in the field for a day. Bill drives over it pulling the tedder, a machine like a giant eggbeater that flips the hay and fluffs it up. The day after that Bill can rake the hay into long rows called windrows, so that the baler can pick it up and make it into bales.
Then the fun begins. The baler drops the bales all over the place. We drive the dump truck through the field throwing bales into it.
Loading the truck
Someone (I am usually the one) stacks them up into a huge interlocked pile that can stand the trip back to the barn. We can always get 80 or 90 bales into one load. Sometimes, if there are enough people who can throw that high, (and each bale weighs 40 or 50 pounds), or if we have enough time to fool around, we try to see how many we can get on a load. I think the most we ever did was 116. We take them back to the barn and unload them and stack them all over again. When all the hay is in, it feels wonderful to sit for a while and talk and laugh together.
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of blogs about my writing and my life on the farm, two things that are intertwined. They feed each other and enrich each other. My fiction comes out of my life in Vermont and my life has writing fiction at the center of it. There is a chapter in THE SIMPLE LIFE that tells how Sonny Trumbley and his family picked up the hay and put it in the barn.
On top of the load
Vermont Woman Review November 2009
This isn’t a new review, although it was new to me. I only found out about it a month ago. I have only included part of Amy Lilly’s review. If you want to see the whole thing go to: Vermont Woman article
Novel Gift Choices That Won’t Be Returned to Sender
By Amy Lilly
Fiction lovers planning on gifting copies of Lorrie Moore’s or Hilary Mantel’s latest for the holidays would do well to look closer to home: Vermont boasts a slew of talented women novelists. Here are five new works of fiction that appeared in 2009, all by experienced authors. Delve into the world of dairy farming or small-town Vermont life; plow through a suspense novel or linger over a family saga. There’s something for everyone.
According to Kit
by Eugenie Doyle
Front Street, 2009
215 pp.
Dismantled
by Jennifer McMahon
Harper, 2009
423 pp.
Ordinary Magic
by Ruth Porter
Bar Nothing Books, 2009
451 pp.
Return to Sender
by Julia Alvarez
Knopf Books for Children, 2009
336 pp.
Two Rivers
by T. Greenwood
Kensington Books, 2009
373 pp.
Dedicated DIYer Ruth Porter of Adamant just self-published her second novel, Ordinary Magic. She and her husband created their own publishing company, Bar Nothing Books, to ensure that her debut novel, The Simple Life, met her artistic specifications. The new one has a similarly quiet beauty: Porter’s own photographs, of icicled eaves and snowy work horses, form a silent introduction to the novel and grace each chapter page, and the paper stock is luxurious. The whole effect renders the Kindle and its kin irrelevant.
Ordinary Magic is an extended-family saga set in 1977. George and his older brother Cal grew up on the family farm, but George left for the nearby, suggestively named town of Severance to become a lawyer while Cal stayed on. Cal is now a gruff old Vermonter who can smell snow coming and peppers his comments with such colloquialisms as “goin downstreet” – meaning, leaving the farm to go anywhere. When he gets shot through the foot during deer-hunting season, the semi-estranged brothers and their families reconnect in ways as various and tangled as the dark tree branches in the painting Porter chose for her cover.
What aids that process is that George and his wife Laurie’s younger daughter Nora has suddenly come home from her single life in Boston without explanation. Nora is in fact trying to keep her pregnancy a secret, and she finds solace in escaping regularly to Uncle Cal’s. But everyone else seems to have private struggles, too: George is an alcoholic in denial; Nora’s sister Lena juggles two small children and an aloof husband who’s been sleeping with “a friend”; Cal and his wife Ursela’s son Conrad wants to make it on his own as a logger but finds himself becoming mired in debt.
Such a summary makes the book sound depressing, but nothing could be further from the truth. Porter’s meticulous descriptions of the emotional fluctuations behind family members’ conversations, sentence by sentence, make for absorbing character studies with a ring of truth. Sometimes the detail overwhelms the forward drive of the story – there is something to be said for that intermediary in traditional publishing, the ruthless editor – but Ordinary Magic ends up creating a world unto itself that seems as familiar as the one downstreet.
Vermont Woman Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington.
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