Author Interview ~ Michelle Moran

Michelle Moran took an interest in writing from an early age, purchasing Writer's Market and submitting her stories and novellas to publishers from the time she was twelve. Not surprisingly, she majored in English in college. Following a summer in Israel where she worked as a volunteer archaeologist, she earned an MA from the Claremont Graduate University. Michelle has traveled the world, from Zimbabwe to India, and her experiences at archaeological sites are what inspire her to write historical fiction. A public high school teacher for six years, Michelle Moran is currently a fulltime writer living in the mountains of California with her husband and a garden of over two hundred roses.

What new book or project do you have coming out?

On July 10, Crown Publishers will be releasing my fictional debut, Nefertiti: A Novel, about the queen of Egypt who was lost to history for more than three thousand years.

(to read a review of Nefertiti, click here)

How did you come up with this story? Was there a specific 'what if' moment?

Actually, there was a specific “what if” moment, and it happened while I was on an archaeological dig in Israel. During my sophomore year in college, I found myself sitting in Anthropology 101, and when the professor mentioned that she was looking for volunteers who would like to join a dig in Israel, I was one of the first students to sign up.

When I got to Israel, however, all of my archaeological dreams were dashed (probably because they centered around Indiana Jones). There were no fedora-wearing men, no cities carved into rock, and certainly no Ark of the Covenant. I was very disappointed. Not only would a fedora have seemed out of place, but I couldn’t even use the tiny brushes I had packed. Apparently, archaeology is more about digging big ditches with pickaxes rather than dusting off artifacts. And it had never occurred to me until then that in order to get to those artifacts, one had to dig deep into the earth.

Volunteering on an archaeological dig was hot, it was sweaty, it was incredibly dirty, and when I look back on the experience through the rose-tinged glasses of time, I think, Wow, it was fantastic! Especially when our team discovered an Egyptian scarab that proved the ancient Israelites had once traded with the Egyptians. Looking at that scarab in the dirt, I began to wonder who had owned it, and what had possessed them to undertake the long journey from their homeland to the fledgling country of Israel.

On my flight back to America I stopped in Berlin, and with a newfound appreciation for Egyptology, I visited the museum where Nefertiti’s limestone bust was being housed. The graceful curve of Nefertiti’s neck, her arched brows, and the faintest hint of a smile were captivating to me. Who was this woman with her self-possessed gaze and stunning features?

I wanted to know more about Nefertiti’s story, but when I began the research into her life, it proved incredibly difficult. She’d been a woman who’d inspired powerful emotions when she lived over three thousand years ago, and those who had despised her had attempted to erase her name from history. Yet even in the face of such ancient vengeance, some clues remained.

As a young girl Nefertiti had married a Pharaoh who was determined to erase the gods of Egypt and replace them with a sun-god he called Aten. It seemed that Nefertiti’s family allowed her to marry this impetuous king in the hopes that she would tame his wild ambitions.

What happened instead, however, was that Nefertiti joined him in building his own capital of Amarna where they ruled together as god and goddess. But the alluring Nefertiti had a sister who seemed to keep her grounded, and in an image of her found in Amarna, the sister is standing off to one side, her arms down while everyone else is enthusiastically praising the royal couple. From this image, and a wealth of other evidence, I tried to recreate the epic life of an Egyptian queen whose husband was to become known as the Heretic King.

Writing the novel took years of research. I wanted to be sure that when I wrote Nefertiti I was extremely accurate, down to the color of the palace tiles and shape of the women’s beads. At the same time, however, I wanted to be careful not to weigh the story down in too much detail. There needed to be the same sense of urgency, danger, and passion as filled Nefertiti’s world.

Tell us about your publishing journey. How long had you been writing before you got a contract? How did you find out and what went through your mind?

My first attempt at getting published was in seventh grade, when I was twelve. I had written a full length book that was certainly pathetic but everyone praised it and my father hailed it as the next Great American Novel. My father was very good at ego-boosting.

But no one knew how to go about getting published, so I went to my local Barnes and Nobles and asked them how. And instead of laughing, the bookseller took me to the writing section and I purchased the current edition of Writer's Market. From then on, no agent or publishing house was safe.

I learned how to write query letters and regaled them all. And some of them sent personal letters back too, probably because I had included my age in the query letter and they either thought a) this kid has potential or b) this is sad and deserves at least a kind note.

Then, after going on an archaeological dig in my second year of college, I changed my genre from literary to historical fiction and found my calling. That summer I wrote a novel called Jezebel, and signed on with a prominent agent. His foreign rights department sold it successfully to Bertelsmann in Germany, and I had my first publishing credit with the company that owns Random House.

But my agent in NY had a difficult time selling the novel, and when it was clear that he had done what he could for Jezebel and that there would be no sale in the US, I saw the writing on the wall. I would have to write another book.

So I began my research, and over the next few years I came to a slow and eye-opening realization. No mater how many times or how nicely I wrote, my agent never answered my emails. Even after I had finished the book on the subject that he’d suggested, he never took my phone calls. Did this mean I didn’t have an agent? Had I been dumped because Jezebel hadn’t sold? Did agents do that without telling their clients?

Apparently, he did, and apparently, some do. So I took the high road and wrote a letter thanking him for what he had done for me (he did get my foot in the door), and I asked to be released from our contract. I sent the letter by certified mail and promptly never heard from him again.

But publishing isn’t personal, and neither is rejection, so I began sending query letters out the next month, mentioning that my agent and I had recently parted ways and that I was searching for new representation. It was a matter of weeks before I had a new agent, the wonderful Anna Ghosh at Scovil Chichak Galen, and she took on the task of submitting the novel that my precious agent had suggested I write.

But my heart hadn’t been in the book. It was set in the 20th century, and my specialty – what I studied in college and what I’ve since become an amateur historian on – is ancient Egypt and the Middle Ages. We had quite a few near misses with the novel, where editors wanted to purchase the book but were told no by the acquisitions committee, since all sales have to be approved by a committee.

After Anna sent the novel to all the major houses, I began to panic that I’d be dropped as a client for a second time, and that is when I started Nefertiti, a project I was extremely passionate about. Anna waited for two years while I wrote the book, and eventually she sold the book and its stand-alone sequel for six-figures to Crown. After that, her foreign rights agent Danny Baror (who happened to be the same foreign rights agent who sold Jezebel) sold Nefertiti and The Heretic Queen to more than fifteen countries.

I do believe there is a moral to this story, which is to be persistent and not to be afraid of starting a new project. I have thirteen books that I’ve written, and just because they’re not published doesn’t mean I didn’t learn from them, or that I can’t publish them in the future (although I probably won’t). I think what aspiring writers need to understand is that if something isn’t right for the current market, that doesn’t mean they should simply give up.

Do you ever struggle with writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?

Truthfully, I never struggle with writer’s block. I do, however, struggle with interesting blogs on the internet, the desire to check news every half an hour (who knows, maybe Oprah picked my book and I didn’t even know it!), and my obsession with email. I would be a saner person, not to mention a more prolific writer, if the internet didn’t exist.

What is the most difficult part of writing for you, or was when you started, i.e. plot, POV, characterization, etc?

The most difficult part of writing is resisting the temptation to keep all of my characters safe and away from danger. I like people, and I don’t want to see them get hurt, even if it’s in my own fiction. So when I sit down to outline a novel, it takes great force of will to plan a scene in which one of my protagonists, or even my antagonists, feels pain.

But good writing thrives on jeopardy: jeopardy to the character’s life, their reputation, or someone they love. Jeopardy is what keeps readers turning the pages. And because I write historical fiction, my characters are people who really lived, and loved, and unfortunately, got hurt.

So while it’s tempting to write out their pain and focus instead on the adventures that ended happily for them, it would be unfair to history as well as to the reader. But knowing that doesn’t make it any less difficult.

Where do you write? Do you have a dedicated office or a corner or nook in a room?

I write in an office on my first floor, looking out of my window onto a garden of over two hundred roses and eight fruit trees (None of which I can take credit for. The woman who sold the house to us had retired and spent her life gardening).

I have a variety of images in my office. One is a black and white photograph of the Wright Brothers taking flight, the other is a beautiful Didier Lourenco whose paintings evoke life on the Mediterranean better than any other artist I know. But there has always been a space to the right of my desk that has gone unfilled since we bought our house, and back when Crown commissioned a painting for the cover of Nefertiti: A Novel, I had the brilliant idea of purchasing it. After all, what better image could fill my empty wall than one that represented my first success?

So immediately, I contacted the representative for the artist Doug Fryer, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the painting. I told myself that I would purchase the original at whatever-the-cost, imagining that whatever-the-cost would probably mean around $500. Or maybe $600.

When Doug’s agent emailed back, however, I discovered that for the ten by fifteen inch oil painting, I would need to fork over several thousand dollars (the agent also mentioned that this was a bargain, and that the artist’s other paintings go for thirty thousand). So I looked at my husband, and he looked at me, and to my great surprise he said, “Well, there will only ever be one debut novel.” So now I sit beneath the gaze of Egypt’s most fascinating queen, and it’s worth every dollar!

Do you have a word or page goal you set for each day?

I do. I write 2000 words a day, and spend the rest of the time on publicity or marketing (or using my stair master, or surfing the web, or standing for ten minutes with the fridge door open wondering if I look inside long enough, whether my favorite food might appear since I haven’t gone shopping in two weeks).

What does a typical day look like for you?

I wake up, check email for half an hour, attend to my blog for twenty minutes, spend another half hour surfing other people’s blogs, and then at about 10am I get down to business. I open a diet coke (my mother says that when I’m fifty and have no teeth I’ll know why), check my outline for the day, and begin to write. Writing sessions are punctuated by visits to my hotmail account more frequently than I’d like to admit. But I don’t stop until I get my 2000 words, even if that’s at nine o’clock at night.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve heard?

Sometime during my fourth year in college, I decided I wanted to pursue a Ph.D in English, and I began my applications to places like Duke and Stanford and Harvard, knowing that if I wanted to teach at a good university I would have to earn my Ph.D somewhere equally prestigious. Everyone thought this was a wonderful idea. After all, what else was an English major going to do with her life?

But when I went to get a recommendation from a young (and brilliant) professor who had just started teaching at our college, he gave me a puzzled look and asked, “Why would you do this? Don’t you want to write?” I told him I did, and the best advice anyone has ever given me about writing was when he replied, “If you want to write your own work, then do it. If you want to spend your life writing about someone else’s, then get a Ph.D and become a professor.”

I am so thankful that this professor, Paul Saint-Amour (lovely name, isn’t it?), took the time to sit down and really open my eyes as to what I was about to get myself into. After that I went back to my dorm room to think over what he had said, then two weeks later I withdrew all of my Ph.D applications. It was the best thing I ever did.

What do you wish you’d known early in your career that might have saved you some time and/or frustration in writing? In publishing?

I wish I had known how much time publicizing a book would require so that I could have started much earlier on The Heretic Queen.

How much marketing do you do? What have you found that particularly works well for you?

I do a lot of marketing. A lot. I contact large websites whose focus is on history and find out their rates so I can pass them off to my publishers. For instance, after I contacted The History Channel Online, Crown decided to advertise there for Nefertiti: A Novel. I also write to reviewers, make my own advertising deals with smaller websites, and purchase advertising in historical fiction magazines.

Unfortunately, I can’t really say what works, since Nefertiti is my debut novel. Perhaps next July I can come back and tell you how it all went, and what the best use of my time and money (not to mention my publisher’s time and money) seemed to be. I keep very detailed records, so I should be able to tell with some degree of accuracy which websites provided the most click-thrus, or which newspapers had the best exposure to my target market.

Do you have any parting words of advice?

Learn as much as you can about the business of writing. Because we writers feel an emotional connection to our stories, we tend to feel that publishing is also emotional. If I’m nice, they’ll publish me. If I send them chocolate with my query letter, they’ll see what a good person I am. But publishing isn’t personal and most of the time it’s not emotional either. It’s about numbers and sales and - at the end of the day - money.

So learn everything there is to know about the business before you send off your material, especially once your material is accepted for publication. That’s when business savvy matters most, and knowing important publishing terms like galleys, remainders and co-op is extremely important when trying to figure out how you can best help your book along in the publication process. Learn everything, but above all, keep writing!