Eden Burning (32 page)

Edited for HarperCollins e-Books—excerpts from a 2000 interview with Elizabeth Lowell by
Claire E. White
for
The Internet Writing Journal
®, http://www.writerswrite.com

Individually, and with her sometime co-author and fulltime husband, Evan,
New York Times
and international bestselling author Ann Maxwell (her real name, though she goes by her nom de plume, Elizabeth Lowell, just as readily) has written over fifty novels and one nonfiction book (
The Year-Long Day
, 1976)—with twenty-three million copies in print, and editions in twenty-one foreign languages. The novels range from science fiction to historical fiction, from romance to mystery to suspense.

Ann is married to Evan Maxwell, who was a reporter for twenty years, fifteen of those at the
Los Angeles Times
. When not writing, Ann enjoys hiking, salmon fishing, cooking, gardening, and just being on the family boat,
Silver Raven
. She and Evan have two grown children, Matthew and Heather. She is quite at home on the Internet and enjoys interacting with her fans at her website, www.elizabethlowell.com.

When asked why she writes romantic suspense—the genre for which she is best known and which she seems to have invented—Ann replies, “I write what I know. I have been married to the only man I’ve ever loved coming up on thirty-four years now. And it just keeps getting better. I like to write about the ability of love to both heal and create, so I simply combine that with my other interests—gems, culture, politics, and history, and I end up with romantic suspense.”

Ann began publishing romances as Elizabeth Lowell in 1983. One of her early romances was
Fires of Eden
(1986), which she completely reworked as
Eden Burning
, publishing it in 2002 as a new hardcover from Morrow/Avon and as a HarperCollins e-book. As Elizabeth Lowell she has received numerous professional awards in the romance field, including a Lifetime Achievement award from the Romance Writers of America (1994). Since July of 1992 she has put fourteen romance novels onto the
New York Times
bestseller list.

What led up to your first book,
Change
, a science fiction novel, being published in 1975? What prompted you to start writing professionally?

I think I’ll take these the way they happened to me, which is in reverse order. Earlier in our marriage, Evan was a reporter, which meant two things: rotten hours and pretty bad pay. We lived in the suburbs, had a son who was fifteen months old, and I was pregnant. Evan worked four
P.M.
to midnight and our son woke up at dawn and never took a nap. Evan needed the car for his work, the bus route hadn’t heard of anything within two miles of our house, and I had read all my favorite science fiction authors from back to front several times. There was no money for new books, no books I hadn’t read in the public library (when I could get there), and no chance of anything changing in the near future except my waistline.

Television bored me. I was going nuts. So I sat down at the old manual typewriter that had seen two generations through college and started to write the kind of science fiction book I would enjoy reading. At the time, I didn’t know any fiction writers. I’d never taken a class in novel writing. I simply began with chapter one and kept going until the end.

By the time I finished, our daughter was born. I sent the manuscript “over the transom” to various publishers. It took nine months and three separate pub meetings for the first rejection. The next two weren’t much faster. I found a literary agent, handed the manuscript to him, and had a second novel finished by the time the first sold. The first book was called
Change
, and it came within one vote of being a Nebula Award finalist. At the time, I was too naïve to realize how unusual any of this was. A few years ago,
Change
was reprinted by Zebra. But don’t look for it on any bookstore shelf. It’s out of print again.

You didn’t turn to writing romance until 1983; how did your first romance novel come about?

Actually, I led a deprived childhood: I was raised on the classics. I was in college before someone introduced me to science fiction. I didn’t even know romance books existed until much later. About five books into my science fiction career, the first dedicated word processor hit the marketplace. We bought one. It was like flying. Instead of typing, hand correcting, retyping a clean page to see how it flowed, correcting the page again, retyping it again, etc. etc., I was able see a clean page instantly. The time I spent actually creating as opposed to editing doubled and then tripled, but I wasn’t spending any more hours at my work than before.

Soon I was ahead of my contract and looking around for something I could enjoy writing just as much as science fiction but that would pay better. That year the ABA [American Booksellers Association] was in Anaheim, only a few miles from our home. Evan and I were writing mysteries together [as A. E. Maxwell], but mysteries at that point weren’t stellar profit centers either. We met our agents, asked what the marketplace was hungry for, and were told Ludlum-type thrillers, romance, and horror.

While Evan checked out the thriller possibilities, I took a look at two entirely new genres: romance and horror. I quickly decided that horror wasn’t something I would enjoy writing. Evan collected a second round of five romances at the convention for me (the original batch was swiped the first time he set the books down to get a cup of coffee). The books he gave me were five Silhouette novels. Three of them were from the new line Silhouette was launching, Desire. I read four of the novels and didn’t feel much of a tug. The books were certainly as well written as any other genre out there, but they didn’t make me want to write romance.

Then I read
Corporate Affair
by Stephanie James (a.k.a. Jayne Ann Krentz). I was hooked. The story was intelligently written, fast paced, sexy, and featured people I cared about. Since I hadn’t previously read romance, I read fifty or sixty category books before I submitted an outline and three chapters to Silhouette. That book,
Summer Thunder
, was the debut of the Elizabeth Lowell pseudonym. After that, I didn’t look back. I loved being able to include a relationship in my books, because at that time the idea of the hero and heroine working together was unexpected and/or unwelcome in thrillers, mysteries, and science fiction.

You have published many novels under the name A.E. Maxwell—written with your husband, Evan. How does the collaborative process work for you? How did you divide up the writing itself?

If it’s a mystery, Evan usually chooses the backdrop of the stories we write together. Once the backdrop is researched, we sit down and create characters. Then comes the plot. When the story line is pretty well nailed down, Evan goes off and begins writing while I work on Elizabeth Lowell books. If he has any character questions during the writing, we’ll talk about it. If he wants to change a major aspect of the story line, we’ll talk. (Did you know that talk is another word for argue?)

When he has a first draft done, he dumps it on my computer and walks away. We learned on our first book that it would be a very short collaboration (not to mention marriage!) if he questioned every change and compared each word of the first and second drafts. As I put it years ago, he asked me to be a collaborator, not an editor. I have complete freedom to make any changes I think will be beneficial for clarity, pacing, dialogue, and characterization. When I’m done, he reads through my work with the same freedom I had with his. Then I go over the manuscript once more, making certain that there aren’t any breaks in style or continuity. Then it goes to the editor.

What is the most challenging aspect about team writing?

The most challenging part of collaboration is putting your ego on hold and looking at what is on the page rather than who put it there. The only question that should be permitted in a collaboration is: Does it work as a piece of writing?

Evan and I collaborate not because we can’t write alone—we can and continue to do so—but because together we can create something neither one of us could create alone. In that, it reflects our marriage. For that reason, I can’t imagine collaborating with anyone else. The process is simply too intimate.

What is your advice to aspiring novelists?

Never give up.

What do you love most about writing contemporary romances?

Contemporary romantic suspense gives me an opportunity to combine my favorite storytelling elements: a man, a woman, danger, mystery, and resolution. In a pure romance, the developing relationship is the plot; romances are entirely character-driven novels. In romantic suspense, the relationship doesn’t drive the plot, the mystery does. The challenge, and the pleasure, of writing romantic suspense comes in making revelations of fact; these and the developing relationship combine to propel the story. Protagonists who can’t/won’t trust each other won’t be able to solve the mystery. With each increase in mutual trust, more of the mystery can be solved. When you add objects of great value or cultural significance to the mix, you have the kind of romantic suspense I really enjoy writing.

I’d like to talk about the details of your creative process. What is a typical writing day for you like?

A typical writing day. . . if only there were such a thing. Okay. On a mythical typical writing day I get up, exercise, eat breakfast, shower, reread the eight pages I did the previous day, write four more, eat lunch, write another four, cook dinner, begin/continue research for the next book, go to bed, sleep, get up. . . Repeat until book is finished. My actual writing day is more like “Will somebody please kill the @%#$!# phone before I rip it out of the wall?” (Often yelled before I get out of bed.) Exercise interrupted by ringing phone. Breakfast, same. Go to computer. Write/answer email from agent/publisher/other professionals. Answer questions on my elizabethlowell.com website. Answer more email. Answer phone. Work on interviews such as this. Edit the few miserable pages I managed to squeeze in the day before. Eat lunch. Ignore phone. Sit down to write. Yank phone plug out of wall. Write as much as I can before the world catches up with me again. Cook dinner. Research or zone in chair, depending on how bad the day was. At unexpected intervals there are always line-edited manuscripts to go over. Copy-edited manuscripts to go over. Page proofs to proofread. Cover copy to deal with. Royalty statements to scrutinize. Did I mention all the normal domestic crises? Yeah, I have them. Go to bed. Sleep. Get up. Repeat until book is finished. Writer’s block? Forget it. A deadline is a great inspiration, as Charles Dickens proved.

What do you think about Stephen King’s decision to publish his novel
The Plant
in serial form on the Internet, with people paying $1.00 per download, on the honor system, with no publisher involvement at all.

I think Stephen King relishes pushing the envelope and is in the marvelous position of not needing advertising/promotion/distribution, etc., in order to reach his audience. Everyone has been trying to figure ways to “monetize” the Internet. King is already a household name, so getting people to buy from him isn’t a problem (unless the honor system goes bankrupt). The Internet, indeed, might be a way for future “brand names” to reach their audience. Authors who don’t have a following in the millions will face an entirely different, and much more difficult, set of circumstances when/if they publish on the Internet without benefit of expensive advertising and promotion to help them reach their audience, whatever size it might eventually be. It is one thing to have the gratification of seeing your work put in front of an audience. It is another thing to get paid for it.

What do you look for when you go to pick up a book to read? What makes a truly great romantic novel to you?

I don’t separate my requirements for a good romance novel versus a good any-other-label novel. If the writer’s voice and characters don’t compel me, I’ll put a book down and never pick it up again, no matter if it is science fiction, romance, suspense, or any other of the divisions marketers love to make in fiction. I know that in real life bad things happen to good, bad, or merely boring people; I don’t find immersing myself in those fractured lives an entertainment in reality or in fiction. I also know that good things happen in life. In my reading, as in my writing, I prefer to celebrate the possibility of joy rather than delineate the futility of modern life.

One of the greatest challenges facing women today is trying to accomplish more than ever in a limited amount of time, and having to play many roles in life: businesswoman, mother, wife and friend. You are so prolific in your writing, yet have also managed to have a full and satisfying family life as well. How do you juggle all the demands on your time? Do you set certain priorities in your life?

Yes, I set priorities. Otherwise I would be stressed out and overwhelmed. (Some days I am anyway!) How do I set my priorities when all things seem equally important and/or urgent? While our children were living at home, their needs came first. After all, they didn’t ask to be born. We asked for them. For me, that meant writing part-time around the kids’ schedules. As long as Evan worked outside the home as a reporter, the majority of the parenting demands fell on me. Once he quit, we shared the demands of parenting, which allowed me to write full time. When there were inevitable conflicts (usually around deadline time), I simply asked myself, “Am I going to go to my grave regretting not doing A or B or C or Z? Which is more important to me?” A sick child is more important than a deadline. The child will get well with the comfort of a parent nearby and the parent will just work longer at night to meet the deadline. The older you get, the more you learn that your priorities don’t really change. Family comes first. People come first. Writing comes at night.

You have written in so many genres, from romance to science fiction to mystery. Yet of all the genres, romance seems to get the most criticism as a valid art form, while remaining the most popular genre of books sold in America. Romance novels are well loved by millions of people, but the literary critics routinely trash the genre—quite unfairly. Why do you think this is true?