For myself, I have a very vague idea of what my next book will be. First I thought it was going to be nonfiction. Then I realized that I never read nonfiction and get really bored reading nonfiction and that all I really care to read are literary novels. So then it occurred to me that maybe I need to take my nonfiction research and turn it into a novel. I like that idea! But I am SO SO far from beginning a draft. I haven’t even begun to research it let alone come up with an outline or a plot. Oy. I get anxious just thinking about the process. And I envision myself (maybe this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy) taking years to really figure out a) What it is I want to say b) How I’m going to say it (plot), and c) What style I want to say it in. Maybe if it were my full-time job I could whip off a draft in a year, but with two kids, freelance editing, blogging, and finishing up what I hope will be the last revision of my memoir, I see it taking more like 5. And in five years, Tawna Fenske, and all fast writers like her, will have whipped off another six books, two or three of which will perhaps get published.

What about you? Are you a lightning speed writer like Tawna Fenske or a pokey poke writer like me? Do you wish you could write faster than you do, or are you happy with your pace?

1. Aim to write a bad book (or bad story, or bad chapter). This will eliminate your fear of writing crap. It will shut off your internal editor and allow you to just sit down and write, no matter what comes out.

2. If you’ve already written a bad book (or a so-so book, or a good book), and you’re in the revision stages, aim to make this draft just a little bit better. Don’t expect this draft to be the final draft, or a great draft, or even a much better draft. Just aim to make it a little bit better than the last draft.

3. Break your big goals into bite-sized, manageable tasks. Make them so small you will eliminate all your fear and resistance. For instance, if your goal is to write 1000 words today and you really really really would rather clean the gutters, try writing just 100 words. Still want to clean your gutters? How about 50 words, or even 25? Once you get started, you’ll find yourself writing much more than you expected.

4. Write in a journal. These could be morning pages à la Artist’s Way, or they could be typing on your computer about how sick you are of your book, how much you’d rather be outside, how you have a million things to do, how you need to make more money, etc. Just get it all out so you can move on.

5. Find the fun in writing again. Remember why you first started writing? It was fun. And reading was fun. You loved it and thought it would be much more fun to write for a living than to clean gutters. Now that you’re finding yourself applying for gutter-cleaning jobs, think back to when writing was fun. What was fun about it? Inventing bizarre stories? Getting revenge on ex-girlfriends by turning them into villains in your novel? Take a break from your WIP to write something fun. It could be a poem, a sci-fi story, a children’s story—anything. Fall in love with writing again.

6. Put your WIP aside for a while and write something else. Work on a short story for a while, or an essay. Don’t set it aside for too long, but sometimes you need a break. I did this last week. I started a new book and about half hour into it, I missed my WIP. I closed the document and went back to work on my book.

7. Take a break from writing for a while. Give yourself a chance to miss writing. Don’t set goals; there’s no point in feeling bad about yourself if you really need to take a break. Give yourself a finite amount of time—a week, a month, whatever you need. Use that time to do some things you’ve been missing out on. Take a vacation, get some exercise, cook some gourmet meals. Then get back to work.

8. Research. Spend some time researching your WIP. Gathering information is a fun and easy break from writing and will serve you when you sit down to write. But limit your time researching so that it becomes a means to get excited about writing again and not as a means to procrastinate.

9. Eavesdrop. Spend sometime sitting in cafes eavesdropping on conversations and taking notes. This is a great way to learn to create authentic dialogue and it gives you an excuse to drink tea and eat chocolate croissants.

10. Reread your WIP. I find that reading my book helps me in three ways. 1) I find myself automatically editing and before I know it, I’m working on my book again. 2) It makes me realize that my book is good and WILL sell one day. 3) It helps me stay connected to my work in a way that is resistance-free. There is NOTHING scary about reading, so I can put in a few hours on my book without much effort at all and, like I mentioned in 1), before I know it, I’m writing again.

11. Read other books. Underline/highlight when you read. When you come across great passages, fabulous descriptions, apt metaphors, take notes. Reading good books will help you to become a better writer, and it will get you excited about writing again.

12. If all else fails, check out Jerry Mundis’ methods for fighting writer’s block. He has an audio seminar and an out-of-print book that this writer raves about. I asked Sean Miller, by the way, whether he still thought Mundis’ strategies for fighting writer’s block worked now that three years have passed, and here was his response: “Three years gone, I still wholeheartedly endorse Mundis and his method. Without it, I don’t think I would have finished my doctoral thesis in a timely fashion with a minimum of stress.”

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about vanity press going digital.

Meg Waite Clayton has a great series of posts on how writers get started. Start with Part I and read all six!

After the New Yorker released its 20 Under 40 list (I’m honored to know three of them—Daniel Alarcón, Yiyun Li, and ZZ Packer—Ward Six released a 10 Over 80 list, including Beverly Cleary, Harper Lee, and Elmore Leonard. Check them both out!

Rachelle Gardner at Rants & Ramblings has an inspirational post for writers eager to get published. And her guest blogger, Susan DiMikele, says there is no good time to write.

JD Moyer teaches you how to get luckier, and, what a coincidence, Meg Waite Clayton’s guest blogger Julie Compton writes about luck, too!

Simon over at Constant Revision has a fabulous post on the cycle of blogging.

A friend sent me this great New York Times article on 50 Fancy Words. Thanks Herzel!

Samuel Park has a great post on why writers irrationally dislike their WIPs.

And Sierra Godfrey has an interview with New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch.

Have a great (HOT if you’re in the Bay Area) weekend!

I’m not gifted at writing metaphors. They don’t come naturally; I have to think long and hard to come up with a good one. But I love reading them. And I’m always impressed by readers who are good at writing them. Here are a few that I’ve come across recently:

From Laura Fraser’s travel memoir, All Over The Map: “From the air, Savai’i seems much bigger and wilder than Upolu, matted with rain forests, its jagged ridge of volcanic craters raised like the backbone of a dark and ancient sea monster.” And another: “He helps me off with my jacket and his sure, gentlemanly touch makes popcorn explode under my skin.” I love both of these images—the dark and ancient sea monster and the popcorn exploding under the skin—because they’re both so perfect and because I never would have come up with them on my own.

What makes a good metaphor is that it not only conjures an image, but that it is unique. If we’ve heard it before, or something similar, it’s not unique. Sometimes metaphors are so tenuously related to the noun they describe that I never would have made the association on my own. And yet that is what makes them unique. For example, in How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes Virigina Woolf’s The Waves: “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” The day waves yellow! I think it takes a poet’s sensibility to come up with something like that. As Wood puts it, “The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual images of crops waving.”

From Gretel Erlich’s Solace: “Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.” I love that line, although it’s a bit more difficult to get my head around than “the day waves yellow” or “popcorn exploding under the skin” because, well, verbs don’t conjugate, do they? People conjugate verbs. So I get caught up in trying to understand the exact meaning of the sentence. But I still love it.

And from the first page of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “The December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic”—the scratchy yard! The calligraphic trees! Fabulous! And can’t you just see them? Both of them? And on page four, Eggers describes his mother’s cancer: “It was staring out at them, at the doctors, like a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oil—Good God!” More than a physical description, an emotion is conveyed—the horror of this thing growing inside his mother, like a thousand slimy worms.

From Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors: “He had the loving, affectionate, outgoing personality of petrified wood” and “This makes everything she says sounds like it went through a curling iron.” Both brilliant descriptions!

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. The trick is to come up with metaphors that are original, that the reader hasn’t heard before, and that convey either an image, a feeling, or both. The metaphor has to compare the noun to something ordinary, something that we’re all familiar with and can picture (like a curling iron), not something obscure or abstract.

So how does one learn to write great metaphors? You go to metaphor school, of course. No, really, I don’t know. You practice, like you practice any writing skill. You take an ordinary description, like snow hanging heavy on a branch or the ruler-straight bangs of your first grade teacher, and you practice writing it more originally. And you practice and practice until you develop a “knack” for writing metaphors. Listen to me, I sound like I know what I’m talking about!

What about you? How do you come up with original metaphors/similes? Do you have any favorites from other books? Or authors who are particularly good at writing them?

1. Blog
2. Do your laundry
3. Read a book
4. Do the dishes
5. Go running
6. Make some tea
7. Get something to eat
8. Check your e-mail
9. Balance your checkbook
10. Shop online
11. Read/comment on other blogs
12. Read the newspaper
13. Walk your dog
14. Take care of your kids
15. Go to the bathroom
16. Watch TV
17. Clean the house
18. Organize your desk
19. Call a friend
20. Go shopping
21. Clean out the basement
22. Take a nap
23. Take some photos
24. Download those photos
25. Organize those photos
26. Upload those photos
27. Look at Facebook
28. Twitter
29. Update your website
30. Sync you iPod/iPhone/iPad
31. Do some yoga
32. Bake some cookies
32. Eat some cookies
33. Start a photo album
34. Send a birthday card
35. Do your taxes
36. Go out for dinner
37. Check the mail
38. Pay your bills
39. Write a To-Do list
40. Respond to an e-mail
41. Water the plants
42. Make a doctor’s appointment
43. Go to the doctor
44. Go to the dentist
44. Browse for books
45. Return something to a store
46. Go grocery shopping
47. Cook something
48. Go to the dry cleaners
49. Buy someone a gift
50. Send someone a gift
51. Meditate
52. Feed your cat
53. Play with your kids
54. Donate to a charity
55. Go for a walk
56. Go out for coffee
57. Plant a vegetable garden
58. Take out the trash
59. Start a worm compost bin
60. Plan your next vacation
61. Think of ways to save money
62. Look at stocks
63. Listen to a podcast
64. Research baby products
65. Research cars
66. Book a camping trip
67. Take your cat to the vet
68. Plant some flowers
69. Knit
70. Wash the windows
71. Skype with a friend
72. Call your Mom/Dad
73. Kill a spider
74. Watch the sunset
75. Splash in a puddle
76. Backup your documents
77. Read a magazine
78. Iron your shirts
79. Change a lightbulb
80. Go on a vacation
81. Go for a hike
82. Go to the beach
83. Go for a bike ride
84. Give your dog a bath
85. Put flea drops on your cat
86. Make homemade gifts/cards
87. Make candy
88. Go to a movie
89. Google exes
90. Look up gradeschool friends on Facebook
91. Learn a new language
92. Download some apps
93. Play a video game
94. Play with your Wii
95. Play Farmville
96. Change your profile picture
97. Go out late and sleep in late
98. Take a long, hot bath
99. Host a dinner party
100. Restock your disaster bin
101. Write a list of things you are grateful for

What about you? Can you think of any more ways to procrastinate?

Monday
1. Went running instead of writing, but compromised and did a short run.
2. Resisted writing e-mails, balancing checking account, and blogging during writing hours.
3. Almost stopped writing to edit, but then resisted and continued writing.
Self-Sabotage Level: 1

Wednesday
1. Decided to work from home to avoid commute and get more done.
2. I wanted to look at a preschool website, and I did.
3. I wanted to make a haircut appointment, and I did.
4. I wanted to run to the bank and to get lunch, and I did.
5. I wanted to balance my checkbook, and I did.
(I realized at this point that I was really tired, and that when I’m tired, I can’t focus on writing and instead do everything to sabotage my writing. The smart thing would have been to take a nap.)
6. I wanted to do more banking, but I did not.
7. I still wanted to do more banking, and I did.
8. I received a long e-mail from a friend but resisted reading it.
(Finally started writing at 2:42 p.m. and wrote for 1.5 hours.)
9. Checked e-mail and then was about to look at Yahoo groups, and I did.
10. Was about to send an e-mail to everyone in a group, but I didn’t.
11. I wasn’t going to post to my blog, and then I did.
12. I wasn’t going to comment on other blogs, and then I did.
13. I wrote just 1.5 hours today, but I did make my weekly goal of 10 hours.
Self-Sabotage Level: 8

What I learned from last week’s experience was that when I’m well rested and consciously logging my self-sabotage, I get a lot more done, but that when I’m really tired, I just don’t care that I’m sabotaging myself and do it even when I’m aware of it. I also noticed that I lose motivation to work more hours than my pre-set goal, which makes me want to rethink my goals.

This week my experience was a little different. I was in a “poor-me-I-never-had-time-to-myself” mood over the weekend. I also had a little epiphany about happiness while tutoring a student on writing an essay about happiness. (I’ll share that later). So I decided today to run some errands and go to the gym, things I knew would make me feel better, before I started writing. By the time I ate lunch and wrote for an hour, I was so tired, I lay down to take a nap and didn’t get up for two hours. The result? My workday was over, and I’d only written for one hour. But instead of beating myself up about it, I vowed to make up the hours after the kids went to bed, and I did. Often, though, what happens when I allow myself to indulge is that I don’t get a chance to make up the hours, and I fall behind my goals. The answer, I think, lies in the comments section of my last post: balance, balance, balance. We all need breaks to get fresh air, watch a movie, go out to eat, whatever it is we like to do. But we’re smart people. We know the difference between the things that really improve our lives (like exercise) and the things that are time wasters (like TV and surfing the Net). It’s by being really honest with ourselves that we can identify when we’re sabotaging our writing and when we’re taking a much needed break that will bring some new energy and a fresh perspective to our writing.

How about you? When do you sabotage your writing? Do you do it consciously or unconsciously? And, if you did the homework, what did you learn?

Kristen Tracy describes herself as a “poet who also writes young adult and middle-grade novels,” but that’s an understatement. Her first two teen novels, Lost It and Crimes of the Sarahs, were published by Simon & Schuster, and she has three more forthcoming from Disney-Hyperion, including A Field Guide For Heartbreakers, due out June 1. She also published her first middle-grade novel with Random House, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus, which was selected by School Library Journal as one of the Best Children’s Books of 2009. She has three more middle-grade novels forthcoming from Random House, including The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter, due out in January 2011. Her poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review. In 2009, she was selected by Tom Sleigh as the poetry fellow for the Writers@Work Conference in Park City. She has an MA in American Literature, an MFA in Poetry, and a PhD in Poetry. She lives in San Francisco where she tutors at 826 Valencia and is a volunteer gardener on Alcatraz.

You may remember Kristen from her interview with Alan Rinzler. What intrigued me most about Kristen’s interview with Alan was that one of the mistakes she admitted to was not blogging or social networking, and yet, when I talked to Kristen, she wasn’t apologetic at all:

Your first book was published in January 2007, but you didn’t put a website up until nearly a year later. Why the wait?

I am a private and shy person. The idea of having a web presence didn’t appeal to me at all. I didn’t want to have any photographs of myself online, and I didn’t want to have biographical information about myself floating around the electronic world either. I just wanted to write books. I really like being anonymous. I sort of get bummed out when I run in to people I know at the grocery store and stuff like that. Being a more public person has been a big shift for me. I’m not totally comfortable with it, but I’m getting there. (And I think my website, which includes four photos of me, is proof of that.)

You don’t have a blog, and you’re not on Facebook or Twitter. Why not?

Well, I don’t do those things for several reasons. First, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter appear to be a total time suck. I am not at a point in my life where I can afford to have my time sucked. Maybe after I’m retired I will become the world’s most active Twitter person. Today, not so much. Also, for me, writing is something that I have a physical and emotional urge to do. If I wrote a blog and wrote on my Facebook wall or other people’s Facebook walls (That’s how it works, right? You go around writing on everybody’s walls?) I think it would lessen that urge. I want to harness that motivation and use it to complete my books. If I spent writing energy on social media, I’d feel like I was wasting it. And then I’d feel bad about myself. I see the use in social media for building an audience, but I also think you can build an audience by writing the best books you can, while maintaining a small web presence. My agent, Sara Crowe, has a blog and she asks all of her writers to contribute to it a couple of times a year. I do that. But it is not my favorite, and it feels like work and those infrequent semiannual blog entries are one of the few things that I actually procrastinate writing. I don’t like it. If you like it and it helps you write, and it helps you connect to your readers, then that’s great. But that stuff isn’t for me. (I should say that in June my publisher is sending me on a book tour with two other writers and apparently we will be blogging and tweeting our way across the nation. My plan is to do this. Then pretend like it never happened. And then go back to living my social media-less life.)

Do you think having a small online presence has hurt your career in any way?

A small online presence has probably cost me book sales, but I don’t feel like it’s hurt my career. Maybe I’m being naive. Not blogging hasn’t weakened the actual books I’ve written. On the contrary, by not expending my creative energy on anything but my actual writing, I think I’ve gotten further faster. For me, it’s really about the writing. That’s where I put everything. I think I’m growing my audience book by book. After I sold my first novel, I had the choice to either become a promotion machine or write the next book. I chose the latter and it’s always felt like the right choice. My next teen novel, A Field Guide for Heartbreakers, comes out in a couple of weeks. I have a middle-grade novel, The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter, coming out in January. And I’ve got another teen novel about a group of twins who end up adrift at sea and get attacked by sharks due out from Disney next summer. I am ferociously busy. The whole debate on whether or not I should do more online to promote myself sort of seems like a moot point. I’m too busy to do much else besides write, garden on Alcatraz, hang with my cat, and live a little.

What advice do you have for an unpublished author who is told to “build an author platform”?

I have no idea how to build a platform. Instead of worrying about this, I focused on my own strengths and interests—funny and event-driven fiction set in Idaho and other places I’ve lived. The first short story I ever wrote (spoiler alert) was about a girl who digs up her dead cat in order to reassemble its bones for a fourth-grade science fair. It turned out to be a chapter in my first middle-grade novel, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus. I paid attention to what I wanted to write, and I realized that I’m drawn toward humorous fiction for a younger audience. So that’s what I pursued. But I was reading teen stuff at that time, too. And the idea hit me that I should write a funny story about a girl who loses her virginity, because so much of what I was reading was dark and dangerous, sex with consequences stuff. So I wrote Lost It about a girl who loses her virginity underneath a canoe. And I’m really happy with that book. Thinking about platform doesn’t help me generate a story, so I don’t think about it. I write the books I want to write. And I also think about entertaining my audience.

What advice do you have for an unpublished author looking for an agent?

When I was an unpublished author looking for an agent, I read a lot of books that were similar to the books I was writing and when I really connected with a book, I looked in the acknowledgments and saw who they thanked and looked for their agent and editor. I kept a list. I learned a lot about children’s publishing this way. Some people get a subscription to Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch. I didn’t do that. Using the Internet, I Googled people from my list, and I tried to figure out who were the younger agents at the bigger agencies. That’s how I found my agent. She was at Trident Media, just getting ready to move to a smaller agency, and she liked my query and my first three chapters and my manuscript, and now she’s my agent. It’s about the fit. You want somebody who really likes your writing.

Why do you think it’s important to maintain some privacy online?

Sometimes my readers email me and that’s great. I really like hearing from them. But I also get nervous that they approach me with the expectation that we will have repeated electronic correspondence. I don’t have time for that. And I hate disappointing people. Maybe this all boils down to the fact that I have boundary issues. I’m not sure. But I know I like having a limited online presence. It feels right to me.

My homework for you is to record, for the next week, all the times you sabotage your writing. What does that mean? It means all the times you could have written but instead scheduled a date with your dog/dentist/psychic. It means all the times you sat down to write and then got up to eat/drink/clean the toilet instead. It means all the times you turned on your computer to write and instead e-mailed/read blogs/shopped online. It means all the times you chose television/exercise/research over writing. It means all the times you met deadlines for work and paid your bills but didn’t write. And in addition to writing down all the times you sabotage your writing, I want you to record all the times you were about to sabotage your writing, and then didn’t.

For example: Two months ago I ran a half marathon and then stopped running because I was injured but also because it was really time consuming and I wanted to focus on my book revision. Then two days ago I started missing running. Yesterday, I wrote a lot and got ahead on my goals. So today I decided to go running instead of getting to my office early. Was this self-sabotage? Maybe not since I was ahead, but I could have used that opportunity of being ahead to get even more done this week.

I decided a compromise would be to do a short run, so off I went. When I got to the point of turning around, there were two little devils on my shoulders (no angels, just devils). One said, “Keep going! You can do it! You can get up that hill and do the longer run!” and the other said, “This is self-sabotage! Turn back! You’ve run far enough for today!” I listened to Devil One and started up the hill. Then Devil Two spoke up again and I turned around and ran home.

So now your job is to be aware of all the choices you make during the next week and record when you choose to listen to Devil One and when you choose to listen to Devil Two. I started doing this today, and it made a huge difference in my productivity. When I arrived at work, I made a mental list of the e-mails I had to send and promised myself not to respond to any others. Then I turned on MacFreedom and went to work. Ten minutes later, I really wanted to balance my checkbook. And make a haircut appointment. And e-mail a friend. And record the run I did his morning on Daily Mile, but then I would have had to record all those things as moments I sabotaged my writing. So I didn’t do any of them, and I kept writing. An hour after that, I accidentally opened a document that I need to finish editing and decided I’d just edit it quickly and then get back to writing. But that would have been self-sabotage. So I closed the document, and went back to writing. I completed the two writing goals I had for today and then I went home and cooked and watched TV while I ate dinner. Cooking and watching TV were not self-sabotage because I had no goal this evening to write, and because we all need breaks from time to time. The key is that they were conscious decisions, not things I did unconsciously during the time I had intended to write. This exercise should a) help you get more writing done b) help you identify the ways in which you sabotage your writing and c) make you stop feeling as if the time just “slipped away” (while you were blogging/e-mailing/playing Farmville.)

I’m looking forward to hearing your results next week!

Agent Nathan Bransford has a post on creating a Series Bible. A Series Bible is to a book (or series of books) what a script supervisor is to a movie—the person who makes sure a character’s hair looks the same in each scene and that they’re wearing the correct blouse, etc. to give the illusion of continuity.

And via Nathan, a post from the Gatekeeper on whom to thank in your acknowledgments.

Agent Rachelle Gardner asks what do you give up in order to write? And she has another great post about what goes into a publishing contract.

As usual, editor Alan Rinzler has a great post on eavedropping on conversations to help you write authentic dialogue, a practice I highly recommend. And another on building courage as a writer. His advice? Go skydiving!

Intern gives her thoughts on book trailers for unpublished books, which I found intriguing since I was considering making one myself.

Samuel Park writes about the future of books and why he thinks they’re around to stay. And he has another great post about the power of coincidence, or, how much luck plays a role in your getting published. I love Samuel’s blog. If you haven’t yet subscribed to it, go do it right now!

Roni at Fiction Groupie has a post on e-publishing and whether you should go that route.

Jane Friedman at No Rules talks about managing multiple identities online.

Last but not least, from Literary Agency Upstart Crow, can you boil your book down to 25 words or less? These people did.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you writing moms out there! I hope they serve you breakfast in bed!

* * *

The Beginning

I’m standing in the storefront window of Anne Taylor at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan, trying not to fall asleep. A woman reaches out to touch the sleeve of the wool plaid blazer I’m wearing.

“Oh, my God, she’s real!” she yelps, when I flinch. “Betty, look! She’s real!” She takes a step back and points at me.

“Oh, that’s fabulous,” Betty says. “You can hardly tell.”

I’m freeze modeling, which means standing like a mannequin in a shop window all morning with ten-minute breaks each hour to change clothes. I was chosen because I’m a member of the Twelve Oaks Mall fashion panel, a group of high school-aged models who do fashion shows for free. Now three young girls, about twelve, are standing outside the window, pointing and giggling.

“Look, she’s falling asleep,” one says, as I struggle to stare motionless ahead. And now here comes my mom and my sister. My sister’s the one who got me into this, the one who wanted me to model. I’ve never had any interest in fashion, let alone modeling. My favorite outfit is this long blue skirt that I wear knotted on one side with a white shirt, white leggings, and white cowboy boots. I look like I walked straight out of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but it’s comfortable. My sister, however, has plans for me.

“You’re tall and skinny; you should model,” she said to me one day.

“Why would I want to model? Models are dumb.”

“Who cares? You could make a lot of money. Just do it for a while, make a ton of money, and then you can do anything you want.”

“Like how much money?”

“One of my students makes $800 a day doing Dominos pizza commercials, and she’s 17. She’s got enough money saved to go to college already.”

I hadn’t thought about how I planned to pay for college yet—I knew my Dad couldn’t afford it on his own—but $800 a day! I could buy a lot of things with $800 a day—new clothes, a car, another trip out to California to visit my brother.

One of my five brothers (I’m the youngest of eight kids) had invited me out to visit him at Stanford for spring break, and I’d fallen in love with the Bay Area. I dreamt of getting out of Michigan and moving to a place where there were palm trees, where it was sunny in December, and where it never snowed. After much badgering, my sister convinced me to get some photos taken by a photographer her student knew, and things snowballed from there.

First I was stopped by a talent scout from Elite Model Management in New York while out studying at the local library with my friends. She was a Detroit photographer and asked me if I’d had any photos taken. When I told her that I had, she asked if she could come to my house to see them. She talked to my parents and convinced them to let her take me to a scouting competition at a local mall. There I met a sort of model manager, who took me under her wing. She took me to Chicago to meet the agencies there, and they told me I was too high fashion for Chicago and that I needed to go to to New York.

She set up an appointment for me to meet John Casablancas, the owner of Elite Model Management in New York, the largest and most prestigious modeling agency in the world. John took one look at me and told me I needed a nose job. She had me do a couple of test shoots, and the photographer at one of the shoots asked me if I’d ever considered getting a nose job. That clinched it for me. If I wanted to model, I’d have to get my nose fixed. My sister had had a nose job already, so it wasn’t a foreign concept. My friend’s dad happened to be a plastic surgeon, and she took me to meet him. He said he could write it up as a deviated septum so our insurance company would pay for it. All I needed was $200 for the deductible, and I’d be picture perfect. I scheduled the surgery as though it were a routine checkup at the dentist, and then convinced my parents to give me the money. It helped that my sister was on my side.

Meanwhile, the model manager convinced my parents to sign a contract that gave her 5 percent of everything I earned for the next five years. She organized appointments for me in New York, and I went there with yet another one of my brothers, who lives upstate there. The agencies suggested I go to Europe to get some experience and to build up my portfolio. A lot of models start out in Europe because there are so many magazines there—a Vogue, an Elle and a Marie Claire for every country, plus all of their local magazines. Then I could return to New York and clean up doing catalog and advertising jobs.

But I was 16, and there was no way I was going to quit high school and move to Europe, so I gave up on modeling. I did a few local jobs—shoots for The Detroit News and the Metro Times, a fashion show for Xandra Rhodes, and some mall shows here and there, but I gave up the idea of ever making any real money, especially after I lost an auto show job for which I would have been paid $50,000 a year to travel the country extolling the wonders of the Ford Taurus, Sierra, and LTD. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then the universe conspired to move me to California. First, a friend from school decided she was moving to LA after she graduated and encouraged me to go with her. Then I met a guy who had gone to my high school and moved to San Francisco. “LA sucks,” he said. “Move to San Francisco instead.” Then my brother in New York, after flying me there to do a milk commercial for the American Dairy Association, said, “If you want to go to California, then go. What’s stopping you?” Really? I thought. I can just … go? So I started making plans.

I got a second after-school job to save money for the move. I spent my English classes sitting at the back of the room drawing up plans—how much money I needed, when I would leave, and where I would live and work once I got there. There were details to work out, like how I was going to get to California. I didn’t own a car and didn’t have money to buy one. My parents weren’t willing to help me out because they didn’t want me to go, and I was too young to rent a car. I could have flown, but then how would I take my life’s possessions? I wasn’t going for a couple of months; I was going for good.

Then I ran into the mother of an old grade school friend and discovered that she had plans to move to California, too—to Santa Barbara. I convinced her to move to San Francisco instead, so we could share an apartment. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law got a job in LA, and my brother needed someone to drive his pickup truck cross country from Michigan. I saved money to buy a cap for the truck and had a friend teach me how to drive a stick. All this went on while I was taking the SAT and AP exams, writing college application essays (to please my parents), and acting as the vice president of my senior class.

I arrived in San Francisco on July 7, 1988, and I had a tougher time finding a job than I expected. I eventually got one selling T-shirts at a tourist shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, but I hated it. I wanted to work in a restaurant where I could eat good food and make good tips, but instead I was folding T-shirts all day. I wasn’t even allowed to operate the cash register. My money was running out fast, so I began to sell my clothes and return unused Christmas gifts for cash. Before long, I was dining on 50-cent burgers at Burger King and drinking tap water for lunch. I was broke.

I tried attending classes at City College in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco, but coming from a private school, I couldn’t stand the way the teacher condescended to us. If we worked really hard, she said, some day we may be able to go to UC Berkeley. Of course I was going to go to Berkeley, you ninnywinny, I thought, and never returned. So there I was, broke, without a college degree, and feeling very very trapped.

“Just call that model manager woman,” my roommate said. “Go to Europe, make $5000, and then come back and go to school.”

So I called her. She set up appointments for me with the three biggest agencies in San Francisco, and all three agreed to represent me. I went with Look because it had the best reputation, and within a week they had me doing test shoots and meeting agents visiting from Paris and Milan. The agents asked me to go to Europe for the shows, whose castings were three weeks away.

“Pourquoi pas?” I said. What did I have to lose?

I stopped in Michigan on my way to Paris to see my family and put some of my things in storage. While here, I agreed to do one last job for the fashion panel, and now here I am, a real mannequin, the French word for “model.” I’m excited to go to Paris. I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve taken four years of high school French, so at least I can conjugate my verbs. I figure with my good business sense, I’ll do well. I plan to model for a year, make as much money as I can, and then apply to UC Berkeley next fall. Until then, Paris, j’arrive!

* * *

L’Arrivée

The taxi driver deposits me on rue Etienne Marcel, at the corner of the six-lane boulevard de Sebastopol. The buildings are dirty but beautiful, their windows like shiny fat women wearing white wooden shutters for jackets and black lace balconies for skirts. Tiny Peugeots and Fiats idle impatiently at red lights while I drag the brown tweed suitcases my parents gave me for Christmas across the street to number 62, the Marilyn Gauthier Agency. I step into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen, stack my suitcases one on top of another, and squeeze in sideways beside them. I’m relieved to have made it through the airport maze with its giant glass wormholes that suspend travelers over the seven-floor terminal, but I’m worried that Marilyn won’t like me, that she’ll think I’m not pretty enough or outgoing enough, and send me home.

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror as I rattle and hum my way up to the third floor. I examine my new nose, wondering whether Marilyn will notice that I’ve had it fixed, and then pop a tiny zit that has formed beneath my left nostril. The elevator door opens out onto a hardwood floor, and I step out. I’m about to meet one of the most powerful modeling agents in the world, the person who could make the difference between a lucrative international career and a dead-end job selling T-shirts on Fisherman’s Wharf, and I can’t stop yawning, a peculiar response I have to fear.

Inside, a pale woman with thick, dark ropes of hair instructs me to wait on a black sofa beneath a photo of a buxom, almost fat, model. When no one is looking, I stand to glimpse my reflection in the glass of the photo behind me. Together we are the before-and-after photos of a cancer survivor, she healthy and smiling with florid cheeks and golden locks, and I emaciated and pale, my brittle, bleached hair shorn to an inch. I don’t understand why anyone thinks I could model. I don’t look like the girls in fashion magazines. I don’t look like a girl at all with my boyish face and cropped hair. And it’s not like I’m fashionable. I don’t know the first thing about what’s in and what’s out, who’s hot and who’s not. I sit down quickly as two buxom women, one blond and one brunette, appear in the foyer. They’re both wearing décolleté sweaters, knee-length wool skirts, and high heels. In my jeans, hightops, and baggy wool sweater that’s pilling at the sleeves, I’m sorely underdressed for this high fashion capital. I would have changed into something nicer, but I don’t have anything nicer. When the one on the right introduces herself as Marilyn, I see that she resembles the woman in the poster, except that she has dark, curly hair and a hooked nose that my plastic surgeon would have been quick to send for surgery. Her disarmingly sad eyes make me like her right away. Her assistant, Siobhan, has a pug nose and an imperious regard, but a warm smile that makes me like her, too. They look at me and exchange some words in French. I hold my breath.

“Come along, dahling,” Siobhan says in a British accent, motioning for me to follow. I exhale. I’ve passed the first test.

In the booking room, four agents, called bookers, sit around a large, round table—all dressed to kill: Kevin in a designer cowboy shirt, Anne in a fur-collared blazer, Etienne with a silk scarf around his neck, and Ulla in cat-eye glasses. A chair remains empty for Marilyn, who looks like a Balla painting in her constant flurry of motion. I’m taking everything in, memorizing their clothes, their mannerisms, and the intonation of their words. I want to be a straight-A model.