Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: So we're here with Lauren Kate, author of By Any Other Name. I am personally excited about this one because it is set within the publishing world, that of course always has an interest for me as a writer and someone that is also operating within that world. But I think it also offers a great opportunity for readers who I think are instinctively interested in that.
Lauren: Having worked in the publishing world, it was such a fun and charged experience all the time. It really was as exciting, I think, as it's often portrayed in books and movies. If you enjoy books, being surrounded by them, talking about them non-stop, it’s very fun, and I love getting to bring that to the page in this book.
Mindy: One of the things that I think is interesting about this book, By Any Other Name, is that it's not not a biographical book, but in some ways it is based on things that happened to you in your life is that right?
Lauren: I put all of these pieces that are auto-biographical together and let them explode into something a bit more fictional, but yes, many pieces of this story that are based on my life. When I worked as a young editor at the publishing house, I worked with a really reclusive, mysterious author who I idolized and had based a lot of my ideas about life on that writer's books. So that alone, and the mystery around who that person actually was, was always in the back of my mind, and something I wanted to explore in a story. I never knew that I was gonna make it a comedy, I never knew that it was going to be romantic and fun in this way. That is one piece drawn from real life. And the other one was a big dramatic break-up that I had on the back of a motorcycle on the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast that I transformed to make myself the hero that I wish I had been in the moment.
Mindy: Tell me. Hindsight is 2020. Breakups. Oh my God, I've been through my share.
Lauren: And yeah, you get to retell it the way you wish it would have gone.
Mindy: You get to retell it so that you come off perfect. To open it up for listeners a little bit, why don't you let them know what By Any Other Name is about?
Lauren: Sure, so the main character of the story is Lanie, an editor at a publishing house, and she works on the books of this very prominent reclusive romance novelist, and she, like me, has based a lot of her ideas about what love is and what a heroine, and a love story is supposed to be like on this writer's books. But she's never met the writer. She has a vision in her mind of what they are, and it is a slightly older female mentor that she looks up to as a model. When she meets the writer in person, there's a circumstance that forces them to meet each other, she is shocked and horrified to learn the writer of her favorite books is a man, and he's kind of a jerk. This throws a lot of her life into chaos. You start second guessing all of the choices that she’s made based on these books that have meant so much to her, her career, she's in a relationship kind of inspired by these novels, she's engaged to be married, and all of that begins to crumble. And as it does, she is surprised to begin to fall in love with the author of these books.
Mindy: So many things going on there. You do move and work and participate in the romance industry, you have these break-up stories in your past, we all do. I don't know that this is't necessarily true, but I do think I, as an individual, tend to short change real life men because they are not living up to their fictional counterparts. When I think about the romance industry and what I thought a hero was supposed to be...
Lauren: Exactly, these other guys need to step it up.
Mindy: Having had these experiences as a reader - in a book, like this guy is perfect! As a writer then, kind of viewing it through this lens of - This is a woman writing the ideal man. And I think if I were to discover it was actually a man writing it… I think that that would throw a little bit, I don't know if that's sexist or not, but I think it would.
Lauren: And these are the questions and the arguments, what are our expectations about the origins of the stories that we believe in, and why do we assign different gender roles to them, and what does it mean to have them challenged? What's possible when you look beyond your conception of who gets to tell what story?
Mindy: And I think that's really important because I have definitely had moments as a writer when I'm writing a male character, where I will seek out male friends and be like, Hey, in this situation, if a male reacts like this, what's the internal? Because I can see the external, but what's going on internally? Because if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be divorced.
Lauren: I do ask my husband. Sometimes I'll write the male side and then I'll share it with him and he'll make a couple of edits, like just change a sentence or two, and it changes the entire interiority. That is a fascinating thing that I would never have known a man would feel that way.
Mindy: Yeah, and I think that men get short changed very often in the emotional depth.
Lauren: That was an interesting thing to explore with this character too, because he's all about emotional depth, he's writing vulnerable men and women as his career for a number of books, and that's his particular fascination. And so a lot of it is on the sleeve for Lanie and for the reader to experience. I guess the question for me was then, if there's a virtual or the writerly version of this person, and then there's the real life version of this person, which one is true? Which one is real? The walls that come up in the real person, is that artifice?
I like to think about the deep and true friendship that these characters developed online and via email and via books before they ever met in person, I didn't wanna discount that, and that was a thing that the main character had to overcome this feeling that... Yes, they do actually have a history, they are actually friends, they are building on something that they started that was real, even though she was operating under an assumption that was incorrect. She has to come to peace with - Was that a lie or was that my own mis-characterization of who this person was?
Mindy: Yeah, and that's really interesting. That's a really good question. It's like if you're connecting with that person, knowing or even not knowing what their gender is? Because I grew up and I assume you did as well in a world of interacting with screen names and their gender wasn't necessarily inferred by their name. So I had a friend that I became pretty close with that was a fellow writer on a writer's forum, we would just be interacting with each other on the forum, and then there would be some DMs, and then, you know, that relationship changed and became more of a friendship. Because I think that when the internet first became a thing, it was really a question for a lot of people, whether you can have online friends... Is that a real thing? And now I think people realize, yes, it is.
Lauren: We surrender.
Mindy: You have a real relationship with this person, but I didn't know if that person was a man or a woman. We were just having these conversations and connecting about concepts and ideas and humor and our opinions about other people, and it didn't matter.
Lauren: Did you ever find out?
Mindy: Yes, it was a man and he ended up becoming a woman. We had an interesting conversation where I was talking to this person and they were like, Hey, you know, I know that we haven't actually talked on the phone, or you haven't seen me in a while, and I'm just letting you know this is a thing that happened, just like FYI. I was like, Well, you know, for two or three years of our friendship, I didn't know what your gender was, so it doesn't actually matter now either.
Lauren: Now, that is remarkable. That's a really cool story.
Mindy: I connected with you as a human person. Whatever else is going on. It doesn't matter.
Lauren: Exactly.
Mindy: It's an interesting way to view human relationships, and I think once she begins making the connection into romance and falling for him, I do understand why she would then be like, Well, wait a minute, is this predicated upon a lie?
Lauren: And she has a lot of questions, I think because it rocked her so much to realize that there was a man behind the stories that were shaping her ideas of how to be a woman. She has a lot of ethical questions about what she's perpetrating for the millions of women who read this writer's books. And she doesn't want to be part of this lie, if it is a lie, that's the crux of what she's struggling with. Even as she's trying to get him to write that next book that he's way past his deadline for and even as she's falling in love with him. And of course he's able to write all of these wrongs in the end. I really liked making him reckon with the lie or the misconception that he had been living under for years, he has a public reckoning with that, that made me care for him a great deal.
Mindy: Was that something you planned or was that just like a character move that took you by surprise?
Lauren: I did always plan on the truth coming out to the public within this world, but originally I had a more of a nemesis character who exposed the back story. And what ultimately happened as I refined the draft and moved deeper into my revision, was I realized that it had to originate from the character and he had to make a choice to come clean, be open with his readership. That shouldn't have come from anywhere else, that was the change.
Mindy: Organic and internal choice rather than being forced is really important.
Lauren: It's hard to see in the outlining stage or the first draft because you know it's gotta happen, it's just not as clear how it has to happen or how the characters are gonna feel about it when it happens. For me, the second draft is like where the beautiful things begin to happen in my stories and begin to feel like things are clicking into place. And so realizing that and knowing this has to be a self-directed move and the bravery required for that. It feels really good.
Mindy: For me, when I'm writing a first draft, I'm learning those characters as I'm going, no matter how much planning. I don't really plan a lot, but I will be living with them inside my head for some time before I start writing it down, and I think that I know them, but the act of writing them is where I actually learn them. And oftentimes I've written that first draft, and when I go back to the beginning, when I'm editing, when I'm doing a second draft, I have to adjust the first five to six chapters because who they are changed.
Lauren: I like the little bread crumbs that my subconscious leaves for me. In this book, I kept mentioning something about her father, and then I would mention something about her grandmother. I wrote the whole first draft, her mom never came on the page and I was like, Oh, I gotta put the mom in here somewhere, why is it the mom never weighing in on this? And I started to look closer and I was like, the mom, she's not here. I can't find her, and then I realized that the mom was dead and that her death was this formative experience that already had echoes in other places of the story waiting for me to just pick them up and use them. So many things fell into place. Once I realized she had this space in her heart that was left by her mom's death, I was just able to sort of move into the right places to address that, that I never saw coming.
Mindy: Yes, I had a character recently, in my 2023 release, who was supposed to be Type A, good girl, and when I started writing her, she was mad, she was angry, and there would be a lot of resentment and not necessarily sniping, but just internal anger that she bottled up and kept a lid on. And whenever I was writing her externally, what was going on with her internally was very different, and I was just like, Well, hello, I didn't know that was in there.
Lauren: You're the only one who gets to see that side of them. They're not showing anyone else in their world this.
Mindy: Right, and it ended up being absolutely perfect, and even driving the plot and changing the character. She spoke to me, I was like, if she's an angry person... Well, this changes everything.
Lauren: Yeah, yeah. Now you have your work cut out for you. That's amazing,
Mindy: I love when that happens. When they become real people, then I think you know that you've really hit something.
Lauren: Thank you, thank you for being real. I don't have to do the work now.
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Mindy: So you've written across genres, you've written YA, You have written historical, obviously, you are also writing romcom. So I also write across genres and I get a lot of questions that I don't wanna ask you, because I know what it's like to have someone say - how does your process change? And I'm like, I don't know, I'm just writing a book. I think my question to you is more like, how do you prepare your readership for this? Do you look for crossover? Do you think people are following you, or are you not worried about that and you're just writing what’s in your heart?
Lauren: I am just writing what's in my heart. To me, the experience of writing every book is the same, and I almost feel like all my books, whether they're set 400 years ago or funny or super serious with theological implications, whatever the book is. To me, it feels like it's kind of the same story. It circles the same questions about how empowering love is. I think that's just a preoccupation in all of the things that I write, and they have different tones, but they are at their core coming from the same place for me.
I just wrote my first middle grade novel, and it's the first thing I've ever written that doesn't have like an erotic romance of its core. But it has a best friend romance, that really intense female friendship between two girls who are pre-puberty, they're not in love or even having crushes yet, they just are deep best friends. And I found that even writing that relationship was so similar to exploring a romance, dealing with so many of the same possibilities and frictions, and so again, it's like even when I'm going really far away from the thing that I think I do. I'm still doing the thing that I do.
Mindy: I agree. My books are all about gray areas of morality and human experience, that's what every book is about. What is right, what is wrong? Do those things exist? And how do we behave in the world, morally?
Lauren: You can circle that in any number of ways, but we all have our own personal preoccupations that they're going to crop up in our writing no matter what.
Mindy: Agreed, agreed. And I think as a reader, I like finding those elements and identifying them, in an author, and I can trace that thread through all of their books, and it really does feel like there's an intimacy there.
Lauren: That's true. I'm a big fan of Madeline Miller's books and just reading The Song of Achilles and Circe back to back, and I read Circe a couple of times 'cause I was teaching it, I was starting to see things. Obviously, they're both about mythology, but deeper than that, I'm noticing there are all these things going on with unloving parents and a child who should have gotten better parents than their luck of the draw dealt them. I do love to notice little tropes like that and think about how they echo throughout the writer's canon.
Mindy: I struggle with it a little bit because I believe in the death of the author. I want the work to stand separate. I think that the author's opinion, even intent, sometimes doesn't matter. Once I have written a book, it has passed beyond me, and everyone is going to do with what they will or will not with it, and I don't think I get to direct that anymore. There is some danger in that too, because I don't wanna be misinterpreted, but I also would never tell someone that they're wrong.
Lauren: Yeah, and they can't possibly be wrong. I think it's funny that you mentioned that because in By Any Other Name, when Lanie first meets Noah in person, they have an argument about the death of the author and if that's possible, and what Roland Barthes meant in his essay and they really pick that one part quite ferociously. I think that's a fascinating question.
Mindy: I do too. I think it's super important. I have to try to, especially in today's world, but it stands true for many things, I have to sometimes look at an individual, a writer an artist, to singer or whatever they are, if their personal life is something that I find or their public actions are something that I find reprehensible, but I love their books or I love their song. I do struggle with... It's like, Okay, how do I handle this? Am I supporting them by buying their music? Or interacting with it? Or am I just going to separate the art from the artist and say, I like this song?
Lauren: I mean, I think that the art is always already separate from the artist, but I can imagine some of the artists that you're referencing, and I know the struggle. It's a strange struggle, especially to be a true fan of someone who you don't agree with.
Mindy: I think it's really difficult. If they're already dead, I don't struggle with it as much, so that's easier. Don't meet your heroes. I haven't, but I also don't really have any... I try very hard to keep those things separate, like we talked about, keep the artist and the art separate. I think it's important. I really do. I think that you need to experience whatever it is, the piece, apart from knowing anything about the author, and if you are driven by what you've experienced - that you feel like, Oh, I think I could connect with this person. I want to know more about them. It can bastardize both your experience of the person and the art. So yeah, it's a question that I've kind of always had. And of course, now moving in the actual world of publishing and authors where I will meet people, I have yet to have the experience where I was like, Oh wow, that was a serious let down...
Lauren: As a child, I was obsessed with Louis Sachar. I'm still kind or am. And I remember meeting him at a book festival a few years ago, and just couldn't not fan-girl. I really went for it, and he was so kind, very friendly and everything, but it was like - I realized what it's like to be on that side of the equation, and I simply could not hold in my enthusiasm. I became very aware that I'm meeting a hero, I'm actually doing it. I know that you know this too, the solitary nature of what we do 95% of our time, to ever have somebody say to you, Your book meant something to me, whether their enthusiasm level is off the charts or whatever, it is a deeply moving experience.
Mindy: It’s why I do it. Obviously it's nice to have an income, but I mean, I got an email the other day from someone, it literally was identifying the threads in my books and said, You've changed the way that I look at the world. It is a beautiful feeling, and I have yet to be on the other side of that where I just kinda lose my cool
Lauren: One day, you won't be able to reign it in. And it'll be good.
Mindy: I look forward to making a complete ass of myself. So last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book By Any Other Name, and where they can find you online?
Lauren: You can get the book anywhere books are sold. Online, my handle is generally Lauren Kate books everywhere on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those spots, and yeah, I would love to connect with any readers out there.
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