Lisa Genova's 10 Rules of Writing

1. Show up and stay there.  Stay in your seat.  Nothing is coming to you, you say?  You’re staring at a blank page or the blinking cursor on a white screen?  Stay.  Resist the urge to flee and do something else (check Facebook, text someone, eat something, do laundry, take a nap).  Learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

2. You can’t edit nothing.  Write something.  You can edit something.

3. Give yourself permission to begin without it being perfect.  I begin with pen to paper, writing in a loose, sketch-like, journaling, incomplete sentence form.  This allows me to find a way into the “real” writing.  I usually begin with what I’m unsure of, afraid of, pissed off about, dreading.  I jot down a flash of a thought about what needs to happen next, what a character might say, and then and then and then.  And then, I’m in.  There’s something magical in the connection from brain to hand to pen to paper.  Grab a pen and go.  Let loose.  Don’t be judgmental or afraid to be sloppy here.  Julia Cameron calls this process “morning pages.”  Natalie Goldberg calls it “getting the pen moving.”  I call it “permission to begin.”

4. Tell the truth.  Always.  If you lie to your readers, they will break up with you.

5.  Be present.  Slow down and be in the moment within your story.  What is there to see, smell, hear?  What’s the temperature, the emotion, the energy?  Go inside moment to moment.  Breathe and really be there.

6.  Believe it’s already done.  In some kind of time-space continuum, I believe every book I write is already written.  So why am I avoiding writing chapter 12?  It’s already done.  Show up, stay there, and get the words down.

7.  Do your homework.  This is not simply a Google search, people.  Whenever possible, go to the primary source.  Your story takes place at Yellowstone National Park?  Go there.  Your main character is a lawyer?  Start hanging around a courthouse.  Writing about a woman with Alzheimer’s?  Get to know people who have Alzheimer’s, their families, caregivers, doctors.  Three-dimensional research will breathe three-dimensional life into your story.

8.  Cross-training.  I write novels.  I read everything—scientific journal articles, medical textbooks, spiritual texts, nonfiction, memoir, classic literature, contemporary fiction, plays, poetry.  Listen to all kinds of music.  Go to the theatre, the ballet, museums.  Keep your senses open for what works and what doesn’t, what’s beautiful, what makes you care, what lights you up, for the universal threads of human experience.

9.  Show yourself.  Be brave.  Be vulnerable.  Open your heart.  That’s where the real stuff lives and breathes.  Now write.

10. You’re going to be dead someday.  Write it now.

Notes from Italy, 11/15/11

I'm at Spannocchia (a 900-year-old farmhouse near Siena), sitting outside on a cool, sunny day at a rickety round table, about the size of a large pizza, on the lawn overlooking the hills of Tuscany.

They took the lemon trees inside yesterday.  Winter is coming.  The two cypress trees and bench that I woodblock printed with Sabra Field five years ago are to my left.  I have such fondness for that time in my life.  The last time I came to this magical place, I'd just finished STILL ALICE.  And here I am again, this time in the middle of writing my third book.

I can smell lunch cooking.  Onions and garlic.  And fennel?  Not sure.  It smells delicious.  People are chatting behind me on the terrace where we drank wine every evening five years ago.  We don't drink there now because it's November and too cold (last time I was here, it was June).

A man is picking something from a tree and dropping it into a ceramic bowl.  Something for dinner maybe.  I love how connected Italians are to their land, the earth, their food.  Back at home, my yard is a place where my kids play or ground that I walk over to get to the car.  Here, it is tended to and touched daily.  It is eaten.  I like that.  It's what we should be doing.  Connection to the earth and what we eat, nourishing our environment and ourselves.  At home, we go to the grocery store.  We're disconnected from this process.

Connection and disconnection.  LOVE ANTHONY is about this.  Faith and loss of faith.  Communication and silence.  Connection and isolation.  How do we love?  What do we need in order to experience love?

Notes from My LOVE ANTHONY Writing Journal, 11/30/11

Just realized I'm on chapter 20.  Sounds substantial, doesn't it?  I'm at about 46,000 words and 200 pages, so it's getting there, baby.  I go back and forth lately between thinking it's brilliant to thinking it's an absolute mess.  I'm worried that Beth's story doesn't tie in strongly enough to Olivia's, that it's like--SO WHAT?  Why not just tell Olivia's and Anthony's story?

I think because their story is too internal.  Beth's story provides the movement, the action and immediacy.  But why not tell Olivia's story in that way--tell the story of this mother who has a son with autism, how she first suspects it, then the diagnosis, living with it, etc--and make it linear?  Because that's too predictable.  It's been done.  Mother has a child, expects a "normal" life, then there is a diagnosis and a deviated development, a deviated life. This mother's point of view has been told.

I'm hoping that this story offers something new and unexpected, that readers will learn about the experience of autism from the more severely affected end of the spectrum without feeling like they're reading a clinical manual, without being hit directly over the head with it.  I want to tell a great story and give a voice to this voiceless child.  How does he experience the world, emotions, relationships?  How does his life matter?  I want readers to experience what it might feel like to have this kind of autism.  I think a straightforward, linear story of only Olivia and Anthony without Beth doesn't hold as much power somehow.

So finish the first draft, Lisa, and if there are ways that you can tighten Beth's ties to autism in metaphor, do it then.  You've planted the seeds.  Make sure that elements from each Anthony and Olivia chapter tie in to elements of Beths' chapters--illustrate that the spectrum is long and wide, and we're all on it.  And then it will be brilliant, my dear.  And when the first draft is done, have Tracey read it, and listen with an open heart to her feedback.

For now though, you are writing chapter 20.  So what happens next?

Still Alice, still going!

My books feel in some ways like my children (so far, I've given birth to 3 babies and 2 books).  Each one is unique, I love them all, and you'd better watch out if you have anything bad to say about any of them (well, I understand that not all reviewers and readers are going to love all of my books, but they're not allowed to say anything mean about my kids!).

And even though I have no favorites, there's a special place in my heart for the first one, both child and book.  I didn't know what the heck I was doing with either one (as a mother or an author), and I'm eternally grateful to both of them for bumping their way into this world and into my life, however ungraceful and ignorant I was in guiding them here.

This week I received phenomenal news about STILL ALICE, my firstborn book.  STILL ALICE won the Bexley 2011 Book of the Year award!  More than two years after its publication date, I couldn't be more proud!

Because this distinction is awarded from England, I thought I'd share with you some of the UK STILL ALICE covers (the different covers are like showing people pictures of your baby dressed in different outfits).


Here's the original UK cover concept that was rejected:

And the original UK paperback that was released in March 2009:

And the STILL ALICE paperback released in the UK a year later, the copy on the stands there now:

Cute, huh?


Thank you so much for choosing STILL ALICE as the 2011 Bexley Book of the Year.  I'm truly honored and thrilled! Thank you for reading STILL ALICE and for using the book as a vehicle to discuss Alzheimer's.  So many people are afraid to talk about Alzheimer's.  It's incredibly rewarding to know that readers are braving this scary topic and coming away with a better understanding of this disease, the people who live with it, and that we are more than what we can remember.


Again, so proud.  Now off to pay some attention to my third "baby,"  LOVE ANTHONY....