Lottery Distraction (and Dogs Too)

When it comes to your fiction, have you ever wondered what you’d do if you won a $150 million lottery?

Today I stopped at the grocery store to buy yogurt. A teenager (pink rubberbands on her braces and, like, green eyes) with a dog carrier caught my eye. We got to talking about her pup, a Japanese Chin.

I was about to ask the pink-banded one if her dog also dances up on its hind legs, when a growing line of people visible over the girl’s shoulder distracted me further. Apparently, Powerball is up to $150+ million and people are buying tickets big-time.

It took me an inordinately long time to decide on the yogurt. In the midst of all-important considerations — strawberry-flavored or vanilla? lowfat okay since there are no nonfats? what, now there’s yogurt with added fiber? — I couldn’t help wondering what I’d do if I won the lottery.

Just how much of a novelist do I think I am anyhow?

Would I live a well-invested life of bling and leisure, happily dabbling at writing, no pressure to publish, no need to see my words in print?

Or, would I self-publish because I’d have the money to hire excellent editors, copyeditors, designers, marketers and publicists?

Or, would I take 20 years to write one masterpiece, get it out there, and call it a day?

I like to think that I wouldn’t change when it comes to my fiction, but I don’t know that for sure. Writing might be a totally different experience when you don’t have to worry about growing a career.

It’s that nasty word “career” that adds a level of urgency to the equation and has me wondering what my writing would turn into if I didn’t have to earn a living.

(P.S. Didn’t buy a Powerball ticket.)

Patricia Wood’s novel, Lottery, is a quiet novel with a high-concept that caused agents and then publishers to compete for it. Since publication, the novel has sold steadily in hardover (unusual) and is now selling well in trade paperback. It’s one of those word-of-mouth wonders we sometimes hear about.

Wood’s concept: What if a mentally challenged man won the lottery?

Grabs, doesn’t it? And it got me thinking that the “high-concept” concept doesn’t only apply to commercial fiction.

Debut novelists on book tours are a relatively rare event these days, and even more rare is a paperback book tour, so I was curious about how her reading would differ from the likes of Phillip Margolin and David Guterson. There were less than 10 of us, but everyone except me had already read the novel. Ms. Wood was an energetic self-promoter, inviting random book browsers to sit down and have a listen.

Unlike the seasoned novelists I’ve seen recently, Ms. Wood didn’t talk much about craft or process. I got the impression that she was so pumped by her extraordinary, maybe even surprising, success after years of unpublished toil that she wanted to talk about that instead. (I probably would, too, come to think of it.)

Some highlights:

1. What else could prop up hardcover sales besides word-of-mouth? It probably didn’t hurt that Lottery was short-listed for England’s Orange Prize and that actress Sarah Michelle Gellar bought the film rights.

The Internet is a strange, strange world. Apparently, the purchased film rights appeared as a factoid on a website somewhere, and Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer fans everywhere sought out the novel.

2. Self-promotion: She handed out novel business cards in hopes we would pass them on and also signed bookplates to stick into our books. She participates in two or three book clubs a week via iChat or speaker phone (or are those the same thing?).

3. Lottery is her fourth written novel. Another example of patience and perseverence. Her first, second, and third written novels will be her third, fourth, and fifth published novels.

4. And she accumulated about 90 rejections with those first three novels! Patience and perseverence indeed!

5. Where did her novel idea come from? She woke up early one morning with a voice in her head and this first sentence: My name is Perry L. Crandall and I am not retarded. She wrote the prologue immediately, and it didn’t change much from first draft to published version.

What interested me is that her idea came out of her life — it wasn’t as random as a dream voice telling her to write it down. First, she’s well-versed in disability issues through her graduate school studies and advocacy work. Second, her father won the Washington state lottery back in the 90s. Two distinct areas of her life melded themselves into a pleasing story idea. Gotta love the subconsious mind.

6. Best quote: “Writers are socially acceptable schizophrenics.” I and I and I are down with this observation!