Annie Liontas: Creative Writing Professor and Novelist

This person: Annie Liontas

That job: author of Let Me Explain You, among other things, and temporary creative writing lecturer at UC Davis

What we talked about: To be honest, I’m not totally sure how to write about my conversations with Annie. She’s been so supportive and friendly and generous with her time, and I really like her writing, and she’s doing the job I want to do, so I always leave her office hours just totally overwhelmed with gratitude and hope and happiness.

She’s given me a ton of reading recommendations in our conversations, and a ton of writing advice, especially on how to make writing work with real life: how to pick an MFA program, how to write regularly, how to keep learning and improving when you’re not in school.

What I’ve learned: Real people do this job. Really smart awesome inventive people, to be sure, but real people. Writers are not reclusive word sculptors who live in caves and tear out their hair. They can be kind, funny, normal humans who are obsessed with story-writing and have agents and earn money sometimes.

I’ll probably revisit this profile as we continue to talk, but the biggest thing I’ve learned from Annie Liontas is that writing is a job, and it’s a hustle. It involves working on connections, always improving, always looking for the next step. It is, as she said,”feast or famine.”

But some people make it. And who makes it comes down to talent, I’m sure, but also study and work and time and craft. And to me, that makes it worth taking a shot.

Annie’s advice: Wait a few years before starting an MFA to work and live. Go to readings and panels and conventions as much as possible: make hearing other people’s work as big a part of the writing diet as reading it. Read interviews with authors to hear what they have to say. Find friends and fellow writers whose opinions you admire to read your work regularly; build structure and deadlines into unstructured writing time. She told me that “the world doesn’t want you to write,” and I believe it. Everything around me–even people I care about–puts demands on my time and distracts me from writing, and it’s my job to put the time in anyway. To make more work, to get better.

To learn.

Chris Boral: Marketing Director, Children’s Books

This Person: Family friend and neighbor Chris Boral. She has known me since I was in kindergarten and I think she’s great.

That Job: Marketing Director for the children’s book department at Chronicle Books

What we talked about: Chris and I talked generally about the atmosphere and working environment of a publishing company. I asked her whether she thought that working in publishing was a good day job for someone who wanted to write fiction, and she told me that a lot of people in publishing are inspiring authors.

What I learned: Talking to Chris made me interested enough in going into publishing to talk to Lisa, who has a job–developmental editor–that’s closer to what I can see myself doing. However, Chris described the whole world of publishing as a place I’d like to be: competitive, political, but also creative, always-changing, and centered around people. She stressed that publishing is a business, and that a big part of her job was balancing understanding manuscripts as individual creations, and knowing what readers were looking for and what sort of books would sell. She talked about keeping up with the market and considering what would work in the future, anticipating what people would want to read next.

Lisa McGuinness: Developmental Editor

This person: Dear, helpful family friend Lisa McGuinness

That job: Founder and head of Yellow Pear Press and author of the novel Catarina’s Ring

Formerly a developmental editor at Chronicle Books, co-author of several children’s books, and a writer and editor at Diablo Magazine

What we talked about: After talking to Chris Boral, I got in touch with Lisa to get more information on working in publishing. She explained the entire process of publishing a book, from manuscript to press, and explained what it was like to be an editor, a novelist, and now the head of an independent publishing house. Lisa gave me insight on balancing editing and writing on the side, and gave me some ideas for my next steps forward in publishing.

What I learned: Publishing is hard and doesn’t make a ton of money. However, it sounds like an incredible job. Lisa and I spent a few minutes towards the end of our coffee date just talking about how excellent physical books are, and neither of us could really add anything beyond that. We both just sort of smiled and nodded. Books are so exciting! She had been explaining just how long the publishing process takes, from acquiring a manuscript to printing–nine months to a year, fyi–and noting that, unlike many endeavors that have become instantaneous in the digital age, making a book still takes a lot of time.