In
college (Barnard College), I majored in playwriting (Program in the Arts:
Writing-Playwriting), an impractical major if there ever was one, but I won the
Helen Price Memorial Prize for Dramatic Composition. My first play, “Do
Hermaphrodites Reproduce Only in the Spring?”, was a finalist for the Eugene
O'Neill Memorial Theater Competition. It was scheduled for production twice:
the first time, the theater owner died, and the season was shut down; the
second time, the director committed suicide. For the benefit of the arts
community, I decided to get out of playwriting and get a real (read: “paying”)
job, and spent 15 years in public
relations and marketing for health-care, high tech and consumer products
companies before returning to writing. Sometime during that period (“the lost years”),
I also earned an MBA at Yale University.
Can you tell us more about your writing
and your latest book?
The Accidental Anarchist is the true
story of an Orthodox Jew who was sentenced to death 3 times in the early 1900s
in Russia – and lived to tell about it. He also happened to have been my
grandfather, and the book is based on the diaries that he began keeping in 1905
during the Russo-Japanese War. That was when he decided that he needed to
overthrow the Czar (Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov dynasty).
ISBN:
978-0-9845563-0-4 Available at:
www.TheAccidental
Anarchist.com
Follow
Me: @BrynaKranzler
Tell us about the genre of your
work.
I
don’t work only in a single genre, choosing the medium based on the story I
want to tell. The Accidental Anarchist
is a historical biography, but also have two unpublished novels, one of which I
plan to rewrite as a YA book. I also write essays, and just yesterday submitted
a cartoon to The New Yorker called “If Football Penalties were Applied to
Parenting.” Also in the works are an ebook about self-publishing and a novelty
book/card to be sold at bookstore checkout stands.
Why did you choose this genre? How is
writing in the genre you write, different than other genre?
When
I wrote The Accidental Anarchist,
it was difficult to define the genre. I didn’t want to call it Non-Fiction,
because any personal recollections or documentation as in a diary is, by its
very nature, an opinion or perspective. Nor did I want to call it a Memoir
because I had never met my grandfather, and structured the book with a
narrative structure that the diaries didn’t have. I also rewrote and summarized
some portions of the diaries that had been published but were necessary to
appreciate the unpublished material; tightened the pacing of the writing; and
added content in my grandfather’s voice based upon historical fact or what I
was able to learn from my mother. Biography seemed to be the most descriptive
category for the work I had done that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Oprah.
I’d also like to point out that In
Cold Blood, which is the first book in the genre of Creative
Non-Fiction, is typically shelved in Fiction in bookstores, so I also tried to
think about how a reader might look for my book.
Where do you get your ideas for writing?
Life!
What is your favorite thing about your
book?
I
kept the book in my grandfather’s unique voice that was filled with an ironic,
not mean or sarcastic, sense of humor that was a remarkable contrast with the
circumstances he wrote about: poverty, starvation and the horrors of war. I was
pleased, when I let my mother read it, that she said it sounded just like her
father, including the parts that I had written in his voice.
Why and when did you begin writing? Is there any one person who had a big
influence on you or encouraged you to write?
My
father was a writer. In fact, he was the first Orthodox writer in Hollywood, so
there was nothing unusual about the fact that I started writing when I was very
young. I had one elementary school teacher, and I don’t remember for which
grade, who gave us an assignment of writing “A Day in the Life Of…” We were to
pick an inanimate object and imagine what life was like for the character that
was a hangar, or something else. I wrote a whole series of “Day in the Life” stories,
and remember how delightful it was to imagine the world from the perspective of
different objects.
Unfortunately, I
believed I was ‘expected’ to be a writer, and although I was drawn to it, I
also resisted it, which resulted in a lot of wasted years that could have been
spent developing my skills.
What is your writing schedule? What atmosphere do you need to write?
I
work out first thing every morning. That’s when my energy is highest, and if I
don’t do it then, the day would get taken away and there would be no other time
to do it. I run errands on my way home (if a business isn’t open by 8 am, I
don’t patronize it; I don’t like to break up my day.) Then I go home to write.
At the moment, I’m working at the kitchen table because my office is so overwhelmed
with paper. I go back and forth between writing longhand and composing on the
computer, but I seem to always need to be surrounded by various papers, various
projects, which results in my no longer having a usable kitchen table.
For a few years,
I wrote at a local Starbucks or Panera because I found the atmosphere less
distracting than home. That’s right; all the people walking around me and
talking, the music, the general cacophony – I found that less distracting than
knowing there was a load of laundry to do or dinner to make; whenever I got to
a tough spot in my writing, I used to hear household chores calling me, so I
had to leave the house. But if I sat myself down at Starbucks for the day, I
had no choice but to keep working. And it gave me the idea to for an article I
wrote about people who had turned Starbucks into their “office away from the
office,” which I called: “Have Laptop, Will Travel.”
What
projects are you working on now, or plan for the future?
I am working on an ebook about self-publishing, about half of
which will focus on the mistakes I made so that other people don’t have to
repeat them. That’s where I can add value in this category. I’m also working on
a humorous novelty book about parenting, and plan to rewrite my first novel as
a YA novel built around the first chapter. Of course, to get back to these
projects, my book, The Accidental Anarchist, needs to start selling itself
without my needing to constantly seek out opportunities to speak about it,
which has been my most effective way of selling it.
What kind of advice or tips to you have
for someone who wants to write and be published?
Start
young! Begin submitting your work to publications that accept contributions
from kids and teenagers. Then, by the time you’re an adult, you’ll have a
portfolio to show, and you will have also grown as a writer by having gotten
advice on how to improve. That takes having a thick skin, which not everyone
has at a young age. Find at least one person other than a parent, such as a
teacher, who thinks you’re good and encourages you. That will help you take
what’s useful from rejection without letting it demoralize you.
What do you do when you are not writing?
I
work out regularly, though not for long enough, because I am always trying to
lose 5 pounds that just won’t leave me. I love the movies, and see several
movies a week that I review on my personal Facebook page. I also read a lot and
go to the theater, and review these as well on my Facebook page. I spend
whatever time I can with friends; I have really remarkable friends who are
wonderful people. And I enjoy cooking. Lately I’ve been making desserts from a
cookbook from a well-known baker in San Diego, each of whose recipes runs about
5 pages long and take several days to complete!
What “Made It” moments have you
experienced in life?
My
happiest experiences have been seeing the success that my children are
achieving. They amaze and inspire me every day.
Is there anything else you would like to
add?
I
grew up on the periphery of Hollywood. Although my father was a writer, we were
Orthodox, so it wasn’t easy to be part of the Hollywood ‘scene,’ and from my
parents’ perspective, it wasn’t desirable either. But I was always fascinated
by the movies and television, and used to accompany my father to the studios to
watch different television shows being filmed, such as Medical Center. There
was a time when I thought I wanted to be an actress because I longed to be
“popular.” But after watching different shows being filmed, and seeing the hands
of the clock on the set turned back over and over for the multiple takes it
took to shoot each scene, I saw the work as incredibly boring. That was the
best way to disabuse a kid of any notions of stardom.
I don't know if
I knew it at the time that I was going to the studio with my father, but
apparently Carl Reiner, who was a nursery school parent at the same time as my
parents, was 'smitten' with me and wanted me to be Little Richie's next door
neighbor with a recurring role on the Dick Van Dyke show. My parents turned
down that offer, wanting me to have a 'normal' childhood. While it's true that
a lot of child actors have not had made easy transitions to adulthood, it might
have been nice to have had Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as surrogate
parents...
Note from Sylvia: You can visit my other
blog at: http://love-faith-and-guts.blogspot.com/that features a preview
to my new book released in 2012, Traveling a Rocky Road with Love, Faith and
Guts.
2 comments:
It's hard to read your first advice: to "start young" from my perspective. Of course you're right! When I went to Barnard, there was no course in writing, or I would have taken it, and the rest, as they say, would probably have been history. I like to read about someone who has put to use whatever has been offered to make her into a writer. So many stories speak of missed opportunities. Brava.
Hi JLC,
Yes, it's hard to hear "start young" but I say that because I wish someone had told me that. It's not that one can't start at a later age, with the benefit of maturity and life experience -- it's just harder, and for that reason I encourage kids and teens who want to write to publish in their school newspapers or other publications that are open to them. It's always easier to approach the next project being able to show what you've already done.
And when I went to Barnard, they had just phased out a class in "Gracious Living," which taught how to make appropriate cocktail party conversation. It seemed well-behind the times even more than 30 years ago.
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