First Time Novelist Breaks All Rules with a Winner

How Far is the Ocean from Here by Amy Shearn has to be the weirdest, funniest saddest road novel I've ever read. A single, confused 20-something, named Susannah Prue, agrees to surrogate for a pair of cozy yuppies. As the due date nears, she panics and eventually finds herself careening through the southwest in the company of a 9-year-old hermaphrodite and a sex-starved mentally retarded teenager. The yups are in hot pursuit. Hey, they paid for that baby, they want it!

As Shearn deftly shifts back and forth through time, she used the opportunity to delve into some pretty strange psychological territory. But this isn't a thinky book - it's a page turner - which makes it pretty unusual. Even more unusual, the first-time novelist had the courage to chuck that sacrosanct rule: write what you know and then she wound up getting published by ultra-prestigious Random House after finding an agent through a cold call. I sat down with her to find out how it happened.

CK: What gave you the courage to write what you didn't know?

AS: I think that my experience of world is very boring. I grew up in a nice suburb of Chicago so I love imagining situations I've never been in. When I first heard that women rent out their wombs, I couldn't believe that it was real. The situation seemed so fraught, complicated, imbalanced and I'd never read about it in fiction, so I was drawn to it.

CK: Do you think that we've gotten a handle on this idea of surrogacy yet?

AS: People don't know what to make of it. There was this fascinating Newsweek article about how many military wives become surrogates. It makes sense in a way -- their husbands are gone for long periods of time, they could use the money, and many of them described feeling this sense of duty and self-sacrifice. There was another article about couples outsourcing surrogacy to India, and actually having Indian woman (who they sometimes have almost no contact with) carrying their babies. It's so weird that any of this is even possible. And it's still so new that the whole thing is pretty unregulated, and still illegal in much of Europe, which I also find really interesting. I'd say no, we certainly have not gotten a handle on the idea yet it still seems kind of unlikely and inexplicable.

CK: Let's talk about your process. How do you work? Do you write outlines?

AH: Nooooo. I write a very messy first draft, just getting it all down. As I write I tend to rewrite sentences pretty obsessively, and do a lot of revising on the line-level as I go. Only once I have a draft or most of a draft do I create some sort of outline and figure out exactly what's happening. With this book it was pretty late in the game that I figured out its themes and trajectory, and how, for example, many of the characters are kind of weird doubles of each other, and how each is damaged in some way.

CK: You got an MFA from University of Minnesota. How much does a writing program cost and can graduate schools teach people how to write?

AS: It's like visual art. You have to have basic desire and raw talent or just that raw want-to-do-it -- you can't be taught those things. But you do learn certain things that make you better - you expand your vocabulary and knowledge, and hopefully you learn something about discipline, buckling down and getting it done. I really learned how to construct a novel by writing a couple failed attempts and then throwing them away.

They also teach you to be comfortable getting your work torn up in front of all your friends. You start to talk about your work in a way that makes you get over taking it personally. You stop being so touchy and that is a hugely important lesson.

As for the cost, they really range just as undergraduate programs do. I chose mine, in part, because they offer a tuition waiver and a teaching stipend to every student. In other words, it's free. I don't think I would have gone if it had meant taking out loans to do it. It's not like you're going to suddenly make a lot of money (or any) once you have that MFA in hand.

CK: Those ego-shredding lessons are really important for beginners. How can you get them if you can't afford grad school?

AH: You could have a similar experience by joining a good, rigorous writers' group, or by taking a workshop or two.

CK: What books have taught you how to write?

AS: I always go back to Virginia Woolf. It sounds pretentious but every one of her books makes me feel like I want to quit because I could never be that good - and inspires me to keep trying. I'm also always going back to Nabokov for the same reasons. And then reading Ulysses was like meeting the prom queen and realizing she really is actually awesome and totally deserves to be prom queen. The contrarian in me wanted to find Joyce sadly overrated but nope, it's actually amazing, and really fun to read. Same goes for Proust.

CK: Didn't people tell you it was crazy to try and become a novelist in this day and age?

AS: My friends and family have always been really supportive of my creative endeavors < I think I'm really lucky in that way. As for the world at large, everyone's always saying, no one reads anymore, no one publishes - but I didn't listen. I feel like there is always the sky is falling mentality. I know I live in a book-nerdy hothouse here in New York, but I still have the sense that there are more books by more people more widely available than ever before. I try to feel hopeful. It's a little too bad that it's not exactly a self-sustaining career path for most of us, but that's okay. A day job isn't going to kill anyone. I work as a freelance web editor for dominomag.com and teach writing classes, and I think it's good for a writer to have that outside stimulus and contact with the world.

CK: Why did you get an agent - to sell your book?

AS: At first, I just wanted an agent to read it. If my friends read it and said it was awful I'd be devastated. But if an agent - a stranger - didn't like it, I could just assume they didn't know what they were talking about.

CK: How did you find yours?

AS: Most authors acknowledge their agents. So I did some reconnaissance work. When I read the gorgeous novel The Seas by Samantha Hunt, it really felt like my sensibility, so I thought, whoever liked this book might also like mine. I looked at her acknowledgements and saw where she thanked her agent, PJ Mark. I kept having the experience of reading a book I'd love and realized he represented it: Ed Park's Personal Days, Amy Fusselman's 8, Pia Z. Erhardt's Famous Fathers. So it seemed like a good match. I sent it to him and he accepted it.

Everybody says that this is exactly how you aren't supposed to do it. You're supposed to send query letters to millions of agents. But I was just really careful in who I queried, and got lucky!

CK: You seem to have two themes: breaking the rules and sticky situations - so what's your next book about?

AS: Well, I really believe in that superstitious mojo about not discussing current projects. But I can tell you that in this next novel there is a big, huge, sticky situation that itself breaks all sorts of rules. So while it feels really different, topically anyway, from HFITOFH, perhaps it's not so different after all...