(Pictured left to right) John Hart, Jack Pendarvis, Gene Edwards, and Pia Ehrhardt at the Writers' roundtable

“I’ve never taken a writing class” shares best selling author John Hart. His first novel, King of Lies was a huge success but writing it was “hard knocks. The learning curve is so steep.” Although he’s finishing his third book, he admits to “still learning and making mistakes.”

 

Pia Ehrhardt has a graduate degree in writing. Nonetheless, she says, “Novels are hard.” Hurricane Katrina changed the landscape of this New Orleans based short story writer’s first novel and has forced her into an intricate revision.

 

Jack Pendarvis commiserates. After a colleague critiqued the draft of his first novel—about a giant, Jack began what he thought would be an easy rewrite. “It was tough,” he remembers. “It was almost sentence by sentence.”

 

The trio joins host Gene Edwards at the Writers’ roundtable to tell of their writing lives. A group with different styles and approaches, they all have novels in various stages. At the time of our taping, Ehrhardt was rewriting her first; Pendarvis was awaiting publication of his first; and Hart was finishing his third. Hart’s first burst out of the starting gate and spent three weeks on The New York Times best seller list.

 

John Hart gave himself a gift in order to complete his first novel--time. He quit his paying job and spent one year writing. “Every day I went to work thinking that this is what I am doing without distraction. I am writing this book. That’s what allowed me I think to really bring the focus that got me published.”

 

Pia Ehrhardt has learned to recognize her own body language as she writes. “If you can just keep your butt in the chair when you have this incredible urge to go get a snack, you really can write through that and use that, use that discomfort and keep inside the story.”

 

Jack Pendarvis’ tale is a little different. “I’d been trying to get published for twenty years and no luck. So I started writing these stories that went against everything they told me.” His first published story was Our Spring Catalog, a tongue-in-cheek literary list. His first novel Awesome about a 30 foot tall giant is scheduled for publication in July, 2008.

 

Ehrhardt likes writing about “the tender places that make us all human.” Hart says that “good storytelling needs tension and conflict and good, honest emotion.” And Pendarvis has fun with his stories and characters. “If I have a fleeting phobia or a stray thought that seems odd, rather than push it to the back of my mind as most of us have been trained to do in the normal human world, I try to take it out and let it fester and sort of push it and imagine the most extreme version.”

 

Pendarvis also says that chopping is “the most fun. I had one story that was 70, seven, zero pages long and it ended up being a page and a half.” He explains, “A lot of times you find you’re telling yourself something more that you’re really telling a reader”

 

Ehrhardt, too, likes editing. When she has a great line and fears she loves it too much, she “kills the darlings.” She does a head count and checks her themes and says for her “the fun part is getting the story down and then doing the crafting of the story.” She continues, “And making sure that you’re mining what you put in there that may be very subtle and underneath the surface.”

 

Hart writes in the morning and edits in the afternoon. “Normally, I will make sure each page is perfect before I move on to the next.” Editing as he works allows him to “set down the last page, step back and know that it’s the best I can make it.” He also adds that “fiction should be fun. At the end of the day if you’re not having fun doing it, it’s not worth it. It’s too hard.”

 

Ehrhardt concludes, “It’s just tremendous to have a book that has your name on it that people can actually buy.”