Cafe Kitsune Paris, with book from Librarie Galignani
When I go through a dry spell in my writing, I find it helps to think in fives. Instead of beginning the day with a scene from my novel-in-progress, I begin with a quick exercise: write about five of something. Five books I love, five cities I’ve lived in, five dates, five meals…anything.
In her excellent and esoteric blog Writer’s Notebook, NorCal native and Paris expat Summer Brennan explains the origins of the Five Things post.
“There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader,” Brennan writes.
With that inspiration, I’m sharing my own five things: Five Things I Love and Five I Can Do Without. (I considered calling this post “5 Things I Love and Five I Loathe.” That would have been a catchier title, but a dishonest one. There’s nothing in this list of fives I actually hate. I began with the idea of very strong preferences. Here goes: Five Things I Love, and their less lovable counterparts.
Coffee not Tea
I have a secret bias. If someone reveals that they drink tea instead of coffee, I automatically mistrust them. I don’t think they’re morally corrupt, necessarily, but I question their common sense. Fair or no, I associate tea with china cups and doilies. Ruffled lampshades. Dusty sofas in floral patterns. I secretly suspect that the majority of tea-drinkers can name the lesser royals and perhaps even recall their more questionable moments in haberdashery. (I do have dear friends who drink tea and exhibit none of these characteristics, and I fully admit my bias is not based in fact). By contrast, in my mind, a coffee drinker’s lamps give good light. Their linens are unfussy. They like to get stuff done.
Give me coffee (I wrote a whole book about it)—the stronger the better. Black, not doctored. Give me energy and focus, the noise of the coffee grinder, the oil of the beans, the straight-to-the-brain olfactory joy when you pour the ground beans into the filter basket. Give me the heat, the first bitter taste, the burn in the throat, the electric charge. Give me a really good drip machine.
Best coffeemaker ever: Technivorm MoccamasterDeux Magots coffee in Paris
I should mention my husband drinks neither tea nor coffee. He is strictly a hot chocolate man. Once, when he edited one of my novels, he replaced every mention of the male protagonist drinking coffee with the male protagonist drinking hot chocolate. Despite reservations, I let it stand. Several layperson reviewers objected. “No grown man drinks that much hot chocolate,”they said. For some readers, the prevalence of hot chocolate in the novel created a problem of verisimilitude, a corruption of the fictional dream.
I will quote one of the reviewers, who calls herself muppetbaby99 and who writes a great blog called Doubleplusgood where she does wildly entertaining “live readings” of novels. She posted about The Marriage Pact for several days in July of 2017, right after the book came out. On the matter of hot chocolate, she had this to say:
I think Michelle Richmond must own stock in a bunch of different ‘hot chocolate beverage flavouring chemical’ companies due to sheer number of times she mentions/describes HOT CHOCOLATE in this story. She must be getting a kick-back from Nestle
If I were the type of writer to correct readers on matters of the possible, I would have responded, “But there are men who drink that much hot chocolate. I am married to one of them!” Of course I am not that type of writer. Readers are, after all, entitled to their opinions. May they all be so lucky as fall in love with a man who is man enough to drink hot chocolate instead of coffee or tea.
P.S. I don’t own stock in Nestle BUT we do have an entire cabinet full of Benco, the French equivalent of Nesquik, which my husband buys by the case whenever he goes back to Paris.
Here are a few of my favorite books about French language, culture, and history. I started reading books about France before I moved to Paris in 2018. There are loads of books about Paris, many of them memoirs about restoring a country house or eating one’s way through France or finding love in Paris, not to mention the huge genre of World War 2 books set in France. These aren’t those kinds of books.
These 5 books to read before you visit France will help you understand the culture, codes of behavior, and French ways of thinking. They’ll help you be a better and more respectful tourist or expat, and they’ll help you to understand why that infamous French rudeness is really just a stereotype based on the bad behavior of visitors, not the French themselves!
We’ll get to the reviews in a minute. But first, here are my recommendations for books to read before you visit France, based on your mood or what you hope to accomplish:
If you’re in the mood for an informative but lighthearted look at making a home in Paris, start with L’appart, by David Lebovitz.
A practical primer on what to say and when to say it, The Bonjour Effect should be required reading for American expats in France. You can’t play the game of life in France if you don’t know the code. Read this book with a highlighter in hand, and commit its “rules” to memory. The Bonjour Effect goes far beyond casual French conversation, delving into the driving forces behind French language, culture, and behaviors. You’ll learn why language purism is increasingly regarded as right wing, and why the French government so vehemently defends the separation between church and state. Informative, entertaining, and indispensable.
A comprehensive history of France featuring a fascinating cast of characters, all written in the “definite assurance of style” (Library Journal) for which prolific historian John Julius Norwich is known. Learn something! “The major achievement of this book is the very fact that Norwich takes each of the four rulers to be a piece of the same story . . . written with often humming literary verve.” ?New York Times Book Review
As charming as it is informative, L’appartoffers a chef’s eye view of the beauty and bureaucratic madness that is France.
After moving from San Francisco to Paris, Lebovitz spent a decade living in a tiny top-floor flat with a magnificent view of the City of Light. When he finally decided to buy his own place, he had no idea what he was in for. In this fresh, funny memoir, sprinkled with insider knowledge about Paris life (sales only happen twice a year, for example, and baguettes always come wrapped in tiny paper “because excess is ground upon in France”), Lebovitz chronicles his attempt to buy and remodel a Paris apartment amidst miles of red tape and misunderstandings. Each chapter ends with a recipe, which, for the culinarily untalented among us, may prove as daunting as dealing with the Parisian real estate agents and electricians. Even if you can’t imagine pulling off a pain perdu caramelise, you’ll be happy to learn that pain perdu got its name because it “takes lost (perdu) bread and turns it around, making it something marvelous.”
Leibovitz’s love of his adopted city, as well as his passion for the bounty of the Parisian marche, comes through loud and clear. An utter delight.
A light-hearted look at part-time expat life in a French village. While the narrator’s voice may at times remind you of a creepy uncle, you can learn a few things about how to get long with the locals.
Don’t let the title and the silly cover deter you. La Seduction is a highly informative examination of French culture from the perspective of the former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. In this thoroughly researched book, Sciolino dives deep into French history to explain how and why seduction is as much an intellectual pursuit as a carnal one. From food to fragrance to politics, Sciolino argues, seduction is deeply ingrained in the French way of looking at the world. Although the narrative at times feels forced to meet the theme, there is much to learn from Sciolino’s interviews with politicians, executives, farmers, perfumiers, fashion icons, and chefs.
A hilarious look at trying to navigate life in France, literally and figuratively. Worth buying the book just for the story of the roundabout, the car accident, and the strangely accommodating car rental agency.
How the French Saved America is of particular interest to me, as I grew up in the coastal Alabama city of Mobile, which has a longstanding love affair with the Marquis de la Lafayette and which was founded in 1702 by two French-Canadian brothers, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, and which served as the capital of the French Louisiana territory until 1720.
For further reading:
This is part of my 5 Things series. Read more Five Things posts.
Read my post about walking in Paris in the first year of the pandemic, after the end of lockdown.
Develop these 5 Writing Habits for a More Productive Writing Life
Writing advice columns will often tell you to write every day, write a certain number of words a day, keep a journal, or find a writing group. While all of those practices are good, they may not work for you. During my 15 years as a professional writer (I count my years as a “professional” from the date of my first book publication), I’ve noticed a few writing habits that help me be productive and keep my writing practice fresh and lively. After all, when writing is your job, it can begin to feel like a job. That said, it feels like a job I’m very fortunate to have. Just like with any other job, though, I have good days and bad days, days when I can’t wait to get to work and days when I’d rather be hiking or sunning or running off to the movies.
When I published my first novel eleven years ago, I thought I’d finish another one within a couple of years. That’s because I thought that, having written one novel, the next one would be easier. Which brings me to:
Writing Truth # 2: Writing a novel never gets easier.
My fourth was just as difficult, if not more so, than my first. My fifth, the one I’ve recently turned in, was just as difficult to write as the rest of them. Through long experience I’ve finally accepted the fact that writing a novel never gets easier.
As I mentioned in How to Write a Novel, there’s no magic formula for novel writing. Each novel demands its own structure, its own pace, its own way of looking at the world.
Each time I complete a novel (and by complete, I mean very specifically the moment that I receive word from my publisher that the novel in its current state is ready for publication), I tell myself that I don’t know how I’ll have the patience to do it again. But patience is beside the point. Because by then, invariably, I’ve already started another novel, a novel I cannot bear to abandon, a novel that promises to be everything the last novel wasn’t, a novel that surely, certainly, will not be as difficult to write as every one that came before it.
I know, I know, the definition of insanity and all that. Call me Homer Simpson.
Where is the hope, then, for novelists, if this thing we do never gets easier? I take comfort from the ice skaters. Yes, the ice skaters. And, if I may be so bold, the aerospace engineers. It doesn’t get easier because it shouldn’t. Who wants to go back to the salcal when you can do a triple lutz? Who wants to merely go into orbit when you can go to Mars?
This metaphor implies, of course, that each novel is more complex than the last. That isn’t necessarily true. But with each new novel, your skill set is larger—or should be. That’s because you should have learned something from the process of writing the last one. Your first novel will probably teach you a lot about timing. Hopefully, it will teach you about clarity. But what it will not teach you is what shape the next novel should take. Because the shape of the story changes.
If it never gets easier, why do we do it—again and again and again? Most of us do it because we love it, and because, though we live by imagination, our imagination fails us on one particular point: we simply cannot imagine a life without writing. While such a life might very well be worth living, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
I take inspiration from one of my favorite books, a novella by Lars Gustafsson, The Death of a Beekeeper.
“Kind readers,” Gustafsson begins. “Strange readers. We begin again.”
And so, strange beings that we are, we begin again. The next novel, the next story, the next essay. And while it never gets easier, for this writer at least, it never gets boring. Each time you begin a new novel, you inhabit a new world. Each time you finish—finding, as most of us do, that the book you have written falls far short of the idea of the book you had intended to write—there is the hope of the next one. Today, the salcal. Tomorrow, the triple lutz. Carry on.
