The Hidden Life of Ellen Baker
There are a lot of parts of being a beginner author that can intimidate us off of being published, or of writing our book altogether.
But your story deserves to be out in the world, and there are plenty of things we can learn to make the process less terrifying.
Acclaimed author Ellen Baker is here today to share some of her own experiences, both as a writer and as an editor, to help make the process from draft to finished book a little easier for you.
The Secret Life of Ellen Baker
Listen to learn:
- Common issues in the manuscripts of beginning writers
- The benefit of having a framework for your writing
- How to find the right agent for you
- How to keep writing when you’ve got a book coming out
Here’s a sneak peek:
[07:13] I read a lot, but then I ended up just kind of making up what I thought made sense based on what I read, because I didn't ever find a story of a child learning to be a bareback rider. So that's just made up.
[09:45] Like, maybe I had worked too hard on that other one and too often and read on it so many times.
[11:41] I think I was thinking it would be a better way to be than what I was naturally. And what I learned is, you have to go with what you naturally are.
[14:39] So I started just from scratch. I was like, “I want to find somebody who doesn't look at what I've done before, but just looks at a book I've written and loves it.”
[15:24] I got 74 rejections for Cecily Larson and the 75th one, I have found the best agent for me. I'm so thrilled. But it took a lot of persistence, a lot of research, a lot of time.
[21:04]And if you do that throughout, it's sort of sanding the work every day, just a little more, a little more, until it's really polished.
[23:39]I find that a lot of times the manuscripts I see are a little bit, for lack of a better word, like, loosey goosey. They don't have that framework in place.
[29:40 If you want to keep going and you want to keep doing it, and it matters you, then you just weave that in and you realize that the work is what it is.
Links from today’s episode:
Start Your Novel with Confidence
The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson
The Resilient Writers Radio Show: The Secret Life of Ellen Baker -- Full Episode Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Hey there, writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm excited to have with me today the acclaimed novelist, Ellen Baker. Ellen is the author of a series of books, well, they're not a series, they're standalones, but the first one was Keeping The House, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. She's also the author of, I Gave my Heart to Know This, and her latest book is The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, which is available for pre-order now, but actually comes out in February, 2024.
It's delicious. It's one of those curl up on the couch or read it through all in one day kind of books. So, I definitely encourage you to grab that. And she also has a course for writers called Start Your Novels, so we're going to get into all of it. Welcome, Ellen.
Ellen Baker:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Rhonda:
I'm delighted to have you here. I would love to talk to you first about The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, just because I enjoyed that book so much. I got an advanced reader copy from you. I'd love to ask you about the inspiration for that.
Where did that start? I know that you kind of do a lot, I think, with the history of women, but that one has turned so much on a secret at the heart of her life. I just love to hear the inspiration for it.
Ellen:
Yeah, great question. The book is about a family that discovers this long lost secret through a DNA test. And where I really began, it really did with this idea of secrets. I've always lived in small towns and I thought it would be really interesting to consider, “could you keep a secret living in a small town?” It's actually really hard to do, but what would happen if you did keep a secret the way Cecily does for 70 years, and then what would happen when it came out?
I really did have to then think about what that secret could be, what would still matter after 70 years, and then what would be the consequences for her and all her family. So yes, it totally started with this idea of keeping secrets and what the consequences of that are.
Rhonda:
I love that. And yeah, this one, it's nice and juicy and I love the idea of thinking in advance about, “what would the implications of that be?” And then I love the start of this story. The book goes back and forth in time, which I think is a really interesting structure because there's something about it that just amps up the tension and really keeps you reading. It's a total page turner.
So, when did the structure come to you? Did it come first? Did you know at the start that you were going to move back and forth in time, or did that come later, and how did you make the decision about how to structure it?
Ellen:
Yes, all of that. It started in my mind as thinking about the implications of stuff that happens in the past on the present and how those things are so connected. The previous two novels that I've published also go back and forth in time, and not necessarily only a dual timeline, but lots of different moments in time. The reason why this happens for me when I'm writing, I think, is because I tend to think of stories not necessarily as linear objects, but as kind of mosaics where each piece is put together and if you move the pieces around, it kind of changes the whole of how it's perceived.
I love to play with that kind of thing, but the way that I began to write this novel was I actually wrote out a detailed timeline of the events of the novels in a linear fashion, like, “in 1924 Cecily is four years old, and she gets dropped off at the orphanage by her mother.”
And I went through all the way to 2015 with all the characters and said, “on this date in time, this is what's happening to them.” But then the way I actually wrote the novel was to have that timeline, and then I just kind of did it by feel, where I obviously started with the prologue in 1924. And then I knew I immediately wanted to go to 2015 when Cecily's 94 years old, because the idea is the bridge of this whole person's life, the arc of this whole person's life. You get the beginning and the end right at the beginning of the novel, and then you get the other pieces woven in as I decided, piece by piece by piece, what comes next.
Rhonda:
So early in her life, Cecily ends up in the circus—I enjoyed that so much, and I just wonder, what kind of research did you do for that? And how fun was it? I was like, “she must've gone to a lot of circuses.” Did you do that? Did you actually go out and, I don't know, it's an older circus, maybe they're not the same anymore, but did you delve into circus life at all for this?
Ellen:
Well, I delved into it a lot through research. I didn't actually go to any circuses. There aren't very many, at least in the US, where you can still go see an old fashioned circus, maybe none. But I did read a lot and what I really needed to figure out, particularly number one for Cecily, who becomes a bareback rider. She starts when she's seven, training for this job, and she's being poised by the owner of the circus to be the only child bareback rider in the country.
I needed to figure out how she would learn how to be a bareback rider and what problems they might encounter and how they would go about it and all of that. I read a lot, but then I ended up just kind of making up what I thought made sense based on what I read, because I didn't ever find a story of a child learning to be a bareback rider. So that's just made up.
Rhonda:
Yeah, I was thinking, “wait, there are books about that?” That's kind of amazing. “How to be a child…” No, that doesn’t—
Ellen Baker:
But what I did get very granular in the detail about was the logistics of circus travel and the logistics of putting up a circus every morning and tearing down a circus every night, getting it on the train and getting it to the next town. And that's all very much based on real information that I found. I found this wonderful 30 or 40 page article in a journal, and transportation logistics where they were using the old circus as a model for how to move a lot of people and a lot of things very quickly and very efficiently, because huge circuses like the Ringling Brothers, they had this down to a science and they would move thousands of people overnight to the next town.
So, I studied up on how to do all that, and then I made lots of lists of who my people in the circus were, where they lived in terms of within the landscape of the circus itself, in terms of, you know, certain people lived in certain cars on the train, and so forth. I really did do a ton of research for all of that, and it was very interesting, but not so fun.
Rhonda:
Wow. It sounds fascinating. Yeah, it's amazing what you can find when you go down the rabbit holes, right?
Ellen:
Yes, exactly.
Rhonda:
So you had mentioned to me that there was a 13 year hiatus between this book and your last book. What happened there?
Ellen:
Well, I was writing the whole time. I started writing a different novel back in 2013, which I had in mind as my third novel. And I wrote it, submitted it. I was rejected by a few editors in New York, and I decided to rewrite it, and I thought, “well, I'll get it right the next time.” So that happened eight times and then finally—
Rhonda:
Eight times, wow. Wow, okay, that's a lot.
Ellen Baker:
We were about eight years, and then in 2021, January, it was the new year, I thought, “well, I'm going to start fresh with something that comes more naturally,” because I still love that other book, but it wasn’t finding a home. Like, maybe I had worked too hard on that other one and too often and read on it so many times.
I started over with this book, Cecily, and wrote my draft in about eight months and then rewrote it, had some people read it, revised it, started looking for an agent for it. Within about two years, I had my agent for this book, and she got a book deal for it within a few months of that.
I know that I learned so much from that process of writing and rewriting and writing and rewriting. I also learned a ton by editing other people's books during this period of time and learning as an editor-slash-reader, what am I looking for when I delve into a novel? What am I looking for on the first page? What am I looking for within the first 10 pages? What do I want to see happen within the first third of the book?
So all of that together, the writing, rewriting and the editing, made it possible for me to sort of see this book, Cecily Larson, in its entirety in my mind before I sat down and started to write the scenes, I believe.
Rhonda:
Wow. So what was your process like for this book? Are you an outline everything down to the beats an advanced person? Are you a pantser? Are you somewhere in the middle? I'd love to hear that.
Ellen:
Yeah, I'm really in the middle and more toward the pantser side. I think actually one of the problems with that third book I was telling you about, the one I rewrote eight times, is I did spend about a year before I even started writing it researching everything and outlining every scene. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and then I got to writing the scenes and I was like, “well, I already know what happens.” It was kind of not my style.
I think I was thinking it would be a better way to be than what I was naturally. And what I learned is, you have to go with what you naturally are. So for Cecily, I did create that timeline, as I said, and knew when events would happen, but I didn't make an outline as far as when the scenes would actually happen in the novel.
I just went pantser style with that. I'm like, “well, what feels right next after I just did this, how am I going to fit this next part in here?” So that kept the process really interesting and fun for me. And then the other part of my process was to be pretty strict about sitting down every day and writing the next thing. So the next three to four pages, I would try to get done every day.
So, go back and start from the beginning, read through, edit whatever needs editing, and then keep going, where do I want this story to go next? Kind of thinking as a reader in a sense, what do I want to hear about next? Especially with the multiple storylines, multiple timelines. That was my process, and then it just kind of unfolded that way, which was quite magical in the sense that I really didn't end up changing the order of the scenes at all in the editing process. They seem to come out in the right order. I can't explain it, but they did.
Rhonda:
That's great when that happens. So, do you think that this third book, which is now in a drawer, do you think it will ever see the light of day? Do you think it'll ever be published? Would you publish it yourself, like indie, or is it just going to be there?
Ellen:
I hope someday that I'll be able to publish it, and I'm going to not think that it's going to be my next book, but because I have another idea for a new book that I want to write more in the style of the Cecily Larson book. So hopefully someday, though. We'll see.
Rhonda:
Can you talk a little bit about your process of finding an agent? I know that's something a lot of writers really wonder about, how you went about that. Did you have an agent already for the previous books? And so, did you end up shifting? What's been your experience with the process of finding an agent?
Ellen:
Sure. I found my first agent back in 2006 just through sending query letters. In those old days it was actually typing a letter and printing it out, typing it on the computer, printing it, mailing it, actually sending manuscript pages through the mail. That was a slower process than it is these days.
I ended up going to a different agent through a referral in 2011, and then because, ultimately, we couldn't make progress with that novel I worked on for so long, it just felt like time to make a shift. And we agreed on that. It was kind of like, “okay, we're not helping each other here.” So I started just from scratch. I was like, “I want to find somebody who doesn't look at what I've done before, but just looks at a book I've written and loves it.” And that was ultimately what I found.
I went through the whole thing of sending, researching people, using query tracker, trying to tailor each query letter to each agent individually, writing about, “I saw that you represented this book, I loved this book that you represented.” Always telling the truth. Never say that you've read something you haven't or love something you don't, but always try to find the right match and be authentic about it.
So, I went through that whole process. I got 74 rejections for Cecily Larson and the 75th one, I have found the best agent for me. I'm so thrilled. But it took a lot of persistence, a lot of research, a lot of time. It took several months to do that.
Rhonda:
Wow. Were you sending them out at the same time? Were you sending out 10 queries at a time?
Ellen:
I did as much as I could do at a time. Usually it would take me about a day. First you do all the research to think these people are probably a good match, and then you delve in deeper, maybe spend a day and actually polishing the query and get it sent out, because they all have different requirements, as you know. I'm sure you all know. It's not like you can just batch send them out. I would try for four or five a week. Didn't always hit that, but that was what I would try for.
Rhonda:
Okay. Wow. And 75 is your lucky number?
Ellen:
That's it, yeah.
Rhonda:
Amazing. How long did it take for your agent to then sell the book?
Ellen:
She wanted me to do a little bit of a rewrite, so I did that within about the first month, and then we were coming up on the holidays last year. So she said she would send it out first of the year, 2023, and she did, and then February 2nd was when she sold it.
Rhonda:
Wow. And it's coming out in February, 2024. That seems like a really short timeframe.
Ellen:
It's been pretty quick, yes.
Rhonda:
And are you happy with it? I love the cover. What's been your experience so far?
Ellen:
Yes, I've been really loving every step of the process. I couldn't be happier with my editors, my publicity, marketing people, the art that they've done. They did this beautiful galley, which you have, Rhonda, in your hands, and then they decided to change the cover. The cover that's going to be on the final edition is not—
Rhonda:
Oh, I like the cover on the arc.
Ellen:
I like the cover on the arc, too. It was kind of disappointing when they said they wanted to change it. Then we went through a whole process of getting a new cover, which I actually, in the end, love even more. It's completely different. And it's interesting how they go through that process, but—
Rhonda:
Why did they tell you they wanted to change it? Did they say why? I'm assuming it was marketing related?
Ellen:
Yes, it was marketing related, and it seemed like once it got out of the editorial area where everybody loved the cover and they got it in front of the sales and marketing people, they were having a different feeling about it. We like to listen to those people and go with what they feel will work best.
Rhonda:
Absolutely. Did you ever, when your agent came to you and said, “oh, I love it, but just a few little rewrites,” did your heart sink thinking about the previous rewriting of the other novel? How did you manage that in your mind?
Ellen:
No, not really, because it was really tiny. The thing she wanted me to change was just a story detail, and it involved work on about 15 or 20 pages out of the whole novel. It wasn't a big rewrite, and I thought, “well, I can easily do this.” And what I have found over the years of working with these editors—I had the great privilege of working with Kate Medina, who's a top editor at Random House, with my first book. These people are so smart, and they see things that you don't see because you are so close and you've been working on it for so long that you can't necessarily see it.
And you're obviously wedded to and attached to the ways that you've done things, but when you open your mind and say, “oh, okay, well, you must know something I don’t.” Obviously you don't discredit yourself, but also give these people credit for all the experience that they have and the things that they can see that you don't. I always look at making changes in that way.
And similarly, when it sold and my editor wanted me to make a change, I had to look at it that way too and say, “okay, well, I'll do that and let's see.” And then in each case, it made the book better, even though I felt resistant in the beginning. But I think it's always the case. It will make it better if you do the work.
Rhonda:
And equally, you will always feel resistant at first. They will give you the editorial notes and you're like, “what do you know?” But they know what they're doing.
So, what's your current process like now? Have you started the next book?
Ellen:
I've started making some notes and having some ideas, doing a little bit of research and reading, but I haven't gotten to a point of writing or outlining anything even in a vague sense.
Rhonda:
And when you dive into a project, how do you approach it? I think you said you reread what you've written the day before, or the whole thing, and then add three more pages.
Ellen:
I always do that because I want it to flow. I mean, of course if you have 200 pages written, you can't read them all in the morning, but you can read the previous 25 pages, or something, quickly through. As I try to experience it every day, a reader would experience it as much as possible.
I mean, you can't really and truly do that, but you can try and say, “well, where did I get hung up?” And it's big things, little things, word choice, maybe an extra line here and there. It's fixing things along the way. And if you do that throughout, it's sort of sanding the work every day, just a little more, a little more, until it's really polished.
Rhonda:
And what's your process for getting feedback? Do you get feedback before you send it to an agent, do you have a writer's group or another editor? I know you edit other people's work. What's your own process for getting that kind of feedback?
Ellen:
It has varied over the years. I used to have a writing partner who I would exchange all my work with, and she and I helped each other a great deal, and that was a great relationship. I actually did have her and another friend read, and they have different ways of looking at things, so I was looking for two different sets of eyes. I had that kind of feedback on Cecily on the first draft. This one though, I kind of just did on my own. I didn't get a lot of feedback, just those two readers.
Rhonda:
But even just having two people go at it makes such a difference.
What's your experience when it comes to working with other writers? What would you say are the big three issues that beginning writers have when they're first starting a project like a novel? When you see manuscripts, what are the top three things that tend to go awry?
Ellen:
Let me think about that for a second. I have had such a wonderful range of clients, and what I have found is that each and every book and each and every writer seems to present its own particular set of, I don't know what to call it. I don't want to say hangups. It's nothing negative. It's just like, where do you need to focus? But I think one of the things that I like to focus on as an editor, and for writers to think about and what I talk to my clients about is framework.
Understanding what the framework is for a story, even if that's as simple as realizing you're dealing with an arc, and that sounds simple, but if you can visually place your story on an arc, I feel like that helps to create the framework that you need to understand pacing, to understand how to build drama, to understand where to make a shift, where to make in terms of a scene or a point of view or whatever.
If you always keep that arc and the framework in mind, you're going to make better decisions. I find that a lot of times the manuscripts I see are a little bit, for lack of a better word, like, loosey goosey. They don't have that framework in place. So that's one thing I would say that I think would be really useful for beginning writers to keep in mind is that you're trying to create something that has a recognizable structure so the reader can read it while feeling like they know where they're at.
And not to be too strict about following those story structure guidelines or to get too caught up in that, but just to keep it in the back of your mind as you're going. That's one thing is the framework, that I would say is the number one thing I tend to seem to work with people on.
Rhonda:
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I think a lot of times, I think particularly for those of us who love to pants a good story, you get in and you're following your nose, and it's such an organic process that when you stand back from the draft, you're like, “I don't know if this hangs together.”
Is that why you started your, you've got a course that you offer for writers called Start Your Novel, I think? That's not the full name, is it?
Ellen:
Start Your Novel with Confidence.
Rhonda:
Start Your Novel with Confidence. Awesome. So, what do you cover in there and how did you come to put that together?
Ellen:
What I cover in there is how to, number one, overcome any mindset blocks that may be stopping you from starting your novel. We all know that it can be a scary kind of a prospect. And I also have a really straightforward and structured plan about eight key decisions that people need to make before they start their novel. That course guides you through making those decisions. It guides you through completing a general outline.
I talk about story structure quite a bit, and then it guides you through how to create an effective opening hook and guides you to write your first chapter. And then it also helps you create a plan for how to continue and pace yourself and set a deadline so that you can have a draft done by a particular date based on what you know is true about your working style and your schedule.
It's really designed to give you a catapult as you get started, and I believe when you have that framework, you have the schedule and things, it becomes more about the writing than about, “oh, I don't have time today,” or, “I can't figure this part out.” You already have that. You're good to go. Just sit down on your scheduled time and start writing. I'm really excited about the course and very much looking forward to sharing it with people.
Rhonda:
So if you're interested in that, you can go to ellenbakernovels.com, and she's got a button on her site that says “studio.” You just click on “studio” and there's a whole explanation of the course there for you. So, Ellen, what's next for you as the book launches in February? Are there a lot of expectations around what you do for marketing?
Ellen:
Well, there's certainly plenty to do, and it's all lots of fun. I'm going to be pretty busy, I guess I don't entirely know. I'm leaving my calendar open and every day I get an email saying, “here's a thing we'd like you to do,” and it's very exciting. So I'm just going to go with the flow, and I'm doing my own social media and doing a bunch of things like that.
Rhonda:
You’re on Instagram, right? Is it @ellenbaker?
Ellen:
It's @ellenbakercreative.
Rhonda:
@ellenbakercreative. I was seeing some stuff around Cecily starting to happen on your Instagram.
So, you're going to leave your calendar open and do everything you can when the book comes out, sort of basically from now ‘till, gosh, probably June anyway, by the time you get the first season done. How does that fit with writing and getting the next piece done? Do you find that you have to pause and give the season over completely to marketing, or are you still also going to be working on the next project, and how do you fit it together?
Ellen:
Well, I think that my plan, now—because I've been working on editing projects up until really last week or even this week, and I just finished my last one—my plan is that I love to get up early in the morning and write early in the morning before things wake up in the world.
I think what I'll do is get up and write for a couple hours every morning and then give over the business day to the other things, so that way I can do what I, well, I actually love the whole process, but there is a part of me that doesn't feel alive unless I'm actually creating and doing the writing itself. So that's how I'm going to manage it.
Rhonda:
That sounds like a great idea. I love the idea of getting to the creative work, making it your first priority in the day before the day takes you over.
So, Ellen, as you know, this is the Resilient Writers Radio Show, and I've been asking people this season, what does it mean to you when I say “resilient writer”? What comes to mind for you around resilience for writers?
Ellen:
Well, I think resilience has to be part of the equation when you're a writer, because you are going to encounter setbacks, you're going to encounter rejections. I won't review my own story, but I've certainly, prior to getting my first book published, experienced a bunch of rejection, thought that everything was great and I had made it, and then went through this whole decade of another set of rejections and setbacks.
I think resilience is part of the fabric of being a writer. If you want to keep going and you want to keep doing it, and it matters you, then you just weave that in and you realize that the work is what it is. A lot of us feel we're born to do it, and we don't want to not do it. So we keep going, and that I think is what resilience means to me.
Rhonda:
Thank you so much for that. Thanks for being here. Learn more about Ellen @ellenbakernovels.com, and definitely get your hands on Cecily, The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson. I kept calling it “The Secret Life” ‘cause it had the secret, but it's The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson. It's a delicious read and you can pre-order it now. Thank you so much for being here, Ellen, it was lovely to talk to you.
Ellen:
Thank you for having me.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
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