Westport best-selling author Jane Green told the Westport Rotary Club today while social media is presenting time-consuming challenges for writers, it also produces rewards.
Westport best-selling author Jane Green addresses the Westport Rotary Club today. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
“Social media is a blessing and a curse for me,” she said. “It’s such a curse and such a drain and so time-consuming, but I can see how my writing is touching people.”
Green, an English-born journalist now a naturalized American citizen living in Westport’s Compo Beach area with her husband and six children, said while more and more people are using smartphones and other devices, there still is a inner desire unmet by electronics.
“We all hide behind phones and computers, but long for a human connection,” she said.
Green said she loves Westport and often uses the town and its citizens in plotting her novels. She said a cigarette-smoking female bicyclist she and her husband saw frequently on late night walks at Compo turned into a character in one of her books.
Repeated encounters with Westport women who appeared to suddenly lose weight and look years younger led her to discover a number of them were having affairs, she said. Maybe it was the trainer or the landscaper. And they, too, became characters in her novel.
Bill Harmer, the new executive director of the Westport Library, was among those in the audience today to hear author Jane Green at the Westport Rotary Club meeting. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
Green said she was happily married, though flattered by what she perceived to be recent flirtatious emails from a man half her age she met at a New York conference.
“A happy marriage is a disaster to write about,” she said.
As for the art of writing, Green said she traces her skills to her early job at the Daily Express in London writing features, especially ones requiring 1,500 words produced on deadline.
“I became a writer because I was a reader,” she said.
Green, whose 17 novels add up to 10 million books in print worldwide, said she has learned to discipline herself, setting a writing goal of a certain number of words each time she sits down at the computer.
“It’s all about discipline,” she said. “I do it by word count. Others do it by page count and other ways.”
She added: “The only way to unlock words is to just start writing.”
Green’s newest work is a not a novel but a self-published cookbook, financed with $70,000 raised from more than 1,000 backers at the crowdsourcing website, http://www.kickstarter.com. (See WestportNow June 15, 2015)
The book, due out in October, has now raised interest among traditional publishers, she said, adding a real-life dimension to her usual product born from her imagination.
“I’ve included some recipes in some of my novels,” she said. “But this is a first for me.”
