I wrote a book review on The Ringer by Jenny Shank and she was kind enough to do an interview with me.
What was your inspiration for writing The Ringer?
I enjoy novels that give the reader an inside look at a particular subculture—for example, you learn a lot about the atmosphere of an advertising agency in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End or you learn about John Henry memorabilia enthusiasts in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days. The intense world of competitive youth baseball is a subculture I knew well because I grew up playing softball and my older brother was a very good baseball player.
In 1999, when I was just beginning to think about writing a baseball novel, the Denver Police raided a house in north Denver on a no-knock drug warrant, and shot and killed Ismael Mena, the Mexican immigrant they encountered inside. Later it came out that their informant had given them the wrong address of the house, and they’d killed someone whose house they had no business entering. I was shocked and moved by this incident, and I watched it all unfold. In the aftermath, there was a lot of racial tension Denver between whites and Latinos. The part of this story that interested me most as a novelist was the fact that the cop who killed the wrong man was not responsible for the mistake on the warrant—he was doing his job, carrying out orders. I imagined the guilt he felt must be incredible.
I was also interested in writing about Denver, because there aren’t many novels set in my hometown. So I combined these ideas of writing about baseball and Denver with this growing feeling that I had to in some way address the shooting of Ismael Mena by the Denver police, because it seemed to me to be an important, elemental story, one that could tell us a lot about Denver if we’d listen to it.
Did you develop the story as you went or did you have it all figured out before you started?
I started to keep a folder with press clippings on the Ismael Mena shooting. I did a lot of research on police, studying what it’s like to be involved a shooting. I spoke to cops and families of cops that I happened to know or meet. My cousin is married to a police officer in Omaha, and he told me in smaller cities, patrol officers often train for SWAT work, and then are on call when SWAT situations arise. (Smaller cities can’t afford to have SWAT officers sitting around, because there isn’t a need for them every day.) So I decided to have this be the case for Ed.
Somewhere in the middle of this research, I started writing a draft, working forward from the scenes I could envision easily. When I realized I was beyond my depth, I’d do more research. I made an informal outline of scenes I thought should be in it, and I gradually refined it. It took years of rewriting drafts and getting stuck and getting unstuck to produce the final version. I rewrote the first fifty pages more than anything—it took me years to figure out the right tone and perspective.
How long did it take you to write it?
It took about eight years. The Ringer is actually my third novel—I wrote part of one novel, got stuck and stopped, so I said next time I would finish a novel all the way through. So I wrote a second novel, worked on it for four years, finished a draft of it, but then I was tired of it. So I decided for my third novel I would write it all the way through and revise it until it was good—that’s what I did. It took eight years. I worked on it for four years before I had my kids, which gave me a solid draft, and then after I had kids I had only enough time to revise it—not to start another big project!
What kept you going?
I guess I had this small confidence, despite the years of rejection and failure, that this story was important to tell, and that it would be interesting to someone besides me. It was like this small voice inside that told me to keep going.
Also, I live for art and literature. If there was a world without stories, I wouldn’t want to live in it. I am a happier, more fulfilled person when I’m working on a creative project, and this has been true of me for as long as I can remember. So even if nothing worked out with this book, I think I’d still be trying. But it’s a great affirmation to have a book published—it puts the wind in my sails to try writing something else!
Having regular critique group meetings with my writing buddies also helped keep me going, too. Now I am hoping to keep them going until they get their publication breaks.
How did you find a publisher?
I finished a big revision of the book just before my daughter was born in June 2006, and a few months later I started sending queries to agents. I sent queries to a dozen or so agents at a time, not too many, because I was holding myself open to the idea that the book maybe wasn’t ready yet and that I’d have to revise it some more.
You have to go into writing a novel with a mixture of humility and confidence—you have to be humble enough to keep revising, yet confident enough in the belief that it’s worth your time. From that first batch of submissions, several agents requested to read the book, and based on their feedback, even though it was limited, I decided to do another draft. I finished another draft just before my son was born in November 2008. I find having a baby to be a nice, firm deadline to work with.
A few months after Theo was born, I sent out some queries, and I found my agent when my son was three months old. I sent out queries to 60 agents total over those two years. I found my agent through an interview on a website called the Guide to Literary Agents—it’s run by Chuck Sambuchino. At first I’d tried doing what everyone recommends, which is contact the agents of authors whose books you admire, but often times those agents aren’t taking new clients. Or at least that’s a helpful thing to tell yourself when they reject you. But I think it helps to seek out sources of new agents who are still looking for clients.
My agent, Gary Heidt, with Signature Literary, didn’t ask me to make any changes to my book, except for the title. He was enthusiastic about it, and so I went with him. He started sending it around in March of 2009 and The Permanent Press agreed to publish it. They asked me to rewrite the ending of the book—not a massive change, but it was good advice, and I think it made the ending much stronger and truer to the characters. I signed the contract with them in August of 2009, six months after my agent started looking for a publisher and about seven years after I started writing it, and it was published in the spring of 2011.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Find some writing buddies. If you don’t have a group of writing buddies that you can form a critique group with, take a class—even if you don’t want to go to grad school for writing, there are a lot of community writing groups that offer classes, which will give you a sense of camaraderie, inspiration, and deadlines to meet. I am teaching a novel writing class for the Boulder Writers Workshop, and in Denver, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop offers a wide variety of classes.
The last thought I have is that it looks like it’s never going to happen right up until the day it actually does. When I think about my writing buddies, and compare who has published a book and who hasn’t so far, it isn’t a question of talent—some of my most talented writing buddies just haven’t had that break yet. Talent is involved a little, and luck is involved, but what’s mostly involved is persistence. It seems to me that the ones that made it through to publication were just very dogged, very determined, honest with themselves about when the manuscript needed to go through another draft, and willing to work through the nausea that you have toward a project when you’ve been working on it for too many years. Instead of vomiting, do one more draft, and it might be the one.
That’s great advice, Jenny that applies to any creative project!
Thanks so much for sharing your gift and your process of writing!
