Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.A decade ago, a playwright friend asked Rainbow Rowell: “What do you write for you?”
At the time, she was a columnist for The World-Herald's Midlands section. As she thought about the question, she realized the answer.
“Nothing.”
So, informally, she started writing a novel — jotting down thoughts, doing character studies, creating outlines. She knew she wanted to write something funny. People who know Rowell — and people who feel they know her from reading her columns — know she's a funny woman.
She loves to crack jokes and write humor. She likes to laugh. She likes to make others laugh.
Now she's a published author. Her first novel, “Attachments,” comes out Thursday.
It's a romantic comedy set in a familiar place: a newspaper.
Newsrooms are quirky — the wildly different personalities of writers and editors; the sometimes odd, sometimes hilarious rules; the friendships and resentments; the deadlines; the elation of jobs well done; the frustrations.
Rowell soaked it all up — especially the frustrations of writers who sometimes chafed under editors.
There were times, she said, when editors didn't share her sense of humor.
“Editors cut things I thought were funny.” Rowell said on a recent morning in the casual coziness of a midtown coffee shop.
Writing for herself took the edge off that, and honed her humor.
The book is set in 1999, when the Internet and e-mail first came to many workplaces, including newsrooms. With the technology came rules. No e-mail for personal use topped many lists for fear somebody might gain access to a company through employee e-mails.
When e-mail in the workplace was new,, Rowell was exchanging intense personal e-mails with a newsroom friend, because the friend was going through a hard time.
“My closest friend in the newsroom had a miscarriage,” she said. “We disregarded the rules. She was going through a lot. I wanted to help her. I always tried to cheer her up.”
If employers have rules, they probably have someone watching to see that they aren't broken, kind of a “Big Brother” type who issues warnings to scofflaws. Rowell started wondering who was reading her e-mails. That grew into the novel.
All this started about 2002, Rowell said. At first, she didn't think seriously about publication.
“I just wrote. I didn't think about the endgame. After I got a laptop, I got more serious. I started working on characters, giving them stories.”
She said she had been writing the manuscript off and on — taking months and even years off at a time — when her younger sister asked to read it.
Rowell gave it to her, reluctantly. Her sister loved it. She thought Rowell should finish it and pursue a book deal.
After Rowell had her first son six years ago, she did just that. She worked on the novel through her maternity leave. Then she used Sundays and vacation time to write.
“For years, I missed my husband's family Christmas,” she said, laughing.
Rowell left The World-Herald in 2006 to pursue a job in advertising.
“I hadn't done anything else” except work for newspapers, she said. “I started to feel that maybe I couldn't do anything else. I felt like I was drifting.”
The change proved to be a good thing. It turned out she excelled at advertising. “It was rejuvenating.”
Along the way, she continued to write the novel, and it was evolving.
The women exchanging e-mails, a newspaper movie critic and a copy editor, took on supporting roles. The IT e-mail monitor, Lincoln, became the main character. Narrative about him — his life, and how he was reading their conversations and following their lives from the shadows — connected the story.
“I started caring about him, I wanted him to be happy,” Rowell said. “I didn't want to make him a creep.”
In fact, “I fell in love with Lincoln the more I wrote about him.”
Finally, when she thought her book was finished in 2007, she had to think about getting it published. She had no idea how to do that. She didn't belong to writers groups or online chat groups that might offer tips.
She went to Barnes & Noble and pulled books by writers she liked or writers whose work seemed to fit her style. She noticed that two writers she liked — Haven Kimmel and Augusten Burroughs — had the same agent.
“I wasn't thinking, ‘I'm awesome like they are.' I was more thinking, ‘I like them. Maybe an agent who likes them will like me.' ”
She wrote their agent a long letter and was thrilled when he asked to see the whole book. (“A big ‘no' for starting writers,” Rowell says now. Long is bad.)
He came back with a pretty radical suggestion: Cut it in half. Since she was used to working with editors, she was OK with that. She did that, resubmitted her work, and then heard nothing back.
She sent letters to other agents and received plenty of rejections. She finally found an agent, only to get dumped. Rowell again e-mailed the first agent (“You may not remember me, but I'm the one who ...”) and he e-mailed her back. He'd never received the revisions.
“We became friends through e-mails,” she said. “He called the agent who dumped me ‘my starter agent.' ”
And he signed her in 2009.
When he was happy with Rowell's revisions, there was the customary auction and her book sold right away to Dutton.
“But it took another two years to publication,” she said.
Nine years from beginning to end.
“I finished that book as a totally different person,” she said, and laughed again. She's written a second book, and it took three months, she said.
People probably will wonder if characters in “Attachments” were based on real people. Although she drew some characteristics from people she knew, “basically all the characters are based on myself or my experiences,” she said.
“Attachments” also has sold to several foreign countries — Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Taiwan, Germany and the United Kingdom. After a round of book-signings in the Midlands, she will go to London next month “to meet with my editors and do some publicity for the book in the UK. I'm crazy-madly-extremely excited about that.”
Rowell returned to The World-Herald last year as a columnist for the Living section.
“It's a good fit,” she said. “I'd always wanted to work in Living.”
Although Omaha isn't mentioned specifically in “Attachments,” there's no doubt where it's set, with its references to specific events and areas of town, such as the demolition of the Indian Hills Theater, the Dundee neighborhood.
“I made a special effort to put the book in Omaha,” she said.
She is, after all, an Omaha girl, born and raised.
“All my books will be set here.”
Contact the writer:
402-444-1067, carol.bicak@owh.com
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