This interview was recorded in January 2011.

Blackstone Audio is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Erin Blakemore, author of The Heroine’s Bookshelf. Conducting the interview is Tavia Gilbert, the award-winning narrator of The Heroine’s Bookshelf and more than 30 other Blackstone audiobooks. A portion of the interview is excerpted below; to hear the full interview, please click on the link at the bottom of this post. 

Through February 17th, join Erin Blakemore in the celebration of “Heroine Love” at theheroinesbookshelf.com, and enter for a chance to win free audiobooks!

Tavia Gilbert: So, we were just talking about the kind of writing process and I know from our conversation over lunch that you were ill while you were writing most of the book and pushing through a lot of personal grief and loss in your own life while you were writing it. So, how did this writing come to you? What was the process of all of these connections between heroine, author—Erin, heroine? How did those all come about?

Erin Blakemore: That’s kind of the biggest question ever, but—

TG: Well just go ahead and answer that (laughs).

EB: So, I’ll answer it. Part of it, I don’t know, I always feel like writing is this multilayered experience where you know it’s like there’s this technical slog part of writing—which doesn’t mean it’s awful or anything but it just needs to happen—there needs to be a certain number of words that have been written and they need to fit into whatever box I’ve determined they need to fit into. But then there’s also that kind of deeper process, motivation, connection part. For me the genesis of all of this was in reading. Reading was always the first part. Sometimes it was the work itself, sometimes it was a biography of the writer I was looking to make a portrait of. And I’d start with the reading and just kind of give myself over to it for a while. But not too long because otherwise I would just have been reading, always, which is a huge temptation. And then just on a really technical level, I’d start looking at this cursor blinking and nothing being there and start to kind of freak out. And so I came to this—I don’t know if it’s a system even, it’s really so simple—process of writing an outline that was seven sentences or less. Just a list. So I’d say here’s what I know I need to cover in this chapter: I want to cover Charlotte Brontë’s trip to Brussels and I want to cover the fact that all her siblings died in a year and I want to cover Jane Eyre crawling over the moors and I’d want to cover whether or not Jane Eyre was stubborn or something like that. So whenever I felt stuck in the actual writing of the chapter I would go up—I was doing this all in Google docs—I would go up to the top of my Google Docs and I’d see “Oh, I haven’t talked about all of her siblings dying in the same year yet. All right, I’ll talk about that.” So it was like I gave myself this little rudimentary, pitiful roadmap, and that was enough to just get things out. I’m such an editor that the editing to me is the fun part and so, I don’t know, the actual writing part, I feel I just kind of forced myself to sit down, turn off the phone, turn off my worry about what’s happening at home and just kind of give myself over to all right, what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. I don’t know, I always compare it to that driving without headlights feeling or driving with headlights on the misty road where you can’t see any landmarks. It’s like I don’t really know even the map of where I’m going but I know where I am and what’s directly in front of me and what I just did. So, I have no idea if I answered your question.

TG: Yes. Absolutely. I think that’s really interesting because I am wondering if you set out to write The Heroine’s Bookshelf. I’m going to write about these authors, these heroines, or did it come more organically to you so that you became more aware of your structure as you went through the writing process?

EB: Well, when I got my book deal I sold it on proposal and so I did have an outline which was little capsules of each chapter. So I knew who I wanted to cover but that ended up not being the complete list that I chose for the book. So after I’d gone through that selection process I knew roughly the heroine, the book, and the author, but I didn’t really know the structure of the chapters. So my first draft was kind of just figuring out what was there, what was the world of information, what could possibly be covered. And after I reread all of the chapters I realized, oh, there’s this arc. I mean I know each chapter kind of can stand on its own and it was designed that way, but I also feel like there’s a swing and an arc of the book itself building on each heroic trait and each story until it reaches an end. And so, once I saw that, I could see that through line, and then I worked backwards to make sure that I was building in that direction and that each chapter felt at least similar enough to the other chapters that it could be a whole work, because I really didn’t want to write a book that was just a random assortment of seemingly disconnected essays. And so a lot of the structure revealed itself to me after I had done that kind of slog of you know, ”All right, Charlotte Brontë’s sisters all died and then she went to London and then this happened.” You know, once I knew the biographical structure that really helped point back to the book. I wouldn’t say that all the heroines and authors in my book are necessarily the same person or that the experiences parallel each other one hundred percent, but there was enough of that almost resonance or bouncing of story and theme that the more I got more into actually articulating things about that author and heroine myself, through my own voice, that was a good guide for the actual structure of the book itself. It was interesting, I would always come to a stopping point and it would be the same, roughly the same, number of words, which I thought was so fascinating. And I wasn’t sitting there saying, “OK, I’ve got to get up to thirty-two hundred words,” or whatever the word count was. It seems I got to a rhythm where I knew, OK, this is the amount of information that can be contained in this chapter. It was really fascinating, I don’t know, I feel like some of the subject matter, obviously, I mean hello, so much ink has been spilled over all of these subjects that I could have written much longer books about, but as it was it seemed I got into a bit of a groove.

TG: Yes, and I felt when I was narrating it, that there is an internal rhythm to it, and each of the women, heroines or their authors, could be a whole book-length manuscript of its own. But what I love about your book is that you get a great picture of these women and their lives but it leads back to you and what you took from each of those heroines, each of those authors. And it wasn’t a stretch. I never felt that you were reaching to try to mold this person. It was a wonderful relationship that the three of you had in each chapter, which allowed me to get into it. 

Note: This transcript has been slightly edited from its original recording for readability.

To listen to Tavia Gilbert’s complete interview with Erin Blakemore, please click on the audio file: Tavia Gilbert Interviews Erin Blakemore.

About the Author:

Erin Blakemore learned to drool over Darcy and cry over Little Women in suburban San Diego, California. These days her inner heroine loves roller derby, running her own business, and hiking in her adopted hometown of Boulder, Colorado.  

About the Narrator:

Tavia Gilbert is an Earphones Award winner, Audie^® Award nominee, and Parents’ Choice Award–winning producer. A classical-theater- and public-radio-trained actor and producer, she lives in Portland, Maine, where she works as a writer and stage and voice actor. She produces, directs, and narrates unique audiobooks, full-cast recordings, and documentaries.