ourtney Milan has been reading novels since before she can remember, and
finished writing her own first novel when she was ten years old. The novel was entitled "To Bring Back
the Buffalo" and it featured exactly one character. As you can imagine, this put a damper on
dialogue. Incidentally, the novel also contained no description. You can imagine that this
one was a resounding success. It's a spoiler, but here's the plot: The buffalo were all
gone! Somebody had to bring them back. But who could do such a thing?
f you're scratching your head wondering, here's a hint: There
was only one character.
ourtney started writing her second novel when she was eleven. This novel was
entitled "The Return of the Grimson." What is a Grimson? Gosh. It was some kind of a
giant bird. I'm not sure why the Grimson was returning, especially since the Grimson
had never been around in the first place. The writing of this novel endured for years, up until
Courtney turned thirteen and got a D in Geometry because she was writing a novel during
class rather than learning how to prove Pythagoreas's theorem. She never actually finished the novel,
and sadly, the Grimson never returned. Despite all that, you'd
think that this endeavor would have turned out better, because this novel had two
actual characters. Conversation was possible. Theoretically.
nfortunately, both characters were of a particularly taciturn disposition.
It was not to be.
ourtney decided she sucked at writing fiction and so she decided to
focus on Geometry instead. Also, partial differential equations, real analysis, and
algebraic topology. And when that didn't seem quite serious enough, she spent some
more time working on statistical physics and phase transitions and the
renormalization group. But with all that left-brain activity going on, Courtney
kept reading novels. Genre novels. Science fiction. Fantasy. Romance.
lso, she kept arguing with her boyfriends.
ou're wondering--how does the arguing with the boyfriends thing
play in? Ha! That's easy. The most effective way to argue with a boyfriend is to supply
both sides of the conversation. Also, provide him with the losing side. Men
love that.
ut what she was doing then? You got it--writing dialogue!
n any event, over the course of the years, Courtney mired herself
in more left-brained stuff than you could shake a stick at. She was doing left-brain
stuff from dawn until... well, dawn. And unfortunately, her besetting fault kicked
in: she got bored. And while she was trolling her favorite authors' websites, she
saw an advertisement for a fan romance-writing contest run by Avon.
o, one night, while she was hopped up on Vicodin, she wrote her
first piece of fiction in well over a decade. It was entitled the "Quality of Disguise," and
it featured both dialog and description. But after it was posted, she realized
it sucked. It was too much like all the other stories that had been submitted. And it featured
characters that she didn't really care about. Let us be frank: Courtney knows more about
supplying dialog for hapless men than she knows about beautiful women seducing chest-beating
alpha-males. So she imagined a woman who wasn't beautiful until you got to know her, and a
man who had lost a leg. Since the assignment called for a dance, the rest of the story wrote itself.
he story was The
Goddess of Small Things, and it came in fourth place out of more than five hundred entries.
Julia Quinn read it and said, "The writing is gorgeous, the wit subtle and sophisticated."
nd Courtney realized she really did, deep down, still want to be an author.
he's working on that.
