If you ever read one of Sara Gruen's novels and thought, "I bet she'd make a good friend," you wouldn't be off the mark. When I met up with her and her publicist at BookExpo America, where she was promoting Ape House (Random House, 2010), they were gossiping about Sarah Ferguson like any pair of girlfriends passing the time. She looked far younger than she could possibly be, with three kids and four books to her name, and turned out to be the kind of person who'd rather talk about her friends than about herself. With her long brown hair and down-to-earth demeanor, she could easily be the girl next door, if the girl next door sometimes hid behind the curtains to avoid talking to the postman — or if the girl next door counted a family of bonobo apes among her personal friends.
If she's happy to indulge in a bit of royal-family gossip between promotional events, it's also clear that she's a seriously hard-working writer. Before starting to write creatively, she worked as a technical writer for ten years, and she's always treated writing like a full-time job. "In this way, technical writing was very good training," she says. "It taught me to sit down and write for eight hours a day, whether I liked it or not." She starts writing when she first wakes up, saying, "The longer I'm awake, the further away my ideas get."
The first hour and a half or so of her writing day, she spends getting out of the real world and back into the fictional one, mostly by rereading pages she's already written. "Once I'm there, I'm good for 1,500–2,000 words; it's just getting to that spot." Because it does take her some time to get there, she guards that mental space jealously — hence the necessity of occasionally hiding from the postman.
"People don't understand that I'm often having a conversation with somebody else in my head — because I'm being two different people in writing dialogue. Sometimes I'm having a fight with myself. I can't have a conversation with someone and not be pulled out of the fictional world."
In addition to maintaining a strict writing schedule, she also furthers her writing by taking on a different challenge with each book. Her first, Riding Lessons, and its sequel, Flying Changes, were written in first person, present tense, from a female point of view, and though they were chronologically straightforward, she chose a "very difficult set of characters and a not always sympathetic narrator."
Speaking of her third published novel, she says, "I wanted to do something entirely different with Water for Elephants." The bestselling novel was written from a male POV and shifted back and forth in time between the Depression era and the present day. Ape House doesn't jump around in time, but it does alternate points of view. It's in third person, past tense, instead of third person, present. "I'm going to try to do something interesting with the structure in this next one," the writer says.
Although she won't share what she's working on yet, she has already begun her fifth novel. For Gruen, the process of writing a new book always starts with character. "I let the characters take shape and then go where they lead me." After the first draft is done, she edits heavily, starting onscreen and then printing out batches of fifty pages or so at a time to edit by hand. "I throw out entire chapters, whole scenes, take out characters. It's a very different thing [at the end]. My first draft, I liken to over-boiled, sloppy spaghetti. You have to make the shape of it afterwards." Hence the many drafts. She edits "until it's ripped out of my hands."
For that, good readers are a necessity, and there, a gift for friendship can indeed come in handy. She works with two other bestselling novelists, Karen Abbott and Joshilyn Jackson. "I don't know how I got so lucky. It's hard to find the right critique partners: they have to be people you absolutely adore and whose writing you think is better than yours, because they have to be able to push you. And we all just love each other." They met online before any of them had published and continue to meet for writing retreats, at their various houses, five or six times a year. "We have 'goals meetings' in the morning, usually to write so many words or edit a certain number of chapters, and you're not allowed to go play poker and have a martini until you've done that."
Her husband, a former Houghton Mifflin editor, also reads all of her manuscripts. By the time a manuscript gets to her agent and editor, these three readers have helped her work out most of the big issues.
With Ape House, the book will have another important reader: Panbanisha, one of the bonobo apes Gruen got to know while writing the book. Like the apes in Ape House, Panbanisha understands English and can communicate. "One of the really neat things that's happened over the past three years is that I now consider this family of six language competent apes as personal friends. I've visited with them, had tea parties where they made the tea, had breakfast with them, and talked to them. I've had two-way conversations with them in a human language.
"Panbanisha will be reading this for sure," Gruen continues. "I dedicated the book to her. And she knows it, and she's really delighted. They're really amazing animals."
Ape House will be on shelves starting September 7, and in May 2010 director Francis Lawrence began filming a movie version of Water for Elephants starring Robert Pattinson, of Twilight fame. Look for a cameo appearance from Gruen.