Photograpg by R.W. Bradford
Louise Zobel has called herself a writer since age 11.
By Cristy Shauck
Pounding on keyboards late at night, waking up early before the rest of the household stirs to jot down notes, snatching a few minutes here and there throughout the day or hunching over a desk so long they lose track of time--this is how local writers create books, articles and poems.
To escape the distractions of his Sunnyvale home, Michael Vaughn, laptop computer in hand, skates off to the Coffee Society in Cupertino on Monday nights to work on his latest novel, Courting the Seventh Sister.
"I like to tell people at cocktail parties it's about how to succeed at adultery without really trying," says the author of Frozen Music, a novel set in Sunnyvale Northwest Publishing, Inc., 1995. He also writes poetry and leads a poetry reading group.
"Don't do it for the money," Vaughn advises would-be writers. "Do it for the creative process. I never feel better inside than when I've just written a chapter."
Vaughn says he is sending Straight Into the Green, a novel about three thirtysomething male housemates and their misadventures, to publishers now.
Vaughn has chosen to lower his lifestyle expectations in order to find time to write. Included among several odd jobs that sustain his quest for the Great American Novel are house painting and teaching literature at the Bill Wilson Teen Center and a homeless shelter.
The author says he doesn't mind the sacrifices that come with being a writer, except for one thing: relationships.
"Until recently, I was dating someone involved in the Silicon Valley scene. She realized after a while that I wasn't ever going to have any other career except writing, and I was probably going to be poor for a long time, so we parted ways, amicably."
The process of writing a long novel can be arduous, but Vaughn finds joy as well. "Getting there is all the fun," he says. "I have longtime friends who are purely creations of my mind. You get to know your characters in this strange sort of relationship; they're sort of like children and sort of like friends."
Those who avoid writing because their first attempts weren't exactly Pulitzer Prize-winning material can take heart from Vaughn's experience. "My favorite Hemingway quote and the No. 1 rule of my writin g regimen is, 'Everyone's first draft is crap,' " he says. "If you think you're going to sit down and write beautiful golden words on your first attempt, then you're not doing it right. The idea is to get the story out, get things going and get the raw material."
He continues: "The first draft is magical because you're trying to create something out of thin air. But then the editing process is where you put your working hours in. I rewrite like crazy. I've actually gone over certain passages in books 20 times. But the hardest part is actually getting yourself to sit down and do it. That's why I go to a coffee place to write."
In a retirement community nestled among the gently sloping hills on the west side of Highway 280, just past the Foothill Boulevard exit, Cupertino resident Louise Purwin Zobel types up travel articles about the exotic places she and husband Jerome, a Palo Alto physician, have visited. "I've got to get at those articles on Hawaii," she says, referring to a trip they took a few weeks ago.
While majoring in journalism at Stanford University, Louise Purwin Zobel discovered magazine writing and promptly sold an article about "the woman's place in the Red Cross during the war effort" to The Woman at the tender age of 19.
"They paid $25, which was a lot of money then," she says.
During World War II, Zobel worked at the Pacific headquarters of United Press International in San Francisco, broadcasting the news over pony wires to small-town papers that had flatbed presses and a 2 p.m. deadline.
The reporter also moonlighted at a San Francisco Chinese newspaper, published in English, and continued freelancing for other periodicals. She chose to put her career on hold when the first of four children came along. Twelve years went by before she returned to a free-lance career, but she can now boast several hundred published articles, mainly on travel writing, which carry her byline.
With a household of four children to run, Zobel learned to squeeze in writing time after the house had quieted down. She still writes late at night to avoid interruptions.
"I have lots of ideas, but not enough time to work on them," she says. "Living here, I'm busier than I've ever been."
Zobel authored The Travel Writer's Handbook, published in 1980 by Writer's Digest Books. The book sold 65,000 copies, including 12,000 hard-cover copies that sold out in six months. She's currently writing new chapters on eco-tourism ("we need to think about what we're leaving for the future") and researching and publishing online for the fourth edition, due out during the holidays.
She admits to one serious failure: a travel tape that a national distributor promoted poorly. "Neither of us had the time to give it the publicity and promotion it needed," Zobel says.
This September she lectures on travel writing for a six-week UC-Berkeley course held in Menlo Park. Local residents will have an opportunity to attend her "Write Your Life Story for Pay" class at West Valley College in November.
Susan Mueller of Sunnyvale has parlayed her entrepreneurial background into a column for the San Jose Business Journal and articles for South Bay Accent and other publications.
The 58-year-old scribe didn't become a professional writer without taking a few lumps. "There have been rejections that felt terrible," she says. "I crawled into a corner and didn't do anything with the articles at first. I didn't rewrite or resubmit. Once I took a writing class, I started to have a picture of what was wrong with some of these things. I've saved all this stuff and will resurrect it."
Three book ideas tempt her. "I have in mind a Studs Terkel-type book about women," she says. "Different ages, walks of life, perspectives. This century is such a tremendous turning point in the roles of women in society and for themselves." She's also considering collaborating on a book about how the Internet influences a child's academic achievement, and writing under a pen name about some of her family history--which apparently includes a few juicy anecdotes.
Local writers make books
Sunnyvale resident Phyllis Koestenbaum, a nationally published poet, has been working on a manuscript of prose poems for five years.
She also is writing a collection of short stories and short prose poems for another manuscript and an essay of events that happened during her college days. "I usually do a number of things at once. I find I get less stuck that way. It's good to go off and do something else," she says.
Ethyl Herr labors on the sequel to The Dove and the Rose, a new historical novel, which appears on a shelf in the "Local Writers" section at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books.
Chitra Divakaruni, a Foothill College creative writing instructor, just completed The Mistress of Spices, a novel which will come out next year. "It's a magical book about a woman who knows how to use herbs and spices." Her prior novel, Arranged Marriage, a Bay Area bestseller, came out last summer.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, August 7, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.