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Interview
with Jean Auel Jean M. Auel, pronounced “owl,” does her best writing at night. From her downtown Portland condo in Oregon, the best-selling author has been flipping on the nightlight for 12 years, working on the fifth book in her six-book “Earth’s Children” Ice Age series. In April, the book will finally be on bookstore shelves (it’s titled "The Shelters of Stone," published by Crown Publishing Group). At 65, Auel has sold 35-million copies of her Earth’s Children novels. That makes her one of the best-selling historical fiction authors of all time. Previous best-selling titles — all written over 10 years in the 1980s — are “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” “The Mammoth Hunters” and “The Plains of Passage.” Do you have to do a lot of
extensive marketing on your own to get those figures? No, my publisher has always done the marketing. They put me someplace, and they point me in a direction, and they say ‘go.’ I have never arranged my own publicity. I understand that now there are more and more authors who do, but I’ve been really lucky, and from the beginning the publisher has promoted me. Most publishers though, when working with a first time author, wouldn’t do this much publicity. So... What happened? Laughs. Well, first of all, I’ve got a very good agent. She knew that if they could invest enough money into the first book, then it’s in their vested interest to put the money into marketing to get their money back. So she held an auction for this first novel, by a totally unknown, unpublished writer -- but she felt the book was strong enough to support it. And for a while we had about five or six [publishers] in on that auction, and we ended up with two. At that time, and it’s still the case, if you get $5,000 or $10,000 for your first novel, then that’s tremendous. We got $135,000 for hardcover, North American rights only. And it’s just gone crazy ... crazier ... ever since. That broke a record in 1978. It absolutely broke a record for an unknown, unpublished writer to get that kind of an advance. But the agent told me later, that was her whole thing. Once they had made that investment, then they needed to earn their money back. Of course she knew that, because she was a smart agent. Did they sign you on a multi-book deal? Oh no. The first one, we just sold the first book. And that’s been the case all over. Then she sold foreign rights, and all that. The publisher sold the book club rights. And then my agent sold the second one, and then the third,
and it wasn’t until we got to the fourth that I finally said, 'Okay, I can
commit to more than one book in the series.' And that’s mainly because, by
that time, I wanted the same publisher to do the whole series. What was your process for writing? I probably rewrote that [first] book at least four times in total, and probably some sections I rewrote 30, 40 times. Nowadays, there is no first draft, when you think about it. Because you can go into the computer and change it right away. If you're like me, you even change words in sentences as you're typing them. Yeah, all the time, all the time. And that’s how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I’m reading, I’m tweaking -- putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing. So when I get to the place where I left off, I’m sort of given myself a little bit to start with. It’s one of my ways of getting going. Why would you say you're writing is so successful? You want to know something? I don’t know what I’m doing right; I really don’t know what I’m doing right. I’m just writing a story that I want to read. So you’re not a big fan of the outline? The thing that happened was that I thought I would write a
short story, or I thought I’d try to write a short story. I quit my
[11-year] job at [electronics maker] Techtronics, and I went to look for a job
-- didn’t think I was going to write. But I was kind of spinning wheels, and
trying to figure out what I want to do. I just got my M.B.A. when I was 40, and
I didn’t know where I was going, or what I was going to do with it. You didn’t want to go back into business with that master’s degree in business administration? That’s what I thought; I was going to get some great job in business, you know? So then I got this idea for a story: a young woman who was living with people who were different, except they thought she was different. It’s a little like “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” you know. I always used to get a little annoyed with those shows where you had some young starlet who was adored by some native people just because she was a young Hollywood starlet. And I wanted to really say, “Yes, she might be a beautiful woman, but to the people who raised her, she was different.” And I wanted it to be more than physical. It wasn’t just different color skin, different color... The iconic long-legged blond? She is blond, and blue eyed, but that’s because that’s what the Cro-Magnons were. As a matter of fact, Jodalar himself, the character who’s six-foot-six in the story, is based on an actual skeleton that came from a site of Cro-Magnon. Well, I took a little literary license... he was six-foot-five and three quarter inches, so I gave a quarter-inch of literary license, because it’s easier to write six-foot-six. But they were tall, handsome, robust, modern – you’d recognize them as modern people. If you picked one up out of time and brought it to the present, he’d be fine. He’d be a basketball player. [Laughs] That’s one thing about your books; you’ve done a lot of research. You travel to France and South Africa.... Oh yeah, it’s tough. [Laugh] So if a writer is doing a story like this, when can they justify making a trip? Let’s say this: I think you can justify it when you are actually going for the purpose of doing something with the book. When I went to Africa, it was partly because I wanted to see a full-eclipse of the sun, because my character sees a full-eclipse of the sun at some point in the [sixth] story. Anything else interesting? The other thing that’s really interesting about it, is that I fell in love with the animals. I really fell in love with Africa. (That was my first time there.) You see, the animals in Arctic Europe were much the same, except they all had heavy coats. It was too cold – the ice was too close – and it was too cold for trees. When you don’t have trees, you have grasslands. Often it’s too cold for that too, but we’re talking para-glacial, at the edge of the glaciers, so to speak. And the glaciers at that time covered about a quarter of the earth; they were covering all of Canada in this hemisphere, and into Michigan and New York and all that. So you learn all of this, some would call it minutiae... But that’s fine, because that’s what I think makes the books work. It’s all about learning. I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know. I don’t have to stop and go look for that 3-by-5 card. I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I’ve really studied it.
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