Interviews on the Literary Fiction Network

Round 1: Mary L Tabor

Mary L. Tabor is a very talented author, radio show host, columnist, and professor whose deeply personal and inspiring work, (Re)Making Love: a memoir, won the Watty's 2014 and was selected as a Featured Read on our network. She's a highly respected long time member of the Wattpad community. We're proud to shine the spotlight on Mary this week as part of our interview series and rest assured we will have more authors featured soon.

In many ways, you are already established both in your writing career and other ventures before joining Wattpad. What introduced you to Wattpad and what made you consider publishing here? In what ways has it influenced/impacted your writing experience?

I discovered Wattpad through the Business/Technology section of The New York Times, in an article by David Streitfeld that begins "Not since the heyday of Dickens, Dumas and Henry James has serialized fiction been this big." I took a look at Wattpad and I got hooked.

I've written a memoir in the form of short chapters—kinda the right format for serialization. It's titled (Re)Making Love and is the real life story of what happened when my husband said, oh-so-Greta-Garbo, "I need to live alone." Lots of lovely, even terrific reviews on Amazon but, to my publisher's dismay, not many sales—some, but not many. So, I'm thinking, Why not?

First thing that happened as soon as I posted the first two chapters of (Re)Making Love: a memoir was that Zoe Pollock Di Novi of HQ found me, read me and decided to feature the memoir on Wattpad. Zoe is a former senior editor at The Dish with Andrew Sullivan, the well-known, highly respected British author and writer. She's a delight, very smart.

Then Danielle Thé at HQ (love her story Crumbs) asked me to do a writing tip for #JustWriteIt.

I could go on because there is more. But the bottom line is that Wattpad has literally changed my literary life and found for me an audience I never would have otherwise been able to reach.

I feel blessed and grateful.

I've been in the literary world for the biggest and best part of my life, published stories in literary journals, won literary contests. On Wattpad I'm flourishing in a way I don't think possible anywhere else. I have readers, writers, community, feedback—it's constant, encouraging and often brilliantly insightful –and all this from folks I would never otherwise know.

We definitely all have been blessed; that's why we're able to do this now after all! For sure we can all see the dramatic shift when it comes to writing. Regardless of the platform an author might use to publish/promote their work, it's nearly impossible to make it as a writer without the involvement of the internet now. Wattpad has revolutionized the way people write and read, but the platform does have a bit of a stigma in demographics. Is there a place and a future for literary writing on Wattpad?


Here's why a literary writer should be on Wattpad: The future is here and it's digital. Think about the way you discover music today, songs you find on the Internet first and then buy the album. Of course I want readers to buy my published three books, hold them in their hands, and, yes, I want folks to discover the new novel Passing Through that I'm writing live on Wattpad. But perhaps as key or more is the chance to be seen, to close the round and let the invention, the work go into the world.

My broader thinking on this question I have told Wattpad HQ in a recent survey: On Wattpad we find the potential for both literacy and writing—writing that matters. Let's talk for a minute about literacy and art: Think of a child who paints a painting and you love it and hang it above your piano as I have. Think of a child who writes a poem and you save it and read it at their bat mitzvah or confirmation, as I did. Literacy and art hold hands like children in a circle. They dance together. To think that Wattpad is not literate enough because young people are trying out writing, and taking risks is to not understand the relationship of art to life from the get-go—from birth to death. Art emerges on Wattpad. Writers on Wattpad of all ages and languages and countries all across the world are taking risks here, bleeding on the page.

Wattpad is rich with the undiscovered, the voice that waits to be heard.

I love your answer.  "To think that Wattpad is not literate enough because young people are trying out writing, and taking risks is to not understand the relationship of art to life from the get-go—from birth to death." As a professor you must see plenty of literary potential in students. Certainly our team have discovered amazing writers, young and older, that normally would be overlooked if there wasn't a platform to promote their work. But of course, the digital online mediums haven't been without its criticisms.

Wattpad is a workshop in its own wonderful way. But workshops can be flawed if the result is this: Writing to the common denominator. Here's what I mean: The story that is written by committee, by trying to please all one's readers and fearing their reaction to invention is the failure of the workshop. I taught writing workshops as a professor at George Washington University, in the post-graduate Creative Writing program at U. of Missouri and at the Smithsonian's Campus-on-the-Mall. The result of pleasing your critics can easily produce what I term "the competent story," "the competent poem or lyric." Shoot for the moon—and that includes fan-fiction. Sure, learn by imitation, but make the story or poem your own.

How do you do that? The writer has to find his voice by selling his heart and no tool box advice will achieve this. Risk, risk it all.

Other than striving to making it our own, making it new, are there other personal golden rules for writing well?

I've been reading challenging work since I was a child. And I believe reading leads to writing. No one ever wrote the so-called great American or Canadian or International novel without reading voraciously.

What are some of the writers you'd read and consider your influences?

Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf, Kundera and Colm Tóibín, Bishop, Kunitz, Eliot and Auden. Of these, Auden, most prominently because of his use of form, of the ways he broke form, my understanding of the power of rhythm and the force of prosody, why it's worth studying—and the way his heart is in his work.

What landmark classics! I find it hard to imagine a proficient writer who isn't also a proficient reader, kind of like trying to become a chef only raised on bread and water. But you're also not afraid to really tell readers about your life and let yourself come through, especially in your memoir. Are there any common ideas or messages you're trying to express?

I think that's a question my readers might answer better than I. I actually don't recall my writing after the invention has occurred. The process of invention is mysterious and wondrous—and every good writer must protect what we might refer to as the muse—or, more prosaically, the process.

A true magician never reveals their tricks, but perhaps it's the opposite in this case: true magic never reveals its tricks to the magician.

Thank you for your time Mary, we believe our readers will be inspired by your words.