With more than 70 books to her credit, including close to 20 New York Times best-sellers, Barbara Delinsky, MA’69 stands in the first rank of Boston College alumni who’ve made lucrative careers as novelists—a list that includes such prolific authors as Jean Walker Pogany, MA’73, who has written some 60, mostly best-selling, thrillers and romances under the name Catherine Coulter, and the late George V. Higgins ’61, JD’67, famed for his depictions of the Boston underworld. On April 30, 2008, Delinsky returned to Boston College to speak about the writing profession and the commercial fiction business. Her onstage interviewer for the evening event in the Yawkey Center’s Murray Room was English professor Judith Wilt, holder of the Newton College Alumnae Chair in Western Culture.

Delinsky, whose appearance was sponsored by the University bookstore and Boston College Magazine, drew an audience primarily female and largely beyond college age. Danielle Svendsen, 41, a self-described fan, had driven from her home in central Massachusetts for the occasion. Delinsky “deals with everyday issues that could probably happen to anybody,” said Svendsen, by way of explaining the author’s appeal. Judging from their conversations beforehand and questions for Delinsky afterward, most in the audience had a close acquaintance with Delinsky’s books, from the early romances through the longer, more fully developed novels that she writes today, Family Tree (2007) and The Secret Between Us (2008) being the latest. And most aspire to write books too.

Wilt kicked off the evening by calling Delinsky a “sociologist” and “the Mary Arnold Ward of [our] time.” As Wilt explained, Mary Ward (1851–1920) wrote a book a year for 15 years in turn-of-the-century England, best-sellers that plumbed “the interaction of moral life, social life, and gender life.” In this sense, Ward was “very much a student of the kind of thing that Barbara Delinsky is a student of,” said Wilt. (Popular women authors—mostly of the 19th century—are a focus of Wilt’s scholarship, and she wrote the book on Ward, Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward, published in 2005.) Wilt then asked if Delinsky, like “the great Scottish historical novelist” Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001), had taken up writing to create “more of the kind of books [you like] to read.”

With disarming modesty, Delinsky, a delicate-featured blond, looking trim in a white textured jacket and tailored black trousers, responded, “I’ll start by shocking you all and saying I’m not an avid reader. I cannot read when I’m writing, because I start writing in someone else’s voice.” She said she reads other people’s books only on vacations.

“And I don’t think my degrees in psychology [from Tufts University] and sociology [from Boston College] made me knowledgeable about people,” Delinsky continued. “There was some instinct I had, was born with, maybe developed.” Delinsky said she writes what she’s “comfortable” writing, but it’s “a very basic fact of commercial writing: You have to write something that your audience is going to like.” As her writing has matured and her interests have broadened, Delinsky said, her fans have remained “amazingly loyal”—after all, over 28 years “they’ve grown, too. They’re mothers and grandmothers and wives and successful business people, and they can appreciate the characters that I’m writing about.”

While she lacks formal training as a writer, she said, she does have “formal training in living,” as a mother of three (including twins) who lost her own mother to breast cancer at age eight and is a cancer survivor herself. “That’s what makes my books strong,” said Delinsky. “But I feel inferior to someone like you [Wilt] because I’m not well-read.”

Of the dozen or so questions posed by Wilt, the one that seemed to resonate most with Delinsky had to do with women characters in her novels who, having succeeded professionally, still feel like impostors. The phenomenon is widespread enough in real life, noted Wilt, to have served as the topic of a much-publicized psychological study back in the 1970s (“The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women,” by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes). Before Wilt could finish framing her question, Delinsky was pointing energetically at herself.

“When I start a book, I’m convinced I cannot write. . . . Everything I’ve picked up has been learned as I go along,” she said. “There’s always that sense of being the impostor.” Later in the evening, she elaborated: “I’m not a literary writer,” someone capable of breathtaking imagery or arresting prose. “I just understand people.” And, she said, at another point, “I do have a mind for business.”

In the late 1970s, after some years as a stay-at-home mother, Delinsky was looking for a way to help support her family when she happened upon a newspaper feature on romance novelists. (“I wish I could say I was driven to write,” she says now, “but I wanted to earn money.”) Though unfamiliar with the genre, she read a few romances and found she liked them. Then she read some more—“30 or 40 of them.” She outlined them: “Ten chapters, 20 pages per chapter. [In the beginning] man meets woman; at the end, they go off together into the sunset. . . . In between, there are all kinds of misunderstandings and challenges that could keep them apart, and they have to work through that.” She tried the formula herself and succeeded, penning her first romance in three and a half weeks on legal pads supplied by her husband, a lawyer, while sitting in their backyard. She now spends nine months on a book and publishes a title per year.

Delinsky’s visit to boston college was billed as a Master Class, and she offered plenty of shoptalk, peppered with references to “PW” (Publisher’s Weekly), and an article on “what’s happened to old-fashioned editing”; Ken Follett, whose 150-page outline to The Key to Rebecca, she said, was a tighter, better telling of the story than the book turned out to be; Robert B. Parker, whose outlines may be only a sentence per chapter; and John Grisham, who said, if you can’t write a page a day, you’re not a writer. Author tours and airport sales were dissected, along with advertising (“a full-page ad in the New York Times costs somewhere in the vicinity of $250,000″) and the way that the work of selling books increasingly cuts into the writing of books. “Business takes about 30 percent of my time,” said Delinsky. “It starts off every single morning with my website,” where she maintains a blog; the marketing may continue with an online Q&A with fans and resume in the evening when she joins conference calls with book discussion groups around the country. (“I do this a lot. I was talking with a group the other night from Michigan.”)

On the writer’s craft, Delinsky’s advice was hard-nosed and concrete, an amalgam of principles acquired from editors, agents, and long experience: Don’t use three adjectives “when you can use two.” “It’s lovely” to have a cutting-edge idea, but “I always hedge my bets” (example: in Family Tree, her book in which a white couple gives birth to a black baby, the subject is not race or DNA testing, said Delinsky; it’s “hypocrisy”). The opening of a story “has to be dynamite”—if prospective editors and agents trip over chapter one, they won’t read further. “You don’t tell the reader, you show the reader, and dialogue is great for that.” And two points of view are better than 10; try to write every scene from the point of view of the character “who has the most at stake in that scene.” Delinsky was notably firm on that last point. “You need to be where the high emotion is. That’s what defines my books.”

David Reich is a writer in the Boston area. Judith Wilt’s May 14 interview with Barbara Delinsky may be viewed in its entirety at www.bc.edu/frontrow.

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