Susan Wiggs is romance royalty, the brain behind books that have long made many readers cry, swoon and hearts start a-fluttering.
And the Bainbridge-based author’s own life indeed sounds like the biography of one of her beloved characters: She’s a teacher turned successful novelist, lives on a picturesque island, in a home by the water, and often commutes to her regular writers group in a 21-foot motorboat.
The reality behind the romance, though, is much less cinematic, Wiggs said.
It’s a lot more work — and a lot less exciting — than most people believe.
“If I had to write about myself, it would be a very boring and short book with not a lot of conflict and not a lot of drama,” Wiggs said. “That’s how you want to live your life, but you want your fiction to be a lot more amped up. So that’s what I do.”
She also does research. A startling amount. She’s kind of known for it.
Wiggs’ trademark blend of historical and romantic fiction, with an emphasis on real-life details and accurate depictions of interesting professions and locales, has earned her a legion of fans and seen her hit best-seller status.
Now, with her latest book, “Map of the Heart,” on sale in August (available now for preorder at Eagle Harbor Book Company), and celebrating the 30th anniversary of her first published novel, Wiggs said that her work habits are as strict as ever, though what was once “women’s fiction” or “speculative fiction” is now just fiction. Genre works are more popular than ever — superheroes, zombies, swords and sorcery, titillating dramas — and reaching a wider audience than before through quality TV and streaming adaptations, digital platforms and an uptick in audiobook usage.
That last one’s especially interesting to Wiggs, as all of her books tend to start out as audiobooks.
“I used to type it up — I hate typing — but now I can dictate it, which is so nice,” she said. “I just kind of read it, and then I do a lot of revisions on screen and then I print it out and I do more.
“I write in long hand,” she added, typically while sitting on her patio overlooking the water. She still holds herself to a word count, she said, but by now knows about what her daily quota looks like in terms of full notebook pages.
“I know after this many books, I know how my longhand, how I fill the page and everything,” she said. “When I’m composing a first draft, that’s how I do it.”
As for classification, Wiggs said she leaves that sort of thing to the bookstores. The lines between genre works and so-called mainstream “popular fiction” have never been so permeable — and she likes it that way.
“I think they do tend to blur,” Wiggs said. “Nowadays they just call it fiction. [My work] used to be called ‘women’s fiction,’ and now they’re thinking, ‘Well, you don’t want to limit yourself to just having women readers.’
“I think what they mean by that is there’s not a big thriller aspect to it,” she explained.
“There’s not a big crime solving aspect. It’s really more people in the middle of their lives facing just ordinary, or extraordinary, circumstances. And the reason I say ‘popular’ and ‘commercial,’ is to kind of distinguish it from literary fiction, which is a very measured genre where people are really writing something for the ages. And I never saw myself in that role.
“I don’t worry about calling my books escapist reading, because I think they should be.”
Regarding romance, her professional bread-and-butter, Wiggs said being a novelist might be the most romanticized profession around. Though it can be as wonderful as it seems, she said, it can also be very frustrating and very lonely.
“It’s such a pleasure to read a book, and it’s so easy for anybody to tell a story,” she said. “But that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
A daily tidal wave of emails — appearance requests, notes from her publisher, fan mail, professional correspondence — and also marketing her work, updating her website and engaging her audience all takes time, Wiggs said.
A lot.
Then, there’s the actual writing and the editing of that writing, and research and even more research — almost all of it done, or at least begun, alone.
“You have to be really happy in your own company,” Wiggs said.
“One reason that I continue to write things out in longhand is I’m not tempted to go see what they’re saying on Twitter or Facebook, or whatever the headlines are. It’s very distracting.
“I always strive to write in such a way that I kind of pull the reader through the story, because God knows I’m doing that to myself. Some days the longest walk is to the patio with my notebook like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be here!’”
Thirty years after her first book, Wiggs said she’s learned a lot about herself and the craft of storytelling, but that she doesn’t spend much time looking back. She’s not concerned about considering her place in the world in a macro sense, or how her work might stand the test of time.
“Especially with popular fiction, I feel really, really lucky that I’ve so far had a 30-year career,” she said. “Because sometimes you’re only popular for a few books, and so, no, I’m happy with the way things are.”
In life, much like in her novels, Wiggs said she doesn’t want to know the ending. Not exactly, anyway.
“I always think that I know the ending, and then there’s usually some little grace note that surprises me,” she said. “I didn’t see that in my headlights. It’s kind of like you drive as far as the headlights shine and then the next thing reveals itself, but that’s part of the entertainment of being able to make up stories.”
These days she’s working hard to give the fans more of what they’ve come to love and expect from Susan Wiggs, with all the tireless research, realistic characters and empathetic storytelling for which she is renowned. She’s also testing herself, trying new things, like an online screenwriting class with Aaron Sorkin (writer of TV’s “The West Wing,” “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” “The Newsroom” and many new classics of the silver screen).
“I don’t see myself retiring,” Wiggs said. “I see myself maybe writing slower or writing something different — like maybe writing a screenplay or a play or a literary novel — where there’s no expectations attached to it.
“But, right now I’m very committed to my publisher, to giving them the kind of books they want to publish from me.”
Reading with Wiggs
Susan Wiggs is a best-selling author with name recognition to spare.
But, she’s also a big-time reader — “I read about a book a week,” she said — and a fan of many types of prose, fiction and not. Here are a few authors that Wiggs said she thinks deserve to be better known, more widely read, and whose work she has personally enjoyed.
1. Paulette Jiles, author of “News of the World,” “The Color of Lightning,” “Enemy Women” and “Stormy Weather,” among others.
2. Sheila Roberts, a Pacific Northwest author whose Christmas classic “On Strike for Christmas” was made into a movie for the Lifetime Channel. Her novel, “The Nine Lives of Christmas,” was made into a movie for Hallmark.
3. Lisa Gardner, author of 17 best-selling suspense and crime novels, the latest being “Find Her.”
4. Jenny Colgan, a Scottish author of romantic comedy and science fiction.
Want to spend more time with Susan Wiggs? She will host “An Evening in Provence,” a dinner and meet-and-greet event Sunday, Aug. 13 at the Resort at Port Ludlow.
Tickets, $85 per person, include hors d’oeuvre at the meet-and-greet and then dinner in the Sun Room, as well as an autographed copy of “Map of the Heart.”
Visit www.portludlow resort.com or call 360-437-7000 for more information.
