Just got home from a book reading by Tracy McArdle, author of Real Women Eat Beef. Honestly, I was initially drawn to the event just on the basis of her catchy title (not that I agree, but I was intrigued nonetheless). However, when I discovered that the book is about a non-meat-eater whose Boston advertising firm assigns her to rebrand beef, I was HOOKED! What could be funnier? (Sidenote: the novel that I don’t have time to write also takes place in Boston. That’s about all I know at this point.) Tracy’s reading of the scene where her heroine meets the good ol’ boys of the beef industry was hilarious. Now there’s an author who can milk a scene for maximum comic effect!

I definitely plan on reading the complete novel and her debut novel, which is cleverly titled Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa, but perhaps the juiciest portion of the evening came when Tracy talked about her writing process. She emphasized that regardless of how funny or true a scene is, if it doesn’t develop the characters or the plot, it doesn’t belong in your novel. I think a lot of writers (myself included) struggle with this problem. We find a few lines of dialogue or an idea that we’re madly in love with, but we can’t get enough distance to see that it’s not contributing to the bigger picture. This is where it helps to have a good editor friend to bring us back to earth. She also talked about reading versus analyzing, e.i. taking a book and, instead of getting carried away by the well developed characters and setting, really looking at what makes it work. I think this works for non-fiction as well. And, of course, what book reading would be complete without someone asking totally off-topics questions about Norman Mailer or the logic behind physical attraction? Being a savvy PR person, Tracy handled it like a pro.