
Deborah Copaken Kogan working in Zimbabwe, 1989
I read Shutterbabe the first year I worked at CNN. I was fresh out college with my journalism degree in tow, drowning in a newsroom pool of brilliant minds and it couldn’t have come at a better time–I was an incredibly small fish in a vastly deep pond, struggling to swim. An ex-boyfriend brought the book over, along with a stack of others on our first date. Sounds promising, but I assure you, the book was the best thing out of the relationship.
Since reading it, I’ve likely lost, loaned, or gifted at least 20 copies. It’s just such a great read. I’m beyond thrilled to interview Deborah Copaken Kogan, the author of (among other titles) Shutterbabe.
danapop (dp) How did the idea for Shutterbabe transform into it actually being published? What was your writing process like?
Deborah Copaken Kogan (dck) The whole process, in retrospect, was weirdly easy and lightening fast, especially compared with my second effort, the novel ‘Between Here and April’, whose finished manuscript was rejected 39 times. (While ‘Shutterbabe’ was an instant bestseller, ironically ‘BH&A’ has sold more books over the course of its life, 59,000 to date.)
I took a leave of absence from my job as a producer from Dateline NBC to see if I could actually sit down and write my memoirs of my career as a war photographer from start to finish, something I’d been wanting to do for years. The first day, I went to a coffee shop to sit and think about how to approach it and wound up writing the entire outline, pretty much in its final form, on a napkin. (I then transferred my notes to a small moleskin notebook.) This was back in May of 1998, when my husband and I shared an old desktop computer, so I didn’t have a laptop on which to work. A few weeks of long-hand writing later, realizing I wouldn’t be able to work at home on our one computer—my older kids were 1 and nearly 3, and we lived in a tiny 1 ½ bedroom apartment—I purchased a cheap laptop and started writing at my friend Maia’s apartment on the 3 days a week I had babysitting. (We couldn’t afford to have full-time care once I left Dateline, as my salary, at that point, made up the bulk of our income.)
I wrote the first chapter in a month, and a book proposal within a few weeks of that. I then asked my friend Tad’s then-girlfriend, Courtney, a book editor, to give it a read to see if I was on the right track. She gave me verbal notes while I was on vacation with my family that summer and then provided agent recommendations. I sent the sample chapter and proposal off, via snail mail (remember, this was 1998) to the five agents she suggested. Three came back wanting to represent it, two declined. I picked the agent who seemed the most passionate. She had me edit the first chapter and expand my proposal from 3 pages to 15. She sent it out to publishers, and within days I had a book contract with Villard, who’d made a pre-emptive bid. By that time, my eldest had just started his first year of preschool on the Columbia University campus, so I would drop him off in the morning and write in the Teacher’s College Library, after finagling a library pass from a kind librarian. I wrote three days a week for about a year, then four days, then five—using my advance to pay for extra babysitting—and handed in the manuscript on my then-youngest’s 3rd birthday, March 2, 2000.
Looking back on that era of dial-up internet and few distractions, I realize what a perfect bubble of concentration I had. (Oh, to go back to those twitter-free days!) I would just sit down at 9 AM, when the library opened, and write like a demon until it was time to pick up my kids or relieve the babysitter, whichever applied to that particular day.
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