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. (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. 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 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. (While ‘Shutterbabe’ was an instant bestseller, ironically ‘BH&A’ has sold more books over the course of its life, 59,000 to date.) I’m beyond thrilled to interview Deborah Copaken Kogan, the author of (among other titles) Shutterbabe.ĭanapop (dp) How did the idea for Shutterbabe transform into it actually being published? What was your writing process like?ĭeborah 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.

Since reading it, I’ve likely lost, loaned, or gifted at least 20 copies. Sounds promising, but I assure you, the book was the best thing out of the relationship. An ex-boyfriend brought the book over, along with a stack of others on our first date. 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.

I read Shutterbabe the first year I worked at CNN.

Deborah Copaken Kogan working in Zimbabwe, 1989

Shutterbabe by Deborah Copaken Kogan