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 < back to authors list LuAnn Nissen:
Inside Today's Home began in the mid-1950s by the Faulkners, a husband and wife team. Ray Faulkner, the chair of the art department at Stanford University, had seen a need for an introductory interior design book. The first edition, published in 1954, was successful from the start. By 1975, after three editions, Ray became ill and died. At the time of Ray's death, the Faulkners had begun a fourth edition. An editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, where the book was published at the time, ended up ghostwriting much of it. Because the book had been so successful, the publisher didn't want to let it go by the wayside. So in 1960, to keep the book going, the publisher began a year-long national search for a new author for the fifth edition. Educators who had done reviews for earlier editions, including Nissen, were asked each to review the fourth edition. "I had no idea they were searching for a new author," she said. "All I knew is that they asked for a review of the text. I did the review and was contacted again. It was then they told me they were looking for a new author and liked what I had indicated in the review. They wanted to know if I had any interest in being an author. I was asked to write a sample chapter to see if my writing style was compatible with previous editions." Again, Nissen was among a group of educators asked to write a sample chapter. "A long time went by and I didn't hear anything so I assumed that they must not have been too thrilled with what I had written," she said. "And then out of the blue I got a phone call saying they had reviewed the chapter and liked it. Would I be willing to meet with Sarah Faulkner, and talk some more about style and content to see if she felt I would work out?" Nissen went to the interview and was chosen as co-author for the fifth edition. "I discovered along the way that Sarah was an invaluable resource for the past history of the book, the way they had approached things, and to keep the millions of details straight and organized, but that in reality, at that point, she was not interested in the actual writing," Nissen said. "She was happy to look at what I had written and give me feedback, but it basically ended up being a project on my own. It was a new experience for me and became an enormous task. I discovered along the way that writing is not the glamourous occupation that people who have not tried it think it may be. It's a lot of work, a lot of soul-searching." Nissen said writing a textbook alone is a lonely process. She worked full-time during the day as a professor of interior design at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she developed the interior design bachelor's degree program,. The only time she could work on the book was late at night. "I worked into the wee hours every night by myself, sitting and pondering," said Nissen. "I think the hardest part of writing the book was having to work late at night alone. I find that working late at night is probably not the optimal time. You've already had a long day at work, you're tired, you're working against a deadline, and you're working alone and can't pick up the phone and bounce ideas off people at 2 a.m. That's probably the thing I find most difficult." Sole authors, she said, have to be very self-motivated and discliplined: "Fortunately I'm able to do that. We have a joke in our house that my husband locks me in our home office. When I hand out a chapter, he hands in a meal." One of the difficult things with a comprehensive introductory text, she said, is that you have to cover all the areas within the subject, but not in the greatest depth in every area. "There was a lot of agonizing over what was too much information," she said. "Is this enough to give students a foundation, but not so much in-depth that it goes over their heads?" She reviewed every text on the market to see how other authors approached such a problem. She had her husband, Howard Goodman, a political consultant, read the drafts of each chapter. "He would say, 'I'm of no use to you. I don't know the subject of interior design,'" said Nissen. "But that's exactly why I wanted him to read it, because neither do beginning level students know the subject. So if I could write so that he could easily understand the principles I was trying to explain, then I would know those students would as well." The text was extensively reviewed by educators throughout the country. It went through three rounds of review. "The publisher wanted to make sure they were maintaining the quality of the highly respected text and the reputation of it, so they were very careful to get a lot of feedback," said Nissen. For the fifth and sixth editions, although Ray was dead and Sarah didn't do the writing, the Faulkners were still listed as coauthors. For the fifth edition, which was published in 1986, Ray's name was first, with the sixth, published in 1994, Nissen had made a name for herself and the publisher felt comfortable putting her name first. The seventh edition will be soley Nissen's. "They established the text and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to take it over because it was such a prestigious text," Nissen said. "It gave widespread recognition to my name and to my university." Nissen also had a high-profile position with the Interior Design Educators Council, a professional organization that most interior design teachers belong to. "People were meeting me, becoming acquainted with me and recognizing my name so the publisher felt much more comfortable putting my name first on the sixth edition," she said. About 80 percent of the fifth edition was rewritten. "Between 1975 and 1986, the interior design profession had changed dramatically," Nissen said. "It had become far more technical, far more specialized than it had ever been before. The body of knowledge and the variety of areas of knowledge had increased tenfold in those years so there was a lot of rewrite to do, but there was a great deal of concern also that the writing style be compatible so that sections that were kept from the previous editions didn't stand out and look like they had come from a different author." Between 1986 and 1994, there were many new changes in legislation affecting interior design, Nissen said, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which affects the accessibility of spaces, and the Energy Policy Act, which affects energy consumption and lighting. Nissen said by the sixth edition, she was more knowledgeable and aware of what was involved in writing a textbook. "By this point we virtually have an entirely new textbook," Nissen said. "There's nothing left of the old editions. In fact, one of the interesting and fun things to do is to look back to the 50s at that first edition and look at today and the sixth edition. It's amazing, and somewhat amusing, to see how much change there has been. It seemed primitive in the 50s. Back then the interest people had was how to do it yourself, how to make your home warm and cozy and comfortable and interesting. Over the years the emphasis is more and more on the profession of interior design and the training of young students who are going to become professionals." All of the changes caused by mergers, acquisitions and relocations during this time -- with Holt, Rinehart and Winston becoming a part of CBS College Publishing in New York and then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in Texas and now Harcourt Brace -- has had an effect on the project, said Nissen. All of the editors, she said, have changed many, many times. For the sixth edition, she said, the publisher didn't have an experienced person to work on the illustration program, so Nissen had to do a great deal of it herself. "In interior design books, like art books, the illustrations are of critical importance," she said. "You have to not only be able to talk about the things you want to teach students, and have them understand and apply them, but they also need to look at things where they can see the application and recognize and understand it to see how it works. The illustration program is very extensive, it's like writing a textbook in itself." Nissen flew back and forth to Harcourt Brace in Fort Worth several times, spending three-day weekends and 12-hour days going through illustration material. "That was a new experience and a learning experience," Nissen said. "We also did quite a bit more with computer-generated graphics in the sixth edition. There's always a new experience with every edition and although you've been through the process before, there's a lot to learn each time." One of things that people say is valuable about Inside Today's Home, said Nissen, is that it's up to date and talks about issues that are of concern to designers today and that students need to be learning about. Nissen said she was thrilled when a couple of interior design educators doing a study to find the top 10 comprehensive introductory design textbooks named the fifth and sixth editions of Inside Today's Home in the top seven. Nissen said four qualities make a good textbook: readability, organization, comprehensiveness, and currency. "Readability is of paramount importance," she said. "It's important that new terminology be highlighted and clearly explained so it can become part of the vocabulary of the learner. Organization is also important. The text should be broken into sections, components with headings and subheadings. Writers should try to summarize the material in tables and charts and use illustrations to point out principles." Nissen said she will probably start a seventh edition soon. "It's time we started looking at a new edition," she said. "I would say that most interior design texts are on a little bit longer cycle than texts in other fields partly because they are very expensive to produce because of the illustration program. That might have an effect on the time span between editions." What Nissen says she enjoys most about writing is feedback from students. "When students say they find the textbook not only full of information they need to learn, but also easy to read and understandable, it's very rewarding," she said. "There's a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I finish and look back on the hours of burning the midnight oil, slaving away. I feel like I've done something significant. But the real reward is the people who benefit from it, that they find it useful and enjoyable and that it's not a dry, technical text that they feel they have to wade through because they need the information." < Nissen said she considers the textbook her biggest career accomplishment: "In a lot of ways it sums it up. All they years and hours spent preparing yourself to teach is condensed, particularly in this kind of introductory, comprehensive textbook. It is my single, crowning achievement; putting all of that experience and knowledge into one publication." She has been working on a new text on cultural diversity and its effects on interior design, with a co-author, Roberta Null, a retired professor, who lives in Whittier, California. "It's been difficult working long-distance with a co-author," said Nissen, who lives in Reno, Nevada. "I always thought I wanted to work with a co-author, and still do. Before this I had experienced the difficulties of working alone, and now I'm understanding that having a co-author is great because you have feedback, but you're here, and they're there, and your work schedules don't jibe. There's pros and cons in both." The idea for the book came out of an increased emphasis by universities for students to learn about diverse cultures. It will look at diversity from the perspective of design. "Design is something that touches everybody's lives," she said. "So if we are to understand how different cultures view things, design would be an area that touches our lives directly. You can walk into a space and see the way it is organized, how they've used color, how materials, patterns and have a better understanding of those influences and an appreciation and thereby acceptance of other cultures." As a child, said Nissen, she was always facinated by how things were designed. She enjoyed making her own toys using materials she found. "In some ways I enjoyed that process more than I enjoyed playing with them after they were made," she said. "I played with things that were imaginative. I was creative and practical at the same time. I always liked arts and graphic design and was a good student." She went to a high school that was very small and didn't offer much beyond the basics. She remembers wanting to take mechanical drawing but was told it was only for boys. When she was graduated from high school in the mid-1960s, it was still a time when women could go into only traditional fields: teaching, nursing and secretarial work. "I was presented with all of those options and knew that they weren't what I wanted to do," she said. Her brother, who was a few years older and out in the work force, gave her several career ideas that were nontraditional, but still acceptable for women. One was interior design. "I'd always been interested in things related to that, so I decided to study interior design," she said. Nissen received her bachelor's degree in interior design from the University of Nebraska in 1969. "When I graduated and started looking for jobs, none fired my imagination at the time," Nissen said. "I was a good student, I had graduated in the top 10 percent of my graduating class, and was being recruited by several graduate schools. I figured I would go back to graduate school at some point so why not now when they were offering an assistantship position?" She chose Iowa State University, which paid her to teach half-time. When she was graduated with a master's in applied art interior design in 1972, she went to Europe for a year and lived in Brussels, working in a pub and traveling whenever she could. When she returned to the United States, she went to work for an international lighting designer. "I loved it," she said. "His original lighting design is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was a wonderful experience, but was a small company, with not many opportunities for advancement." She had liked teaching in graduate school and decided to let her old professors know that she was looking for a teaching position. The University of Nevada called and asked if she would be interested in starting an interior design program there. "It sounded the most intriguing -- the opportunity to build something," she said. "Again, the creative and practical side of me thought the challenge would be appealing. The rest is history. I'm still here." The single most rewarding element of teaching, said Nissen, is seeing students be successful after graduation. "I enjoy the one on one contact with students," she said. "I like working with them individually. You're there the moment the student gets it and that's very rewarding. You see that sense of confidence, knowledge and skill developing." She now directs internships and independent study and teaches courses on the history of interior design, as well as chairs the interior design program at the University of Nevada. Nissen gives this advice to new and aspiring authors: Join Text and Academic Authors. "I think it's such a leg up to discover there are other people out there willing to talk about things that are really stumbling blocks for new authors," she said. "The first time I signed a contract with CBS Publishing, I was so intimidated by the fact it was CBS I didn't know how to interpret things. There was a part of the contract that I didn't feel adequately reflected the co-authorship agreement, so I talked with a number of other people about their contracts and experiences. My husband and I wrote what we thought would be the right way to reflect the agreement between Sarah Faulkner and myself. We sent it over and talked about it with Sarah. We successfully went head to head with CBS corporate attorneys and negotiated some changes in the contract. We had no idea what we were doing or that it was possible." New and aspiring authors, said Nissen, can get some experience from other authors at TAA. "You can find out that, yes, you can negotiate a contract," she said. "They have people that will review it for you and tell you if it's fair for a new author." TAA, she said, has been the single most informative association she's been involved in. "I had no idea that authors from all over the country met regularly and shared information about experiences with their publisher, contracts and royalties," she said. "So the first time I attended a TAA conference in 1992, I was literally blown away. I was amazed that all of these resources, all of these knowledgeable people are out there so you don't have to struggle with it by yourself." Nissen was nominated for a TAA McGuffey award for textbook longevity in 1999. Nissen said the American Society of Interior Designers has also been helpful in her writing career. She has met a lot of interior designers and has been able to use their work for illustrations in her book. She started an authors' network within the Interior Design Educators Council so that authors could exchange experiences and new authors could talk to experienced authors about the process. "No organization, though, is as supportive of authorship and publishing as TAA," she said. "That is the single best find, I think." Organization is critical in being an author, said Nissen: "You wouldn't be a new author if you didn't have the ideas. But some people don't have the organization in their life to get it done. Determine when you will have blocks of uninterrupted time. I found it frustrating if I didn't work on it continually. You can't say you'll do it 15 minutes here and there because all you'll be doing in that time is starting over." Don't spend all of your time researching and second-guessing yourself, said Nissen: Just do it. "I spent enormous amounts of time doing research. I had self-doubts about whether I had the facts to back it up. That's important, but at some point you have to write it down. Get it down. You can refine it, edit it, subtract from it, add to it, but get it down. People walk around with ideas for books for years but never get to the point of just doing it." Nissen says although her work has consumed her life, she also likes to travel and read when she has time. She has an interest in golf and would like to take it up. She met her husband Howard Goodman, a political consultant, while he was doing a statewide political campaign. They were married in 1980. — reported by Kim Pawlak, 1999 |
