Monthly Archives: July 2021

What My Mentor Taught Me: Karen Bender on Setting

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Following graduation, 2021 BookEnds Fellow Rachel León reflects on the focus of work with her mentor.

In her brilliant memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado states, “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” 

Machado reminds us of the exchange that should be happening between story elements. Setting affects plot, which affects characters, which affects point of view. All the elements should be in conversation with one another. Except they all must be present for the exchange to work, and setting was largely absent from the draft of my novel I submitted in December, the one my mentor, National Book Award finalist Karen Bender, read. 

Karen provided thoughtful, generous notes on my manuscript, offering me a clear map forward to make the novel stronger. The manuscript was in good shape structurally, though I had too many point-of-view characters (thirteen at the time). My two main tasks were compression and expansion. There was plenty to cut, but also so much I needed to build. Karen noted how my characters were floating in space; they were rarely grounded in scene and setting, which I’d shied away from because I’d thought no one would want to read about my city. 

The novel is set in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, which often finds itself on lists like “Worst Places to Live in America.” Rockford is known for its high crime and unemployment rates, but what I think defines the city is its eternal optimism and dedication to improvement. I hadn’t considered how Rockford’s determination to triumph against-the-odds echoes the themes of my novel, which Karen described as a book version of The Wire focused on the foster care system. 

Because I had so many characters and storylines, Karen suggested opening the novel with an overview of Rockford in a way that could introduce the different characters. Was there a way I could bring everyone together? Not really. The intersection of the characters’ lives happens gradually by circumstance. So I played around with the idea before writing an opening narrated by the city itself. I loved it, but ultimately, had to scrap it. Karen was right: it didn’t quite work. I needed to start with characters, in a scene incorporating the setting. Karen had said she’d love to see more of Ebony, a queer white teen in foster care. It turned out Ebony’s sarcasm and view of Rockford was the perfect entry point into the story. 

But the failed attempt at an opening was, of course, not wasted. Not only was I able to rework some of my favorite sentences and sprinkle them throughout the manuscript, the exercise got me searching for places to infuse more Rockford into the manuscript. It also got me thinking about when the story took place, something I hadn’t previously considered. After writing about a citywide celebration held in honor of Rockford native Fred VanVleet after the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, I wanted to include that, too. 

Once I had a time period, I began researching the weather and what was happening locally, information that altered the storyline. The novel opens around Father’s Day, but clarifying it was June 2018 made me realize that was during a torrential storm that devastated some residents and left others unscathed—a story opportunity. It also ended up deepening Ebony’s character as I needed a die-hard basketball fan, and making her a small forward on her high school team meant she could be obsessed with Kawhi Leonard, who was traded to the Raptors in July 2018. Ebony had much more depth when she was good at something beyond being sassy. 

When Karen encouraged me to ground the manuscript, I had no idea focusing on setting would also add character depth and strengthen both the plot and themes of the novel. But like Machado said: places should be more than just places in our work, and that’s now true of my novel’s setting. Karen helped me see how “Rockford” my manuscript is—despite my characters being affected by economic and racial disparities, they rise up, striving for something better, which gives my novel a sense of hopefulness. In fully embracing Rockford as the setting—both the aspects that land it on the worst city lists, and its many virtues that go unnoticed—I finally activated all the story elements and made them work together. 

Rachel León is a social worker and writer whose work has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, West Trade Review, and other publications. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Christina Baker Kline on Perspective and Narrative Closeness

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , , , ,

Jennifer Solheim’s interview with Christina Baker Kline is part of the Reader’s Guide in the paperback edition of Kline’s latest novel The Exiles, out today from Custom House.

When I learned Christina Baker Kline would be my faculty mentor for BookEnds, to say I was excited was an understatement. I had such admiration for her novel A Piece of the World (2017), a fictionalized account of the life of Christina Olson, the woman featured in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Kline’s work is deceptive: her fiction reads like a glide on a porch swing and yet behind the sense of being gently carried along lies a  meticulous engineering. Each section of A Piece of the World reads like a prose poem, yet taken together  the narrative transports you back to the mid-twentieth century, to a creaky farmhouse with no running water or electricity and into the bodily experience of a brilliant young woman who was taken out of school to work the family farm, and whose body grew increasingly incapacitated by an undiagnosable condition.

My novel is set in Chicago in 2001, about an indie rock band in family therapy. I’d begun working in 2012, and over the years, the world of my novel had become far less contemporary. For example, the first completed draft in 2015 included characters sending text messages, something that was impossible in 2001. In the revision Christina first read, I had tried a narrative perspective that alternated between an omniscient narration that took a long view of history—from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016—and close third in the narrative present of 2001, with three of the main characters. 

One of the first things that Christina pointed out was the way the omniscient perspective undercut the action. She suggested I stay closer to my characters in the narrative present, as the heat of the story lay with them, in that time. Furthermore, she said, with three points of view, there were times it was difficult to distinguish one perspective from another. Even though I had written those scenes in the close third person, it wasn’t close enough. Looking back, I think I’d been so concerned about trying to get the historical details and perspective right  that I’d lost sight of the particularity of my characters. 

Christina suggested I try writing a scene or two from each perspective in the first person. I did and was excited to see how the scenes seemed to shake themselves out, unfurl. I began to see  how the words, phrases, and obsessions of each of the point-of-view characters distinguished them from one another.

But another problem quickly became apparent: if I was writing in the past tense, I needed to figure out the point of telling—that is, from where, when and why the characters were narrating the story. So I checked in with Christina again, and her suggestion made perfect sense, but also felt antithetical for a work set in historical time: write not only in the first person, she said, but also in the present tense. 

This was, in fact, how she had written A Piece of the World—from Christina Olson’s perspective, in the present tense. Since Olson, a marginalized cultural figure, was historically elusive, Kline’s first-person present rendering of her life not only brought the reader into her experience, it lent a narrative intimacy with the character that simply wasn’t possible if she had crafted her story with more distance, whether in time, space, or both. 

As I dove into revising the first scenes as Christina had suggested, I experienced a disorientation that manifested as physical vertigo. And yet, after two mornings of revising in the first person present, I was certain this was the way to go. 

Why? First, and most importantly, it allowed me to access my characters with total immediacy—I was dropped into the moment with them, and by writing as if they experienced each  moment,  the world became tactile and palpable, the actions and dialogue of the other characters immediate and visceral. 

This brings us to the second reason why the first-person present can so well serve a novel set in historical time. Where historical events and eras are often written from the perspective of those in power, fiction can bring us into the experience of those at the margins—those whose stories go untold. 

What I learned from my mentor is that narrative perspective is a negotiation of time and space not only between text and reader; but also between character and writer. As Christina and I discussed, we can take these Emily Dickinson lines as an edict for writing fiction set in historical time: “Tell all the truth / But tell it slant / Success in circuit lies.” To bring my story into its time and place, I didn’t need an omniscient narrator to offer a history lesson. Rather, I needed to write my characters as they experienced their present, particular to their own lives, desires, fears, and motivations. 

Jennifer Solheim was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020, and now serves as the program’s Associate Director.