Monthly Archives: June 2022

What My Mentor Taught Me: Matthew Klam on Finding the Emotional Heart

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2022 BookEnds Fellow Rachael Warecki reflects on working with longtime BookEnds mentor Matthew Klam.

“Do you consider yourself stoic?”

It was early February, three weeks into working with my mentor, Matt Klam, and we were discussing my protagonist’s emotional arc—or lack thereof. My novel, The Split Decision, is a speculative hardboiled noir, set in an alternate version of 1947 Los Angeles in which there are more women than men and California is on the verge of seceding from the United States. Against this backdrop, my homicide detective protagonist, Rita Mitchell, must solve the murder of a man she vaguely knows from her home neighborhood. I’d oomphed up the plot, thanks to help from my BookEnds pod throughout the fall. I’d tied the novel’s themes more clearly into the whodunit. But I couldn’t nail Rita’s emotional journey—the heart of the book.

I described the methods I’d tried so far and where they’d failed. I’d written small moments that were supposed to brim with symbolism and significance, only for them to read as limp and meaningless. I’d tried writing emotions as experienced through Rita’s physical sensations, only to have beta readers ask if she was on the verge of a migraine or seizure (I have these conditions, but my protagonist does not). I’d sidled up to Rita’s feelings, crab-like and obliquely, only to scamper right over them in favor of more plot.

Matt’s follow-up questions felt like a therapeutic intervention, writer-style, and at first I was hesitant to engage. I didn’t see how my feelings related to Rita’s emotional journey, especially since my attempts to imbue my protagonist with some of my own reactions had flopped. I’d followed that old adage, write what you know, but what I knew wasn’t relatable, at least thus far. “I don’t think I know how to write the emotional reactions that people seem to want,” I confessed. “I don’t experience emotions at that volume.”

Which is when Matt asked me if I was a stoic.

That question, and the conversation that followed, allowed me to view my protagonist’s emotional arc in a whole new light: I could let her be cold, dissociative, and alienating to all but a few of the novel’s other characters. Matt told me that Rita didn’t have to project all her emotions to the cheap seats. In fact, it made sense, based on her background and job, that action would be her reaction. But, Matt added, readers needed to understand why this was Rita’s way of dealing with fraught situations, and they needed to understand it right from the get-go.

I ended up writing a new beginning to my second chapter, in which I put my novel’s mystery plot aside and let Rita get messy. I showed why she had worked so hard to cultivate a stable life, and then gave her nine pages in which to feel out of control beyond the parameters of her job, in a situation not of her making, and to lose her shit. When I re-read this chapter toward the end of the semester, I saw how it worked on multiple levels. Not only did it give the reader necessary insight into Rita’s psyche, it also foreshadowed her brutal reactions to later events in the novel, when the case’s chaos upends her sense of normalcy.

Without Matt’s guidance—in particular, that therapy-style discussion of my protagonist, in which I felt seen and normalized and validated as a writer, and which prepared me to get to work—I never would have had the insight needed to write a scene just for the sake of the novel’s emotional journey. It was a concept I returned to again and again throughout my revisions. By letting my characters be more human in ways that aren’t always easily categorized or understandable, I’ve made The Split Decision into a more compelling page-turner, with the novel’s emotional stakes given as much weight and consideration as the intricacies of the plot. 

Rachael Warecki is a MacDowell Fellow whose short fiction has earned recognition in contests held by Tiferet, Glimmer Train, and American Short Fiction, in addition to being published in various literary journals. Her work has also received support through residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Wellstone Center. She is a graduate of the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program, was a 2021–22 BookEnds Fellow, and is originally from Los Angeles, where she currently resides.

The Talking Cure: Pods in Conversation

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2022 Fellow Jena Salon reflects on pod meetings. 

My novel The Way They Whispered follows two sisters, Nina and Cora, after a tragic accident has led to the death of their young brother. Both of them are devastated by the loss of their brother, but while Cora begins to open up into the world outside the family, Nina, undone by her guilt, retreats into her mystical and sometimes dark imagination. 

Coming into the BookEnds program with a complete first draft, I thought  that the success of the novel hinged on convincing the reader that Nina was not evil, but traumatized. They needed to feel for her, and buy into the imaginary world she created. In BookEnds, we send our podmates questions to consider about our work as they read and offer feedback in each three-hour session about our books.

So when I first met with my podmates, Jeff Perkins and Rashaun Allen, this was a question I asked outright: “Do you read Nina as evil?”

But while my instinct was correct—readers did need to understand Nina—I was asking the wrong question. Or rather, the questions I posed to my pod were not producing the answers that were most helpful. 

Instead, it was in the conversations, those three hours of time spent on my book alone every few weeks, that I began to learn what my novel needed. 

Pods are different from your typical readers. In my experience, at least, all the people who had generously read for me over the years would give me fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, maybe an hour of conversation. Maybe they would give me intensive line edits, maybe marginalia filled with love, excitement, confusion. These readers were always willing to answer questions I had, but  it was hard to excavate what I really needed to know. There was a guilt that built up over time when I wanted to ask them just one more small question. I blushed with embarrassment having to ask if my seventeenth version of a paragraph now solves the problem they’d pointed out. And in the conversation, between just me and this other person, I became trapped in my own perspective. 

With the BookEnds pods, time and care are built into the equation. They exist to sit with you in your discomfort, to care about your project. That’s their job. They are like your book’s grandparents, always proud, always interested, always invested, even though they’re not the one’s doing the day-to-day heavy lifting to shape and mold your book baby. Other people lose interest in your book, but not Grammie and Papa. You can ask questions, brainstorm solutions, circle back. Their curiosities, concerns and ideas feed off of each other, so in a way, I became less central. I could sit and listen. It was a luxury. 

It was during those pod meetings with Jeff and Rashaun— three full hours of time and space blocked off from the world, with nothing to do but talk about my book—that the magic happened. When we had finished talking about my specific questions, we had nothing to do but hold my book together. This was where the most useful conversations took place. We talked about my book outside of my expectations, guided by what moved Rashaun and Jeff. And because we were sitting there, with time and space to be in this world, they began to ask small questions which dug in deep, and proved to be the most revelatory.

Through those conversations I realized that my edits were not just about filling out Nina and adding a line of exposition here or there to explain why she had the idea, say, that she needed to get her sister to cut another little girl’s hair. The reader needed to understand the entire universe. Every character, the entire mythology. They needed to understand it viscerally, so that every individual choice made sense within the world of the novel. I loved and understood Nina already. But I needed to do the work of crawling out of my own head, and putting my heart—Nina’s heart—thread by thread onto the page. 

Thanks to conversations with Jeff and Rashaun, I was able to flesh out Nina’s belief systems, why she made certain decisions, what she knew and didn’t know, how she cobbled together her knowledge. We talked through how her thoughts impacted her feelings. We were talking about my characters as if they were human. Doing that forced me to answer questions as deeply as if they were living in the world. 

Jena Salon’s most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Litro, Identity Theory, Annalemma, BOMB, and Bookforum. 

Summer News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels

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We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House, June 21, 2022)
  • Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville Publishing, July 19, 2022)
  • Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press, August 16, 2022)
  • Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, February 14, 2023)
  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, Spring 2023)

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions and #1000wordsofsummer, the alumni meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!

Slack Therapy: How My BookEnds Pod Became My Writing Support Network

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As the new BookEnds cohort gets underway with podwork, 2020 Fellow Colleen Curry reflects on working with her pod during the fellowship. 

By the first time I met my BookEnds podmates in person, I’d already read their works in progress. I was so impressed — and intimidated — by how good their books were. I was so nervous to meet them. When BookEnds co-founder Susan Scarf Merrell excitedly introduced us at the Southampton Writers Conference, I realized how powerful it was to be introduced to writers through their work. Something formed instantaneously around us, something like being on a team, or part of a family. These were my people. I would root for every possible success for them, and help them achieve it — not because they were helping me in return, but because their work mattered to me.

During our fall semester, we meet biweekly for three-hour video calls, and in between those meetings, we Slacked — pretty much every day, nonstop, sharing all our ups and downs of the writing life. My BookEnds work was focused on revision — I had a lot of work to do on plot and scenes — but that fall with my pod was also about learning how to be a writer. When I started BookEnds, I’d brought a lot of my anxiety and insecurity into my work, and into my pod meetings. My voice was uncertain, on the page and on screen.

A few weeks into the fall semester of my BookEnds year, I sat down to work on my revisions and decided to check Slack before I got started. There was a barrage of messages waiting for me. “Guys,” April had written, “I’m alive, but barely.” An emergency doctor’s appointment had derailed her week, and her pages were going to be late. “But how are you guys doing? Hanging in there?”

This wasn’t unusual. We were all feeling the pressure of writing as fast as we could, with every ounce we had toward our submission deadlines while balancing jobs, parenting, illnesses, and the rest of the responsibilities of adult life. And this was all as the clock was ticking down to a global pandemic that we had no idea was coming. 

Jenn was quick to respond. She’d had a time like that, when she was struggling to balance workload and life, and she promised it would get easier. The fact that we’re writing at all through these moments is a testament to us, she said. “That gives me hope,” April had written. “Thank you so much, poddies.”

Jenn had been getting up before dawn for weeks to revise her novel’s structure, and she’d just cracked open a pivotal scene between two of her characters. “Heartbreaking,” she’d written. “I’m so proud of you,” April responded.

And then there were questions from them both: “How’s it going with you, Colleen???”

I had avoided responding for a few days — and I had been avoiding my book for more than a few days. Every time I sat down to rework a scene, or write a new one, I was flooded with doubts: Was the work ever going to be good enough? Was I smart enough to actually pull this off? Had I read enough good books? Did I even know how to write?

I reread our messages a few times, noticing the effect they were having on me, the sense of comfort and solidarity and inspiration from a few brief messages. I wrote back to my podmates, and then I turned to my work, buoyed, ready to tackle my revisions.

Each time I submitted work, Jenn and April arrived to our meetings with pages and pages of notes — careful, gentle, thorough, brilliant insights into what I was trying to do and how I might try to do it more effectively. They spoke to me like friends, but also mentors who had read and written a little bit more than I had, who had seen some writing tics and could tell me how to get rid of them, who could point me toward authors who might help me figure out a better way to show what I was trying so hard to show. And they shared their struggles, their worries about their work, about their books, about how to fit writing into their busy lives. And slowly I began to see that I could write — and not only that, but I could revise, work hard, and fit writing into my life. As the weeks went by, I grew more confident. With their support, I realized: Hey, maybe I can actually do this.

Then the pandemic happened, and our already intense year received an enormous, world-altering shock. Susie and our other BookEnds co-founder, Meg Wolitzer, swooped in with heroic, superhuman support: our cohort met weekly to talk about how to proceed — and sometimes, how we just couldn’t proceed at all. And all the while, Jenn and April kept Slacking, kept texting, kept checking in with updates. Life got even crazier for all of us, writing became even harder, but somehow, we made it through our year with manuscripts that were ready for agents to read. More than that: we made it through with a new support system for our writing lives. 

It’s been nearly three years now since April, Jenn, and I first started our work together, and we just met a few weeks ago for a video chat about Jenn’s latest stories. It’s such a joy to continue reading her characters after so long. This time when we met, I wasn’t anxious or uncertain. I was excited to see my friends, and to spend a couple of hours together talking about writing. As long as we’re all writing, and reading, and Slacking about it, there’s too much to be grateful for to waste time worrying. That goes for the writing, too. I don’t show up to the page worrying anymore, at least not the way I used to. I can do this work. I have enough supporters in this program who have told me that — over and over again, for years — and I’ve decided to believe them. 

My BookEnds book is on its way. It was like a little egg back in 2019, a fragile egg I was carrying around very carefully trying not to break. It took awhile for me to realize that I had to break it in order for the thing inside to emerge, to grow into the thing I wanted it to be. There was no better nest than my little pod. It transformed my relationship with writing, and with myself. 

Colleen Curry was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020 and is working on her first novel.