All posts by jesolheim

Pod Commitment: Meetings as Part of the Writing Process

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2019 Fellow and Edgar Award-winning novelist Caitlin Mullen reflects on working with her BookEnds pod. 

I’d applied to BookEnds because of a problem I suspect afflicts 99 percent of recently-minted MFAs: I had come out on the other side of my degree with a novel I cared about but the work the novel needed had outlasted my time in the program. I wasn’t entirely prepared for how aimless I would feel without the structure graduate school had provided: deadlines, camaraderie, close mentorship that helped me navigate through the first three drafts of my book. I was working, but deep down I knew I wasn’t doing the kind of work that the book needed: the harder, gutsier revisions that wouldn’t just improve the novel, but that would transform it.

 All of this changed when I started the BookEnds program and met my pod in person. During the program’s kickoff weekend in Southampton, Sheena Cook, Mike McGrath and I bonded over one another’s work, over books we all loved, over the writer’s conference craft talks and readings. And by the time we said goodbye we had firm ideas of the goals each podmate had for their novels and a schedule of work submission deadlines and video chats in our calendars. 

And we treated those deadlines and meetings as inviolable. Over the next four months we FaceTimed every week for at least two hours, sometimes longer. We stuck with our schedule even when we had to work long hours on our day jobs, when we were tired or under the weather, when we felt swamped with family obligations, when we traveled internationally (during one particularly memorable meeting I joined from Dublin, Sheena joined from Edinburgh, and Mike from Portland, Maine.) We showed up not because it was an obligation, but because the process was working. Every time we ended one of our FaceTime sessions I felt buzzed: with the pleasure of my pod’s company, with their good ideas and their own commitment to their work. 

It’s rare to have readers willing to return to your work again and again, who can assess it within the context of that novel’s past iterations and the context of each writer’s strengths and weaknesses, their influences and their goals. We came to one another’s work as advocates, but respected each other enough to be honest and clear in our feedback. And reading my podmates’ novels was both pleasurable and instructive: putting my editorial brain to work in service of their drafts helped me return to my own work with a sharper critical eye. Looking at novel-length manuscripts and their evolutions over these months hastened my understanding of my own project and its needs. A few months before BookEnds began, I wondered if I should walk away from my manuscript, stick it in the proverbial drawer and start something new. A few months in, with the help of Sheena and Mike and with my brain constantly humming with our weekly craft discussions and brainstorms, I could see the novel in its most fully realized form and finally, I understood exactly what I needed to do to get it there. 

Halfway through my fellowship year my book was acquired by a big five publisher. I continued to work on it with my pod as I awaited an editorial letter from my new editor at Simon and Schuster, compiling their suggestions for future revisions. When my editor sent me her notes I found they lined up perfectly with the latest round of suggestions from my pod, which fortified what I already knew: that Mike and Sheena knew my novel intimately, that their suggestions were astute and rooted in the aims of my book, in the potential they saw in it, and in their belief in my ability to get the work done. 

Publishing a book is certainly a gratifying experience in many ways but it also taught me that there is truth in what people say about the necessity of finding pleasure in the process—the only part of a book’s life cycle you have any control over. For me, working with my pod was one of the most singular and rewarding parts of that process. Sheena and Mike challenged me, made me a better writer, and made the book better in more ways than I can say, but it added something even harder to come by in the long and sometimes lonely path to publication: it was a necessary source of commitment, friendship and joy. 

Caitlin Mullen earned a BA in English and Creative Writing from Colgate University, an MA in English from NYU, and an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University.  She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Saltonstall Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Her debut novel, PLEASE SEE US, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

 

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.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice with Rebecca Morgan Frank

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Fellow Rachel León on our March 2022 BookEnds alumni group author event 

Rebecca Morgan Frank works across several genres and brought this interdisciplinary approach to her talk, entitled “There Were Nine Muses: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice.” She’s the author of four books of poetry, most recently Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon University Press), but she also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and collaborates with composers. Drawing on her rich artistic background, Morgan explained that not only can we draw inspiration from painters, composers, choreographers, and other non-writer makers, but also we can learn from them, and even “steal” their approaches. She gave us several examples, including prompts from Gregory Halperin’s The Photographer’s Playbook to see how to apply them to our writing. 

It was an idea I hadn’t considered. While I grew up writing stories and dabbled in poetry as a teenager, I’d always seen writing and visual art as separate spheres and resisted the idea the two could overlap, partially because I saw them at odds. I attended college on a significant art scholarship and was in the middle of taking studio classes for my art major when I had my first child. It was like I’d given birth to a new creative brain in the process: I felt unable to draw, sculpt, or paint, but inexplicably wanted to write fiction. I tried to describe my predicament to my art professor—I just can’t anymore… but it was inexplicable. I’ve long tried to make sense of it (could it have happened out of necessity as writing can be done quietly and in spurts, whereas I painted while listening to loud music and needed hours at a time?) but the reason matters less than the aftermath: I abandoned visual art in favor of writing. 

After Morgan’s talk, we had an informal discussion about the way we’d all switched to writing from another discipline—the contrast of the collaboration of music theater versus the solitude of writing and the physical limitations of the body to return to the demands of ballet in middle age. As a recent alum, I’m still getting to know those in the cohorts before my BookEnds year. I’ve been friends with Jennifer Solheim for years, so I knew she was a bassist, singer, and songwriter in several indie punk bands. But in conversation with Morgan, I discovered that Sheena Cook and April Darcy studied classical music prior to writing; Daisy Alpert Florin was in musical theater; Sue Mell, like myself, was first a visual artist; and like our guest speaker, Marian Donahue was once on track to become a professional ballerina. It was delightful to learn all of us shared a creative lineage that didn’t start with writing. 

We also discussed how returning to art forms—or exploring new ones— can help our writing practice. For example, Marian’s novel is structured like an art exhibit, and she’s begun delving into art herself. Sue returned to visual art to design the cover for her novel, Provenance (out July 2022 from Madville Publishing) and Jennifer’s novel Interstitial centers around a rock band. April recently returned to playing the piano, while Daisy is taking lessons and finds comfort in the freedom to do it for enjoyment without the pressure of having to be good at it. This is something I could relate to: I took up dancing on my fortieth birthday for nothing but my own pleasure. 

Creating for enjoyment is something we can lose as writers when we get mired in the goal of publishing. Another thing Morgan addressed was the two sides of the writing process: the creative side, where our imaginations reside, and the publication realm, which is task-driven, applying, submitting, and getting our work into the world. While both spheres are necessary, we want to keep them separate when we’re creating. One way we can do that is through bodily practice—the physicality forces us to leave behind things like social media, which is notorious for distracting us, yes, but also pulls us into the marketplace of competition. She quoted the late Martha Graham, modern dancer and choreographer, who said, “This is not competition, there is no competition. You’re in competition with one person only and that’s the individual you know you can become.”

Being part of a supportive writing community like BookEnds and the alumni group helps remind us of that quote. Despite how it can feel—particularly with social media—we aren’t in competition with other writers. Rebecca Morgan Frank’s nourishing and inspiring talk reminded us of that, and how we each have a unique sensibility and can draw from our past creative backgrounds. Perhaps writing and visual art aren’t as antithetical as I thought when I was a new parent. Maybe it’s time for me to return to see how these art forms speak to each other through my own practice. 

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Fiction Editor for Arcturus and Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, Entropy, Nurture, Necessary Fiction, (mac)ro(mic), The Rupture, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere.

Spring News Round-Up

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The first great news from BookEnds: we received close to 60 applications this year! Thanks so much to all of the amazing and talented applicants for their interest in the program. We’re immersed in so much great reading.

We’ve also had some remarkably great news from our fellows and alums:

  • Vanessa Cuti had a short story featured in Best American Short Stories, a second story was included in the Distinguished BASS list as well. 
  • April Darcy is the recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist Award from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. April was also given an Honorable Mention for the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award.
  • Alison Fairbrother’s BookEnds novel The Catch is forthcoming with Penguin Random House on June 21, 2022.
  • Daisy Florin’s BookEnds novel My Last Innocent Year is forthcoming with Holt in January 2023.
  • Kathleen Gibbons has been nominated for two Pushcart awards for her debut short story publications.
  • Haley Hach won Carve Magazine’s 2021 Editor’s Choice Award.
  • An excerpt from Maggie Hill’s BookEnds novel Hoops was published in Cleaver Magazine. 
  • Celine Keating and Greg Phelan are co-leading the Novel Incubator, a yearlong program offered by Project Writer Now, a writing studio Greg co-founded. As peer artist leaders, they are having a lot of fun drafting a new novel along with the 10 participants.
  • Sue Mell’s BookEnds novel Provenance is forthcoming with Madville Publishing on July 21, 2022. Sue also won the Chestnut Review 2021 Chapbook Prose Prize.
  • Coco Picard’s BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press on August 16, 2022.
  • Jennifer Solheim was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize.
  • Rachael Warecki had a MacDowell Fellowship in autumn 2021.
  • Dan White is launching a new literary journal called L’Esprit.
  • Nearly a dozen additional BookEnds fellows have found representation with agents, and are either on submission or will be very soon.

BookEnders are also busy at work with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions, the alums monthly 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 in 2022!

What My Mentor Taught Me: Scott Cheshire on Scene, Line, and Sequence

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2021 Fellow D.W. White on working with longtime BookEnds mentor Scott Cheshire. 

My novel The Seachamber follows a young woman, Elizabeth, during the extended weekend of her younger sister’s wedding in 1994 Santa Monica, California. When I first started the project, it was written in a fairly conventional third-person, which did not add much to the book’s goals. By the time I started BookEnds, it had developed into a very close third, focused on Elizabeth, and exploring high modernist mechanical techniques and theory — in the vein of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Lucy Corin — something that, although very effective in rendering Elizabeth’s thoughts and realizing the themes of memory, time, and individuality, were challenging and demanding. Further, I was very invested in centering The Seachamber narrative in its literary ancestry, in conversation with the books that had inspired it. 

Scott was the ideal mentor for these concerns. We spent several meetings discussing books I should read (for example, he’s a great fan of Don DeLillo), and I was able to begin exploring areas of literature new to me. 

We  also worked on the deeper issues of perspective and pacing within The Seachamber itself. In particular, he helped me address the progression of scenes that take place during family meals. In these scenes, the narration doesn’t employ summary  or time-jumps. The Seachamber employs and relies on temporal compression to give weight to the plot, so there is always the danger of running aground on the shores of ennui. In fact, this had been a considerable issue for me in the novel’s early drafts: how to keep the reader engaged even when the protagonist is disaffected or bored. Although this problem was largely resolved through future revision (essentially, Elizabeth ended up having more going on during the weekend), the meal sequence presented a similar risk. 

Scott pointed out that in order to avoid redundancy and reader fatigue, I might sequence them to make each one build in some way on the rest, despite the fact that they occur at intervals throughout the narrative. This consisted of taking each meal scene — there are four in total, spread out across the book — and thinking about them as a linked progression, rather than isolated scenic moments. Scott’s idea was deceptively simple — progress each of the four different meals my course, and treat them in revision as if they were all one long meal. 

Thus, during the first dinner, the narrative entity focuses on the wine, and the time signature (to borrow narrative theorist Gerard Genette’s term) is distended during the ordering and serving of drinks. In the second, several chapters later, the narration places an emphasis on appetizers, main course, and desserts. To do this, I used a few techniques, the first being “pause” (another term from Genette) to slow down the movement of the narration. There is, essentially, a higher text-to-fictive-event ratio, the amount of space used to narrate each minute or second is increased in these moments relative to others. This space is then usually given over to a detailed rendering of Elizabeth’s consciousness, which in turn is accomplished in what comparative literature scholar Dorrit Cohn terms “quoted monologue,” the first person present tense running of a character’s thoughts within a third person narrative moment, which allows unfiltered access to the character’s interiority and mental state. Finally, I increased the amount of detail for the portion of the meal in question. In these ways, I was able to indirectly emphasize certain parts of each meal — which was the goal for this process — while also allowing more space to explore my protagonist Elizabeth’s mind at certain moments of heightened plot intensity — which is a goal for the book as a whole. 

This great advice helped me to change the reading experience for each of the meal scenes while retaining the authenticity of their happenings. This type of thinking, too, helped with other areas in The Seachamber where I worried about redundancy, and so Scott’s advice was key in bringing the manuscript to a more advanced state. 

Each precise sentence-level decision in a novel comes with a world of literary theory, history, and philosophy behind it. By finding a new way to incorporate the type of Modernist techniques that aid in the rendering of consciousness, not only was I able to depict the meal scenes in a fresh way, but I was able to continue to explore the core raison d’être of my novel. Elizabeth’s setting and struggles as a character are emblematic of the transition from the Victorian and Edwardian novel to the Modernist one—the rise of individualism and the fracturing of traditional society—while also suggesting a parallel between the pre-9/11 world she inhabits with the European interwar period that spurred the elevation of consciousness in art and literature. By incorporating these techniques into The Seachamber, I hope not only to render my protagonist with greater verisimilitude and depth, but also to weld her technical foundation to her literary ancestry as a fictive entity and her intellectual pursuits as a character, thereby unifying the book’s philosophy. 

D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he serves as Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from The Florida Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Rupture, The Review of UnContemporary Fiction, Fatal Flaw, Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, and elsewhere. A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He is on Twitter @dwhitethewriter. 

In Treatment?

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Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin on when therapy scenes work in a novel, and why they often don’t—yet are still invaluable to the writing process.

In an early draft of Sheena Cook’s novel, A Tender Hate, Scottish detective Iris Larkin is ordered to go to therapy when her personal issues threaten her ability to do her job. If therapy was a way for Iris to work out her issues, it was also a way for Sheena to discover what those issues were.

“I was trying to work out on the page the secrets Iris wasn’t telling anybody, the secrets I didn’t even know,” Sheena, a BookEnds fellow, said.

There were seven therapy scenes in the draft Sheena submitted to her mentor, Meg Wolitzer, at the end of 2018. At Meg’s suggestion, she cut them down to three. But when the book went on submission, one editor suggested cutting the scenes altogether.

“She told me the scenes did not move the plot forward,” Sheena said. “It was a surprise, and I was sad to take them out.”

When I heard Sheena’s story, I was well into a revision of my own novel, which included scenes where my main character, Isabel, goes to therapy in the aftermath of a sexual assault. At the time, I considered whether or not to cut the scenes but, in the end, decided to keep them.

The scenes remained in my draft throughout my BookEnds year and were still there when the book went on submission. It was only when my editor, Caroline Zancan at Henry Holt, did a close edit that she suggested I remove the scenes. 

“I think you needed to write those scenes to get insight into Isabel’s character and motivations,” Caroline wrote, “but you don’t need to spell out those motivations so neatly for us.”

Like Sheena, I was surprised, but when I looked closely at the scenes, I could see the novel didn’t need them. Aside from a few exchanges, which I reassigned to other characters, I scrapped the scenes entirely.

All of which got me thinking: do scenes of therapy in novels ever work? 

“Therapists work well in fiction when they are used to move the action along,” said Sandra Leong, a BookEnds fellow and practicing psychotherapist. “They work less well as a form of exposition about a character.”

Therapy is central to the plot of BookEnds fellow Jennifer Solheim’s novel Interstitial, about a rock band on the rise. When Nate, the band’s lead singer, passes out on stage during a performance, he goes to therapy to understand what is happening to him. His therapist, Kathleen, is a former musician and working with Nate brings up issues for her about her lost music career. Therapy works in Interstitial because it is crucial to the central question of the novel: it defines Kathleen as a person after she leaves music. She plays a pivotal role in the band’s story, but—as Sandra explained as crucial to the role of therapists in novels—she also has a fully developed storyline of her own.

Therapy can also work in fiction if it leads to an explosive revelation that causes change in the novel. In Pat Conroy’s 1986 bestseller The Prince of Tides, for example, what is revealed in therapy is a secret so dark and long buried, it clarifies what has happened to the characters up to that point.

But, Leong points out, those kinds of breakthroughs are rare in therapy and can feel contrived in fiction. “More often than not, therapy is a slow drip of information,” she said.

While sending your character to therapy can be a useful exercise, those scenes don’t always need to appear in the final work. When considering whether or not to use therapy in a piece of fiction, Caroline says it’s important to distinguish what you as the writer need to know about your character and what needs to be on the page.

“The things that often come up in therapy,” she said, “are often more powerful as the subtext rather than the text of the novel. It’s important for you to know these things, but let us see them at work in the characters’ actions and interactions.”

In the end, Sheena removed the therapy scenes from her novel, keeping only the most essential points, which she lets Iris muse on throughout the novel. But even though the scenes didn’t stay, she doesn’t regret writing them. 

“I learned so much about Iris by writing those scenes,” she said. “And besides, I love eavesdropping on other people’s secrets.”

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her novel My Last Innocent Year will be published by Holt in 2023.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Pleasure and Faith in Writing with Alice McDermott

Drafting, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , ,

Fellow J. Greg Phelan on our November 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event 

I was having lunch with my mom’s three close friends from childhood. It was the first time we’d seen each other since my mom passed away, and her friends wanted to mark the occasion with a drink. I told them I couldn’t, that I had to keep my wits about me as that night I was going to interview my favorite author on Zoom. 

“Who?” they asked. When I told them, Aunt Kay, my mom’s buddy since junior high, smiled in joy and recognition. 

“Alice McDermott is my hero,” she said. “I feel like I know her, and she knows me.” 

Anybody who’s read Alice’s work knows what Aunt Kay means. (“Aunt Kay’s one of my people,” Alice said, when I told her the story.) 

I’ve been hooked on Alice McDermott’s work since Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel. I felt like I knew her and she knew me, and my family, too. I don’t know of any other living writer whose work has touched me more as a reader and inspired me more as a writer, to slow down and observe the extraordinary moments of ordinary people, to seek meaning, wisdom, and truth in their stories. 

Her most recent book is her first of nonfiction, What About The Baby?, a wonderful collection of insightful essays on writing and craft based on her lectures at Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as her 23 years teaching creative writing at Johns Hopkins.

What an honor and privilege it was for me to interview her for our BookEnds Alum’s Visiting Writing Series, to ask her variations on the same question: How do you do it? Evoke such richly observed lives with such compressed, beautiful, seemingly effortless prose. Here’s what I learned. 

Alice makes the time and space to write, doing her best to keep distractions and self-doubts out of the room, so she’s alone with the words on the page. She writes badly for as long as it takes—which, she reminds us, is sheer hell—as she works and reworks sentences, keeping the faith that she’ll get where she needs to go in due time. 

The reason she has faith to keep at it is because she’s experienced moments of transcendence herself, as a reader––when, as she put it, “we read something and felt like it changed our lives, hit us in the spine, gave us a new way to look at the world. We just fall in love with a character or a setting or a situation or a voice and we recognize the value of storytelling.” That’s what keeps her going: “This endless hope; it’s not based on nothing. It’s based on what I’ve experienced as a reader.”

She reads and rereads her works-in-progress constantly, looking for patterns, connection, and meaning, like a scholar would. That’s the way she finds the form of the story. “Constantly going back and seeing, ‘Well now, I know this, what do I make of that?’ is part of the pleasure, but also part of understanding the consequence and the logical movement of a story through time.”

Her emphasis on rereading led to my big epiphany, which seems obvious when you hear it out loud: We should bring the same high expectations we bring to reading books to reading our own works-in-progress.  

Indeed Alice advocates reading our own work with the same level of concentration, curiosity, and expectation as the books we love––all the while reminding ourselves, no matter how impatient we are to get it done, that unless we feel the same excitement and sense of discovery reading our own prose as we hope to feel as a reader, we still have work to do. 

“Language is the only tool the writer has,” she writes. 

So how does she do it?

Block out time to write, putting distractions and self-doubts out of the room. Have faith the work is worthwhile, knowing what you have experienced as a reader. 

Read widely and deeply, bringing the same curiosity and high expectations to your own work-in-progress as you do to any book. 

That’s it, really. Why make it any more complicated?

Alice McDermott shows and inspires us to understand that, simply, there’s pleasure to be had in the work, for us and our readers. That this pleasure is reason enough to keep going.

Greg Phelan was a BookEnds fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He co-founded a writing center, Project Write Now, where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently finishing a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.