All posts by jesolheim

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. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Susan Scarf Merrell on Cutting Timelines and Embracing the Blank Space

Mentors, Revision, ,

Alum Daisy Alpert Florin reflects on working with the BookEnds Founding Director.

I applied to BookEnds with a manuscript I’d been working on for four years. The story of an affair between a college student and her professor, the novel shifted back and forth between two timelines: 1998, when the affair takes place, and 2016, when the two main characters meet again. My biggest challenge was how to combine the two timelines and also how to find the right ending, something that had eluded me so far.

I had tried combining the timelines in a few different ways. I’d put the 1998 section first followed by 2016, a structure used by Susan Choi in her novel My Education. I’d also tried starting with the 2016 section, allowing the novel to unfold like a long reminiscence like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Working with my BookEnds pod, I spent the fall working on braiding the timelines together, similar to Julie Buntin’s Marlena or Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa. This was the version I turned in to my mentor, Susie Merrell, in December. But I knew it wasn’t quite working and I still hadn’t found a way to finish the novel; the draft still had sections marked “FINISH THIS” and “SCENE TBD.”

When Susie and I met at her house in early January, she asked me to bring the whole manuscript printed out and separated into scenes. We laid it across her kitchen floor, the 1998 sections on one side and the 2016 scenes on the other. Right away, I could see how unwieldy it was and also how haphazardly I had incorporated the timelines. I started to worry—how had I worked for half a year and not managed to solve this problem? And what would I do now?

“You know what?” Susie said, looking around. “I don’t think you need the 2016 timeline,” and in that moment, I knew she was right. Susie walked me through the pages and showed me how little information was being conveyed in the 2016 sections and also that the second timeline had no real tension or arc. The story—the real story—was happening in the 1998 sections. I felt instantly relieved, as if I’d been walking around with three arms and someone showed me how much easier it would be to have only two. 

I went home and got to work. Still, early on, I had doubts. Was I eager to discard the second timeline because I just couldn’t figure it out or because it was the right thing to do? But Susie encouraged me to push forward. I worked from January to June on the revision, this time starting in a different place and cutting 55 pages of 2016 scenes. I could feel right away that the novel was sharper and tighter and with Susie’s clear and precise editing, I knew exactly how to get to the end. 

Early on, Susie asked why I had wanted the 2016 timeline in the first place. First, because I wanted the book to have a wistful, retrospective tone, to capture the feeling we have as adults when we look back on the actions of our youth. But Susie showed me I could do that by making it clear that the main character is narrating from a very specific time and place in the future. Whenever her voice intrudes on the 1998 narrative, I made sure it was emanating from this place.

Second, because my book asks questions about consent and sex and power, I felt in some ways obliged to include references to Trump and #MeToo. But Susie showed me how these details threatened to swallow up the novel I was better suited to write. I still think my novel is political, but once I let go of the idea of writing a capital-P political novel, I was able to complete a draft I was happy with.

Do I miss the second timeline? Not really, because it’s still very present for me. I needed to write those scenes for the rest of the story to make sense. Once I knew what was there, I no longer needed it in the same way, and, like scaffolding, it could be removed. Every writer throws out material, but it is never really gone. The 2016 sections of my novel are no longer on the page-—but they still exist in blank space.

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her personal essays have appeared online in Full Grown People, Motherwell Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. Her novel My Last Innocent Year is represented by Margaret Riley King at William Morris Endeavor.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Suzzy Roche on letting the note fail

Literary Community, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fellow Sheena MJ Cook reflects on our May 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event.

Suzzy Roche is a founding member of the singing group The Roches who has recorded over fifteen albums. Her debut novel Wayward Saints (Hyperion/Voice) was a selection of the Spring 2012 B&N Discover Great New Writers Program, and her second novel The Town Crazy (Gibson House Press) was published in 2020. Since she was a teenager, Suzzy’s life as an artist, actor, singer and dancer has interwoven with her writing; the influence of music and lyrics on her writing is part of what we invited her to discuss with us, but we came away with an understanding of Suzzy’s commitment to her artistic process over time that goes far beyond the influence of one practice over another.

During the couple of weeks since the event, while I have been finishing a revision of my novel manuscript, what kept coming back to me was when Suzzy said that as she gets older, she can no longer reach the musical notes she used to. Yet, instead of fleeing from the note, which is her impulse, she makes herself stay there. “Let it fail,” she said. “Let it go where it’s going. Allow yourself to do it ungracefully. Go towards it, stay with it.” It’s that imperfection—the desperation of an attempt at the right note, listening to the singer aim for a note and not quite making it—that breaks open our hearts.

Suzzy talked about Marilyn Monroe having a sorrow about her, how everyone wanted to touch that place of pleasure and pain, the part that was falling apart, utterly human and not “figured out.” 

It made me think of Leonard Cohen’s lines “there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” It also made me think of the polio in Joni Mitchell’s left hand, which forced her to experiment with open tunings, allowing her to form the chord shapes that still break open our hearts today. Mitchell stayed with the failure, worked around the problem and strengthened a different part of her.

By contrast, I was trained in classical piano and if I hit a wrong note, I got a wooden ruler across my knuckles. It was physically frightening to fail, to hit the wrong note. My mother sang the correct note (with its name: B flat minor!!!!) from the kitchen while scraping mud off a basin of potatoes. When Suzzy told us it was not only fine not to hit the right note—and to stay on it, let it go where it wants to go—I wished she could go back down the years and have a word with my piano teacher.

I reread Lily King’s Writers and Lovers last week, about an aspiring novelist whose editor says, “Linger here. Let the reader feel this.” When she stayed with it, felt the moment, her understanding of it expanded. Things began to thrum across the book.

Suzzy said that if she is beginning to unkindly attack what she’s working on, she takes a break, moves to something else, then comes back to it. “I’m going to sing you again,” she says to her work. When she sticks with it, allowing it to become itself, it always finds its good place. “Let it be you, the gentle, imperfect you.” Sometimes it takes years to open up. She lets go of the intellect and lets in an openheartedness. It makes her vulnerable, allowing herself to be seen, however imperfectly.

As an inflection point, when the group discussed whether or not we listen to music as we write and how it affects the mood of our work, Meg told us that Kazuo Ishiguro thought he’d finished the manuscript of Remains of the Day, but then heard Tom Waits singing “Ruby’s Arms.” The crack in Waits’ voice as the song’s narrator says goodbye to Ruby made Ishiguro allow his emotionally buttoned-up butler a moment of having a crack in his emotions. Here it comes again: the crack in everything. It’s as if the breaking heart of Tom Waits’ soldier funneled itself through Ishiguro, cracked open the heart of his butler and the light got in.

So in my revision work after we met with Suzzy, I decided to do an experiment by listening to a song on repeat during breaks from editing the final draft of my manuscript. I had a scene near the end that wasn’t failing, exactly—it just wasn’t as satisfying as it could be. So, instead of avoiding it, I decided to “Suzzy” it: stay with the failing note, press on it, watch where it wanted to go, be kind to it. The scene is about a character who has helped someone dear to them die. I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World” on repeat.Williams sings about everything the person choosing to leave the world will never feel again: the breath from their own lips, the touch of fingertips, a sweet and tender kiss, wearing someone’s ring, someone calling your name, somebody so warm cradled in your arms, dancing with no shoes, the pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one. 

In the old draft of the scene, my character only glanced lightly on the emotion behind the act, or rather I, the writer, had only touched lightly on the emotion. I listened to the song on repeat, I felt in my own body what my character might have been feeling, then I went back into the scene and let more emotion in, more senses, more loss. I stayed with the work, treated it kindly, sang it again, let it go where it wanted to, to an imperfect place—and finally, pressed “send” into the hands of a kindly stranger.

Zadie Smith says to “resign ourselves to the lifelong sadness that comes with never being satisfied” with the imperfection of our work. Perhaps this is an oblique complement to what Suzzy said: “It’s a gentle thing, this imperfection that comes with age. Be nice to the thing you’re trying to create and be nice to you, the creator of the thing.”

Sheena MJ Cook grew up on her family farm in the north of Scotland, became a lawyer in Edinburgh and London, then moved to the US and did an MFA in creative writing at Bennington. Her short stories and novel extracts have appeared in Two Serious Ladies, Literary Orphans and The Southampton Review, among other publications. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2018 and a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019, when she worked on her novel A Tender Hate. 

Dogged Submissions

Publication, Query letters, Submissions,

As a writer pitching your novel—or any other kind of work—your job is to be read. That’s the only job, and you have to get on it. A tough truth, told to a fellow alum, by BookEnds co-director Susie Merrell. But the most important words of encouragement—among so many—that she gifted to me, were in regard to the finished draft of my novel, Provenance. Play all sides of the street, Susie said at the end of my fellowship year, meaning query agents, submit to contests, and to independent presses.

I knew my literary novel would be hard to place in the current marketplace, so I took those words to heart. In fact, I promised, and there were plenty of days in which that commitment was the only thing that kept me querying and submitting. My Submittable queue and other tracking lists grew long. Provenance is my first novel, but I’m also a writer of short stories and flash nonfiction, and I was used to sending pieces out to ten or more places at a time, aiming for 100 rejections a year. (Yes—rejections, which means, in any given year, submitting much more.)

Writing a good query letter and synopsis—not to mention researching agents—often felt harder than writing the dang book. And, I’ll admit, I had little faith that I would ever get an agent’s request. But I’d promised to try, so I honed my query and in September 2020, I started sending out five queries a week, while still entering contests and submitting to independent presses. I also continued to write and submit shorter work. When my first request for the full manuscript came in, I was stunned. Then a flurry of others followed, and I decided to hold back on submitting to small presses. Contests seemed like such a long shot to me, that I kept entering those as I heard about them. 

Over the next six months, many agents passed on my query and many more never responded at all.  But I continued to get requests. Half those requesting agents passed. At the half-year point in March, I’d queried 176 agents. My plan was to wait three months, after which I would consider any queries I hadn’t heard back on as “ghosted.” Then I would start submitting to university and independent presses. 

In early April, I got a congratulatory email saying that Provenance was one of fifteen novels longlisted for Madville Publishing’s Blue Moon Novel Contest. Several writer friends urged me to “nudge” the agents that still had my full. I only ever hoped to be listed or placed in a contest to boost my bio or for just this kind of leverage. But I wanted to wait, because it was already clear to me that if, by some chance, I won, I would accept the prize—which included publication. 

And to my great shock, that’s exactly what happened. Provenance is slated to be published by Madville Press in the fall of 2022. For me, a very happy ending. It’s a long game—writing and trying to publish a literary novel. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Resources:

Two invaluable sources of information on the how-to of getting a book deal, both these amazing women offer additional (paid) services beyond the free listings here:

  • For researching agents and tracking your submissions:

Publisher’s Marketplace

Manuscript Wishlist 

Query Tracker

Duotrope 

  • For researching Independent Presses:

CLMP Directory

Entropy Magazine Where to Submit  

  • Literistic for contests and other submission opportunities  
  • And, of course, Poets & Writers (Agent Q & A’s, contests and other submission opportunities, small press database, and a hundred other things!) 

Sue Mell was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020 and holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her winning novel, Provenance, is slated for publication by Madville Press in the fall of 2022, and her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, was a semi-finalist for the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cleaver Magazine, Digging Through The Fat, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine, Newtown Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Whale Road Review.

Thank you, BookEnds Graduate Assistants!

Literary Community,

This year BookEnds has been incredibly lucky to have Erin Fahy and Hannah Thaggard as our graduate assistants. First-year students in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton, Erin and Hannah have proved themselves to be social media gurus and organizational geniuses, invaluable to our team. We are so grateful for everything they’ve done, and will miss them terribly when they move on to teaching undergraduates next year. Thanks a million to you both!

Erin Fahy
Hannah Thaggard

 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Paul Harding On Generating Heat In Writing

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, ,

In workshops we tend to talk about point of view and character rather than the psychological resistance we must overcome to realize the potential of our work. We shy away from discussing the challenges of the writing process in favor of the relative concreteness of craft. 

My BookEnds mentor, Paul Harding, didn’t shy away. Through his close reading and annotations of my work-in-progress, he helped me identify forms of self-sabotage and practical ways to remedy them. A case in point: how do we generate energy on the page? Sure, we know it when we read it: “the heat,” some call it. But how do you generate this heat? And how do you stop yourself from tamping it down?

Paul gave me vocabulary to think about this challenge, borrowing concepts from Newtonian mechanics to dramatize the opposing forces at work. 

First up is centrifugal force, which pushes energy outward to spin off in all directions. Also called inertia. (You guessed it, this one is bad). In prose this happens when the writing lacks focus. There’s an overabundance of themes, actions, characters, or information as if the writer is, as Paul described, jumping the rails to see what’s over here and what’s over there unintentionally creating a crippling and dreadfully familiar-to-me narrative sprawl. 

This happens not because we don’t have the technical chops or aren’t good writers. It happens because we fear our story isn’t sophisticated or original or interesting enough and so we keep accreting more stuff to our story. We fear commitment to this story, so we keep adding more in an attempt to hedge our bets, when hedging doesn’t work. The reader bounces from one idea to the next before the necessary connections are made to make the reader curious and interested enough to want to keep reading. The energy dissipates, leaving no heat. 

The solution is to resist succumbing to our anxieties and seeking answers outside the book but rather to stay in it––in the moment, in the story, in the character––trusting the answer lies within. That’s how we cultivate centripetal force––from Latin centrum, “center” and petere, “to seek”––directing the energy inward. Does this sentence convey exactly what I want to convey in the most vivid way possible? Does that sentence do the same, not by adding something new, but rather expanding and deepening what I just conveyed in the last sentence? That’s the way, as Paul showed me, going one sentence at a time. Staying in it. Staying present. That’s what staves off resistance, builds heat, makes art. 

Write this on a Post-It and stick to your monitor (I did):

Resist centrifugal forces! 

J. 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 on the Jersey shore called Project Write Now where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently working on a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.

Congratulations Caitlin Mullen!

Awards,

Caitlin Mullen has won the Mystery Writers of America 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Award for the Best First Novel. Her novel Please See Us was also named a New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2020. A BookEnds 2018-2019 Fellow, Caitlin is also a graduate of the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing & Literature. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Saltonstall Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. You can read more about the writing of Please See Us in an interview with Caitlin by BookEnds 2019-2020 Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin at Fiction Writers Review. Congratulations, Caitlin!

BookEnds Alumni Inaugural Speaker Event: Rebecca Makkai on Time in Endings 

Novel Tips for Novel Writers, , , ,

As part of our ongoing BookEnds community, the alumni group has started inviting authors to speak on different craft topics every other month. Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin reflects on our first invited author’s lecture, Rebecca Makkai’s “Closing Time: Chronological Shifts at the Story’s End.”  

As writers, we are taught to give a lot of thought to beginnings, to grab our reader with a compelling opening sentence, paragraph, page. We tend to place less emphasis on endings— although, as award-winning novelist Rebecca Makkai pointed out in her recent talk to the BookEnds alumni group, the ending of a novel or story is often where we find meaning.

The end of a piece, Makkai said, can be a moment of great opportunity when you, the writer, can break rules—including ones you’ve set for yourself—and experiment with dramatic shifts in tone, point of view or pacing. In her talk, Makkai focused on endings as they relate to time. Our relationship to time is heightened when we reach the end of a story or a novel, she said. We might be casting our mind back to what we’ve just read, soaking up our last moments in the world the author has created and also imagining what might come next, not just for the characters but for ourselves.

Makkai discussed different story and novel endings that experiment with time, dividing them into three categories: those that stay in the present, those that revisit the past and those that look ahead to the future. These temporal shifts are not necessarily connected to verb tense, although they can be; it’s more a question of where the energy lies, if it’s backward-looking or forward-looking, if it stays in the present moment or is some combination. The ending of a novel might flash back to a time earlier in the story, or even to a time before the story began as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. An author might choose to end on a moment of reflection, as in The Catcher in the Rye, or in a “freeze frame” moment like Rick Moody does at the end of The Ice Storm. Many novels end by imagining characters at some point in the distant future using a technique called prolepsis, as in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. A writer might also create an ending that combines time periods. At the end of his short story “Joseph,” for example, Etgar Keret describes the moment just before a suicide bombing and simultaneously projects into the future to let us know who will be killed. The combination of present with future adds to the pathos of the story’s ending.

I decided to parse the ending of one of the novels that most influenced my own recent work—Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—which ends with what Makkai would call a directed open ending, one in which a future outcome is strongly suggested but not explicitly described. In the last chapter, Wharton zips forward in time nearly thirty years, summing up decades of protagonist Newland’s life, those he has lived without his erstwhile lover Ellen—their relationship the central focus of the story—in just a few pages. By moving forward in this way, Wharton is telling us how life without Ellen has felt to Newland, colorless and drab; it is only when he has occasion to see her again that Wharton returns to scene level pacing. In the novel’s last scene, Newland, on a trip to Paris, sits for a long time on a bench beneath Ellen’s window. He sees a servant close Ellen’s shutters and, “as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.” 

We don’t know for certain that he will never see Ellen again, but there is a strong suggestion that he won’t. It should be a disappointment. After the journey Wharton has taken us on, we desperately want Newland to reunite with the woman he loves, and as modern readers, we believe in the possibility of second acts. So why is the ending so satisfying? Because Wharton remains true to her characters and the world she has created. A novel about duty, honor and sacrifice could have no other ending.

Makkai concluded her talk by encouraging us to look closely at endings, both as readers and as writers, and ask ourselves what they are doing in relation to time and with what effect. She also acknowledged that while the possibilities are endless, you’re never locked in. “Let go of the idea that there are right or wrong decisions, right or wrong choices,” she said. “You don’t need to try everything. You just pick something and you see.”

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her personal essays have appeared online in Full Grown People, Motherwell Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. Her novel My Last Innocent Year is represented by Margaret Riley King at William Morris Endeavor.