Category Archives: Creative process

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Cutting Characters with Meg Wolitzer 

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2024 Fellow Caitlin O’Neil discusses her work with BookEnds our co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

My BookEnds journey began with a missed e-mail, then a missed call. Somehow, Susie Merrell,  the co-director of the BookEnds program, finally found me and my messy manuscript, and told me, “This is a book.” What writer doesn’t want to hear that? What I didn’t understand yet was how little of what I had written belonged in that book, and how much excavating it would take to find the book within those pages. 

My work at BookEnds was largely that of paring away. First, the plot. There was way too much, and not enough that mattered. Then, point of view. There were too many perspectives where only one was needed. By the time I was paired with my mentor, co-director of the program Meg Wolitzer, my story was already transformed. What, I wondered, could happen next? 

My book is the story of former Senate staffer Franny Goff, who has wormed her way into her boss’s political family to become caretaker of their summer home on Cape Cod. When Meg read the current draft, the story was overstuffed with characters, both living and dead. In addition to Franny and her senator, there are his children Julia and FX, and two wives, Eileen (dead), and Helen (living).

So next, of course, came character. All my previous cutting away—my mantra became that of a baker who burns her cookies, “You can always make more”—made space for a story that mattered more to me and my many characters. I was generating reams of new prose; it was as exhausting as it was exciting. 

As we began our work together, Meg seemed to sense my fragility. I’d lost perspective on what was actually still in the story, what belonged and what didn’t. Meg, however, could see.

During our mid-term check-in, Meg gently guided me forward to the next phase of revision. I often found myself frantically typing during our calls because I never knew what part of her excellent advice would resonate and when. Her statements were always simple and logical, but I wasn’t always ready to hear them. Meg encouraged me to further refine and focus my thinking, to write “a crystal clear, very readable book.” To this end, she asked me to think about each of my characters. “If it feels busy, who do you need? And why do they matter?” And then, in a casual aside, “There may be other things, like Helen, that have to go.”

Our discussion was a brief to condense, focus, and think of the reader. The book was coming together, though because of all my many changes it now lacked an ending. Meg was urging me forward so I might write that ending. 

It wasn’t until hours after our phone call that her aside came back to me. There may be other things, like Helen, that have to go. She hadn’t told me to cut Helen, the senator’s second wife, but I felt that she had placed it there strategically, knowing I needed to hear it, but sensing I wasn’t ready. Of course, Helen had to go! How had I not seen it? 

I took her out of the book that afternoon in no less than ten minutes. That it was so simple to remove her made her superfluousness clear. And the effect on the book was immediate. The strife between Franny and her old boss Frank was immediately clearer without Helen playing interference, and Frank’s late wife Eileen hung over the book in new, more haunting ways.  Without Helen, the themes of the book rose to the surface and the plot began to sail.  

Who do you need? And why do they matter? These questions were simple questions, but profound in their wisdom.  In cutting character, I both unlocked and opened up the story I wanted to tell.

Caitlin O’Neil was a 2023-2024 BookEnds fellow at The Lichtenstein Center of Stony Brook University. Her work is published in Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she is an associate teaching professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

When Things Fall Apart: The Pod as Foundation

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2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier reflects on working with her BookEnds pod.

Writing a novel is such a long, strange process. The non-writers in my life tilt their baffled heads in pity: why go through all that? At least at BookEnds, we don’t have to do it alone.

During my first BookEnds residency, we were sharing our outlines, and it was suddenly painfully obvious that my manuscript had major issues. I came away from my outline presentation and discussion with a task list that seemed insurmountable. The novel lacked focus. It needed a single protagonist, and it had to be told from the point of view of the deeply dysfunctional business-owning family at the center of the story. The novel I had submitted had twelve different point-of-view characters, including a prison warden, a nun, a nine-year-old boy, and a drug kingpin, in addition to the entrepreneurial Fisher family. Furthermore, I had constructed a complicated Rubik’s Cube-like plot that locked the story into place, and it seemed to me that to disassemble any one section meant the whole thing would crumble. 

I felt crushed. The story over which I’d labored for so long, the story I believed was nearly finished, had to be taken down to the studs. “I’m open to making changes,” I said to my pod, Rose Afriyie and Katie Kalahan, “as long as I can do so without completely blowing up the plot. Ideas welcomed.” They commiserated and made encouraging cooing sounds. I knew I was in good hands because they didn’t laugh in my face. Instead, they suggested I reach out to the program co-director, Susie Merrell, who reassured me. “Stop worrying and start writing,” she said, and explained that the people who were most successful in the program were those who didn’t cling to previous versions of their work. She gave me an assignment: Write 20 pages, by Thursday, every week. Messy, vomitous, rambling pages and I shouldn’t worry one bit about the plot or where things started or ended. “Just write,” she said. 

So, I wrote twenty pages that week. And vomitous they were. I did the same thing the next week, and the next, writing as fast as I could from the Fisher family’s point of view, exploring without conscious thought to the sequence or propulsivity or humor or conflict or stakes. Characters mostly ruminated and remembered and wandered. I wrote of Steven’s recollection of his mother peeling an orange, Amanda’s memory of playing Mousetrap as a kid. 

I was reluctant to share the pages at first, because I worried all those memories and ruminations were just wheel-spinning. But my pod said that these set pieces, memories, and deeper dives into the psyches of my characters added context and tension. Rose told me that she fell in love with Adam the moment he shoved a carving knife into the Christmas goose’s back. Katie told me that it crackled when the grandmother was in the room. They loved the new omniscient perspective that made the story feel epic. They reminded me that readers cared about what happened that terrible Halloween fifteen years ago; they wanted to know how in the world a mother’s relationship with her son became so fraught.  

For eight weeks I generated 1000 words a day and the story of the Fisher family began to emerge. I made a list of things my characters could do instead of ruminating and remembering: sneak around, threaten one another, plant a kiss on a stranger, have a drink after ten years of sobriety. I went back through the vignettes and added action, and some of those snippets became actual scenes. But was it a book? I worried I wasn’t moving the story forward. 

My pod showed me that I was, in fact, putting stakes in the ground. The scenes began to line up in surprising ways. Suddenly, they had so many questions: Will Corinna die? Will Amanda’s lie be exposed? How far will Adam go to get what he believes is his? 

Katie assured me that writing “forward” might look like writing backwards sometimes, or downwards or inwards. Rose reminded me that there was no shortcut; writing a novel takes time. We brainstormed plot ideas for all of our books, and talked about trusting ourselves, diving into the depths, and nurturing our spirits while doing the emotionally charged work of novel-writing. They cheered me on. 

Within a few months, I had completed a new draft. Now the novel told the story of the Fishers and their family business. Many characters and elements from the earlier draft remained, but now there was a clear plot line, narrative thrust, and an emotional heartbeat. 

Without the support of writers to read, cheer, coach and commiserate, I might have given up when I realized I had to smash my manuscript to smithereens. But my pod helped me understand that when things fall apart, that’s just part of the revision process. It’s a sign of progress. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Juxtaprose, on the San Francisco NPR station, as well as in fifteen anthologies. She co-directed the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which aired on PBS.  She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and was a ‘22-23 BookEnds Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California, and is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism. More about Suzanne on her website: https://suzannelafetra.com.

Pod Rewards: Writer Geeks, Unite!

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2023 Fellow Craig Holt reflects on working with his BookEnds pod. 

I have always been impressed with the way the writing community supports its own. Whether it’s online or in flesh and blood, we recommend each other’s books to friends, review one another’s books, celebrate each other’s successes, and listen to each other lament the inevitable slowdowns and five-car collisions on the long and winding road to a finished draft. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent critiquing each other’s work. 

I’ve had the good fortune to participate in some excellent writers’ groups and I have exchanged plenty of pages with wonderful peers in my MFA program. I even have a coven of reliable beta readers in my life. I’m grateful to all of them. But as a novelist I always wished I could exchange entire books with other authors and take a deep dive into each other’s revisions over the course of months. I always assumed that such a dedicated gaggle of authors would be difficult to come by and impossible to sustain. How would you structure it? Who has the time? Where do you find peers generous enough to devote that much time to other people’s projects? 

The answer, for me, was BookEnds. 

BookEnds was – and continues to be – an exceptional learning experience anchored by an unprecedented level of mutual support between writers.

First of all, there is the question of scale. Instead of going over ten or twenty pages of one person’s work every few weeks or once a month, my amazing podmates Miranda Shulman, Fae Engstrom and I started by reading each other’s entire manuscripts. We spent our first three meetings talking through our initial impressions and learning what the author was trying to achieve with the book. Thereafter, we gathered every week on Zoom, often for three hours or more per session, to go over one podling’s book. 

We started by addressing big picture issues and then worked our collective way over the course of six months down to line edits. We weren’t obligated to meet every week, but all three of us had been encouraged to essentially run our novels through a woodchipper and reshape the splintery, resinous hash into a new draft. Having read each other’s manuscripts in their entirety, we were eager to see each other’s stories reborn. 

But there was more to it than just the quantity of feedback. There was also the quality. I was struck by the depth of insight Miranda and Fae brought to my work. They are experienced authors and careful readers, and they came to every session with a wealth of ideas, many of which surprised me. Their feedback came from a place of real understanding of my characters, and an enthusiasm for helping me create the story I had intended to write. They were relentlessly honest and unflaggingly encouraging. Miranda and Fae put as much into my story as they did their own, and it was a pleasure to do the same for them. 

Before the program began, I worried that spending so much time on other people’s books would wear me out. Instead, working on Miranda and Fae’s stories energized me. In thinking critically about their work I gained insight into my own story, and their remarkable progress inspired me to slog onward. 

Even after we began work with our mentors (for more on that happy topic, take a look at Daisy Alpert Florin’s excellent post on working with program director Susan Scarf Merrell, among many other posts on working with mentors) our group continued to meet regularly. We continued to go over pages, but we also touched base to talk through slowdowns in our plots or float ideas for alternate narrative routes. Sometimes we got together to listen as one or the other of us lamented being blindsided by self-doubt or just shook our tiny fists at the literary sky. We guided each other to our BookEnds destination, and beyond. 

Since completing the program last June, we’ve continued to meet. We’ve gone through another round of edits on each other’s books, and we share notes on the good and humbling process of querying. We remain invested in each other and in our fellow BookEnders. And as part of the active and encouraging BookEnds Alumni group, our support network continues to grow. There is sustenance there. Fuel for the long journey. So, yes, BookEnds helped me improve my book. Just as importantly, it expanded and strengthened my writing family.

People talk a lot about how solitary the writing life can be, but BookEnds showed me that being a part of the writing community is about more than craft. Investing in other writers and their work can make the process a little bit less painful and a lot more rewarding. 

Craig Holt’s work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He graduated from the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program and, more recently, from the BookEnds, where he worked with program co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Creating Compelling Characters with Eve Gleichman

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2023 Fellow Katie Kalahan discusses their work with BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman, whose forthcoming novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, co-authored with Laura Blackett) is available for pre-order now. 

Sometimes what’s obvious to outsiders is invisible to us. In my BookEnds novel The Flicker, narrator Ida becomes romantically and professionally entangled with Lolo, who might or might not actually care about Ida. Early readers, including my BookEnds podmates, wondered why Ida puts up with and even likes Lolo. 

The question of “why Lolo?” was raised once more when I was paired with mentor Eve Gleichman, co-author of The Very Nice Box (Harper Perennial). Early on, Eve identified one of the core challenges of my novel: how to build tension in a romantic relationship that savvy readers will realize is never going to work. Eve asked me more than once why my narrator liked the love interest, saying, “Is it just because she’s hot?”

Readers tend to like Ida, and since Lolo doesn’t treat Ida particularly well, readers tend to not like Lolo. So how could I make Lolo compelling to my sweet readers who want to step into the novel and save Ida? According to Eve, “being hot” isn’t enough. Eve wanted to be compelled by Lolo the same way that Ida is. They wanted to get it, to understand why Ida keeps returning to Lolo. They wanted to fall in love with Lolo, as a reader, and then have their heart broken. 

Picture me, grumpy in the general direction of this feedback. When I get grumpy about feedback, often it’s because I haven’t done a good enough job (yet!) of teaching my readers how to read my book, leading them in the directions I want to lead them, and being a trusted guide through the world of my novel. 

Eve counseled me to look at novels that create compelling, complicated characters well, including We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart, and The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, pointing out that in both of these novels, the power imbalance which is in the love interest’s favor at the outset shifts to the narrator by the end. When the power balance shifts, the narrator can see the situation more clearly, and, now holding power, is no longer entranced. 

Likewise, in Eve’s novel The Very Nice Box, co-written with Laura Blackett, the narrator also gets sucked in by someone who turns out to be both less and more than what they originally presented. How, Eve asked me, might I do this in my novel? They asked me the following questions over our sessions, which I copied down close to verbatim:

  • What is it about Lolo that is so captivating to Ida?
  • Why does Ida continue to pursue Lolo?
  • What is Ida getting from Lolo?
  • Why wouldn’t Ida leave? 
  • What does Ida like about being in this situation with Lolo?
  • Why doesn’t Ida demand more from Lolo?

Eve also guided me to commit to telling the story from start to finish, reorganizing the book from the fragmented narrative I had been trying to use into a chronological one. Though seemingly unrelated to making Lolo more compelling (but not less hot), shifting to a chronological structure was key in deepening Lolo’s character. The new structure forced me to slow down, which forced me to spend more time with Lolo. As I moved through revision in this new structure, I considered how the characters moved between scenes and how each interaction led to the next. I had to trust that I could hold the reader’s attention. 

I realized that I had been jumping around in the narrative because I was worried that my readers would get bored if I went step by step. Eve assured me that my readers would not get bored, and that I could linger in scenes and linger in specificity. By telling the story chronologically, I was able to explore more fully the weirdness and awkwardness and fits and starts of their romance. I made Lolo weirder, their interactions more awkward. I lingered in the moments of friction between Lolo and Ida. This way, readers discover Lolo as the narrator discovers Lolo.

As writers, we teach readers how to read our novels. The question “why Lolo?” that I had been receiving from readers like Eve was not the question that I wanted my readers to ask. So, in revising my novel under Eve’s mentorship, I explored my own questions about the narrative, in hopes that readers would join me in asking the same questions. When Ida finds herself unaccountably drawn to Lolo, what is it about their dynamic that feels familiar? What feels exciting? How do people behave when they feel as though they don’t have choices? What do we do when we get exactly what we think we want?

Perhaps Lolo is fascinating in the same way that grifters or cult leaders are fascinating. From the outside it’s easy to say that we wouldn’t fall for it, but from the inside it looks like the only obvious choice. To bring readers to the inside with Ida, I’ve found that making the novel chronologically structured allows me to reveal information more intentionally. Although readers will naturally have more distance and perspective than the narrator, by keeping what the reader knows and what the narrator knows more closely aligned, the reader’s experience of Lolo will more closely track to Ida’s experience of Lolo. 

As I continue my revision process now, the question I am facing is: how far am I willing to go? In order to make Lolo break hearts, first I have to make her someone readers might fall in love with. It’s funny, I have to do to readers what Lolo is doing to Ida, drawing her in before she can realize who Lolo truly is. 

My yearlong BookEnds fellowship and mentorship with Eve Gleichman built my confidence, helping me understand that I am sculpting an experience for my readers, and that storytelling includes more than a splash of manipulation. I’m writing a book about two characters who are, in their own ways, manipulative. As I work to illustrate that in the world of my novel, I am coming to terms with the understanding that I may need to use some of their tools in order to tell their story. 

Katie Kalahan (she/they) has a 2021 MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a 2013 BFA in Printmaking/Drawing and English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. Katie was a 2022-2023 BookEnds fellow at Stony Brook University. Their work is published in Crosscut, Witness, and Split Lip, among others.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Line Editing with Christina Baker Kline

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2023 Fellow Stefani Nellen talks about working with one of our longtime BookEnds mentors. 

My novel THE DREAM THIEF is about a Dutch scientist who falsifies data and is consumed by his fraud. When I came into BookEnds, the manuscript started too early—about five chapters too early, as program director Susie Merrell helpfully pointed out. I ended up rewriting the entire book, Lauren Groff-style. My guess is that, while this approach hurt my hands and wrists, it saved me a lot of time in the long run.  

When I began working with my mentor Christina Baker Kline in the second half of the BookEnds year, she noted things were becoming shaky in the later chapters. This is what will happen when you write a book in a hurry: fatigue takes its toll. Our first conversations focused on how to stick the landing and come up with the effortless mix of pain and exhilaration that allows a reader to make peace with the ending, no matter how open or pat, happy or sad. 

But the ending became an afterthought once Christina sent me an email about my style. The email was kind, clearly prompted by her fondness of my book and her ambition to make it better, but it was also an honest email: I tended to overwrite, some analogies were hard to follow, and metaphors meandered. In places, it was all too much, and nothing stood out anymore. “Do we need to see the fluffy yellow rag?” We would work on this, she said, making it sound like no big deal, which, to a pro writer, it presumably isn’t. 

To illustrate her comments on my writing, she’d line-edited the first chapter of my book. I read the email late at night in bed, and promptly suffered a case of panic. I’m incompetent, how awful, and to think people have looked at this with their eyes…

Rationality returned the next morning, when I processed Christina’s edits with the goal of understanding what she had done, and saw how much her small changes improved the text overall. 

At this point, I should point out that yes, I’m in the habit of revising my work. Extensively. From nixing timelines to eliminating identical paragraph beginnings, I’ve done it all. But I’d never thought of line-editing as a discrete stage in the editing process. Instead, I treated it like a necessary but boring task, to be finished as quickly as possible. 

Having worked as an editor, Christina told me she routinely edits her own work closely—and that the editors publishing her work appreciate her clean submissions. The word clean still stands out to me from this conversation. 

Imagining many happy editors in my future, I line-edited my book. Christina responded to the edits I sent her with praise, encouragement and meta-edits of her own; I picked through our layers of edits and inserted those that passed final muster into my manuscript. One by one. No shortcuts. I never trust reject/accept changes, but especially not this time. I wanted to get a feel for things, the changes under my fingertips.

My hands and wrists hurt again. It was brutal. It was a lot. And yet, when I was done, I saw my work and my task as a writer in a new way. I can’t edit my work the way an outside editor can, but I can make it clean(-er). 

We even had a little time left to work on the ending. 

Removing clunk, junk, and the evil word that wasn’t what I’d expected going into the mentorship term, but it was what I needed. I learned a new skill, gained insight and wisdom on the writing life from a seasoned novelist, and greatly improved my manuscript. 

Looking back, I’m thinking that my initial response to Christina’s editing email was related to the emphasis on brilliance and individuality of expression that is guiding both our appreciation of and our mentorship in the arts right now. And yes, both must be nurtured and respected. But the term with Christina reminded me of Teju Cole, who said: “Originality is important, but competence and expertise are more important. You can’t be an avantgarde violinist without being a violinist.” Line editing gives me the control to say exactly what I want, precisely what I mean. 

Stefani Nellen is a German psychologist who lives in the Netherlands and writes in English. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Glimmer Train, The Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She was awarded the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Fiction Prize, and had a story in the Masters Review Anthology, Vol IX (selected by Rick Bass). 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Rachel Pastan on Excavating the Story

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2022 Fellow Jennifer Yeh reflects on working with Rachel Pastan.

My BookEnds novel Migratory Creatures follows protagonist Gina Lee over the course of a single day in San Francisco. It takes place on the day when Gina’s estranged husband Mark is getting engaged to his new girlfriend, and as Gina tries to muddle through these difficult hours, she meets up with awkward electrician-trombone player Peter, and encounters a mysterious, appealing amphibious man. When I started this novel, I was inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses and hoped to capture Gina’s entire life and world by describing her thoughts during a single day. 

In the first half of my BookEnds fellowship, working with my pod, I streamlined the draft and made one especially notable addition: I expanded the role of the amphibious man. Instead of two brief meetings in which he never speaks, Gina has a long, romantic interlude with him. 

Still, when I started work with my BookEnds mentor Rachel Pastan, a lot of the actual drama in the story remained half-buried in Gina’s memories, thoughts, daydreams, and day-to-day life. 

Early on, Rachel noticed my tendency to turn away from the drama rather than toward it. For example, at one point in the original draft, Gina has a pleasant, easy conversation with her daughter while recalling an earlier rocky conversation. Rachel suggested that they have this difficult conversation in a scene, on the page. She also suggested in-scene flashbacks for important moments in the past between Gina and Mark and Gina and Peter, rather than presenting them as filtered memories. In other words, Rachel helped me excavate the narrative and then build it up, largely by focusing more on the interpersonal relationships among the characters. 

We also looked at the protagonist’s arc in the story. Rachel observed that Gina is unhappy at the beginning of the novel, and arrives by the end at a different, happier state. She wanted me to think more carefully about how exactly the events of Gina’s day take her from one state to the other. We figured out that three interactions in the book represent the key steps of Gina’s emotional journey—encounters with the electrician Peter, the amphibious man, and finally her estranged husband Mark. 

Peter’s significance was relatively straightforward. He represents Gina’s attempt to move forward in her life by throwing herself into a new romantic relationship. Gina tries to copy what Mark did, but this is a failure. But what is the role of the amphibious man? This was trickier. Although I can’t help thinking of the amphibious man as real, I simultaneously consider him Gina’s invention, something manifested by the power of her grief, distress, and desire. I told Rachel that I thought of him as a creation of Gina’s—a “wish fulfillment,” in the Freudian dream sense. By contrast, Rachel described him as Gina’s “gift to herself.” This might seem only slightly different, but it was revelatory to me. The idea of the amphibious man as a “gift to herself” made him seem less the sad invention of a lonely person and instead an active attempt by Gina to heal. 

The next question: what does Gina need in order to heal? Rachel immediately saw that it would be sad if all Gina needed was a perfect lover. As I revised, the amphibious man became not only a generous and responsive lover but also an empathetic companion who, among other things, helps Gina fix up her apartment, which is full of empty spaces where Mark took his things away. He helps Gina “find her home again”—which is the same task of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and Odysseus in The Odyssey. Gina and the amphibious man spend part of the evening rearranging books to fill in spaces in the bookshelves, hanging new pictures on the walls, and sanding down a stuck window. The amphibious man helps Gina begin to put her home and life together.  

The third important interaction takes place between Gina and her estranged husband Mark. In the original draft of my novel, Gina never confronted Mark to figure out with him what happened. Gina ran into Mark in the morning, spoke with him on the phone in the afternoon, and was drawn to Mark’s new home, the site of his engagement party, in the evening. But their interactions were all superficial and brief. 

Following Rachel’s suggestions, I made each of Gina’s interactions with her estranged husband longer and more significant. For example, in the evening, when Gina throws rocks at Mark’s window, instead of sneaking away after, she has a long conversation with Mark in which they finally talk about what happened in their relationship, and how their breakup relates to a family trauma. Doing this work is what finally sets Gina up to move forward in her life.

These changes gave the story more of the tension and urgency it needed. Rachel also helped me find ways to keep the reader curious. Her explanation of how to make a story work was something I thought about many, many times—she said that you have to make the reader wonder about something, and then make them wait to find out what happens. I gradually learned how to make the reader curious about certain questions ahead of time: Is Gina going to call Peter? Is she going to run into Mark? Who is knocking on the window three stories above the ground? Rachel provided frequent guidance with comments such as “she could start thinking about Peter here” or “make the reader wait a little before she sees him” or “what is the reader curious about here?”

In our work together during my BookEnds fellowship, Rachel helped me turn a drifty and shapeless manuscript into a novel with narrative drive and urgency.

Jennifer Yeh was a BookEnds fellow in 2021-2022 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.

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.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Meg Wolitzer on Unjamming the Narrative

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2021 Fellow Coco Picard on her work on two manuscripts with the BookEnds co-founding director.

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with two manuscripts, The Healing Circle, (Red Hen Press, 2022) and a nascent work, The Other Jane Dick. In looking at these projects with Meg’s generous and laser-sharp attention, I discovered my propensity to pack in the jokes. “Give them space,” Meg said. To let them land. Not only to provide the manuscripts a broader range of emotion and depth, but to let the reader enjoy the experience of reading without (my words) being force fed. 

Because I have a visual art background, I think about scenes and narrative like a painting: ranging contrasts and saturation are important in a picture. It’s essential that the individual components that make a composition serve rather than dominate the whole. Colors respond to one another. The relationship between shapes must be harmonious. My tendency, I discovered, was to try to make every part of my composition (or novel) a punchline. Meg and I talked about this. “Probably it’s because someone somewhere along the line liked that.” 

I realized that one way I mitigate my insecurities about longform fiction is by pushing the scenarios into absurdity, almost as a way of sublimating my own anxieties driving character dilemmas. So, for instance, The Healing Circle began as a nonlinear story of a hospitalized woman searching for a miracle cure. The Other Jane Dick is about a heartsick, low-rung art curator, who accepts an invitation to attend a globe-trotting, “branding” junket. In both books, the initial drafts kept everything on the surface. It was as though each narrative arc and its contextualizing world was described in saturated, dense colors, all sardonic, jokey, self-aware, and hard-nosed. In both instances, my characters refused sympathy as a result. They exhibited little emotional range and consequently denied that range of the book, withholding what was at stake in such a way as to ultimately refuse admitting a reader into the watery marshlands of vulnerability, change, and consequence. 

In recognizing the ways that I jam jokes, I was able to recognize that tendency in other formal decisions. Meg helped me prioritize certain aspects in each book over others. She encouraged me to reduce the waxing philosophic monologues (a little goes a long way) in The Healing Circle and make the individual threads of that book linear, even if different time frames punctured the fictive present. Similarly, in The Other Jane Dick, Meg helped me add space between elements to more fully highlight the difference between contemporary art culture and influencer culture so that my protagonist’s imposter syndrome came across.

Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent. My characters—all of them—are significantly more compelling and complex because of that mentorship and the space it afforded. 

Coco Picard was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her novel The Healing Circle won the 2020 Women’s Prose Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Comics and criticism have appeared additionally in The Paris Review, Seven Stories Press, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is the author of The Chronicles of Fortune(Radiator Comics, 2017) and founded  the Green Lantern Press in 2004. www.cocopicard.com