Category Archives: Energy in fiction

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

BookEnds novels, characters, Creative process, emotion in fiction, Energy in fiction, Mentors, narrative time, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision,

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.

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

characters, Energy in fiction, literary theory, Mentors, Narrative Perspective, narrative time, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Pacing, Revision, , , , , , , ,

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.