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.