Category Archives: Novel Tips for Novel Writers

What My Mentor Taught Me: Karen Bender on Setting

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Following graduation, 2021 BookEnds Fellow Rachel León reflects on the focus of work with her mentor.

In her brilliant memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado states, “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” 

Machado reminds us of the exchange that should be happening between story elements. Setting affects plot, which affects characters, which affects point of view. All the elements should be in conversation with one another. Except they all must be present for the exchange to work, and setting was largely absent from the draft of my novel I submitted in December, the one my mentor, National Book Award finalist Karen Bender, read. 

Karen provided thoughtful, generous notes on my manuscript, offering me a clear map forward to make the novel stronger. The manuscript was in good shape structurally, though I had too many point-of-view characters (thirteen at the time). My two main tasks were compression and expansion. There was plenty to cut, but also so much I needed to build. Karen noted how my characters were floating in space; they were rarely grounded in scene and setting, which I’d shied away from because I’d thought no one would want to read about my city. 

The novel is set in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, which often finds itself on lists like “Worst Places to Live in America.” Rockford is known for its high crime and unemployment rates, but what I think defines the city is its eternal optimism and dedication to improvement. I hadn’t considered how Rockford’s determination to triumph against-the-odds echoes the themes of my novel, which Karen described as a book version of The Wire focused on the foster care system. 

Because I had so many characters and storylines, Karen suggested opening the novel with an overview of Rockford in a way that could introduce the different characters. Was there a way I could bring everyone together? Not really. The intersection of the characters’ lives happens gradually by circumstance. So I played around with the idea before writing an opening narrated by the city itself. I loved it, but ultimately, had to scrap it. Karen was right: it didn’t quite work. I needed to start with characters, in a scene incorporating the setting. Karen had said she’d love to see more of Ebony, a queer white teen in foster care. It turned out Ebony’s sarcasm and view of Rockford was the perfect entry point into the story. 

But the failed attempt at an opening was, of course, not wasted. Not only was I able to rework some of my favorite sentences and sprinkle them throughout the manuscript, the exercise got me searching for places to infuse more Rockford into the manuscript. It also got me thinking about when the story took place, something I hadn’t previously considered. After writing about a citywide celebration held in honor of Rockford native Fred VanVleet after the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, I wanted to include that, too. 

Once I had a time period, I began researching the weather and what was happening locally, information that altered the storyline. The novel opens around Father’s Day, but clarifying it was June 2018 made me realize that was during a torrential storm that devastated some residents and left others unscathed—a story opportunity. It also ended up deepening Ebony’s character as I needed a die-hard basketball fan, and making her a small forward on her high school team meant she could be obsessed with Kawhi Leonard, who was traded to the Raptors in July 2018. Ebony had much more depth when she was good at something beyond being sassy. 

When Karen encouraged me to ground the manuscript, I had no idea focusing on setting would also add character depth and strengthen both the plot and themes of the novel. But like Machado said: places should be more than just places in our work, and that’s now true of my novel’s setting. Karen helped me see how “Rockford” my manuscript is—despite my characters being affected by economic and racial disparities, they rise up, striving for something better, which gives my novel a sense of hopefulness. In fully embracing Rockford as the setting—both the aspects that land it on the worst city lists, and its many virtues that go unnoticed—I finally activated all the story elements and made them work together. 

Rachel León is a social worker and writer whose work has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, West Trade Review, and other publications. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Christina Baker Kline on Perspective and Narrative Closeness

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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. 

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

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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. 

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

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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.

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

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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. 

 

Susan Scarf Merrell on what she looks for in a BookEnds applicant

Novel Tips for Novel Writers

Applications for BookEnds 2021-2022 are now open! As would-be BookEnds fellows around the world prepare their manuscripts for submission, we thought it would be fun to interview Susan Scarf Merrell—co-founder of the program and author of Shirley: A Novel, now a major motion picture—on what she looks for as she reads through stacks of manuscripts.

Read on below to find out the qualities that make an application to BookEnds successful, and see how YOU can make your application stand out.

Applicants to the program should have a completed, full-length manuscript. What makes a manuscript right for BookEnds?

I think It’s a feeling of internal energy—a sense of a book that knows what it is, even if it hasn’t gotten all the way there yet—that excites us most. Because if a book has some internal energy and presence, we can certainly get to its core and help it to become its better self.

BookEnds fellows are placed in “pods” of three writers. What qualities or attributes should a writer have to be a successful pod mate?

In essence, members of a pod take ownership not simply of one another’s books, but of the purpose of the books. To help an author’s book become its best self, the pod mates need to understand the author’s purpose and belief systems, the why of the manuscript. We work very hard on this aspect of pod-matching and pod-building. These relationships are critical, not simply to the BookEnds fellowship year, but also to the ongoing relationships built during that time.

I’ve heard you say that not every writer–regardless of the quality of their work–is a good fit for BookEnds. What’s the “X-factor” you look for when reviewing applicants?

Our writers want success, yes, but of course they are also committed to excellence. They’re willing to give the time, to make the time, to put in the time. And they have big hearts and generosity—you can’t do BookEnds only for yourself. You do BookEnds and become a citizen of a community, a member of an ongoing group. We look for smart, kind, brilliant, motivated writers. And then we do everything we can do to help them succeed.

What do you love about working with budding novelists?

Everything. Start to finish. I love seeing what matters to other people and helping them to become more themselves, to communicate what they believe in and what matters to them most.

 

Thanks, Susan! We hope these answers help you decide whether BookEnds is the right program for you. If you think you’d be a good fit, don’t forget—applications are open now through March 1, 2021. 

Apply to be a BookEnds 2021-2022 fellow here: https://bookends.submittable.com/submit

Karen E. Bender on the revision process, sticking to a schedule, and what Michelangelo taught her about writing

Novel Tips for Novel Writers,

This month, we’re continuing our series of distinguished writer interviews with a Q&A with award-winning novelist and short story author Karen E. Bender. Karen’s story collection Refund was a Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize and longlisted for the Story prize. Her most recent collection, The New Order, was also longlisted for the Story prize. She is currently the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, and is Faculty for the low-residency MFA program at Alma College; she is also a BookEnds mentor.

Read below to learn more about Karen’s insights on the writing process …

 

You’ve written both novels and collections of short stories. How does the writing process differ for each? Are there lessons from one genre you can apply to the other?

Writing a story is like jogging and seeing an endpoint in front of me; writing a novel is more like a marathon and the endpoint may not be visible for some time. Both require patience, but a novel requires tremendous, really Herculean patience. A memorable story should have the feeling of expansiveness beyond the borders of the story, and a good novel should have the particular detail essential to stories.

I began to rewrite parts of my first novel as individual stories, and it helped me figure out how to edit. The concision of a story, the importance of every line and scene in construction of the structure, really helps you see what is necessary for a narrative rather than what you just want to keep in. And the expansiveness of a novel can help you see ways to enlarge the scope of stories.

Otherwise—for both genres, you want to write something honest, urgent, new—something you want to say that hasn’t quite been said in the way that you know you want to say it.

 

What’s your advice for writers entering the revision process of their manuscript?

First: look for what’s working. What feels most alive to you, most honest, most original. Then don’t think about revision as fixing everything all at once; revision is a series of tasks that you can address one at a time. When writing a draft, you have to allow yourself to make a mess, to take risks, to create and not know. Revision, though, is a process of knowing. You’re still making a mess, but doing tasks in a more intentional way. I also love Michelangelo’s quote that a sculpture is already there in the marble; it already exists. I like to say that your story and novel already exists in its final form, and you just need to do the work to release it!

 

You are a proponent of committing to a writing schedule (something I personally find very hard to do!). What is your schedule? How did you figure out a schedule that works for you?

I do think schedules can be helpful, but it’s also important to learn to be flexible with them. We have to juggle writing around so many things-jobs, families, etc. If you can try to write something each day—whether it’s half an hour or a page or something that feels manageable—the writing grows. The world, with all its demands, conspires to keep us from writing. The idea is not to be hard on yourself if you miss a day, because we all do, but to commit to writing so that it is part of you, that you announce to yourself and others that it is important, and that you carve out some time and space so that you can do it.  

 

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given on writing?

A few bits of advice stay with me: Martha Graham’s advice to Agnes de Mille about choreography: “It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”

 Frank Conroy said that the bad writing leads to the good writing. I find that calming and true.

 

Bonus question: What do you love about working with budding novelists? 

I remember so clearly what it was like writing my first novel, what it was like struggling through the muck. There really is nothing like that first novel muck. I love being able to help the new novelist clear a path through the muck, see what is wonderful about their novel, see their work in a new way. And it’s thrilling to watch their work get better as they revise it, as they see their own place in the literary conversation.

 

We’d love to hear: Do you have a writing schedule? And how do you approach revisions?

If you’re interested in working with Karen, consider applying to BookEnds. Our hands-on mentored fellowship can help you take your novel to the next level.

 

Meg Wolitzer on getting unstuck, working with novelists, and the advice she would give her younger self

Novel Tips for Novel Writers,

It’s December, which means NaNoWriMo has officially come to an end. At this point, you may find yourself with the beginnings of a novel, or heck–even a completed first draft! Now is when the fun (or the challenge, depending on your viewpoint) truly begins: Where to go from here?

To help, we thought we’d seek out some pearls of wisdom from novelists who were once in your shoes. And who better to interview than Meg Wolitzer, the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Wife, and most recently, The Female Persuasion? Meg is also the co-founder and co-director of BookEnds, meaning she has plenty of experience helping emerging writers take their novels to the next level. Read below to hear her advice about the novel-writing process…

I’ve heard you have an “eighty percent rule.” Can you explain what that is? 

I think it was really an eighty-page rule, but that is very very loose. At eighty pages you can have a look at what you’ve done, and if it isn’t flying yet, you might consider putting it aside for now and saving some of it for another project that excites you more. Eighty is not so many pages that you’ll feel as if you’ve wasted your life. But if, at eighty pages, it looks pretty good to you, this might be a nice time to try to make a sort of outline, to plan ahead for the rest of the book, because finally there’s a bit of a “there” there, and you can plunge ahead feeling as if you’ve already really accomplished something. Eighty solid pages is a really good start.

What is the most common “mistake” you see in early or unfulfilled manuscripts?  

Hard to say. The so-called mushy middle is sometimes an issue… There can be a strong start without a way to take it through to the end. The excitement and energy sometimes get lost or wind down way too soon, and the writer can feel a bit deflated. 

What do you do when you get stuck? 

I read a great passage in a favorite book that I know the writer was excited about when he or she wrote it.

What advice do you wish you could give your younger self on the writing life, and on trying to make a career as a writer?  

To not worry so much about what other people think. 

Bonus question: What do you love about working with budding novelists? 

You can almost see the wheels turning as they make connections in their minds. It’s very exciting to witness.

Now it’s your turn: What do you do when you’re stuck? We’d love to hear! And when you think you can’t hone and revise your novel anymore, consider applying to BookEnds–we’re where novels go to become their very best selves. 

30 Tips for Novel Writers

Novel Tips for Novel Writers

To kick off the month of November–and National Novel Writing Month!–we’re sharing writing tips from some of our favorite writers and novelists. Writing a novel is no easy task, but we hope these words of wisdom give you the inspiration and encouragement you need to get started. 

And don’t forget: even the very best writers get stuck sometimes, too. We’re featuring one tip for each day of November, so check back here whenever you need a little boost!

 

  1. “First drafts are tough. Just get to the other side of the pool. One time across and then you can stop, take a breath, and think about what you’ve done.” – Susan Scarf Merrell, co-founder and co-director of BookEnds
  2. “The first draft can be The Worst Book In The World. Nobody ever needs to read it or know it exists but you.” – Neil Gaiman
  3. “Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.” – Zadie Smith 
  4. In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” – Rose Tremain 
  5. “You must write as if your reader needed you desperately, because he does.” – Roger Rosenblatt
  6. “A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.” – Elmore Leonard
  7. “The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.” – Joyce Carol Oates
  8. “If you wanna write a novel, you have to sit on your ass.” – Michael Chabon
  9. “You can do anything, break any rule, as long as you believe it’s in the service of the story you have to tell.” – Karen Russell
  10. “When I get stuck I find that the best strategy is to just work on something else for a while and then come back to it later. There’s always something else you could be writing: a different chapter of the novel you’re working on, notes for a new short story, an essay.” – Emily St. John Mandel
  11. “When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.” – Ursula Le Guin
  12. “Make a rule: The only way for anyone to ever hear about your stories is to read them.” – Andy Weir
  13. “I’m not looking for any kind of clear moral, and I never do in my novels. I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me. Emotions are very important to me in a novel.” – Kazuo Ishiguro
  14. “There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.” – Vladimir Nabokov
  15. “I didn’t publish my first book until I was 37, so if anybody out there is reading this and thinking your chance has passed, there’s no expiration date on your talent.” – Leigh Bardugo
  16. “If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself ‘Why?’ afterward than before….There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” – Zora Neale Hurston
  17. “Sometimes the first draft is us telling ourselves the story. The second draft is the real first draft.” – Paul Harding
  18. “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while, the muse shows up, too.” – Isabel Allende 
  19. “If you’re using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.” – John Steinbeck
  20. “Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.” – Michael Moorcock
  21. “Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.” – Kurt Vonnegut
  22. “I think my favorite compliment that I got from a writer early on was someone saying to me, ‘You leave out all the right things.’” – Amy Hempel
  23. “Aesthetics and politics are not incompatible with each other.” – Carmen Maria Machado
  24. “[O]ften […] when a writer doesn’t strike gold, they believe they are a failure, and give up, instead of taking the long, slow road. But the long, slow, uneven road is the more likely way that you will succeed.” – Kameron Hurley
  25. “The world […] [is] more than the description of buildings and the name you give your seasons. The world is your characters moving through it.” – Tochi Onyebuchi
  26. “There is no such thing as a reliable narrator.” – Matthew Klam
  27. “[T]o dream or write about a place effectively, you need to have memories that are distant enough to be transformed by your imagination.” – David Surface
  28. “Creating art is like jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down: if you want to only start when you know exactly how to get everything right, you never actually will.” – Harry Brewis
  29. “Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence and practice.” – Octavia Butler
  30. “The middle of books is HARD, especially for beginning writers. Why? Because the middle of a book gives you the most flexibility in terms of telling your story… the MIDDLE is where your personal style has room to play.” – Jim Butcher

 

Which tip did you find most helpful? Any other tips you’d add to our list? We’d love to know.

And remember, just because November ends doesn’t mean your writing has to–a good novel takes many (many!) drafts to achieve. When you get yours in tip-top shape, consider submitting it to BookEnds. 

 

November is here! That means it’s time for NaNoRiMo!

Novel Tips for Novel Writers

As the weather turns cooler and the leaves begin to fall, writers around the world hunker down with their laptops and draft outlines, focused on just one thing: NaNoWriMo. November is National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as it’s colloquially known) and we can’t think of a better way to spend the start of the chilly season than writing your first (or tenth!) novel.

Maybe you’ve always wanted to write a novel but didn’t know where to start. Maybe you’re a seasoned writer in need of a little motivation–a gentle push to keep you focused and on deadline. Or maybe you’re just plain tired of carrying a jumble of characters around in your head, begging to be let out, and you’ve decided that this is the year you’ll get your story down on paper. 

Whatever your background is, you’re likely to find a group of like-minded writers participating in NaNoWriMo–in fact, more than 450,000 writers participated in 2019 alone. The founders of NaNoWriMo know that writing a novel can be a lonely and daunting task. Even just saying the words “I’m writing a novel” can spark fear into the hearts of the hardiest writers among us! That’s why they created the NaNoWriMo community: It’s a place to find fellow writing buddies, participate in write-a-thons, and get encouragement and inspiration when facing the dreaded writer’s block.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is simple: Write 50,000 words in one month. Sound ambitious? It is. But the program provides the tools and structure you need–like daily writing goals, motivational emails, draft outlining workshops, and more–to get going. And, of course, it’s worth remembering that NaNoWriMo is generative. You’re not expected to finish the month of November with a fully polished, completed novel. For that, you might need the help of a program like BookEnds.

But that doesn’t mean that good things don’t come out of NaNoWriMo. Plenty of now-published novels began as November drafts, including Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. So what are you waiting for? Bust out those outlines, fire up the coffeemaker, and get writing. 

To help you get started, in our next post we’re featuring 30 tips for novel writers–one tip for every day of NaNoWriMo. Hear what writing experts like Zadie Smith and Neil Gaiman have to say on everything from craft to character development. When December 1st rolls around, you might just be the proud author of a novel’s first draft–and eventually, with a little elbow grease and some keen editing, that same novel you started in NaNoWriMo might even be ready for BookEnds.  

Happy NaNoWriMo!