Category Archives: Revision

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.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Matthew Klam on Finding the Emotional Heart

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2022 BookEnds Fellow Rachael Warecki reflects on working with longtime BookEnds mentor Matthew Klam.

“Do you consider yourself stoic?”

It was early February, three weeks into working with my mentor, Matt Klam, and we were discussing my protagonist’s emotional arc—or lack thereof. My novel, The Split Decision, is a speculative hardboiled noir, set in an alternate version of 1947 Los Angeles in which there are more women than men and California is on the verge of seceding from the United States. Against this backdrop, my homicide detective protagonist, Rita Mitchell, must solve the murder of a man she vaguely knows from her home neighborhood. I’d oomphed up the plot, thanks to help from my BookEnds pod throughout the fall. I’d tied the novel’s themes more clearly into the whodunit. But I couldn’t nail Rita’s emotional journey—the heart of the book.

I described the methods I’d tried so far and where they’d failed. I’d written small moments that were supposed to brim with symbolism and significance, only for them to read as limp and meaningless. I’d tried writing emotions as experienced through Rita’s physical sensations, only to have beta readers ask if she was on the verge of a migraine or seizure (I have these conditions, but my protagonist does not). I’d sidled up to Rita’s feelings, crab-like and obliquely, only to scamper right over them in favor of more plot.

Matt’s follow-up questions felt like a therapeutic intervention, writer-style, and at first I was hesitant to engage. I didn’t see how my feelings related to Rita’s emotional journey, especially since my attempts to imbue my protagonist with some of my own reactions had flopped. I’d followed that old adage, write what you know, but what I knew wasn’t relatable, at least thus far. “I don’t think I know how to write the emotional reactions that people seem to want,” I confessed. “I don’t experience emotions at that volume.”

Which is when Matt asked me if I was a stoic.

That question, and the conversation that followed, allowed me to view my protagonist’s emotional arc in a whole new light: I could let her be cold, dissociative, and alienating to all but a few of the novel’s other characters. Matt told me that Rita didn’t have to project all her emotions to the cheap seats. In fact, it made sense, based on her background and job, that action would be her reaction. But, Matt added, readers needed to understand why this was Rita’s way of dealing with fraught situations, and they needed to understand it right from the get-go.

I ended up writing a new beginning to my second chapter, in which I put my novel’s mystery plot aside and let Rita get messy. I showed why she had worked so hard to cultivate a stable life, and then gave her nine pages in which to feel out of control beyond the parameters of her job, in a situation not of her making, and to lose her shit. When I re-read this chapter toward the end of the semester, I saw how it worked on multiple levels. Not only did it give the reader necessary insight into Rita’s psyche, it also foreshadowed her brutal reactions to later events in the novel, when the case’s chaos upends her sense of normalcy.

Without Matt’s guidance—in particular, that therapy-style discussion of my protagonist, in which I felt seen and normalized and validated as a writer, and which prepared me to get to work—I never would have had the insight needed to write a scene just for the sake of the novel’s emotional journey. It was a concept I returned to again and again throughout my revisions. By letting my characters be more human in ways that aren’t always easily categorized or understandable, I’ve made The Split Decision into a more compelling page-turner, with the novel’s emotional stakes given as much weight and consideration as the intricacies of the plot. 

Rachael Warecki is a MacDowell Fellow whose short fiction has earned recognition in contests held by Tiferet, Glimmer Train, and American Short Fiction, in addition to being published in various literary journals. Her work has also received support through residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Wellstone Center. She is a graduate of the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program, was a 2021–22 BookEnds Fellow, and is originally from Los Angeles, where she currently resides.

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

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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. 

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.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Pleasure and Faith in Writing with Alice McDermott

Drafting, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , ,

Fellow J. Greg Phelan on our November 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event 

I was having lunch with my mom’s three close friends from childhood. It was the first time we’d seen each other since my mom passed away, and her friends wanted to mark the occasion with a drink. I told them I couldn’t, that I had to keep my wits about me as that night I was going to interview my favorite author on Zoom. 

“Who?” they asked. When I told them, Aunt Kay, my mom’s buddy since junior high, smiled in joy and recognition. 

“Alice McDermott is my hero,” she said. “I feel like I know her, and she knows me.” 

Anybody who’s read Alice’s work knows what Aunt Kay means. (“Aunt Kay’s one of my people,” Alice said, when I told her the story.) 

I’ve been hooked on Alice McDermott’s work since Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel. I felt like I knew her and she knew me, and my family, too. I don’t know of any other living writer whose work has touched me more as a reader and inspired me more as a writer, to slow down and observe the extraordinary moments of ordinary people, to seek meaning, wisdom, and truth in their stories. 

Her most recent book is her first of nonfiction, What About The Baby?, a wonderful collection of insightful essays on writing and craft based on her lectures at Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as her 23 years teaching creative writing at Johns Hopkins.

What an honor and privilege it was for me to interview her for our BookEnds Alum’s Visiting Writing Series, to ask her variations on the same question: How do you do it? Evoke such richly observed lives with such compressed, beautiful, seemingly effortless prose. Here’s what I learned. 

Alice makes the time and space to write, doing her best to keep distractions and self-doubts out of the room, so she’s alone with the words on the page. She writes badly for as long as it takes—which, she reminds us, is sheer hell—as she works and reworks sentences, keeping the faith that she’ll get where she needs to go in due time. 

The reason she has faith to keep at it is because she’s experienced moments of transcendence herself, as a reader––when, as she put it, “we read something and felt like it changed our lives, hit us in the spine, gave us a new way to look at the world. We just fall in love with a character or a setting or a situation or a voice and we recognize the value of storytelling.” That’s what keeps her going: “This endless hope; it’s not based on nothing. It’s based on what I’ve experienced as a reader.”

She reads and rereads her works-in-progress constantly, looking for patterns, connection, and meaning, like a scholar would. That’s the way she finds the form of the story. “Constantly going back and seeing, ‘Well now, I know this, what do I make of that?’ is part of the pleasure, but also part of understanding the consequence and the logical movement of a story through time.”

Her emphasis on rereading led to my big epiphany, which seems obvious when you hear it out loud: We should bring the same high expectations we bring to reading books to reading our own works-in-progress.  

Indeed Alice advocates reading our own work with the same level of concentration, curiosity, and expectation as the books we love––all the while reminding ourselves, no matter how impatient we are to get it done, that unless we feel the same excitement and sense of discovery reading our own prose as we hope to feel as a reader, we still have work to do. 

“Language is the only tool the writer has,” she writes. 

So how does she do it?

Block out time to write, putting distractions and self-doubts out of the room. Have faith the work is worthwhile, knowing what you have experienced as a reader. 

Read widely and deeply, bringing the same curiosity and high expectations to your own work-in-progress as you do to any book. 

That’s it, really. Why make it any more complicated?

Alice McDermott shows and inspires us to understand that, simply, there’s pleasure to be had in the work, for us and our readers. That this pleasure is reason enough to keep going.

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, Project Write Now, where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently finishing a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Working with Meg Wolitzer

Mentors, Revision, , , ,

2019 Fellow Sheena Cook reflects and speaks with other Meg mentees. 

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with my manuscript A Tender Hate, which I had only been working on seriously for about a year when I applied. The manuscript was full of holes, and by the time I got to the second half of the BookEnds fellowship and began my work with Meg, my podmates had helped point out where the holes were and how to fill them with missing scenes. When I first met with Meg after she’d read my manuscript, I knew what I wanted to say, but didn’t know when to reveal which information.

Meg saw the structure from the first. “Well, this novel is in three parts,” she said. “The first part can end with this sentence here, the second part can be the big flashback and the third can be back in the present where the first part left off.” It was as if she had taken me to The Container Store and picked out three perfectly-sized and -shaped boxes, and sent me home to fill each one with what I already owned. I left that January meeting filled with energy. It was a sorting exercise. I could do this.

I had been longing for a structure, an architecture, a template. Meg gave it to me, as if she had intuited what the manuscript needed.

Indeed, Caroline “Coco” Picard, whose BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press in 2022, said this: “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.”

I totally agree that Meg has “uncanny ability” as a mentor to novelists. She plucked a phrase from the middle of my novel and turned it into the title, A Tender Hate—and that title, it turns out, was the essence of the novel, the “core of the book’s concerns.”

Journalist Colleen Curry, who worked with Meg on her novel Married Women through the early months of the pandemic, said these were the nuggets from Meg that would stay with her: “Cut every part that isn’t the reader’s favorite, never stray too far for too long from what the book is really about; there should be something on every single page that delights the reader.” With these simple phrases, Meg sharpened Colleen’s eye toward her own work and reminded her of the purpose of the task.Colleen went on: “Meg’s line edits are so insightful, and her generosity in helping other writers is a model for all of us.”

When Stephanie Gangi came to speak to the BookEnds alums group about freelance editing, she said that what she looked for in an editor was someone to stand shoulder to shoulder, nose to the grindstone in the editing. Over many months and through multiple drafts, this was what Meg did for me. She was shoulder to shoulder with me, nose to the grindstone, generously inhabiting my manuscript and my characters along with me. In the last couple of weeks of my BookEnds fellowship, before the manuscript was submitted for  the agent read, I was in Scotland, so Meg and I were working at a 5-hour time difference which she accommodated without missing a beat. I would send the manuscript to Meg at my bedtime and when I woke up, there it would be in my inbox with a full edit.

At the last minute, Meg saw that there was an important missing scene. I had about half an hour before I was supposed to press “send” to Susie. I would normally mull over a new scene for days, writing drafts long, then reducing, sitting with it until it revealed to me what it wanted to say, but because Meg assumed I could write a whole new scene in minutes, it made me rise to her expectations. I wrote it in minutes and inserted it into its place. Shoulder to shoulder, indeed. 

“It’s Meg’s perception of how fiction works in the minds of readers that left the deepest impression on me,” Colleen said. “She understands why readers come to fiction in the first place, and what makes them sink into a book. Her lifelong study and deep love of stories remind me why I write.”

What a gift, Coco and Colleen and I agreed, to have had Meg’s brain and heart laser-focused on our work.

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. Her novel is now on submission in the UK and she is working on the next in the series.