Category Archives: Revision

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.

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

Awards, Creative process, Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Publication, Revision,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , , , ,

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. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Susan Scarf Merrell on Cutting Timelines and Embracing the Blank Space

Mentors, Revision, ,

Alum Daisy Alpert Florin reflects on working with the BookEnds Founding Director.

I applied to BookEnds with a manuscript I’d been working on for four years. The story of an affair between a college student and her professor, the novel shifted back and forth between two timelines: 1998, when the affair takes place, and 2016, when the two main characters meet again. My biggest challenge was how to combine the two timelines and also how to find the right ending, something that had eluded me so far.

I had tried combining the timelines in a few different ways. I’d put the 1998 section first followed by 2016, a structure used by Susan Choi in her novel My Education. I’d also tried starting with the 2016 section, allowing the novel to unfold like a long reminiscence like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Working with my BookEnds pod, I spent the fall working on braiding the timelines together, similar to Julie Buntin’s Marlena or Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa. This was the version I turned in to my mentor, Susie Merrell, in December. But I knew it wasn’t quite working and I still hadn’t found a way to finish the novel; the draft still had sections marked “FINISH THIS” and “SCENE TBD.”

When Susie and I met at her house in early January, she asked me to bring the whole manuscript printed out and separated into scenes. We laid it across her kitchen floor, the 1998 sections on one side and the 2016 scenes on the other. Right away, I could see how unwieldy it was and also how haphazardly I had incorporated the timelines. I started to worry—how had I worked for half a year and not managed to solve this problem? And what would I do now?

“You know what?” Susie said, looking around. “I don’t think you need the 2016 timeline,” and in that moment, I knew she was right. Susie walked me through the pages and showed me how little information was being conveyed in the 2016 sections and also that the second timeline had no real tension or arc. The story—the real story—was happening in the 1998 sections. I felt instantly relieved, as if I’d been walking around with three arms and someone showed me how much easier it would be to have only two. 

I went home and got to work. Still, early on, I had doubts. Was I eager to discard the second timeline because I just couldn’t figure it out or because it was the right thing to do? But Susie encouraged me to push forward. I worked from January to June on the revision, this time starting in a different place and cutting 55 pages of 2016 scenes. I could feel right away that the novel was sharper and tighter and with Susie’s clear and precise editing, I knew exactly how to get to the end. 

Early on, Susie asked why I had wanted the 2016 timeline in the first place. First, because I wanted the book to have a wistful, retrospective tone, to capture the feeling we have as adults when we look back on the actions of our youth. But Susie showed me I could do that by making it clear that the main character is narrating from a very specific time and place in the future. Whenever her voice intrudes on the 1998 narrative, I made sure it was emanating from this place.

Second, because my book asks questions about consent and sex and power, I felt in some ways obliged to include references to Trump and #MeToo. But Susie showed me how these details threatened to swallow up the novel I was better suited to write. I still think my novel is political, but once I let go of the idea of writing a capital-P political novel, I was able to complete a draft I was happy with.

Do I miss the second timeline? Not really, because it’s still very present for me. I needed to write those scenes for the rest of the story to make sense. Once I knew what was there, I no longer needed it in the same way, and, like scaffolding, it could be removed. Every writer throws out material, but it is never really gone. The 2016 sections of my novel are no longer on the page-—but they still exist in blank space.

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.