Tag Archives: Revision

Spring News Round-Up

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The first great news from BookEnds: we received close to 60 applications this year! Thanks so much to all of the amazing and talented applicants for their interest in the program. We’re immersed in so much great reading.

We’ve also had some remarkably great news from our fellows and alums:

  • Vanessa Cuti had a short story featured in Best American Short Stories, a second story was included in the Distinguished BASS list as well. 
  • April Darcy is the recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist Award from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. April was also given an Honorable Mention for the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award.
  • Alison Fairbrother’s BookEnds novel The Catch is forthcoming with Penguin Random House on June 21, 2022.
  • Daisy Florin’s BookEnds novel My Last Innocent Year is forthcoming with Holt in January 2023.
  • Kathleen Gibbons has been nominated for two Pushcart awards for her debut short story publications.
  • Haley Hach won Carve Magazine’s 2021 Editor’s Choice Award.
  • An excerpt from Maggie Hill’s BookEnds novel Hoops was published in Cleaver Magazine. 
  • Celine Keating and Greg Phelan are co-leading the Novel Incubator, a yearlong program offered by Project Writer Now, a writing studio Greg co-founded. As peer artist leaders, they are having a lot of fun drafting a new novel along with the 10 participants.
  • Sue Mell’s BookEnds novel Provenance is forthcoming with Madville Publishing on July 21, 2022. Sue also won the Chestnut Review 2021 Chapbook Prose Prize.
  • Coco Picard’s BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press on August 16, 2022.
  • Jennifer Solheim was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize.
  • Rachael Warecki had a MacDowell Fellowship in autumn 2021.
  • Dan White is launching a new literary journal called L’Esprit.
  • Nearly a dozen additional BookEnds fellows have found representation with agents, and are either on submission or will be very soon.

BookEnders are also busy at work with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions, the alums monthly meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. We look forward to bringing you more great news in 2022!

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Working with Meg Wolitzer

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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.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Stephanie Gangi on Freelance Editing as a Writer

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Fellow Maggie Hill on our October 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event. 

It’s a known secret that novelist Stephanie Gangi (whose second novel Carry the Dog is just out with Algonquin) is also a “manuscript whisperer.” She works with both well-published authors and debut writers, to help develop what’s already germinating in the narrative. Although she’s written a massively entertaining first novel (I devoured The Next in two nights of everyone-leave-me-alone-I’m-reading obsession), it was her business as an editor over the course of the past twenty-five-plus years that was the focus of our Visiting Writer series guest discussion. 

Stephanie broke down how she approaches her editorial work, and outlined how she uses skills such as deep listening, translating with care, and approaching the work with kindness, consideration, and respect. Honesty, charity, patience are also high on her list of how to engage with an author. To use her expression, it sounded a bit “woo-woo” but I believed every word she said. “Every writer is different,” she said. “You have to tune in to where the person is at.” 

Stephanie prefaced her talk with how she is “not a lecturer, but a learner.” She was emphatic about how writers sometimes get to a point where “they are not able to see their own work” and reassured us that this was actually part of the process. What a good editor offers, she said, is “a cold eye that’s helpful.” But there was nothing cold about her, as she tried to articulate a process which is intuitive and subjective, coupled with a lifetime of practical engagement with good writing.  

What she said rang so true for me, as I’ve been on the merry-go-round of submission and rejection for a couple of years now, and even just that day had gotten a head-scratcher of a rejection from a wonderful agent. There are days when I just put my head down and work, and try to forget that this is a business, too. Listening to Stephanie helped me pick my head up and try to blink my way forward again. I’m also about to sit down with a bunch of post-it notes and try Stephanie’s manuscript evaluation technique as a revision exercise. One of the ways she approaches a piece of writing is to “flag, flag, flag” where her attention lags. She will then go back, and do the same for when she is fully engaged and actively reading in the manuscript. Examining every single moment, good and bad, allows her to “look behind the curtain to see how the book works.” 

A question she posed to us was, why do we grant permission for a voice, a narration, to get inside our heads? What is the moment when we grant access to this voice? I thought back to recent books I’ve read to find where and when I was fully on board and gave the author permission to enter my head. One novel that comes to mind right away is Toni Morrison’s SULA. The opening lines had my permission immediately:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood….It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. 

The tremendous, sonorous, elegiac voice of Morrison makes a town a character. All of the senses are being engaged right from the start. The narrative is particular, yet the poetry is universal — the full sensual engagement of experiencing this town, and the loss of it, begins in these first few lines. By the time the single paragraph is done, some seven sentences later, I am in church having my soul saved. Ah, I see what Stephanie Gangi is talking about with this permission business…

Stephanie was also adamant about how at some point in the process, we are unable to see our own work anymore—and how that is actually part of the process. “Editing a manuscript is an enormous undertaking,” she said. As such, she will work on (perhaps) two manuscripts in any given month. 

In answer to a question about how this freelance business of editing works, she explained the process of generating either an editorial letter (a one-shot, five-to-seven page editorial breakdown), or an extended period of working with an author on a developmental basis (months-long process of going through the work). “Seventy percent are process problems,” she said, so along with developmental work, she may also offer coaching. 

Summing up her process, she said she sees her work as an editor in part as an active meditation of deeply listening, loving words, and also, recognizing that she’s “a little judge-y.” She is also deeply grateful for how she’s been given chances to publish her novels at a later stage than ‘normal’ so she wants to pay it forward. For her, editing is a way to give back. 

This year, BookEnds welcomes Stephanie Gangi as a mentor for the 2021-2022 fellowship. Learn more about her at www.sgangi.com.

Maggie Hill came from a journalism background, writing about educational technology for Scholastic Professional Magazines, among other freelance clients. Her book reviews, essays, stories have been published in The New York Times, The Daily News, Persimmon Tree, and Flatbush Review. A 2018-2019 BookEnds fellow, she worked with Amy Hempel on completing her first novel, Hoops.

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. 

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

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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.

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.