Guest Blogs | Christina Baker Kline

Don’t Skip the Sex Scenes

June 22nd, 2011 by bakerkline

Novelist Ellen Sussman explains why she likes to write – and read – about sex:

When the first Amazon reader review for my new novel, French Lessons, showed up on the website, I was thrilled. Five stars! Enthusiastic praise! And then came the last couple of lines: I wish she didn’t write the sex scenes. Women don’t want to read about sex.

Really? I like to read about sex. And I like to write about it. Interesting things happen on the page when people make love. It’s not just about the sex, though a reader might get a charge out of that as well – it’s about what gets exposed during sex. A sex scene is an opportunity for the writer to reveal unexpected things about her characters: about the way they relate to each other, their vulnerabilities and desires, the way they fit together (or don’t) emotionally as well as physically.

But it’s not easy. Many writers skip the sex scenes because they’re damn hard to write. How do you make them fresh, and how do you make them matter?

The most important consideration for me as a writer (and as a reader) is that the sex scene exists for a reason. It’s not gratuitous – it isn’t meant just as a turn-on. (We can read other genres for that experience.) The sex scene in literary fiction has to take us someplace new. It has to surprise us or affect the story line or take us somewhere deeper. When I’m writing, I ask myself how I can use this sex scene – in the way I use any scene – to move my story forward.

The scene must engage the reader. A graphic description of sex usually doesn’t work – I try to find surprising details, quiet moments, the fresh image. You don’t want to lose your reader because you’ve explained too much or gone too far. Often, desire is sexier than the sex act itself. So the writer needs to look beyond the naked limbs and focus on what’s happening to the heart when all that heavy breathing takes place.

French Lessons is mostly about love and loss. It’s about complicated relationships and intimacy, and sex is a part of all of that. We wouldn’t learn very much if the lights go out just when we’re getting to the good part.

Ellen Sussman is the author of a new novel, French Lessons, published by Ballantine. Her first novel, On a Night Like This, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. It has been translated into six languages. She is also the editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller.

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Tagged as: Bad Girls, Dirty Words, Ellen Sussman, French Lessons, reading about sex, sex, writing about sex

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Literary Names: Do Characters Name Themselves?

June 10th, 2011 by bakerkline

On Sunday -- June 12 -- I'll be on a panel called "Going Beyond 'Tom, Dick and Mary': Naming and Giving Your Characters Dimension" at Books NJ: A Celebration of Books and the Readers who Love Them, 1-5 p.m. at the Paramus Public Library. (Stop by and say hello!) Consequently I've been thinking a lot about character names this week.

So has novelist and playwright Joanne Lessner, author of Pandora’s Bottle and Critical Mass, who wonders whether she names her characters….or they name themselves:

In my alternate life (the one where I’m a jet-setting opera singer based in London), I have a clutch of children with fabulous names. The girls are called Tessa, Lily, Francesca and Imogen, and the boys are Sebastian, Phineas, Jasper and Colin. In my actual life, I’m a New York-based writer and performer with two kids who got my first round draft picks: Julian and Phoebe. But as a writer, surely I can pepper my work with those other glorious, un-exercised gems, right?

Well, not exactly.

J.K. Rowling has famously said that Harry Potter just strolled into her head, fully formed. I understand what she means. My characters have a habit of knocking on my mental door wearing nametags. Even names that carry hints of significance are often a chicken and egg situation. For example, the hero of my novel, Pandora’s Bottle, is named Sy Hampton. I don’t recall consciously choosing his name, but one reader asked if it was meant to illustrate a “sigh” of disappointment (he’s having a mid-life crisis.) Another suggested that “Hampton” indicates a yearning for the finer things in life epitomized by those exclusive Long Island enclaves. Those are certainly reasonable assumptions, but I can’t say honestly whether Sy grew more melancholy and striving because of his name, or if, when I named him, my subconscious instinctively know where he was heading. However, I do know that when my editor floated the possibility of changing his name – feeling that Sy suggested someone of a slightly older generation – I just couldn’t.

The anti-heroine of a novel I’m working on now is named Katelyn. I must confess, I’ve never been a fan of that name or its multiple spellings, so imagine my surprise when that’s what my fingers typed. Her last name is Marx, which I also don’t recall selecting, but have since recognized has political overtones in line with Katelyn’s schemes. The success of her plans will hinge on her ability to remain chameleon-like and forgettable. What better way to illustrate that quality than with a name with multiple, hard-to-keep-track-of spellings? Except that, again, I gave it no thought whatsoever. Katelyn Marx just showed up for work the day I started writing and politely introduced herself.

Still, it doesn’t always work that way. Minor characters, in particular, can be more reticent, and as they blink patiently at me in the doorway, I try to let my mind free associate until something clicks. Even so, these characters often don’t live and breathe in quite the same way as the ones who are instinctive. But giving serious thought to a name is not necessarily a bad thing, and when you hit it right, you know. As one writer friend told me recently, a simple change from Lily to Billie made her character come alive.

One situation that does require special care is naming for the stage, where the sound is more important than the way it looks on the page. In my play, Critical Mass, a character named Stefano Donato kept my cast’s tongues twisted. It looks neat and symmetrical in print, but the actors had to remind themselves where the accents were every time they said it. Lesson learned.

In a musical, names that rhyme are a boon.

I’m currently adapting Wilkie Collins’s gothic novella The Haunted Hotel. The heroine’s name is Agnes – not much joy there. But make her Alice, and suddenly we’ve got malice, callous and palace, which happens to be the name of the eponymous hotel. Her faithless lover? Collins named him Herbert. But rechristened Edward, he can lure another woman bedward. Even here, though, where active choice is involved, expedience takes precedence over all those names I’d love to employ.

An acting teacher of mine once said that your gut is a better actor than your brain, and I think the same holds true for writers, particularly when choosing the right names for characters. I’ve had the experience of reading others’ work and being distracted by a name that’s too fussy, unrealistic, or forced in some intangible way, and I find myself wondering if that person was mining his or her well of untapped baby names hoping to press an old favorite into active service. So for now I’ll have to hope that I get a surprise visit someday from Tessa, Francesca, Phineas or Jasper – unless I can come up with some good rhymes for them. Until then, I’ll continue to let my subconscious do the work, opening my door to whoever knocks, and eagerly asking that character his or her name.

Joanne Sydney Lessner is the author of Pandora’s Bottle, a novel inspired by the true story of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine (Flint Mine Press, 2010). This post originally appeared on Pamela Redmond Satran's Nameberry blog.

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Tagged as: character names, J. K. Rowling, Joanne Lessner, Nameberry, naming characters, Pamela Redmond Satran

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Posted in Guest Blogs, The Creative Process | 1 Comment »

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Embrace the Digital Age! A Contrarian Opinion

May 30th, 2011 by bakerkline

Some time ago I posted a piece by Chad Taylor, a freelancer for Kirkus Reviews and a purveyor of fine tweets (attracting the likes of such literati as Susan Orlean and Caroline Leavitt) on why Twitter is actually a good thing for writers. Here’s his take on the fuss over e-books, self-publishing, and the demise of publishing as we know it:

Writing is a romantic endeavor. The problem is that too often writers romanticize the wrong things. A decade ago print journalists howled about the rise of bloggers as if they were pillaging Huns. Today, many novelists and other writers lament the death of print newspapers and the rise of the e-book because it's a different model than the one we've grown up with. But times change. Technology changes. Almost always, I would say, for the better.

Three thousand years ago Plato told everyone who would listen that this newfangled thing called an "alphabet" was going to be the death of storytelling. Why would anyone remember stories, he asked, when you could just "write them down"? Plato -- with all his ageless brilliance and wisdom -- was so caught up in what the new technology would take away that he never bothered to consider what advantages it might bring. In a similar way, our generation rails against the advent of digital printing and e-books because it changes the things we’re comfortable with: the weight of a bound book in your hand; writing annotations in margins; passing a physical copy from one person to the next. James Gleick refers to this as "a lack of imagination in the face of new technology.”

E-printing and digital distribution allows for direct, intimate contact between author and reader. Why buy a copy of a book from Barnes & Noble, then stand in line for hours to get it signed at a formal event, when I can download a copy for half the price from Amazon, then talk to the author directly about it via Twitter, Facebook or email? Removing the cost of paper-and-glue publishing will also eliminate the need for an author to give 70% of each sale to Random House. Bad news for Random House; great news for anyone who's ever tried to feed his or her family writing novels.

Computers have made the act of writing more immediate, more visceral and accessible to everyone. It's easier to write and edit on a word processor than to bang a manuscript out on a typewriter, and the act of sharing a draft with other people requires an email or thumb drive, not a trip to Kinko's, unwieldy boxes, and an unreliable postal service. It allows writers to easily interact with other writers and receive feedback instantly on what we're doing. It enables us to meet and share with people we'd never have dreamed of interacting with even 10 years ago.

The bottom line is this: Social media allows us to intimately connect with people looking for exactly what we're offering, sell directly to the people who most want to pay for our art, and hear firsthand how what we do matters to the people who most appreciate it. And that’s a good thing.

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Tagged as: Chad Taylor, digital age, e-books, Kirkus Reviews, new technology, pillaging huns, Plato, Twitter

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What Makes a Title Great?

December 16th, 2010 by bakerkline

Novelist Caroline Leavitt on the impossibility -- and importance -- of finding the perfect title:

When I finished my new novel, I was relieved, excited, overwhelmed, and then terrified. I knew I wasn’t really finished -- I had to do the one thing that makes my head feel as if it is going to explode: I had to find the right title. Having published eight other novels, I knew that a title wasn’t just my own creative decision. My editor, my agent, publicity and marketing were going to weigh in, and truthfully, I could see why. The title’s the first thing a prospective reader sees (besides the cover, of course, which is a whole other story), and if you can’t grab someone’s attention with a few words on the glossy jacket, you may not have a chance with the thousands more that are inside.

A lot of my writer friends are expert book namers. They argue with marketing, they follow their instincts and convince their editors about the rightness of their choices, but I’ve had no such luck. I admit that I’m horrible at titles, that none of the ones I ever think of seem right to me. I can, however, recognize a decent title when I see it. Or at least, I think I can.

Originally, my new novel was called Traveling Angels. It’s a screenwriting term I got from story guru John Truby. A traveling angel is a person who comes into the midst of a village, changes everyone’s life, and then vanishes. How perfect for my novel! Or so I thought. But my publisher was afraid no one would get the title. Plus, it sounded too soft for them, and what did it really mean? How many people would get the screenwriting reference? So I came up with a one word-title. Breathe. One of my main characters, a nine-year-old boy, is severely asthmatic. The word “breathe” could also apply to the other characters, who could use a good deep breath themselves. I loved it. I was sure it was right!

It wasn’t. “Not strong enough,” my beloved editor told me. She asked me to come up with a list, but it was actually she who came up with Pictures of You. “It’s the name of a Cure song,” she told me, which I knew, and I instantly loved the idea. (One of my other novels, Coming Back to Me, was the title of a Jefferson Airplane song I loved, and an homage to my husband, whose book on the band, Got A Revolution, was making many Best of the Year lists.) Plus, the title Pictures of You fit in all sorts of ways, since the novel is about photography and how we choose to see (or not see) the ones we love.

I’m writing another novel now, due to Algonquin in 2012, and of course I've worked hard on the title, trying desperately to come up with something that would be both evocative of the story and mind-grabbing. Set in the late 1950s and early 60s, this new novel is about how we try to keep the ones we love safe, how the unseen in our lives affects the parts we are aware of. I thought I found the perfect title: The Missing One. My editor emailed me. “I love what I’ve read so far of your pages,” she wrote, “but the title has to go.”

Caroline Leavitt’s new novel, Pictures of You, officially out in January 2011, is already in its 3rd printing! She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com, at facebook at http://www.facebook.com/carolineleavitt, at Twitter at @Leavittnovelist, and on her blog, http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/.

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Tagged as: book titles, Caroline Leavitt, creative process, finding a title, Inspiration, novels, Pictures of You

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Nothing is Ever Lost

December 9th, 2010 by bakerkline

In which the writer Mark Trainer explains how old ideas can spring to life when you least expect it:

One of my writing teachers way back when, George Garrett, used to say of being a writer, "Nothing is ever lost." He meant it as comfort when every lit mag under the sun had rejected your story. Just because you can't make use of it now doesn't mean you won't be able to years down the road. It's true for the ideas we have for stories as well. The first story I published originated with a single sentence I discovered in some notebooks (otherwise terrible) that I'd written when I was fourteen or fifteen.

The story that St. Martins Press has just published as an e-book, New Wife, had an even longer gestation. I'm not proud of this, but during college some friends and I used to watch a soap opera during lunch—okay, it was All My Children. When they change one of the actors on a soap -- just before her first appearance -- there's usually a voice-over that says, "The part of Alexis Stone [or whoever] is now being played by Jane Smith." But if you miss the day when this announcement is made, you tune in next time to see a stranger being treated as though she is Alexis. Alexis's children hug this unfamiliar person and call her Mommy. All the family pictures used for set decoration now include this person, as though the former actor had never existed. I remember thinking back then that it would be interesting to transpose that situation onto the real world. Maybe it would make a good skit for SNL or something. It just took 25 years to find the context that would give this idea resonance.

Here's a strange and dangerous thing: The ideas that have worked the best in this way are the ones I never wrote down. Maybe it's because they seemed more like gags than the seeds of Literary Fiction. Sometimes even in the simple act of jotting down an idea, you limit it in some way, give it a point of view and a context that fix it in the place it was found rather than letting it find the place it wants to go.

Late last spring, I found myself thinking about a couple of much older friends suffering from memory loss and dementia. It led me to think how delicate the mental threads are that connect us to the people closest to us, and how we forget some things exactly because we never imagined we could forget them. The name of your best friend's husband or the lyric to a favorite song will temporarily slip away because they're so familiar you haven't taken any steps to fix in them in your memory. I have elaborate systems in place to make sure I remember where my glasses are, but nothing to make sure I remember my daughter's face.

I was sitting in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill across from my wife, both of us staring into computers. Could the misfiring of a couple of neurons, I thought to myself as I looked over the table, make me forget you? And then I'd be like that viewer watching the soap opera, wondering why everyone was pretending that this stranger was my wife. I wrote the first few paragraphs and then realized the meter on our parking space was about to run out. (And a note about titles: I had to save the file as something as we rushed out; “New Wife” was the product of half a second's thought, but it never got changed.)

The rest of the writing was a process of following a small idea to its logical conclusion, placing an odd premise in a context that's as recognizable and ordinary as most of our daily lives. If my character doesn't recognize his wife, what about his son? Will he forget him too? Wouldn't he have to manage his job, his household chores, and everything else while he wonders why no one else thinks this woman isn't who she's supposed to be? And is there a reason for all this forgetting? Is there any way to turn it around? I felt like I'd come a long way from the soap-opera-casting premise and found a way to express something about how we incorporate our past into our present.

It's a great feeling to find a good use for something that's been kicking around your writer's toolbox for years. Better still when it's something you could so easily have forgotten. And yet you didn't.

Mark Trainer (@marktrainer on Twitter) is a writer living on Capitol Hill. His stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Brain, Child, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post.

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Tagged as: All My Children, creative process, fiction writing, George Garrett, Inspiration, Jeffrey Archer, Mark Trainer, New Wife

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A New Twist to a Familiar Story

September 9th, 2010 by bakerkline

Karen Essex talks about how she reclaimed -- and reframed -- the vampire myth by exploring its female origins in her new novel, Dracula in Love:

From the first time I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in my teens, I just knew that Mina was not satisfied with her role as the quintessential Victorian virgin. Little did I dream that many years later, I would actually revise the story, retelling it from Mina’s perspective.

Though Stoker’s Dracula was a brilliant creation and a haunting story, when it came to the women, he wrote like a man of his time, constructing the typical paradigm of bad girl (Lucy Westenra, who succumbs to the vampire’s seduction) versus the good girl (Mina Harker, who does not). The vampire’s kiss was a thinly veiled metaphor for—you guessed it—sex. In the pre-feminist construct, the bad girl is punished; the good girl rewarded.

My ambition for Dracula in Love was to turn the original story inside out. I wanted to give Mina and Lucy rich, full lives, as well as plausible inner lives that made sense in the era in which they lived, but also reflected the breadth of women’s desires. I researched late Victorian art, culture, costume, design, sexual and social mores, religious beliefs, and laws concerning the rights, or lack thereof, of women. I moved to London so that I could haunt its streets and its museums, breathing in the atmosphere as I wrote. Walking in the footsteps of the characters is a crucial part of my process, so I also traveled to southern Austria and the west coast of Ireland, where I set Mina’s birthplace.

Those who have read Dracula know that a good portion of the book takes place in an insane asylum. This is also true of Dracula in Love, but I wanted to recreate the asylum as it would have been in the late Victorian era—not inhabited by an insect-eating vampire slave like Stoker’s Renfield, but full of women, committed for having what we today would consider normal sexual attitudes and desires. Because these asylum scenes are crucial to both the plot and the themes of my book, I scoured the archives of late 19^th century insane asylums. I also studied the Victorian fascination with the metaphysical.

In the process of my research, I unearthed a wealth of information that became a major theme: vampires have a long history dating back to pre-biblical times, and many of the blood drinkers of myth were female, symbolic of feminine magic and power.

Digging deeper into world mythologies, I became fascinated by these bloodsucking goddesses and monsters. These are the bad girls of mythology—the fearsome Indian goddess Kali who punished and possessed her enemies by drinking their blood; the vengeful, child-eating, blood-drinking Lamia of Greece and North Africa; Lilith, Adam’s Mesopotamian wife who drank blood in vengeance; and the blood-lusting warrior fairy queens of Ireland.

So if the original blood-drinkers were females, then why was Stoker’s Dracula male? For one thing, mythological stories rarely follow a straight line. Myths are reinvented in every culture, adapted to the needs and beliefs of the people and the times. Through the millennia, concepts of vampires shape-shifted. They were thought to be spirits of women who had been witches; angry plague victims risen from the dead; victims of crime come back to suck the blood of the perpetrators; and succubi who visited men in the night, draining them of their life force (the male spirits who did similar harm to slumbering females are known as incubi).

But power, supernatural or otherwise, was the last thing the Victorians wanted women to possess. In the Victorian mind, women were pure and innocent creatures who must remain protected, shielded from worldly life. To accommodate this mentality, writers like Bram Stoker turned the predatory vampire into a male, giving him preternatural powers, while women became his victims.

Suddenly it was the male vampire roaming the foggy, narrow streets of London threatening lovely young ladies. With Dracula in Love, it was my joy and privilege to give Mina deep hidden desires and a paranormal past of her own to discover and embrace. The good girl has some very “bad” moments for which she is not punished. The old paradigms turn upside down, returning the women to that place of power lost somewhere in the centuries since Lilith and the Lamia roamed the earth, taking their bloody revenge and causing men to quake with fear – and quiver with excitement.

Karen Essex is the author of Kleopatra, Pharaoh, Stealing Athena, and the international bestseller Leonardo’s Swans, which won Italy’s prestigious 2007 Premio Roma for foreign fiction. She graduated from Tulane University, attended graduate school at Vanderbilt, and received an MFA from Goddard College. An award-winning journalist and a screenwriter, she lives in London and Los Angeles.

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Tagged as: Bram Stoker, creative process, Dracula, Dracula in Love, Inspiration, Kali, Karen Essex, Lilith, Mina Harker, writing a novel

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Great Writing

July 16th, 2010 by bakerkline

Justin Kramon didn’t think he was qualified to call himself a writer. And then he thought about his favorite books, and had a change of heart:

For some reason, I used to have the perception that writers should be interesting, well-rounded, generally knowledgeable people. I got this idea before I’d met any writers, and certainly before I started trying to become one. In fact, my perception of writers was a big obstacle to writing, because – and I have to be completely honest here – I’m not that interesting, am poorly rounded, and most of what I have to offer in the way of knowledge concerns the time it takes to heat various foods in the microwave.

A few years ago, I’d started working on a novel, but it hadn’t come alive. The voice was wooden and the characters seemed predictable, too polite with each other. It was like watching my novel through a window. I wanted to get in there and tickle everyone.

The problem, I realized, was that I wanted to be a good writer. I wanted to sound like the writers everyone had been telling me were great writers, the best writers, the important writers. A lot of these writers happened to be men, and happened to write in wise, commanding, and slightly formal styles. Reading them made me feel like a slow runner in sixth-grade gym, sweating and hyperventalating while everyone else rushed by. They were doing something I could never do, that I wasn’t built to do.

But these great writers were not actually the writers I most enjoyed reading. Picking up their books was more of a responsibility than a pleasure. The writers I loved, the writers who had meant most to me, who had entertained me and stuck with me and let me lose myself in their books – this was a completely different list.

So one morning, when I couldn’t face my own fledgling novel, I decided to make a list of writers I loved. One of the writers that immediately jumped to mind was Alice Adams, who died in the late-1990’s and unfairly seems to have fallen off the map. She wrote some of the most entertaining and insightful books I’ve read, including the novel Superior Women and a story collection called To See You Again. I can’t think of many writers I’d rather sit down and read than Alice Adams. Her books are so absorbing that I feel like I’m reading gossip from a close friend, about people I actually know, except the writing is so much funnier and clearer and more beautiful than any gossip I’ve ever read. John Irving is another one. I love his intricate plots, the slightly larger-than-life characters, the comic set pieces, and the sense of bigness and adventure in all his novels. I think of Irving’s books, as I do of Charles Dickens’s, as treasure chests of ideas and characters and funny moments.

Making this list helped me let go a little bit of the desire to be important. I realized that these are the kinds of books I want to write – books filled with unforgettable characters, books that give me an almost childlike sense of wonder. I started a new novel, Finny, with a narrator whose voice is informal, quirky, a little devilish. Finny’s voice made me laugh, and I honestly cared about her and wanted to see what would happen to her, the people she’d meet, the man she would fall in love with.

Part of the process of becoming a writer has been acknowledging my own limitations, the things I don’t know about. And also being honest: about what I like, what I enjoy, what moves me. To be truthful, I don’t enjoy research. I’m not all that interested in history, and even though I try to stay informed, I’m not ardent about politics. I don’t get a huge kick from philosophical or intellectual discussions. I’m interested in psychology, food, loss, sex, death, awkward social situations, and I’m passionate about the subject of why people are as annoying as they are. I may not win a Nobel Prize for this, but it’s the only kind of novel I can write. Making my list, I saw that what I wanted to do was write books that people love reading, that make them laugh and cry, and that allow me to bring a little of myself into the world.

Justin Kramon is the author of the novel Finny (Random House), which was published on Tuesday. Now twenty-nine years old, he lives in Philadelphia. You can find out more about Justin and contact him through his website, www.justinkramon.com. You can watch a book trailer for Finny here, and you can access Justin's blog for writers here.

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Tagged as: Alice Adams, Charles Dickens, creative process, fiction writing, Finny, Inspiration, John Irving, Justin Kramon, Superior Women, Thoughts, writing a novel

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Stop! Before You Try to Get an Agent …

July 7th, 2010 by bakerkline

Molly Lyons of the Joelle Delbourgo Literary Agency on the questions agents wish you’d ask yourself before you send a query or a manuscript:

As an agent, I see proposals and manuscripts at all stages. Some of them are just a glimmer of an idea hidden inside a lot of text; some are polished to a gleam, ready to be sent out to publishers. Often it’s difficult to see the potential in the projects I’m sent because their authors haven’t asked themselves a few crucial questions.

So before you press the “send” button (or address that SASE), take a few minutes to answer the following. It may help your query shine – and get you an agent. Or it may convince you that there’s a better way for you to go.

What’s my end goal? Securing a publishing contract with a big publisher is only one way to get your story out into the world. If your aim is to, say, record your family history for future generations, self-publishing may make the most sense – and you don’t even need an agent for that. If you already know your core audience is a narrow interest group that congregates on a few websites, then it may make more sense to find a digital way to distribute your work. Again, no agent needed.
Who is my audience? Sometimes this is easy to answer — men with heart disease, for example. At other times, it’s trickier to know where your manuscript fits in. But if you can’t figure it out, it’s going to be that much harder to attract an agent. Spend some time researching those books and how to reach those readers before you send out your query.
How can I reach my readers? Finishing a manuscript or a proposal is an accomplishment in itself, but unfortunately, it’s only part of your job as an author. You’ll also need to know how to effectively market and publicize the work once it’s on the shelves. This ability, known as your “platform,” is the first thing publishers measure after the book’s description. No one expects a first-time author to have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, for example (though it can’t hurt!). But make some efforts to reach out to potential readers before you send a query to an agent. A potential client who is at the very least aware of the need, and ready to take on the challenge, of building a platform will get a second look.
Has my manuscript been read by sharp critics? Query letters that tell me the novel was written in three months, or that I’m the first to read it, make me wary from the start. Sure, the proposal or manuscript may have been proofread by a friend or spouse, but has someone objective looked at it with a critical eye? Your work is personal, but it has to stand up to challenges at every stage. A trusted, critical reader can help point out weaknesses so you can submit the most polished manuscript possible.
Have I done my homework? I get endless queries for horror, thriller and romance novels despite the fact that our website shows I don’t represent horror, thriller or romance novels. I know it’s tempting —especially in the age of email queries — to say, “Why not? You never know, maybe this thriller will be the one for her,” but in the end, it just will mean one more rejection for me to write and for you to get — and no one likes rejection. Each agency has different guidelines, and most agents have websites or carefully fill out their profiles in agency listings. You should always check them out to see how they like to receive queries. When I find a query that is well written, thoughtful and thorough, it’s like finding a piece of buried treasure in my inbox.

Molly Lyons began her career as a magazine editor and writer, which informs her approach to agenting — from developing manuscripts and proposals to positioning clients in the marketplace and helping shape their careers. Molly is interested in strong voices, stories that tell universal truths in highly personal ways, and entertaining books that offer solid information.

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Tagged as: creative process, how to get an agent, Joelle Delbourgo Literary Agency, literary agency, literary agent, Molly Lyons, the writing biz

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Bi-Curious about Writing Fiction

April 7th, 2010 by bakerkline

This was never the way she planned -- not her intention. But journalist Cindy Schweich Handler wrote some fiction. And she liked it.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. And since I was an avid reader of fiction as a kid, that meant being a novelist. I was in fourth grade when I wrote the vaguely titled “Castle of Things,” a blatant rip-off of “Alice in Wonderland.” A year later, I followed this up with “Queen Elizabeth Alive,” a “Bewitch”-inspired imagining of the Tudor ruler coming forward in time to hang with a grade-schooler who happened to be a lot like me. Writing for fun was … well, a lot of fun.

As I neared college-age, though, and considered how I would eventually make a living, I decided to become a journalist. That way, I reasoned, I could consistently get paid to write, I’d experience the relatively instant gratification of seeing my work and byline in print, and I would learn about a variety of subjects while covering them. I ended up working in magazines for years and freelancing for them after starting a family, and I never regretted the decision.

That is, until years later, when I wearied of reading the final, heavily edited versions of my service pieces—those articles in women’s and parenting magazines that tell you, in strictly formatted, nearly style-free prose, how to raise a child, budget your time, or achieve any number of perennially visited objectives. Writing them paid well, and (before the market crash and digital revolution smacked the publishing industry) there was a demand for them. But I started to feel as if my writing was merely meat fed into a hamburger grinder. And it wasn’t satisfying.

It was at this point that I started hungering for a more enriching writing experience. Coincidentally, a friend who’s a successful fiction writer suggested that I attend a class for beginning novelists she was teaching in her home. With some trepidation, I took her up on her offer.

That was four years ago. Since then, I’m gratified to report, I’ve written one novel and nearly completed a second, scored a world-class agent whom I adore, and I continue to meet with my extremely supportive fellow students of fiction. (I wish I could say I’ve sold my first novel, but despite three near-misses, I haven’t. Yet.) What I’ve learned during this time, with the guidance of my excellent teacher, is that the leap from nonfiction to fiction is less about blind faith, and more about understanding what all good writing has in common. Among the observations I’ve internalized are:

What Stephen King observed in his wonderful guide, On Writing, is true: the magic of writing lies in successfully transferring a thought as it exists in your head into someone else’s. That is, when you visualize an image or scene, no matter what genre you’re writing in, you need to convey it exactly the way you see it, as economically as possible for maximum clarity.
Always keep your theme in mind. This is true whether you’re writing an essay on, say, why cell phones are evil, or a novel about a woman who discovers that her dead son was a sperm donor (my current project). Your writing is an argument, basically, and you’re trying to persuade your audience of something. With non-fiction, of course, you do your research upfront, whereas with fiction, it’s an ongoing process of discovery that takes place in the course of the writing itself. But in both instances, there’s a lot of trial and error before it’s clear what’s extraneous and what gets you closer to your goal. The longer the work, the more arduous this process will be. Which brings me to:
Trust the process. A short story might be comparable in length to a long non-fiction piece, but a commercial novel probably averages around 90,000 words. It can take so long to write that first draft that it’s easy to look at the thing, after a year or two of effort, and think, “Wow, this sucks.” Maybe it’s helpful to remember an analogy I read by an online writer. The first draft, he said, is akin to your kitchen sink after you’ve washed off the Thanksgiving dishes: After a thorough going-over, there are bits and pieces that survive, and you go on from there. Sounds harsh -- but it’s not, because that realization makes it easier to continue, and the next draft will work itself out a lot faster.

Commercially, fiction is harder to sell, since fewer people read it. And in my experience, it requires more focus and attention to write, because it’s more personal. But in that respect, I find it more rewarding. And not a mysterioso, you’re-born-with-it-or-you’re-not phenomenon, but rather a process that can be learned, and savored.

Cindy Schweich Handler is a former magazine editor whose nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, O: The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, and many other print and online publications. She writes about politics for The Huffington Post and is currently at work on her second novel, Disaster Recovery.

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Tagged as: bi-curious, creative process, fiction writing, Inspiration, Newsweek, nonfiction, O: The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Stephen King, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, writing a novel

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Posted in Guest Blogs, The Creative Process | 3 Comments »

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Reinventing the Novel

April 1st, 2010 by bakerkline

My friend Pamela Redmond Satran is a novelist, New York Times bestselling author, ninja web developer, and one-time magazine editor. Now she's embarking on something entirely new:

Two things inspired me to write my new novel, Ho Springs, online, day by day, instead of writing it for a conventional publisher the way I did my first five novels. Well, two things that are easy to explain.

The first was my husband, after watching the DVD of American Gangster, telling me he found the movie good enough but ultimately unsatisfying. “It was a movie,” he explained, “so you knew from the beginning that everything really interesting was going to happen to Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and that it was going to build to this big climax at the end.”

That was the problem with conventional novels too, I thought. They were predictable, limited and finite in form and scope. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to write – and read – a novel that unfolded in a way that was both more leisurely and more compelling, the way TV shows like Mad Men and The Wire did?

The second influence was creating my blog How Not To Act Old after no one wanted to buy it as a magazine article, turning it into a book and making that book a New York Times bestseller. That experience taught me that not only was it more fun and exciting to write without an editor between me and my readers, but my own creative instincts were often better than those of the traditional publishing world.

My experience writing five “real” novels and developing two big websites – I’m also a partner in the site nameberry.com, based on the ten baby name books I coauthored with Linda Rosenkrantz – put me in a unique position to create a piece of digital fiction that would combine the best of both worlds. Rather than writing episodic pieces, I wanted to create a novel that included such conventional elements as a character-driven story, causally-related scenes, and an extended plot that would unspool in unexpected ways, but in a form that could exist only online.

My blueprint was a television series I’d created (but hadn’t sold) a few years ago, set in a fictionalized version of Hot Springs, Arkansas. A place-based story was perfect for an online novel, I thought, offering a wide range of characters and settings and the potential for stories to expand in an unlimited number of directions.

The big problem was the name, Hot Springs. The url hotsprings.com was obviously taken. And then, driving one day, I had a eureka moment: hosprings.com, or Ho Springs. I was so excited I did a u-turn and drove right back home to track down and reserve the name.

From that moment on, I knew the idea was right. I wanted to create the site in wordpress, so it would be free and I’d have total creative control, but I couldn’t find a theme that included all the elements – videos, graphic windows that opened to places in the town and story, room for a big block of text.

I needed a designer – or, as it turned out, three designers. I had a vision for a logo that would look like all the letters were in realistic flames, with the T up in smoke, which called for a photoshop expert. My budget was zero, or as close to that as I could get. I was lucky to find Katie Mancinewho built me an amazing logo.

The only problem was, Katie said, she couldn’t design a good-looking site to go with that logo. Rather, she sold me on the concept “Vintage Tourist Guide,” which was great, but in the end that didn’t work out either. Katie finally ended up with the design you see now on the site, and my friend Dennis Tobenski, who’s really a composer, made the whole thing dance. Combined cost: under $1500, and several hundred gray hairs.

Weeks and then months were passing, during which I found a musician, Matt Michael, to write and record two original songs for the site, and also drafted several writer friends to create independent blogs from the characters’ viewpoints. But the only writing I was doing during this time was putting together the static content describing the characters and the settings.

A novelist creating a work for the web is not, then, just a writer, but a designer, a logician, a manager, a tech guy, a producer.

And then, once you do start writing – or at least, once I did – the process is different too. I suppose you could write one long story and parcel it out day by day, but the whole point for me was to create it as I went along, publish it immediately, to swing by the crook of my knees with no net below.

That’s the only way to feel the wind on your face, which is something you rarely feel when you’re writing a conventional novel, one that won’t be published for two years or maybe five, that no other person may even see for all that time, or maybe ever. Writing all my other novels, I’m a big planner, outlining the big story and even each individual scene, revising and reimagining, working on the same piece until I lose sight of where I started and when it will ever end.

With Ho Springs, I get up in the morning, having a vague sense of what I’m going to write about, from which character’s viewpoint, but letting myself be swayed by whatever I encounter between brushing my teeth and opening my computer. A David Sedaris story in an old New Yorker got one of my characters beaten one morning; an email from a writer friend inspired me to make a video of myself talking about what had influenced me that day.

It wasn’t until after I launched the site that I looked at what anyone else was doing in this arena. The only site I’ve found that’s similar is All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas, by the brilliant Amber Simmons, which makes me believe God saved me from that Vintage Tourist Guide idea. Penguin’s We Tell Stories is brilliant, but much more expensively and expertly produced than I could hope for, and more limited in writerly ambition. Visually-based web fictions that blow me away include Unknown Territories and The Flat on Dreaming Methods. But they’re movies, really, not novels.

Where is this project going? My ideal vision is that someone like HBO or a publisher with a production arm will buy it and produce it as a multimedia property, with a television and a web and a book element working together. I believe that this is how fiction will be written and published in the future, that this will become the new standard long after anyone remembers that Ho Springs ever existed.

Or I may take it down tomorrow and build something else. The excitement is in creating something. Holding it in your hands, or staring at it on a screen, holds so much less satisfaction.

Pamela’s personal site may be found here; with Ho Springs just around the corner. This post originally appeared on the site Noveir.