The Creative Process Archives – Christina Baker Kline

June 22, 2011 By bakerkline

Don’t Skip the Sex Scenes

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.

June 10, 2011 By bakerkline

Literary Names: Do Characters Name Themselves?

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.

December 9, 2010 By bakerkline

Nothing is Ever Lost

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.

April 7, 2010 By bakerkline

Bi-Curious about Writing Fiction

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.

March 22, 2010 By bakerkline

“You Have to Make It Excruciating Somehow”: More on James Cameron

Last week I posted James Cameron’s answer to the question “What’s the most important thing you know about storytelling?” Discussing Cameron’s ideas with the writer Bonnie Friedman – with whom I have an ongoing, percolating conversation about craft and creativity (as regular readers of this blog well know) –, I mentioned that I particularly liked his idea that “you have to take [your characters] on a journey – and then you have to make it excruciating somehow.” Excruciating – such an intriguing word! Bonnie agreed, as usual responding with nuance and subtlety to my own visceral reaction:

“It seems to me sheer genius to come at storytelling from this vantage point,” she said. “So many of us begin from a thing in us that demands to be told and whose unleashed energy we hope will fuel us all the way along, rather than from this distant and perhaps more masterly height. And that term ‘excruciating’ is somehow so validating. Because one does find those sequences late in a film just torturously suspenseful. So many romantic movies end with a chase scene, the main character running: The Graduate, Manhattan, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Up in the Air, Sleepless in Seattle, Casablanca, etc.

“It’s interesting to think about this in terms of novels. Even in Great Expectations, a book that precedes the movies by half a century, there’s a grand, excruciating chase scene at the end. When Pip finally discovers who his benefactor is, late in the story, he also discovers that it’s urgent he help his benefactor run for his life, with the grand escape via the river, the race to intercept a foreign ship — and that sinister mystery craft which shoots out of the gloom and pursues them. The whole race and apprehension of the benefactor Magwitch has this very quality of the excruciating about it.

“It occurs to me that one effect of this is that the audience is left with fast-beating hearts and an upswing of energy, even as they are haunted by the final, grand, masterpiece-sized vision – and so instead of feeling exhausted by their long journey, they end up energized, and want to relive the thing or recommend it to their friends.”