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By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 11/5/2015
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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Margo Rabb,
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Look for me behind stacks of books. That's where I'm living lately.
Assembling the content for a
traveling multi-day memoir workshop. Preparing to teach the personal essay during a morning/afternoon at a Frenchtown high school. Knitting together ideas for a four-hour Sunday memoir workshop, next weekend,
at the Rat (also in Frenchtown; places still available). Conjuring poem-engendering exercises for the fourth and fifth graders of North Philly. Building the syllabus for my next semester of teaching at Penn. Putting more touches onto the
Beltran Family Teaching Award event at Penn next spring (featuring Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, and A.S. King). Re-reading Buzz Bissinger so that I can introduce and then publicly converse with him at the Kelly Writers House this Saturday, for
Penn's Homecoming. Talking to
Jennie Nash about an online memoir workshop. Writing the talk I'll give this evening to kick off the
LOVE event (featuring film students and Philadelphians) at the Ambler theater. My writing (my novels) sit in a corner over there, where they have sat for most of this year. I'm sunk deep into the pages of other people's work. Their stories, their sentences, their churn: a thrilling habitation.
Every time I feel frustrated by a sense of career stall or perpetual overlook, I remember this: There are writers—truly great writers—who have gone before me, who have written more wisely, who have seen more clearly. I may want to be noticed, I may hope to be seen, I may wish to be important, a priority, first on a list, but honestly? Why waste time worrying all that when there is so much to be learned—about literature, about life—from the writers who have gone before—and ahead—of me.
James Agee. Annie Dillard. Eudora Welty. We could stop right there. Read all they've written. Make the study of them the year we live and it would be enough. It would be time well spent, time spent growing, time during which we learn again that aspiration must, in the end, be contextual. We can't hope to stand on a mountain's top if we don't acknowledge all the boulders and the trees and the ascent and the views that rumble beneath the peak.
My cure for my own sometimes literary heartbreak: Sink deep inside the work of others. Recall what greatness is.
And there she is. That soaring tower. That beacon at the edge of Manhattan, collecting the city lights.
For the past two days on this blog, I've been interviewing Jennie Nash, a friend who has given authors a new kind of tool—and experience—called Author Accelerator. I've been interviewing Jennie because she has approached this business of book coaching and author support in an entirely new way. She's studied what hasn't worked elsewhere. She's created a program that rises above—provides content, individualized attention, and motivating ideas.
So here is the third and final installment of our series. We talk about characters, intention, and the publishing biz. Find Part 1 of our conversation here. Find Part 2 here. And don't forget Jennie's special offer: a discount to try out Author Accelerator for a month. The normal price is $199/month, which gives writers four deadlines against which they turn in ten pages for review. Jennie is offering a discounted price of $150 for the first months. Authors can write to [email protected] and ask for the Beth Kephart special offer. That will be good through November 15, 2015. What makes a character interesting, and how do help authors think about and manage complexity?
The whole reason we tell each other stories is to find meaning in the world, and in our lives. We’re desperately hungry for meaning – and when stories give it to us, you cannot tear us away. So it’s meaning that makes a character interesting. If we can see ourselves in a character, if we can learn something about ourselves by watching their struggle, we will not be able to put the book down.
The Peanuts cartoons are much in the news right now because the new Peanuts movie is about to come out, and if you read anything at all about Charles Schultz, you realize that his gift was being able to convey meaning in those tiny little four-panel comic strips. The fact that he and his characters became beloved is a direct result of the meaning he made. I mean, Charlie Brown getting his heart broken one more time by the Little Red-haired Girl ignoring him, or Lucy duping him – we all feel what Charlie Brown feels, and we feel it in our bones, because the same things have happened to us at one time or another.
So the question you are asking (I think!) is how I do I help authors make characters who mean something?
Everything goes back to intention. What point are they trying to make through this character or through this narrative? If the writer doesn’t know, she might as well quit right now. Once she knows, then it’s a matter of creating that structure (or shape or ecosystem) to best show that point.
And once authors do that, I teach them what meaning looks like on the page – how to let us into a character’s head, and into his skin, at every single turn. We have to know what a character thinks and feels, what meaning he makes of what is happening to him. So I point out where the writers are doing it, and where they miss the mark, so they can begin to build that muscle.
We often want to think, as writers, that our work comes to us intuitively—that we can’t see chapter ten until we’ve lived chapters two and three. How have you helped your clients tame their desire for fuzzy ambiguity in the name of a process that leads to a finished, polished work?
I have come to believe that while any given creative act is not linear (and not, therefore, able to be tamed) the creative process itself is somewhat predictable and knowable and it is, therefore, able to be tamed to a certain extent.
What I offer my clients is the benefit of my experience with the creative process. They may not have written a book before, or written THIS book before, but I have helped dozens and dozens, of writers through the process of writing a book and I am not surprised, or upset, or concerned by the things that happen on that journey. If someone wants to throw out six months of work and start all over again, I have seen that before. I know that it doesn’t have to be the death knell for the project. If someone drags his feet in finishing a book (which happens all the time!) I know that this is par for the course. Writers get spooked when the end is near and may need a little extra attention to get over the finish line.
I recently had a client who fell into total despair, for example, because she was convinced that her work was crap, that she was crap, that she would never be able to actually write a book -- but I have seen a hundred writers in that exact place before. Maybe they fell into that dark place three months earlier in the process than this writer did, or three months later, or a year later, but when it happens in the process is not the point. The point is that it happens, and that it’s normal, and that I have seen writers write their way out of it time and time again. I know this woman’s story and I know it is not crap, and I believe she can do it. So I help her find her way back to her story.
My clients often say that it seems as though I can see their book – envision it complete and finished and out in the world in readers’ hands – before they can, and I think this is actually true. I can see their book. And I hold that idea in my mind for them when they may not be able to. It’s almost as if I act as a bridge to get them over the chasm of doubt. They can’t see their book yet but I can.
The question that would naturally follow is, “Do I believe that anyonecan write a good book?” The answer is, yes – and no. I don’t think it’s about talent, whatever that is. And I know that it’s not about having a good idea, because there are a million good ideas. It’s about being willing to commit, being able to tolerate the chaos of the creative process, and being willing to hold in your head the needs of the reader even when you can’t yet see the complete book, or don’t know what’s coming in Chapter 10, or don’t know how you’ll get there. If you can do those things, then yes – I believe anyone can write a good book.
It bears saying that not all my clients publish their books or meet with commercial success. Publishing is a fickle thing, and so much depends on luck and timing. But what I have found is that finishing is the best part of the process by far. When a writer actually finishes the book, he feels a deep soul-level satisfaction that he can’t access in any other way. Talking about writing a book is one thing, but actually doing it is something else entirely. I consider it an enormous honor to be able to help writers get there.
Yesterday I introduced my friend Jennie Nash. It was the first post in a three-post series that spotlights Jennie's Author Accelerator, a singular program that helps steer authors toward their own finished books. Today, we're continuing that series with Jennie's reflections on process, structure, tone and voice. What gives a book lift, shape, foundation? What makes a story soar? Who is that soul with the voice in the cathedral, finally ready to sing?
As you read, please remember Jennie's offer—a discount to try out Author Accelerator for a month. The normal price is $199/month, which gives writers four deadlines against which they turn in ten pages for review. Jennie is offering a discounted price of $150 for the first months. Authors can write to [email protected] and ask for the Beth Kephart special offer. That will be good through November 15, 2015.
Author Accelerator encourages authors to think before they write—to map out their desires as writers, articulate their hopes for their projects, ponder requirements like structure and tone. You’ve published eight books yourself. When did you begin to recognize, in your own work, the power of the authorial pause?
There has been a certain frantic-ness in my own work for a long time. I was one of those people who wanted to be published before I was 25, because I was restless for success. Each time I wrote another book I would think, “THIS is going to be my big breakthrough book!” I would set arbitrary and very ambitious deadlines for myself – like, “I have to finish this draft in three months.” That can sometimes be good for staying motivated, but if you never let the work breathe, or let yourself breathe, it’s hard to find your voice. All that pushing and striving didn’t help me to become a better writer, in the end, or to find any wider success. In fact, it was one of the things that led me to my biggest publishing failure – my last novel, which did not sell. I was so frantic to get the book done and out there and sold, and my desperation was my undoing.
When I began coaching other writers, I often saw that same frantic energy, and I began to believe that it was the thing that was harming them the most. Rushing to begin, rushing to finish, rushing to publish – these were the biggest problems I was seeing.
I began to build into my coaching process systems for helping writers to slow down and to THINK. I came to believe that taking the time to be intentional was the most critical step for any writer in any project.
It doesn’t mean you have to necessarily add time to the creative process; stopping to think actually savestime, in the end. I recently had a client complete a rough draft of a book in about six months of very intense work, but she was very intentional, and she followed the strategic process, and it worked out very well in the end. So pausing to be intentional doesn’t have to mean your process is slow.
We all think we know what some words mean. But maybe we don’t. How do you define structure?
Oh my goodness, this is such a hard question, because structure is such a complex thing! While we might start out by saying structure is the shape of the work – how it unfolds in time, what territory it covers – that is only one small part of it, the surface part of it that we can see, and perhaps graph or outline. Structure is much bigger than that. I think of it more like a writer’s intention for their story.
I recently heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity (because of her new book, Big Magic, which is an exploration of the creative process) and she said the most extraordinary thing about the beginning of that book idea. She said it took her awhile to start work on it because she didn’t know what the book was going to be. She knew that she would write about creativity, but she didn’t know HOW she would approach the subject. She said that she asked herself, “Does this book want to be a self help, `ten steps to creativity’ book, or `I travel around and interview creative people’ book, or a novel, or an academic neurobiology of creativity book? I had to find out what this book wanted to be.”
That is, in many ways, a perfect explanation of structure – deciding what the idea in your head is going to be, how it’s going to exist in the world, what your intention is for the work. You can see very clearly that Gilbert couldn’t start writing, and couldn’t sketch out a graph for the work or a table of contents or anything representing physical structure and shape, until she knew what the book was going to BE.
Once you make that decision, you create a kind of ecosystem for the work to grow into. It now has certain parameters and limitations. It is going to follow certain conventions – or perhaps break those conventions. That is when you can start looking at how it’s going to do its job. For memoir and non-fiction, you can begin to ask what is going to be in the book and what is going to be left out, where it’s going to start and where it's going to end. For fiction, you can begin to think about who is going to tell the story, where they’re going to stand in time and how much time is going to unfold in the course of the story.
Voice?
Voice, to me, is an understanding about who your narrator is and where she stands in time and what her agenda is – her point, her purpose, the reason she is speaking to us in these pages. Voice, in other words, is not just how the narrator sounds or how she (or he!) speaks. It’s all the things the narrator believes and cares about and fears. It’s everything that makes the narrator who she (or he! or it!) is.
Every book has a narrator, which is obvious in fiction, but in memoir and non-fiction, it’s slightly less obvious. In memoir, the narrator is YOU, of course, but is it you, the twelve year old? You, the thirty year old? You, the person who has justlearned the lessons the story is showing, or you the person who learned those lessons last year, or you the person who is experiencing those lessons as they unfold? You have to chose one narrative voice and stick with it.
If an author intrudes on the established voice, we can hear it. If a different “you” shows up in a memoir when you didn’t intend her to, we can sense it. These small gaps result in a breech of trust between the reader and the writer, and once you lose trust, you lose everything. That’s why establishing and maintaining a consistent voice is so key.
Tone?
Tone is how the voice comes across to the reader, what the attitude or stance of the narrator is as she tells the tale or conveys the information. A book can have a desperate and angry tone, or a sad and melancholy tone, or a light and joyous tone. For the longest time, I didn’t want to read Gone Girl, even though it was all anyone could talk about, because I felt very uncomfortable with the tone of the book. It felt frightening to me, slippery, dark, not to be trusted – and I didn’t want to go to that place. I finally did read it – and of course my sense of the tone was precisely correct. That book had a very strong tone!
Big Magic, which I just mentioned, has a very joyous, lighthearted tone. Gilbert talks about some dark things in the book, to be sure, but she does it in a way that is very safe, and ultimately uplifting. In many ways, that’s a triumph of her tone.
Early this morning, these two things, unrelated, except they both involve people I adore.
First, I am celebrating the remarkable work of Sheri Fink, a PhD, MD, and writer whom I first met when chairing the PEN First Nonfiction Award in 2004.
War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, was, for us, a deserving finalist, a tale about medicine during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sheri, in person, was exquisite. She went on to do important things, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a National Magazine Award, and countless other honors. Today her new book is out—
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital—and Jason Berry in the
New York Times, along with many others, is giving it a rave. I could not be happier for this extraordinary woman.
Second, I am celebrating—and thanking—Jennie Nash, a long time friend and excellent writer, who surprised me with these kind words about
Handling the Truth. Jennie is the kind of teacher who genuinely loves her students, who wants them to succeed, who gives them everything she can, then steps aside and applauds their journey. I am so touched that Jennie took the time to think so creatively about
Handling. Her words are
here. But included in these words is a special offering to students of writing. If you have a chance to work with Jennie, do.
It was Katrina Kenison (
The Gift of an Ordinary Day, Mitten Strings for God) who introduced me to Jennie Nash (
The Threadbare Heart, The Only True Genius in the Family, The Last Beach Bungalow, The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming, Raising a Reader). Katrina was sure that Jennie and I were like-minded souls, and Katrina (who knows many things, who can be trusted) was right. Jennie and I became instant friends and we have remained close, though she is a west coaster and I am an east coaster, and though she has lately been writing novels for adults and I have lately been writing for young adults. We share motherhood stories, frustration stories, breakthrough stories, and when my mother passed away, Jennie sent a gift—a purse knitted from yarn that, Jennie said, looked like the colors of the sky on the day my mother passed away. (Jennie also sent red lipstick for my first ballroom showcase number.)
When Jennie, then, sent an email today, brief as brief could be (it simply said:
Writing about you today), I clicked on the link. It took me to
The Huffington Post. It took me to t
hese words, from dear Jennie.Thank you, Jennie.
The morning after my mother passed away, the sky was every color—cranberry, orange zest, azalea pink, lemon peel. I told my dearest friends that this was proof of my mother's lingering presence, a peace offering after a terrible time. Several weeks later, a package arrived in the mail—a perfect knitted purse of sunrise colors. It was small, an ornament, to be hung not used, to be filled with nothing more than the essence it already contained, which was the love of my friend, Jennie Nash. Her time. Her thoughtfulness. It is a work of art that hangs here, in my office. I note its brilliance every day.
This morning I rose early to read Jennie's second novel, The Only True Genius in the Family. I was for many reasons feeling blue and not at all convinced that I could be lifted from the closed shell of myself. On a day I needed elevation (transformation), Jennie was once more there. I love this novel of hers—so quintessentially Jennie, which is to say honest, deeply felt, smartly paced, and highly relevant. Genius is the story of a woman named Claire (another Claire, I smiled to discover) whose daughter is an exceptionally gifted painter and whose father was a renowned photographer. Claire stands in the middle—a bridge, yes, a facilitator, maybe, and perhaps an artist, too, though she doubts herself, questions the career she's forged in food photography.
Jennie's book is due out in February. I quote a passage here that reminds me of my own last Thursday, when I got out to the beach too late to catch the pink that I'd been chasing. Claire, like me, is a photographer, stalking the perfect picture of a sun-touched sea.
The sky gets light by small degrees. It is night, and then there is a moment when it is something else. I wanted to catch the sun itself, emerging over the houses, so I waited while the light rose. But when the sun peeked over the roofs, I questioned the moment. I waited one beat, then two. And then the sun was there, glaring bright in the sky. "Take it, take it," I told myself, but the sun kept creeping higher and I kept stalling and then it was too late.
How blessed you are to have such friend, such a supporter.
人生中最好的禮物就是屬於自己的一部份............................................................
What a lovely post she wrote about you! And congratulations -- two books in one year? That's pretty spectacular.
Many congratulations to you, Beth. The work you do is a gift to us all, and I'm glad you are getting more acknowledgments for your beautiful words.
I love 'Mitten Strings from God' - I have it near my bedside and I often pick it up and read a random chapter. I have never read anything by Jennie Nash - but I will get some of her books soon.
So kind.