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Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books for adults include THE INTERESTING, THE TEN-YEAR NAP, THE POSITION, ADN THE WIFE. She is the author of a novel for middle grade readers, THE FINGERTIPS OF DUNCAN DORFMAN, and, most recently, the YA novel, BELZHAR.
A lot of workshops give writers micro-advice, but there’s a larger issue that hasn’t been addressed. Even if you fix a passage or sentence or beginning, you’re not taking care of what needs to be done. Punching up dialogue or adding a new scene gives you a good feeling, but it’s often cosmetic. Making those changes just makes your story marginally better.
Think of your work in a different way.
How did you lose that energy anyway? How do we let our books get that way?
"The middle is everything."
Meg thinks it’s often a foundational problem when you have a mushy middle.
All books start off with a grandiose fantasy. You know it’s good because it’s something preoccupies you. You want to write about it. You take it and start to push the story through an invisible funnel and you realize you can’t do everything and you have to make some choices. This is a moment when you getting serious about your novel. You can write about 80 pages of a book (without outlining), not worry about where it is, who’s going read it, if someone someone will buy it, etc. Once you have, print it, read it, and find out not what you hoped to do but what you really did.
If the writing is weak in a certain area it might be because the ideas in that section aren’t strong. Maybe it’s because you didn’t know what you wanted to express in that section.
Meg thinks flashbacks are a made up concept. In real life, we are always toggling back and forth from past to future and now. You don’t have a character stop and remember something. It should be fluid.
Ask yourself:
- Is the voice strong?
- Are you being faithful to a thought process that isn’t working? (why the 80 page rule works) -you can use ideas that don’t work
- Did you get off on the wrong track tone wise?
Revision is the greatest tool in the writer’s arsenal.
Meg Wolitzer has written novels that blow the minds of adult and young readers alike. Her adult work includes
The Interestings, The Ten Year Nap, The Position, and
The Wife.
Her YA novel is
Belzhar, and for middle grade readers she has
The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman.
She talked to us about writing for both adults and younger readers.
She started by describing a horrible question people ask writers at parties: "Would I have heard of you?"
The right answer ... "In a more just world, yes."
Her world involves going back and forth from one literary world to another.
"Being a writer is really about freedom," she said. "All of you should have the freedom to say I want to write the next Hunger Games. Then switch and say I want to write the AARP games. A scary tale."
Meg had a secret weapon in the fight to become a writer: her mother, an 85-year-old writer who is still publishing books.
"My mother was the only writer in town, and the exciting thing for me was that the checkout person would let us take out as many books as we wanted."
People often ask what's going to happen to books, but Meg feels encouraged. It's natural to see narrative all around in the world (including in one-celled amoebas). And the stories we tell are very reflective of us.
"A novel is a sort of concentrated version of who a person is," she said, "a boullion cube of concentrated sensibility."
She gave us great advice about how we should approach our writing.
"Be who you are, but much more so on the page. That's how a book starts to take shape. That's how a writer develops," she said. "Write what obsesses you."
Another way to do this is to write the book you would have loved to read as a teen. She once had a book taken from her because it was for older kids, and it suddenly became irresistibly alluring.
She also had the help of others when she first started writing stories, which she'd dictate. One was about truckers, and included the dialogue, "Get on the rig, Mac."
Meg's mother also wrote for adults and for children, and began her work around the time the women's movement started. Meg also became a feminist. (One of her mother's first published stories was titled "Today a Women Went Mad in the Supermarket.")
Writing tortured Meg's mother, who typed on a quivering Smith Corona. But it showed Meg writing was something you could do. She did have to get over the sex scene her mother wrote in her first book—something she was teased for by the neighborhood toughs, who went into the store and bought something from the literary fiction section, which makes her laugh now.
She encouraged us not to be afraid of what we write, and not to avoid something that makes us feel uncomfortable. When she writes her adult novels, she doesn't think about audience, except that she's the ideal reader for her kind of books. She doesn't have to worry about any of the content or emotional complexity. All her adult editor wants is to know that the book is meeting the expectations Meg had when she set out.
When you write, you should be able to do it freely without fear of being judged or found lacking. And in one sense, she writes adult work for herself today, and kid lit for the person she used to be. She is mindful of making her work have a rhythm that will work for her readers.
With "Belzhar," she was looking to create what obsessed 15-year-old Meg, not just the arty summer camp girl, but someone who was waking up to an emotional world for the first time. It's inspired by Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," which struck her hard when she read it.
It's about a girl who was sent to a school for emotionally fragile, highly intelligent teenagers. The students there are all reunited with the things they've lost, taking the short view of their sorrows. The characters she creates are filtered through her own humanness. It's taking them and making them us. We're all different, and every novel has lots of ways in. Points of view can vary.
But we should only write about what's important to us, she said.
Switching hats means we have a lot of roles. The one we occupy among our friends and family. The one you wear when you write autobiographically. The one you wear when you're writing about about growing up in the 12th century.
"Write about what obsesses you because that is the one that people will identify with," she said, "and that will be one I definitely want to read.
This post is part of a series on the blog where I share some of the nuggets of wisdom and inspiration — related to writing and/or life — that I find steeped in the pages of novels that I’ve read.
This is a book I found at my public library. It’s been on my radar for awhile and I was happy when I saw it on the shelf. Ironically, I had just re-read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath the week before so maybe it was kismet since this book revolves around this author.
This novel centers around several teens who are all going through their unique traumas. This particular line spoke to me because we have all been through some type of trial or trauma ourselves and sometimes we just want it to be over — but sometimes you just have to go through whatever it is that has hurt you before you can move on.
From Jam, the narrator of the novel Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer
“I hadn’t known that if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change. It’s big, and it’s always incredibly messy. But there’s no way around the mess.”
By: Aubrey,
on 12/9/2014
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So what is with all the hullabaloo about young adult literature these days? Do we have John Green to blame for getting us sucked in to the tragic sagas in coming-of-age children's books? I am in the fourth decade of my life, and I found myself pulled into the throws of YA lit this year, [...]
By: Stacy A. Nyikos,
on 12/3/2014
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Belzhar
Meg Wolitzer
YA
In the spirit of the cold winter months' clamor for a good book to curl up with, I present
Belzhar. I had the great pleasure of listening to Meg Wolitzer speak at BEA in May. She is an author of predominantly adult books who's tried her hand at YA and delivered a strong, new voice to enjoy.
Belzhar is the story of Jam who has basically given up on living after she loses her boyfriend. She stops functioning at school and becomes so depressed her parents and therapist send her to The Wooden Barn, a school for teens struggling with traumatic issues in Vermont. There, Jam is enrolled in a special English class that changes her life. Not only does she meet a new boy but also, at the same time, gets to communicate with the boy she's lost in a world unlike any other. Jam makes friends, rebuilds her life, but cannot move forward until she not only faces but relives the trauma that imploded her old life.
Woltizer's writing is strong, her characters both flawed and endearing, and her alternate reality within reality a great hook that entices the reader throughout the story.
There is an interesting trend, almost rule, within YA that the story is written in present tense. This is to make the reader feel closer to the events happening, and to mimic how very much teenagers are affected and live in the "now". It has made me wonder how exportable present tense storytelling is. I've used it in a picture book, just to try it out, to get a feel for the effect of tense. In a way, present tense makes even the past seem very present. It speeds up action and imbues what is happening with novelty, urgency and unpreditability. There's no telling how the story can end, especially if it is in first person POV. I just ran across a chapter of present tense in an adult novel,
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Man Booker Winner 2014). The story up until that moment had been told in simple past, then suddenly, present tense appears. It was a jarring, blast of air that pulled me out of the observer's position and into the narrative. I straightened and listened more closely. This had to be important. What a difference a tense can make.
For more great books to balance out the hustle and bustle of the end of the year, check out
Barrie Summy's site. Happy reading and a wonderful new year!
By: Deborah Jensen,
on 10/31/2014
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Publishers Weekly today released its list of the 100 Best Books of 2014, for the first time including three translations among its top 10 books, which were written by Hassam Blasim, Elena Ferrante, Marlon James, Lorrie Moore, Joseph O’Neill, Héctor Tobar, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Lawrence Wright, and Emmanuel Carrère.
The three translations include two works of fiction: The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Penguin), and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa). Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia by Emmanuel Carrère, is nonfiction translated from the French by John Lambert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
“Every year when we put together our best books list, we understand why we’re in this business,” Publishers Weekly review editor Louisa Ermelino said. “It’s not just about the best books, but the fact that there are so many good books being published that we have to struggle to choose. We consider the game-changers, the brilliantly written pure entertainment, the clever, the well researched.”
Publishers Weekly’s selects for the best Young Adults books include: Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin, and Half Bad by Sally Green, among other titles.
Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi and Redefining Girly by Melissa Atkins Wardy are two of its best Lifestyle books of 2014.
Marlon James, featured on PW’s cover, is author of A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead), a sweeping saga with the attempted assassination of Bob Marley at its center.
Descriptions of Publishers Weekly’s “100 Best Books of 2014” are available here.
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When Jam and four others are given unique journals and assigned Sylvia Plath for a "Special Topics" class in a boarding school for fragile teens, they discover new ways to reconnect with their lost loved ones and one another in this insightful, moving novel about grief and loss. Books mentioned in this post Belzhar Meg [...]
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Guest post written by Kelsey Manning (@kelseyMmanning)
Before Thurber Prize winner John Kenney settled in to read a selection from his novel Truth in Advertising, he had a few words for his fellow finalist:
“Dear David Letterman, Please let me win this award. Just this one. We need the money.”
It was one of many hilarious moments during last night’s presentation of the 2013 Thurber Prize for American Humor. David Letterman attended alongside co-writer Bruce McCall on behalf of their book This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me). In the absence of third finalist Liza Donnelly (Women on Men), her husband Michael Maslin spoke about how much James Thurber means to them, especially as New Yorker cartoonists themselves. The pair’s first date was to see a James Thurber drawing at the Armory on the East Side.
In the true spirit of the night, Truth in Advertising author John Kenney joked, “My first flight wasn’t to the Thurber House or my first date, but I was conceived there.” It was easy to see why the Thurber Prize judges—Meg Wolitzer, John Searles, and Henry Alford—were so taken by the wit in Kenney’s debut. (more…)
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Belzhar
by Meg Wolitzer. Dutton Children's Books. 2014.
The Plot: Jam Gallahue was in love with Reese Marfield and it was wonderful and magical and all that made life living.
Was.
A year that has passed since she lost Reese, a year of life not being worth living, a year of Jam barely able to leave her bedroom, shattered by his death.
So Jam's parents have done the only thing they can think of: sending her away from her New Jersey home and all the memories, to go to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school in Vermont for those who are
"emotionally fragile, highly intelligent."
Jam isn't happy to be there, but then she finds herself in a unique seminar: "Special Topics in English," with five students intensely studying one author for a semester. This year, the author is Sylvia Plath.
Each student is given a journal, to write in. And when Jam puts pen to paper ... something magical happens. She finds herself in a place where time stands still, and Reeve is hers again.
As the semester draws to a close, Jam wonders what will happen when she reaches the last page. Will she figure out a way to stay with Reese? Should she?
The Good: Another one of those books that I love, but part of what I love is the twists and turns and the reveals. It's not just the secrets: it's finding out the secrets.
Jam is at a school for the "emotionally fragile," so everyone has some type of story Hers is Reeve. Her fellow Special Topics members (Sierra, Marc, Griffin, Casey) each has had a loss; each, it turns out, can also use their journals to return to that pre-loss time. Inspired by the title of Plath's novel,
The Bell Jar, they call the place they go to Belzhar.
Jam's whirlwind romance with Reeve was meaningful and magical but short: only 41 days. Actually, that is the sum total of the days they knew each other. It was sixteen days before they kissed. So Jam has only a handful of memories stored up and what she finds is in that Belzhar, she is limited to experiencing only what actually happened. Oh, it's not as if she's stepping back in time: Reeve understands that something is happening, something outside time almost, and impatiently worries about the times she isn't with him.
And... I don't want to get into spoilers, about Jam and her friends, or about Jam and Belzhar, and what it is or is not. But wowza; there was a certain deliciousness in reading and figuring out and discovering, much like there was with
We Were Liars (but for different reasons.)
Belzhar is not just about "emotionally fragile" people, but it's what it means to be emotionally fragile and how that shapes how you see the world and how you act in it. And aside from that, it's about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, much like
The Bell Jar itself is Plath telling her story in a certain way.
And, of course, the language! This, for example -- "
to be on the verge of your life, and not to be able to enter it" is just such a good description of someone being held back and knowing they are held back, for whatever reasons.
Or this: "
Because when I let go of the story I've been telling myself and just try to think about what's objectively true, I can barely get a grip." And how often is that true, also -- the truth being so frightening that we tell ourselves other things we believe to be true, to get through the day.
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© Elizabeth Burns of
A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
Meg Wolitzer began
The Interestings, her acclaimed 2013 novel "for adults" (my quotation marks, because I so dislike/unlike categories) with this convocation of the teenaged young:
On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time. They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. Julie Jacobson, an outsider and possibly even a freak, had been invited in for obscure reasons, and now she sat in a corner on the unswept floor and attempted to position herself so she would appear unobtrusive yet not pathetic, which was a difficult balance. The teepee, designed ingeniously though built cheaply, was airless on nights like this one, when there was no wind to push in through the screens. Julie Jacobson longed to unfold a leg or do the side-to-side motion with her jaw that sometimes set off a gratifying series of tiny percussive sounds inside her skull. But if she called attention to herself in any way now, someone might start to wonder why she was here; and really, she knew, she had no reason to be here at all....
In
Belzhar, Woltizer's new book "for teens," it is not a camp teepee toward which the characters are drawn, but a school for emotionally fragile children called The Wooden Barn. Unknown to each other in the school's early days, the students have arrived bearing secrets. Soon enough the core protagonists will forge camp-like bonds in a miniature English class focused on Sylvia Plath and facilitated by journal writing. They will learn, unlearn, and learn themselves. They will enter a mystical world called Belzhar, a condition or place that Wolitzer explains like this:
Belzhar lets you be with the person you've lost, or in Casey's case, with the thing she's lost, but it keeps you where you were before the loss. So if you desperately want what you once had, you can write it in your red leather journal and go to Belzhar and find it. But apparently you won't find anything new there. Time stops in Belzhar; it hangs suspended.
Wolitzer's theme, in
Belzhar, is second chances, and in order to have a second chance, you have to be honest with yourself, you have to know what
really happened. Through Belzhar, Wolitzer transports these student-friends to the past. She builds a reckoning mirror and holds it steady.
Whereas
The Interestings (which I reviewed for the
Chicago Tribune here) was rich with detail and character asides, full of the messy, tangential sprawl of messy life, Belzhar is lean, plot-focused and plot-purposeful. Like
We Were Liars, E. Lockhart's summer sensation, it harbors a secret within a secret that will keep readers turning pages.
But perhaps what I liked best was this simple and essential thing: Wolitzer has written a novel that reminds teens how much words matter. A message that must burn eternal.
By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 5/14/2014
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Publishers Lunch has released Buzz Books, a free eBook collection of excerpts from "32 of the most buzzed-about books scheduled for publication this fall and winter."
Buzz Books 2014 Fall/Winter includes excerpts from: Audrey Magee’s The Undertaking; Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves; Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist; and Neil Patrick Harris’ Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography, among many others.
In addition, Publishers Lunch has also published Buzz Books 2014: Young Adult, a similar collection of excerpts for YA novels. The book includes excerpts from Meg Wolitzer's Belzhar; Ellen Hopkins’ Rumble; Eric Kahn Gale’s The Zoo at the Edge of the World; and Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Bombay Blues, among others.
Both titles are available to readers in the U.S. for free through NetGalley.
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Occasionally, you encounter a book that devastates you just because it has to end. The Interestings is one of those remarkable books that you start living in... and, emerging, you are all the richer for the resultant, uncomfortable reflection. Books mentioned in this post The Interestings Meg Wolitzer Used Trade Paper $11.95
Author Meg Wolitzer is working on a new YA novel inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar called Belzhar.
“My narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl named Jam Gallahue who’s dealing with a tragic loss. She’s sent to a boarding school in Vermont for “emotionally fragile, highly intelligent” teenagers. While there, she is put into a tiny, elite class that reads only one writer a semester. And this semester the class is reading Sylvia Plath,” Wolitzer explained in an interview with NPR. “Plath’s work, and her emotional problems, not to mention her journal-writing, take on important dimensions for all the students in the class, who are also asked to write in their own journals, and who, when they do, experience something startling.”
Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin, will publish the new work in September.
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by Meg Wolitzer
Dutton 2011
Three kids at a Scrabble tournament realize there are more important things in life than winning. Wait. One of these kids has a superpower?
Life's been tough for Duncan and his mom who have moved back to mom's childhood home in Pennsylvania to regroup at Duncan's Aunt Djuna's house. New kid at school, fish out of water, mom working for a thrift store owned
By: Maryann Yin,
on 8/24/2011
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The finalists for the $5,000 Thurber Prize have been revealed. Follow these links to read free samples of the finalists: Sleepwalk with Me & Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia, Half Empty by David Rakoff and Sports From Hell: My Search for the World’s Dumbest Competition by Rick Reilly.
This year’s panel of judges included two-time Thurber Prize winner Ian Frazier, 2010 Thurber Prize finalist Jancee Dunn and novelist Meg Wolitzer. The winner will be revealed at the awards ceremony on October 3rd in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel.
Here’s more from the release: “The 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor will be conferred upon the author and publisher of the outstanding book of humor writing published in the United States between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2010. Initiated in 1996, thirty-five years after the death of this key figure in the development of American humor, it is the nation’s highest recognition of the art of humor writing.”
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Skype has released a new group video calling feature that lets users have conversations with up to ten people at a time. This is great news for book clubs that wish to meet from remote locations or, better yet, book clubs who’d like to invite the author to attend.
To take advantage of this new feature, More.com is running a Skype book club promotion. Author Meg Wolitzer will attend nine book club meetings in August via Skype to talk about her novel, The Uncoupling. Interested book clubs can enter to win a Skype visit by answering a simple question: “Tell us why your book club should be selected.”
Follow this link for more details.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
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Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books for adults include THE INTERESTING, THE TEN-YEAR NAP, THE POSITION, ADN THE WIFE. She is the author of a novel for middle grade readers, THE FINGERTIPS OF DUNCAN DORFMAN, and, most recently, the YA novel, BELZHAR.
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I’ve read The Bell Jar several times.
I’m adding this to my wish list.