As the playwright Wendy Wasserstein once wrote, “It’s disturbing having sympathy with everyone’s point of view.”  She was talking from the point of view of one of her characters, but I imagine that it’s the playwright’s predicament, too.  Whereas  novelists are very much in the head of their protagonists,  playwrights are more likely to be in touch with all of their characters (a good thing), not just get stuck making sure the main character’s experience is believable and interesting.  I think of this quotation, from Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others, a lot when I’m writing–but perhaps not as much as I should.

To wit: I was going back through an outline of a work-in-progress, Not that Girl, and saw this comment from my advisor, the great Tim Wynne-Jones.  Next to one of the near-final chapters, I had written something like, “…and [protagonist] Jackie has forgotten about Becky by now,” and Tim commented in the margin, “Jess has, too.”  And I thought, ye gods, he was so right about that: what was Becky doing in the story at this point?  I kept making her mysteriously absent, so either I needed to cut her or figure out what she brought to the story.

I chose the former and decided that I’d outline the novel from her point of view, identifying what she was thinking and doing at each juncture.  Lo and behold, it opened up so many things.  Maybe Becky, in watching Jackie drift further from her best friend Mel, would seize the opening and try to become Mel’s best friend, and Jackie would have to deal with those consequences.

And speaking of Mel, maybe I should outline the story from her POV, too–and once I did, I realized that the story was less interesting when she commented cattily on Jackie’s choices and would be more interesting if she were a sort of wide-eyed, I’m-not-going-to-say-anything pleaser-type of critic.  That way, when Jackie does things like consider asking a guy out (horrors), it would be Jackie’s own internal gender police that makes her hesitate, and that would make for a more interesting journey.  And when outlining the story from Zoe’s point of view, I made Zoe much more interesting, too–less flaunting her older-boyfriended status in everyone’s face and more trying to get her due from friends who ignore her because they feel like she’s transgressed.

So thank you, Wendy Wasserstein and Tim Wynne-Jones.  Your encouragement, implicit or explicit, to identify what the characters think and want at all junctures has made for a much better story on these shores.  Now I just have to go ahead and write the dang thing!

If anyone of you read this and try it out, or have already tried it, will you weigh in?  I’d love to hear about your experience.

"Uncommon Women and Others," one of my favorite plays from high school

As any good Jewish person or FOJP (friend of Jewish Person) will tell you, the title above is the first of the four questions asked at Passover.  It was four questions that recently–and thankfully–changed the way I’ve been approaching my work in progress.

I’ve been working on this thing for a long time–almost two years.  Throughout, people have had problems with the narration.  I don’t want to go into it too explicitly, but basically, I was keeping the narrator’s identity a secret with a big reveal about it at the end.  Those who have read chapters have expressed confusion or even frustration about this, but I had always thought, “I can muscle through this.  I can see their objections, and I can work past them.”  This all changed last week when a friend read through the entire draft–one of about two people in the world to have done this, I think–and approached the problem in the manner of Passover: asking questions.

They were pretty simple questions, but they got to the heart of the matter: how would I sum up this story in one sentence?  Why was I keeping the narrator’s identity a secret?  What would I lose by changing that up?  In answering these questions, I realized that the whole secret narrator thing was, heartbreakingly, more of a device I was hanging on to than something that really served the story.  In fact, what I thought might be most important in the story had nothing to do with a mystery and was not at all about hidden identity.

I stress again that none of this should have been a huge revelation.  Just like Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects, I started hearing voices and seeing images of people saying the same–voices whose words I could remember with shocking clarity for conversations that happened quite a while ago.  Grad School Advisor Margaret: “I’m not saying it’s not working.  I’m saying it’s not working yet.”  Agent Elizabeth: “I’m not saying to give up on it.  But I am sounding an early warning.”  Critique group member Jen, over her frothy chai (okay, I’m making that part up; I don’t remember her beverage of choice): “I’m still not buying it.”  So–to throw in another question–why was my recent reader able to break through when these great responders–and they really are some of my favorites–couldn’t?

(By the way, I don’t mean to be cagey about the identity of the recent reader.  She’s one of the most amazing writers I’m privileged to know, and I’ve been in agony awaiting her first book, which comes out in the fall.  I just think she’d be a bit abashed at my naming her publicly, so I’ll call her Dane, a joke that I think she’ll enjoy.)

So anyway, why the great breakthrough with Dane?  Part of it, I think, is time; I sent her the second draft, so I’ve had time to live with this story for a while and murder many darlings already.  But more than that, I think there’s a power to asking questions rather than making statements.  Goodness knows I can be a statement-y person–so eager to convince the writer that my idea is the right one, I might just rush in and declare my insight.  However, this might not always be the right choice.  Dane didn’t assume she knew what was best for my novel, and I shouldn’t do that for other peoples’.

I hope to learn by example to open peoples’ work up to them.  In the meantime, I remain grateful for the four questions and also look forward to my mom’s customary Passover dessert come April.  But that, dear readers, is another story for another time.

[note: this post was originally titled, “My first Friday Five!” but by the time I had reached 500 words, no Fives had yet appeared.  So it’ll be the Saturday Five. Or maybe Sunday.  We’ll see.]

No way!  I am participating in a meme–Friday Five! 

When an esteemed grad school classmate asked, “Jess, what is a meme?” I was not very well prepared to answer.  (“In literature, it’s like a theme, although I don’t know why they don’t just call it a theme.  But on the web, a ‘meme’ is like a thing you participate in–kind of like a theme.  Um, yeah.”)  So maybe I’ll just teach by example and say that Friday Five is a meme in which bloggers note on Fridays the top five things they’re grateful for that week.  (At least, I think that’s what they are. Quick, nobody disabuse me before I write this next post.)

Before I go ahead with my list (I know, you’re just dying of anticipation; I am, too, to see whether I have five or actually ten), I wanted to note that I’ve been thinking lately about how if all you knew about me was from the web, you’d probably think I did nothing but read, write, occasionally give readings, and watch Mad Men.  Not that I don’t spend a ton of time on these things, but there is so much of my life that doesn’t even enter in here because it seems like so much is verboten on the web, and with good reason.  I don’t want to jeopardize anything at any of my freelance jobs, and I don’t want friends to feel like they have to watch themselves around me because they might be quoted on here.  I also don’t want friends to feel left out if I write about other friends!  With all these things I don’t want to discuss, it leaves precious little that I can include.

And this is sad to me.  Because I really wish I could have written about the  afternoon a few weeks ago when I ended up hanging out with some people who had previously intimidated me and we had such a rockingly hilarious time that I’m still thinking about some of our jokes and cracking up.  Or the way a recent interaction with a previously prickly person turned out to be really terrific.  Because what if these women read this and thought, “Hey, why do you say I’m intimidating?” or “Well, I never knew you found me so annoying before!”  Argh argh argh.  I mean, it’s a good thing I write fiction, so I can get out some of these ya-yas, but when I’m supposed to have a public blog persona and then feel like I can’t write about anything that’s actually emotionally important to me, I think I end up sounding like a total hermit.

Hm. 437 words and still no Friday Five.  I think I’ll save them for tomorrow.  But at least now you may think I have some kind of social life.  But do any of you bloggers either worry about the impact of what you post, or fear that you seem like you have no life?

Talk about stepping in the same river twice.  I did, a few weeks ago, with regard to my Vermont College MFA reunion (it was great, by the way.  None of my worries came to pass.  I am kind of a nudnik.)  I stepped in another familiar river this week when I went back to an old-but-not-dead piece of writing to revise it for its appearance in the Sunday paper.

Yes, you read that right!  The Louisville Courier-Journal, which (who?) featured Nice and Mean when it first came out, invited me to provide their August Sunday serial, so over the next four weeks, my friends and neighbors and anyone with the internet can read the first few chapters of what I hope will be my next middle-grade novel, NOT THAT GIRL, potentially with groovy art.  (At least, I think there might be some art.  Might have to check on this.)

There was so much craziness involved revisiting the story, including the fact that the request came while I was travelling [no–traveling; I always misspell that], and I had to ask my partner to brave my Extremely Messy, Filled with Deep-Dark Secret Documents that are Likely to Fall On You Shelf and extract my notes from when I workshopped this piece last summer, along with one of about a bijillion Clairefontaine notebooks.  (Do you use these?  Are they not a superior piece of notebookture?)  A side-note on this challenge is that she succeeded the first time around!  Go, A!

The biggest source of craziness, though, was how ridiculous some of the writing was.  The prose was spiffy enough; the characters, distinct; there’s a passage of dialogue whose punchline is “Where’s your butt?” that I enjoyed again, as though I hadn’t written it.   But what was sorely lacking was something that Grad School Advisor Margaret calls Emotional Residue.

Case in point: Not that Girl starts out with Jackie and Mel being shocked when their friend Zoe, previously uninterested in boys, unexpectedly brings an older guy to the movies with them.  Then, in the next chapter, I had a guy–an adorable one, unfortunately nicknamed Nathaniel the Spaniel, crossing Jackie’s path and Zoe and Mel strategizing about how Jackie can pursue him.  I had this line to the effect of, “I’ve been feeling a little weird about Zoe since the movies the other night, but I’m willing to listen to her advice.”

Um, really?  Just “a little weird”? So glad I chose to make that event the focus of your first chapter, Jackie, because I can see that it brought a lot of emotional residue to your subsequent interactions.

Why aren’t Jackie and Mel more upset?  Why don’t they talk about this–instead of nothing relevant–in the scene before Nathaniel comes along? Jackie’s feeling of being caught between Mel and Zoe should drive the emotion in the strategy session, because it becomes the heart of the story.

Thankfully, I fixed these things.  I’m still kind of appalled that it took me so long to see them, and I await with dread the missteps I will find when I go back to The Novel Formerly Known as The Book of the Dead, which I will do tomorrow or so (today is maintenance day, as you can see.)  I guess I can just hope that even if I face-plant in the river, I will have plenty of chances to cross it again, because that seems to be what writers do.

Having long admired fellow mid-souther Shelli Johannes Welles’s blog, Market My Words, I am a bit agog to find myself on it.  (Well, I answered the interview questions; I can’t be that surprised.)  So if you still have a yen to hear my thoughts, you can head on over there to see what I said.   More importantly, though, you can read the other entries and pick up marketing tips! 

In other news, I went to The ALA C onference (American Library Association) this weekend in DC, and it was awesome!  I can’t wait to post pics and share tales.  Preview: teens weighing in about YALSA picks; book-cart drill team; Will Shortz.

I also look forward to telling you about how I’m seriously considering killing of one of my characters (meaning editing her out, not killing her in the book) and how great that will be if it’s the right choice.  But I must return to said manuscript and reread in its entirety today, so back to’it, missy!

I recently got an interview request from Louisville Magazine to share my thoughts about books.  A thrill!  Anyone who hasn’t read E. Lockhart surely must, and I will tell them so.  Also the fine nature of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife” must be trumpeted. They also asked me, Which book do you think should be required for high school students?

You’d think, what with all my opinions and the fact that I taught middle-school for quite a while, I’d be able to name one, but I am having the hardest time with that question!  Part of the trouble is that I’ve been traveling since I got the interview request, so I haven’t been able to look at the bookshelf, but I can picture it pretty well and can’t seem to name anything perfect.

I offered The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson, since, as Queen says (although not about this book), it is “guaranteed to blow your mind” if you are in high school.  A story about Napoleon’s chicken-cook and a girl with webbed feet, set in Venice, The Passion has history, love, world-melting, and beautiful language.  But does it expose the reader to new insights about the actual world?  Does it help develop empathy?  (It may, and maybe I just can’t remember, but that doesn’t seem to be one of its salient features, and high-school students can be so grounded in their own worldview that I’d want to recommend a book that forces discussion of differences.

For that, I might recommend The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, about four sisters stuck on their parents’ mad mission trip to the Congo.  Kingsolver alternates perspectives and each girl’s voice is amazingly distinct; we learn about history and geography, we’re moved by the stories, and the problems of Colonialism would spark a meaty discussion.  But the book is pretty accessible, and if I get to make students read something, shouldn’t it be something they might not finish on their own?

Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex might strike a good balance between The Poisonwood Bible and The Passion.  A story about an intersex kid growing up in Michigan, the granddaughter of Greek immigrants, this book won a Pulitzer Prize and is both world-broadening and stylistically cool.  But is the book a little cold?  Would high-school students want to keep going with it?

Oh, maybe Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison.  Everyone in my sophomore-year English class loved this story, about four generations of African-Americans in the south, for the rich language, aforementioned world-melting nature, and the fact that it recounted an experience outside of our own.  Hmm, that is definitely seeming like the most likely contender so far, maybe because I have firsthand experience of what it felt like to read it.  It was like hiking through the woods only to come upon a glacier field–gorgeous, unique, and totally unexpected.  On the other hand, this is already on lots of lists.  I want to make a splash in my fictional curriculum!

Any thoughts, reader friends?  What do you think all high-school students should read, and why?

I did an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal that’s going to run tomorrow (Sunday.)  Since so many newspapers put their content online in advance, I ventured to the internets to see if I could get a preview.

A preview was indeed what I got, as in a teaser that did not give the full story, so now I am very curious!  I get the sense it will be positive (features usually are), but there’s still that lingering wonder of, “What did I say that they will and won’t use?  Will they emphasize something I said that was totally uninformed/dorky/not really representative of me, even though I said it?”  What direction do you think this will go in?

In Arts

Author Jessica Leader has gone where few adults dare: back to seventh grade. If diving into the emotional lives of 13-year-old girls sounds as dangerous as swimming with sharks, Leader is living proof that you can go home again and emerge unscathed.

I’m wondering if it will show that even if the characters in Nice and Mean are, by turns, catty, manipulative, insecure and over-dramatic (and creative and resourceful and resilient, of course)–their creator, moi, is mature, thoughtful, poised, the possessor of excellently polished toenails, &c &c.  So I can’t wait to read it.

I am sure it will mention my toenails.

I didn’t like a word I’d used yesterday in my chapter, “swath.”  It’s the kind of word that would turn me off if I was reading–too studied–and, in fact, when I got to the paragraph with the offending swath, I skimmed over it.  Bad sign!  I needed a replacement.

Only thesaurus.com didn’t have any suggestions at all!  I suspect that thesaurus.com is not the most sophisticated website for thesaurily endeavors, but I didn’t have the time to search for a better one, so I thought, “Okay, what’s the closest I can come to providing a synonym, even one I wouldn’t use, and seeing where that leads me…How about ‘blob’?  Yes, let’s try blob.”

The ‘blob’ entry had many gross medical synonyms that I won’t name, but it also had, on the sidebar, a list of what I can only assume are frequently used terms involving blob.  They’re so intriguing, I had to share:

It’s a blast–a summer blog blast tour!  As a fan of America’s Next Top Model (yes, you can judge me now), I can’t help but think of New Cover Girl Lash-Blast Mascara when I hear the words “Summer Blog Blast Tour.”  But I should really put some new association to those words, because on Wed-niz-day, I am going to appear on said tour!  Yep.  That’s right.  Writer nirvana. 

The Summer blog blast tour consists of some of kidlit’s most thoughtful, provocative bloggers interviewing writers.  I’m pasting the line-up below so you can see that I mean what I say: some serious pith will be offered up.  

The cherry on the sundae–the lengthen of the lashes–is that I got to answer interview questions from my much-esteemed grad school friend Gwenda of Shaken and Stirred fame.  (Doesn’t her blog have the best name?  I wish I had a cool last name so I could give this blog something equally rich, but sadly, there’s nothing cool about–oh, wait.  I do have an extremely cool last name.  But all cognates–Leader of the Pack; Follow the Leader–sound obnoxious when applied to myself.) 

I so digress!  My point is, I hope you’ll stop by these blogs and read the interviews throughout the week.  And for goodness’ sake, don’t be a lurker!  Comment to show the love!  And thanks to Gwenda for looping me in on the coolness.  I can feel my eyelashes growing longer and thicker already!  

Monday, May 17 

Kate Milford @ Chasing Ray

Mac Barnett @ Fuse #8/ School Library Journal

Hazardous Players @ Finding Wonderland

Malinda Lo @ Shelf Elf

Barbara Dee @ Little Willow

Tuesday, May 18

Mary Jane Beaufrand at The Ya, Ya, Yas
Rita Williams-Garcia at Fuse Number 8
Jennifer Hubbard at Writing & Ruminating
Charise Mericle Harper at Shelf Elf
Holly Schindler at Little Willow

 Wednesday, May 19

 Michael Trinklein at Chasing Ray
Nick Burd at Fuse Number 8
Sarah Darer Littman at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
Tom Siddell at Finding Wonderland
Jessica Leader (that’s me!) at Shaken & Stirred

 Thursday, May 20

 Matthew Reinhart at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Jenny Boylan at Fuse Number 8
Lisa Mantchev at Writing & Ruminating
Tara Kelly at Shaken & Stirred
Donna Freitas at Little Willow

Friday May 21

Julia Hoban at Chasing Ray
Stacy Kramer at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
Nancy Bo Flood at Finding Wonderland
Paolo Bacigalupi at Shaken & Stirred
Sarah Kuhn at Little Willow

Things I could blog about if I weren’t so tired:

-The careers I would take on in another life (Broadway orchestrator; gynecologist; Olympic gymnast)

-What’s going on with my work-in-progress (I’m facing down the last few chapters and daunted about the prospect of pulling it all together.  That’s a photo of a ditched-out horse trail, by the way.)

-How it’s Derby season here in Kentucky and there were Derby Pie samples at the grocery store this morning and I almost fainted with delight (Derby Pie=pecan pie with chocolate chips.  It is SO GOOD.)

-Um

-Something else

-Probably another thing

-I’m really happy that Nice and Mean will be on the Summer Indie Next List–I told you that, right? 

-What does it say about me that I repeatedly bury the lead?

-Also might as well mention that I’ve almost confirmed dates for launch parties in Louisville, NYC, Providence and Boston

-I bought pretty Indian bangle bracelets to give away as swag for Nice and Mean and kind of all I want to do is make them ring-a-ling all day long

Yeah.  That’s about it.  If you would like to propose a topic for me to blog about, please go ahead.  Especially if you’re my friend, and you once heard me talk about something funny, please remind me what it is so I can talk about it.  I would welcome a little direction.