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

News summary: After a very fun run of it, my serialized story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Not That Girl, has wrapped up its monthlong appearance.  You can read  You can read the series from start to finish here.

I was also thrilled to get this lovely review from Tweendom, which is run by the lower-school librarian at Little Red School House in NYC.  (I did a little Internet sleuthing; it’s true.  The school looks almost nothing like that picture, by the way; although it is, in fact, little and red, it’s on the corner of very busy 6th Avenue.  That image was so gorgeously Maxfield Parrish, though, I couldn’t resist including it.)  Little Red was so much cooler than I was that I didn’t even know anybody who went there, but I can recoup some of that lost coolness now by having a nice mention on the librarian’s review blog.  You can read it here, or just enjoy this part:

“Jessica Leader has gotten the multiple worlds of the middle schooler down pat. Seventh grade tends to be a time of big changes…of kids figuring out who they want to be and where they are going to fit in. Marina and Sachi, while seemingly opposites, illustrate this beautifully. Round out the cast of their satellite friends and many types of kids are shown without seeming like Leader simply lined up types and put them in. Nice and Mean shows readers that most likely, the kids they think of as mean aren’t all mean, and the kids who seem nice definitely have some back story of their own!”

Off to the beach this weekend, and I desperately hope that Earl does not delay me!  I have kind of a horrible fear of flying,

and if this flight is punctuated by turbulence, I don’t know what kind of state I’ll be in when I get off the plane.  If you want tosay a little prayer, I wouldn’t mind being included.

Happy Labor Day weekend!  May the fruits of your labor be recognized!

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.