A Learning Experience

by Therese Fowler


A college student who's an aspiring fiction writer got in touch recently, hoping to interview me for a project she was doing. Along with the questions she asked about what it's like to be a novelist, she wanted to know whether I believed creative writing could be taught.

What she was really asking, it turned out, was, Should I study creative writing? Will it help make me good enough to have a writing career?

Back in 2002, not long after I'd invested two years in my first effort at writing a novel, I began to wonder the same thing. I'd written an entire story beginning-middle-end (an accomplishment itself; you aspiring writers, don't let anyone tell you differently), revised it, revised it, revised it, and was in the midst of my second descent into the fiery pits of hell--er, agent queries. What I got back, in those days of SASE replies, were lots of form letter rejections in my mailbox. Dozens of them. But amidst those were a few encouraging letters--and, one day, a phone call from a very successful agent, a dream agent. When she said her name, I thought I might wet myself. (Yes, that's how it is at that stage, oh my...)

She'd read the novel. She'd liked a lot of what she read. The writing was solid, the voice was fresh. But it was clear to her that I still had some things to learn about how to tell a story in writing. Things like...building a plot. Small thing, but kind of important.

"What do you recommend?" I asked, the phone receiver clutched in my hand like a lifeline.

"Oh, there are some great books that address plot. You might also consider a writing group or workshop. Whatever makes sense for you. And then, if you revise it, I'd like to see it again."

She didn't say, "Go get an MFA in creative writing."

Because the fact is, most authors don't have MFAs. Don't need them, don't want them, can't afford the time and/or the money it takes to get those three letters that no one even gets to put after their name. You finish the degree program and you are not Dr. Great Writer, MFA. Not even Ms. Great Writer, MFA. Really, not even Ms. Great Writer, though of course there are some writing programs that seem to project exactly that expectation (but that's a subject for another post...).

But in 2002, I had a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old, both of whom I hoped to be able to send to college right after they finished high school (not when they were in their 30s, as had been my personal experience--and of course my parents didn't pay). I really, really wanted to be a novelist, a professional, full-time writer who earned a decent living. When people asked me, "What do you do?" I would be able to say, "I'm a writer," and be identifying not only my occupation, but my career.

So, in order to hedge my bets in as many ways as I could figure out how to do, I applied to grad school hoping to learn plot and whatever else came along. I didn't have a writing credit to my name. I'd never taken a writing class. All I had to recommend me to the faculty was a well-rejected manuscript and a burning desire to learn to be a better writer. If I got in, then completed the program, I'd come away with at the very least some extra credentials that would, I hoped, allow me to get a teaching job while I kept working at my ultimate goal.

Three years later, I'd written another novel (twice), figured out plot, completed the MFA degree, taught a couple semesters of undergraduate creative writing, and had gained representation by my first choice of agents. Nine months after that, I'd written one more novel--Souvenir, the one that would launch my career. Today, nine years after that agent's phone call, I'm in my fifth year of writing full-time, at work on my fourth novel, which is under contract, and my sons are both in college.

"So you see," I told the student, "every writer with even a little innate talent can, with instruction of whatever flavor, become a better writer. But you won't know for sure whether instruction will make you a better writer, a good enough writer," I said, "until you try. If a writer is what you really want to be, do it in whatever way makes sense for you, but do it."

A coda: It's not only about writing. In 2005, the same year that I was finishing grad school, Steve Jobs spoke at the Stanford University commencement. He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year earlier; as you know by now, he died yesterday. In that speech, he told the graduates many useful things, but among them was this message: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do... Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

Try.

*********

Therese Fowler is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is Exposure, recommended by the New York Times, USA Today, and Family Circle Magazine. She's doing her best to adjust to her new empty-nest status by regularly posting photos of any of her four cats on Facebook.

In the Beginning Were the Words

By Susan McBride

Here I sit, desperate to talk about beginnings and wondering how to start, when I think, “Eureka! I’ll share the first graphs from some of my books, and we can see if I’ve gotten any better at it.” Okay, yes, I’m a glutton for punishment. But it might be amusing; and, with all the rain we’ve had in St. Louis lately—not to mention the tornadoes—I figured amusing would be very good indeed.

Just for clarity’s sake, I’ll italicize what I cut and paste from the books. The rest is just running commentary (aka, Susan Babble).

We’ll begin with BLUE BLOOD, the first of my Debutante Dropout Mysteries for Avon (circa 2004), where I needed to set the scene for murder:

Unlucky.

That’s what she was.

Molly O’Brien pulled her T-shirt down over her head, not bothering to tuck the hem into her jeans. She squinted at her watch, barely illuminated by the faint stream of light flowing in from the hall, and she groaned when she realized it was well past midnight. God, how she wished she’d weaseled out of helping Bud Hartman close the place! He was creepy enough in broad daylight. If that didn’t bite, now she also owed the babysitter overtime.

She grabbed her purse from its hook, slammed her locker, and turned around.

Bud stood in the doorway, watching.

In all five of those mysteries, I started with a Prologue, written in the third person, while the rest of each book is in first person (seen through the eyes of my protagonist, deb ball refugee Andrea Kendricks). It was great fun getting into the head of either the murder victim—before the murder, of course—or, in this case, the prime suspect, Andy’s old friend, Molly, now a single mom working at a Hooter’s type restaurant called Jugs. Fun fact: BLUE BLOOD was originally called STABBED IN THE BACK, which was changed to DEATH AND THE DEBUTANTE DROPOUT before it sold to Avon then ended up as BLUE BLOOD, which suits it perfectly.

Let’s move ahead a few years, to my first “Debs” book with Delacorte, released in 2008:

Laura Delacroix Bell grabbed the arm-rests of her seat in a death-grip as the Southwest Airlines jet touched down at Houston’s Hobby Airport, the wheels bumping hard against the tarmac before rolling to a stop. The kid behind her let out a wail loud enough to split her eardrums, and she gritted her teeth, willing the Flight from Hell to be over with ASAP.

Ten more minutes, and I’ll be off this cattle car, she told herself, thinking that nothing would feel better than stretching to her full 5’ 9” after her cramped ride from Austin. Besides her neck getting a major crick, she’d been stuck smack in front of the crying child who’d kicked the back of her seat for nearly an hour. As if that wasn’t torture enough, all they’d fed her were two tiny bags of peanuts.

Confession: I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote the first draft of THE DEBS, my first-ever young adult novel. The story features four privileged prep school girls in Houston, and I wasn’t quite sure how to utilize all the different points of view. In the initial draft, I started with another character entirely, but I realized with the revision that the real starting point was Laura returning from "fat camp" where she’d been exiled for the summer by her teeny-tiny über-socialite mother. Laura probably has the juiciest external conflict in the book, and by the end of Chapter One, you can’t help but know she’s bought a ticket on a train wreck. So THE DEBS was definitely a case where my original beginning was not the beginning I ended up with.

Finally, let’s skip to this year and LITTLE BLACK DRESS, my second women’s fiction book (out August 23, 2011), which starts like this:

I never meant to resurrect the dress. I had intended for it to remain out of reach so there would be no more meddling. But I awoke before dawn with tears in my eyes after another strange dream about Anna, and I knew that I had to find it.

A bruised-looking sky bled between half-drawn curtains as I dragged myself from bed and padded down the hallway in my nightgown and bare feet. I switched on the attic light and grabbed the banister to climb, my knees creaking as sharply as the wood beneath my heels. At the top of the stairs, I paused to catch my breath and loudly sneezed.

I’d forgotten how dusty it was up there and how full of things forgotten: discarded furniture, a steamer trunk stuffed with my parents’ belongings, and more boxes than I could count. It could take me days to dig through all the detritus. I wished I had listened to Bridget about getting my life sorted out months ago so there would be far less clutter. The house was full of it now. Like so much of the past, I found it harder to face than to ignore.

This beginning was the beginning I had in my head from the start, going back to when I wrote the proposal a year ago. Once I knew what the book was about—two sisters, Evie and Anna, who could not be more different, and a magical black dress that shows each her fate and changes the course of their lives forever—I saw this scene of Evie at 71, alone in the Victorian house she’d grown up in, awakening at dawn after a recurring dream and realizing she had to unearth the dress from the attic. The story shifts between two points of view: that of Evie and that of her daughter, Toni. Evie’s voice is more immediate (first person) and Toni’s is third person limited. Somehow, the combination worked, with Evie kick-starting the tale and Toni capping it off.

It’s rare when I have that clarity from the get-go. Usually, I rewrite my beginnings over and over again as I go along. Sometimes as I figure out the pieces of the puzzle—and understand better all the nuances of each character—I see a different starting point. What I’ve learned through the years is to trust my gut and to just get the freaking first draft done. I always feel like, once I know the whole story from start to finish, the fun truly begins (aka, revisions!). But—as you’ve heard me say before—the first draft is pretty much verbal vomit.

Hopefully, I’ll start vomiting copious words very soon since I’ve got a new book to write (like, now). I wonder if Office Depot sells writers’ barf bags?

P.S. As you read this, I am trying hard to keep my nose to the grindstone, sweating over the beginning of a young adult thriller, DEAD ADDRESS, for Random House/Delacorte. No doubt, I will mess with said beginning endlessly before this draft is done. Feel free to drop by my web site any time or find me on Facebook!

Here We Go Again by Melissa Clark

Spring is in the air. What a perfect time to talk about new beginnings. Flowers are blooming, farmers markets are overflowing with new harvests, Dancing With The Stars has started up again, and I have begun a new novel.

While technically my two previous novels are still on submission, I've had to let go of that oppressive yet thrilling and consuming daily hope. Not because I don't still hope for a sale, some way, some how, but because I need all that energy to delve into this new story.

I am tackling this piece in an entirely different way.

First, I am writing it directly onto the computer. In the past, I've handwritten everything and then plugged it into the computer at a later date. This time I'm cutting out the middle-man and jumping straight to the source. While I love the process of correcting while I translate, I find the straight-to-computer method simply quicker.

Second, I have set a 500 minimum words-per-day goal. I have NEVER written this way before. In the past, if it flowed, great, if it stalled - oh well. In fact, I never understood people who spoke of their oevres in wordcount speak. I was a page number only girl. But not anymore. The 500 words-per-day method has been a revelation. No more stalling. If I'm not in the mood to write, tough luck, I've got a limit to reach. I so admire people who have set high wordcount goals. I could probably eek out 1,000 per day if held by gunpoint, but you 2-3,000 word-a-day writers are total rock stars. This is so challenging, but as of today I have 18,500 words and I'm not even paying attention to how many pages that is.

And third, I am writing from a vague outline. This is another NEVER HAVE I DONE THIS BEFORE moment. What I love about writing is the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience. I always assumed an outline killed that sensation. But nooooo. This vague outline (that admittedly keeps getting adjusted, recreated, moved around) has been a lifeline.

Lastly, and this is a hard one, I'm not playing the fantasy game. It's burned me too many times in the past. I'm not standing at a podium at the TED conference, nor am I being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I'm not thinking book tour, book festival, book awards...I'm simply telling a story the best way I know how, by putting one word in front of the other and enjoying the ride.

Has your writing process changed throughout the years? How so?

Melissa Clark is the author of Swimming Upstream, Slowly, and teaches literature and writing at Otis College of Art and Design. You can follow her on her blog, Connections Clark.

Writing While Napping

by Sara Rosett

My novel writing career began during naptime.

I had many false starts on a novel, but wasn’t getting anywhere. I always seemed to hit a wall at, oh, about Chapter Two, so I decided to switch to non-fiction.

To build up my clips, I worked as a volunteer reporter for a couple of Air Force base newspapers. One exciting assignment was to cover the presentation of a $500 check to the winner of a cheese promotional giveaway at the commissary. I interviewed the "Big Cheese" (i.e. the cheese company representative and, no, I did not call him that!) and winner after the obligatory photo op. I also wrote features about pilots who had been given desk jobs after completing their flight training because the military had more pilots than planes. Then I landed a job writing travel itineraries for a company that coordinated professional exchanges in foreign countries.

It was a dream job—I loved research and part of the job was finding obscure medical organizations in countries like China, Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for the professionals from the U.S. to liaison with. Writing the sight-seeing tours—the Great Wall, Buda Castle, the Hermitage, and Charles Bridge—was my favorite part of the job.

I spent the next several years in Mom Land—too tired and too busy to do much except read my favorite mystery authors before I dropped off to sleep shortly after my daughter’s bedtime. I did, however, begin to dream about writing a novel again.

It was the birth of my second child that nudged me back to the computer. I realized that my life was only going to get busier and if I was ever going to try and write a novel I better take what little time I had and crave out some writing time.

So, three days a week, I dropped my daughter off at Pre-K, rushed home and put my son down for a nap, then typed for forty minutes. As you can imagine that first draft took a long time.

But I got it done. Then came the revisions. While I alternated rather erratically between revising whole chapters and then agonizing over a single comma, I put my research skills to work and learned everything I could about publishing and finding an agent.

Fast-forward eleven years, and here I am…that “naptime” book became Moving is Murder, the first in the Ellie Avery mystery series. This week, the sixth book in the Ellie series comes out, Mimosas, Mischief, and Murder.

There’s a saying—“the days go by slowly, but the years go quickly.” Never is that more true than when you are an author. While I’m slogging away a few hundred or thousand words at a time, eighty-thousand words seems like an almost insurmountable goal, but when I look back over the last ten years...it’s all gone by so quickly.

I hope you’ll look for Mimosas this week or give one of the other Ellie books a try. The ebook version of the third book in the series, Getting Away is Deadly, is on sale for 99 cents from March 28 to April 11.

Happy reading!

~ Sara

P.S. The ebook version of my book Getting Away is Deadly is currently a free download at Amazon. It's also on sale for 99 cents at Barnes and Noble!

Incite me, baby!

This blog post on beginnings is by Carleen Brice, author of two novels, Orange Mint and Honey and Children of the Waters. You can read the beginnings of both books on my website.

Randy Susan Myers, author of The Murderer's Daughters, posts the first pages of novels on her site and invited me to participate. I posted what I thought was the beginning of my current novel, Calling Every Good Wish Home. No sooner had I posted it, than bam, I had an idea for a better opening. Which I'm not going to post here because it may change again. (I learned my lesson!) This scene is still in the book, so please do read it; it's just not the first thing we see anymore.

Most writers and editors talk about the importance of the first few lines and pages being intriguing enough to draw the reader in. Of course, this is the primary work of the beginning. But I also find a good beginning does something else: it sets up the ending. To me, there's an added enjoyment of an ending when it's foreshadowed (subtly) by the beginning.

Indeed, that's what Robert McKee says in his book Story, which is one of my writing bibles. He calls the opening the "inciting incident." This isn't necessarily the first page of the story, but is "the first major event of the telling; the primary cause for all that follows." More from Mckee:

"...this is the event that incites and captures the audience's [I'll add readers] curiosity...witnessing [reading about] the inciting incdent projects an image of the obligatory scene into the audience's imagination. The obligatory scene (AKA crisis) is an event the audience knows it must see before the story can end."


Like a few others here, my writing process involves writing the beginning, usually the first 100 or so pages, then writing the end and then filling in the middle. The opening I'm currently working with really informed the ending, which then led me to great stuff for the middle.

I think. I hope. We'll see! If the published version of this novel has a different opening than the one I'm working with now I'll let you know!


Happy writing and reading, and good luck with your own beginnings, middles and endings!

Where to begin? by Brenda Janowitz

I love beginnings.  There’s just something wonderful about starting a new novel.  New characters, new ideas, a totally new chance to make something special.

I always find starting a new novel so easy.  There’s that level of excitement you have—you’re armed with your idea and you’re rearing to go.  I can sit down at the computer and churn out a first chapter in no time flat.

But that’s when things get a bit more difficult.  Once that opener is done, once you’re done with that initial burst of adrenaline, you find yourself alone again with the blank page.  You’ve begun something, you’ve introduced your characters, your setting, and now you’ve made the reader a promise.  And you’ve got to deliver on that promise.

Your characters need to be fully fleshed out, the situations you put them into reasonable, or at least feasible.  You’ve got to keep your voice consistent throughout the novel, and you’ve got to make sure your tone remains steady.  There’s nothing readers hate more than starting out a novel that they think is one thing, only to end up with another thing entirely.

Your novel needs to have a good beginning—most people won’t read more than your first chapter unless they are immediately engaged (or first line, if you’re like me), but your novel also needs to live up to the promise that you make the reader in that first chapter.

Lots of people can start a novel or have an idea for a novel—just ask anyone I’ve ever met at a cocktail party—but most people won’t actually finish writing a novel.

Beginnings are really important, but finishing is the hard part. 

What’s your favorite part of a novel?  Is it the beginning?  And for you writers out there, what part is your favorite part to write—the beginning, middle or end?

I’m the author of Scot on the Rocks and Jack with a Twist.  My work’s also appeared in the New York Post and Publisher’s Weekly.  You can find me at brendajanowitz.com.

Beginnings: Opening Lines

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

(Please note: That picture has absolutely *nothing* to do with what I'm about to write, but why *not* add a handsome man's picture to my post if I've got one lying around the old computer? If you find him handsome enough, you won't care if what follows fails to entertain or makes no sense!)

"Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?"

Pretty acerbic, I know, but that's the line that launched my career as a novelist, the first line of my debut novel, The Thin Pink Line. And it does suit the story that follows. How else to begin a contemporary novel about a sociopathic Londoner who decides to fake an entire pregnancy?

When people ask me about my - I can't believe I'm going to use this pretentious word that I hate, but OK, here goes - process, I say that I typically begin a new book with three things: 1) an idea (e.g. woman fakes entire pregnancy); 2) a character (e.g. sociopathic Londoner Jane Taylor, who stitches together her own crazy story; 3) an opening line (e.g. "Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?") I often also know the final line as well, even though I rarely know how I'm going to get from first to last, but there's no point in giving away last lines just in case you were all going to immediately rush out and buy all my books - I don't want to spoil the endings for you!

But first lines...ah, first lines...I can talk about them all day. First lines set the tone for everything that follows.

Take the opening from Vertigo, a book which is about as far from The Thin Pink Line as it's possible for a book to be. Actually, it's the first two lines, which encompass the entire prologue, Vertigo being a dark novel set in Victorian England involving murder. "For nearly seventeen years, I was a good, some might say exemplary, wife. As I put pen to paper for the first time to record my tale, it is important you know this about me from the start." You know what this line says to me? It says, "Uh-oh. Things are not going to go well for this woman, are they?"

Writing for young adults, as I also do, presents its own set of challenges. The YA market is so exciting to write for these days, the story possibilities endless because the audience is so intensely imaginative, but due to the competing-for-attention items such as advanced technology, that same audience has pretty much the shortest attention span in recorded history. So you have to grab that attention fast. Here's Lucius, opening his part of the two-voice he-said/she-said novel Crazy Beautiful: "My arm rises toward my face and the pincer touch of cold steel rubs against my jaw. I chose hooks because they were cheaper. I chose hooks because I wouldn't outgrow them so quickly. I chose hooks so that everyone would know I was different, so I would scare even myself."

And then there's the challenge of writing for even younger kids, like the nine-book The Sisters 8 series for kids approximately six to ten years old. Chapter One of Book 1 opens: "It was New Year's Eve 2007, approximately ten o'clock, and we were just getting ready to celebrate Christmas." There are a few important things in that first sentence: 1) why are they celebrating Christmas on New Year's Eve?; 2) the line sounds so innocent and yet before the 12-page chapter is through, the octuplet stars of the series will realize their parents have disappeared and it's up to them to solve the mystery of those twin disappearances while keeping the rest of the world from realizing they're home alone; 3) the most important thing of all, we - "we were just getting ready to celebrate Christmas. The entire series, with the exception of the prologues, is written in the rare first person plural. It sets the quirky tone for all the quirkiness to follow.

Anyway, that's just a sampling from the 19 openings I've had published in my career thus far. This coming November, I'll have a new YA novel out, Little Women and Me, the prologue of which begins: " 'There's no such thing as a perfect book,' Mr. Ochocinco says." Not long after that, my teen heroine gets sucked out of her contemporary world and into the world of the classic novel Little Women, where she must choose to right one of that novel's chief wrongs: the death of Beth or the fact that Laurie winds up with Amy instead of Jo. I hope it will turn out that my first line serves the novel well.

So how about you? What are some of your favorite opening lines from your own writing? Come on - don't be shy!

Be well. Don't forget to write.