Posts by Sarah Callender
Once upon a time, I didn’t believe in monsters under the bed. Boogeymen were also make-believe, and hostile, big-eyed aliens were only real in movies. I didn’t want to believe in scary stuff so I chose not to believe in it. Behold, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . da Queen of de Nial!
I applied the same head-in-sand mentality to Writer’s Block. When my high school English students claimed Writer’s Block rendered them unable to write their Hamlet essays, I rolled my eyes and called them pribbling, beef-witted pollywockers. When, in 2005, I had the pleasure of hearing Dorothy Allison speak about her paralyzing, three-year Writer’s Block, I didn’t yell Shakespearean insults, but I didn’t quite believe her either. Lionel Messi doesn’t suddenly find himself unable to play soccer. Meryl Streep doesn’t suddenly find herself unable to act. Barbara Walters doesn’t suddenly find herself unable to ask nosy, semi-inappropriate questions. And three years? Surely Dorothy Allison wrote something over those three years.
But let’s get back to the monsters.
While I didn’t want to believe in monsters, deep down I have always known that they exist. They come in the form of pediatric cancer, domestic violence and chronic mental illness. They look exactly like political leaders who don’t care that their country’s people are hungry and voiceless. They are the terrorists who lob bombs into crowded public spaces. They may not live under my bed, but they do exist.
And, as I have been writing over the past fifteen years, I see Writer’s Block is equally real. My students did feel paralyzed. Dorothy Allison was unable to write for three years. It’s a monster that resides under my bed after all . . . under your bed too.
Read MoreAs I work on my third novel, I realize I don’t really know how to write a novel. I know I can write a novel. I just don’t know how. You know?
Recognizing some significant gaps in my knowledge o’craft, I decided to give myself an at-home MFA (which is an awful lot like doing an at-home tooth whitening kit. Or an at-home Zumba workout. Or at at-home enema). More or less.
This month, enrolled in Point of Viewbies for Newbies, I reached toward my bookshelf and found The Art of Fiction, a (rather stuffy) craft book by David Lodge.
“The choice of point(s) of view from which the story is told,” David Lodge explained, “is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make.”
Oh good. No pressure.
David (who, as it turns out, is not stuffy but British) explained that Point of View “fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.”
Fine. That was what Point of View did, but I wanted to know what Point of View was.
But book after book contained an iteration of this idea: Point of view is “who is telling the story.” That was typically followed by a discussion of First Person or Third Person narration, and the tossing around of phrases like “limited omniscient” and “third-person unified” and concluded with admonitions about the perils of multiple points of view.
These limited (from my POV) discussions of POV led me to believe either 1) authors were withholding information so they could beat me in writing contests, or 2) authors were as uncertain about Point of View as I.
Then a writer-friend directed me to David Jauss’ book, With All That Could Happen: Rethinking the Craft of Fiction Writing. When I stumbled upon his chapter, “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction,” I knew I had found a friend. At least, an acquaintance. He, like the other David, seemed a little stuffy, (though he’s from Minnesota and Little Rock so there’s no excuse).
But no matter! This David wrote:
Authors “use point of view to manipulate the degree of emotional, intellectual and moral distance between a character and a reader.”
A-ha! Point of View was the technique writers used to keep characters and stories a certain distance from the reader.
Read MoreLast month I shared my utter ignorance about why the Where matters in a story, confessing that Setting had never interested me much. (Read that post here.)
To me, Setting was nothing more than a nice description of the natural world, the urban world, the domestic world. And writing (or reading) about that put me in a sleepy, book-closing mood. I cared about the people in stories, not where those people hung their hats.
No surprise, the more I studied it, the more I began to understand that of course, Setting (or Place as I now think of it) is much more than location. Place drives character. Place determines the identity, values, and goals of the characters. Place drives the plot. In a way. More or less. I think.
Because I was still a little foggy and fuzzy on the whole concept, I called on my friend, Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, author of the recently-released The Art of Floating, a stunning, heartbreaking, fresh and funny novel that’s like none I’ve read before. In this novel, Place truly is a character, and, at the same time, it molds the characters. How does she do it? I have no idea. It’s as mysterious as Magic Shell.
Lucky for me, she was willing to chat about it with you, so please, keep reading to glean some of Kristin’s fabulous and witty wisdom. And then go get your hands on her novel. The prose sings arias and rock ‘n’ roll. The characters (one in particular) will get lodged in your heart. And the Place! Oh, the Place!
Take it away, Kristin . . .
Place: Getting It On the Page Whenever I teach my “The Geography of a Novel” workshop at a writers’ conference, I introduce myself as a place-passionate writer and cultural spelunker. The terms formalize my writerly addiction to place, make it seem tame and orderly, and even make me look kinda normal. But as I lead writers through the various stages of the workshop, they realize pretty damn quickly that I’m the nutball of all nutballs about place, and when I describe the crazy-ass, magical, spine-tingling, mystical roaring I feel in my soul whenever I land in a city or country with which I connect deeply and about which I know I will write, they scooch back a little and eye me warily, as you might a rabid raccoon. But despite their trepidation, most stick around, anxious to learn a little something about how to transfer a deep connection to place onto the page. Over the years and via various projects, I’ve figured out all kinds of ways to create a place on the page about which readers pant and say, “Wow, your city/country/castle/village/mountain/etcetera is just like another character in your book!” And while describing a place is a great start—who doesn’t love a spot-on description?!—it takes a lot more than that to connect readers to your setting. Here are some strategies to help you get there:
Read MoreI was not gifted with a Sense of Direction. North often feels West, and South usually feels down-ish. To make matters worse, when I travel in a new place, I forget to pay attention to landmarks. I can never remember if I should turn left at the river or at the white shack. Is the white shack even on this road? Wasn’t the river on my left earlier this morning? The next thing I know, I am lost.
I was born without an internal compass, but I also often find myself lost because landscape and landmarks do not interest me. People interest me. The road maps on their faces and veined hands, the direction of their posture, the location of their piercings or birthmarks, the foundation of their sadness. People hold my attention, but landmarks? Who cares! Setting schmetting!
It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, when my writing partners nudge me about the “where” of my story. As in, Sarah, where’s the Where? They are lost. Without Setting, stories feel blurred and gauzy.
The problem? When I consider Setting in my writing, I feel ho-hummy. Setting feels boring like chess or physics. Like Pokemon or cricket (the stick game, not the insect). Like economic policy or bridge (the card game not the architectural structure). Like baseball. Wait . . . you know what? Baseball used to be boring, but then my son started playing, and after sitting through nine thousand innings in 40-degree Seattle drizzle, I now love it. Because I understand it.
So I set about trying to understand Setting, and I am now a Setting evangelist. As such, may we please scrap the term “Setting” and instead use “Sense of Place”? It’s such a lovely term, Sense of Place . . . a lot of people think Flannery O’ Connor or Eudora Welty invented it, but no, I did.
OK, then. Let’s talk about why Sense of Place is so powerful and important.
Sense of Place Orients the Reader. The specific place doesn’t matter (it could be Augusta or Anchorage or Antarctica) but the reader cannot feel like the story takes place Anywhere or Anyplace. I have never heard a reader long to be more disoriented, more uncertain of where she is. A reader must feel tethered to a story in order to willingly tumble into it. The writer must create the Sense of Place that tethers the reader.
What else?
Read MoreDo you know what I love? Writing conferences. They inspire me. They invigorate me. They connect me with other writers who are as passionate about words and stories as I am.
Do you know what I dread? Writing conferences. They terrify and overwhelm me. They make me wonder why I spend thousands of hours with people (i.e. characters) who don’t technically exist. Writing conferences make me phone my husband, mid-conference, and cry, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry write again!”
A few weeks ago, at AWP, I found myself in the throes of this conference-induced, Oscar-worthy melodrama. Come with me, and I’ll share some highlights . . .
Thursday @ 7:30 a.m. The first full day of the AWP Conference: I spend the morning making my kids’ lunches and half-listening to them practice their violin. Trying to look professional but not preppy, writerly but not weird, I try on roughly thirty-seven outfits before settling on a casual dress and a scarf that can hide or reveal (audience depending) my cross necklace. Uncomfortable-but-funky shoes. Black tights.
Now running late, I yell at my kids who are moving at the speed of sloth. I hug my mom when she arrives to stay with the kids. I gather my notes for the panel I’ll be sitting on. I remind my son to get his soccer stuff in his backpack and his basketball stuff in the car. I remind my daughter to talk to her music teacher about choir and her soccer coach about a new jersey. I remind them both to eat their fruit because I don’t pack that stuff in their lunches for my own amusement. I text my husband: I CANNOT DO THIS ANYMORE, THE JUGGLING OF WRITING WORK, PAID WORK, AND MOM WORK. I hug my mom again, and run to the bus stop. Already my tights are falling down. I am trying not to cry.
Read MoreYou know what I like to do for fun? Sit around and obsessively analyze the thoughtful, detailed, eloquent rejections my agent and I have received from editors. It reminds me of when I was sixteen and I’d try to figure out what my boyfriend really meant when he said, “I love you so much that I want to carve your name in my leg.”
But this post isn’t about my high school beau. Nor is this post about me and my rejection. This post is about what my pile of thoughtful, detailed, eloquent rejection letters reveals about traditional publishing.
The nice thing about receiving loads of rejections is that it’s easy to notice the trends! (I say this when I’m wearing my Brightside Betty underoos.) But it’s true. When my agent and I can see feedback trends, we can learn from them. We have noticed two biggies. First, some editors don’t quite connect with the narrator of Book #1 or the protag of Book #2. That’s OK. They are both a bit quirky. Not everyone can be everyone’s cuppa tea.
The other bit of recurring feedback is more interesting: several editors believe I have written genre-straddlers. Stories with audience-identity issues. Books that, if there were still bookstores in the world, would end up on the shelf called, “Transgenre’d.” Even when an editor falls in love with a story, if she doesn’t know what to do with it, she won’t buy it. She can’t buy it.
Here. I’ll show you some snippets to illustrate the editors’ concerns:
As much as I admire the originality and daring of the narration, I confess I don’t totally have a vision for the best way to publish the book. As we discussed on the phone, the book has elements that are a little YA and then elements that are definitely not.
And another:
Sarah Callend[e]r’s warmth as a writer illuminated [the book’s narrator] and her adventures. I did have some worries; that the book fell into a gray area between adult and YA.
Still another:
While reading, I couldn’t help but be reminded of E.L. Konigsburg and Madeleine L’Engle (excellent authors to be reminded of while reading), but it also gave me pause as to how best to position and publish this book.
Such encouraging compliments. Still, publishing is a business. If editors can’t identify the target audience, how do they market it?
With the feedback on Book #1, I worked very hard to make Book #2 fit into a single, identifiable genre-box. But perhaps the stories I have in me, the only stories I want to tell, aren’t so easily boxed?
I’ll show you:
Read MoreHi, friends. I am thrilled to welcome Wiley Cash, author of the debut A Land More Kind Than Home and the upcoming novel This Dark Road to Mercy.
I came across Wiley’s debut after following Book Pregnant, a blog that describes itself as “a group of debut authors who met via the internet and have been commiserating, cheering, consoling, cackling, and congratulating each other through this strange and unusual process of bringing a book from contract to publication and beyond.”
Reading the blog prompted me to read Wiley’s debut and that prompted me (and my whole book club) to fall in love with the writing and storytelling of Wiley Cash. Compared to Harper Lee and Cormac McCarthy, Wiley’s work has been called “mesmerizing” by The New York Times. National Public Radio said, “The book is a thriller, but it’s so beautifully written that you’ll be torn about how fast to read it.”
Read on to learn about Wiley’s writerly Achilles heel, the most important trait of a literary agent, and which member of Wiley’s support team garners MVP status.
SC: Some writers are a bit reclusive, but most of us rely on a team of supporters. Who beyond the usual suspects—agent, editor, etc.—comprise Team Cash? What various roles do they play in your growth, stability and success?
WC: My wife is the most important member of my “team.” She reads everything before it goes out, and I’m always bouncing ideas off her: anything from premises for a novel to video footage for trailers to community charities we’re considering partnering with when I’m on the road. I also have a great group of friends, many of whom are writers and artists, who’ve supported me every step of the way. When I speak to student writers, especially college students, I always tell them to surround themselves with people who take them seriously as writers. Pick the friends who will support you, not the ones who will guilt you into having another drink or staying up late to play video games.
SC: You have had two agents representing your work. What do you personally need in an agent, and what makes your current agent-author relationship thrive?
Read MoreGenetically, I am not a stop and smell the roses kind of gal. I wish I were. I have tried to be. But genes are a weird and powerful thing, and my DNA says I’m more of a “sprint past those roses and think, ‘gosh, I bet those would have smelled nice’” kind of person.
I envy the roses-smellers of the world. Those who don’t worry so much about where, precisely, they are going, how long it will take to get there, the distance between semi-clean restrooms. I envy those who don’t worry about packing sufficient, fiber-filled snacks for the road. About packing mittens and sunscreen and Chap Stick and breath mints, just in case. I envy travelers who believe that the real joy in any journey lies in getting lost. I don’t care for getting lost. I’m just someone who appreciates knowing where she is at all times.
So it’s interesting to me that I am a writer. Because (and you may have already noticed this) for most of us, the road to publication is long, meandering and surprisingly indirect. Restrooms on this journey are sporadic. Cell coverage is spotty. Perhaps for lunch, the only thing for miles is a dicey-looking gas station manned by a hungry-looking fellow named Russ who sells me a bag of Funyuns for a buck nineteen.
The funny thing? I knew it would be tough to get published. As a no-name without fancy connections or credentials, I was aware the odds were small and low. I knew this.
But I was someone who Accomplished Goals. I was a High Achiever, a Hard Worker. When I got my first agent four years ago, I really and truly believed my hard work and goal-accomplishing would result in a book deal. Most likely a huge book deal that would allow me and my husband to travel in South America for a year or two. A book deal that would allow me to get an unlimited data plan for my phone and a new laptop that wasn’t missing the F12 key. I had done my 10,000 hours of practice, and while getting a novel published was hard, I figured it was hard for those who hadn’t worked their tails off.
Read MoreSarah here, with a Public Service Announcement for anyone searching for an agent: You are not desperate.
Sure, you may, at times, feel desperate. You may think, dear not-yet-published writer, that your chances of getting an agent are very slim. You may think it is arrogant to be picky, that if an agent—any agent—wants to represent your work, you should sign with her, no questions asked. You may think that because you’ve heard “no thank you” or maybe nothing at all from your first fifty queries that you will absolutely say “YES!” if numero fifty-one offers representation, signing on the dotted line without a moment of hesitation.
But you won’t do any of that because you are not desperate. Remember? Repeat after me: I am not desperate.
Good. Now, please say these words: I will thoughtfully consider what I need in an agent before I start an agent search.
Because here’s Part II of my PSA: It’s not enough to have an agent. You need to have the right agent.
Of course, “right” looks different for each of us. In fact, finding the right agent is a lot like finding your “right” romantic partner or the “right” nanny for your child. Let’s explore that nanny analogy . . . when you are searching for a nanny, trying to figure out if a particular person is the right in loco parentis person, you do your research. You consider the following questions: Will this nanny love your child (almost as much) as you do? Will she keep your child safe? Will she want your child to have solid skills before she’s launched into the Real World? When she takes your beloved to the park, will she push her in the swings and sing to her and read to her on a picnic blanket and make up silly haiku poems about squirrels and teach her the multiplication tables and maybe a little French OR might this nanny plug into her iPod and iPad and iFriends and smoke ciggies while your crying leibchen is plopped in front of Elmo TV?
Read MoreI have this friend named Clara. Clara is an unpublished writer, and she and her loyal, dedicated agent have been pitching her debut since June 2012. Since then, nearly forty editors have written kind and thoughtful rejections, most of them including Goldilocks-esque details in their notes. Here are some snippets (and amalgams of snippets):
I loved this narrator and cried in the [X] scene, but I’m afraid the teenage voice would be too hard to sell to an adult audience.
This novel reminds me of John Green/Madeleine L’Engle/E.L. Konigsburg, but the topics feel a little too mature for Middle Grade readers.
[The narrator’s voice] is fantastic, fresh, hilarious and unique, but I worry she’s just a little too innocent for Young Adult readers.
Too soft, too hard. Too hot, too cold. The manuscript has even made it to an editorial meeting or two. But so far? Nothing that’s Just Right.
Each time Clara’s agent has to forward another rejection, Clara feels like she is standing naked and thirty pounds overweight in front of a million people, all of whom are hucking rotten tomatoes and water balloons and Slim-Fast shakes at her and her not-quite-right manuscript.
The weird thing? Clara’s 2012-13 Rejection Tour has only made her want to be honest about her rejection. Not so she can be a whiner or a compliments-fisher, but because she knows, from experience, that when she is vulnerable, when she shares the truth of her rejection, her failure, her shortcomings, most other folks offer empathy instead of disdain, compassion rather than contempt.
Read MoreSince most of you can’t easily pop over for a visit at Casa Callender, may I let you in on a little secret? My house is a wreck. The toilets are a health hazard. My bedroom closet should have CAUTION tape across the door. The piles of too-small kids’ clothes I swore I’d take to the Goodwill in May still sit in the guest room. Summer Projects look like they will become Fall Projects (or Never Projects).
In my personal life, things feel equally ignored. I have mostly stopped exercising so everything’s feeling rather low and swingy. I keep forgetting to call about a haircut. The whisker on my chin has run amok, and I hardly care. I find myself saying no to coffee dates or walks with friends. My inbox overwhelms me, and my list of must-be-done errands keeps shifting over to the next week.
Yes, an apparently manic gang of Muses has slapped a sticky pair of blinders on my face. As a result, I hardly see the domestic messes or the amoking chin whisker. I ignore my bursting inbox and attempt to explain to my very patient friends why I am saying “no.” That I hope they understand I must spend time with my characters. That I need to write. That when I can’t write, when I don’t write, I feel itchy and crabby.
Read MoreI’ve got bunion-clad old lady feet. I’d take a picture and post it so you could see exactly what I’m talking about, but you may be eating breakfast, and needless to say, Bunions + Special K = Ick.
Just last week at the gym, however, something magical happened. I was doing a barefooted class, and this (gorgeous and close-to-my-age) woman came up to me. She pointed to her feet. “Look,” she said. “I have them too. Aren’t they horrible? Don’t you hate them? And yours are so much smaller than mine!”
Maybe mine were about .02% less bunion-y than hers, but still, shoeless in that gym class, I had found a sole mate. We prattled on about how difficult it is to find cute shoes. How embarrassing it is to wear sandals in the summer. How we were both far too young to have old lady feet. How I dated a guy in college who took one look at my feet and said, “What IS that?!?” How she used to be a foot model, for crying out loud!
In those few moments of chit-chat and empathy, I found someone who a) understood, and b) knew just the right thing to say to make me feel less weird and lonely. It’s important to surround ourselves with people who do both. And as writers (which, face it, is a weird and lonely profession), we need at least one someone who knows exactly what to say when we are experiencing writer-bunions.
What are writer-bunions, you ask? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they don’t feel good, and I’m very sure they don’t make us happy. But because all of us writers, all of us, go through periods where we feel pretty dang lousy about our lack of talent, luck, and success, we all need someone who knows what to say when we’re feeling low.
Because it will happen.
Read MoreI love bookstores. But some days, if I enter a bookstore at just the wrong time (i.e. when Ron is on duty), the mere sight of shelves and shelves of books fills me with despair and hopelessness.
Ron (the mean-voiced doubter who sits in the back of my head and whispers nasties in my ear) hisses, Silly little fool. Silly little Nobody Callender thinks she can write a book that will get noticed! Why would yours sell when no one’s buying the already-written ones?
Most days I can remember to tell Ron to go suck lemons, but he is right about one thing: there are millions of books out there, many great ones we will never read, many others we will never even notice. But I can’t stop writing any more than I can stop breathing or blinking or eating Seattle Chocolates’ Coconut Macaroon Truffle Bars. So I figure we should discuss how, in an age where many (myself included) have the attention span of a goldfish, we can write attractive stories that hold readers’ attention.
Of course, definitions of What is Attractive vary wildly. You think Bill Clinton or FDR is attractive; I prefer Abe Lincoln. But what attractive people do to us, I think, is pretty consistent from person to person. Same goes for fiction. What makes a story attractive is far less about what the story is, and much more about what it does to readers.
So what does attractive fiction do? I’ve thunk up three essentials.
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