Writing a novel is hard work, but over the years I’ve learned a few things. With my fourth novel, Bird in Hand, coming out in paperback in the summer of 2010, and another due in a year, I’m blogging about what motivates and inspires me, what tips and tricks I use to keep going, and how I deal with the unexpected. I talk about how I carve out time to write while juggling all the other parts of my life — namely, promoting my new novel, teaching, and raising three boys. I talk about how much I write, and how, and when, and where. I talk about what I’m reading and what ideas and experiences influence my writing. I also feature guest posts by other authors on specific aspects of craft and identity.
Writing a novel never gets any easier; it’s different every time. What remains the same is process – it’s always a matter of discipline and perseverance. Orphan Train, the book I’m currently working on, is the first of my novels that involves an actual historical event and lots of research, which is both exciting and daunting.
I am the author of four novels: Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water. (See my website and the HarperCollins website for more information.) I am coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror. I also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. I am co-author, with my mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins. My essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.
As Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, I teach creative writing and serve as an advisor to graduate and undergraduate students. I’ve taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, New York University, Drew University, and the University of Virginia. I am a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship, a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Fordham Faculty Research Grant to Ireland. I also donate my time and editing skills to a number of arts organizations in New York, New Jersey, and Maine.
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What a fantastic, inspiring site!
Christina, I saw the blog in shelfawareness. I enjoyed the writing/dialogue commentary and the format. I hope that I pick up a few tips on writing as well!
(I need them)
Sheila Williams
This is brilliant – how a novel is born and the processes it goes through. I’ve never thought of doing this but now I’m going to. I didn’t keep track with my last novel, and it irks me somewhat that I have no record, no notes even, about how it came into being and how I ‘followed it’. I can also see it would be helpful in driving the process… just by giving it this kind of attention keeps it uppermost in the mind (or should I say, churning around in the unconscious!)
Thank you for writing your thoughts.
Andria
To what degree do your students come in knowing what they want to write and to what degree do you help them think about what they might write? Do you assign them reading, help them find reading that works with what they want to write, a little of both or none of that? Just trying to have a little convo about teaching writing…
Both, I think. Students come up with their own ideas for stories (though we talk a lot about how stories work). But in class I give them writing prompts and exercises that often lead to longer works, too. I use Writing FIction, by Janet Burroway, as a text in fiction classes. I think it’s a brilliant book – now out in a new edition. What about you?
I’ve used Burroway’s Imaginative Fiction and I really like her “try this” exercises. I teach only composition students and we do a lot of excerpt reading and I ask questions such as “do you want to tell a moving story?” or a “relationship story?” We establish what we call “writing territories,” we write from those and we write from our reading until something catches for the writer. I think as a new writer, left to my own devices, I didn’t have enough sense of what was possible. Of course that’s just me writing. I certainly recognize that we all find our own ways to imagine work.
What recommendations do you have for shaping the arc of a story. I keep changing the arc of the memoir I am writing. It is about 180 pages and I feel stuck. Suggestions?
I think memoir has its own unique challenges. But here’s something I do when I’m stuck: I find a book that inspires me or that is similar in some way (even if only in sensibility) to my story, and I map the structure of that book. I look at how the arc develops, where the climax occurs, whether it’s chronological or ordered some other way, and how the author transitions from one idea, one chapter, to the next. I find it immensely helpful to use successful published books as a guide. The latest contemporary book I read with an intriguing structure was “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” The author, Rebecca Skloot, goes back and forth in time; at the start of each chapter, she puts a mark on a timeline so you know what decade you’re in. It’s pretty ingenious.
I like this in the sense that I see my writing as always in conversation with other texts. I can’t think of much on my own until I consider what those around me (even in texts) are saying. What others say/write helps me think about what I will say/write. A good suggestion for considering all the possibilities/choices.
What’s with me and dashes in this post?
wjt
I think the arc would depend on the story. What effect on you did the writing of the story have? Are you moving from one emotional/intellectual place to another? If so, then you might think about where you begin and what needs to happen on the way to the “end.” You could apply this same thinking to considering your reader. When I begin reading, where is the narrator physically and emotionally? Where will I be taken to? Think about how to move me there. You can’t just jump, right?
Possibly a confusing post from me. It’s fun to think about. I don’t run into these sorts of questions much.
wjt
I run into them all the time, and I think it’s fun too. Today a student (at Fordham) asked me if I prefer teaching or editing. I realized that they’re kind of the same to me. So — how to find the arc of the story is a common problem, in my own work and others’ …
some REALLY helpful responses to my query about story arc. Thanks. I have a stack of books I recently ordered (memoirs) so I am going to dive into those and take a look.
And I really do think bill is on to something there with where I am now emotionally and where I am taking the reader emotionally and why.
any others have thoughts on this?
These are useful comments.
O.K. …I know, that’s the type of comment somebody who doesn’t care writes!
But these are. I have been trying to write a book. It started out just as a project for my friends to read. But now I’m struggling. These comments have helped me realize that I am in that bog of indecision as to where my story arc is going, and that is why I am stuck (partly).