Kathleen McCleary

Parenting Advice, Elevator Pitches, and the Essential Heart of Story

February 20, 2019 By Kathleen McCleary 10 Comments

When my daughters were little I used to read all kinds of books and magazines filled with parenting advice, looking for the nugget of wisdom that would help me be the best possible parent. One day, I found it: “Don’t forget to smile at your kids.”

Well, that’s obvious, you think. But it isn’t. In those days I was working full time, raising two toddlers, and helping support my husband through a PhD. I played stuffed animal games while plotting grocery lists in my head, and bustled them into clothes and socks and shoes and coats with determined concentration every morning. But once I took that mandate to heart and began smiling at them more readily, the dynamic in our house shifted. Their faces would light up in response to my smiles, and their happiness made me happy, and it became a virtuous cycle. It remains the single best bit of parenting advice I ever got.

Can writing advice be distilled down to one game-changing essential nugget? I’d say yes: What does this character want? Well, that’s obvious, you think, as obvious as smiling at your kids. But just like that nugget of parenting wisdom, there’s more to it than that. Because what your character wants may conflict with the wants of a host of other characters, for starters. What your character wants may put them at odds with themselves. What your character wants may be not one thing but two things, and those two things may be at odds. And if you can stay focused on all those wants, you will end up with one hell of a story.

So what’s the best way to do that? Here are a few tricks: [Read more…]

Navigating Families in Fiction

December 19, 2018 By Kathleen McCleary 8 Comments

On Thanksgiving Day, I was standing in my kitchen, chopping celery and contemplating the timing for dinner, when Joni Mitchell’s song “The River” came on and all of a sudden my eyes filled and I felt such a sense of loss I could hardly stand it. I missed my father, who LOVED the holidays and has been dead for seven years; I missed my mother, whose distinctive laugh has been the soundtrack to all my holidays but who is now too infirm to leave her home; I missed my daughter, who lives 3,000 miles away. Then our guests arrived and the house filled with food and talk and laughter and I felt elated.

If ever there were a best of times and worst of times, it would be now, that period from Thanksgiving through Hanukkah and Christmas, with all its expectations and disappointments and loves and heartaches and estrangements. It’s the time when all the things we value most and despise most about families come roaring to the forefront, demanding attention, and when all our own successes and losses seem to tumble from their neat little shelves in our lives and knock us on the head.

Families are at the heart of most fiction, be it Game of Thrones’s Starks, John Steinbeck’s Trasks and Hamiltons in East of Eden, or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the ultimate father-son dyad. Every single fictional family is messy and imperfect, sometimes fierce in their love for each other, sometimes brutal to each other, always multi-layered and complex. So if the holidays evoke a similarly broad range of emotions in you, USE that. Use it to explore the complexity of family relationships in your fiction. If your main character is an orphan or a thief or a soldier, she still has a “family,” even if it’s the one she’s cobbled together out of vagrants or wizards and elves (depending on your genre). Consider:

Estrangement. Once, one of my family members stopped speaking to me for more than a year over something that seemed minor to me but was major to them. And of course it wasn’t just about the inciting incident; it was about our years of history together, the wounds inflicted without knowing how much they hurt, the misunderstandings, the failed communication. If one or more of your characters is estranged from someone important to them, make sure you understand the history behind that. You don’t have to put it all down on the page, but you need to understand the complexities there, so the estrangement makes sense to the reader even if the characters themselves lack the self-knowledge or self-awareness to get it.

Loss. I’ve written before about how loss drives fiction (https://writerunboxed.com/2016/06/15/forging-character/). And it’s true. There’s not a person alive who hasn’t experienced some kind of loss by the time they’re a teenager, whether it’s the loss of a first love, the death of a pet, a move, a loss of innocence, or the death of a grandparent. [Read more…]

It Takes a Village

October 17, 2018 By Kathleen McCleary 17 Comments

Last week in the creative writing workshop I teach, one of the students shared her latest short story with the group. None of these kids—ages 13-17—know each other outside our class. They all attend different schools. One is an outgoing 6’5” 17-year-old rower who loves fantasy fiction; another is a shy and brilliant 14-year-old who writes realistic fiction about the terrors of high school. Anyway, we all read Riya’s story and one of the students immediately said, “I love this. This story is just CLASSIC Riya.” And I thought, Bingo!

My thought wasn’t a response to the student’s comment; it was a response to the meaning behind the comment—I know you, I know your writing, you have a voice that is only yours, I get you. It was the validation we all hope for—to be seen and heard and understood. It was also affirmation that our little workshop of 6 (including me) has become a real community, a group of people who are working hard, making themselves vulnerable, challenging each other, and rooting for each other’s success as much as their own. It took me many years to understand the important role of community in my writing, and I couldn’t have written—let alone published—any of my novels without the various writers, readers, students, teachers, friends, and family who make up my communities.

Here’s what I love about my writing communities:

A community keeps you honest. I wrote half of my first novel sitting alone in my house without showing it to a soul. I had no idea what I was doing or whether or not it was any good and I was stuck. So I took an online novel-writing class. Every week, the instructor and seven or eight other students read whatever chapter I posted. I was warmed by the positive feedback—they liked it! They really liked it!—but they also pointed out that the reason I was stuck was because I had taken the plot in a direction that was way too complicated, difficult to follow, and didn’t make a lot of sense. It was hard to hear, but it was also true. It gave me the courage I needed to delete the chapters that didn’t work and forge ahead in a new direction. Now I’m in a critique group with four other published authors. We genuinely like each other and admire each other’s work, but we also tell the truth. When one writer showed us the climactic chapter of her crime thriller we congratulated her on getting the book done, then pointed out the flaws that made the chapter totally implausible. We hashed out all the reasons it didn’t work. She was embarrassed (she’s a pro who had published four novels by then) but also agreed. The next week she rewrote the chapter with a brilliant, unexpected twist that couldn’t have worked better.

A community keeps you going. Have I told you about the hell that was my second novel? I’m sure I have, because I’ve told just about everybody. I struggled to write it and rewrote it and rewrote it and despaired and it took me YEARS. But my community—in this case, my Fiction Writers’ Co-op, a private Facebook group of 50 writers—kept me going. I would post about whatever roadblock I encountered—I don’t know who this character is, my agent read a first draft and hates it—and friend after friend in the Co-op would respond with words of encouragement, tales of their own nightmare novels, and a steady belief that I could do it. I didn’t believe I could do it, but they did, and that was enough to get me through.

A community understands what a difficult, crazy life this is. [Read more…]

The Books That Change Lives: Why the Books We Read When We’re Young Stick With Us Forever

August 15, 2018 By Kathleen McCleary 22 Comments

What book changed your life? As tempting as it is to give a lofty, literary answer, the truth (for me, at least) is probably A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read over and over and over, or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which upset me so much (the shaving of the lion’s mane) that I cried all afternoon and threw the book out the window because it distressed me too much to even have it in the house (a lesson in the power of story). Last week I interviewed writer Anne Lamott for a magazine piece. She’s a voracious reader and prolific writer (seven novels and even more works of non-fiction, including her classic book on writing, Bird by Bird). What book changed her life? Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which she read for the first time at age eight.

What is it about the books we read when we’re young that makes them stick with us forever? PBS has a new initiative underway called “The Great American Read” which brought out a list of America’s 100 Most Loved books this spring. PBS worked with a public opinion polling service to “conduct a demographically and statistically representative survey asking Americans to name their most-loved novel.” Approximately 7,200 people participated. And what’s interesting about the list is that Americans don’t seem to love the books that are supposed to constitute great literature (Phillip Roth, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen). But we sure do love the books we read as children or teenagers—fully a quarter of the list are books aimed at kids and teens, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Charlotte’s Web to Harry Potter to The Hunger Games.

Here’s what many children’s/YA books have that make them resonate with readers: [Read more…]

Am I a Real Writer?

June 20, 2018 By Kathleen McCleary 20 Comments

So here’s the thing: I’m not writing fiction right now. I haven’t written fiction for a solid 18 months, maybe longer. My last novel was published in 2013, the culmination of a writing streak that produced three novels in five years, all of which were agonized over and rewritten and edited and re-edited and shopped around and published and reviewed and read. I started and shelved two different novels over the course of three years after my last one came out and then, dear reader, I stopped writing.

I still write—I have a busy and productive career as a journalist, I teach creative writing to kids and play every writing game and do every writing exercise right along with them—but I don’t have a “work in progress” right now. I don’t have an idea that consumes me; I don’t need to write to maintain my sanity; I don’t write every day.

What have I been doing since I stopped writing? All the work involved in the full catastrophe of any life. Mine happens to include an elderly parent and kids and spouse and work and bills and leaky roofs and grocery shopping and head colds and what’s for dinner tonight? Yours is some variation on that, I’m sure. But if I don’t make writing fiction a part of my full catastrophe, am I really a writer?

When I was young, from age 8 or 9 on, I wrote. I wrote a neighborhood newspaper and I kept a journal and I wrote short stories and I wrote poetry. I kept writing through high school and I wrote when I got to college. I remember vividly during my senior year when a friend mentioned that she’d been doing some non-school-related writing lately, that she was pleased with her writing, that she liked being a writer. When I asked what she was writing she said she’d been writing one or two journal entries a week. To me, that was living, not writing. I marveled at her boldness in declaring herself a writer but I still didn’t think it applied to me.

For a decade or more I would say, “I’m a journalist,” or “I’m an editor,” when people asked what I did for a living, because even though I was writing magazine and newspaper articles regularly and still writing poetry and fiction (for my own amusement) it seemed hubris to declare myself a real writer. Then, after my first book came out, I’d say, “I’m a journalist but I recently published my first novel.” It wasn’t until my second book came out (and I already had a contract on my third, as-yet-unwritten novel), that I began to answer, “I’m a writer” or even “I’m an author.” I felt I’d earned it.

But I think I earned it long before I could say it. I think all of us who have tried to capture the currents of words and images as they run through our brains are writers. It’s ****-ing HARD, what we do, isn’t it? [Read more…]