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Can We Be a Pod? Writing an Ensemble

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Flickr Creative Commons: K State Research and Extensions

This past weekend, I had a pandemic-proper dinner on my screened-in porch with four good friends. It was kind of like camping—we all wore sweaters and jackets and warmed ourselves with whiskey and steaming bowls of chicken and dumplings and laughed a lot. At the end of the evening my friend Connie said, “We just have to be a pod for the winter so we can get through this together.”

Connie is on to something, and not just our most basic human need for friendship and companionship. While some great stories involve individuals facing down formidable obstacles, many of our most beloved stories involve ensembles, whether they’re the stories we’re living or the stories we’re writing. From Little Women to The Lord of the Rings to Lonesome Dove to A Game of Thrones, there’s an ineluctable draw to stories that show the complicated ties that bind people to one another and put them at odds with one another. Many of my favorite movie and TV shows are ensemble stories: The Princess Bride (based on the fine book of the same title), Doc Marten, Star Wars, Little Miss Sunshine, Poldark, The Godfather—I could go on and on.

I’ve written two novels that switch back and forth between the two POVs of the two main characters, but I’ve always wanted to write a genuine ensemble novel because I love them so much. It seems daunting, though. I’ve always written from a close third-person POV where I feel I come to know my characters so intimately I’m just transcribing their thoughts and feelings and actions. To write an ensemble, I’d have to know a lot of characters that intimately, and that’s challenging. To try to make it less so, I’ve tried to think through what makes a good ensemble novel work. [Read more…]

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Get Me Out of Here

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If there’s a Church of Emotional Truth in Writing, I’m a founding member. “Write the truest version” is my mantra, and I’ve written novels exploring fear and loss and shame and passion and love and I’ve written essays on the importance of vulnerability in writing. Yet as I struggled with the start of a new novel recently, I realized that I don’t really want to write my emotional truth right now, because I am in a dark and difficult place, as many of us are. All I really want is to be somewhere, … [Read more...]

When All Else Fails: Do Something Different

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“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I don’t know about you, but writing fiction is not coming easy for me these … [Read more...]

Fueling Your Writing With Feeling

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After a month of social distancing and the uprooting of almost everything that was routine in my life, I’m having a lot of feelings about this whole situation. I miss hugging my friends—heck, I miss seeing my friends. I miss the casual banter with the lettuce lady at the farmer’s market and the camaraderie of my workout buddies and running to the store on a whim to pick up the bread I forgot to buy earlier. My palms are peeling from all the hand-washing and I have dreams about Clorox wipes. My … [Read more...]

Answers to Questions About Writing

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Because my life is completely entangled with writing—I’ve written three novels, hundreds of articles and essays, and I teach creative writing to kids—I get a lot of questions about writing from students, friends, friends of friends, third cousins of former neighbors, and strangers. So here are some of the questions I get asked most often and a few I’ve never been asked but wish I had (with answers to them all): How did you get your first novel published? Several key factors helped me get my … [Read more...]

The Worst-Case Scenario

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This past fall, I went backpacking for four days in the Canadian wilderness with a good friend.  It will be an adventure, I told myself as we planned the trip, when I read online about the “rugged,” “challenging,” “demanding” trail. It’s good to get outside your comfort zone. The trail included “steep climbs,” and “boulder hopping.” I’m tough; I can push myself. It didn’t occur to me to question whether pushing myself was a worthwhile goal; it was what I always did. What happened was that I … [Read more...]

The Books That Get People Talking

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I’m a writer but I’m also a reader, and every 4-6 weeks my book groups (I’m in two) meet to talk about what we’ve read. Some of the discussions are brief—a cursory talk about the book, then a diversion into discussing our kids, our careers, our dogs, our aging parents, the Washington Nationals (I live near D.C.), world politics, and the many delectable treats to be found at Trader Joe’s. Other discussions can go on, literally, for hours as we debate the pros and cons and ins and outs of a book … [Read more...]

The Values of Good Fiction

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Many years ago, the magazine I worked for decided to do a special issue on “Values,” and we chose a handful of key values and interviewed people who exemplified those values. Chris Fields, the firefighter who tenderly carried the baby killed in the Oklahoma City bombing out of the rubble, talked about COMPASSION; Cal Ripken, Jr. (who broke Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive baseball games played) talked about PERSEVERANCE; Mary Fisher, an artist (and later activist) who contracted AIDS … [Read more...]

Be Careful, or You’ll End Up in My Novel

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So here’s my dirty little secret about writing fiction: Most of my characters begin with a real person. And before friends and acquaintances start thumbing through my novels, wondering if they should be outraged, let me emphasize that the key word here is “begin.” And let me also suggest that you may want to give it a try if you haven’t already. Plenty of authors “steal” from real life—Harper Lee based To Kill a Mockingbird’s Dill Harris on Truman Capote; Harry Potter’s Severus Snape was a … [Read more...]

The Flip Side

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Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death. Losing a parent—especially the only parent you had left—sends the world spinning off its axis. It can feel like a free-fall into grief. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous … [Read more...]

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

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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 … [Read more...]

Navigating Families in Fiction

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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 … [Read more...]

It Takes a Village

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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 … [Read more...]

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

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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 … [Read more...]