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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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Am I Still a Writer (If Words Evade Me)?

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The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off” – Gloria Steinem Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote her debut novel, The Bean Trees, while pregnant and suffering from insomnia. Not only that, she scribbled away at the draft inside a closet so as not to wake her sleeping husband. Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, suffered a massive stroke which left him paralyzed. Yet he managed to complete his novel by blinking to an assistant as she repeated the … [Read more...]

Sarah’s Simple Pleasures: Dog Days of Summer

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We are officially in the Dog Days of Summer, and I would venture to say that this might go down in history as the doggone doggiest summer of humankind. For once, that’s no exaggeration. And while you may be reading this nodding, crying, shaking your head, or catatonic with disbelief that we are still in a coronavirus pandemic, I must warn you that I do not use the term ‘dog’ in a negative context. Quite the opposite. I am here to honor the sometimes vexing (excessive barking at mailperson), … [Read more...]

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...]

Terrified About Writing Your Novel? Excellent!

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Please welcome multi-published author and returning guest Randy Susan Meyers back to WU!  Randy is an internationally bestselling and award-winning author of five novels, most recently Waisted, which releases TODAY in paperback. Randy's books have been translated into over twenty-five languages and been chosen three times as a Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read." Besides reading, her obsessions include gardening, painting garden art, and, during the pandemic, bingeing on ER reruns. She lives in … [Read more...]

Cooking Life Into Fiction: Writing From What You Know

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We’ve all heard the injunction to “write what you know.” Well, yes and no. If it were true, unequivocally, a female writer would have no male characters, and there would be no fantasy or historical fiction. That’s obviously not what the statement is meant to imply. While the injunction has merit in important ways—including, for example, caveats about the danger of cultural appropriation—taking it literally is far too restrictive. We’d be limited to memoir and autobiography. Rather, we need … [Read more...]

We Are Unsafe

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The world is not a safe place.  Our leaders cannot protect us.  Our society is not fair.  The ones who are supposed to take care of us are slaves to profit, or drugged with power.  Repression is the norm and corruption goes unpunished.  We speak of injustice but are dismissed.  We are keenly aware but nothing changes. We know that feelings of futility already mean defeat, so we resolve to do our part.  We listen.  We march.  We donate.  We change what we can.  We vote.  Our voices are hoarse … [Read more...]

Sarah’s Simple Pleasures: Mind the Gap

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June 2019 One year ago today, I was in London with my husband riding the Underground transit from Piccadilly Circus to High Street, Paddington to Westminster, packed nose to nose in a metal tube launching us at warp speed across the city. Up and down the lifts, rushing through the turnstiles, bumping our way through the opening train doors in an ocean of commuters. We saw nothing extraordinary about it at the time. Public subways in big cities are so common that we even grumbled at the chore … [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...]

When Words Are Not Enough

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I am going out on a limb here and going to make a small assumption. We’re all in the same boat in terms of what’s occupied most of our minds for the last couple of months.  It is the first time we can collectively relate to an experience no matter where we live. We’ve been smacked down with what we thought only our imagination and ace-plotting skills could create.  A world-wide pandemic that has universally changed our lives forever. In my lifetime, I’ve had templates and past experiences to … [Read more...]

A Writing Life in Singular Times

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Even before I was published, writing, which to me has always been about the weaving of stories for other people, has been part of the very fabric of my life and my being.  Since my first book was published, thirty years ago precisely, I have felt lucky, indeed, blessed, to earn my living doing what I've always felt I was born to do. Aside from my public work, working emotions out through writing them down in journals and diaries has always helped put things into perspective in times of personal … [Read more...]

Sarah’s Simple Pleasures: Birthdays

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It goes without saying that the time between my last post and now has been rollercoastic. That’s not a word. I made it up. But making things up feels appropriate given the global coronavirus shutdown. We are living a reality that seemed only to exist in science fiction. Stranger still was celebrating two milestone birthdays during this apocalyptic time. Doc B and I were born exactly four weeks apart. I’m the perpetually younger. His birthday is in March and mine is in April. With … [Read more...]

Readings for Writers: Auden’s Mandate

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When the Apocalypse comes, I will have a dirty bum, for the righteous will have bought every last square of toilet-paper. Standing in my third grocery store of the day, the thought makes me laugh, makes me release any assumption of what I should or should not expect to find on a store shelf, makes me remember the shelves in Havana the last time I was there, and the hard-scrabble life most people here, in this country, can’t quite imagine, much less associate with the US embargo. If you ask me … [Read more...]

The Spark of a Novel: Five Ways to Light That Spark

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Where did you get the idea for your book? I’ve been asked that question about Queen of the Owls, my own novel, and I’ve responded in various ways. Mostly, I say that it was a combination of things. Some had been simmering below the surface for a long time, others were new, and they all came together in one of those convergences that was both magical and the product of intense work. In fact, the very first spark—the story’s true moment of origin—was one that I didn’t recognize until years … [Read more...]