Authors on Craft: Bill Konigsberg on Surprises

I write for the surprises.

Now don’t get me wrong: I like the moments when it feels like I have some semblance of control over my story, and I know what I want in a scene, and it happens correctly, and the prose feels solid and evocative.

But the best is when something happens as I’m writing that surprises me. Because in my experience, those surprises are where the magic lives.

Here’s an example: In my novel HONESTLY BEN (coming from AAL Books/Scholastic, March 28th) I have two characters who are in love but struggling to admit it. One is a gay boy named Rafe. He has known he’s in love with Ben for a long time, but he also is aware that Ben isn’t gay, or doesn’t consider himself to be gay. They had a fling but it didn’t work for various reasons, and there was a lot of pain for both characters.

Now they’re trying to negotiate their feelings and their relationship, and in a scene I wrote for the middle of the book, I have them beginning to get closer, beginning to regain trust. I had them going for a late night drive to the ocean in frigid February in Massachusetts. I went into writing the scene with no real goal except for them to come away from the scene feeling more in tune with each other.

I thought they might run into the ocean naked together. Yes, that would be chilly! That was just a thought of what might happen.

Instead, as I wrote, I found Ben chasing Rafe in a joking sort of way along the hard sand.

And then: a surprise.

Ben leaps and tackles Rafe. Hard. On the sand. And they wrestle. In a serious way. I was not expecting that! I thought they’d dealt with a lot of their feelings, but it was so, so right, and I knew it as it happened. They quarrel verbally while wrestling, and when it’s done, they’re better.

That there is a surprise! As I was writing, my skin got all shivery.

There was a level, a layer, of passion that I did not understand until the tackle and wrestling appeared, and it carried me, it gave me a sense of momentum that would carry the book to its climax. Without the surprise, I simply don’t know how I would have moved forward.

Sometimes our best plans aren’t good enough, and we don’t know it. Not until a surprise appears.

And I guess my point is that when our novels take an odd turn, we have a choice. We can nix it. We can decide it doesn’t fit into our perceived ideas of what the book is, or what is going to happen. We can steer the ship rather than allowing the ship to turn on its own. That’s my prerogative.

But I tend to think that when a surprise happens, I need to have a little faith that it means something. That I should follow it, and see where it leads. Because to me, surprises are God-or-Whatever’s way of showing up and leading me somewhere.

And I’m going to follow!

Bill Konigsberg is the award-winning young adult author of four novels. THE PORCUPINE OF TRUTH won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award in 2016; OPENLY STRAIGHT won the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2014; His debut novel, OUT OF THE POCKET, won the Lambda Literary Award in 2009. HONESTLY BEN, available in March 2017, has already received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and School Library Journal. Bill is Assistant Professor of Practice at The Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He lives in Arizona with his husband, Chuck, and their Australian Labradoodles, Mabel and Buford.

 

Guest Post Regarding Writing: Editor Kendra Levin & The Hero is You

Kendra Levin is my guest today on The Blabbermouth Blog. She is a senior editor at Viking Books at Penguin Random House, a certified life coach, an author, and a teacher. Kendra helps writers and other creative artists meet their goals and connect more deeply with their work and themselves. Kendra’s new book, The Hero Is You, goes on sale November 1st. 

5 Tips for Being Your Own Life Coach for Writers

 I’ve worked in the publishing industry since 2002 and in that time, I’ve had the pleasure and honor of working with dozens of authors and writers from seasoned bestsellers and award-winners to first-timers. But when I added “certified life coach” to the “special skills” section of my resume ten years ago, I had no idea I’d end up using coaching so much in my work as an editor at Penguin. I’ve discovered that just about every person who picks up the pen—whether professional or aspiring—could probably benefit from a little life coaching.

Here are five ways to be your own life coach.

LISTEN TO YOURSELF.

The most fundamental act a life coach performs is being a good listener. When I listen to a client, I’m not just listening for what the person is saying on the surface level; I’m listening for the deeper agenda, what’s under the surface of the words. Listen to yourself. What are the deeper themes you might not realize you’re trying to explore in your work? What is your piece trying to be?

DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK YOURSELF TOUGH QUESTIONS.

As a coach, it’s my job to ask clients questions that will help them investigate themselves, not necessarily make them feel happy and comfortable in the moment. So rather than asking yourself a judging question (like “What the hell am I doing with this chapter?”) try to come from a place of natural curiosity (“Wow, I wonder what’s going to happen in this chapter! How will I resolve these plot dilemmas? I’m so curious to find out what the solution will be!”).

GIVE YOURSELF SPACE.

Hold silence for yourself as a writer: when there is a question you don’t have an immediate answer to in your writing, don’t push yourself to immediately resolve it. Instead of rushing to tie up every loose end right away, hold the silence and see what bubbles up gradually.

BE WILLING TO THROW YOURSELF A CURVEBALL.

If you find yourself feeling stuck, be willing to consider a massive change to your work or a hyper-ambitious challenge to your process. Even if you decide against it, you may renegotiate—“I won’t try to finish the manuscript this month, but I will set a more aggressive goal about finishing it in the next three months”—and in doing so, find a way to refresh your thinking about the issue.

BE COMPASSIONATE.

Remember to treat yourself the way a good life coach treats a client: with compassion, respect, and boundless faith in your potential. Judging yourself helps nobody, and nor does punishing or browbeating yourself if you don’t meet your exact goals. You are not perfect and nobody expects you to be. You are a beautiful work in progress, and you are making progress all the time.

Pre-order The Hero is You at IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. You can find Kendra online at kendracoaching.com and @kendralevin.

Guest Post Regarding Writing: Matt Bird & The Secrets of Story

Today’s guest post is from Matt Bird, who runs the SecretsOfStory.com blog (formerly known as Cockeyed Caravan), and whose book The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers hits bookshelves this November. In his book and on his website Matt offers general writing advice. He also does manuscript evaluations for books and screenplays where he gives specialized advice. Today he’s kindly sharing some of his smart writing advice here. Thanks Matt!

As you write, you have one overriding responsibility: to build identification between your hero and your audience. We need not sympathize with your hero, but we must empathize with her. If we identify with her, we’ll go anywhere with her, and remain rapt by her actions. If we don’t identify, then no matter sympathetic or “heroic” she might be, we’ll feel alienated and disinterested, if not repelled.

So what is the #1 identification killer in the manuscripts I’ve evaluated? When the reader has figured something out by page 30, but the hero doesn’t figure it out for another 200+ pages.

In an otherwise-great fantasy manuscript, the heroine was wrong to trust her mentor, and this was clear to the reader right away, but she didn’t figure it out until page 250. This makes it hard to identify with her. Every time the mentor speaks, the text says, “he snarled” or “he sneered”. It’s obvious to us that he’s the bad guy, so we get so frustrated with her that she can’t see it. If the heroine is going to be betrayed, we should be betrayed too. If the heroine gets fooled into trusting this guy, then you should fool us into trusting him as well, right up until you pull the rug out. As a writer, you have to get us to see the mentor in the same way the heroine sees him, so that we’ll fully identify with her.

In a sci-fi manuscript, the heroine was given the weapon she needed very early on, and it was clear that it could solve the whole plot, but she didn’t realize how useful it was until page 300. The book was well-written and exciting, but I spent the whole time yelling at the hero: Don’t you remember? You could win this thing at any time! Why should I root for you to solve this problem if you can’t see the easy solution that I can see?

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a good idea to shift us back and forth in our identification with the hero. Sometimes we should be one step behind, trying to figure out what our clever hero is doing, sometimes we should have the same amount of information as the hero, and then sometimes we should get one step ahead of the hero, aware of a danger or possibility that she isn’t aware of, and nervously anticipating her discovery of it.

But we should never get ten steps ahead. We should never watch our hero go on a mini-quest for 50 pages, knowing full well that this endeavor is for naught, because the hero hasn’t figured out something yet that we already know. How are we supposed to feel for those 50 pages?

I realize that it’s tricky, because you want to “play fair.” In the first example, you don’t want the betrayal to come out of nowhere. It should be a shock, but the sort of shock that leaves us kicking ourselves, lamenting that we should have seen it coming. In the second example, you don’t want to pull out a solution in the final chapter that feels like a deus ex machina. You do want to set it up earlier, but you have to outsmart your audience. Fake us out. Plant us the solution, but hide it well, and make us forget it. Misdirect us into thinking that there will be a different solution, and then yank that false solution away, leaving us totally sweating it out alongside the hero.

A hero cannot simply “be identifiable”. You need to carefully manipulate our feelings all along the way so that we are encouraged to identify with the hero at every step of the way. As often as possible, we need to feel the same thing the hero does at the same time she feels it. That’s full identification, and that’s the heart of great writing.

To pre-order Matt’s book The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers you can go to Amazon, Indiebound, or Barnes & Noble.

Got comments? Hit him up here…