Author: Kelly Caldwell

In 2001, I volunteered for the post-September 11^th disaster recovery, and one of the first things I learned from the crusty, kind-hearted career FEMA workers there was not to use “endurance” and “resilience” interchangeably.

It’s embarrassing to admit (because I’m persnickety about word choice!), but I did use “endurance” and “resilience” interchangeably. Big mistake.

Because they are so, so different.

Endurance is simply withstanding adversity, often at length. That’s it. It’s Kate Winslet in Titanic, clinging to that door.*

Resilience is something more. It means a person or community has met adversity, absorbed its blows, adapted to it, and recovered. Someone who is resilient may change, but they’ll still preserve the most essential aspects of themselves. It’s Margot Robbie at the end of Barbie — she reclaims her home and her community, but she will never return to life as she previously knew it.

Because stories are all about adversity, it’s important to ask: Are your characters (and maybe their communities) merely enduring the plot? Or are they resilient?

And if it’s the latter, it’s important to understand, resilience doesn’t just happen. Like any good story, it’s created.

What do you construct resilience out of? I’m glad you asked! Three main components:

• Preparedness. A community in Oklahoma’s tornado alley is more resilient if it’s got a state-of-the-art early-warning system and enough sturdy shelters.
• Easing Suffering. The more relief someone gets from their misery, the more quickly they can heal. (Breaks from all the suffering are often appreciated by audiences, as well.)  
• Speeding Up Healing. The faster you clear debris, counsel the bereaved, and treat the wounded, the faster the recovery.

You can see that if a character is resilient, they enter a story on p. 1 with traits, resources, or connections that will enable them to absorb the blows and emerge more or less intact. The trick is identifying them.

Some questions to ask yourself about your resilient characters:

• Were they well-prepared for their trials? Or did they possess a previously unknown (maybe even secret) advantage?
• What will help ease their suffering through their crises?
• What will help them heal? What will make things worse?
• When they emerge from their adversity, what aspects of their previous lives or of their deepest selves will be lost? What will be preserved, or restored?

Hint: One of the most surefire, reliable ways that people ease one another’s suffering is through  comfort and joy — food, love, friendship, laughter, community. It’s why the mass assault of people rushing in to help survivors after a disaster is so moving. All of that kindness and camaraderie is a balm—literally.

Your characters may not have 1,000 strangers swarming in to help them clear away debris, but if they’re resilient, they, like Barbie, have loyal friends, ardent fans, a cool pink convertible, creative instincts, and Rhea Perlman. (Or the equivalent.) Look for the places your characters will find joy, or where they found it before their troubles started, and you’ll find the key to their resilience.

*Yes, I am on the That-Door-Was-Big-Enough-For-Two team.

A mistake that I make often as a teacher (and I suspect other writing teachers make, too), is we don’t explain in enough detail one of our favorite exhortations: Writers must read a lot.

I don’t dig into it much because writing students are usually avid readers already. They’re the ones who stayed up way past their bedtimes as kids, to read just one more chapter. They’ve got at least two books on the go at all times. They complain their TBR list is too long. (They assume everyone knows TBR means “to be read.”)

But at Gotham’s recent Children’s Book Writers Conference, literary agent Samantha Fabien said something that made me sit up straight: “I encourage folks to do more forensic reading.”

“Obviously we’re all readers, but I don’t know that we always sit and read a page or a chapter and examine what it’s doing and how it’s doing it,” she said.

Before this, “forensic reading” to me meant teaching high school students to improve their reading comprehension and to read critically. I hadn’t thought of it as what we do when we read as writers.

Fabien made me realize, it’s not enough to tell writers to read more. We need to talk more specifically on what we’re doing when reading forensically, as opposed to when you’re reading for pleasure (which you should keep doing!).

For example, Fabien suggested pulling books off your own shelves or shelves at the library and reading just the first chapter (or two), and then asking yourself:

“What kind of voice am I getting? What’s the tone? How much do I know about this character? Why am I interested in reading more? Why am I not? Especially why am I not?”

It’s that snag in the brain — for good or ill — you’re seeking when reading forensically. You want to re-shelve the book before finishing the chapter, and you search for what triggered that impulse. You realize the author transported you from one idea to another so smoothly you barely noticed, so you hunt for their transition. You admire something, you get bored, you realize you’ve been enraptured, you feel a little manipulated and not in a fun way. Each time, you go back and look for the why.

But there’s another way to read as a writer, too, as novelist Matt Bell describes in his fabulous craft book Refuse to Be Done: You read to replenish your supply of inspiration.

“The bigger you make your art life, the more possibilities your imagination will generate,” Bell says. “You want as many possibilities floating around you as possible especially in the earliest and wildest stages of your draft.”

Reading as a writer is about more — more moves, more ideas, more inspiration, more permission, more grain to pour into that whirling mill of your mind. The more you take in, the more you create, and also, the more fun you will have, too.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

A question my students regularly ask is, what do you do if a story is accepted, but you disagree with changes proposed by the editor?

What they’re often really asking is, “If I want my work published, my choices are either withdraw the story, or go along with all the edits, no matter what, right?”

No, writers. No. Most editors — and all of the good ones — want a collaborator. They don’t want divas — writers who believe their every word is precious and sacred. But neither do they want to work with people who swallow their thoughts, just to get the byline.

But don’t take my word for it.

Recently, I attended an “Evening With the Editors” hosted by Hippocampusmagazine, and all six editors on the panel agreed that they prefer to work with writers who are open to change, but who will speak up when an edit will hurt their work more than help it.

“As a writer, I’ve had editors introduce errors into my work, [so] I definitely encourage writers to push back, said DW McKinney, an editor of Shenandoah literary magazine.  “We  want to make sure the integrity of the piece is up to your standards.”

The integrity of the story is key, McKinney said, to deciding when to be open to change, and when to say no. As important as it is to defend your work, it’s just as important to listen to the editor trying to make it better.

“We are especially tender with our authors because we know when we make suggestions it might be difficult,” said Kristine Langley Mahler, director of the independent publisher Split/Lip Press. “So in our acceptance letter, we’ll say, ‘Would you be open to having a conversation about this?’ We don’t want to have an author under contract, and then…have the author go, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ ”

And then, a really interesting thing happened. Rae Pagliarulo, flash editor at Hippocampus, and Hattie Fletcher, editor at Short Reads, started talking about the back-and-forth they had when Fletcher accepted an essay by Pagliarulo.

After eight years of rejection, Pagliarulo was thrilled to find a home for her story. Still, she felt a bit rattled when she first read through Fletcher’s notes.

“A lot of the suggestions you made,” Pagliarulo said, “were stylistic choices I wasn’t married to, but I felt they set my work apart.”

“Flash hinges on really specific images, a word, a turn, and sometimes editing is about clarifying that turn, that image,” Fletcher said. “It’s gem polishing.”

“But then when I read through your edits, I realized what I wanted the piece to convey remained perfectly intact,” Pagliarulo said. “I realized there was not as much intentionality behind those choices as I had originally assumed.”

“You could have pushed back on some of those if you wanted,” Fletcher said. “These are works of the heart. A foundational principle for editing is finding and preserving that heart.”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty