Letters From Kelly

“Revision! Whatever that is.” 

And thus Gotham’s own Arlaina Tibensky kicked off our Fiction Writing Conference a couple of weeks ago, with a panel on strategies for revising. Which was perfect, because by asking, “What even is this?” Arlaina freed the other writers in the room to come back with an unexpected answer. 

Revision is… emotional. 

“The first thing is accepting that even though you’ve been working on your book, and you think you’ve finished it, it’s really not your book yet,” said Kate Fagan, sportswriter and author of the novel The Three Lives of Cate Kay. “You’ve got to mourn that.”

When she first sends a book to her editor, Fagan—who has also published two nonfiction books and is working on her next novel—indulges the fantasy that the draft is perfect, or nearly so. When her editor instead responds with notes, Fagan takes two days to mourn, “the loss that I didn’t deliver the perfect book.”

 “You have to build the emotional space inside yourself for the realization that your first draft is only holding one little space in your heart,” Fagan said. “You have to create room and emotional energy for subsequent versions—it’s a very real thing.” 

The emotional roller-coaster doesn’t end there, though. Matt Bell, novelist and author of a craft book all about revision called Refuse to Be Done, said he goes through a stage of revision where some characters don’t know who they want to be yet. They move in and out of drafts, existing sometimes “almost as a kind of alternate reality character that lived in the book, or maybe didn’t.”  

“Living with uncertainty is another revision skill that gets stronger over time,” Bell said. “You learn it’s OK to have multiple things still in flux, that maybe that’s actually kind of joyful, even if it feels frustrating at time.”

For Gotham teacher Katherine Taylor, revising her second novel involved facing down demons, writing through heartbreak, and summoning no small amount of courage. Because, one day after going through a bad breakup, Katherine went to lunch with her editor, who told her she had to throw away her entire first draft. 

“I literally boo-hooed for probably an hour, and my editor sat there, and we talked, or I talked and she listened, and finally, when I said, ‘I’m ready to talk about the book now,’ she just said it: ‘I need you to throw out this entire draft and start again,’” Katherine said. 

The editor liked the characters and the story. But the voice and point of view were not working, and so everything else had to go. 

Katherine briefly tried to salvage something from the draft, asking if there were even any nice sentences in it that she could keep. But once the shock wore off, she plunged in and started fresh. 

“I think I was like every writer with their debut novel, traumatized by the response to my first book. I was trying to make the second one so different that I squashed out all the warmth and all the humor and all the stuff that makes my work, work,” Katherine said. “I took a breath and let all that stuff back in. And I did totally rediscover the book. I had fun writing it, which of course showed in the draft. Suddenly the voice was alive and not stuffed down and dead. And everything in the book was a total surprise after that.”

If all this makes revision sound like a wrenching gauntlet, I apologize, writers. If you re-read their comments, you’ll notice a common thread among all these writers. After each one made peace with their own demons, they all found another emotion—joy.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Recently, Donna Talarico, the founder and editor-in-chief of Hippocampus, spoke at the magazine’s summer mini-conference about what writers need to know about search engine optimization. 

In addition to being an editor and publisher and writer, Donna is also a marketing and content strategist. And I’m going to share her top takeaways with you here, but first, do this (also stolen from Donna):

Jot down three words or phrases that describe what you write about. What are your most common themes? What are the ideas you return to in your work, or the expertise you bring to it?

Got it? OK, onto the tips! 

1. You need your own website. 

Already have one? Good—skip to Tip No. 2! 

Yes, you need an author website even if you’ve got a thriving Substack, or thousands of social media followers, or you’ve got a big online presence in your other life in competitive sport fishing or stop-loss reinsurance. 

“The author website is really, truly crucial to discoverability,” Donna said. “[It] makes you more credible to Google and more findable to an end user, and that’s because you own it, you control the content, and you can update it.”

Don’t panic—you don’t have to spend a lot of money to own an author website. There are platforms out there that will let you set up a basic one for free. 

The main thing is to have it. It’s the one place online where you decide what the internet says about you. 

“You can’t control what Google shows, but you can help influence it,” Donna said. 

2. Keep it current. 

This means not only adding your stories, awards, and events as they occur, but also keeping up with what people search for, and how they’re looking for it. You want to update the “evergreen” pages of your site—the ones about who you are and what you write—to include up-to-date keywords, or methods.

For example, because people are using voice search so frequently now, search engines favor  websites with a Q&A element to them. So you might tweak your About page to add a few questions and answers. Knowing that Google now likes to present results in a bullet-pointed list, you might rearrange your work history as, you guessed it, a bullet-pointed list. 

“We care a lot about word choice in our creative work,” Donna said, “and we should also care about it in our web content.” 

3. Be specific about who your audience really is.

Just as a memoirist pitching an agent should never say “My book will appeal to all readers because it’s about Life,” you can’t assume someone searching for their next read will just find you. You have to give them something to find. 

Think of the way you search for something to read. You don’t just type “novel” and throw a dart at what comes up. You search for things you’re already interested in. 

Now look at that list you made a few minutes ago. Plug those terms into a couple of search engines as well as AI programs like ChatGPT.  Are you seeing your own page(s)? Your own stories? Could your stories fit into the results? Or do the results show you stuff about stop-loss reinsurance, when you wanted swordfish?

Then look up what people are searching for. (There are lots of websites and services that track this.) Which ones might help lead readers to you?

If this all feels overwhelming, just breathe. It’s not that different from the way you already create your stories—your subconscious mind decides what it wants to write about, and you know you have to let it have its own way, or you’ll never get anywhere. But then you take charge, shape your story, edit it, decide whether to publish it at all. You decide. As writer and brand strategist Michelle Tamara Cutler has said, “If we don’t define our online presence for ourselves, the internet will do it for us.” 

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

This week, I heard for the first time the phrase “vulnerability hangover.”

AndI know—I’m late! I’m soooo late!

Apparently, the author Brené Brown coined it about 20 years ago. One of my students even told me it’s been in the lexicon so long, bad actors are already weaponizing it.

I am fascinated.

A vulnerability hangover describes the feeling people often have after sharing something deeply personal—they get swamped with a kind of buyer’s remorse, but more intimate. They’re embarrassed, worried they’ve made their audience uncomfortable, or worse, that they’ve alienated them.

It really is a perfect expression. It describes what every writing teacher sees in their inbox about ten minutes after writers post their stories for workshop. I’m now convinced it’s the reason Gotham’s tech support team gets so many emails from students who want to delete and re-upload their Booths, just so they can fix one typo.

The next time someone tells you that all the really great expressions are borrowed from languages other than English, you can retort “Oh, yeah? What about ‘vulnerability hangover’?”

Even more fascinating: Once Brown identified the vulnerability hangover, researchers started exploring it, and they discovered a related phenomenon, which they named, perfectly, the “beautiful mess effect.” It describes the audience, the people who hear the deeply personal confession. Overwhelmingly, they tend to view the person who made the disclosure as strong. They admire them for having the courage to share something so raw. And the flaws at the heart of the story they shared? They see them as part of the beauty of being human.

Basically, just your average night in a Gotham workshop.

I want you to picture it: A classroom above Eighth Avenue in NYC, raised voices, car horns, and the smell of pizza wafting in through the open window. At one end of the table sits a writer, bracing themselves for the class to start discussing their story, their face scarlet, their breathing shallow. Maybe their arms are protectively crossing their chests, maybe they’re kneading their hands between their knees, maybe they’re massaging their temples.

The vulnerability hangover is pounding.

But around them, their classmates are buoyant, chirping with excitement.They can’t wait to tell their fellow writer why their words resonated with them, what they love about the pages, how they hope when it’s their turn, they can be just as brave.

They’re drinking in the beautiful mess.

In every scene, the real action simmers beneath the surface. In every scene, all the characters see the same action in wildly different, often polar opposite, ways, while also cluelessly believing everyone sees it as they do.

Every scene is a beautiful mess.

And so are you, writers. Keep that in mind next time you hyperventilate after you pour your heart into your story, and show it to someone else.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s science.*

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

*OK, I haven’t reported out the research on this, so I’m like 85 percent but not 100 percent sure it’s science, just take my word for it, and whatever you do, don’t tell Neil DeGrasse Tyson.