Letters From Kelly

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.

Forbes magazine recently published its list of the 15 best opening lines in fiction, and I’m a sucker for these lists. I read them all. I text them to friends. I should probably be more discerning. But I’m not.

And yet. This one irked me. All 15 were the same openers everyone has named for the last, like, 40 years: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Toni Morrison’s Paradise. (Usually, these lists choose the first line from Morrison’s Beloved, so this one did mix it up.Sort of.)

It’s not that I disagree. Gabriel García Márquez nailed it with his opening to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s just—there’ve been more recent great first lines, too. Poets & Writers magazine even features a sampling every issue in its Page One column. This month, they included the first line from Hala Alyan’s memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: “I dreamt of a lyrebird once, before I knew it existed.”

But also, Gotham teacher Dalia Pagani recently made me more aware that the literary community tends to over-emphasize what she calls the Big Hook Opening. These are what my journalism colleagues would call grabber ledes. Something heart-stopping and dramatic, rendered in a vivid, preferably short sentence.

Most of the choices on the Forbes list would qualify as Big Hook Openings. As would some of the nonfiction perennial favorites, like Cheryl Strayed’s grabber lede to her essay “The Love of My Life:” The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.”

The Big Hook Opening is terrific when you’re writing about death and adultery, or people turning into insects overnight as they sleep.

Dalia’s point, though, is that it’s hard for a story to live up to the promise of the Big Hook Opening. And more importantly, not every story is meant to. Some stories are about two friends out for a walk. A woman misses her dead mom and feeds apelican.

In “Fortunate Sons,” a recent story by Gotham teacher Cleve Lamison, a father and son walk to the roof of their apartment building. Something dramatic does happen, eventually, but mostly, it’s a father-son story. And it starts like one: “By the time we reached the 11th floor, my chest heaved like I was a drowning man chasing the surface.” A middle-aged man, regretting that he didn’t exercise more. His son teasing him for being out of shape.

If it sounds like so many conversations you’ve overheard in the farmer’s market or the subway, well, that’s probably intentional. Cleve’s story is a family story. It’s also about what happens when the father and son get to the roof. And why they’re taking the stairs. So starting in the stairwell, at the 11th floor, with a family moment, is the right approach, in the right place. It works.

In her essay “The Heart Is a Torn Muscle,” here’s Randon Billings Noble’s lede:

Overview

     Your heart was already full, but then you saw him and your heart

     beat code, not Morse but a more insistent pulse. Oh yes.That’s him.

     That one.

“Overview” indicates this is a hermit crab essay mimicking a Web M.D. entry. Then, the first sentence mimics a racing heart; the last three sentences mimic a regular heartbeat. Read it aloud. You’ll hear it. It’s the right lede, for that story.

Listen, Dalia and I aren’t coming out against Grabber Ledes/Big Hook Openings. I love that lede of Cheryl Strayed’s. I would never suggest Kafka open Metamorphosis in any other way.

I’m just saying, don’t reach for the Big Drama, if it doesn’t suit your story. Not every story should open the same. And you’re not the same as any other writer. When the right lede comes along, be open to it.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty