Letters From Kelly

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

Sometimes, when writers get together, an idea will ignite and become a kind of running theme for the duration. And so it was this week during HippoCamp Weekend, a mini-conference put on by Hippocampus magazine, that one refrain almost became the motto:

No heroes. No villains.

“Of course we do have people who have been heroes to us, or who have behaved villainously to us,” said Jiordan Castle, author of the YA memoir Disappearing Act. “It’s very important in nonfiction…just like it is in fiction, that the gray areas are not only more interesting, they are also more true.”

This is a different take on how we as writers usually think of heroes and villains. We like to say, make them three dimensional. We (including me!) like to say, look for their shadow selves so you can make them more fully human. You can have heroes and villains, we say. Just make them believable.

This was not that. When these writers said none, they meant, None.

This idea might sound radical, but I don’t think it’s new. In an interview a few years ago, Jamaican-born novelist Marlon James alluded to it while talking about readers who crave more Black characters in books, but want them only to be heroes.

“But representation doesn’t just mean heroes,” James said. “If we want to show the full range of human experience, it must include the bad. It must include the difficult. But I also want to believe they’re people, as opposed to types. Otherwise, we’re just going to end up with a bunch of one-dimensional villains and magic Negroes.”

It’s OK if you’re skeptical. But let’s say you were going to try to give up heroes and villains, cold turkey. The question then is, how?

James immersed himself in the mythology of African cultures, “because I wanted to know what it feels like to have that thing so far in the back of my skull that I take it for granted.” That, he said, it changed the way he viewed the world, and stories.

Castle sought heroes and villains that were things other than people. Her book is about growing up while her father was imprisoned, so “a more interesting villain is, in my case, the criminal justice system, a system [I’m] fighting against.”

And her hero? “It’s not someone coming in to save anyone. It’s the journey, the realization you have.”

Maryann Aita, author of Little Astronaut, had maybe the most fun method for avoiding heroes and villains: Self-deprecation.  

“It’s always okay to make fun of yourself, but avoid being cruel,” Aita said. “Self-deprecation brings a sort of awareness. You don’t want to be so cool that people don’t like you.”

For example, she said, if you write about a time you rushed to the bedside of someone in the hospital, be sure to include the fact that you packed three pairs of shoes.

“You need to ask, why would I bring—to a hospital visit—a pair of high heels, a pair of flip-flops, and a pair of sneakers?” she said.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty