Telling the Truth While Making Things Up: Guest Post by Joan Leegant, Author of Wherever You Go

I’m thrilled to be able to offer you this guest post by Joan Leegant, author of Wherever You Go, as part of the Wherever You Go read-along that I’m co-hosting this month with Carrie from Books and Movies. After watching Joan’s videos, I sent her the following message: “I’m curious about your writing process. In one of your videos, you mention that you don’t pre-plan your writing (that you are discovering how the story unfolds as you write it) and I wonder how that works when you’re writing about current and politically charged events. Do you worry about getting it ‘right’? What kind of research do you do?” This is what Joan sent me as a reply.
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Writing about something that’s based in fact or is topical—what some call “ripped from the headlines”—can pose unusual challenges for a fiction writer. You’re writing about an event that’s actually happened (as Jim Shepard does in his terrific story “Love and Hydrogen,” which takes place in 1937 on the doomed Hindenburg airship) or set amid a real political conflict (like Tim O’Brien’s collection about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried), and yet you’re also making things up. How does one go about this? How close to the “facts” must one stay? Are there dangers in sticking too closely to the facts? And is it harder if your story is set in 2011 rather than forty or seventy years ago?

Naturally, you have to get your facts straight. For my novel Wherever You Go, I needed to have a pretty thorough understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of the phenomenon of Jewish political extremism in particular. I needed to have an ear for the rhetoric of the radical settlers and a solid grasp of Israeli society. Fortunately, most of that was readily accessible to me. Since 2007 I’ve lived in Israel part of each year; for decades prior, I was a close observer of the country, following a three-year stint in Jerusalem in the late 1970s.

Beyond that, writing a novel with topical elements isn’t all that different from writing any other novel. Always, your characters have to be believable. Their emotions and behaviors have to ring true; otherwise your reader will set aside the book and not go along with the pact you make with them: I will tell you an invented story, but through it I’m going to reveal the truth. You also have to get the details right. Otherwise the reader is catapulted out of the book, thinking, No, it’s not like that. This writer doesn’t speak with authority. Some years ago, I was at an artist colony and read aloud a part of a work-in-progress. The excerpt mentioned an M-5 bus from Queens, NY to Manhattan. At the conclusion of the reading, a painter from New York said, “Your story is good. But there are no buses from Queens to New York with an M. They’re all Q.” My mistake ruined the flow for this reader. Needless to say, I fixed the error. For a scene in Wherever You Go involving an explosion, I spent hours on the Web researching how to make a bomb (I’m still waiting for the FBI to show up at my door).

How much of what I wrote in Wherever You Go is factually true and how much did I make up? What’s true is that extremist groups exist in Israeli society and operate on the West Bank; it’s also true that some Americans are active in these groups. Also true are the physical descriptions: the thousands of birds dotting the sky over Jerusalem at dusk; the security questioning at Ben-Gurion Airport; what it’s like to be in a taxi stuck in traffic when the bomb robot comes to dismantle a suspicious object.

What I made up are the personal stories I tell in Wherever You Go. For instance, there is a violent incident at the heart of the book that I invented. Could it have taken place? Yes, though I don’t know that such an event ever actually occurred. Likewise the characters. I made them up, they aren’t composites of people I know, but there certainly could be a troubled kid like Aaron Blinder, a religious seeker like Mark Greenglass, a woman trying to forgive herself and reconcile with her sister like Yona Stern. I know this, as a writer, from a combination of observation, research, and intuition.

Sometimes being too faithful to the facts can straitjacket your storytelling. I waited to visit several West Bank settlements until the draft was done so that my imagination could have free reign; only when it was done did I go there to check for accuracy and tweak some small details. Writers of autobiographical fiction struggle with this all the time. Just because something happened in real life doesn’t mean it makes for good fiction.

You can probably play a little faster and looser with the facts if your story is set in the past rather than the present. If Jim Shepard made an error describing the defective cooling system of the Hindenburg (which probably caused the fire that caused it to explode), there aren’t a lot of readers who’d know the difference. But you still have to be careful. You need the reader to feel she’s in good hands and that you know what you’re talking about. One novelist, John Dufresne, titled his book on craft The Lie That Tells a Truth. That’s the fiction writer’s goal: to tell the truth. But you get there by way of believable fabrication.
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Have you ever had the thought, while reading a novel: “No, it’s not like that. This writer doesn’t speak with authority.” (I can think of one or two examples right off!) What about the opposite, when you feel sure that a book is telling you the truth, even though it’s fiction? (I felt that way about The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, for example, and Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, even though that’s historical fiction wrapped in science fiction.) Thank you, Joan, for this thoughtful post!

For more about Joan and her work, including more guest posts, please visit www.joanleegant.com.

Guest Post and Giveaway: Dani Shapiro, Author of Devotion: A Memoir

I’m thrilled to be able to offer you this guest post by Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir, as part of the TLC Book Tours for her book (read my review).
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While I was writing Devotion I came upon the Sanskrit term samskara. A yoga teacher explained one day during class that samskaras are the tensions, pressures, memories, stored in our bodies that are sometimes released through the practice of yoga. Someone might be in the middle of a pose—say, a very simple forward bend, and find herself suddenly weeping. Or laughing. Or shaking. Why? Because a samskara has been activated, released. I found this whole idea completely compelling, revelatory. As a writer, I found myself thinking that samskaras are like stories. Our stories, embedded in our bodies. They never entirely go away, do they? What has happened to us during the course of our lives continues to live inside of us. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a very beautiful thing, if we understand it properly. Nothing ever really goes away.

Just last week, I found myself grappling with a samskara for the first time in a while. I wasn’t doing my yoga practice. I wasn’t meditating. No. I was on Ninth Avenue in New York City, leaving a restaurant with another couple after a long dinner. The two men—my husband and our friend Jack—were walking ahead, having hailed a taxi. I was trailing behind with our friend Holly, talking. Not paying attention to where I was going, or the slick pavement, or the high heeled boots I was wearing, when suddenly, I was down. Down, so, so, fast. I fell forward, somehow (I have no memory of this) and landed on my knee, and on my cheekbone. My face pressed into the concrete of Ninth Avenue.

Fortunately—and somewhat miraculously—I wasn’t hurt nearly as badly as I could have been. My knee took the brunt of it, and my face somehow didn’t get bruised. Holly and my husband helped me off the street. Shaken, I got into the taxi. I kept moving. There was talk of stopping for ice, of going back to their apartment. I wondered if I was more badly injured than I felt. I had hit my face full-force, after all. But I kept moving, kept going. We took the taxi uptown, got our car, and my husband and I started the two-hour journey home.

Here’s the thing. That fall set off a samskara for me. The next morning, I was completely shaken. Teary. Twenty-five years earlier, my parents had been in a terrible car accident that killed my father and gravely injured my mother. It was my introduction to suddenness, to randomness, to the thin, thin veil that separates us at any given moment from mortal danger. From change. Illness. Accidents. Death. I carry that knowledge—that story, that samskara—within me. I don’t think about it very often, but when I fell that night on Ninth Avenue, it was reawakened in me. Oh, it seemed to be saying. Remember this?

The feeling passed. A day, or two, and I no longer felt that jarred, frightened feeling. I no longer felt on the verge of tears. I was grateful to be okay. But my body had reminded me that everything that has ever happened to me remains alive within me. A story. A samskara. A slip and fall on Ninth Avenue brought to life a fatal car accident on a snowy highway twenty-five years earlier. It reminded me of life’s randomness, life’s fragility. It also reminded me to count my blessings. There is much we can learn from what we carry with us.
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Would you like to win a copy of Devotion? Harper Collins has offered to send a copy to one of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Friday, April 1.

To enter the giveaway:

Please let me know if you’ve ever had an experience with a samskara (even if you didn’t know at the time that that was what it was called) OR tell me why you want to read this book.

If you are a follower or subscriber, please let me know and I will give you another entry.

Make sure you provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries that fail to answer one of the questions or that don’t provide a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

Good luck!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.

Guest Post and Giveaway: Frances Moore Lappé, Author of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want

I’m thrilled to be able to offer you this guest post by Frances Moore Lappé, author of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want (read my review).
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None of us gets up in the morning vowing, “Today, I’m going to make sure another child starves.” And no one turns off the alarm asking, “How do I heat the planet?”

But that’s exactly what we’re doing.

So what could be powerful enough to have us creating a world not one of us would ever choose?

Ideas! Human beings, uniquely, see through a mental map. It determines, literally, what we can see, what we believe our own nature to be and therefore what is possible.

Now that’s okay, if our framing lens serves life. But I believe we’re alive in an era in which the dominant mental map, going global, is destroying life… creating a downward spiral that’s brought us to this crazy place: Where solutions abound yet we’re convinced we’re powerless to bring them to life!

And what’s at the center of this spiral of powerlessness?

Lack. The belief that there’s not enough of anything. Not enough goods—energy, food or parking spots in Boston. And not enough goodness, for at heart we humans are just “selfish little shoppers.” Once believing this about ourselves, of course we believe we can’t come together to solve problems. You know… democracy? We’re too flawed. Best turn over our fate to an automatic law to sort out outcomes for us—the “magic of the market,” Reagan called it.

Markets are great. But unfortunately for us we’ve fallen for one peculiar version of a market, one driven by a single rule—highest return to existing wealth, corporate chiefs and shareholders. But wait! Didn’t we all play Monopoly?

At the end of the night one person (in my home, my brother!) had all the best property while I couldn’t even afford Baltic Avenue. That’s not too bad in a game—at least I got to go to bed at the end of the night. But in real life? Not so good. We end up with what in 2005 Citigroup glowingly named plutonomy… where the top one percent of U.S. households has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

And the bad news doesn’t stop there. Tightly held financial power morphs into political power. For every single law maker there are two dozen lobbyists, mostly serving corporate interests working the halls of Congress.

FDR warned us: “[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism…” That was 1938. And here we are.

Starting with the false premise of scarcity of both goods and goodness, we end up actually manifesting lack—as now half of American children depend on food stamps at some point in their childhood. And we end up with the ultimate oxymoron: “privately held government.”

So, from the premise of lack, we’ve deprived ourselves of the very tool we need to make a planetary turn toward life: true, Living Democracy. To break free, we must ditch the sweet notion “seeing is believing.” For our species, it’s the opposite: Believing is seeing. So the challenge? To believe in a world actually aligned with our real nature.

Its premise is… possibility.

And that starts with embracing all of who we are—the good, the bad and the very ugly. To align with all of our nature, we can identify the conditions that bring out the worst; and, by flipping them, create the conditions proven to bring out the best. And it’s happening—as real, Living Democracy is emerging.

My argument here is that we live in an era where the dominant mental map is life destroying. What can we as individuals do to create a frame that it is life supporting? What are the conditions shown to bring out the worst in us? And how do we create the opposite to bring out the best, to create a world we really want?
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GIVEAWAY DETAILS

The Small Planet Institute has offered to send a signed copy of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want to one of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Friday, June 21.

To enter the giveaway:

Answer one of Ms. Lappé’s questions at the end of her post OR tell me why you want to read this book.

If you are a follower or subscriber, please let me know and I will give you another entry.

Please be sure to provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries that fail to answer one of the questions or that don’t provide a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

Good luck!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.

What Is the Nature of Reading, What Are Its “Rules” and Its Gifts? (Guest Post by Brogan)

This is a guest post by my sister Brogan, who has contributed reviews to this blog in the past as well as last week’s Teaser Tuesday post.

Since I started writing book reviews, I’ve been thinking about books: what makes one choose a book, what makes a book work, and just what is this business of reading all about anyway? I feel that reading a book is about entering into an agreement with the writer. The writer extends a promise, a lure, and the reader agrees: I will enter into your fantasy. I will follow the roads you take me down; I will let you determine what happens next. And in exchange, the writer gets the reader’s time and attention.

This has nothing to do with the actual monetary exchange for the book, because many books are borrowed, some are bought without being read, some are chucked halfway through. The agreement then is more about the art of the book than its commerce, the why of the author writing it in the first place, the tender wavering of nerve cells rearranging themselves as a reader is impacted by what they’ve read.

This agreement is entered into on often seemingly tenuous grounds: someone reads a book jacket flap, someone is drawn to the cover of a book or its title. Sometimes the reader chooses based on a blurb or a review, or a friend saying a book is fabulous.

Being someone who has 50 books out on my library card at any one time, I know just how important the selection of a book is (those are, after all, just the ones I bring home!)—and yet I still think there is something deeply mysterious and elusive about finding a good book. It’s an incredible feat of chance when the meeting of reader and text hits that note of harmony.

To declare the biases on my side of the agreement: I am not one who is easily pleased. Where some people might like 90% of the books they read and love 50% of them, I probably like 50% of the books I read and love about 5% of them. But that love, when it is there, is an experience so intense that it is in the realm of alchemy—it’s the magic of a response, of an interrelationship between two things, self and text, and in that sense it is even intimate, between self and writer.

The other part of my bias is that I also write, which means that I sometimes confuse where someone else is taking a story and where I would take it. Not that I relinquish control with difficulty: once, when my sister told me she rewrote the endings of books if they really didn’t work for her, I was both horrified and amazed at this possibility. It is quite unusual for me to feel that I can do that, after the fact. Although I do have to say that since this suggestion was made, it has happened to me on occasion that I’ve said to myself that X didn’t happen and Y did at the end of such-and-such a story—or in one exceptional, but very clear case (The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life by Camilla Gibb), I allowed the whole thing except for the very last page, which I arrogantly treated in my mind as an editorial error—I willfully pretended to myself that the last page did not exist and was just not part of the story.

But I think I may have been unclear with this last declaration, in saying that I’m a writer. It isn’t that I’m constantly considering how I would mould the text. It’s that when I read the description on a book jacket, I’m immediately heady with the expectation of how I will feel as I read the story.

There’s that great story by Ron Evans (a Canadian Chippewa storyteller)* about how electricity is first brought to an African village, and a westerner is there to witness the arrival of the first community television set. Everything stops in the village for about two weeks because everyone is watching TV. Then life goes back to its usual pace. The puzzled westerner asks why no one is watching the TV anymore. “Oh, we don’t need it, we have the storyteller,” someone tells him. “But don’t you think the TV knows more stories than your storyteller?” “Oh, yes. The TV knows lots of stories. But the storyteller knows us.”

I think that is the same magic of a very good book: as a reader, you feel known. You feel that in some way the story is either about you or for you. This reminds me of an E.M. Forster quote I saw on the wall of a big-box book store: “I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

What happens, then, when you project a book onto the path ahead of yourself and it really isn’t what you expected?

I’ve experienced this twist in expectation as both neutral and negative. The Perpetual Ending by Kristen den Hartog and Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott (read review) were both books that I read with particular expectations, and then halfway through I thought: “Oh. Wait a minute. That’s not what this book is about.” And I could then let the books be what they were, and let myself be open to what they were offering.

With Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay, I anticipated a totally other journey than what the book was about, and when I finished it I was actually annoyed because I had thought it was promising one thing (a romantic journey) and it gave me another (an intense exploration of non-affection and selfishness in love relationships).

When the agreement is broken in this way, whose fault is it? My expectations are my responsibility; a book cannot possibly please everyone… but at the same time, there are some books that will displease readers in similar ways, so it’s not just accident or personal taste.

How fragile is that promise then, how tender the line between writer and reader! How amazing when the accident happens in the other direction: When I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, I had no idea what to expect at all—I don’t even know if I had read the book jacket—and I thought the story was enchanting (if a little uneven).

Or how strange when you find yourself reading a book at breakneck speed, and then finish it and decide you didn’t even like it.

I think, in the end, the mystery is intact. I will continue to stumble upon books, like some, dislike others, and sometimes, by astonishing good luck and to my great surprise and satisfaction, find some of those gems that make me remember why I read in the first place.

*This story was created by Ron Evans in 1982 in the context of storytelling revival.

Guest book reviews in October and radio interview

I’ve guest posted on two different blogs this month:

My review of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld appeared on Word to Mouth earlier this month. Thanks, Carrie, for featuring me on your blog! If you are not already familiar with Word to Mouth, I encourage you to check it out. As Carrie says, this site “is an Internet talk show and companion blog website produced to introduce readers to new and seasoned authors and the books they write.”



My review of The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent was also featured on Tina’s blog, Bookshipper, today. Thanks, Tina, for giving me the book and guest posting my review!

Enter my giveaway for a copy of this book . Deadline is November 7.


Finally, Kathleen Kent was interviewed on Blog Talk Radio a couple of days ago. If you haven’t already done so, you can listen to the interview.

Harriet Scott Chessman’s guest post on 1st Books

One of my “finds” this year was author Harriet Scott Chessman whose wonderful book Someone Not Really Her Mother I reviewed earlier this year. She recently guest posted on one of my all-time favourite blogs, 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started,* which is required reading for anyone who aspires to become a writer or is actively trying to get published. May I someday walk through that magical hedge too!

*This is Meg Waite Clayton’s blog. Read my review of her book, The Wednesday Sisters.