← The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
Capturing Your Character’s Voice by Deeply Immersing Yourself in Their Perspective
00:32:28
Allegra Goodman
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- [00:00]
Bianca Murray
This is not a drill, but it's the final week's buildup to the Deep Dive Virtual retreat happening on the 1st and 2nd of February from 10am to 5pm Eastern Time each day, along with two other breakout sessions happening from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time on the 25th of January and the 8th of February in which you can interact with all the other delegates and ask us all your burning questions. This is our most stellar lineup to date. You'll be hearing from top editors, agents and authors about all aspects of writing and publishing. Plus every delegate stands a chance of winning one of nine life changing critiques done by the presenters themselves. We're especially proud of the 32 scholarships that have been awarded to our listeners, the most scholarships we've ever awarded for a Deep Dive. We really hope to see you there. Go to our website the Shit About Writing and go to the Deep Dive page for more information and to sign up.
- [01:03]
Carly Waters
It's a new year and time to get fresh eyes on your work in progress. Are you looking for Beta readers, some of whom might potentially become writing group members down the line? Are you wanting to be matched up with those writing in a similar genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs? At the same time, your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 2nd of March, with the matchup emails going out on.
- [01:34]
CeCe Leera
The 3rd of March.
- [01:36]
Carly Waters
Always such an exciting day. For more information and to Register go.
- [01:40]
CeCe Leera
To Biancamarae.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup tab. And please spread the word.
- [01:46]
Carly Waters
Even if you aren't joining the matchup this time, the more writers we have signed up, the better the matches will be.
- [02:00]
CeCe Leera
Hi there and welcome to our show the Shit no One Tells you About Writing. I'm Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Carly Waters and CeCe Leera from P.S. literary Agency. Today's guest is the author of nine works of fiction, including two short story collections and a novel for young readers. Her most recent novel, Sam, was a Read with Jenner selection and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue and Real Simple. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the American Scholar. She is a recipient of a Whiting Award and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. It's my pleasure to welcome Allegra Goodman. Allegra, welcome to the show.
- [03:03]
Allegra Goodman
Thank you.
- [03:05]
CeCe Leera
It is such an honor to chat to you today. So for our listeners, I'm just explaining that the book that we are discussing today is Isola. That how you pronounce it? Allegra.
- [03:16]
Allegra Goodman
I was corrected myself yesterday by a friend who knows Italian. She goes, isola.
- [03:20]
CeCe Leera
Isola. Okay. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Those of you watching the YouTube channel will see the COVID of the book. Beautiful cover. I'm going to read you the flap copy and then we're going to dive in because there's so much I need to speak to Allegra about. So here we go. Heir to a chateau with its own village and lands, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned. And Jean Francois de la Roc de Roberval, an enigmatic and volatile man Marguerite has never met, becomes her guardian, controlling her future. He sells her property to pay his debts, leaving her destitute, and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends Roberval's servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when Roberval discovers Marguerite's deception, his rage is all consuming. As punishment, he maroons her and her lover on a small island. Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns blanketing the island in ice, survival becomes nearly impossible. She despairs. Has everyone and everything she once held dear abandoned her? A riveting portrait inspired by the real life of a 16th century heroine and a gorgeous celebration of the power of the natural world. I'm going to say it wrong again. Isola is the timeless story of a woman realizing her true strength. So just. Wow. So first question for you. Allegra is in an industry that tries really hard to pigeonhole writers as either one thing or another because let's be honest, it makes it so much easier to market them. Right. You've shown incredible range throughout a 35 year career with narratives about rock climbing, loners, virtual reality gamers, Orthodox Jewish families in the Catskills. Can you speak a bit about this and the importance about writing about topics that interest and transport you, regardless of the so called genre or whether they're contemporary or historical?
- [05:27]
Allegra Goodman
Yeah, I think that is a really important point. That in terms of the industry and marketing of a book, people love consistency Right. But if you're an artist, you love to work on what interests you and what you're passionate about. So I've always been sort of more on the side of writing what I'm interested in or writing what draws me imaginatively. And early on, especially when I was very young and just starting out as a writer, I did feel some pressure because people were sort of like, especially if you have something that succeeds, they want the last book that you did. So my very first book was a book of very satirical, light hearted stories, very funny. And then I wrote a novel which was sort of very different in tone, sort of elegiac and a completely different mood. Like you wouldn't have guessed it was the same. It was me. And my editor at the time now passed away, actually said to me, where is the sparkling Allegra Goodman that I loved so much from your last book? You know, what is this? And it was very discouraging when I was young to hear that because I thought idealistically, you know, a writer should grow, a writer should go to new places. And I thought it was progress to do something different, not disappointing. But eventually, as I persisted and kept working on different subjects, I found that editors started to follow where I was going a little more. And I'm not a genre writer in terms of writing in one genre. You know, I would also say that over time I have certain themes that I come back to, certain ideas that I'm interested in, even though I might, the setting of my book might be different, or the tone or the voice of the book might be different. I am interested in families, I am interested in intergenerational conflict. I'm very interested in religion and what people believe and what they doubt, what they don't believe. I'm interested in self deception and the illusions that people carry with them. And all of those sort of thread through my work. I'm also very interested in women and their role in the world and young women and how they deal with the challenges that custom and culture impose on them. And I would say, especially in my recent work with my last novel, Sam, which was about a young girl in the 21st century, and this novel, Isola, about a young woman growing up in the 16th century, you know, very far apart in time period and very different in setting and in the tone of the book. But they're both about women sort of coming into their own, coming into their power. And so there's, there is continuity there as well. So one way to talk about your question is that a writer can say there's a through line in my work. You know, there is consistency in my work and maybe let's not think so literally about writing the same kind of thing.
- [08:23]
CeCe Leera
Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. And that's something we say on the podcast all the time, is don't try and chase trends. Don't go what is publishing. So I'm going to try and write that. Always write what you are passionate about. I talk about it in terms of the waving a turkey leg at family Thanksgiving, the thing that gets you really riled up, and the things that will keep bringing you back to the chair, because that's what you have to say about the world, and that is regardless of genre or contemporary or historical. So I absolutely love what you're saying there. There is an author note that you wrote, Allegra, that I would like us to discuss. Because there was just after finishing the book and I read the author's note and it just blew my mind. And there's so much to unpack there. So could you just tell us a bit about what's in the author's note?
- [09:08]
Allegra Goodman
So at the end of the book, in my author's note, I talk about how I came upon this true story of a young woman in the 16th century who traveled to the New World, or New France, as they called it. He was coming from France. So this was 22 years ago. I was traveling with my family to Canada. We live in Massachusetts, and we took a road trip up to Montreal. And we had four children, our four children with us who were at the time 10 years old, seven, three and a newborn. I don't know why we were traveling when I just had this baby. I think she was about six weeks old. So I think I was in sort of postpartum euphoria or something like that. But we're driving up to Canada, and I had taken with me a whole stack of books that I checked out from the public library about Canadian history, which I thought I would share with the boys. So on this trip, the boys had no interest in any of these books and of course, didn't read any of them. And I read all of them because I was up all night nursing the baby. And I just remember sitting up in bed with the baby in my arms, one after another, looking at these books. They were all children's books or young adult books about Canadian history. And I was reading a book about the explorations of Jacques Cartier to Canada. And he did three expeditions. Three times he sailed to the New World. And on the third expedition, and this I would add is 75 years at least before the Pilgrims, you know, made their progress to Massachusetts. He on the third expedition, there was a ship which went out with a captain named Roberval, which was full of colonists which who were supposed to settle in the New World in this new land, and according to the king, spread Catholicism, you know, throughout the land. And in parentheses in this discussion of this ship of colonists, it said on the ship there was a kinsman of the commander, who was a young woman named Marguerite de la Roche de Roberval. She, you know, she annoyed the commander and he set her down and marooned her on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And I just sort of sat up in bed and I was like, what? Wait, what? What happened? Close parentheses. Then back to Roberval and Cartier. You know, it was so emblematic, the women's history in the, you know, cloistered in the parentheses, and we go back to the male explorers. And I was like, wait, what happened to her? What does she do on this island? Isn't it subarctic there? What in the world? And at the time I thought, oh, this would be such an interesting story to explore and maybe to write a novel about. I need to look into this. But I didn't end up doing it right away. I wrote a lot of other books. I was raising these children. And also I thought, and this goes back to your first point, you know, I was like, wait, I don't write historical fiction. So even I, who pretend that I don't like to be pigeonholed, I was sort of like, that stresses me out. I can't imagine doing the research. You know, what did they wear? What did they eat? What was a ship? Like, that's too much. So I kept putting the idea aside and working on other projects, and my kids got older and I ended up having more time and I started doing a lot of reading. I was still kind of intimidated by the idea of starting this novel. But in the end, while I was writing Sam, which was the novel about the contemporary, the 21st century young girl who was a Boulder climbing rocks all the time, I started. I really felt compelled by this idea. And this maybe is another thing that writers and some of the listeners may feel that sometimes an idea chooses you. And, you know, I could not write the book at that point. I'd done a lot of reading, but I didn't call it a novel. I called it Project M After Marguerite, which, you know, project, not a book. And I didn't do it on my computer. I was writing Sam on my Computer, officially. And then I was sort of cheating on Sam by. I had a notebook and a pen, and I was sort of working by hand, trying out openings for this new novel, which would have been historical novel. And I took this notebook and I just wrote the first sentence. I just thought, let's just see if I can just write one sentence. Because I really was intimidated. And over and over again, I wrote the first sentence of this book by hand. And until I got to the point where I wrote this line and it said, I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born. And so we passed each other in the dark. And then I thought, oh, there she is. She's speaking to me. And, you know, not. Not to make light of all the work that I did after that, but once I had that sentence, I had the voice of the book or the voice of the woman in my head, and it was a little bit like she was telling me the story.
- [14:01]
CeCe Leera
I love all of that. There is an alchemy to writing, you know, and it is our own brains. But sometimes it does feel divine. It does feel like, you know, we've been chosen to tell the story and we kind of are just, you know, channeling this person. And when that happens, it's just so incredibly magical. But okay. So sometimes I wonder as well. When a story idea comes to us, sometimes we are not the writer we need to be in terms of skill, in terms of life experience to tell that story. And sometimes I feel like we rush to tell a story, but some stories need that time. They need us to become the storyteller that story needs us to be in order to tell it. So I love that this story took you 22 years, and it took another character sort of speaking to you. I just want to read your exact wording in the author's note for our listeners, because I especially love the wording of Here It Goes. So I began to dream of writing the story, but I didn't do it. I wrote several other books, including Sam, a contemporary novel about a girl growing up bouldering in Massachusetts. However, all those years, even while writing Sam, I kept thinking about Marguerite. In fact, it was Sam herself who inspired me to write about Marguerite. I tucked away my interest in the French noblewoman. But as I wrote about Sam's coming of age, I began to think about Marguerite's journey of self discovery. While writing Sam, I began to research Marguerite's voyage. And it carries on, and then it goes. But in the end, it was Sam who opened up this material for me. Sam, the climber and the striver. Sam, the survivor. Marguerite is a survivor, too. And then it goes. In the mornings, I worked on Sam writing and rewriting chapters on my computer. In the afternoons, I wrote by hand in a notebook, experimenting with different openings, as you said. But just that one character. Writing one character can be the bridge to get you to another character, to me is just so incredibly fascinating and so many writers would have parked it and gone, okay, I'll come back to that later. But you wrote the two at the same time, Allegra. Like how. How.
- [16:04]
Allegra Goodman
Well, I should say when I was younger, and this, you know, this speaks to. Sometimes the time has to be right. I had more time because it was so the baby, the newborn, was now 22 years old. She was graduating from. Or actually she's now 22. When I wrote the book, she was in college. She had started college. So I had no children at home, and I had more bandwidth to do both books. So that's just on the practical level. And I also had more maturity. But I discovered something about myself as a writer, and I wonder if some of your listeners might also find this interesting. I am not the kind of person who can just sort of hole up and, like, churn out a lot of material in one day. I'm really a slow and steady writer. I write quite slowly. And I'm the kind of person that if I write one good page, I'm really happy with the day. And I have about two to three hours in me to work on a project. But what I discovered when I was writing Sam was that even though I only had that amount that in me for Sam, I could work on a different project later in the day. So I couldn't write Sam all day, and I couldn't write this one all day. But I did split the time, and it's the first time I've really sort of written two books at once in that way. I've always written short fiction at once and, you know, at the same time and done shorter pieces and that kind of thing, but not two novels at the same time. And I kind of love it. I think.
- [17:30]
CeCe Leera
I think the only other author that I've spoken to who does this is Lauren Groff. And I think she said that she would move desks. So she would write one book at one desk and then she would move desk completely, you know, to write the other book, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm actually going to reference her a little bit later with another question I have for you. But, yeah, I just, you know, when I write. I also have about two to three hours in me. I will sort of try and type faster to override my critical brain because I find if I write slower, I'm more pedantic and critical of each sentence. But we will talk about your writing on a sentence level because we can see you are pedantic about your writing on a sentence level because it does show, which is incredible. But, yeah, to just hear of somebody working like this would just really blew my mind. And I love what you said about trying to find your way into the story, because I find Beginnings tremendously difficult. Because as you continue a story, with each decision you make in terms of plot, in terms of character arc, in terms of this is the decision the characters made. You keep narrowing down your options, which makes it kind of easier. But the beginning is so wide open, you could begin anywhere. And I talk about it on the podcast as circling the building of your story to find the best way in. And sometimes it's the front door, sometimes it's the back door, sometimes it's the chimney or the fire escape. But it seems like for you, it was the same thing until you got to that sentence. How long. Do you have any recollection of how long it took you to get to that opening?
- [18:58]
Allegra Goodman
I think it was several weeks, honestly, just for the opening. And I love your image of circling the building. That's a really great image. I've often described it. I do teach on occasion, and I've described it to students as sort of like when you start the puzzle, you have all the different pieces, but you don't have the picture on the box either, because you have. Because you're making the whole thing up as you go along. And it is true that as you progress in a novel, there are fewer choices because of the choices that you made before. So it's sort of like. But, you know, at the beginning, when you're starting the novel, it's sort of like, is this an edge piece or is this the center? Is this the background or is this the person you know? So, yes, it can be overwhelming, the freedom.
- [19:43]
CeCe Leera
It's almost like a white puzzle, you know, never mind pictures on the puzzle without seeing it. It's just like you're putting together a whole puzzle that's all made up of white puzzle pieces at the beginning, you know, and that's why it's so difficult. But when you get that opening, it is like this eureka moment, because then you just feel it. So something else that I want to talk about is, you know, so often with Literary fiction, emerging writers especially think of literary fiction as jazz hands writing. It's like, look, Ma, I'm writing huge metaphors, purple prose. Yet the through line in all your work, besides all your themes, is also clear. There's this economy of language. You know, each sentence does what it's intended to do. No more. You know, there are gut punch moments, but there's no grandstanding or jazz hands writing. So for our listeners, I'm just going to read you a page or two. Well, a few paragraphs from the prologue. So. I still dream of birds I watch them circle Dive into rough waters and fly up to the sun I call to them but hear no answer Alone I stand on a stone island I watch for ships and see three coming tall ships close enough to hail I load my musket and shoot into the air I see pennants close enough to touch as I run barefoot to the shore Rocks cut my feet and I leave a trail of blood Brambles tear my sleeves and score my arms as I shout wait. Stop. Save me. And that's the beginning of the prologue. And then again, as you said, the opening sentence. I never knew my mother. She died the night I was born and so we passed each other in the dark. She left me her name, Marguerite, and her ruby ring but no memory of her.
- [21:29]
Allegra Goodman
It's.
- [21:30]
CeCe Leera
It's really like economy of language, but also really, really striking. Is this something that you just naturally had as a writer when you started writing all those years ago? Or is it something that's come with time? Have you had to be ruthless in terms of editing, explain that process to us?
- [21:48]
Allegra Goodman
I do a lot of revision, and I am ruthless. So I try to catch places where I'm not clear or where I'm getting wordy. And I think over time, actually, this is a great thing about writing. You get better as you get older. It's not like being an athlete, where you're sort of done at 30. And I have learned to be clearer and to really. I want my words to do their work. I'm not interested in words for their own sake. And actually, even when I was very young, I decided I am not a poet. I am a storyteller. And, you know, poets might be interested in the shape of the word or the picture, the way the word looks on the page. And I'm really interested in each of my words doing its job to tell the story. And I've often found, actually, that the best narrative effects often come when they're the most useful, you know? But when I started as a Writer. I was mostly interested in voice and I was mostly interested in dialogue. That was sort of my strength. And my early stories, they're almost like plays. I was never, as a writer or an early reader that interested in description or all of those things. And that came later for me. And even now, when I do description, it's usually in character. It's often like a lot of times, it's through the perception of the hero or the heroine and from what she sees, what she feels, what she hears. And again, that's where the words are doing their job. They're working to convey the story of this person.
- [23:16]
CeCe Leera
And that brings me to another question in terms of voice, because I wanted to ask how you capture the voice, and especially when you're writing from the first person perspective of a woman living in like the six in 16th century France. Right. I remember when I interviewed Lauren Grof about how she wrote dialogue for Matrix, which takes place in the 12th century. And when I was reading, I noticed that she had a hack in that she never used direct quotes for dialogue so that it didn't have to sound the way it sounded back then. She would use reported speech. Speech. And she said, yes, that was a hack to just get past all of that because it would just have been too difficult. So I imagine there was intentionality in your part in terms of saying, I am not going to try and sound like, you know, she would have sounded back then. I am going to. Yes, there is formality in the language to indicate that it is historical fiction. But you use quota dialogue. How did you approach that? Because I assume it was very intentional.
- [24:15]
Allegra Goodman
First of all, I found it liberating to think that these people would have all been speaking French to each other, so their idioms would have been in French. So we're reading it in English, So we already have that, you know, that change. So I wasn't going to worry about, like sounding Shakespearean or something like that. Even though this is the time of Shakespeare, they weren't living in England and they weren't speaking Shakespearean English. They were speaking French. So. And then the other way that I worked on the voice was I actually read stuff that was written at that time and thought about it and found it idiomatic, you know. And so I was interested in sort of keeping the imagery and the world that they spoke about correct. I really wanted to avoid it sounding obviously like a 21st century person, like Sam would talk, you know, but just being clear and clean. And strangely, it was. That part didn't bother me too much. I did use quotation marks. I like Lauren's idea with the dashes. And I do remember that from the Matrix.
- [25:15]
CeCe Leera
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was an interesting hack, but it. But you made it work so well here, even though you went to completely different route. And you mentioned in the author's note something about being an actor. And that is how I write. I kind of do a method acting form of writing. So whenever I interview authors, I say, do you see your characters acting out in front of you, almost as if you are a godlike being? Or do you climb into the character and look out at their world from their eyes? And it's very clear to me that you climb into the character and look out from their eyes because as you say, every description is through the lens of their experience, how they would see it, etc. Now again, that's so interesting that you would write one character in the morning, another character in the afternoon. Did it help that one was first person and one was third person? And do you use that sort of active, a method form of writing?
- [26:10]
Allegra Goodman
I do. You have it exactly right. I try to get inside the character and in a method sort of way, including like doing all this research which might not appear in on the page. Just the way an actor might think about. Ask a lot of questions about the character that don't appear in the script, but just to inform the performance. That's very much how I work. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about the fact that Sam is in the third person and this is in the first. She's in a very intimate third person and this is the first person. I guess in terms of. If you want to carry the theater image further. I was doing them in repertory, but I found it refreshing, strangely. And again, it was sort of this. Sam was the book I knew I had to finish, that I had the contract for this one. And here's another important point I didn't mention. But I didn't tell anyone that I was working on this secret project. That's why I called it Project M. I was sort of pretending it was like a secret, even for myself. And so I didn't tell my family, I didn't tell my husband, I didn't tell my agent. I was working on this because I was a little nervous at the beginning. And also later I enjoyed the secrecy and being able to protect it. So I worked on it for a year and a half before I had the first draft, before I confess that I was working on it, but I wanted to get to the end that was also unusual for me. But maybe that secrecy part also. I had a public project and a private project.
- [27:39]
CeCe Leera
It is lovely sometimes to have that delicious secret because you feel so protective of it. Right? And that's why writers feel superstitious about talking about something until they know it's a real thing, et cetera. Something I want to ask, because Sam could have been written in the first person and like you say, it's an intimate, really close third person. And this is something that a lot of emerging writers struggle with. They think, oh, well, first person is just pronouns. It's just I and me. And third person is just she and her. But there is. There's a lot of intentionality that has to come to choosing, you know, which point of view you using. And I'm starting a new project now, and I'm busy circling the building, and I keep going backwards and forwards between first person and third person close. So what was your mindset when it came to Sam, when you decided this is going to be third person? And what was the mindset here? Or do you find that it comes to you instinctively and you don't really have to give it too much thought?
- [28:36]
Allegra Goodman
With Sam, it sort of came instinctively in that. And there again, when I wrote the first line of that book, all of Sam is written in language that she would have understood at her age. So this book starts when she's a seven year old. Seven years old. And the first sentence of the book is, there's a girl and her name is Sam, which is almost the kind of book that she would be able to read at that age. And then as she gets older, the language of the book changes and gets more complex. And I was really interested in playing with that, telling her story almost in the style of the books that she would be able to read at those different ages. With this book, Isola, I was thinking a lot about sort of the great tradition of castaway novels. And, you know, as, you know, like, when you're a writer, you do a lot of research in terms of the background of the character and all that, but you can also do research in terms of other people who've written in that genre. So I was thinking about Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels and Kidnapped and other books in which the person ends up on an island and they were in the first person. And I thought of this book as a female Robinson Crusoe, and she's telling the story as what happened to her. And I was also really interested in the way that stories, survival stories and Especially women's stories can be subverted and changed and stolen from them. And I played with that in this book as well, so. But here she is telling it as she saw it, and the reader is then invested and knows what she experienced so that later on we know the difference between what she says and what other people say.
- [30:12]
CeCe Leera
Yeah. You know, I'm interested in the person who wrote the children's book that you read, because by putting her in the parentheses, I'm wondering if it's a woman who wrote it who just wanted to put a stamp. Here's Marguerite. It's not part of the story, but I'm damn well putting it here. And I'm hoping someone will notice it. Or if it was a man who was like, oh, this is just an afterthought. It's interesting, but it was a man. Yeah, You Okay, There we go. Damn it. Damn it. I was hoping for a woman who was like, I'm supposed to be writing a book about this person, but I'm just going to put this in here. Okay, last question that we have time for, because on the podcast, we. We review query letters and opening pages from emerging authors to help them polishing it up ahead of querying agents. And most times, nine times out of 10, the prologue does not work. It's a band aid tacked on to fix a first chapter that is just not working. Now, I know you started with chapter one, so clearly you came back to the prologue. So again, when it comes to intentionality, why the prologue? And at what point did that come into the story?
- [31:11]
Allegra Goodman
Such an interesting question. And I can see that you really think about these craft ideas, but I'll be very honest, I didn't have a prologue. I wrote the whole book. For me, that first page was the first page. And it was my editor who, late in this process, I think, even when it was going into copy editing, suggested a prologue to me. And I will also be honest that I didn't love the idea of writing a prologue. I felt like it was done. I'm with you. I don't usually like prologues, but she felt she wanted to give a sense of what was going to happen because the book has a lead up, you know, she wanted to give the reader that sense of the adventure to come and tie it in later. And I started getting intrigued by her idea because Marguerite is now looking back and telling the story, which is another thing that happens with the first person. With the third person, you don't know what could happen to that character. Right. Like with the first person, you know, that she's like, alive to tell the story. Right. Unless she's a ghost or something. So I experimented with different kinds of prologues, and my brilliant editor, Whitney Frick, was the one who really urged me to do it. And I tried different ideas and then came up with this idea of her still dreaming about the island. And Whitney said she liked that one and we used it. And then I saw how people responded to it, and I was thinking, oh, you're a good editor. You did the right thing. But it certainly wasn't there when I first submitted the book, or in not at all. It came much later.
- [32:43]
CeCe Leera
But it was such a good choice because when you described the book, now, you described it as like the female sort of castaway story. And had you begun just with chapter one, we wouldn't have got that. So the prologue, set the scene, gave us a flash forward to the future. So we knew it was a female sort of castaway story. So, yeah, excellent, excellent addition down the line. And that's the thing. Your editor can suggest something, but you as the writer, get to decide if you're going to do it and how you're going to do it. Because again, that prologue could have gone any which way. And it went the way you decided it was going to go.
- [33:16]
Allegra Goodman
Exactly, exactly. This is why. This is a good example of editor and writer working constructively together and both knowing the book really well. Also, it helped that we. The book was done, you know. Yeah. So then it was. The prologue became part of the frame of the book rather than the band aid, as you know, or something. Or the afterthought or something like that.
- [33:35]
CeCe Leera
Yeah, Love it. Allegra, thank you so much for your time. It's been wonderful chatting with you. I'm going back now and I'm going to dive into your whole backlist. I love it when I discover a writer and I'm like, ah, the backlist. I got to get to it. So for our listeners, we are linking to the book on our bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy it there, you support an independent bookstore and you support the podcast at the same time. Please get the book.
- [33:57]
Carly Waters
Read it.
- [33:58]
CeCe Leera
Especially if you're someone who's writing in literary fiction and, you know, struggling with the language. This is just a masterclass in that. Thank you, Allegra.
- [34:06]
Allegra Goodman
Thank you so much for having me.
- [34:08]
CeCe Leera
And that's it for today's episode. I hope you'll join us for next week's show. In the meantime, keep at it. Remember, it just takes one. Yes.
- [34:22]
Bianca Murray
This is not a drill, but it's the final week's buildup to the Deep Dive Virtual retreat happening on the 1st and 2nd of February from 10am to 5pm Eastern Time each day, along with two other breakout sessions happening from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time on the 25th of January and the 8th of February, in which you can interact with all the other delegates and ask us all your burning questions. This is our most stellar lineup to date. You'll be hearing from top editors, agents and authors about all aspects of writing and publishing. Plus every delegate stands a chance of winning one of nine life changing critiques done by the presenters themselves. We're especially proud of the 32 scholarships that have been awarded to our listeners, the most scholarships we've ever awarded for a Deep Dive. We really hope to see you there. Go to our website the Shit About Writing and go to the Deep Dive page for more information and to sign up.
- [35:24]
Carly Waters
It's a new year and time to get fresh eyes on your work in progress. Are you looking for beta readers, some of whom might potentially become writing group members down the line? Are you wanting to be matched up with those writing in a similar genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs? At the same time, your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 2nd of March, with the matchup emails going out on.
- [35:56]
CeCe Leera
The 3rd of March.
- [35:57]
Carly Waters
Always such an exciting day. For more information and to register, go.
- [36:02]
CeCe Leera
To Biancamarae.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup tab. And please spread the word even if.
- [36:08]
Carly Waters
You aren't joining the matchup this time. The more writers we have signed up, the better the matches will be.