Ellyn Bache's Blog

Lessons from the writing life

One of the most memorable moments – and best lessons – of my writing life came early on. My first novel, Safe Passage, had just come out, and I had been invited to teach a class at The Writers Workshop in Asheville, followed by a signing at what was already the iconic Malaprop’s Bookstore. Emoke B’Racz, the owner, even picked me up at the airport instead of sending someone else, making me feel honored and important. The seminar went well. But oh! The signing promised to be a disaster.
Except for a few students who’d taken the class, no one bought a single book. The pleasant young clerk assigned to keep me company at my signing desk valiantly kept introducing me to readers who walked by looking for other titles, but after a while, it was embarrassing. I wasn’t savvy enough to know then that this was the fate of most unknown writers. I was crushed.
Then a middle-aged woman holding the hand of a little boy wandered by, undoubtedly on her way to the children’s department. As she’d been doing all afternoon, my intrepid clerk-companion got up and said, “Let me introduce you to Ellyn Bache . . . ” and went through her spiel. But instead of sneaking away, the woman listened, nodded with what looked like enthusiasm, and said, “Well then I’ll have to have one.”
By now the little boy was tugging at the woman’s arm so I signed the book quickly and let her go. It had been only one sale, but I felt restored.
“Do you know who that was?” my clerk-companion asked. “It was Gail Godwin. She brings her nephew in here often.”
Gail Godwin, whose novels I read and much admired, had bought my book!
Maybe she never opened it. Maybe she’d only bought it to be kind. No matter – her gesture had made me feel like a writer again, and not just a nuisance.
This happened nearly thirty years ago. Ever since, when I go into a bookstore where a writer sits alone and humbled, hoping to find an audience for a new book, I remember that long-ago afternoon in Asheville and how fragile an ego can be at the beginning of a career. Then I usually buy the book, if only to watch the sparkle come back into the writer’s eyes.

Fiction Tip 3 - The Bingo Moment

Fiction Tip 3 – The Bingo Moment
November 6th, 2017 by ebache

Advice from one of the great writing teachers of the 20th century, the novelist Doris Betts, who spent many years on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

In the modern short story, everything should lead up to one “bingo moment” for the main character.

This means that the story should be organized so that everything goes toward the critical moment or away from it. Sometimes we get to the “bingo moment” and stop. One perfect example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” where the action consists of the townspeople making their way to the eccentric, now-deceased Emily’s house, revealing bits about her background along the way, all the time moving toward the “bingo moment” when they discover one of her iron gray hairs on the pillow where she must have been sleeping next to the decomposed remains of the lover lying next to her. The sight of the hair explains everything we have learned while the townspeople were walking toward the house — Emily’s purchase of rat poison years back, the terrible smell around the house soon after the murder, and so on. Every detail now makes sense as something that leads up to critical moment. Nothing is extraneous. We see the hair. Bingo! The story ends.

“A Rose for Emily” was published nearly a century ago and remains a powerful classic.

This is not to say that the story should always end at that moment of revelation. Depending on the subject matter, the story might require a bit more summing up. But not too much. The sooner it ends after the bingo moment, the more power it retains.

In addition, the “bingo moment” should be in the present time of the story, not in a flashback. In the title story of Lee Smith’s collection, “Me and My Baby View the Eclipse,” an otherwise happily-married housewife and mother, Sharon, has been having a clandestine affair with a local pharmacist, Raymond. Then, on a day when he comes over so they can watch the eclipse in her backyard and then go to her bed, they are discovered afterward by her six-year-old coming home from school. Raymond, nearly dressed, distracts the child, but the next day, when the girl asks who he was, Sharon says, “Oh, just nobody,”and suddenly realizes that is true. This is the bingo moment. The affair is over. She will always love Raymond, but she loves her family and her life more.

A lesser writer might have flashed back to the near-discovery of the affair. A lesser writer might have had her mulling over what happened yesterday and telling the reader the affair ended then. But it didn’t. It ended when her semi-aware daughter asked a question she never wanted asked. It ended in the present.

For the writer, one way to troubleshoot a story-in-progress that doesn’t quite work is to look at it scene by scene and ask if each element is leading up to the bingo moment. If not, get rid of it or revise it so that it does. Ask if the bingo moment is in the present of the story. If not, move it. Small changes can sometimes add up to big differences in the effect the work has on the reader.

This concept of a “bingo moment” works best for the short story rather than the novel. Sometimes there’s a “bingo moment” that ends a novel, but often a longer work needs a little more falling action after the bingo moment in order not to feel cut off too soon. But for the short story it can be a valuable tool for making the work memorable.

Fiction Tip 2 - The Bear

October 11th, 2017 by ebache

If the story is about a bear, bring on the bear.

There’s no better way to drive off a potential reader than to frontload a story, or even a novel, with a lot of extraneous material. Paragraphs about the turning leaves, the deteriorating neighborhood, the family’s history — all of these can be lovely, even lyrical, and the details may even be essential to the finished work. But more times than not, putting the critical subject first will keep the reader reading instead of checking the phone.

One of the most powerful ways to introduce the bear is with a zinger one-liner:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

“I am an invisible man.” — Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.” The Stranger, Albert Camus

And on a considerable less famous note: “I hated my mother in the summer of 1963, and as I recall, she hated me back.”—The Activist’s Daughter, Ellyn Bache

But more often than not, it takes more than one line to introduce the bear. The opening can be as long as you like so long as it encapsulates the main subject of the story and is potent enough to keep the reader’s attention.

“One night, deep into it, when sounds are prone to carry, a baby boy lies crying on Sara Creamer’s kitchen table. He is minutes old, still wet with his mother’s blood, and hungry for his mother’s milk.

But she does not hear his cries She is no longer there.”

This is the opening of Bren McClain’s critically acclaimed debut novel, One Good Mama Bone, about a young woman who takes on the job of raising her husband’s orphaned, illegitimate child. It’s a unique and remarkable story about motherhood, in which a cow (yes — and though it sounds unlikely, it works amazingly well) teaches Sarah how to deal with the daunting tasks of motherhood. Though the cow becomes a powerful mother figure. the critical focus (the “bear,” if you will) is on the young woman who will be thrown into a predicament she can’t escape — something suggested in those first lines.

—

“At four-thirty on Sunday morning Mag came up from sleep with her heart thumping and sweat pouring from her, the way she’d awakened years ago when her son Izzy was out delivering newspapers and she found him two blocks away lying on the street with a broken ankle. She sat up in bed, wide awake, sick to her stomach. She hated motherly premonitions; she thought she was through with them. Except for Simon the seven boys were grown.”
From my novel, Safe Passage, about a family with a son/brother in Beirut when terrorists attack the airport that serves as a Marine headquarters.

—

“The dog was a tan fice–Cowlicked, thin pointed sticks for legs, a pointed little face with powerful whiskers, one ear flopped and one straight.

He was lying on the back steps of Mattie Rigsbee’s brick ranch one summer Saturday morning when she opened the door to throw out a pan of table scraps for the birds. She placed her foot on the step beside him. She was wearing the leather shoes she’d cut slits in for her corns. The dog didn’t move. Holding the bowl, Mattie stepped on out into the yard and tried to see if it was a him or her so she could decide whether or not it would have been possible to keep it if she were younger and more able. If it insisted on staying she would have to call the dogcatcher because she was too old to look after a dog–with everything else she had to do to keep up the house and yard. She was, after all, seventy-eight, lived alone, and was — as she kept having to explain — slowing down.”

Much more low-key than the other examples, this is the opening of Clyde Edgerton’s comic novel, Walking Across Egypt, about an aging woman who is decidedly not slowing down. There’s detail here, yes, but very much focused on the character of Mattie, still far more vitally interested in life than she imagines — which is the whole point of this very funny book..

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Fiction Tips - Where to Begin

A few weeks ago, my “Tips for Fiction Writers” seminar was cancelled partly because high winds caused schools to close for two days and left our area in a state of high confusion. A couple of people asked me when the class would be rescheduled, and since I had no idea, I thought it might be useful to put some of the “tips”online, one at a time over a number of weeks, where anyone can get them for free.

These are very much “tips” and not rules, concepts that I’ve found useful in my own writing over the years, things to think about and put to work where you can. You may realize that you’re already using some of these ideas, probably because as a reader as well as a writer you’ve internalized them and subconsciously decided this was the best way to tell your story. For each topic, I’ve tried to give good examples that illustrate the concept – though there are literally thousands of other works of fiction that illustrate these points – and you can use the “tips” with or without studying the examples. Anyway, here goes – starting at the beginning.

Fiction Tip #1 – WHERE TO START

Most stories and most novels BEGIN WHEN EVERYTHING HAS HAPPENED BUT THE ACTION. A lot of us spend days and weeks writing a whole lot of backstory – mainly, I’ve come to believe, because we need it for ourselves. Then we get into the middle of things – and this is where the story really begins. That four (or six or ten) pages of backstory can be woven, later, into the forward action.

Another way to say this is to start in medias res – in the middle, after things have already gotten under way that will lead to the climactic moment of the piece.

Take a look at William Faulkner’s classic short story, “A Rose For Emily.”

As the story opens, Miss Emily Grierson has died and the whole town is walking toward her house after the funeral, “the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant . . . had seen in at least ten years.”

Right away we know that Emily, now buried, is an eccentric object of curiosity. The events that have shaped her are in the past, soon to be revealed by the narrator during the trek to her house. She wouldn’t pay taxes. She never married but once had a beau. Etc. The pilgrimage, with these details woven in, is the present action of the story – until the shocking finale. Putting any of the “middle” of this story at the beginning would only (in my opinion) have weakened its impact. “A Rose for Emily” was originally published in 1930. You’ve probably read it but if not, you’re in for a treat.

Some other examples:

From the novel Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award..

“The accused man, Kabuo Myamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his arms placed softly on the defendant’s table—the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial.”

The trial comprises the forward action of this brilliant novel about Japanese/American relations, and many, many other issues, in a fishing village on a small island in Puget Sound, in 1954. As the narrative moves through the trial, the reader gets to know Kabuo, his wife, the sheriff, the dead man, and others whose culture and character make up the flawed world in which they live.

—

“Pho,” from my collection “Kaleidoscope: 20 Stories Celebrating Women’s Fiction.” The story was a runner-up for the Nelson Algren Award and first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

“I had a small victory at the music festival in New Orleans, a first place win for my top piano student. I stayed for the awards ceremony, then drove my rental car to Biloxi to see the Nguyens before flying home to Maryland. It was late April, already oppressively hot in the muggy lowlands of Louisiana, the air so thick and weighty that my euphoria soon drained. My fingers ached, especially in the bad right hand. I struggled to grip the wheel. It was one of those days when I could hardly make a fist.”

Sheila is aging, arthritic, a bit depressed, and uncertain about retirement – all things that began long before the story does. The forward action consists of her visit with a Vietnamese family she helped sponsor more than 20 years before – a family she associates with such pleasant things as their delicious noodle soup, pho. In a small way, the visit – and the soup – cure her. When she leaves, even her hands don’t hurt.

Questions? Comments? Email me at ellynbache@gmail.com

The Joys of Women's Magazine Fiction

The Joys of Women’s Magazine Fiction Revisited
February 21st, 2017 by Ellyn Bache

THE JOYS OF WOMEN’S MAGAZINE FICTION REVISITED

My first short story was published in McCall’s Magazine in 1981. I had been writing stories for six years by then, sending them out, getting rejections. So that first acceptance was a huge boost, the beginning of what turned out to be a long fiction-writing career. But it wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had tapped into.

Until the late 1990s, and for most of the 20th century, women by the millions had looked to magazines like McCall’s and Good Housekeeping not just for recipes and decorating tips but for the short stories that appeared each month. At its height, McCall’s had a circulation of 8.4 million. I had loved women’s magazine fiction since I was 12 or 13, reading my mother’s magazines, not knowing millions of others were doing the same. I thought I would do this forever.

Then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, technology- and budget-challenged magazines stopped publishing fiction – and some stopped publishing altogether. There was still women’s fiction, but it came in the form of novels, not short stories. Like most writers, I turned my hand to these longer works – and the short stories I sometimes wrote were longer, more intellectual – “literary” rather than “popular, satisfying in their way but not the same.

Then, time and again at book events, women would hear that I’d started my career writing magazine fiction and they’d reminisce with real fondness about how much they’d liked that type of story and still missed it, even years later. Everyone had a favorite story they still remembered. I did, too – “The Summer Kitchen,” a story from Redbook about making grape jelly in a hot kitchen, standing barefoot on the sticky floor, luxuriating in the purple smell of the grapes. To me, it was the quintessential description of an essentially feminine experience. Some years later, I met the author of that story, the poet and fiction writer Ruth Moose, who told me I wasn’t the only one who recalled that story with nostalgia. To my surprise, I heard similar recollections of some of my own stories and was deeply touched.

The ongoing, almost clandestine interest in that bygone genre was the germ of the idea for my new book, Kaleidoscope: 20 Stories Celebrating Women’s Magazine Fiction, a collection of my stories that originally appeared everywhere from Seventeen and Good Housekeeping to the beautiful, slick regional magazine, Virginia Country to the weekly entertainment newspaper Encore Magazine.

Because those stories were published over a 22 year period, I thought they’d be awfully old-fashioned when I went back – and was surprised to discover how current they still felt. Women’s fiction is often less about plot than about emotions – so even though the characters text instead of talking on a land line, their visceral reactions stay the same. Emotions are pretty universal, pretty timeless.

As one of the first collections of popular (as opposed to strictly “literary”) fiction at what is becoming time of renewed interest in the short story, Kaleidoscope offers a little bit of history along with a great deal of entertainment. Short stories have been a fixture in women’s magazines for centuries, everything from sweet romances to tales of horror – including some of Edgar Allan Poe’s early work in “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” the most important women’s magazine of the 19th century.

But will it make a comeback? General interest magazines continue to give way to special-interest publications about everything from knitting to body-building. A few that still use fiction tend toward simple, formulaic stories, not the sophisticated, thoughtful writing of years past.

But who knows? I think high quality women’s magazine fiction will be with us again for a long time, a much-loved genre with a future as well as a past.

The Babysitting Ghost

GOOD GHOUL, BABYSITTER EXTRAORDINAIRE

In more than thirty years of publishing fiction, I have written only one ghost story.

I don’t believe in ghosts. Also, I am afraid of them.

But many years ago when my four children were small, I was intrigued by the tale of a good ghoul as opposed to a scary one, with talents any harried mother might find irresistible.

The piece started not as fiction but as a feature for The Baltimore Sun Magazine, about a couple who had bought a spacious, pre-Civil War farmhouse to accommodate their growing family – two little boys and another on the way. Everyone loved the big rooms and large yard. What they didn’t love was the occasional chiming of a clock that didn’t exist, the sense they had of eyes watching them as they painted their family room, a rocking chair that rocked for no reason. They joked that the place must be haunted.

Then the baby was born. Almost at once, he slept through the night. His pacifier never fell out of his mouth. Once, a window that had been left open in his room was already secured against a summer storm when his mother came in to close it. Late one night, the parents returned from a party to see a long-haired girl – the babysitter, they assumed – visible in an upstairs window, comforting the baby. But inside the house, both the baby and the sitter were sound asleep.

A ghostly nanny? It seemed so. Research on the history of the house made them decide the ghost was a mother who, more than a century before, had lost her child. Maybe she was trying to protect this one.

But as time passed, the baby grew into a child who understood some of what was going on. When a local newspaper ran an article about the haunting, it spawned lots of gossip. Did the boy really see something? Or had he heard people talking about it, including his siblings? Either way, he was no longer comforted by the spectral being in his room. Night after night he woke up screaming. “The lady” was sitting in the empty rocking chair near his bed! He cried and fussed and became ever more agitated.

But what to do?

Soothing words didn’t work. Bribes (pancakes for breakfast!) were a joke. Appealing to reason produced louder temper tantrums. “You don’t believe me! I know you don’t!”

So the mother said the only thing she could. Of course she believed him! And like good mothers everywhere, she sat down with her son and had a talk with the offender. Speaking to the empty rocking chair where the ghost hung out, she spoke softly, with as much affection as she could muster. “I know you love him,” she told the chair. “I know you took good care of him. But now you’re making him frightened. If you really care for him, you’ll go away.”

And with a sudden sense of something leaving the room, the ghost did.

Did I believe it? Do you? Once, the family related, a guest had insisted she couldn’t sleep because a little blond-haired girl kept crawling into bed with her. Another had rushed from the bathroom claiming she’d been pushed from behind while she was washing her hair. Ghostly pranks? The good ghoul afraid of the menacing dark? Maybe. But how did that tie in with the mother’s description of a translucent scene she’d seen superimposed over the master bedroom, of slaves discussing the underground railroad? For me, it didn’t.
All the same, I used almost everything I’d been told, and the story ran as planned in The Baltimore Sun Magazine.

Afterwards, I moved out of state and lost touch with the family. Sometimes I wished I could have talked to the young ward of the ghostly sitter to see what he remembered when he got older. But by then I was writing mostly fiction, and eventually my one-and-only ghost tale became a short story that was published in McCall’s in 1987. I didn’t think about it again until I began sorting through old stories for Kaleidoscope, a collection of my women’s magazine fiction from the 1980s and 1990s, due out next spring.

I suppose, like the ghosts themselves, old ghost stories never die.

As I said, I was the mother of four young children when I wrote mine. Now I’m the grandmother of fifteen. I still don’t believe in ghosts and I’m still afraid of them – but with a caveat. I figure that, if you are going to have a ghost in the house, it might as well babysit.

Cover Story

Like most writers with a string of books in print, I’m often asked about the covers.

Does the author get a say in them? Sometimes.

How important are they? Very.

And like most writers, I’ve seen my share of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Three truly wonderful covers. One disaster. Lots of in-between.

The Good:

Depending on the publisher, and almost always with a big New York house, the author has little or no control over the cover. My 2011 novel, The Art of Saying Goodbye, was published by Harper Collins, which could have left me out of the design process entirely. But my editor, Carrie Feron, sent me each rendition, including the first one . . . an impressionistic painting of two women, one with her head on the other’s shoulder, being comforted as they sat on a park bench in floaty summer dresses, with a soft-focus white building in the background.

My daughter said it was pretty but looked like a lesbian love story in set World War II – not, as was actually the case, a contemporary novel about a group of 40-something women in an upscale suburban neighborhood, struggling with the illness of a longtime neighbor.

Even before I’d had time to object, Carrie rejected that first cover. She jettisoned several more. She ordered some fine-tuning. The final product was remarkable. A drawing of three women in jeans walking through a lovely but somber fall landscape, it captured perfectly the serious, powerful, graceful journey at the book’s center.

The novel got good reviews. It was chosen as an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. It was nominated for SIBA’s annual book award.

How much did the cover influence that?

Hard to say. But experience tells me there was certainly some. Years before, my novel Festival in Fire Season had come out with a dust jacket featuring colorful azaleas, a hint of fire, and the word, “Sizzling” from the Publishers Weekly review – visuals so intriguing it was hard not to pick up the book. The novel became a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club Selection, important in those days. Later, my novel Riggs Park featured three girls holding hands, hair flying as they ran through a summer landscape that perfectly conveyed happy friendships long past. The novel was selected to help launch a new line of women’s fiction

The Bad:

The Activist’s Daughter is about a girl from DC who flees her mother’s embarrassing civil rights activism by going to college in North Carolina (The South! oh no!) in the fall of 1963. It was published originally by a small, well-respected feminist press. I had no say in the cover, but a warm, pleasant-looking version was sent to me while the book was in production. Imagine my horror when the final copies arrived, all black-and-white and drab tan, with an illustration of a woman with her hair in a bun (in the ‘60s?) and an outfit (floral blouse, straight skirt) from no discernible era, being dragged off by what look like storm troopers. Above that is my name and the title of the book, nothing else. On the back cover, in tiny type, there’s a long plot summary, an excerpt, and some reviews but no hint that this is a novel – much less by a fiction writer whose earlier work, Safe Passage, had been made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon – a film many potential readers would know.

When I started finding copies of the book in the social studies sections of bookstores, it dawned on me that people thought the novel was a memoir.

Happily, the print run soon sold out and the rights reverted to me. The reprint has a beautiful cover (in which, yes, I did have a say) featuring the Old Well in Chapel Hill where the book is set, placards to suggest the civil rights movement, and the words “A Novel” prominently displayed. Over the years, The Activist’s Daughter has become a perennial reading group selection for readers interested in the ‘60s. I’m convinced the new cover helped.

The Ugly:

Most book covers are neither beautiful nor disastrous, even with glitches that can be maddening for the author. The protagonist of Over 50’s Singles Night is named BJ Fradkin – except on the cover, where she became BJ Franklin.The pastel pink cover of Raspberry Sherbet Kisses features lovers kissing while standing in an oversized fruit bowl – so sweet that one reviewer said the novel is light but not that light (about a woman trying to hide the fact that she sees music and tastes shapes – as some people really do). The sales impact? I’ll never know.

If a book is a big seller, the publisher will sometimes correct errors on the next printing. But if sales are low and the writer is unhappy? In today’s digital environment, most books are also e-books, which can stay “in print” indefinitely at little cost to the publisher, which generally opts to hold on to rights rather than reverting them.

Often, the best a writer can hope for is an editor sensitive to the visual journey readers take before deciding whether to open the book and embark on the literary one. It makes a huge difference

Transformers

I’m sometimes amazed at the way lessons of fiction (my own included), hit us intellectually while we’re reading or writing, but don’t affect us emotionally until much later.

Case in point: if you walk through my house right now, you’ll find Transformers tangled in all the leaves and branches of my larger houseplants, courtesy of my four-year-old grandson, Adam. Transformers, based on movie characters, are small toys that, with a few twists of the moving parts, change from robots into vehicles or weapons. From the moment Adam arrives until the moment he leaves, he spends his time inventing stories for the Transformers to act out, the gorier the better, bad guys versus good guys. In the ferocity of battle, some of them fly into trees or hide under the couch, never to be seen again – or at least until I clean.

His fascination is entirely serious. The other day, while buckling up in the family’s minivan, he announced with great conviction, “This isn’t our car.”

“What do you mean?” his mother asked.

“This is Gray Man, who transforms into our car so we can use it.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

Later, at home, Adam got out and patted the car on the hood before entering the house. “Thanks, Gray Man,” he said.

My novel, The Art of Saying Goodbye, is about a group of women who also undergo a transformation as they respond in very different ways to the illness of a longtime neighbor. In their struggle to help her, they form bonds they don’t expect, and find themselves changing in remarkable ways. But although their friend leaves behind a legacy of joy and friendship, she also leaves a grieving husband and two distraught young daughters.

In the real-life events on which the novel is based, the stricken woman was the star of our neighborhood – the prettiest one, the nicest one, the one who seemed to want nothing more than the lovely family she already had. Even now, years later, it is hard to believe how quickly all that was snatched away. Only once did she ever utter a word of complaint, the day she said she wasn’t in pain (we knew she was), but hated knowing she wouldn’t get to see her girls grow up.

Last week at the beach, Adam had a terrible day. Just before lunch, he ended up under water in the pool, unable to rise to the surface until his father rescued him, unharmed. Hours later, he fell off the top of a bunk bed and hit his head on a metal bar. Although not in pain, he was certainly addled, unable to remember anything that had happened all day or buckle his seatbelt properly. Rushed to the ER, he got surprisingly good treatment, and a CAT scan that showed nothing. By the time he came home, he was clearer-headed, remembering things, returning to normal.

It was then, and not when I was writing my novel, not when I was re-reading it, not until that moment, that I was struck, viscerally, by what I’d known so coolly, all along. The immeasurable lesson of a tragedy that doesn’t quite touch you – but so easily could -- is a new and deeper respect for the gift of time that lets us watch our children, and now, for me, grandchildren, transforming every day.