The literary tango

My favorite move in the tango is the corte. In it, the woman lunges forward in a single dramatic and glamorous step, arches her back, bends her knees, tosses her head….great stuff.

Of course it goes without saying (although I'll say it anyway) that if the woman is to step forward, the man has to step back. Dancers call this "creating negative space," and it's just what it sounds like - using your body to create a kind of container on the dance floor, a very certain and specific space for your partner to step into. Sometimes the lead dancer is a big clingy. Hesitant to step back enough and if the man doesn't create enough space for the woman to step into....well you can imagine the disasterous results.

I think it's equally important for a writer to learn how to create negative space. The writer can’t always be the one to advance, just as the man doesn’t always advance in the tango.

But it's hard for writers to step back just as it's hard for men to do it on the dance floor. I don't think it's a matter of ego. I think it's more about the fear that comes when we give up control....Stepping back feels like giving up control, which is ironic, because I'm actually starting to believe that your ability to create negative space is the ultimate demonstration of your finesse.

Bear with me. Here's what I'm trying to say. In a cortes, it's easy to assume since the woman is the one stepping forward the woman is the one leading the move. Not so. The man is using his body to tell her to go forward. It's not like he has let her go totally - not like he says “Hey, babe. You’re on your own. It’s free expression time. It’s fine with me if you want to go over by the bar and start to cha cha.” Quite the contrary. When the man steps backward he is still leading and he is leading her to go into a very specific place on a very specific beat. The cortes is a controlled, technique-driven move. Creating a space and inviting the other person to step into it - which in dancing circles is called “back leading” is a demanding and sophisticated way to dance.


Women love cortes. In my class the women always want to do them and they'll happily dance with any man who knows how to lead a corte. Easy to see why. It’s a fun and flashy move and also - at least from the woman’s perspective - not that hard to do. Men are always less enthused, because backleading is damn hard. The man has to do several tricky steps in order to create the space the woman is stepping into. So for the woman it’s a double blessing - an easy step that makes her the star. And for the man it’s a double curse - a difficult step he doesn’t even get credit for. Leading a woman into a corte is a generous gesture on the part of a man….and it’s equally generous when a writer invites a reader to step forward. A movement away from the idea that this story is somehow something that the writer is doing to the reader and a movement towards the idea that this story is something they’re in together, like a dance.

The poor guys at group dance class. They really struggle. Inexperienced dancers think their job is to grab their partners as tight as they can and march forward, forcing the woman to go backward with every step. There are two problems with this. Number one, a man dragging a woman from one side of the floor to the other is not much of a dance. People who dance like that are said to be "dancing tight" and that's not a good thing. Women don't like men who dance tight. You can drag a woman across the floor but you can't make her like it. Next time she's going to dance with somebody else, somebody who can come up with more varied and creative moves, somebody who lets her in on the action. Somebody who dances loose.

Number two, if marching forward is your only move pretty soon you’re going to find yourself in a corner. And once you're a corner, you’ve got to think of a way to get yourself and your partner/reader out. What writer on earth hasn’t at some point gotten into a plot corner? There's no graceful way to get out of them. After you've been stuck in a few, you eventually realize that you have to figure out a way to build the back and forth movement into the dance, so that you never get into that corner in the first place.

In my second novel I am trying to figure out how to write loose, how to create times when the reader knows more than the narrator, when the reader can predict the next move, when the reader can figure out things on her own, can enter in the story as a participant. It's hellishly hard. It gives me more understanding and greater sympathy for the guys I dance with. Creating negative space isn't the easiest move to pull off....but I know what a supreme pleasure it is, a borderline spiritual/sexual pleasure, to be led by someone who knows what he's doing and I'd like to create that sensation in anyone willing to plunk down $24.95 for my book. I want my readers to feel like they're dancing with a pro.

Zen and the art of publishing

The last week has been very full and productive and I'm on one of those elusive writer highs. Also been meditating faithfully every day (possibly a correlation....hmmmm.....) and just a few minutes ago, while listening to my beloved Jon Kabot-Zinn CD, I remembered something that happened a long time back. Ten years maybe.

I was in New Mexico, on my way to a Native American retreat. It was a typical western landscape, i.e., very blank. One narrow road through a rocky red landscape, one dusty gas station beside that road. I stopped and was shocked when a man actually came out to pump the gas. I was rummaging in my purse looking for cash because it also hit me that this gas station probably didn't take credit cards. As he was standing beside the car holding the pump he had time to take his measure of me, the rental car, the new-agey books in the back and he asked, sort of grumpily, if I was going to the meditation center. I said yeah - probably 99% of his clientele was either coming or going to the meditation center, there didn't seem to be anything else on this road - and he said"You don't have to go to a place like that. I can tell you the secret of life."

I had the feeling I was getting ready to get a great big jolt of Jesus but I nodded anyway and he said...

"Just don't take everything so damn personally."

Through the years I have thought about him several times. I don't know that anyone I've ever met, and I've known my share of philosophers and brainiacs, has ever improved upon his advice.

It's good council for the ups and downs of publishing. You send something out and you don't hear anything back and in those long weeks of waiting it's easy to tell yourself all sorts of stories. None of them kind. None of them fair. Or it's so easy to take the absense of a marketing campaign or a low advance or a bad review too much to heart. They don't like me. They don't like my book. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that publishing is a large, lumbering, and multi-headed beast and that very little that this beast does is a direct reflection on Kim Wright Wiley of Charlotte, NC. If I could just let things happen without rushing in to define and analyze the situation I know I'd be a happier person. Probably a better writer too.

I'm glad I thought about the gas station prophet during my meditation. And I will try to not take everything so damn personally. At least not today.

"What did you do last night?" "The wrong thing."

This has been an insanely busy week. Not just the stuff about getting the webpage up and going (which, thanks to my sainted friend Jason of MacDowell Colony fame, is going very smoothly) but also....

I told my agent I would send him the first draft of the second book by the end of this week. So of course I look over it and of course now that I know someone else, someone important to me, is actually going to read it, I spaz out. Everything looks wrong. I start polishing and trimming and then of course of course of course the missing scene, that place in the manuscript where I had actually typed INSERT SCENE HERE comes to me in a rush. So I start writing that too. Polishing the old stuff and pacing and fretting and adding new stuff and pacing some more. But it is the most incredible high when a whole scene comes to you. Real life fades away. You live in the book. It's strange but it's also a rush.

Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading draft number 314 of the new scene. It was afternoon and the shop was almost empty and as I go up for cream one of the bored teenage girls behind the counter says to the other one "What did you do last night?" and her friend answered "The wrong thing."

What a great exchange! It's perfect. I rushed back to put it into my scene. Because that's the thing about a writing binge - and make no mistake, the last four days have been a writing binge - the whole world seems like it is conspiring to help you write. People speak in dialogue, colors seem brighter, metaphors leap out at you as you walk down the street.


It doesn't happen often. But it does happen

Where does inspiration come from?

I've been working on my author interview for the first novel - quite a few of my friends responded with questions and I'm in the process of answering them. Here are the first two:


What inspired you to write about this subject?

When I got divorced twelve years ago, two weird things happened. First of all, women started spontaneously telling me their bad marriage stories, even women who I thought were perfectly happy. If you get divorced in a small town, you’ve screwed up in a very public way. All of a sudden you become the person it’s okay to confess to and women were practically flagging me down in the supermarket, leaning over my cart and saying “You know, things aren’t that great at home….” I became the repository of a hundred women’s secrets, and the notes I kept from that period became the basis of Love in Mid Air. The stories were altered, of course, a loose amalgamation of what was happening to me and my friends. For so long I had thought it was just me who was unhappy but now I was being shown the whole spectrum, the oceanic quality of female discontent. I walked around for a year saying ‘Wow, isn’t anybody happily married?”
The other thing I realized is that there were very few books that dealt with the subject of divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even thought it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40. And there was often some sort of quick fix - the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house. I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another - ideally as fast as possible - with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web. I knew that needed to make it into the story as well.


Is the material autobiographical? Are you Elyse?

I’m Elyse, but I’m also Kelly and Nancy and Lynn and Belinda and even Gerry and Phil and Jeff. For me, a novel is like a dream - all the characters are aspects of me, in dialogue with each other. But while the material isn’t literally autobiographical, it’s emotionally autobiographical. I’ve never been kissed by a stranger in the traveler’s chapel of the Dallas airport, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve wished would happen. It’s not hard to imagine how it might feel.

A little irony on a Tuesday morning

There has been a sudden flurry of activity about preparing publicity for the first book. The people at the publishing house have been talking to me about websites, email blasts, author photos, etc. (Even though the pub date has now been pushed back to March. Don't ask.)

The tasks at hand are to make a list of questions for reading groups (i.e., book clubs) and to do an "author interview" both of which will go on the website when the hardback debuts and which will be included in the paperback. I'm not having any trouble coming up with the questions for the book clubs but I'm having trouble thinking of how to interview myself. I'm glad they are letting me do it...and I appreciate that it's my background in journalism that's making them think I can easily do it, ergo the irony.

Turns out it's hard to interview yourself. Turns out that I'm a bit secretive.

Also turns out that the only questions I'm coming up with are questions I already know the answers to, i.e., it's tempting to torque this opportunity toward subjects that I want to talk about. To lob myself pitches I know I can hit out of the park.

I might be missing the chance to ask something fresher and more surprising.

So....do any of you have any ideas for author questions?

My velveteen characters

At what point does a character become real?

At waltz class last night I was talking to Ed, a fellow dancer and sci-fi/fantasy writer, who was saying what I've heard so many other writers say, i.e., that at some point in the story his characters begin to take on a life of their own. I'm not a writer who tends to have that sort of experience - I always remain conscious that I have created my characters and that to some degree I am moving them around like chess pieces - but there is a funny and quasi-magical moment when other people begin to think of them as real. Like for example I've just finished looking at the proofs for Love in Mid Air. An exciting part of the process. The book was very lightly edited, hardly any changes at all except for things like comma additions. but at one point there was a back and forth exchange in the margin between the editor and copy editor. They write in different color pencils so I could see the dialogue and the comments were about a line in the book, near the end, when Kelly casually mentions that back in high school Elyse was the homecoming queen.

It is a somewhat significant exchange despite the off-the-cuff way in which I've set it up. Throughout the book we see that Elyse thinks Kelly is beautiful and perfect....that she's blind to her faults in that way women often are with their best friends. Since the book is told from Elyse's POV it's easy to assume that yes, Kelly is the princess and Elyse is less-so. This exchange is my hint that Elyse's POV might not be entirely accurate and that, in fact, Kelly sees Elyse as the blessed one, the one who was always confident and beautiful and full of friends, an angle that is explored in the second book, which is told from Kelly's POV.

It's not a major point - just a nod to the fact that women sometimes put their friends on pedestals and yet are blind to their own beauty.

But then there is this dialogue in the margin in which the editor says that it seems more likely Kelly would have been the Homecoming Queen and the copy editor writes back that he can totally see Elyse being the Homecoming Queen and then the editor writes something else back.... The comments required no response from me, but it was a strange moment, a realization that Kelly and Elyse were real enough that these two people would believe they had a past, that they once were in high school, that they would debate (with a high degree of insight) about which of them might have been more popular 30 years ago.

It reminds me of the time this same editor required an additional scene and I was telling this to my agent. A three way conversation followed in which I proposed a scenario and both of them sort of said some version of "No, I don't think Elyse would do that." Which was fine - maybe my original idea wasn't the best and I later came up with something better - but it was another funny moment, having the two of them tell me what Elyse would or would not do. I felt like saying "I'll gladly come up with another idea but - just for the record - Elyse will do anything I make her do. She's not real."

I think in the long run this may be one of the more rewarding aspects of writing a book, having people react like this to your characters. For me their evolution was so incremental that I can't point to a single moment and say "This is where Kelly became real" but it pleases me to see, in hindsight, that at some point, without me fully realizing it, she must have taken on a bit of a life of her own.