A Conversation with Leslie Lehr

In the summer Unlocking Your Story workshops we've been discussing the differences between fiction and nonfiction, and what each one offers as a form to share the story that you want to tell. For some writers it's an obvious inclination toward one or the other; for other writers, it's not so clear.

I had the great pleasure of talking in depth with prize-winning author, essayist and screenwriter Leslie Lehr about her point of view on this topic. As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, she shared openly about her own creative process and approach, which I found extremely thought-provoking. Leslie also teaches novel writing at UCLA Extension Writers' Program and is a story consultant for Truby Writers Studio. You can read the full interview below!

---

Leslie Lehr is a prize-winning author, essayist and screenwriter. Her new novel, What A Mother Knows, follows Wife Goes On, 66 Laps, and three nonfiction books, including Welcome to Club Mom. Her essays appear in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and anthologies such as Mommy Wars. Leslie mentors writers through private consulting and Truby's Writers Studio. A graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts with an MFA from Antioch University, she is a member of PEN, The Authors Guild, WGA, Women In Film, The Women's Leadership Council of L.A., and is a contributor to the Tarcher/Penguin Series "Now Write."

Karin: You write both fiction and nonfiction. How would you describe the difference between the two?

Leslie: With fiction, like my new novel, What A Mother Knows, every single element is designed to express an emotional truth, so you design and funnel everything for that purpose. With memoir, you are limited to reality. You can expand and compress time or include some things and not others, but it's a tricky thing. It's still your point of view, but our memories are not always reliable, nor popular. Fiction offers a structure in which to include the things that are the most important to you. 

So would you say fiction is more structured or formulaic than memoir? 

Not formulaic in a bad way. The best memoirs have a frame, but you're still dealing with weighing personal experience with what you learned from it. In a novel you are forced to make things up around those ideas. You have to tell a story based on a person who has a need and a desire, strong opponents, a battle, a climax and a resolution - and more things that happen in between depending on what the genre is. It all springs from your theme but doesn't explain it. Writing a novel, the reader needs to know where the characters are all the time. You need to be the camera. And if a certain element doesn't work to tell your story, it shouldn't be there. Everything needs to be carefully designed.

In memoir, you can usually take more time with internal narrative. And you have to tell the truth even if it's just your side of the truth. You can't add stuff that happened to help make your point. That said, if you have something to say, you can say it in either form.

My dad is a scientist, and he doesn't read any fiction. We've discussed this often over the years. And I've written both. I've written three fiction books, three nonfiction, screenplays, and I do a lot of personal essays. My dad writes a lot of articles, but he thinks that fiction is make-believe. I have to tell him that nonfiction - even books on science and history - is according to the statistics of that day. History changes. It also tends to be one person's point of view. So if you're trying to tell a story about an emotional event or some reality, fiction is the way I like to do it. There is a real truth you can get to in fiction that you can't always get to in non-fiction.

There are benefits to both forms, but I am having the most fun with full-length fiction. And I do use fiction as a device to explore real life even beyond the entertainment or escape value. Currently, I'm working on the script for What A Mother Knows, which is truly puzzle-making, cutting so much while keeping the meaning intact. I'm also developing a new story, based on emotional and cultural truths that I want to express. I also do manuscript consultations for Truby Writers Studio using story structure techniques that enhance memoirs as well as novels.

If someone is debating between fiction and nonfiction to tell a certain story, is there a way that they can answer that question for themselves?

That's a personal choice. In fiction, stories are better told in particular genres. But when you want to tell a certain truth, either commit to transparency or wrap it in a fictional story.

Years before I wrote What A Mother Knows, I wrote a memoir that a family member objected to so much that I decided to hold off on publishing until it felt safe for everyone. Some writers feel comfortable even when others are not comfortable - I'm just not one. I think life is challenging enough than to ask for trouble, especially when I can deal with the same issues in fiction. And sure enough, a bit of it ended up in What A Mother Knows - the emotional truth of it, anyway.

The advantage of writing fiction is that you can make up things in order to tell a story in a way that can magnify the idea that you want to explore. On the other hand, you're in competition with people making up any story, and so it has to be really good and bigger than life and yet more intimate and precise, because you're trying to tell your story. So it's a decision that you, as the writer, have to make, and be 'all in' whichever you choose.

Last year a woman from the State Library of California read all of my work for an in depth interview at Literary Orange. She pointed out that most of my work begins with a personal essay then expands into a novel. So, without being conscious of it, I've been playing with the best of both worlds.

Is it true that you always know the ending to your stories when you begin?

I always figure you can't hit the bull's eye unless you can see the target. But that's just me. I know a lot of people who don't know the ending. If you know where you're going, then you're going to design a story that makes it all logical. You want the ending to be a surprise, but it has to be a logical surprise. You know how disappointing it can be when the butler did it? All the time we put in to watching or reading something and then there's no pay-off because something came out of the blue. It has to be really synthesized to work in a certain way. I'm not saying that everyone should have an ending and stick to it. The character's journey can inspire a writer to change the ending. For me it just helps to know where I'm going. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and a lot of passion. For me, caring that much about a story typically means caring that it gets to a particular ending.

In memoir, you might not know the ending when you begin, unless you are ten years hence and have built a strong story frame. The writing can be part of the journey to a deeper understanding. It's a process of finding that transcendent meaning; it's eureka. It's having those epiphanies. And it's often cathartic. That's why it's so important to keep a pad of paper by your bed, to write things down, because it's in there. And you may think you have the ending, and then four years later you find the real ending. But it's never really an ending because you're still alive and you've got other things going on, and maybe those experiences contribute to your understanding.

To learn more about Leslie Lehr, visit leslielehr.com

See all interviews

A Conversation with Daniel Jones

How timely that the February 4th release of Daniel Jones's book Love Illuminated not only coincides with the 10-year anniversary of his renowned New York Times's “Modern Love” column, but also with the fêted Valentine's holiday. The book is a search to find the connections - the themes and trends - among the 50,000 stories that have crossed his desk over the years, and will no doubt offer some enlightening insights.

I had the pleasure of speaking with him last week about his new book, as well as his experience editing the ML column over the years. It was a treat to hear his perspective on everything from the rise of the personal essay to his own editing and creative writing process. You can read my full conversation with him below.

---

Daniel Jones has edited the Modern Love column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times since its inception in October 2004. His books include two essay anthologies, Modern Love and The Bastard on the Couch, and a novel, After Lucy, which was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His writing has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times, Elle, Parade, Real Simple, and Redbook. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, writer Cathi Hanauer, and their two children.

Karin: Tell me about your new book, Love Illuminated, and how it came to be.

Daniel Jones: This book was really a search for me to figure out what I knew, because I felt like I'd been doing this [Modern Love] column for years and years, and every once in a while I would sort of stand up and look around at what I'd done and what I'd read. I'd write, on an annual basis, an editor's observations column on Valentine's Day. I did that about five or six times. And I'd try to make sense in very few words - I think those columns were 1500 to 1700 words - of trends, and you know, entertaining asides. And I felt like I wanted to do that in a bigger way, and really try to understand what I'd learned about what people are doing and what's different. I didn't feel like I could do that unless I wrote a book. Because people would always ask me about it, and they would say, “You must be in a position where you ought to know something about this.” I felt like I was in that position, and I didn't know. So yeah, this book was to answer that.

It was a great experience, actually being able to see themes and how technology was changing relationships, what online dating was doing and how people who were having affairs were rationalizing them according to certain lines of argument. Those sorts of themes and trends started to emerge from the material, and that was a satisfying process.

How has the Modern Love column changed and evolved over ten years?

I think it has evolved in several ways. In the beginning we didn't quite know what the content of the column would be, other than it would be broadly about relationships. I remember we discussed what the name would be, and I was actually the one who suggested “Modern Love” and part of the intent was for it to be broad enough that we wouldn't be hemmed in just to romantic stories that were just about romantic love. I just worried about its longevity. How is this thing going to last if you limit the focus of what you're running essays on? So I interpreted that pretty broadly. At the beginning there was an eagerness about covering certain topics, and having a representative sample of experiences. It seemed wide open, but we wanted the column to represent a bunch of different things and get experiences out there that we thought people would want to read about and that would be eye-opening in one way or another. I wanted to shape readers' perceptions of what this column could be.

That has completely changed. I feel like so many different kinds of stories have run, there is a real freedom now in not feeling like I have to define the column anymore. People know what the range is now, and I feel that I can run things that are offbeat in one way or another or that barely fit under the umbrella of Modern Love, or as far as that umbrella can extend. If you have 12 essays and you're starting a column, those 12 essays are really important in terms of what you're saying. But if you have 500 essays, each one becomes less important in terms of how it's going to shift the perception of what you're doing. So that's a freedom. I feel I can just go after strong, varied material wherever it goes. And so many topics have been covered way beyond what I ever expected I could dream about getting.

Do you have a philosophy or opinion about why the personal essay and personal narrative in general has become so popular? It seems to be more than just a trend.

It's enduring, isn't it?

Young people are writing - people who are in college or in their 20s - with social media and blogging and all these phases that we've gone through. So much of it is about writing about yourself with a sense of audience. I don't think anyone my age or within 15 years of my age - I'm 51 - had that sense growing up, that you had an audience for your experiences. And my own kids who are high school age, wherever they go... or whatever trip they go on... or whatever they're thinking, they can post it and have an audience for it. And, I think, it's not fictional. It's not a fictional mindset. It's a “I've-done-this-and-now-you-guys-can-respond-to-it” kind of mindset. I don't know if that's the main influence, but I think it can't help but be an influence. People are experiencing things, and as they're experiencing them, they want to know what the response is. And it seems to me that that leads into personal essay writing. It's a much more difficult form than posting on Facebook, but I think a lot of the impulse might be the same.

Also, people had timed the rise of the memoir to pre-911 and post-911. I don't feel like I've figured that one out, but there was a lot of talk that that kind of jolt of reality somehow gave a boost to non-fiction, because you're facing things that are difficult. And people assumed that fiction wasn't as urgent enough in that way. I don't know, but that was another influence back then.

What do you look for in an essay submission? What for you are the key ingredients of a compelling story or personal essay?

It's very hard to answer. But a lot of it has to do with, not enough people writing personal essay realize that it can't just be a summarized story from your life. It has to employ the tools of drama that a reader needs - have scenes and dialogue - and the narrator needs to be transported from one place to a new understanding by the end. And hopefully some of that will be shown through scene and dialogue, instead of just told. People consider nonfiction writing or essay writing similar to journal writing, but journal writing is often just that summary style where you're getting it down. So much of what I get that doesn't work, even if it's good writing, is the 'this happened, then this happened, and then this happened' kind of storytelling where you're really just telling a summary of whatever you've just been through, and you're not really shaping into something that has a sense of plot or drama about it.

Beyond that, I think a tone - or a voice - that expresses curiosity rather than judgment or intelligence that you're trying to get down to the page. It's usually a curious but smart voice that works in these essays, someone who has been humbled by experience and is generously sharing that. A lot of material I get that doesn't work can be show-offy, in sort of a trying to be funny. Oh, a typical essay I get is “the long list of losers that I've gone out with.” That has to be really well done to work and not many people do it that well. It's a stance of “I'm better than all these people” and “these people are all nuts!” You don't want to hear people rant on about stuff like that.

You mentioned that you've become a better editor over the years. In what way?

In the early days, these could be difficult essays to edit - very personal stories where you're asking very personal questions and changing peoples' words in ways that cause conflict. That I almost never have anymore. Most of it is that I've gotten better at being able to talk through an essay and probe for more material, or whatever, in ways that are just professional. I don't feel like it is a fraught process anymore, and maybe that comes across to the writer. It's just like, “This is what we need to do,” and it's just a smooth, smooth process. I've learned what's missing in an essay and how to ask for it. I've learned how to write in material based on an interview with a writer, and have them massage it into their style. So that editorial process is probably the most easy and fun part of the job at this point. The hardest is saying “no” all day long and having to write an explanation to someone I would owe an explanation to about why a piece doesn't work. There's an art to that that I don't think one ever quite masters.

How do you work with the writers? Are most essays you accept pretty much “there” when they're submitted?

It's certainly nice to get a piece that is close, and that just requires cutting. The piece I'm working on right now, which is for mid-February is a piece that was 1800 words, really perfectly written from start to finish, and it's just trying to find 300 words to take out. It's just not very hard. It doesn't require a lot of back and forth.

But the essays that I've worked on in the past year - and I work on a lot - were really good stories or powerful perspectives that I wanted to run, but they needed work. And it wasn't that I felt I was doing a person a favor, it was just that, “This is a really good story and I want to get it in, and we're going to go back and forth on this enough times that it gets into that shape.”

But it is true that in the first years of doing the column, when I didn't have this sort of glut of material, I would do a ton of work on something. There was a piece that I ran that someone recommended - a writer that he'd been teaching in a workshop and she was working on this 5,000 word essay. And I had to take a 5,000 word essay and cut it down to a 1,700 word essay. And that was a lot of work. It was worth it and I learned from it, but I would never do that these days. If something comes in over 1,800 words, I just say, “You didn't read the guidelines.” It would really have to be good and close for me to take it on.

As far as your own book, Love Illuminated, can you describe what your writing process was like? How did you find the structure for it?

This is the first nonfiction book I've written from start to finish. I had a novel that came out in 2000, and the process of writing that was like the famous quote, that writing a novel is like driving a car at night where you can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way. I didn't know what was more than 30 feet ahead of me and I just kept writing that way forward and I didn't jump ahead, I just kept writing forward.

Love Illuminated, I felt, needed a structure. The real challenge with this book for me was, “What can I say about this that hasn't been said a million times?” and “What can I bring to it that another writer on this subject matter couldn't?” It seemed to me I had all these stories - both published and unpublished - that I could draw upon and I had my own experience, my own marriage and all of that as material, to the point where I ought to be able to see trends in it and how was I going to compile that into a book? 

I made several attempts. I have a very blunt agent who is not afraid to say, “What were you thinking?” and I had a couple of stabs at book ideas that just were not right and mostly based on what I thought a book like this needed to be, based on what I'd read and gone to the shelves in Barnes and Noble and saw what people were writing about. And my agent, she was very good at saying, “This has to be a book that you would want to write, put the other models out of your mind.”

It didn't really come to me until I wrote what became the first words of the introduction to the book, which was: “Let's start with a quiz.” You know, so many of these books start with quizzes, and they're serious. They have a quiz, and if you answer a quiz in a certain way, then you get a score and it means something. It just seemed sort of ridiculous to me. But I thought, if I were to start with a quiz... and I'd write that sentence in a wry way instead of an earnest way... what would that quiz be? And what were the questions? Everything that I get - all these essays I get - are not answers, but they're all questions that are like, “How do I figure this out?” and “What am I supposed to do about this?” So I thought, what would be the 10 questions that would be most representative of all the stories I read? And I came up with those 10 questions really pretty quickly. And those 10 questions were the themes that were sort of the progression of love in someone's life from start to finish. And within each of those themes were stories that represented situations, trends and all of that; and it was just a matter of going to chapter to chapter and stitching all of that together, and trying to say things that were smart and funny about them, and use examples so that people would have stories to latch onto that would demonstrate what I was talking about. It was really hard for the first few chapters, and then it got easier and easier and easier, and by the end it felt very natural. I had to go back to the earlier chapters and try to get that easier style back into the material that had been over-worked.

How did you juggle your job as the Editor of Modern Love with writing your book? Did you write at night and off hours?

No, I couldn't. I could only do it in several days in a row. And that was different than my novel. I had a full-time job when I wrote my novel, a 9 to 5 job and a little kid. And that I did at night, like 9 to 1 in the morning, or something, and I just had momentum.

With this book, I had to take days off. It was excruciating because, you know, my in-box doesn't stop and my weekly deadlines don't stop and all the busy work associated with the column doesn't stop. And you have to write badly in order to write well; you have to turn out all this crap. And I'd just keep saying to myself, “I don't have time to go through this phase of the book. I don't have time to write badly. I just have to write well.” Of course, that was ridiculous. But those days were horrible. I would just spend day after day after day falling further behind at work, but not really making progress. I was making progress on the book, but it didn't feel like progress. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and further behind at the same time. The good thing about the column is it's not timely, and if I get a good amount of material - it takes some doing, but - I can get ahead and get some breathing room. And I just had to keep doing that, I had to keep pushing that ahead, getting the submission's pile down as far as I could get it to feel comfortable, and then taking time off. A friend of mine loaned me their farmhouse in New Hampshire for a full week once and that was really important, to be off the internet and to really have time where I wasn't responsible for anything else.

Yeah, but writing books is so hard. I don't know how people do it.

Buy Love Illuminated

Link to Modern Love

See all interviews

A Conversation with Cindy Chupack

As most of you know, I love talking with writers and learning about how different people approach and think about the creative process. So when I had the chance to have a conversation with best-selling author, storyteller and Emmy-winning TV writer Cindy Chupack, I thought you might like to hear from her, too.

When Cindy performed in Spark's “Trapped” show, I learned that she was actively sharing essays from her forthcoming book, The Longest Date, at various storytelling series in LA as a way to workshop them (in fact, she used the Spirit of Story site as a guide to finding the best places to read around town!). What a smart, creative way to develop material, I thought. So I encourage you to check out the interview below and glean some of her wisdom!

---

Cindy Chupack is an author, storyteller and Emmy-winning TV writer whose credits include Modern Family, Sex and the City, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Her first book, The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays was a New York Times bestseller. She followed up with The Longest Date (Viking, 2014), which is a humorous look at the reality of marriage and the trying nature of trying (to conceive, create, adopt or kidnap a baby).

Karin: Tell us about your new book!

Cindy: When I first got married I thought my writing career was over, because all I had ever written about was dating. I was worried there was nothing more to say, because who really cares about married relationships? It took me a while to realize that a wedding was not the end, it was the beginning of a whole new story, a whole other adventure. That's why the book is called The Longest Date. It wasn't that different to write about being married, I realized. You have the same sort of conflicts, you just can't break up.

How is live storytelling different from other kinds of writing you do?

I see first-person storytelling as you connecting with an audience and telling them what happened to you in your own words. Because they're hearing it from you, it feels very different and very intimate. It's more intimate than even writing a first-person essay, because even though that's you and your voice, you're not face to face with the audience, you're not hearing their concern or their laughter or their disapproval. So it's just a different kind of beast. You definitely feel more exposed, but it can also be very gratifying to get the feedback and the community of an audience being with you while you're telling a story.  

It's certainly different from the writing I do for television, because even if I'm drawing from personal experience, it is several times removed once you put it through the filter the character you're writing for. In fictionalizing the story, you're not publicly putting yourself on the line -- you're just using the story, or the experience, or how you felt -- as a starting point. The good news is, then you can rewrite what happened and let an actor do or say what you wish you'd done or said at the time!

What have you learned from work-shopping essays from your book at various storytelling venues around Los Angeles?

I've had people worry that my piece is going to be offensive or seem privileged or seem too harsh, and I can usually sell it with my personality. So I shoot for that now when I write, to get enough of my personality and voice in it that you understand where I'm coming from in the piece, even if I'm not there to sell it myself.

But also I've learned to tighten up jokes and to add more jokes. When you're reading aloud, you sometimes think of something funny off-hand in the pause between lines or in the laughter. I've seen that some pieces are more serious than I realized, and I've learned to be okay with that, to trust that the audience is still with me even when they're not laughing.

And then very basically, when I'm choosing a piece to read from my new book, there are certain pieces I think, “Nah, I don't want to read that one.” And then I think, “Why didn't I want to read that one? Is that one weaker than the others, does it still need some work? How do I make it better so I would want to read it aloud?”

Where do you draw the line when writing about your private life?

I'm pretty open, and it's been an interesting transition to go from writing about dating - which is usually failed relationships or just failed dates - to writing about a couple, which involves my husband also, and what he's open to me saying. I think that might be why there is not as much that's funny or current written about marriage.

There is a kind of closing of ranks once you're a couple that people respect, and I felt like that was a doing a disservice to women and really everybody, because there are still stories, and we still need some help, we still want to commiserate. And I think women (especially storytellers) should be able to talk about marriage in a goodhearted way that makes you (the narrator) equally culpable. It's not about male bashing or husband bashing, it's about laughing at all you go through as part of a couple, and trusting that those experiences and feelings are relatable to other couples.

I've definitely cleared everything I've written with my husband. My biggest dilemma now is just how to talk about what we went through to get a baby, because some day this will all be preserved for our child to read, and I want to make sure I'm writing about things I am comfortable with her knowing.

How do you approach writing a new piece?

One big thing, I guess, is that I always keep the audience in mind. I try to remember... even when I'm writing my book... I try to imagine I'm almost writing an email to a friend or something. I just really try to be myself, and be funny but honest. I think sometimes you forget the audience when you're writing and then you get lost, so I try to think of the audience as a friend, and I try to remember the story I'm telling is for an audience, not just for me.

To learn more about Cindy Chupack, visit cindychupack.net

See all interviews