Best-selling author Jennifer Weiner, whose seventh book, “Best Friends Forever,” came out in stores last week, recently visited The Poynter Institute to talk with local community members about her life as a journalist turned novelist.
During her talk she shared insights into how her work as a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter helped her become a novelist, and why the skills she acquired as a journalist made her a better writer.
Weiner, who attended Poynter’s fellowship for young journalists in 1991, also shared witty and thoughtful tips on how she gets inspiration for books, how she deals with criticism and how she balances life as a full-time mother, wife and writer.
Here are edited excerpts from Weiner’s talk.
How Weiner wrote her first novel
I was 28 years old and was working at the Inquirer, and I’d been there for three years and I was having a ball. I was dating this guy … and was doing the things that you do when you’ve been dating a guy for three years — picking out your china pattern and naming your children in your head.
At some point it occurs to me that I have this great life and this great apartment and this great guy, and I think, we’re going to get married, aren’t we? And he’s thinking, uhhhh, I’ve got another phone call. So we decided to do the adult thing and take some time apart.
I remember I would drive around convinced that God was programming my car radio so that every song I heard was about us. And this was 1998, so it was the year of “Titanic.” So I’m driving, and I’m crying, and I’m singing “My Heart Will Go On” in a really crappy French-Canadian accent. And then I said, “OK, enough of this. I have to do something to make myself feel better. What do I know how to do? I know how to tell a story.”
I’d been a journalist for eight years at that point and I thought, I know how to write a lead, I know what details to include, I know about pacing, I know about structure, I know about the way people really talk and stand and act and behave with one another. I’m going to write a story and the girl will be a lot like me and the guy will be a lot like Satan.
I would work from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and I would write my stories about “Survivor” and TV and whatever else I was writing about and then I would go home and I would write at night Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. Not Thursday — my programs were on. Then [I’d write] all weekend long because I had no social life anymore. And that was how I wrote “Good in Bed.”
Why being a reporter is good training for writing novels
I tell everybody that I think the best thing for being a novelist is having been a reporter. With journalism you write every day. And especially if you’re working for the small daily papers, you write a lot every day. You write stories about the school board meeting and the sewage board hearing and the car crash and the fire and the bagel shop that closed. You do not romanticize the act of writing. You do not go to your editor on deadline and say, “I know the sewage board hearing story is due, but my muse has not spoken to me yet.” Your editors don’t want to hear about your muse.
How to start writing a story
I always start with a character. All of my books started with either an image of a character or a character’s voice in my head. And so, what I start doing then is figuring out: Who is this person, and what is this person’s story? Where are they at the moment that the reader is going to meet them at the beginning of the book? And then, where do I want to take them by the end? So it starts with a character, and then I start thinking about the arc of the story. And then, I outline.
I usually know [where it starts], and I usually have an idea about … how it’s going to feel when the book ends. And then, I have to figure out how I get this person from point A to point B. Usually that’s the part that changes the most because when you’re writing, at least what I’ve found, is that your characters have their own ideas about how they want get to where you want to take them.
Things happen that you didn’t see coming. You have to leave yourself open to the possibility that your characters — as you start bringing them to life on the page and enriching them and hearing their voice come through more clearly — will have some things to say about where they’re going to go.
Developing a writing process
Generally I start off with an idea. I do this outline and I think OK, I know my character. I know the idea of where I want her to be or him to be. And then it’s sort of playing with the pieces. You write 3×5 note cards with a scene or a moment or an image or something that’s going to happen. And then, you arrange them in a time line. I need to see it laid out that way, and then I’ll always have my outline with me to refer to when I’m writing. A lot of times it’ll say go left and I’ll go right as the writing progresses, but at least I feel like I have a road map. And the road map will get you where you want to go, even if you choose not to follow it the whole way there.
Handling time constraints and distractions as a writer
I think that journalism gave me this really good work ethic and this good foundation for writing every day, for writing whether I felt like it or not, for writing whether I felt inspired or not. … I wrote “Good in Bed” while I had a full-time job, and I wrote “In Her Shoes” while I was still working at the paper. I had sold “Good in Bed” as part of a two-book deal and there was a year between when they bought it and when they published it, so I worked on my second book.
And then, with “Little Earthquakes,” I had a baby, so that went from free time to no time. Being a novelist is, I think, a really good job when you have little kids because there is flexibility and you can be home, even though I write mostly in coffee shops now. I’m trying to create that newsroom thing where there are people yelling obscenities and dirty jokes and there are TVs and there’s music. Sometimes I bring a police scanner just to really bring it home.
I think that journalism and motherhood have both taught me how to be flexible with my time. I’ve written with my laptop in my minivan, waiting to pick my daughter up at school. You just sort of snatch little pieces of time. I carry notebooks around and I carry my BlackBerry around so I can tap out a note to myself if I think of something.
Suggestions for writing and revising
Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” is one the best writing advice books ever. She talks about “shitty first drafts” — things that are going to work and things that aren’t going to work. You put it all in that first draft. And then the draft goes in a box for a while. And this is [from] Stephen King’s “On Writing.” You know, you put it in a box �- he says six weeks. Your mileage may vary. Then you take it out of the box and you try to read it like a reader.
I revise ruthlessly. That’s where the draft shrinks by 15 percent. Things come out, things move, things change, things get fixed. Then my agent reads it. And she and I go through about two or three drafts together, and she will tell me, this is working, this isn’t working. She’ll send me 20-page memos and thoughts about characters. And she and I will get through two rounds back and forth. I have a novelist friend who reads [the drafts], and she has very different tastes than I do. My husband will read it, and he hardly ever reads fiction. And then my editor gets it and, at that point, it’s been through about five revisions.
There is a romance to writing, and it’s very creative … but at the end of the day you have to be pragmatic. You have to realize that, if everything works out, this is going to be a product for sale in the marketplace. So you’ve got to make it work, even if it makes you want to tear your hair out.
Dealing with criticism from editors and readers
[There’s an] editor joke about an editor and reporter wandering in the desert, and they’re crawling through the incredible, blistering heat. They’re dehydrated, and they’re dying, and their lips are cracking. Their skin’s falling off and they see this beautiful mirage. It’s a pond, a lovely oasis of water. And the reporter’s crawling as fast as he can. He goes to drink from the lovely turquoise water and he looks over because he hears the sound of a zipper unzipping. The editor is peeing in the pond. The reporter says, “What are you doing?” And the editor says, “Making it better.”
I think that you will learn where your comfort level is in terms of dealing with reader responses. I have filters in place for “You suck! How did this ever get published?” I don’t want to read that; that’s just going to make me sad. But if there’s criticism I can learn from … I try to read and use [it as a] learning opportunity, because you always want to get better.
For me, the other key thing has been that I listen to every bit of criticism I can get. But, when the book is published and there’s nothing you can do about it anymore, then I really try to be picky about it. If there’s something I can learn from, I want to learn it. But if somebody’s just trying to score easy points, or talk about silly pink books with dumb covers, I’m not reading that.
Revisiting the term “chick lit”
Here is my speech about the term “chick lit”: You write a book. You sell it to a publisher. You don’t get a lot to say about how it’s going to look, what the cover will be like, how it’s going to be sold, where in the bookstores it’s going to get shelved or how it’s going to be perceived in the marketplace. You don’t have a lot of control over that because your publisher wants to make back the money they’ve spent on your advance.
If you’re smart, you let them. You don’t say, “But that is a serious work of literature!” because, if you call your book “Good in Bed,” that’s a really tough case to make. My problem with chick lit is I think a lot of the people who use the term have never read a book that would be considered chick lit.
I think it’s a condescending term. It’s a sexist term, it’s a problematic term because people deploy it incorrectly. But, my books get read. I have an audience, and my audience knows what I’m doing with my books and they know what they’re going to get in terms of the funny, relatable heroine and generally the happy ending and maybe some body image stuff or some family stuff or some romance stuff. So, it’s a question of, “Do I want to care about my readers or do I want to care about the reviewers?”
