With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

Edan Lepucki

Categorized in : Thinking Stories Simple

All crises, once averted, become jokes.

Edan Lepucki

jokes crisis

At Ucross I learned that I am capable of focusing deeply for long periods of time. I love to write. I don't think I would have said that before this trip.

Edan Lepucki

writing long thinking

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

Edan Lepucki

single-mom people thinking

The issue is that my book, and so many others, are not available for pre-order from Amazon. I hadn't realized how much that mattered for new authors. And how much Amazon is hurting us.

Edan Lepucki

hurt order book

I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it.

Edan Lepucki

intention stories thinking

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

Edan Lepucki

energy writing thinking

I did a lot of this through writing flashbacks. Many of the flashbacks took place at Cal's school and I eventually cut them because they didn't seem essential and they slowed the pace of the story in the first third of the book. They were essential to me, though, in that I learned about my characters.

Edan Lepucki

writing book school

I tossed off a mention of the pirates early on. And they became integral to the backstory. Sometimes now I imagine them in the woods. They scare me. All men. Dirty and wearing red.

Edan Lepucki

pirate men dirty

I was interested in writing about gender in this future world where progress has not only halted but turned backward. On another note, sometimes the personal is not so politically correct, and what we are turned on by can't be made to behave.

Edan Lepucki

progress writing world

I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.

Edan Lepucki

impulse scary world

I am not sure I knew what I was doing, writing an "apocalypse" novel, when I started this book. Now that the book is done, I can own that I have in fact written an apocalypse novel, one that speculates on a dark, dark future. Why I did it, I really don't know - every time people read my work they comment on its darkness, its sadness.

Edan Lepucki

sadness writing book

For me, even when I was pregnant, I wondered, Should we even have children if we're bringing them into this horrible, scary world? But I did have a child, despite these fears - or because of them - and these fears are both contemporary and as old as time.

Edan Lepucki

scary children world

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

Edan Lepucki

safety loss book

California seemed to me to be all about secrets and the need for safety. And this leads to this thematic messiness I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I mean, when it comes to the themes, this is nothing like an Atwood novel.

Edan Lepucki

california safety mean

Oh my goodness, I hate camping. I am like Frida times 1,000. I have always been attracted to wilderness stories, à la the movie Badlands, when Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are in the woods on the lam - maybe because it scares me a little.

Edan Lepucki

camping scare hate

It's a bit scary to see my book come true: the recent (if minor) LA earthquakes, Hurricane Sandy, the Boston bomber, and so on - much of it stoppable, I think, and yet I, too, am also guilty of passivity.

Edan Lepucki

boston book thinking

I am glad it's [California novel] resonated with people because, for me, most apocalyptic novels aren't scary, because they feel so very far off.

Edan Lepucki

california scary people

My signature is like a squished spider.

Edan Lepucki

signature spider like

I wish I wasn't so in love, wasn't so interested, in the Internet. I wish I spent less time online and more time outside and in my head. Writing requires solitude and deep, deep daydreaming, and the Internet just kills that - its lure is toward the external; it asks you to flit from place to place.

Edan Lepucki

you internet time love

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

Edan Lepucki

end think you world