Joshua Henkin's Book Club Adventures: The Latest Chapter, March 2009 Part I

"How did you come up with the names of your characters?" Author and creative writing professor Joshua Henkin answers this question, one he has been asked by reading groups members he talked with about his novel Matrimony. Check back tomorrow for more of Josh's behind-the-scenes stories of the groups he met with in March.





March's Condensed Statistics
Number of Book Groups Visited: 9
Number in Person: 4
Number by Phone: 4
Number Online: 1
Number of States Represented: 6 (New York, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin)
Total Number of Participants, not including author: 84
Total Number of Male Participants, not including author: 1

A Popular Book Group Question in March: How Did You Come up with the Names of Your Characters?

The "how did you" questions, just like the "what did you intend" questions, are very good at making a writer feel stupid. Why did you do what you did? How did you do what you did? When it comes to these things, writers are about as clueless as can be. We proceed intuitively, without a plan. It's a dream-like state, writing; you're in a kind of trance. At a reading once, someone asked me why I named the female protagonist of Matrimony Mia. The most basic --- and most obtuse --- answer is that I needed to name her something, and if I'd named her Susan, someone else would have wanted to know why I'd named her Susan. But why Mia, specifically? And why did I name my male protagonist Julian?

In Julian's case, the answer is simple. In the summer of 1997, I was visiting New York, where I grew up, to give some readings from my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, which had recently been published, and I was invited to the Hamptons for the weekend by some friends. Staying at the same house was a couple with a five-year-old named Julian, and for some reason, that just struck me as the right name for my protagonist. What that "some reason" is is hard to say. Why do we like some names and not like others? We just do. And different names have different cultural associations. "Tiffany" suggests a different kind of character from "Priscilla" from "Jane."

And cultural associations can change. I was once writing a short story with a character named Monica, and then Monica Lewinsky came along and ruined everything --- not just for Bill Clinton but for my story. I couldn't call my character Monica any longer without evoking Monica Lewinsky, and so I changed her name. The wonderful novelist Robert Cohen (read his novel Inspired Sleep) wrote an essay recently about being stuck on his new novel because he can't find the right name for his character. I sympathize. Until I get a character's name right, he or she just doesn't come into focus, and sometimes it takes months and months for me to get that name right. I've actually resorted to a baby-naming book. My wife and I used it to name real babies, but now I use it to name fictional babies, and adults. It's proved incredibly valuable. In some ways, it's the writer's best tool.

---Joshua Henkin

Previous RGG.com Posts by Joshua Henkin:
Book Club Adventures, February 2009
Book Club Adventures, February 2009 Part II
Book Club Adventures, January 2009
Book Club Adventures, January 2009 Part II

Joshua Henkin's Book Club Adventures: The Latest Chapter, February 2009 Part I

"Did you always want to be a writer?" Author and creative writing professor Joshua Henkin answers this question, a popular one with the reading groups he visits to talk about his novel Matrimony. Check back tomorrow for more of Josh's book club musings and behind-the-scenes stories of the groups he met with in February.




February's Condensed Statistics
Number of Book Groups Visited: 7
Number in Person: 3
Number by Phone: 4
Number of States Represented: 6 (New York, California, New Jersey, Utah, Pennsylvania, Minnesota)
Total Number of Participants, not including author: 74
Total Number of Male Participants, not including author: 2 (Come on, guys, do a better job. What are you doing instead of being in book groups? Playing poker?)

A Popular Question in February: Did You Always Want to be a Writer?
The answer is both yes and no. And I'm lucky that the career span of a writer is so long: I could afford a relatively late start. People like to say that as long as you're under fifty, you're a young writer. (I'm sure that when I hit fifty, I'll be saying that it's as long as you're under sixty....). If I were a basketball player, say (or a ballerina!), I'd be long past retirement. I didn't really start to write fiction until after college. At the same time, I always wanted to be a writer. But I also always wanted to be a basketball player, and at some point you realize that you're neither good enough nor tall enough. That was kind of how I felt about writing. In college, I took a more traditional academic path; I was studying political theory, and since I was the son of a professor, I had this skewed idea about what would be a sensible career. I thought getting a Ph.D. in the humanities was the safe, sober choice! So I was planning to get a Ph.D. in political theory, but before I did that, I decided to move to Berkeley for what I thought would be a year before I went to graduate school.

I had a romantic idea of Berkeley, in part because I grew up in New York City and California felt both far away and mythical, but also because my father taught at Columbia --- we lived in Morningside Heights --- and one of my earliest memories was of the campus protests. I was four years old in 1968, and one day, when my mother took me to nursery school, we were stopped at the entry to College Walk because of the student riots. We had to turn around and go home. It was my version of a snow day! I grew up with an idealized conception of the student protest movement, and the way I looked at things, if Columbia was great, Berekeley was even better.

So there I was, in September of 1987, having moved to Berkeley without having found an apartment --- for the first few weeks I slept on a friend's floor while I looked for rentals. In good Berkeley tradition, I didn't know what I was going to do, but I had to support myself. I ended up working for a magazine, where one of my tasks was to be the first reader of fiction manuscripts: I was to pass on to the fiction editor the submissions that looked most promising. I was struck by how terrible most of the submissions were, and I found this strangely inspiring. It wasn't that I thought I could do better. But I felt that if other people were willing to try and risk failure, then I should be willing to try and risk failure, too. And that's what got me started writing.

I took a couple of workshops in Berkeley, got some encouragement, ended up going to graduate school in fiction writing at the University of Michigan, and the rest, as they say, is history. But to this day, I carry with me that lesson that I learned at the magazine. You have to be willing to risk failure. A writer is always doing that. The page is always blank, and you wonder whether you'll be able to do it again; the fraud police watches over you.

We all know that experience of reading a novel we love and then reading another novel by the same author and we don't love it as much. And then we read a third novel by that author and we love that one. What happened? Did the author get worse and then get better again? Unlikely. It's just that some novels come together and other novels don't, and why that is is a mystery. I'm now at the stage where nothing I write will be so bad that it won't pass freshman English. But will it be magical? Will it jump off the page? There's a lot of luck involved in that, and a lot that's mysterious. Come back tomorrow for more on this.

---Joshua Henkin

Previous RGG.com Posts by Joshua Henkin:
Book Club Adventures, January 2009
Book Club Adventures, January 2009 Part II
Book Club Adventures, December 2008
Book Club Adventures, December 2008 Part II
Book Club Adventures, November 2008
Book Club Adventures, November 2008 Part II
Shouting Matches and More

Joshua Henkin's Book Club Adventures: The Latest Chapter, January 2009

It's a new year of book club visits for novelist and creative writing professor Joshua Henkin. He speaks regularly with reading groups across the country about his novel Matrimony, and each month he shares behind-the-scenes stories with us. One of the groups that Josh met with in January is ReadingGroupGuides.com contributor Shannon McKenna Schmidt's book club. Click here to read her re-cap of the meeting.

Check back tomorrow, too. Josh will be answering an intriguing question he was asked in January: What do you think of book group facilitators?


January's Condensed Statistics
Number of Book Groups I talked to: 10
Number in Person: 3
Number by phone: 7
Number of states represented: 6 (New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois)
Total Number of Participants: 102

January's Writing Process Question Number 1: Do you write every day?

I certainly try to write every day, though with teaching and raising two small kids (and meeting with book groups!) it isn't always possible. I certainly don't wait for inspiration, largely because I don't believe in inspiration. Sure, there's writing that's inspired and writing that's uninspired, but I don't think the quality of your writing correlates to how you're feeling when you sit down to write. If anything, I think the relationship is inversely proportional. Often when I'm feeling most inspired I produce my worst work (perhaps because I've fallen in love with the sound of my own voice), and when I'm feeling least inspired I produce my best work. In any case, I think writers do best when they demystify the writing process, when they treat their work as a job. And it is a job. You pack your lunch pail and go to work like everyone else; you tie yourself to your chair every day. You don't write a novel. You write a page a day or however much; only looking back do you have a novel.

In that sense, a novel is like life. It's only once you've taken a certain path that you realize you've taken it; you look back and realize, This is the job I've been at for the last ten years, this is the person I've married, this is the life I've chosen to lead. I don't mean that it happens haphazardly, or that people don't make decisions. But I do think that our lives come most into focus as we look back. And the same is true of a novel. You look back when you're done and realize this is what you've written. When you're in the actual process of writing, you can't see the forest for the trees.

As for how often to write, I tell my students that even if they have next to no time to write, it's better to write as often as possible. Better, that is, to write ten minutes a day six days a week than to write for an hour on a Sunday. Now, obviously, if I were writing only an hour a week, I'd never get my novel done, but the same principle applies. Although it's important for a novelist to have big chunks of time in which to write, what's even more important is to be constantly engaged with your characters. If I go several days without writing, it's like I'm starting over when I come back to the book. But if I'm writing every day, then I think about my characters even when I'm not writing. They stay alive for me, and that's a crucial thing. You need to check in on your characters. They're like plants that need to be watered.

January's Writing Process Question Number 2: When you started Matrimony, did you know where it was going?
Absolutely not. I never know where I'm going, and to the extent that I have some sense of where I'm going, I'm relieved to learn that I'm wrong. When I started Matrimony, I thought it was about a love relationship and that it was taking place at a college reunion. Well, it is about a love relationship, but it's about other things too (friendship, class, health and sickness, betrayal), and though there is a college reunion in the book, it doesn't come until around page 270 and it lasts for all of six pages. So pretty early on I realized I had no clue. Which is as it should be. When a writer has too much of a clue, that's when s/he gets into trouble. Of course, you want to have a clue eventually, but for the first draft, certainly, you want to proceed much more intuitively; you want to be writing in a dream-like state.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that if you want your characters to come to life, you need to give them room to surprise you. That's because the relationship between plot and character is complex and symbiotic. Think of our own lives. We both create our plots and are created by them. Things happen to us, and we become different from who we were when we started. The same is true in fiction. If you're too determined to make your characters do something, then they're not going to be the complex people you want them to be. As a writer friend of mine said, if you inject your characters into a predetermined plot, you end up with Lipton-Cup-a-Story. Another friend of mine wrote her undergraduate psychology thesis on how adults group objects versus how kids group objects. The adults group the apple with the banana, and the kids group the monkey with the banana. This is another way of saying that kids are more natural story-tellers than adults are. One of my jobs as a writer and as a teacher of writing is to teach myself and others how to think like a child again --- albeit like a smart, sophisticated child. And the way to do that is not to plan things out too much --- to allow your characters and your story to carry you on their sails.

In any case, planning out a book never works, in part because the writer changes as s/he goes along. When I started Matrimony, I was 33, single, and living in Ann Arbor, and when I finished Matrimony, I was 43, married, the father of two daughters, and living in Brooklyn. I wasn't the same person as I was when I started. But the book needs to feel seamless. And in order to do that, you have to make so many adjustments as you rewrite and revise. Often it means cutting scenes that you love but that don't belong in the book. At the very least, it means throwing away all those plans you had and looking at things afresh.

---Joshua Henkin

Previous RGG.com Posts by Joshua Henkin:
Book Club Adventures, December 2008 Part II
Book Club Adventures, December 2008
Book Club Adventures, November 2008
Book Club Adventures, November 2008 Part II
Shouting Matches and More