How to Write a Modern Love Column & Then Expand it Into A Book

GENEVIEVE KINGSTON IS A WRITER and an actor who’s recent Modern Love column in The New York Times got my attention and the attention of, oh, everyone I know. She is expanding that lovely column into a memoir. Listen in and read along as she and I discuss how to write a Modern Love column and then how to expand that into a book.  

Marion: Welcome Genevieve.

Genevieve: Hi, Marion. Thank you so much for having me.

Marion: I’m delighted to have you here. Everybody wants to write and publish a Modern Love column and not only did you do that, but at least according to me, and pretty much everyone I know, you wrote the best one I’ve ever read. And we’ll run a link to the piece so people can read it if they haven’t already. But let’s set this up a bit. Just give us the action and the tale, if you will, and then we’ll take on the individual writing decisions.

Genevieve: Well, thank you so much for those kind words about the piece. The piece that I put into Modern Love was the story of my mother and the way that she very bravely and beautifully prepared for her own death. She spent time putting together a box of presents, one for me and one for my brother that really was meant to celebrate the different milestones of our lives that she was going to miss because she wouldn’t be around to see them.

Marion: Oh boy. On the day this piece came out, my email box blew up with people telling me to read it. On my text and my phone I think 12 different people sent it to me. I had already read it and shared it widely. And the consensus is that it’s as good as it gets. So, but here’s why. Not because we sob all the way through it. Nope. To me, it’s the quality, the precision of the language, the choice of each word, the feel like you almost plucked each of these words through a jeweler’s lens through one of those loops for this one purpose. It’s mighty. So let’s walk through this piece a bit, starting with how and when you made the decision to write it. So when did you say, “Oh, I want to do that,” that Modern Love column?

Genevieve: Well, for some reason, the fact that this year 2021 marks 20 years, since my mother’s passing, for some reason that felt very potent to me. It felt like it was time to sort of take a look back at that story. And I began writing the piece in the fall of 2020 sort of in anticipation of that anniversary. And it had something to do with that between moment. In the piece, I talk about how my mother put aside presents for our birthdays, but also presents for the milestones of our later lives. And I had just reached the moment in my life when I’d opened all the birthday presents, but not yet those packages that were meant for the pieces of our adult lives that she felt that she might be able to foresee, things like marriage and children, and that in between place of being almost finished with her preparations, but not quite felt like a very fruitful place to write from.

Marion: Absolutely. And it is a fruitful place to write from it. At the bottom of the piece in the tagline, it says you’re working on a memoir. So which came first, the idea for the book or the idea for the Modern Love piece?

Genevieve: The idea for the book came first. I began working on something that I knew would be a long project, maybe a book in the sort of late spring, early summer of 2020, when everything shut down. My background is as a playwright, but of course all the theaters closed. So I began working on that longer project and then the essay I sort of wrote alongside as a piece that I thought perhaps could stand alone. And a very dear wonderful writer, friend of mine when the piece ran in Modern Love, encouraged me to put that little line about the memoir in my bio so that folks would know that I was working on something longer. And it felt so intimidating to me actually, to even admit that I was working on a memoir. I’m not sure I’d admitted it to myself even and let alone to anybody else. Usually I like to keep my projects quiet and private until I finish them. So it felt very bold to sort of say that I was doing that in The New York Times.

Marion: Yeah, I suspect it did, but it’s something I tell people all the time to do, to test their material on the public. And two of my four books came out of shorter pieces that I wrote. So I’m a great believer in that. And I said earlier, you’re an actor, you’re a playwright. Are you also an actor? Did I get that wrong? Are you both?

Genevieve: I am.

Marion: Okay.

Genevieve: I am an actor.

Marion: Good.

Genevieve: And really that’s my entry point into storytelling. I always loved theater because of how collaborative it is. You tell stories with groups of people. You’re not sort of alone in the way that you are when you’re sitting and writing something long like a book. And so for me, playwriting became sort of a natural extension of my love of acting in the theater and then started to kind of become my primary identity was as a playwright. I’m newer to writing pros, but I think that so much of the work and the effort to create something that is specific, that has clear settings, and scenes, and characters you can fall in love with. I mean, I think a lot of those things are the same, whether you’re writing a play or a book.

Marion: Yeah. So falling in love with, you do this beautifully. We get the opening of the piece, because I want to deconstruct the piece a bit and we get the opening of the piece in four paragraphs that are consisted of only 11 sentences. I’ve studied this piece. We are introduced to your family perfectly. And then we’re introduced to the idea that your mother is probably going to die and we get great characterization of the situation and of her.

So let’s talk about that eye. We’re talking about the eye when we talk about selecting the language, curating from one’s own life. It’s a mighty assignment because our lives, as soon as we sit down to write instantly begin and to feel like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when what we’re looking for is maybe just an apartment size display of paintings. Right. And we’ve got to curate them. So give us some insight on how you looked across the landscape of such loss and chose to tell that opener just the way you did, 11 sentences that I would argue are perfect. How complex, how difficult, what’s your curation memory of the choices that you made to get us into this piece?

Genevieve: Well, I think I was aware even in the first past that at the story I was trying to tell wasn’t the story of my mother’s death or the way that I felt about it exactly. But I was trying to tell the story of this one beautiful thing that she did, which was her process of preparation and her setting aside these gifts and letters and sort of talismans that she was hoping would sort of light our way through our lives. So I tried to narrow in on just that aspect of it, just this one long tender act of preparation. And so anything that wasn’t about that had to sort of be taken away. So I chose just a few moments, a few of the packages that felt most sort of precious to me in terms of what they were, but also at the points in my life where they landed. And it felt to me, like I was sort of just skipping a stone across the surface of this story and sort of letting it just touch down at a few points along the way.

Marion: I love that. It’s an image I give my students all the time.

Genevieve: Really?

Marion: That you have to stand on the shore of a calm piece of water and skim a stone over the top, just hitting down here, there, there, there, and there. And that’s it. That’s what curation is. So it just makes me grin from earring, to earring to hear you say that. It’s just delightful.

Genevieve: Me too.

Marion: Because I think that is so helpful to people. They instead throw this huge net into the lake and try to catch all the fish. And it’s like, no, no, we don’t want all the fish. We just want you to go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I think that in that I identified having read the piece a bunch of times, if we can identify in a moment what the piece is about, I would choose this sentence, she was always looking for a way to survive. And that seems to me to be, and I can be just dead wrong, but for me, how we keep people alive and how we embody their message to us to grow up and be who we were supposed to be, that was the line. She was always looking for a way to survive and survive she does, even though she does not live. So that skimming of the stone took me to there. Was that your intent with that line? Maybe I’m over reading that line.

Genevieve: No, absolutely. I think that there’s a very conscious shift that I’m trying to make in the piece from a time in our lives when I watched my mother looking so determinedly for the right treatment, the right medicine, the right program that would allow her to keep living and that there was a time that I remember quite vividly where things seemed to shift. And while she never gave up looking for that sort of magic cure, she really turned her attention to preparing for what would happen afterwards. And I just give her all the credit in the world for having the courage to face her own mortality and to make something in preparation for us. I think it’s a very, very difficult thing for most humans to do. And so I remain sort of in awe of that courage and that bravery.

Marion: I think that’s what we remain in awe of. In preparation for her own mortality, she provided herself to you forever and to us forever, which is extraordinary. So let’s talk about drafts. I call my first draft a vomit draft. I need to do that because I need to have the proper amount of respect for it. In other words, I can’t fall in love with it. It’s got to be big and voluminous and kind of a mess and stinky and all of those things. What do you call your first draft? And talk to me about the value of that draft. If it’s an artifact, for instance, what is it worth? How did you feel and what do you call them first? And then talk to us about really realizing that you had a first draft of the piece.

Genevieve: Yeah. I’ve never named my first drafts, but I absolutely agree that they usually, especially for something of this length, they often come out all in one sitting and it’s just trying to figure out the beginning, middle and end as it first appears to me and trying to sort of get through that initial path of here’s where I think it starts and here’s where I think it ends. And then of course, when you look back at it, you discover that you were wrong. It probably starts where it ends and the middle’s all wrong and you have to move it all around. But trying to sort of get from point A to point B and take your central character, even if it’s yourself on a meaningful journey between those two points. So I think that that’s my beginning place and I’m usually very, very pleased with it when I finish writing it and I put it away.

And then I look back at it the next day and discover that, of course it’s terrible, but there’s something there, right? It provides a starting point that we wouldn’t have had if we never sat down and written that first terrible draft. And suddenly it’s very clear that this thing at the back has to go to the front. So, and then after I’ve done my own kind of reworking of it a little, I put it away again and then I’ll usually try to show it to one very trusted friend. The great thing about essays is that they’re short enough that you can really impose on people’s time and ask them to give it a look. You can’t really ask a friend to read your book for you, unless it’s a very, very good friend. I ask for one person’s opinion, one person’s kind of big picture edit and then dive back in.

Marion: Good Choices. Those are very, very good choices. I always discourage people from showing it around to lots and lots of people. Did you show this to your sibling? You talk about the role of your sibling in this story, and this is exposure of family. And while no one in this tale behaves badly, not all family likes exposure. Did you mention it? Did you get a good reception? How did that go?

Genevieve: My brother, who is just such a lovely, wonderful human is, been very, very supportive of this piece and this project. He’s not a writer, so I didn’t show drafts of it to him. I didn’t really think that he should have to read it more than once unless he wanted to, but before it ran, we had a lovely conversation. And I actually did sort of say to him, like we don’t have to do this. Like if you’re not comfortable, we’ll just pull it and, but he was wonderful and very excited.

Marion: I’m so glad you had that support. So what happened after the piece came out? It runs in the paper. Your tagline says you’re working on a memoir. Lead us to the point where you are talking to someone about it being actually a book.

Genevieve: Well, I was so sort of overwhelmed and moved by the response after it came out in Modern Love and what was so surprising to me, I had hoped and expected that I might hear from a lot of other motherless daughters, but I was so surprised at kind of the breadth of different people who reached out. I was hearing from men who had the experience of losing their wives to early onset Alzheimer’s and were thinking about the experience that their children must be having, people who were experiencing loss from all different directions and lenses and the fact that they were able to see something of their own experience in the piece was really sort of overwhelming to me. I was very fortunate after the piece came out to find just a wonderful literary agent who really, really seemed to understand and support my vision for this larger project. And so that was a huge gift that came out of the Modern Love piece running. And she’s been such a huge support in continuing to shape the project as I work on it.

Marion: Good. So let’s talk about expanding the piece into a book. We’re not going to talk about who’s publishing it or titles or anything like that. Everybody’s going to have to come back when the book comes out and we’ll reinterview you, but, and that’s the deal, but how about some people I remember, I had an experience with The New York Times. When I was very young I wrote a piece about a sick mother and it led to my first book. And I had people say things to me like, oh, should be easy to just stretch that thing out to be a book length piece. And I’m thinking it should? Easy? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not a piece of dough that you can just roll really thin.

So talk to me about the adventure. Let’s put it in really positive terms, the adventure, or the challenge, or the obligation, or however you would phrase it, of taking this original piece and what you learned from it and expanding it into a book. It’s not as simple is just stretching it. What is it exactly, do you think? How do you picture it? Let’s say.

Genevieve: Well, I think you’re so right that it’s not really so much a matter of stretching or expanding because I don’t actually think of the essay as like a shorter version of the book. I think of the essay and the book as companion pieces. So they have a strong, important relationship, but the book has to be its own entity, its own thing, as you said, its own adventure. So I really think of them as being in conversation with each other, but not being like a sweater that you put in the wash and shrink down into an essay.

Marion: Good. Then you’ll be just fine. So does the original piece in its length allow for the writer to focus in on what it’s about in ways that maybe if you started it as a book would not allow you to do? I mean, I think there’s a great advantage to writing small and then going big. But what about you? What do you think that the advantage is to doing it in the order in which you did it?

Genevieve: Oh, I think that’s exactly right. That the essay is beautiful for getting you down to essentials and for learning how much you can take away. And then when you’re working in a longer form, it suddenly feels like a gift to have all of this space, right? The blank space that can be intimidating is suddenly like this glorious room to like stretch out in and roll around and jump around. It doesn’t feel like an endless expanse you’ll never get through. Instead, it feels like a mansion when you’ve been living in an apartment.

Marion: That’s rather lovely. Talk to me a little bit about your writing life. Are you a highly disciplined person? Do you give yourself a word count every day, a page count? Do you have hours in which you work? Are you obligated to a million other things and you have to sort of do it on the delicate testing plan and rush by it. The writers that are listening in are really eager to know how to do the work. So give us an idea of your days of the week.

Genevieve: I am a recent convert to the methodology of writing every day at the same time for a set amount of time. I never used to be when I was a playwright, I was always working on deadlines at which meant that I would not write for months at a time and then write a great deal all at once. And it wasn’t, really wasn’t until the pandemic, if I’m honest that I found this routine and now I would never give it up for anything. It’s been so incredibly helpful.

So I write five days a week, each morning from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM, just those three hours, but all of those three hours. And I have found that it’s been incredibly useful to meet over Zoom silently with other writers to write together. I used to be part of a silent writer’s group that met in person back before all of this. And when we moved to Zoom, I thought, oh my goodness, how could this possibly be useful? All we do is sit silently at a computer. We wave at each other and then ignore each other for three hours. And you wouldn’t believe what it means to just have someone who’s expecting you to show up at exactly nine o’clock and sit down.

Marion: I have never heard of a silent writer’s group. Now you’ve got my total attention. Are people all over the world? Are they people that you know? Just give us a sense of how you met them and how you hold this together if you’re silent. You’ve given us a little bit of an hint that it’s great to see them, but just back up and tell us, how did you meet them? And you don’t have to reveal their identities, but just give us some sense of the content of this group.

Genevieve: So this is a wonderful group. It’s been around for quite some time. And a fellow writer in New York introduced me to it. And it used to be that we met in person perhaps a week out of every month. And you gather and you have to be there on time because the doors get locked at exactly our start time. And no one is allowed to speak to each other, and you’re not supposed to make eye contact with each other because it’s not about that. You’re just there to work, but there are snacks and we work for three hours and or fours hours or whatever it is. And then at the end of it, you all pack up and you leave and you don’t say goodbye.

And it’s meant to create, one of the founding members described it to me as creating an atmosphere of gentle peer pressure, meaning that if someone else is writing next to you, you’re probably going to be writing. So it was such a gift when I use to go in person. And when I couldn’t do that anymore, it moved to Zoom. And I was absolutely astonished to discover the power of just signing into a Zoom meeting, waving hello to everyone, ignoring each other for three hours of writing and then waving goodbye at the end. It’s just, it’s somehow all the incentive you need to do it right now instead of an hour from now or tomorrow or never.

Marion: I think that is the most generous thing you could tell us about. That is wonderful. And I get it. Having worked in a newspaper, having worked in a newsroom when I was at The New York Times, there were 400 and something people in a room typing on hello, typewriters at the time on metal desks. The noise was unimaginable, but it also made you go type, right? You’re just like, “Well, I’m not typing. I better get typing.” So I totally relate to the peer pressure. That’s a gorgeous thing.

I’d like to talk about the emotional aspect of all this. Again, I wrote this piece again in The New York Times, I got it on a Wednesday evening. It was for the magazine. I went home to my little tiny New York City apartment in my mid 20s. I sat in my rocking chair in my living room and held that magazine to my chest and sobbed, like I have never sobbed in my life. So for me, when I remember that person holding that piece, I think about how much you have to want it to do this. And it’s not this thing, the writing is not this thing that drops from the gods into your head and comes out through your fingers. It’s about sitting in the chair, it’s about wanting it so badly that as the great Stephen Sondheim says, you “watch the world outside through a window while you finish the hat,” in his great depiction of the great painter…

Genevieve: Oh yes.

Marion: Georges Seurat, right?

Genevieve: Yes.

Marion: So how much is wanting it? Can you talk about that power? About how much you’ve got to want this to have the discipline to do it.

Genevieve: Ooh. I mean, I think my temptation is to say that it’s less want than need. I think that if we choose to make our lives as artists, it’s because on some level we need to. And if we don’t need to, then we’ll find a way to do without it, because it is a difficult path with not a whole lot of guideposts along the way sometimes it feels like. So if on some level we don’t need to be making art, I think often we find ways to stop. As a wonderful acting teacher of mine once said, when I asked, how do I know if I meant to do this? And he said, oh, well, do don’t do it. And I said, what? And he said, well, if you need to do it, then you will. And it doesn’t matter what I say.

Marion: Oh. All right. That’s gorgeous. And as we wrap this up, just what insights can you share with the writers who are listening about how to keep your head down and get the damn thing done?

Genevieve: So I believe very strongly in a piece of advice that I actually picked up from a program at a play. It was Collected Stories by Donald Margulies and in the program notes, he shared some advice that he gives to his writing students, which is talking about your writing diminishes your need to do your writing. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is that we can get so excited about talking about our projects, that we get that glow of satisfaction just from talking about them to people and other people saying, oh, isn’t that a great idea. This is going to be so great.

And we feel so good after those conversations that it almost feels like we’ve already done the work, but we haven’t. So where you can, and of course there comes a time when we have to talk about our projects and it’s joyful to talk about them, but I think that where you can really protecting the secret beauty of your own little snowflake that you’re crafting away at your desk, keep it for yourself where you can, keep that glow of secret knowledge. And protect it from the world before they sort of make you see it in a different way or make you feel like maybe you don’t really need to put in those hours. Keep it for yourself when you can.

Marion: Perfect. Thank you, Genevieve. That was just lovely. I’m so glad to get to know you a little bit.  And I genuinely look forward to reading the book when it comes out. You have a huge fan base and we’re just really rooting for you. Thank you so much.

Genevieve: Oh, thank you so much, Marion. It’s so lovely to be talking to you. I turn to this podcast for tips and advice as well, and it’s just so beautiful to have a space where writers can share this kind of thing with each other.

Marion: Well, you’ll be most welcome back when the book comes out. The writer is Genevieve Kingston. Reach her at genevieve kingston dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marion roach dot com, where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.