Becoming a better fiction writer by studying 100 movies, 50 screenplays, and 25 books in 2020.
It’s hard to distill a single writing lesson from a novel as beloved and complex as Little Women (yes, children’s literature is complex). Further complicating the task is the need to also write about the 2019 film adaptation by Greta Gerwig, my current artistic big-girl crush who also wrote and directed Lady Bird, one of my favorite flicks of all time (posts forthcoming). She’s a genius, and that’s the end of that TED Talk. My posts for the book, the screenplay, and the film are all going to be interwoven, but I’ve got to start somewhere.
Like many American girls, I read Little Women when I was a child. Maybe I was ten or eleven? I can’t remember. But as soon as I saw Gerwig’s adaptation last month, I went home and picked up my old copy off the shelf.
Rereading the book
We won’t talk about how much time has passed since I last read Little Women, but let it suffice to say it’s been a while. I remembered liking it, and Jo in particular, very much, but I didn’t remember a ton of the story. If you’d asked, I’d recall: Jo’s fierce and inspiring, she doesn’t marry Laurie, Beth dies, Amy’s a brat, Marmee’s preachy.
You miss a lot of things when you read the story as a ten-year-old. Among them: Amy’s a much more complicated, interesting, and sympathetic character when I read her as an adult. Yes, she commits the unforgivable sin (Jo, you’re a better woman than I am) of burning Jo’s manuscript. But she’s twelve when that happens, and who among us is her best self when she is twelve? I’ll deal more with Amy’s character development when I write about the beautiful, beautiful film.
Back to the book: Alcott’s writing reads more like reportage than the narrative style we expect today. That’s not surprising—a great deal has changed in the world of letters in the past hundred and fifty years—but it made me ponder why the book remains so engaging. Stylistically, there’s not much I want to emulate. If Alcott came to a writing workshop with this manuscript today, the instructor would berate her to “show, don’t tell.” The instructor would also advise Alcott to drop the heavy Christian moralizing to make the book more marketable. So why do contemporary readers continue to love the story?
Tips for writing fiction:
Write what you know.
This isn’t exactly a revelation—any teacher in a 101-level writing workshop will give this same advice—but it’s good advice. So often, writers think, “Well, that’s not a story. Who would care about that?” Alcott herself wasn’t terribly interested in writing this book. She did it at the behest of her publisher, but she used as source material that with which she was familiar: her family. Because it’s realistic and relatable, it’s become beloved. It even blazed a trail, however unintentionally, in the world of children’s literature.*
I can’t claim this insight is original. It comes from my genius crush, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig spoke in an interview that I can’t find right now (gaaa!) but will update this post if I do, about how the ordinary lives of these women were given importance because Alcott chose to write about them. In other words, we look to literature and art to guide us as to what we should pay attention to in real life. Alcott’s choice lent women’s domestic lives significance and authority.
So don’t be afraid to write what you know, even if you don’t think it seems important. You may end up writing an international classic.
PS: Pickles
Here’s something I didn’t expect to discover in my re-reading: in the first fifteen pages, pickles are mentioned twice. In the first hundred pages, they’re mentioned six times. This is a lot. What. Is. The. Obsession. With. Pickles? A Google search of “did Louisa May Alcott live near a pickle factory?” yields no useful information. Another reader on Twitter pointed out that this happens a lot in 17th- and 18th-century novels. (Little Women is a 19th-century novel, but who’s counting?) Is it an insight into an author’s cravings?
For what it is worth, food obsessions are not entirely restricted to 17th- and 18th- (or 19th-)century novelists. A lasagna plays a not-insignificant role in my latest book…
*Sicherman, Barbara (2010). Well Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN978-0-8078-3308-7.
