STAY IN THE NOW: A Writing Tip by Nathaniel Popkin • Cleaver Magazine

A Writing Tip by Nathaniel Popkin
STAY IN THE NOW

My editor and dear friend Ann de Forest knows my writing better than I do—especially when I’m being imprecise, obtuse, or long-winded. She straightens my metaphors, shortens my sentences, and holds me to point-of-view.

During our most recent revision process, toiling over my new novel Partly Strong, Partly Broken, Ann gave me the tools to see something else in my writing and others’: how to use action to eliminate distracting, momentum-crushing explanation and backstory. It’s a strategy I’ve been calling “staying in the now.” (Which is also the name of a workshop I offered at Stockton’s Murphy Writing Program Winter Getaway and will repeat in January 2027).

Action captivates the reader and gives them energy to continue on. Movement stirs the reader to their own moments of reflection and meditation. Backstory and explanation, on the other hand, create distance, pulling (or pushing?) the reader out of the story.

When I teach this idea, I focus on the opening of a novel, where it’s more important to seduce than to convince, shock, teach, or demonstrate. Your reader will catch up, even to something challenging to understand, if you set something in motion (and it could be a thought) and then let that movement carry description, situation, psychic reality, and convey all or some of what came before—as we each of us carry our pasts into the present moment. Sometimes we hide it; sometimes the past leaks out. The writer’s job is to stick with the act of hiding or leaking.

Eventually this will be done with such effectiveness that backstory and explanation will be unnecessary. You will be liberated, and your reader will become more attached.

I will add one more thing: Don’t be afraid to start over. I wrote what was then called “The Kingdom Shall Be Partly Strong, and Partly Broken” in spring and summer 2023, and thought I was done. The events of October 7 and the response to them changed the novel’s underlying reality. It was daunting, but I had to rewrite, almost from scratch, and I got to do it with an editor by my side. The process deepened my characters; it gave them time to breathe.

Nathaniel Popkin and his editor Ann de Forest will x-ray these hidden aspects of the novel-making process, among others, this Friday, June 5th, at Philadelphia’s Franklin Inn Club, in a discussion to be moderated by Cleaver editor Joy Manning.

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of four novels, including Partly Strong, Partly Broken, and eight books in total. He is also the co-editor of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? In the novels The Year of the Return and Everything Is Borrowed and in the book-length essay To Reach the Spring, Popkin examines intersections of Jewish ideals and lived realities. Popkin is a writer and producer of history documentary films, the co-founder of the website and public history and journalism project Hidden City, and formerly a writer of criticism for the Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, Public Books, and Cleaver Magazine, among other publications. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Tablet, and Gulf Coast.