It's All Write to Fuhgeddabout the Plot

Best-Selling author Jennifer Belle shares the method she's used to write five novels, that time she worked with Madonna, how to write sex scenes, and the path that led to publishing her latest novel, Swanna in Love with Akashic Books. 

Jennifer Belle is the best-selling author of five novels, Going Down (which was named best debut novel by Entertainment Weekly and optioned for the screen twenty-seven times), High Maintenance, Little Stalker, and The Seven Year Bitch; and Animal Stackers, a picture book for children (illustrated by David McPhail). Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Independent (London), Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., BlackBook, the New York Observer, Post Road, and many anthologies. Her most recent work is Swanna in Love. You can follow her on Instagram @jenniferbellewriter.

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Books & Writers referenced in this episode

True Grit by Charles Potis

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore

All Fours by Miranda July

The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersesian

Marilyn Rothstein

Liz Tigelaar 

Movies & TV shows mentioned:

Katie's Mom

I Love Lucy

The Carol Burnett Show

Saturday Night Live

Transcript

Jennifer: 0:00

When I started writing, I just, I could just work, I could just express myself, which I wanted to do so badly. That's really the requirement is to want to express yourself and then how you do that will come and what you say will come. So it's all right to just get started and write.

Meryl: 0:29

Hi, I am Meryl Branch Mc Tiernan,

Ariana: 0:30

and I am Ariana and you're listening to, it's All Write, A podcast about the writing life and those who live it. It

Meryl: 0:39

Today we are lucky to have Jennifer Belle, who has been a writing teacher and great friend of mine since 2007. Jennifer Bell is the bestselling author of five novels going Down named Best Debut, novel by Entertainment Weekly, High Maintenance, Little Stalker, the Seven Year Bitch, and her most recent Swanna in Love. Love, and her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Independent Harper's Bazaar Ms., Black book, the New York Observer Post Road, and many anthologies. We're very happy to have you here today, Jenny.

Jennifer: 1:13

Thanks Meryl. Thanks, Ariana. Yeah, welcome. Thank you so much.

Ariana: 1:17

What a career

Jennifer: 1:19

I've been really lucky.

Ariana: 1:21

So Swanna in Love, your fifth novel came out last year, right? Yes. 2024. Do you feel like writing Swan in Love, was that process any different from the first book and then all the books in between? I don't, I hate to say call them all the books in between, but. I They're your babies too. Oh, the middle children. The middle children. How has mothering these books maybe changed or evolved?

Jennifer: 1:43

I'm more confident, when I set out to write my first book I had never written anything before and I didn't know I could do it, so I settled into a character who was not unlike myself, and I let that character go on these tiny little adventures that I thought of as scenes because I came from an acting background, so that's all I knew. And over four years I wrote the book and now I can write with a little bit more confidence'cause I've done it once, you've done it once, you can do it again. So that's really all that's changed that also my level of terror has risen.

Ariana: 2:25

Terror, for what?

Jennifer: 2:26

It's a really tough business, obviously. The first time you don't have an agent yet, you don't have a publisher yet, and you're free to just explore, do whatever you want. And I would say the pressure goes up a little bit as you move on. I always say this very obnoxious thing to people who are starting that it's the best time of their lives before they have an agent. And it's like

Meryl: 2:51

they all wanna kill you.

Jennifer: 2:52

Yes. It's one of the worst things I say, but it really changes when people take an interest.

Ariana: 2:57

That is it a catch 22 of sorts? Sorts, yeah.

Meryl: 3:01

I was rereading Going Down recently and I noticed how much dialogue is there. And I feel like there's a little bit, there's dialogue in all your books, but it seems heavier there. Is that something you're conscious of now?

Jennifer: 3:13

That's interesting that you say that because I wrote in layers with my first book. Now I write in more of an integrated way where everything comes together at once. But when I started I, I really just wrote dialogue and then I eked out a little bit of stage directions. And then I managed to have some descriptions, and then finally I forced out some emotion and inner thought. Because as I said, I had just read plays and screenplays for so long as an actor that's what I was used to. And now I write in a more balanced way, but I think I'm still pretty dialogue heavy.

Meryl: 3:56

Would you say that you hear the dialogue first? Is that like the first thing that comes to you?

Jennifer: 4:00

I think what comes to me first is the emotion. Now, I really wanna get to an emotional truth and I sort of wait till I'm there before I start writing almost. But I do hear my way in a lot of the times, too.

Meryl: 4:15

Same for me. I feel like a lot of writers say, oh, it starts, it always starts with an image. And I'm like, no, it never starts with an image for you. No. A voice or a, it's a, yeah. It's like I'm hearing a conversation or imagining a conversation.

Jennifer: 4:29

Yeah. It does not start with an image for me either. When I sit down to write and I have no idea what I'm gonna write that day, I tend to set myself somewhere like I was sitting on the subway and or I sat in the park. And even if I change it later. I like to put myself in a situation, put my character in a situation before starting that

Ariana: 4:52

feels very like actor driven. That reminds me of yeah, maybe I I spoke about it before doing improv. Yeah. And doing improv actually prompted me to get back into writing.

Jennifer: 5:02

Oh, that's great.

Ariana: 5:02

Which was really interesting. But yeah, that sounds like that. It's okay, have a place, have a setting, have an action, have an object, have a dialogue.

Meryl: 5:11

It's all right if you improv your way in.

Ariana: 5:14

Ooh, that's a good one.

Meryl: 5:20

So most of your books were written contemporarily to the time, other than Swana in Love, how was it going back in time and setting it in a different time period?

Jennifer: 5:31

My first book, my main character's 19. And I was 26, 27 when it got published. And then, yeah, they went up in age from there for sure. And then

Meryl: 5:43

down and then

Jennifer: 5:43

Swana is 14. a lot of thought was put into. How old she should be and when it should take place. And the parents are criminally negligent, so it had to take place before now because they would be in jail. They'd just be in trouble. So it had to take place in the seventies or eighties. And then I made her 14. I really. Deliberated about making her older, making her younger. She has a younger brother and I didn't want her to be too much older than the younger brother. And it's important that she loses her virginity in this book, and I thought that a girl like this would not be much older than 14 when she lost her virginity. So when I finally landed on 14 as her perfect age. Then I corresponded it with when I was about 14, so that's how I came up with the time.

Ariana: 6:42

Ah, so you just went back. Did you keep journals when you were younger?

Jennifer: 6:45

I did. I obsessively kept journals and then my mother read them when I was 13 and I threw them down the incinerator in my building and I still dream about them. If I could do anything again, it would be not do that. I wish so much I had those back and I beg my kids to keep a journal and of course they don't. And when I talk to anybody who says that they wanna write a book and they're a kid I beg them to keep a journal. It's such a shame that I don't have them.

Meryl: 7:20

So writing in your journal is actually currently part of your practice as well?

Jennifer: 7:24

Yes. Yeah. I don't go out without it. And I choose really special books from a guy in Italy. A lot of writers can't write unless they've read first for an hour or two, or, people have different things that they have to do before they write, and it's my way in. I just write anything in my diary to get started in a writing session and it gets the bad stuff out of my head, and then I'm ready to sit down and work on my computer. So I write down dreams, I write down ideas for scenes all the time. Oh, cool. Yeah, I can't imagine not having my journal with me as a writer, I really recommend that to anybody who wants to write like it's not All right, it's not All right. Not to have a journal. Yeah. Let's do a, it's not All right. Podcast.

Meryl: 8:15

Yeah,

Ariana: 8:16

that'll be the

Meryl: 8:16

companion. That's

Jennifer: 8:17

more my speed.

Meryl: 8:18

I got in trouble the other day because I told Jennifer that I had written on my phone, I'd written in the notes app, and she said, why? Because you didn't have your journal

Ariana: 8:28

and is that correct?

Meryl: 8:29

No, I just I'm so slow and my hand hurts, so I was like, I, my thoughts were coming too fast. I had to type them.

Ariana: 8:36

So Meryl is in Jennifer's workshop and you've been in Jennifer's workshop for a bit.

Meryl: 8:42

Mostly, since 2007. Yeah, at the, I started in the New School. And then I was like dying to get into her private workshop. And then I finally did, she finally let me in and then I wouldn't leave. I'm glad I did.

Jennifer: 8:55

I'd love to hear the story. I don't remember. I know she doesn't remember anything. I'm always scared to let new people in, so it always takes about a year.

Meryl: 9:02

What happened was I wanted it so desperately that I met your mother at a party and said, can I be in? I was like, I'll just be in her workshop if Jenny won't let me in. Oh,

Jennifer: 9:12

boy, that, that spurred me to action.

Meryl: 9:14

And then Your mother called and she's, or I called her and she said Jenny really wants you. And I was like, oh, okay. Yes. So that's a method I use with everything. Oh yeah.

Ariana: 9:24

It's almost like a sitcom when you're like, I'm getting in one way or another,

Meryl: 9:28

Jenny really wants you.

Ariana: 9:30

It's yes. yeah. What has it brought to you and to your life?

Meryl: 9:34

I seeing somebody who had done this, I was 25 at the time. And, I loved her books. I'd read three of them by the time I met you. And they both, they all came to me in weird ways. Like my friend Amy Harsuvonnegat gave me Going Down she's like, you'll like this. And then I met this guy near Washington Square Park who was selling books on the street. And he gave me High Maintenance or sold me High Maintenance. He's like, oh, the author's always coming by here. And then I was walking by the New School and I saw her name in the catalog. I'm like, oh my God, this is meant to be. Yeah,

Jennifer: 10:08

I never knew any of this.

Meryl: 10:10

Yeah, it feels very ordained or like destined. Very, yeah. And so I've since written two books and starting a third under her auspices.

Jennifer: 10:20

Yeah. And they're great.

Ariana: 10:26

What would you say is the, what sets your workshop apart or what's your method for running this workshop?

Jennifer: 10:33

We work very hard. We're very critical and we have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot and we bring in a lot of pages I think what sets it apart is the lack of rules In a lot of workshops, there are rules, like you can't say anything bad about the work or the person can't defend himself or his pages. We don't have any rules like that. We don't have time. We really tear things to shreds and we try to make things better. If you're reading pages, you can say anything you want about those pages. You can defend them up and down because I really feel like. We get to what we wanna say sometimes when we're making those defensive remarks and we say what we're trying to do in the pages. So I think those rules that a lot of workshops have don't help at all. We're not a support group although we can be very supportive, but we're all there to be published. We're all pretty commercially minded and we really care about good writing. During COVID, I, when we moved to Zoom, I started to invite famous agents to come and talk to us. And since then we've gotten some book deals and that sets us apart also.'cause we really try to get people published.

Ariana: 11:52

That's amazing.

Jennifer: 11:53

Yeah. It's been really great.

Ariana: 11:55

And I feel like, when you say these things, it seems so, simple. You're like, we're there to, we're there because we like writing, we're there to, actually make the work better. But it's funny how you get in other spaces.'Cause yeah, the group makes the workshop work,

Jennifer: 12:11

so Yes, it does. And also in my workshop we read every single week. So in other workshops that I've been in, it's your turn once a month or it's your turn once a semester or twice a semester. You're bringing in work every single week. So the deadline is a big part of it. Just that your writing helps.

Meryl: 12:31

That's why I'm always like Wednesday and Thursday. No. Yeah,

Jennifer: 12:34

exactly. It puts you in a pretty professional schedule, so that sets it apart too, and also that we never stop. It's just ongoing and it's a lifestyle choice.

Ariana: 12:44

That feels, it feels very. I don't know. It feels very renaissance,

Jennifer: 12:48

I think it's very 1920s and Paris kind of

Ariana: 12:53

thing. That's what I was thinking. that la Boham, like I was thinking like the Harlem Renaissance and Yeah, and all the writers just, it really

Jennifer: 13:01

felt like that during COVID too, because. We were working,

Meryl: 13:05

it was a lifeline during COVID. It was like, yeah,

Jennifer: 13:07

We were working and we just didn't stop. And a lot of us finished whole books during that time.

Meryl: 13:14

Yeah. So you've finished a, including me. Yeah. Yeah. Do you wanna talk about the process of how COVID changed your writing or,

Jennifer: 13:20

I was forced to go to my country house with my family and. I hated it so much, My kids were on Zoom school and I had never even been in the house for 14 days and we went for 14 weeks. And I wrote, I just wrote all the time to get away from

Meryl: 13:36

those people.

Jennifer: 13:37

Yeah. I hadn't published in a long time and I hadn't really wanted to publish. I thought I was done or I was just, I was writing, but I wasn't. I wasn't driven to finish anything. I was working on something that just maybe I just wasn't motivated to finish. And then during COVID, somebody gave me this book True Grit, which I had never read, and I just fell in love with this book. It just inspired me so much that this writer, Charles Portis, could have this 14-year-old character, a girl. Set out to avenge the murder of her father. And I don't know, I just thought if he can do it, I can do it. And I did it during COVID.

Meryl: 14:20

I remember one of the things you were struggling with this book was to have'cause it main character is 14, but to have her be older and look back and you ended Oh. Whether or not to do

Jennifer: 14:29

that. Yeah, I tried. Some alternate first and last chapters where she's an adult. Like that book Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lori Moore, which is a great book. It was another book, a model book for this book. She starts out as an adult in a cafe with her husband, and then you flash back for the whole duration of the book to something that happens to her one summer and then. It ends with her back in that cafe with her husband, and I decided against it ultimately because it just, it didn't really feel pure to the book, when I first attempted the other, the alternative idea of starting with her as an adult and ending with her as an adult. Those were sort of isolated chapters. But what Lori Moore did so brilliantly in her book Who Will Run The Frog Hospital, is there were just these little moments all through the book where we're aware that she's looking back, but very seamlessly. And I didn't want that at all. I really wanted to lose myself in the 14-year-old voice. So that was the choice I made.

Meryl: 15:36

And then this book is also takes place within eight days. How was that to how that was a shorter period than any of your other books, right?

Jennifer: 15:44

Oh, by far. Yeah. My, my first couple of books take place in a year. Each'cause I couldn't figure out, I just technically couldn't figure out how to do anything other than that. And then one book took place over four or five years, and that felt like a revelation. And I had always wanted to write a book that took place in a short amount of time.'cause I always admired that so much like Catcher in the Rye or True Grit takes place in a very short period of time. But then it flash forwards at the end to a sort of epilogue. I didn't think I could do it, but I just did it. You have to track breakfast, lunch and dinner and uh, you just have to have real a lot of control over your time you have to stay in the narration. You, you can't obviously jump ahead, but you can have a ton of flashbacks. Of course.

Ariana: 16:31

I'm. Impressed when writers play with time.'cause you can both condense and extend time in, in books and especially in a novel that's only eight days. I feel like I forgot that was happening.

Jennifer: 16:42

Yeah. There's a girl in the workshop right now who's writing a book that she announced would take place over about a year. And she's on like page 60 of one scene. And I'm like, I don't think your book's gonna take place in a year. because it is 60 pages and we're on night one and they haven't gotten to the movies yet. So she realized, oh yeah, it's gonna take place in a week.

Ariana: 17:09

Are you a kind of person who thinks. Can the work dictate the form and time Oh, of

Jennifer: 17:16

course it has to. You have to tell the story,

Ariana: 17:18

right?

Jennifer: 17:19

And Absolutely. Yeah. You have to see what all we do is talk about what serves the book, so of course the time period has to serve the book and the duration. Absolutely.

Meryl: 17:32

So Ariana has just started writing her first novel. That's great. Any any suggestions on how she might go about that?

Jennifer: 17:40

Yes, I have suggestions. I think you should sink into a character who's not unlike yourself if you don't have one in mind already. And then instead of knowing your whole plot or outlining, which if I had to outline, I would've never written one single word. Just let your character have little tiny adventures that I think of as scenes. And don't write in order. Don't write, don't start at the beginning. Start in the middle and just sink in and see what happens.

Ariana: 18:18

Thank you. Yeah. I was trying to give myself a page deadline of what did we say, 50 pages by the first day of summer. And I find myself just writing little snippets and I'm like, they don't really go together. And I've been like, no. Yeah, if you have 60 pages, beating myself up about pages that are

Meryl: 18:34

totally random or feel all over the place. That's great. That's still amazing.

Jennifer: 18:38

Well, It's that sinking thing in thing I keep talking about. When you write short stories, not only do you have to come up with new plots, but you have to come up with whole new main characters and names. Takes me 25 years to name a character and you keep changing things up so much that becomes part of the challenge. So with a novel, you're just living with these people for a very long time.

Ariana: 19:03

I think that was one of my thoughts was a couple of my stories that I really was loving and I was working on. I started to think, actually this is the same person. In some of them like the same. Of course it's, yeah. And I was like, maybe this is one bigger story and I'm having trouble because it's too small.

Jennifer: 19:21

Yeah. And people worry that they don't know what they wanna write about or. They don't have a big plot. Or if I had to have a plot or a big point, I never would've written anything. I just had this tremendous desire to express myself. I had been an actress and I was really frustrated being in other people's plays. And I would I loved auditioning'cause it was my two minute little show that I was in control of. And then I would get in a play and I would just think, oh no. And, and then when I started writing, I just, I could just work, I could just express myself, which I wanted to do so badly. So that's really the requirement is to want to express yourself and then how you do that will come and what you say will come.

Meryl: 20:15

When I was in Jenny's new school workshop for the first semester, she gave out prompts and I still remember some of them like. How much is in your bank account, how you like to be kissed other stuff. And so I would just write the scene based on three words. And at the end of the semester, I had 86 pages that were all over the place. And then I was like, all right, I have to figure out how these all go together. And it took me like 20 years.

Jennifer: 20:40

I can give prompts again.

Meryl: 20:41

Yeah, i'd love that.

Ariana: 20:44

How do you come up with your prompt?

Jennifer: 20:47

Right. I don't know. There's no particular way just what I think would feed a scene, like for the one she just mentioned, I think was called what you see at the ATM, because that's Important. It's a great way to feel emotion or to raise the stakes in a scene is to worry, have money running out. Yeah, is a great thing for some characters to have to grapple with.

Meryl: 21:13

And it sets you at a place so you're not just I have this much money. You're like with the character. Right? And

Jennifer: 21:18

then the idea of the prompts, like one of the prompts is your mother's closet and the idea is to just riff on it. So maybe you think about a time your father gave your mother something and your, and then they had a big fight and then you end up writing about your parents' divorce. It's not literally your mother's closet, it's whatever that prompt gives to you.

Ariana: 21:40

Do you find yourself writing to these prompts when you give them out

Jennifer: 21:43

Everything that I tell anybody I do myself. Of course I'm, we're just writing for our lives here, we're. We're all struggling to just get through this very crazy, stupid hard, wonderful experience of writing.

Ariana: 22:05

Have you ever taken advice from another writer or teacher that you felt really affected you in some way?

Jennifer: 22:13

I think the answer is no, actually. I feel like I learned everything I know from watching. I love Lucy and Carol Brunette and Saturday Night Live and sitcoms like Meryl and I have sitcoms in common and reading, just. Meryl's a big reader too. She and I just read a book called All Fours by Miranda July and we both really liked it a lot. And so we had a lot of conversations about it. And I think we learned from that book we learned to try to push ourselves to be raw. And I think that book really. Will inspire some good writing from us, but I didn't take any advice from Miranda July.

Meryl: 22:59

You took it from the work?

Ariana: 23:00

From the work, yeah.

Jennifer: 23:01

I'm not against taking advice, but I just don't, I don't think I have actually. I think I'm pretty independent in this process. But I have a lot of writer friends and there's nothing I like more than hanging out and talking about writing but I don't think we really give each other advice. I think we, we do commiserate and we do, we, I find we actually have quite similar processes.

Ariana: 23:24

you're synthesizing everything, the writing that you read, the shows you watch.

Jennifer: 23:30

That's, I use my real life all the time. That's where the prompts come from. Like I probably wrote that prompt about the ATM after, particularly horrifying moment at the atm. I don't remember, but I'm sure that I experienced that and thought this is. F this is what I need to do in my writing. Yeah. Is have my character freak out over money.

Ariana: 23:50

Sometimes I used to'cause some people leave their receipts and I used to, I always like to look at the receipts to see how much money people have Of course. Make up stories about them. See,

Jennifer: 23:59

That's such a great character quirk.

Meryl: 24:06

So your books have a lot of great sex scenes. How do you

Jennifer: 24:09

they do?

Meryl: 24:10

very yeah, rich.

Jennifer: 24:12

My first book is about a hooker and I think it's been called the only book about prostitution with no sex in it,

Meryl: 24:20

which is crazy'cause I wouldn't remember that. There's no sex in it'cause it feels sexual.

Jennifer: 24:24

There's sex, but she's adding up money in her mind the whole time. Right. My new book has, I think it has some real sex scenes. What is your question about sex scenes, Meryl?

Meryl: 24:35

I don't know. I like them.

Ariana: 24:36

How do you approach writing sex in novels that are not, and also writing sex in a way that. I don't wanna call it literary, but when you read sex in a quote unquote literary fiction versus a romance novel, there is some differences, I would say, it.

Meryl: 24:54

how do you write literary sex?

Jennifer: 24:55

I've never read a romance book, so I don't know. All right. I write it the way it would happen.

Meryl: 25:04

It's like anything else, like going to the atm? I don't know. I get I know I'm like I don't know. I'm not a square, but I do get like weird sometimes when I'm reading sex scenes or even if I'm trying to write them where you're like. Do I put that detail in or I'm like, oh, is this corny? Is this I don't know.

Jennifer: 25:20

We've had some hilarious sex scene moments at the workshop over the years. We

Meryl: 25:26

all like Mo, most of us like to write about sex. Oh my God. Especially

Jennifer: 25:30

during COVID. Everybody was writing sex left and right. Really? It was crazy. Nobody was having it, but everybody was writing it.

Meryl: 25:39

I was having a lot of sex with my shower head.

Jennifer: 25:41

Yeah. Meryl likes to write about masturbation. I do not like to write about that.

Meryl: 25:46

But you did one and I think, which one was it? With the Grim Reaper. I

Jennifer: 25:51

don't remember,

Meryl: 25:52

but I will say

Jennifer: 25:54

that my friend who's a writer, Arthur Nersesian who Meryl's friends with too, he wrote the book The Fuck Up, and he's written 14 novels and he says that a book has to hit all the chakras. Ooh, it has he, he says if a book doesn't give him at least one hard on, it's not a good book. So I think of that

Meryl: 26:14

hundred percent agree.

Jennifer: 26:15

I think of that for Arthur. I try to give Arthur at least one erection per novel. In a first person book you have to be very intimate with the reader and you have to decide when is it's too much information. Because you don't wanna be a naval gazer or whatever that phrase is. You don't wanna discuss every single inch of your body, but you want the reader to feel like a part of you. So you have to, that's just, that's where a workshop can be very helpful. We, we can say. Meryl, it's too much. But we never have, we never, we've never said that yet. Not yet. Not yet. We're

Meryl: 26:54

still working on it. But I remember when I was, you never will young. My my parents would read me like Heidi or whatever books they were reading me, and I would ask them, when do they go to the bathroom? Right. There you go. So then they would add that in. My father would add in and then Heidi went to the bathroom.

Jennifer: 27:12

Okay. That's really weird.

Ariana: 27:14

That's cute.

Jennifer: 27:15

But with Swanna in Love. This writer I know named Marilyn Rothstein, who wrote a great book called Crazy to Leave You and husband's another Sharp Objects, and her new book is called Who Loves You Best. She read my book and she said to me your character is obsessed with pee. There's just too much pee. There's, and I thought that was the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life, and I. Read the book again, and she's 14 and she's worried about where she's gonna go to the bathroom, and she's worried about her little brother wetting himself. But there was a lot about pee. So I took some out. but it's a road trip. And all you do on a road trip is worry about the next time you're gonna pee. Truly. But she was very disturbed. I did take out several pee references, so if you want more pee in my book, you can blame Marilyn Rothstein for that one

Ariana: 28:13

more pee in the book.

Meryl: 28:19

One thing we wanted to touch on, is it the exciting news that your book Swanna in Love is going to become a movie?

Jennifer: 28:26

Yes.

Meryl: 28:27

That's so great!

Jennifer: 28:27

Yes. We're saying it here first.

Meryl: 28:30

Yay.

Jennifer: 28:30

A great screenwriter named Liz Tigelaar, who wrote, she adapted Little Fires Everywhere and tiny, Beautiful Objects or whatever that, that, I guess those are well done. She's really good. Yeah, and she apparently, she claims, I hard to believe Hollywood people ever, but she claims that she has a tradition of going to Cabo with a bunch of girlfriends and reading one of my books every few years. And she went to book soup in LA and she said I wish there was a new Jennifer Bell book. And the guy said, there is. So she took my book with her friends to Cabo and apparently they read it out loud and then she optioned it and she put it together with a great producer likely story productions and it looks like it could happen, but it also could not happen. We don't know.

Ariana: 29:29

knock wood. Yeah. So where are you in the process when these things happen? I'm very curious.

Jennifer: 29:35

In the past I've always been the writer and now I'm not the writer

Meryl: 29:40

at three of your books have been optioned or before all of them.

Jennifer: 29:43

All of them have been optioned. The first book was optioned. 27 times. First by Madonna and then by a company called Muse Films, and I was the writer for all the different options.

Meryl: 29:56

Did you have to change it based on every person you were working with or you just kept the same script?

Jennifer: 30:02

Yeah, the first option was with Madonna and she was gonna be the director. Wow. So it, it was under her direction, I had to have meetings with her and discuss every little thing with her. And it had to be, to her approval. And then there were all kinds of different directors and different actors, with High Maintenance, first it was optioned by HBO and then it was optioned by Fox 2000. So those were two totally different scripts and those were series. So that was different. That was a totally different experience and great. I loved it so much. So with this, I'm nothing. I'm just, i'm an executive producer, which means nothing. But I'm excited anyway.

Ariana: 30:45

we have to ask, how was Madonna? Oh, I was like, I was gonna interrupt you before, but I was like, how was working with Madonna?

Jennifer: 30:52

It was very fun and exciting and she is very respectful as a collaborator. She always acted like I was an expert and I knew what I was doing. She was extremely demanding. And I think that's because she's very demanding of herself. I would have a meeting with her and I would think to myself in my mind, okay, now I'm gonna go out to lunch and I'm gonna lie in bed for the rest of the day and I'd be walking out the door and I'd literally be fantasizing about lunch. And she would say, so can I have these pages by four o'clock because I'm flying. At four and I wanna read them on the plane. I would just be dumbfounded I was breathless being in her presence, and then I'm supposed to actually go home to my tenement apartment and write a huge amount of work by four o'clock. It was. But I, she wasn't being a bitch. She was just that's what she would've done.

Ariana: 31:51

Right. Which,

Jennifer: 31:52

so it was a constant it was just a constant grind because she just wanted so much and got so much.

Ariana: 32:02

That's a testament to like her legacy. That makes sense.

Jennifer: 32:05

She had great ideas. She didn't take the time to explain her ideas. Like she would say, this beginning doesn't work. And I'd say, why? And I'd give her 10 reasons why it worked so well and why she was wrong. And she's no, it just doesn't work. And I never knew if it was because she was Madonna and she didn't feel she had to explain herself, or if she just. Or she didn't know how to explain herself if she wasn't analytical in that way. But I would sit up in bed a couple of days later and realize 10 reasons why she was exactly right. And that happened over and over again that she was right and I would have to figure it out on my own. She didn't explain it to me, but she was great to work for. She was a little bit. Unrealistic about no, she was actually, she was, I would say the opposite. She was overly realistic about money. Like she would, I would write a scene that took place in Grand Central Station and she'd say, no, we can't shoot there. It would be too expensive. And I think

Meryl: 33:04

she had her producer's hat on.

Jennifer: 33:05

She had the producer's hat on constantly. And I would think You're Madonna, make it happen make it happen. We'll have Grand Central Station, we'll do it at three in the, but she was very focused on having a financially viable project. She did not want her first film to be a money suck. And I did not think that way. So that was strange. But she's a business woman.

Meryl: 33:31

That is a big thing when you're writing, like when we were writing our screenplay we had intended it for Katie's Mom to be small, but then at some point it started getting big and then we had to cut it back to small again. And that was really hard because we'd envisioned these bigger scenes, but then we had to.

Jennifer: 33:49

Yeah, Madonna ran a tight ship, we can say the whole time, but she was just, she was creative. She was, I describe her as having tentacles on the all over her body, like she was just a feeling creature. She, not particularly analytical, but so smart. Sensuous and feeling, so I really loved the experience.

Meryl: 34:21

So this is your first novel published by Akashic.

Jennifer: 34:24

Yeah. I was with Riverhead Penguin Putnam for my last four books. And then I didn't write for a long time. And then I had some issues with this book because I, we didn't tell people what this book is about, but it's about a 14-year-old girl who has a love sex relationship with a 38-year-old married dad in 1982. And a lot of publishers were very scared of it, I think. It went around on submission right at the height of the Me Too, most heightened moment I think. And people were scared of it and I was prepared for that. And I was prepared to have conversations with publishers where they might wanna make her older or make the guy younger. Or change it in some way because she's not a victim at all. She doesn't feel like a victim. And the books that have come out that are on this topic, the girl very much feels like a victim. Anyway, I got a lot of nos and Johnny Temple at Akashic wanted it and I just had so much respect for him. He published Arthur Nersesian and the guy I told you about. So many other great books. It's just a great independent press. So I went for it. It's been easily the best publishing experience I've ever had. It's been the most enjoyable, the most respectful, the most fun. And I've gotten great reviews and all the attention I wanted. So I just think it's a great place to publish a book.

Ariana: 36:07

How do you manage the disappointments that come with being a writer and, you're optioning these movie deals. You have this book that has quote unquote taboo topic that these publishers didn't want. You had so many nos before you got your Yes. How do you manage that?

Jennifer: 36:25

Probably not that well. It's a miserable feeling and I see it in my workshop members trying to get agents. It's so hard to get an agent these days and probably people listening to this podcast might be trying to get an agent and there's just a firewall up. You just can't, you can't break through. And it's very unfortunate. How did I handle it? Of course I've been extremely lucky and I haven't had to face what some other people have faced. But it's not fun, it's, you have to enjoy the good times. And I, when I did get my book deal for this book, Swanna in Love, I just became determined to enjoy every single second of it. Like this podcast, like I'm just enjoying it. And that's. How you get through the hard times is trying to enjoy the good times. Yeah.

Ariana: 37:18

Is that what we're trying to do in the 2025? This crazy year? Yeah.

Jennifer: 37:22

This is a crazy year, it's so hard to get published. All the more reason to write whatever you wanna write, and write it the way you wanna write it go for it.

Ariana: 37:32

and that's really hard to do. You have to get really vulnerable. Sure.

Jennifer: 37:37

It's, yeah. It's a, that's what art is. Art is, that's what art is. It's pretty vulnerable.

Ariana: 37:42

I feel like sometimes I'm in a war with myself where, I feel what I want to say and then I write it and I'm like, that's not I'm still not saying it all I don't know, for me I'm just, yeah, it

Jennifer: 37:54

takes a really long time before you're a good judge of what you're writing. It doesn't take a long time to be a good writer. You could be a good writer right away, but it takes a long time to have a sense if, is this good or is this bad? And that's why a workshop is great because you shouldn't really be judging it that way. You should just be writing it and then giving it to reader you trust or a workshop you trust. Not trying to decide yourself if it's good or if it's bad. Now I have a sense when I write something that's not good, but for many years I wouldn't have even attempted to try to know if something was good or bad.

Meryl: 38:33

It's interesting'cause I feel that some of my friends do write in a vacuum and they're like, oh, I'm not gonna show it to you until I've, really chiseled and I could never do that. I'm like, I on the opposite extreme, as soon as I write it, I'm like, tell me, is it good? Is it good? Maybe too much.

Ariana: 38:49

I think that's a really good I question.'cause I do feel like there's some folks who feel like they need to be super precious of their work and they feel like that gives them the motivation. And then I was just listening, I think it's called the Harvard something, the Harvard Method, and it's mention what you're doing all the time because the theory is that you're always one connection away from meeting the person you need to meet or doing the thing that you need to do. So if you just keep mentioning what you're working on, all the connections will start to come into place.

Jennifer: 39:20

You asked me just a moment ago, how do you have a thick enough skin Yeah. For this business and being in a workshop certainly helps because you're getting practice getting notes every single week, and you're getting bad reviews every single week. It could be. You you have that support of your friends and you know, ultimately that your book is good because people have signed off on it, so I knew my book was good, and that gives you a lot of strength. Yeah. What Is it all right or not all right to do? It's all right to not know what you wanna write. It's all right to have no idea what your plot is or what your big point is. You just wanna have to have a tremendous desire to express yourself. And just go for it. So it's all right to just get started and write. Oh, I love that.

Ariana: 40:17

Thank you so much for joining. Are you working on anything? Yeah. Now

Jennifer: 40:21

I'm writing a new novel Ooh. And Meryl's in my workshop with me. I bring it in, I bring in pages. It's a lot of fun. And yeah, we will see what happens. That's exciting. And you're gonna bang it out in Paris? I'm heading to Paris to live there for two whole months by myself.

Ariana: 40:39

Oh, that's exciting. And I hope

Jennifer: 40:40

to do a lot of writing there.

Ariana: 40:42

Yeah. Enjoy that for the summer. Yes. Oh, amazing.

Jennifer: 40:45

Yeah.

Ariana: 40:46

All right. Bon Voyage. Thanks for coming

Jennifer: 40:48

Merci, thank you. And thanks for having me on your show.

Ariana: 40:57

That's a wrap on today's episode of It's All Right With Jennifer Belle. You can find us on Instagram at It's All Write. W-R-I-T-E Pod, so it's all write. Pod on Instagram and you can also email us at itsallwritepod@gmail.com. We love to hear from you, write a review, subscribe, all those fun things that you do on the internet.

Meryl: 41:21

Thanks so much.