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Michal Lemberger

Goodreads Author

Born

New York, The United States

Website

http://michallemberger.com

Twitter

michallemberger

Genre

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Member Since

February 2012

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Michal Lemberger's nonfiction and journalism have appeared in Slate, Salon, Tablet, and other publications, and her poetry has been published in a number of print and online journals. A story from After Abel, her first collection of fiction, was featured in Lilith Magazine. Lemberger holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA and a BA in English and religion from Barnard College. She has taught the Hebrew Bible as Literature at UCLA and the American Jewish University. She was born and raised in New York and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters. ...more

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How do you deal with writer’s block?

Michal Lemberger The dark and dirty truth here is that I don't have a way to deal with writer's block. I've suffered from it, for years at a time in some cases. It fee…moreThe dark and dirty truth here is that I don't have a way to deal with writer's block. I've suffered from it, for years at a time in some cases. It feels awful, and I mean that physically: it's as if there's a part of my body, a limb, say, that wants to move, to be used, but instead lies inert. The urge to write is there. Even the discipline to sit down and write is there. And still, I end up with what amounts to a collection of words on a page that don't add up to anything.

And yet. I did manage to write a book. It took decades for me to finally do it, so I must have figured something out, right? I'm not sure that's true, but I will say that in those decades of thinking about other things, learning other things, and reading other things, I was still sitting at my computer playing with words, so that when the stories that I wrote started coming together, I had the benefit of decades of information that I had taken in and years of collecting words on the page. When I say information, I don't only mean subject matter, but also more technical stuff: style, voice, pacing, and more.

It's been a year since I finished writing my last book. I feel like I'm starting all over again with random collections of words on the page. It hasn't gotten easier. There are many days when I feel empty of ideas, images, even language, but I keep sitting down at my computer. I hope it doesn't take another decade to push through it this time. In the meantime, I keep reading. I keep learning, and I keep thinking.(less)

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What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Michal Lemberger I wrote this for The Story Prize Blog--a wonderful site with lots of wisdom from many, many writers. It's in the form of a question, because I was the…moreI wrote this for The Story Prize Blog--a wonderful site with lots of wisdom from many, many writers. It's in the form of a question, because I was the one asking questions like this only a couple of years ago, so in a way, I was finally answering myself:
Dear writer,

You asked what it takes to write? I’m no Rilke. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that I’d be the one asking that question. That’s because I never thought of myself as a fiction writer. I was, however, a devourer of fiction from a very early age, the kind of kid who hid books in the small space between my bed and the wall so I could read after bedtime and first thing upon waking. I appreciated fiction. I studied it for years. I admired those who could write it. I especially admired those who could write short stories. I just never imagined that all that reading would one day lead me to write short fiction, too.

I was a writer, though. Primarily a poet, but then I went to grad school and wrote academically. After that, there was a stint as a book reviewer, then a long fallow period, and then I sat back down—I’d like to say pen in hand, which is a lovely if outdated image—at my computer and began writing poetry, essays, and some reported pieces again. It never occurred to me to try my hand at fiction.

As it turns out, all that reading and writing—and teaching, which I didn’t mention above, but which was an important component, too—was leading to an outpouring of short stories. Which is to say: experience matters.

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that only certain things count as experience: travel, love affairs, poverty, addiction, kinky sex. For writers, reading counts as experience. We learn how to write by reading. And thinking counts as experience. I think about books a lot, about how authors construct their characters, how they keep the action moving, word choices, and paragraph breaks, plot points, images, and themes.

Nomads: Been there? Done that? Not exactly...
The phrase “write what you know” gets bandied about, but it needs to be banished, to be kicked in the ass so that it flies through a window with a cartoon whoosh. Lived experience will make its way into your writing. You may end up writing about travel, love affairs, poverty (or affluence), addiction (or recovery), kinky (or boring) sex, and so much more that you draw from your life. I began writing fiction after I had children. Being a parent informs every sentence I write. But the stories in my book are set in the ancient world, which was much more brutal, but also smaller, than the one we inhabit. I’ve never lived in a caravan of nomads, herded sheep, or even seen the Nile, except in photographs. It was reading, specifically a years-long, deep immersion in ancient texts and other people’s writing about the ancient world that allowed me to imagine myself into its landscapes and rhythms.

Which brings me to the next important aspect of writing fiction: empathy. Empathy so complete, so radical, it hurts. It is empathy that lies at the heart of the writer’s imagination, and it is, I think, the trait that writers share, because we have to enter into our characters’ minds. We have to become their brain stems, sending out the signals that will move them through the arc of the story. Those of us inclined to write are born with the capacity for that level of identification, but if it’s not nurtured it will disappear, like a predisposition to gymnastics or piano. There, too, reading is a crucial tool. All of human life can be found in literature, which means you can find in it every passing squall of temper, or that surge of love that seems to take over all your nerve-endings, or the moment confusion tips over into embarrassment. The empathy you naturally feel will grow stronger the more you read.

The people we encounter as we go about our day are closed to us. We can’t enter their minds. Even though I am writing this to you, I remain a mystery to you, as you are to me, because we give each other just slivers of ourselves, that 10% of the iceberg that juts out into the air. It’s in stories that we learn how to shimmy into another person’s consciousness, how to wrap ourselves in it. Only once we’ve learned to do that can we write something worth reading. Here, then, is the key lesson: what your characters do will advance your narrative. What they feel will be your story.

Yours,

M.L.
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Michal Lemberger’s books

Average rating: 4.13 · 177 ratings · 48 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

After Abel and Other Stories
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Michal Lemberger (Goodreads Author),

Jonathan Kirsch (Foreword)

4.13 avg rating — 177 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions

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Michal Lemberger's Blog

The worst question ever

My first book hasn't even come out yet, but I'm already being asked a question I dread. It's on every list of questions presented to a writer. Publicists, readers, people who come to readings all ask it. Even Goodreads has it listed as one of the questions to answer when an author sets up his or her page.

What question could be as awful as all that, you ask? "Which authors have influenced your wor

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