Becky Chalsen: On Adding Personal Touches In Fiction

Becky Chalsen is a film and TV development executive at the production company Sunday Night. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and now lives in New York City.

Becky is a quadruplet and married to her high school sweetheart—also an identical twin—whose family has spent summers on Fire Island for more than three decades. Kismet is her first novel. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

In this post, Becky discusses how she shifted gears from thriller to contemporary romance with her debut novel, Kismet, the challenge of writing during the early days of the pandemic, and more!

Name: Becky Chalsen
Literary agent: Sabrina Taitz / WME
Book title: Kismet
Publisher: Dutton
Release date: April 18, 2023
Genre/category: Women’s Fiction / Contemporary Romance
Elevator pitch for the book: Kismet follows a woman attending her twin sister’s wedding in their family’s beach town of Kismet, Fire Island, and the complications that ensue when she recognizes the familiar face of the mysterious Best Man. It’s a love letter to sisterhood, marriage, destiny, and the people and places that shape us most.

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During May 2020, my husband began his first semester pursuing Columbia’s executive MBA program, attending classes every Saturday from 8am to 8pm. Because of the pandemic, his classes were remote, taken at home on Zoom. This also meant that our tiny apartment transformed into a tiny classroom all day long.

At first, I thought I’d take advantage of the surprising circumstances and listen in on his MBA lectures, perched just offscreen from his laptop camera. Yet after enduring 11 minutes of a statistics course, I was reminded of why I’d pursued a career in the arts instead of economics and decided to try writing a novel during the quarantine instead.

What followed was a wonderful way to dive into the first love of my life—books—and immerse myself in a sun-soaked story all from the confines of my NYC apartment.

When I decided to write a book, the initial story that I started was actually a thriller. Yet after struggling through the first few Saturday writing sessions, I realized that I was not having much fun writing in such a dark tone. (This was on my weekends, after all! For a hobby! During a pandemic!)

I thought about my favorite books to read for pleasure (women’s fiction and contemporary romances) and my favorite place to read during my time off (the beach in Fire Island), and suddenly the idea for Kismet sparked. What followed was six months of Saturday sessions, outlining and writing the first draft of my book, all from the crowded yet quiet comfort of our apartment, with my husband about five feet away from me attending class on Zoom. (Talk about an accountability partner!)

By New Year’s Eve of that year, I had finished the first draft of Kismet. I then spent the first six months of 2021 editing the book with guidance from my agent, Sabrina Taitz. Sabrina and I actually first met first as WME interns and went on to work as co-assistants together for Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, the former head of the WME Book department.

When I think back to the Kismet process, writing on my weekends, for the first time ever, while balancing a demanding full-time job and the anxiety of the pandemic, I have no idea how to explain the speed and vivacity with which the novel poured out of my soul and out into my Word Doc other than the advice Jennifer used to give us: “When you find your purpose, time expands.”

In July 2021, after being on submission with Kismet for four weeks, Sabrina had called me with the life-changing, mind-blowing news: Dutton had pre-empted Kismet, and I was going to be a published author. It was like magic. I had found my purpose.

The entire copy editing process! I was amazed at the level of care and detail that went into fact-checking and grammar-checking the novel, down to the track number for the Zaro’s Bakery where my protagonist Amy stops for her morning bagel and coffee in Grand Central Station.

Prior to writing Kismet, I’d always worked on the agenting side of the business—my bosses were selling the dramatic rights to film-to-TV executives or selling manuscripts to editors—so I hadn’t had much exposure to all that happened after the book deal. It’s been nothing short of thrilling, to witness and learn about all the stages a novel undergoes (First pass pages! Second pass pages! The entire existence of NetGalley!) before reaching bookstores.

Even though I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, I was unexpectedly amazed by the level of detail that goes into writing a book. From restaurants that the characters frequent to eye-roll-inducing actions of an ex-boyfriend-past, I was consistently surprised and delighted by how many opportunities there were to infuse bits of personality into my characters’ lives.

For me, this doubled as a special opportunity to give “shout outs” to the people and places of my life within Kismet’s pages, inside jokes amongst my family or subtle winks to stories we often tell. I had a blast assigning character names from my own past, naming Amy’s twin sister Jo is after my sister, Joanna, the tailor Josette after my local seamstress, the cousin Mary after a childhood best friend, or even the twins’ mother Grace in honor of my late grandmother.

Now, whenever I read new books that feature a moment of brilliant specificity, I always stop and wonder if it’s an easter egg to the author’s own personal history, a secret story for their friends and family to decode. I sure filled Kismet with my own.

In Kismet, I hope that readers will find a reminder that life doesn’t have to be painstakingly planned to be perfect. There will be mishaps, and there is no one right and true road that we can take. The only constants are the relationships we put the daily work into.

I also hope that readers will finish Kismet and want to hug their sisters (or sister-figures in their lives). My book is an ode to the ways that sisters and families (or any loving relationship, really!) can morph and change and grow, but through communication and commitment in our relationships, we can manage to grow different branches in the same direction.

Write what you know and power through! (I know that’s technically two pieces of advice, but they go together, I swear!)

Because I wrote Kismet during my rare free pockets of weekend time, in a global pandemic, the biggest solve was leaning into however I could make the process easier for myself. The setting? My favorite beach town, a community I knew like the back of my hand, despite writing most of the novel from NYC. The characters’ alma matter for collegiate flashbacks? I had them attend Penn, walking the same streets that I had when I was an undergraduate there. The protagonist’s relationships? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be far off to view Amy, a twin married to her high school sweetheart, as a proxy for the author (I am a quadruplet, married to my high school sweetheart!).

When I was drafting Kismet, the goal was exactly that: to finish the draft. It’s all too easy to belabor over word choice, to rewrite and rewrite one sentence at a time. Given the constricted time limit in which I had to write my novel, I knew (or at least, hoped!) that rewriting was something that could wait until the second pass.

Instead, in my first six months of drafting, I was focused simply on getting as many words onto the page as I humanly could. Sometimes I’d even close my eyes and see how many paragraphs I could write without having to open them! This practice was aided, of course, by writing areas and relationships I could speak to from my own life experience, sustained by a self-disciplined determination to keep powering through.

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