How to Write a Literary Beach Read like “The Guest” by Emma Cline

Calling all writers who love crafting complex, unlikable leading ladies just trying to make a (dis)honest living in our wealth-obsessed world.

The Guest (2023) by Emma Cline is a quippy novel about a con artist in the Hamptons.

Just shy of 300 pages, this easy read takes place by the beaches of Long Island’s famous east end, and explores themes of wealth through the lens of a manipulative outsider—all with a neat narrative structure building up to an ultimation Labor Day party.

The author made a big splash with her debut novel in 2016, The Girls, featuring a young girl who joins a 1960s cult a la Manson Family and the Sharon Tate murder. Like much of Cline’s work, The Guest center the power of women and the violence against them (not unlike the real-life court battle she faced against her ex who used her sexuality against her in his plagiarism accusation).

Most enjoyable (or most frustrating, depending on your persuasion) is the protagonist Alex, who wrongs people left and right. Really, she’s made an art form out of it. Yet the reader can’t help but wonder, will she ultimately succeed in her schemes or will she change her ways? And what does this story say about society’s distaste of strong yet unlikable women who use rich men to get what they want?

As one reviewer says, “I LOVE IT when women have hobbies (she's a scammer)”.

In this Story Analysis series, we’ll break down the main components of popular fiction novels, including structure, character development, and style. Analyzing books is a delightful and efficient way to learn what works well for other writers (and what could use improvement) so you can adapt some of their techniques in your own stories.

If you haven’t read The Guest yet, buy it or rent it from your local library. You’ll get the most out of this analysis with a full read. Otherwise, check out the summary below as reference or a refresher.

Summary of The Guest

Alex, twenty-two, is a grifter and a drifter. Summer is nearly gone when Simon, the wealthy older man she’s dating, kicks her out of his vacation home—and all over an easily avoidable flirting misstep at a party. Rather than return to New York City where an abusive man (who she stole from) awaits her, she makes a plan: wait out the six days until Simon’s annual Labor Day party to give him the space she thinks he needs before wooing him back into a relationship.

Over the course of a week, she drifts from person to person and place to place in a series of manipulation, lies, escapes, and sheer determination to tamp down any sour emotions, like guilt or panic, as things look increasingly dire for her. Oh, and all with a near-broken phone. As the abusive man increasingly threatens to find her and expose her for what she truly is unless she pays him back all the money she no longer has, she continues to push away her panic and desperation until she begins to crack.

After a failed safe robbery and a somewhat severe car crash with the minor she’s been hooking up with for a few nights of housing, Alex’s emotional dam is threatening to flood. But at last, she makes it to Simon’s Labor Day party with an immense amount of pressure riding on her ability to seduce him once more. The abusive man is either at the party or he’s not, Simon either recognizes her in such an altered state or he does not, the other guests are either laughing at her or they’re not. Despite her own confusion and possible delusions, readers get the sense that Simon is not interested in taking her back and now Alex, who’s always so skilled at a quick pivot, is for the first time at her wit’s end.

Narrow down the genre

So, you want to write a literary beach read, too. Before you dive into planning your story, take the time to suss out what conventions and characterisitcs make up these genres. To get the proper framing for your story, let’s break down the tenets of both literary stories and beach reads.

Lit fic

Literary fiction is a loose genre encompassing subgenres like contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, and magical realism. While some readers might frame these as “high brow” literature, all literary fiction refers to is books that prioritize writing style, craft, character, and theme above all other story elements. These are largely internally driven stories where the character-centric plot is the main draw rather than externally driven plots of commercial genre fiction or even upmarket stories.

What characterizes The Guest as a literary read is the anti-hero protagonist, the internally driven plot, the focus on writing style, the in-depth exploration of cultural themes, and the open-ended ending. Though the literary fiction label can be tricky to pin down, aim for these basic tenets to kick your story off in the right direction.

Beach Reads

A beach read is all about pool culture and The Guest abosulutely delivers. If you can pick up a book, show off its trendy cover to other beach-goers, pause to take a dip in the pool, then return to your story just as easily and finish it before sunset—that’s a beach read.

What originated as a marketing term in the publishing realm has now popular subgenre for readers. In the mood for mild escapism and an accessible book that emanates vacation-vibes? Opt for a beach read.

Beach reads are easy to read, but not necessarily “light reading”. These can be anything from thriller, dramas, plot-driven books, and romances. If you can create a thematically rich story that’s also accessible and digestible enough to read by the poolside, you’ve got the makings of literary beach read just like The Guest.

Use a simple six-day structure

One of the best parts of The Guest to study from an analytical perspective is the tidy structure.

After a moderate beginning with just enough backstory to understand why Alex won’t return to her dangerous, “soured” city life, the story reaches the inciting incident: Simon kicks her out of his vacation home. In one fell swoop, her entire life’s security ends. But Alex makes a quick decision to seduce him at his annual Labor Day party in six days. Thus, the structure for the rest of the story consistently follows roughly one chapter per day as the story chronologically builds to the final day of the party. This book’s structure pairs well with the short timeframe, making it an easy read. Had the story covered three months of summer rather than a week, it wouldn’t have been as good a fit.

What drives readers forward are these immediate questions: Where will she spend the night next now that she’s burned that bridge down? Will she find safety and security tonight? For example, after Night #1 of getting kicked out of a house share for hooking up with someone’s boyfriend followed by Night #2 of sleeping in a tick-infested part of the woods, readers wonder how she’ll start from scratch to secure sleeping quarter the next day. In tandem with the larger story questions (will she ever become a better person? why is she this way? will she succeed in seducing Simon a second time?), readers are hooked with both short-term and long-term drivers.

What backstory readers get is minimal, but sufficient. Readers get a clear picture of her former life in the city and why she so readily abandoned it when Simon entered her life. We also learn about Dom, the scary former lover she stole a significant amount of money from to pay her various debts off, who continues to threaten her in the present story. Besides a few hints at her relatively good home life, readers don’t necessarily get a sense of why Alex is the way she is. And while that might be a good piece of information to include in your own story, it does force readers to stay pretty close to the present moment by only dipping into her backstory from a few years ago.

When choosing your own narrative structure, consider the simplest route by selecting a chronological narrative from a single narrator and progressing one hour, day, week, year, or season at a time. Sometimes the easiest structure is the most effective. Just make sure you’re not delaying or rushing the pace with a time unit that’s either too long or too short. Depending on your premise, this structure might take some tweaking to find the right timing and order of events.

Display a beach-y setting

Beach reads don’t have to be based on a beach. But if you want brownie points, consider throwing your characters into a beachy world like The Guest’s east end of Long Island. When Alex isn’t taking a swim in the ocean, she’s dipping into whichever pool she can find. The area itself is also a great place to analyze the wealthy, while providing a good set-up for the narrative: it’s small enough to have some crossover between residents but big enough that Alex can risk scamming multiple people per day.

What makes Cline’s choice of setting work so well is the play on the beach read subgenre. For anyone who sidelines beach reads as fluff reads for women and by women, The Guest forefronts a woman protagonist who Not only is this book, but perhaps Cline chose the setting as a nod to sexist readers.

Also, she’s chosen a great season with the end of summer. The story begins in the final week of August, known as the leg of summer before vacationers return to their jobs in the city and students return to school. Everything is shifting from vacation to work, warm to cold. And Labor Day, a day celebrating those in the work force, not only marks this seasonal transition, but highlights the atypical work (or lack of work, thereof) of the wealthy as well as the non-traditional “free-loading” work that Alex does to keep herself afloat. In your story’s setting, draw in relevant symbolism when you can to further develop the themes.

In terms of the era, Cline managed to build a moment in time that feels both contemporary and timeless. To achieve this technique, you can play with details. For example, while Alex might notice a specific fashion style that’s trendy at that exact moment, Cline doesn’t date the story by saying it’s a pair of Gucci heels that were only popular in 2022. The most detail she references fashion-wise is a pair of chino shorts and white Keds. Similarly, when she seemingly accidentally scratches a famous piece of art in a rich man’s private collection during Chapter 5, she doesn’t describe who the painting is by, but readers understand the significance of it anyway because she focuses on the prestige of the piece:

Some of the art she didn’t recognize. A photo of old actors, flecked with paint. Some still from a vampire movie? A scratchy line drawing of a neon yellow clay panel. But some of it she did. There was a modern piece, brutal and primary colored, basically a museum poster except, bizarrely, that it was real.

If you’re going for a punchier and more immersive setting and aren’t afraid to date your story, go further into details. If you’d prefer a more timeless, slightly eerie, sense of time, go broad on the details.

Write clear prose

First and foremost, this is an easy read. Not only is the story relatively short at 291 pages, but the sentences are also relatively brief and written with digestible language.

Let’s take a look at her writing style on the first page of Chapter 1:

This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day.
Alex waited for a set to finish before making her way into the water, slogging through until it was deep enough to dive. A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm.
From here, the sand was immaculate. The light—the famous light—made it all look honeyed and mild: the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison. The cars in the parking lot. Even the seagulls swarming a trash can.
On the shore, the towels were occupied by placid beach-goers. A man tanned to the color of expensive luggage let out a yawn, a young mother watched her children run back and forth to the waterline.
What would they see if they looked at Alex?

This writing style, though mostly descriptive here, sets the tone and style for the rest of the story. It’s written in fourth-grade reading level, meaning most readers can dive into the story and understand it. Cline uses brevity (“This was August”) and repetition (“The ocean was warm, and warmer every day”). She also uses a mix of active in passive language, but the sentences are varied enough that the passive parts don’t feel too dry. She uses several commas to break up her sentences into smaller clauses (even if the commas aren’t always needed), as well as colons and m-dashes. When listing things, she begins each list item with a new sentence beginning with the noun. And she does all of this while describing the immediate setting, Alex’s place in that setting, and closing with a self-awareness of herself in the setting.

Every writer has their own style, and a unique voice is arguably the most important quality we can possess. You can take a page out of Cline’s book by analyzing or even practicing her style of simple, clear writing. Remember, when in doubt, use a basic word in place of a fancy or inaccessible word for the most oomph in your sentences.

Select a few good themes to dig into

Even with the title, The Guest hints at insiders and outsiders in the land of wealth. Throughout the book, Cline explores power dynamics, control, unspoken rules, and policing of the rich and their spaces from an outsider’s perspective. Alex, like the ticks that are said to be infesting the island’s deer that season, is a parasite who clings from host to host. At her best, she’s in a symbiotic relationship (at least in her view) where she justifies using someone in exchange for them using her. Depending on who she’s latched to in the moment, this contrast reveals who is happy and who is faking it and what role money plays in all of it.

Another big theme is water, which Alex constantly finds herself drawn to—perhaps because it’s a form of escapism or universal equalizer. As she says in Chapter 1, “Why did being in the ocean make you feel like such a good human?” and “In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t.” Whenever she reaches water, we see how she treats life: as a floater who's only willing to change course if the tide carries her too far away from safety.

For example, in Chapter 1 we see how Alex treats life and deals with conflict when she accidentally drifts too far from the shore. She’s a grifter and a drifter but that doesn’t mean she’s always relaxing. In fact, she has to work hard in order to coast through life when she can, who has to get back on track to safety whenever she veers off. In the ocean, she rests and wakes in alarm when she realizes she too far from the shore. But Alex is cool as a cucumber. She quickly tamps down her panic by thinking rationally and acting out a smart survival plan. When she’s safe at the shore again, her former fear is “already forgotten”. She rolls with the punches. She’s adaptable.

Other themes include honesty, transparency, sexism, sexual violence, women's bodies treated as objects and decoration, beauty, and ugliness. If you dig deeper into the two car accidents (Simon’s car and Jack’s car) as the deer distract the drivers, there might be some nuggets of symbolism there, too. And don’t forget her stye, something gross that she tries to ignore (just like her difficult feelings) that inevitably comes back because she hasn’t dealt with it properly.

For your story, consider a few overarching themes to explore, starting with what’s most interesting to you and slotting them into your chosen setting and premise. The key is to explore just enough. One theme, like wealth, can have a myriad of subthemes, so you might want to focus on that single theme rather than wealth and civil war and family issues and star-crossed love. Once you’ve narrowed in on a central theme, consider how your various plot events and characters will draw out the nuances of this theme. And, in keeping with literary fiction tenets, lean towards an open-ended interpretation of the theme rather than a prescriptive moral statement.

Develop a likably unlikable protagonist

Alex tears through life, using and abusing others before ditching them entirely. She’s unlikable because she violates other people’s boundaries, lies often without remorse, and judges everyone with a harshness that could wilt. But she’s not completely devoid of compassion, plus she’s self-aware enough to judge her wrongdoings and she justifies many of her actions with fair points. If you steal from a shitty man who tried to choke you, is it really a crime? And even if you don’t buy her redeeming qualities, you can’t help but admire Alex for her sheer strength in rolling with the punches.

It’s hard to say what kind of character arc Alex experiences. Flat? Negative? Positive? Just as she increasingly experiences moments of compassion for herself and others, her past and present regrets are forcing her to confront her harmful behavior. This suggests a positive arc, but the end is a little too ambiguous to tell where Alex will go from here. What we do know is that Alex occasionally wants genuine love and relationships with others and a fresh start. And this is reason enough to root for her.

How do you make a character unlikable? Give them aspects of the worst parts of ourselves. How do you then make that character likable? Make those dark personality characteristics relatable or at least understandable. Just like Alex, your leading character can hurt others as long as they have a solid reason for doing so.

Another aspect you can draw from is using an unreliable narrator. Alex is a somewhat unreliable due to her occasional mistrust in her ability to read others.

Consider this backstory passage from Chapter 1:

On the subway, or on the sidewalks, woolly with new snow, Alex had started to notice strangers fiving her a certain look. Their gaze lingering. A woman in a plaid mohair coat studied Alex with unnerving focus, her expression twisted with what seemed like mounting concern. A man, his wrists white under the strain of many plastic bags, stared at Alex until she finally got off the train. What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating? Maybe she was imagining it. But maybe not.

Frequently, Alex thinks others are judging her. Sometimes, she’s certain she can read their minds. Other times, like above, she doubts herself. As the reader, we’re both building trust in her character because she’s being honest at least with herself, while simultaneously doubting her narrative because we don’t know what’s true and what’s not. Readers are forced to look at the scene facts more rather than her internal monologue, especially at the ending when she reaches her most unhinged and unreliable state.

Consider using an unreliable narrator for your story if your narration style could benefit. If the enjoyment of the text doesn’t rely on a clear-cut POV all the way through, throw in a mutable character perspective to mix things up.

Introduce a strong supporting cast

Each character in the story, however brief their appearance, peels back another layer of either the theme, Alex’s character or both. Due to the unique structure of the novel, readers don’t have a lot of time to spend with each new character, though Cline does a good job of giving readers just enough.

For example, Alex spends less than a chapter with the little boy Calvin who she “borrows” in her scheme to sneak into the exclusive country club. Through this brief relationship, readers watch Alex’s compassion peek out. When she first meets the boy, she plans to use him and ditch him as soon as he grants her entry to the club. But something makes her help him to the bathroom, play games with him in the pool, and check in on him. When she loses sight of him, our hearts dip alongside hers thinking the worst: that he drowned while unattended. But he’s fine. And once again we see Alex’s humanity in her care of him and her justification of the stolen child:

It had worked out fine, hadn’t it? Nothing bad had happened to the boy. He had been repossessed by his proper caregiver, returned to his proper place, and what had Alex done that was so wrong? Fed him ice cream, dove to the bottom of the pool with his arms tight around her neck, the afternoon a small hiccup in the days of seamless pleasure that awaited him.

Through this brief character of Calvin, readers also get insight into this boy’s inherited, enviable easy lifestyle. And her use of him to get into the club pushes the narrative forward by introducing her to Margaret, who she goes home with at the end of the day.

With each supporting character, ask yourself, what will they reveal about my protagonist’s character? How do they offer a unique perspective on the central theme? How do they drive the plot forward? Are they memorable? Do they pair well with other supporting cast characters?

Bonus: Make your beach read even better

As good as The Guest was, there were three areas for improvement in terms of the abrupt ending, secondary character depth, and protagonist backstory.

• First, consider making a more satisfying ending to your literary beach read. Yes, ambiguity is a tenet of literary fiction, however the ending might have left a little too much to be desired. At the end of The Guest, readers face a cliff-hanger with several unanswered questions. Will Simon take her back? Did Dom find her at last? Why can’t she fully accept her reality?

• Second, give a little more depth to certain characters by revisiting them. Alex moves from character to character as soon as they outlive their usefulness to her. While that’s an exciting way to keep the story’s forward momentum and consistently display her lack of care with a few moments of compassion peppered in, this burning through of characters leaves a lot left untied. Consider revisiting a few more major secondary characters by the end to really drive home how Alex has changed or hasn’t changed, as well as increase the conflicts they pose. And for those recurring characters who do reoccur, like Simon’s assistant Dana, what could Alex have learned about her in the final chapter that she might have missed before?

• Finally, reveal more about why your character developed into the person they are today. Most characters don’t develop their sense of self in a vacuum but are instead influenced by parents and other family members, teachers, friends and community, and cultural messaging. As consistent as Alex’s character, readers barely get a glimpse into her past beyond moving to New York City as if her life only started then.

Closing Thoughts

Writing a literary beach read can be a rewarding next story project for you, especially if you’re a fan of accessible fiction that readers can chew on for a while.

With this analysis, you’re now ready to write take a page out of Emma Cline’s The Guest and map your own story. Whether you’re interested in adopting a similar six-day narrative structure, a stubborn anti-hero hero, or a lovely prose style, this book is a great reference.

Have a popular fiction book you’d like to see in the next Story Analysis? Reach out or comment below with your pick.