Confessions of a Word Slut

The Story So Far

2012-02-16T09:45:00.000-08:00

I find myself in a really odd place right now: I am alone in my own head. I finished my edits and the novel is now in the hands of an agent, so there's nothing really to do with it until she comes back with a response (okay, except for a couple of things. I spoke with one of my readers last night who pointed out places where he just couldn't suspend disbelief that the story was being told by a 14-year old. As he said, "No fourteen year old boy would say 'little old lady flats.' I'm gay, and even I wouldn't have noticed that at fourteen." Point taken). I've kind of been sitting here thinking, well, now what do I do with my time?

Answer: Get to work on the next novel.

So it's back to the generative phase of writing for me, which is exciting. I love the peaks and valleys of this stage of writing. In some ways, it's a heck of a lot easier to get things done (like grocery shopping on a regular basis) because a lot of my thinking, processing, letting things fall into place can happen during the day while the actually putting words down in a logical order portion of it can happen late at night or even very early in the morning. I found the editing worked best during the daytime. Whenever I tried to edit or rewrite after nine at night, I fell asleep or my brain was sluggish. It took a lot of will power to work within the analytical portion of my brain after the sun went down.

I'm excited, though. The next novel is the project which made me apply for grad school. I had written another novel about fifteen years ago that fell apart just at the point where an agent was interested in seeing it. I'd worked on it for several years and, in a workshop, the workshop leader asked me what was the most essential question about the novel and I couldn't answer it. At that point, I realized I was at a dead end. That experience started me on a journey to learn craft so that I would not end up at the same point with the next thing I wrote. I spent many years doing workshops, going to conferences, reading and reading and reading, and, ultimately, going to grad school and getting my MFA in a program that was exceptional for teaching craft and process. (as an aside, it was during an assignment in grad school that I figured out what went wrong with that other novel and will probably go back to it at some point because I still love those characters - as briefly as I can, what happened to that novel was not knowing how to listen to critique group feedback and forgetting what my original vision for the novel was while I tried to revise to answer all the group's concerns. The assignment that made me realize this was to write a synopsis of a novel. I dusted off my old synopsis for this novel, rewrote it and was so pleased with it, I sent it to a friend who had been part of that critique group. She responded that she hadn't understood a key element of the novel's conceit (and neither did the workshop leader, and, for that matter, neither did I by that point in trying to revise it). It made me realize what had happened to that novel and radically changed how I listen to feedback)

At the time I started grad school, I had an idea for a new novel. An idea that was so good, so exciting, that I just didn't want to screw it up. I spent my first year in grad school working on it, had a pretty complete outline, and about a hundred pages written. Then, stuck for a second story to submit to the class in Alice La Plante's fiction workshop, I asked her if I could bring the original draft of a short story I'd written - I got a couple of grants with the story, had gotten some really good rejection letters (most notably, a personal note on a form rejection from The New Yorker), and, in the process of trying to revise it, it had started to unpack itself and was now a novella. I wanted to get some feedback and see if I was on the right track with my revisions. Alice said yes, so I brought the story in, got some really good feedback, and then went back to work on the novel. A couple of months later, I took a half-day workshop with another really gifted SFSU professor, Matthew Davidson. Matthew gave us an exercise and I literally walked across the room thinking about a scene from the novel that I wanted to work on, sat down at a desk to write it, and what came out was a scene from the story. I had been struggling with this scene because I didn't understand what it needed to do. The scene fell into place as I wrote through this exercise and, at the end of it, the story "came out" and declared itself to be a novel and told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to be working on it until it was done.

110,000 words later, that novel is The Altar of Dead Pets.

So, now it's time to let Matt grow up and go out into the world (which, in a funny way, is the movement of that novel), and get reacquainted with Nikki and Owen and their 17-year old son Marcus and the twins, Amanda and Leo. Time to let bitchy Catherine and her sister Helen out of their kennels. Time to shift from living in Reno in March to living on the Sonoma Coast in summer. Time for research and exploring and stumbling through scenes and reminding myself over and over again that it doesn't matter how mundane the words in the first draft are, they will become vivid and wonderful by the time I'm done and I will fall in love these characters as I did with Matt and Denny and everyone else in their screwed up family. In short, it's time to write.

Time Is Not on My Side

2012-02-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

I'm doing my final round of edits prior to starting to query and have had a few readers give me feedback. One of them pointed out that kids today don't use email anymore, they use Facebook to communicate, something I know since I'm the proud owner of a teenager. But my narrator uses email and doesn't have a Facebook account - which is something of a deliberate choice on my part, but it did bring up a problem I have had with the novel and one that plagues a lot of writers. Technology changes. And it seems to change overnight. And nothing dates your work faster than having out of date technology.

My novel started out as a short story in 1999. Remember 1999? That was thirteen years ago. Cell phones were around, but not everyone had one yet. The Internet was around, but most people used AOL, and having a computer was not quite as ubiquitous as it is now, especially one that had Internet access. In my original short story, no one had a cell phone, no one had a computer. Forget about iPods and smart phones and all these other things we've come to take for granted (a blog? what the heck was a blog?) By the time my short story (which had grown into a novella) came out and openly declared itself to be a full-fledged novel in 2008, the world had changed radically. And I have been playing technology catch-up ever since. In this final draft, I realized the flip phone I'd given to the older brother in the first draft (completed in 2009) was now dated, and have been going through the draft and changing all references to "flipping the phone open" to "turning the phone on." My narrator can no longer "snap the phone shut," which is a shame because that's such a great emotional indicator and you can't really turn a smart phone off in a way that shows annoyance.

I am not alone in chasing technology in this way or dealing with the technology conundrum in fiction. Literary fiction is plagued with a dearth of technology in its books. Fantasy has it a little easier since magic tends to take the place of technology, and the genres of Science Fiction and Thriller tend to place technology (and usually fantastical technology that hasn't been invented yet) front and center. The convenience of technology has eliminated a lot of the plot devices we writers of more reality-based fiction relied on to create delays or build tension.

I've written about this before, although I can't find the post right now, about the various ways in which I and other writers have gotten around the convenience of cell phones. See, cell phones made it possible for the hero to call his family to warn about imminent disaster or for the parents to call to warn their daughter they'd just found out her fiance was a psychopath. It eliminated all the time musing in the car while the protagonist drives from point A to point B thinking about the conversation she needs to have with her ex-husband. Now she can pick up her phone and bloody-well call him. So writers have had to invent reasons for the call not to be possible. Protagonists in fiction forget their cell phones a lot, or they forget to charge them, or they forget to turn them on. Their phones are highly susceptible to falling into toilets or other bodies of water that will cause them to be less than functional as phones. Their phones get damaged. A lot. All these are work-arounds, nods to the convenience of technology, but also to the narrative demands of story.

Story requires characters to face adversity. Their lives can't be too convenient or else they become boring, uninteresting. They have nothing to fight against. And, while a non-working cell phone may not be the overbearing evil of Sauron or Lord Voldemort, it certainly is an every day evil with which most people have to contend. Think about the last time your phone didn't work. Didn't you get pissed off? Didn't you want to fire off an angry letter to your cell phone service provider?

Trying to get around the technology conundrum makes a lot of literary writers place their stories in the pre-computer age of the 1980's. It solves a lot of problems because you don't have to worry about how quickly today's smart phone is going to be replaced by something else, like cyborg implants that place the Internet in our brains rather than at our fingertips. A cautionary tale for me is the final story in Jennifer Egan's terrific short story collection, A Visit from the Goon Squad. I actually didn't finish the story because it was set in a future time where people used their hand-held devices to "T" each other (something we commonly refer to as 'texting'). It was such clunky future-history (and I've read so much better from people who actually write in that genre), it felt like a literary writer trying to co-opt the fantasy genre without understanding the conventions of that genre (I could do a whole blog entry on that, let me tell you) or understanding how fantasy writers have actually done it already (and many times) and done it better. What I learned in an interview was that Egan had written that story prior to the iPhone's release. The iPhone brought a whole new way of relating to our phones into the culture and made many of the things Egan wrote about a reality. Unfortunately, reality didn't look exactly like what Egan wrote, so it came off, (to me, at least) as clunky future-history writing and not as revolutionary as many critics said.

I think it's getting better. The transformational pace of technology may not be slowing down, but I think we writers are beginning to adjust to the necessity of its inclusion in our stories and to use it more seamlessly. It's probably not a bad thing that cell phones have made us find other ways to build tension into our stories, or to prevent communication between two characters. The interesting thing, though, is when a writer doesn't find those new ways, it's now glaringly obvious that the whole cell phone problem is a plot device and nothing more.

Good Books About Writing

2012-01-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

I'm done with the writing portion of Draft 3 now, and the novel stands at 332 pages and 105,000 words. Next step, reading it, then editing and polishing.

In the meantime, I've gone back to my favorite hobby: reading. Writers are usually tremendous readers, and one of the things we love to read is books about writing. I could stock a pretty good shelf for a bookstore with what's in my house, so I decided to put together a list of some of my favorites.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. This was the first writing book I picked up after my undergraduate creative writing program resulted in my not writing for seven years. By now, most people are familiar with Goldberg's freewriting technique, but it's still worth going back to read her original book and its sequel, Wild Mind. The revelation of her books was that I learned to start turning off the editor that had so crippled my chances of writing anything and began to listen to my own writer voice again.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. With her incredible wit and spot on understanding of the convolutions writers get themselves into while they try to do anything but write, Lamott's classic should have a place on any writer's bookshelf. While most people talk about her chapter on "Shitty First Drafts," the ideas that had the most impact on me were her 1" picture frame and the "bird by bird" sense of how writing gets done. The 1" picture frame (and I've had one on my desk ever since I read this book almost two decades ago) is a reminder that this space is all you've got to fill, is all you CAN fill, each time you sit down to write no matter how big the finished project is going to be. The title of the book comes from a time her brother was trying to write a report on birds for school. He'd left the project until the very last minute and was faced with a monumental task that overwhelmed him. Lamott's father said the only way to tackle it was "bird by bird," one piece at a time.

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. Gardner was head of the creative writing department from which I received my undergraduate degree. Unfortunately, he died in a motorcycle accident the year before I got there. He was still an undeniable presence in the program my entire four years, and the university's bookstore dutifully carried all his books, fiction and nonfiction alike. I'll admit, I hated this book and On Becoming a Novelist when I read them as an undergrad. Gardner is elitist and sometimes condescending, but he sure knows his craft. As an adult, I came back to these books and found them full of amazing insight into what I was actually doing on the page. One of his favorite words is profluence, the forward momentum all stories (short, novella, and novel) have to have to keep the reader from walking away.

The Making of a Story by Alice la Plante. If you've read my blog long enough, you know Alice is one of my favorite people on this planet. I read this book the semester before I ended up in her class, before I knew she taught in my grad program. This book, or her other book on writing Method and Madness, are terrific nuts and bolts books on craft from the practical rather than theoretical point of view. They offer instruction, examples, and exercises to help you figure out what you need to do with your own work.

Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell. Bell introduces the idea of a modular structure for short stories rather than a linear one. While this is not a good book for beginner writers, he's got a lot of good information about writing and analyzes a number of other writers, breaking down their style to look at what they're really doing on the page.

The Artful Edit by Susan Bell. Incredibly good book on revision. Bell uses The Great Gatsby and the back and forth of revision between Fitzgerald and his editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins , as they turned this book into the amazing work that it is(if you know nothing about this amazing editor, follow the link. The man was responsible for almost all the great writers of Fitzgerald's generation). Along the way, Bell, who is an editor herself, offers great advice and insight into the revision process and what you should be looking for in different stages. One of the few books I've ever come across that focuses on revision.

Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. Although this book is focused on writing poetry, it is an excellent exploration of the impulse that makes you lean forward, start thinking about writing, and using writing as a way to get to what it is your piece is really about. Excellent book. Excellently written, too.

From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler. In my mind, this book is very closely aligned with John Gardner's books, but written with a bit less ego. Like Gardner, Butler talks about maintaining the continuous dream of the story, but, unlike Gardner, Butler speaks about it from the writer's view point. He proposes a very organic way of developing a story by dreaming your way into it, going as far as you can as you tell yourself the story, and filling out note cards for each step with as much information as you know at that time. When you're ready to write, you lay the note cards out and, if there's too big a jump from one state to another, you go back to your dream state and create the bridging scenes. Sound woo woo? It really isn't, and Butler does a far better job of explaining this than I do.

There are so many others books I've read and enjoyed over the years, but these are the ones that have added something valuable to my magic bag of tricks. The ones I go back to.

Let me know what writing books you find invaluable.

We Are Temporarily Experiencing Higher Call Volume, Your Patience is Appreciated

2011-12-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

I'm busy finishing up the final pages of draft three on the novel and getting the last of the holiday shopping finished up, so time is a bit crunched. In lieu of a new post, here's an oldie but goodie and TOTALLY seasonally appropriate:

The Hallelujah Post

Revision - Part 2

2011-11-12T10:40:00.000-08:00

While draft two was more complete - the characters more fully fleshed out, the plot holding together, and the major themes and imagery developing nicely - there were more questions to address in the next draft, and, once again I was faced with the dilemma of starting over with a blank piece of paper of editing from what was already on the page.

I should point out, I did read through draft two and made notes to myself, quite extensive notes, about how scenes needed to change. This was my "time to get real" draft, and anything that I was still in the hopeful stage about (as in the "I hope this works, but I know it doesn't") had to go or change. In some cases I left exercises for myself in the margins - list ten things Matt's feeling about Katami, list ten things Rachelle can say to Matt, ten things Alan's thinking - or rewrote passages on the back of the page. Once I began working on draft three, I would put Post-it Notes on the appropriate page as ideas came to me or I knew I would want an image to echo in specific scene later in the novel.

Draft three was the "figuring out the best way to tell the story" draft - the time to work out the structure of the novel (now that I knew what it was about, were there ways in which the form could work with the theme better?), really nail down the timeline, figure out what's working and make sure there wasn't anything in the novel that hadn't earned its place there. I also got really, really real about dialogue and became ruthless with what I call placeholder dialogue - the kind of dialogue characters speak when you know they have to have a particular conversation but you don't know enough about your characters yet to make it subtle.

Once again, I started out thinking I would cut and paste and edit from draft two. I mean, the draft was pretty solid. It was my MFA thesis and my thesis advisor called it one of the most fully realized theses she'd ever read, so why shouldn't I be able to zoom through this draft simply making changes to the existing text? And, once again, I tried for a couple of weeks to do this before succumbing to the blank document method of creating draft three. In this case, the blank document made it possible to break the novel open in an interesting way.

Like I said, this was my "get real" draft, and I had a transition in the first ten pages that had bothered me from the time this was a short story. In every draft I jumped from the very dramatic opening where Matt's older brother dies in a car accident right to the funeral. Then I was faced with the problem of having to introduce a whole bunch of characters (some of them major) in a gang shot - here's Matt's mother, here's his stepdad, here's the stepdad's mother and his sisters, and the dead brother's ex-girlfriend, and, for good measure, let me throw in Matt's soon-to-be-girlfriend whom he hasn't even met yet but he imagines her sitting in the church with them. It was character soup.

Faced with the "get real" moment, I asked myself what I was gaining by not showing the four days between the accident and the funeral. The answer led me to the creation of fifty or so new pages, new scenes that let me introduce all these characters one at a time, give them their moment on the stage, and then move on to another moment.

This change set the stage for draft three being a complete overhaul of draft two. The difference this time was that nothing was created that wasn't needed, wasn't demanded by the story. Maybe 15,000 words out of the 100,000+ in draft three were also in draft two, and there's only one scene in the entire novel that has survived pretty much intact from when this was a short story. It's still the same story, but it's like buying a used car and replacing all the major components and refurbishing the interior so it's still the same car, but everything's shiny and new and it runs great.

Now I'm in the "telling the story in the best way possible" draft and finally able to edit rather than rewrite. This draft focuses on the language and making sure that all the components are doing as much work as they possibly can. If there's a detail, it has to add something to the reader's understanding of character and plot. This draft is also about making sure that the flow in the piece as a whole feels continuous and builds and ebbs where it should. This is the moment for noticing the mechanics - how is the story being told (what's the mixture of narrative and scene)? Does the dialogue sound authentic for the characters? Do scenes begin and end where they should? Is there enough variation or do I have too many characters doing things that are too similar? Do I use the same description too many times? Is it solid or are there still moments where I'm only hoping it works?

So far, it's going well, and I'm really, really happy with the novel. Even though almost every page is bleeding red, all the parts are in the right place, the characters have their own space, and no one is wandering around in search of a plot anymore.

Revision - Part 1

2011-11-12T09:49:00.000-08:00

(This week, I'm embarking on a series of posts about the revision process.)

Almost every writer hears the adage "90% of writing is rewriting" at least once in their lives (usually much, much more than that). You can read it, or some similar sentiment, in almost every book on writing even though most books on writing dedicate 90% of their pages to the construction of a story and 10% to revision. Even trying to get writers to talk about revision can be frustrating because it seems to be something you should just innately know how to do.

On one level, this is true. When I wrote my first novel at 13, I immediately began rewriting it. By the time I was finished, I was 16 and had completely rewritten the novel from beginning to end. Revision seemed to be quite simple and straight-forward. But then, so did writing.

Now I know better (or worse, depending on your perspective), and the revision process on my current novel has been anything but straight-forward. Each stage of the process has been fraught with anxiety and panic, most likely because a previous novel disintegrated like tissue paper in the rain during the revision process, and I was worried the same fate might await this novel. This was the main reason I went to grad school. I wanted to be in an environment where, if the novel started to fall apart, I could get help. Which worked, sort of. I ended up developing my own theory of revision and creating a map to help me through the process. The other week, when the novel started veering off course, I went back to my map and realized I had inadvertently tripped over into a new phase of revision and was, once again, running along without feeling the ground under my feet, making it up as I go along. The good news is I've reached the home stretch of the revision process - I'm into the editing and polishing phase. The likelihood of the novel falling apart here is minimal because all the pieces are in place and they fit very nicely.

The process I outlined for myself is a continuum of writing from the triggering impulse of the project to the very last word you write or change. It has four stages: telling yourself the story, telling the story, figuring out the best way to tell the story, and telling the story in the best way possible. A lot of the process is rewriting in the "start over with a blank sheet of paper" vein of rewriting. I'd heard of writers doing this and was filled with horror at the thought. All those words I'd labored over, all that time and hard work and anxiety, wiped out. Except they weren't totally wiped out. The first draft became the outline for the second. Having completed the first draft (telling myself the story), I now knew what my story was about and where it was going, so I was in a better position to understand which scenes worked in service to the story and which were superfluous (that first draft had a LOT of "character wandering around in search of plot" scenes) and where there were still gaps in my understanding of characters and plot. So draft two became about actually telling the story.

The difference between telling yourself the story and telling the story is like the difference between experiencing something and then telling your friends about it afterwards. You have the benefit of knowing what's going to happen, so you can pick and choose the details that are important and add information that makes the story better. You don't need to tell about the phone call that kept you at the office if the adventure was getting lost while hiking on the weekend. Same thing in writing. Now that you know what your story is about, you can start making sure your scenes, your images, your details line up in service to the story.

Is it possible to do that without scraping everything you wrote? Sure. I initially thought I'd print out my novel by scene, rearrange the scenes, cut and paste and wa la! Instant draft two. That didn't work for me. With this novel, there was too much that needed to move, be rewritten, added. Some of that may be because this novel started out as a short story and draft one happened when the short story began unpacking itself. So I started over with a clean sheet of paper and retyped EVERYTHING. I was completely stymied by the whole process, even down to the physicality of where to put draft one so I could see it while I typed. I kid you not. I finally had to tell myself it's okay to walk off the edge of the world without a parachute and just get to work.

I'm going to leave this here for now. Next week, I'll take us through draft two and the telling the story in the best way possible phase.

Sometimes I Forget

2011-11-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I forget one of the most fundamental lessons I've learned about writing (and, probably, one of the most fundamental lessons in life):

Nothing is written in stone.

I forgot this lesson this past weekend and got myself caught up in a full blown panic attack as I felt like the novel was careening out of control just as I was reaching out for the homestretch. I felt like I'd lost touch with the novel's essential themes and was adding endless new (and, most likely, unnecessary) scenes that were only set-blocking. Scenes that had no dramatic reason for being included except for the fact that I had to go from Point A to Point D and the logic circuits of my brain were saying that I had to include Points B and C as well, but they were dramatically uninteresting and not relevant to the plot of the novel.

And I so wanted to be done with the draft this weekend so I could go back being somewhat functional. Even I'm getting tired of putting things off "until after the novel's done" and I'm sure everyone around me is sick of this excuse, too (I mean, I missed all of Lit Quake (SF's fantastic two-week long literary festival at which some of my friends and favorite authors were reading) because, at this point in writing, I don't want to hear, see or read anyone else's words except my own).

In the clear, bright-eyed post-Halloween morning, I realize my panic is unnecessary. Yes, those scenes will probably be edited out or changed so they are dramatically relevant BECAUSE NOTHING IS WRITTEN IN STONE. Even years after his books were published, Faulkner was still revising them and editing them to get closer to what he was intending to say. I don't want to be like that. I want there to be an end point, but, and here's the main point: at this point in the writing process, no matter how much I want it to be the end, it's not. And there isn't anything that's on paper right now that can't be changed, eliminated or made stronger.

So, I'm better now. Feeling a little more grounded in the novel. I had to mark a couple of places as "come back to this" just to get myself back in alignment with the ending, and I may have to work backwards from my ending to make sure everything lines up, that the emotional clock ticks forward the way it's supposed to (right now it feels like my main character veers too suddenly, goes from being a good kid to being a bad-ass).

It's uncomfortable, feeling the novel go out of control like this right at the end, but as long as I keep breathing and reminding myself that I can fix whatever I don't like, I should be okay.

Let Me Call You Cupcake

2011-10-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've been putting in a lot of hours at the computer lately, and talking about things I've learned as I work on the draft of my novel in this blog. Tonight, I want to talk about something sweet and fluffy: cupcakes.

Last year, my younger son was obsessed with baking shows on TV. Cake Boss was probably our favorite, but we also watched Ace of Cakes, Ultimate Cake-off, and, finally, Cupcake Wars. We learned decorating terms like fondant, isomalt,and modeling chocolate, and that you can create just about anything out of crisped rice treats. One of my favorite blogs is Cake Wrecks.

I like cupcakes. I grew up at a time when you only got cupcakes when someone had a birthday and their mom was extra nice and made something for the class. Not all moms did this when I was growing up, as opposed to now when every birthday comes complete with cupcakes for the class. So cupcakes are still something special to me.

Living in a large metropolitan area means I've gotten to benefit from the cupcake shop trend, and there are a few in San Francisco I like to visit.

My favorite is Teacake in Burlingame. Of all the shops I've been to, Teacake has the best combination of cake and frosting in terms of mouth feel and taste. Their flavors are a little limited - vanilla and chocolate with vanilla and chocolate buttercream and one or two special flavors each day. October has been great because they've featured a pumpkin cupcake and an apple crumb cupcake, both with cream cheese buttercream frosting. My spouse all likes Teacake because they do frosting shots of any flavor frosting you'd like. It's $1.00 and you get a generous amount of frosting served in the holder for a mini-cupcake. Kind of a sweet deal for someone who likes frosting a lot more than cake. And their frosting is really good. Not too sweet, not too heavy on the butter side of buttercream.

My next favorite is Cups and Cakes Bakery in San Francisco. These photos don't do justice to their amazing cupcakes, but pictured here are Pineapple Upside Down Cake and Pancake Breakfast. Their flavors are outrageous. Fauxstess, Boston Cream Pie, Rainbow Bright, Peanut Butter Cup, Rootbeer Float, need I go on? One thing I really love about Cups and Cakes is that almost all their featured flavors are available each day in regular and mini (not all flavors are available every day, but you can do special and custom orders. A friend of mine spied an order of Blue Velvet going out the door one time when she was there, and that's not a flavor they have on their menu). If there's one fault with these cupcakes, it's that the frosting is a bit on the sweet side. Still...I love the hot pink storefront and the fact that there's always parking on the street where they live.

Last up is Cako Bakery in Japantown. Cako's has some pretty awesome flavors. That's my younger son's favorite pictured - S'mores with toasted marshmallow frosting and graham cracker base. They also have a Blueberry Cheesecake, Cookies and Cream, Pink Lemonade, and 24 Karat, along with the more traditional flavors. My one complaint with Cako's is that their frosting is often too heavy on the butter side of buttercream leaving me with a mouthful of lightly flavored grease. This is especially true if you order one of the more traditional flavors where the cake isn't as sweet. With Cookies and Cream or some of their more exotic flavors, the cake is sweeter and makes up for the lack of sugar in the frosting. Still...the cake itself is probably the best of the three, and the extras like crushed cookies or graham crackers layered under the cake is phenomenal.

I've yet to hit a couple of the other Bay Area staples for cupcakes: Kara's Cupcakes and Susie Cakes, but I'm sure I'll get to them eventually.

And now, back to the novel...

Shakespeare in Love or In Love with Shakespeare

2011-10-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

Home-schooled Teen and I have begun our new school year together, and this year is all about Shakespeare. I'm excited since the last time I really looked at Shakespeare I was all of 21. Granted, it was during my study-abroad semester in London and we went to at least one Shakespeare play a week, many of them by the RSC, but I was 21 and not that widely nor deeply read as I am now.

Last year, HST and I read some of the foundational books of the Western canon - Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Inferno. This year, we are reading, more or less in order: Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar (with the addition of reading Plutarch's chapter on Caesar), Richard III, Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Over the summer, we saw a production of Macbeth and read The Tempest (we were supposed to see a production of Tempest, but that's a whole different kettle of fish). My idea is to circle back to Shakespeare's final play so we can look at how he developed certain themes through his career.

I am excited about this year for a number of reasons. One, I really do love Shakespeare and often forget how much I love him until I pick up or see one of his plays. And then remember all over again how amazing a writer he is. Two, I am going to be teaching a class at Buena Vista University in Iowa this January about appropriation, and the Bard is a master appropriator. Having read the books we read last year, I find myself picking up on his references to the Aeneid in many of his plays. But he also used folktales, popular plays by other writers, gossip, Plutarch, Virgil and almost any other writer with whom the public might be familiar to recontextualize themes and characters who were well-known. Three, I find some of the themes he returns to fascinating. The public versus the private self. The roles people assume and what makes a king a king (I'm not a Shakespearean scholar, but I would almost guarantee that some of the very first seeds of the American Revolution were sown from Henry V and Shakespeare's musing on the idea that a king is just a man with good props). And, four, this time period in European history is incredible. The more I learn, the more fascinated I am with it. We may think our country is in turmoil right now, but it is nothing, NOTHING compared to 16th century Europe with the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Protestants, the rise of the moneyed merchant class, colonization of North America, a woman (WOMAN!) on the throne of England, and the rise of England as the dominant world power. The intrigue, the politics, the social upheaval. How could it not be the stuff of great stories?

So, HST and I have embarked. Our first stop on this voyage is Taming of the Shrew, probably one of the most controversial plays for contemporary audiences. One critic I read as I was preparing my study guide of HST talked about how, though the play is a farce, it can't be forgotten that Shakespeare was a man and how constrained women's roles were during this age. True. But I think it forgets that this is also the man who presents more nuanced roles for women in his other plays. Why would he have other female characters who have great strength and ask us, in this farce, to take Katherine at face value when she talks about the rightful domination of women by men? It's a difficult play for contemporary women to stomach, I agree. I saw a production that went the full nine yards of making Kate a victim of domestic violence. HST and I have just started, so I'll post again about some of the conclusions we come to, and I've paired Shrew up with Romeo and Juliet, so we have two looks at marriage in radically different plays that both, at their heart, turn on the idea of arranged marriage versus marriage for love.

Getting Near the End

2011-10-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

I went away to a lovely little house on the Russian River last week so I could get some writing done, and ended up with forty-eight pages and 13,000 words, which means I'm about seventy pages from the end.

For the most part, the next seventy pages will be some of the easiest writing of the entire draft. I've got very few notes from my draft two read-through, which means I'm just typing, adding in some layering, some deeper understandings of the characters and the imagery of the novel that have developed during the writing of the third draft. With the exception of one sequence of scenes (which I've mapped out so thoroughly at this point), I won't be writing large chunks of new text. Although, I've said that before and found myself writing LOTS of new text in this draft. In a strange way, draft three is the same as the previous draft, and in some ways, it's radically different.

On Facebook, I'm inundating my friends with updates about how many pages I've written, and my frustrations with interruptions (I returned to a remodel in one of our neighbor's houses) and just fitting my life in when my mind is perpetually elsewhere. At this point, Altar is officially the longest thing I've ever written and the longest I've ever spent writing something. One of my friends asked me what I'm going to do after it's done, and I jokingly said, "Go to Disneyland." To which she replied, "That's not a bad idea." I know. I feel it starting already. Though there will be editing to do when (fingers crossed) the novel gets taken by an agent and bought by an editor, it will not occupy me in the same way the writing does. I will not live with my characters in the way I do now. For one thing, I will have moved on to the next project by the time that comes about, for another, I won't have to be living so deeply in the story.

So what does it feel like right now? Fluid. Very fluid. I feel a lightness, an ease not only in my mind, but in my body. I am smiling a lot these days. For the most part, small annoyances (like rude drivers) don't stick with me. I get cranky when I can't get to the words (like earlier this week - re-entry was rough with a long list of things that had piled up while I was away. I still haven't worked my way through all of it), I get cranky with my family when they ask to borrow my time for things that were completely avoidable (aka: when the kids call because they've forgotten something at home that they need for school ASAP), and I get cranky when the hammering starts up in the remodel and interrupts my flow of words.

I am posting word totals to Facebook because that is truly what is going on in my life right now. Words. On the page. The story flowing forward in such a beautiful and profound way it's almost like it's not even me writing it at times. It seems to come through me rather than from me. And that is when writing is at its best. There is a tension building as I write ever closer to the final words, as I write towards some of my favorite scenes in the entire book, as I envision myself staring at the computer screen and hearing the printer churn out page after page of the completed manuscript.

I think what surprises me most is how easy it has been to follow this story to this conclusive moment. Over the years, I've heard of writers who spend decades on a single novel and wondered how they could do that, how they could maintain the focus, how they could not drive themselves mad with all the other ideas they weren't getting to. The answer turns out to be that it's surprisingly simple when the idea, the characters, the way the story develops continues to surprise you, to delight you, to reward your attention by getting better and deeper. It hasn't been easy. I have put this story down many times. It started as a 25-page short story in 1999. It grew into a novella a couple of years later. Three years ago, it turned into a full-fledged novel, and here I am, at last, reaching out for the end.

Can You Believe It?

2011-09-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

There was a discussion on one of the agent blogs I read several weeks ago (months, probably, knowing how chronologically challenged I am) about whether a teenage protagonist in a YA novel would use a particular word or not. The agent said that no teenager she knew would ever use this word and so it ruined the veracity of the character for her. Many of the blog readers commented that they've heard plenty of teenagers use that word or words of a similar elevated vocabulary level (I forget the exact word, but it was a mult-syllabic, Latinate, SAT-type word).

Similar discussions come up in workshop classrooms all the time. One person says something in a story isn't believable and another says, "Oh no, the same thing happened to me (or my brother, best friend, dog) and it happened exactly like this."

I think the discussions actually miss the point.

The question isn't 'can you believe it?' but 'is it believable for this character?'

To paraphrase Shakespeare (because I'm not going to get the quote right, and I don't want to take the time to go find it): there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Or, to paraphrase Douglas Adams: In an infinite universe, everything is possible.

These discussions came to mind while I was working on my own novel tonight and wrote the phrase I haven’t made up the reading I’ve missed nor gotten the class notes from anyone and realized it was the wrong language for my character. I've taken a lot of care to make it clear Matt is intelligent and observant. He has to be. He's carrying the observational weight of the entire novel. The reader has to trust his ability to tell the story and give valuable insight into his own character as well as those around him, otherwise the whole conceit of the novel collapses into the diary of a precocious fourteen year old. And that's not what I'm after.

I'm reminded of a friend who wrote a stunning first novel years ago with a very young narrator. She wrote a very smart scene early on where her narrator observed her mother walking through the grocery store, commenting not only on the height of her heels and the tightness of her shirt, but the reactions of the other customers in the store. Instinctively, my friend had done the work of getting the reader to trust this narrator's ability to reveal truth and tell the story even though she was ten years old.

So I don't think the question is one of whether a particular word or observation is believable. If the question of believability comes up, it's usually because the writer hasn't done the work to make the reader believe it.

In Defense of Harry Potter

2011-08-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting moment the other day when a new character was introduced in the novel I was reading. Her name was Merope. I knew the name came out of Greek mythology (Merope was the name of one of Atlas' daughters), but I kept getting a flash in my mind of a bedraggled young woman with stringy black hair and a very white face. The image was so vivid, I thought it had to come from a movie.

This happens a lot. I have near-perfect recall for just about any actor I've ever seen in a movie. I've only been stumped a few times, most notably by Hugo Weaving who I saw in Priscilla - Queen of the Desert, The Lord of the Rings movies, and The Matrix and didn't recognize as the same person (largely because Weaving is one of the few actors who can change the cadence and tone of his speech from role to role - Johnny Depp can do it, too, but I've never failed to recognize him since I've loved him since his 21 Jump Street days, and he's usually the star of the movie with his name above the title). It wasn't until a friend called Weaving 'Agent Elf' that I realized I'd been completely fooled.

I usually know the names of the actors, too, not just the roles they played, and have been known to recognize dog and cat actors as well. This ability is like my super power and might lead you to believe I spend lot of time reading the tabloids or memorizing IMDB, but nothing could be further from the truth. The information just sticks. Like Crazy Glue.

This time was different, though. I didn't get the snippet of dialogue that usually helps me figure out who the actor is or the name of the movie he or she was in. Every time I saw the name 'Merope,' I got that flash of the woman's face until it hit me. It wasn't a movie. It was the sixth Harry Potter book I was remembering. Tom Riddle's mother was Merope.

When I realized that, I turned to my husband and told him I want to be able to do exactly that, create an image with words that is so vivid a reader will think they've seen it rather than read it. That's not just good writing, that's amazing writing.

Shouting about Rivers

2011-08-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

All this week I’m guest blogging at To Be Shouted, a creative blog started by James Wilson and his family. Each month, they choose a topic and each family member plus one guest blogger gets a week to do whatever they want with the topic. Posts on previous topics (bread, Sundays, home, maps) have included meditations on the topics, essays, paintings, photo essays, stories, just about anything you can think of as a way to conceptualize the topic in a creative way. This month’s topic is ‘river,’ and I’ve been immersed (pardon the pun) in the subject for the past couple of weeks preparing for my To Be Shouted debut.

I’ve been having a good time with the topic, but what’s been really interesting is watching my creative arc as the project developed.

My first step in developing something interesting was to brainstorm. What did I know about rivers? What rivers did I know? What did I think about them? What came to mind when I thought about the word ‘river.’ I wrote down everything I could think of and tacked the list on the cork board over my desk so I could see it each day.

As I got closer to my deadline, I began researching the topic on the Internet. What was a river? What came up on the first page when I Googled the term ‘river?’ That search led me a recording of Joni Mitchell’s “River” on YouTube which got me thinking about the number of river-related songs I knew. So I started searching on YouTube for videos of songs about rivers, which, in turn, led to the post I put up today. But it also started me thinking about the symbolic use of rivers in music, literature and art.

I also thought a lot about mythology and river gods, the words associated with rivers and the effects rivers have on the landscape. I wrote a couple of things about those topics, but I also wanted to do something creative.

The next step in my process was the jump into interpretation of rivers, leaving the physical reality of rivers behind and moving into the metaphysical and symbolic. I’ve written a poem, have a piece of flash fiction/short short in the works, and am working on a couple of visual pieces – all of which will start hitting the blog in the next couple of days.

What’s been nice about this is watching the creative work evolve. So often, when I’m faced with a grant proposal or a residency application, I have a difficult time coming up with what I want to do, a difficult time describing the kind of work I want to create. I now realize, that’s mostly because I’m trying to jump to the last stage of this process without doing any of the previous stages, without any of the brainstorming or processing of information. The work I propose always feels flat. So the guest blogging on To Be Shouted has been a valuable microcosm of my creative process and a really good learning experience for me.

To Be Shouted

2011-08-22T10:04:00.001-07:00

I will be guest blogging over at To Be Shouted from today until the end of the month. To Be Shouted is the brain child of my friend, James Wilson, and his family, all of them talented artists. Each month, they choose a theme and write, create art, or post images related to that them. This month, the theme is 'river.' I've got some meditations, a poem, a story, and some art pieces that will be posted over the next ten days. Come check it out.

(the image above is one I took several years ago at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. The line of stones the girls are walking across marks the boundary between lake and river, the beginning of a journey that ends some 2,300 miles later in the Gulf of Mexico)

And Now, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Life

2011-08-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of school for my younger son (the older one went back to school last week), which means the house belongs to myself and the two dogs (who spend most of their time sleeping) for several hours each day.

It would have been tempting to plan to dive right back into work and start zooming away on the novel as soon as the door closed behind the younger child, but, I know myself better than this. I knew I would need some decompression time, time to adjust to the silence of the house (and the increase in environmental noise - like barking dogs and construction - that would become louder because of the vacuum), and I actually planned to give myself some space to do this. I'll pat myself on the back. I got myself right. Finally.

The house is quiet. Too quiet. And feels empty. The dogs are both sacked out - big dog on the couch and puppy by the sliding glass door. It's an overcast day in Baylandia, which makes the day feel even quieter.

So there's decompression from the kids going back to school and no longer being in the house. And there's also decompression from spending the weekend in Reno for Worldcon, which was a whirlwind of panel discussions on topics as diverse as infectious diseases (a catastrophic epidemic will not wipe out the human race, all it will take is a disease that kills 10% of the population to sufficiently disrupt such essentials as distribution of clean water and food and we'll die of water and food-born pathogens), writing fiction with real people as characters (make sure to choose someone who has been dead long enough to have few heirs or someone who does not have a litigious estate), and the nature of consciousness (a "philosophical zombie" is someone who does not know if anyone else has consciousness because, while you know you yourself have consciousness, you can not absolutely know for sure that anyone else you meet does as well). The highlight of my weekend was meeting Guy Consolmagno, or Brother Guy, who is an MIT-educated Jesuit priest and astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, who set us straight about a number of things including that the excommunication of Galileo was not about his science, it was a political move brought about because Galileo's patrons, the de Medicis, had fallen out of favor. Two years after his excommunication, Galileo was back on his estate carrying on just as before. (which, of course, makes me want to research it and write about it - this weekend was great for giving me more stories that I will probably never be able to write)

Another highlight was the panel discussion on linguistics. The academic credentials of the four panelists were incredibly impressive - PhD's all - but what really impressed...the moderator created the Klingon language and one of the panelists created the Dothraki language for the HBO Game of Thrones series. (Also amazing to me...the number of times George RR Martin crossed my path just wandering around the con like all the rest of us mere mortals. Unfortunately, I never had my camera handy when he did so).

Despite Worldcon's focus on SF and fantasy writing (or maybe because of it), I found plenty of interconnection with my own work. A talk about the ways ancient cultures have mapped the heavens gave me lots of information that relates directly to the novel, as did the linguistics discussion. I often went back to my hotel room at the end of the day with my head spinning and so mentally exhausted, I couldn't even contemplate playing Solitaire on the computer.

So, here I am again, just me and my words, and a novel to complete, and a whole bunch of new stories to think about. Which will make my next blog post very timely. Awhile back, I asked several writer and artist friends, how they created a balance between the existing work and the new ideas that inevitably form while you're engaged in a long-term project. My next post will focus on their responses.

From the Files

2011-07-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Found this yesterday while going through my grad school folders. It was created by those of us in Michelle Carter's Teaching Creative Writing class in fall of 2007 (so I'm not solely responsible for this, just contributed to it). If you've ever been in a workshop or critique group, you'll appreciate this.

Roles and Dynamics Found in Workshop Hell:

The Justifier - a) recognizes the writer's intentions and insists that the writer has accomplished them; b) reflexively defends the work as it is.

The Placater - "I just LOVE the writing!" Everything is wonderful, wants everyone to feel good.

The Alpha-Dog - "As my agent remarked over martinis last night..."

The Slash & Burner - thinks he or she is demonstrating critical acumen by crapping all over everything.

The Psychoanalyzer - "Clearly, the writer is the child of an alcoholic, probably two..."

The Digressor - "This reminds me of that time..."

The Fixer - "Start on page 10, move the scene on page 3 to page 7, and end the story on page 12, and make your main character a man."

The POV-changer - "Try changing this to first person..."

The Cosmic-Nitpicker - insists on focusing on irrelevant trivialities such as word choice in first drafts, titles, the color of a character's clothing or hair.

The Politicizer - "As a Marxist feminist, I find it offensive that..."

The Lit Crit Student/ Aesthetic Advocate - "The signifier fails to decenter the sign..."

The Formalist/Traditionalist/Classicist - "This is not a story..."

The Flame Warrior - insists on having personal battles and butting heads with everyone over everything.

The Teacher/Group Leader-Pleaser - arse-kisser

The Automatic Contrarian - habitually challenges the teacher because he or she knows more than the teacher.

The Personalizer - "I've never been to China, but I did have Chinese food for dinner last night and..."

The Perpetually Clueless - "I've got no idea what this story is about, actually."

The Cliche-Lover - praises what is trite/familiar and fears surprise and originality.

The Defender - responds to all comments with "But my writing group/husband/dog really loves this story."

The Explainer - "I know it's really slow up to page 50, but that's necessary because..."

The Validation-Hungry Genius - just wants to be told how brilliant he/she is.

The Dismisser - "I don't really care what you think about my work, it's being published next month just as it is."

The Apologizer - "You're right, I suck. I should just stop writing now."

The Excuse-Maker - "I haven't slept in a week, I'm moving, my cat died..."

The Psychotherapy Patient/ The Tender Plant - "I haven't felt this violated since my parents' divorce destroyed my life."

The Realist - "But that's how it really happened."

The Unintelligible Theorizer - "This piece is a deconstruction of Heidegger's praxis in its problemization of Paul de Man..."

Notes from the Life

2011-07-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

Couple of things today:

I'm going through my file cabinet right now, becoming reacquainted with various piece of paper I have collected and held on to, sometimes for several years. I've found some story starts from more than a decade ago (probably more like two decades - it is astounding how recent they seem and yet, when I do the chronology thing, I realize how long ago I actually put those words on that piece of paper - have I really been at this writing thing that long?)and been pleasantly surprised at how good they are (which, of course, begs the question of why it is so easy for me to doubt the quality of my writing. Believe me, I do. And often).

I also reacquainted myself with my "success" folder - it contains acceptance letters (and also "good" rejection letters - my favorites are rejections of the short story "Choice" which has become the novel I'm working on: "Although there is much to admire here, sorry to disappoint you on 'Choice.'" and "This story is hovering on the edge of being a great story..."). There are also comments from editors and people I interviewed during my freelancing days - my favorite, after adding a concluding paragraph to a run-of-the-mill round-up article about the top ten innovative tech businesses in Nevada, my editor e-mailed back, "Perfect. Good fluff is an art form." Love it!) Looking at the success folder was a great shot-in-the-arm and I'm grateful the younger version of myself thought to create the folder and keep it in the very front of the filing cabinet where it's visible every time I open that drawer. Good job, younger self!

I'm also going through the vast multitude of folders full of stuff from grad school. It's too early to start doing a thorough culling, and there's sooooo much good stuff in these folders, that I'm not doing a lot of thinning here. But what is interesting is coming across things I wrote for exercises and not recognizing them as my own writing nor remembering their creation at all. This has happened quite a few times. It's completely understandable. The pace of grad school was tremendous - I did my MFA in three years. It was three years of constant pressure to create and write and get work out there on a deadline (maybe that's why the work has been moving at such a slow pace during my first post-grad school year). Looking at these snippets of stories or novels (I mined previous novels and novels that were still in development mercilessly in an effort to short cut the creation process when a professor asked for scenes - a totally legitimate way to create what I needed to for the class), I'm amazed at what I produced, and how much of it there is, and how GOOD a lot of it is. I've thought I hadn't really written anything during my time in grad school. Um, hello? It makes me very glad I'm doing this culling and pruning thing right now. (though I truly wish I didn't have to keep reminding myself that 1) I'm good, and 2) I'm productive, almost prolific.)

The other thing is that I saw George RR Martin last night in Redwood City courtesy of the super in dependant book store Kepler's. What I did not know until last night was that Kepler's promoted George's first book in the series, Game of Thrones, and sold more copies of that book than any other bookstore in the country.

It's an odd thing to see an author in person, especially an author who has achieved the kind of super-star status that packs out a 1,000 seat theater or, as happened at ComicCon, has 7,000 people lined up for hours to get seats in an auditorium that only seats 4,000. There is never enough time for all the questions to be asked let alone answered (in this case, George talked a bit about why this latest book took so long and about the HBO series, then there were a few questions from the audience and then George sat at a table and signed books for the 1,000 people (several of whom had brought the full limit of three books for signing) - the event started at 7, my friend and I got out of there at 10 with our signed copy) and it always seems like the author can't quite answer the question the audience wants answered the most: what is it like in your head?

Having been to a number of author readings and signings, etc, I truly think that is the one question the audience really wants answered, but neither the audience nor the author knows how to get to it.

Anyway, back to the files and the every rising pile of paper in the recycling bin.

(There will be a picture of George attached to this blog post as soon as I can get it from my friend. Promise)

Blame it on the Puppy & the Importance of Rewards

2011-07-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

Our family added a new member at the beginning of the month, which means my writing schedule has gone to heck. Puppy gets up at 6 am, so my 4 am writing times have gone by the wayside for a bit. Puppy also needs constant vigilance because we are in housebreaking mode (Something for which Puppy seems to have no use. He's just not getting it. He will. He is not the first puppy I've had, and they've all learned to ask to go out). But it's all just as well because it gave me plenty of time to read A Dance with Dragons and Turn of Mind and not feel guilty that I wasn't working on my own novel.

Alice LaPlante's novel, Turn of Mind, came out and has been doing very well. Alice was one of my mentors during grad school and is the professor who had me send the first draft of my novel to her agent when it was completed, which I wrote about in this blog entry. It's next on my reading list, but I've heard Alice read from it a couple of times and know that it is excellent. Maureen Corrigan reviewed the book on Fresh Air and made what I think is an incredibly salient point about Alice's combining a story about a woman with Alzheimer's with a murder mystery: If this were a straight work of literary fiction, that grim storyline might be too hard to stick with; but, that's where the suspense formula rescues this tale from despair. Just as we're losing Dr. White, we readers are rewarded with the cold comfort of the truth about the murder.

I think it's a point writers of contemporary fiction too often forget. We need to give readers a satisfying and rewarding ending to our stories. This doesn't mean that our stories have to have a happy ending, but that our endings need to be deep and rich with meaning.

It's something some writer friends and I were talking about over coffee at the beginning of the summer. We got on the subject of naming books we'd read recently that were satisfying reads and realized pretty quickly that, though there were many wonderful books out there, very few contemporary ones left us with a sense of satisfaction when we were done. It reminded me of my frustration with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Franzen spends hundreds of pages building up to a family reunion - the last Christmas the family will spend together because the father is becoming increasing incapacitated by dementia and the siblings are grown and scattered. When we finally get to the moment when all family members are in the same house, the anticipated explosion never comes. Instead, Chip, the youngest sibling, arrives just as his older brother is departing for the airport. True to life? Sure it is. But it was ultimately unsatisfying and left me feeling cheated and unrewarded for sticking with these thoroughly annoying and deeply flawed people. Where was the larger meaning? Where was the sense of closure?

Again, I'm not talking about happy endings. What Corrigan illuminates in her review of Alice's book is that there is no happy ending possible for Alice's protagonist, but the resolution of the mystery for the reader allows for a sense of completeness and closure. There can be unhappy, unresolved conclusions for characters. That's the way life is. We don't always get resolution for our complicated story lines. But for the reader, there has to be something more. In too many contemporary novels, there just isn't.

I was reminded of the need for rewards while reading the fifth book in George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. Martin's book are HUGE. Dragons is just under 1,000 pages, and the previous four books total somewhere around 3,000 pages combined. He gives readers a cast of thousands and more story lines than any one human being should be capable of keeping track of. But Martin is a genius puzzle master and adept at rewarding the diligent reader. The final resolution of this series is years away. It is likely the seventh book will not be released until after 2020 if Martin continues to write at the same pace he has up until now (and no one wants to see him compromise quality in favor of them coming out any sooner), so he has to give readers incremental rewards for continuing to read the series. Spectacular cliffhangers at the end of each book are just part of it. There are characters who disappear and reappear in surprising places, but who's reappearance is entirely reasonable if you are paying attention. He gives clues. And the reward for paying attention is the pleasure you get when you find out you've been right all along or the surprise when something unexpected happens.

I've also been thinking about rewards a lot because of Puppy. Puppy is amazingly food oriented, which makes him incredibly easy to train. He learned to sit on command in less than a day. Dog, who will be three in August (they're both Airedales), has only recently come to understand the value of food. As a puppy, she couldn't have cared less, which made it frustrating and one of the reasons she continues to be a crazy woman when people come to the house and why she needs to be walked on a pronged collar (which I detest, but it keeps her from knocking me over in her desire to greet another dog or person). Because of Dog's behavior, I enrolled both Puppy and Dog in training classes (Dog's breeder recommended the trainer having taken Dog's mother to the classes, so I knew the trainer understood Airedales). This past week we practiced walking on a leash outside the classroom space. Dog's been doing great in the classroom, but, as soon as we were outside, her usual behavior returned. Trees! Dumpsters! Other dogs! There was simply TOO MUCH STUFF for her to pay attention to the clicker or the treats. The trainer suggested, since she wasn't interested in the treats as a reward (and, I mean, I had SALMON, not salmon-flavored treats, honest to goodness dried salmon, in the treat bag), I should use the other things she was interested in as the reward. Walk a few steps and, if she was staying with me, let her go sniff, then call her back and walk a few more steps, then reward her with a good sniff. It worked like a charm.

Which made me think even more about rewards and how, as writers, we need to give rewards to our readers. The reward doesn't have to be the happily ever after of Jane Austen's novels. But it doesn't have to be the happily ever never of Jonathan Franzen either.

Just Because It's True...

2011-06-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

One of the most difficult aspects of writing is getting dialogue right. I got a reminder about that this week when I was working on a scene for my novel that happens on the one week anniversary of the death of my main character's brother. The step-dad in my novel is getting his doctorate in psychology so he's asked a friend who's specializing in grief counseling to help the family. My main character, 14 year-old Matt, is having none of it. The scene is important for a couple of reasons - it brings in the idea that anniversaries or significant milestones can trigger feelings of grief and mourning, which is key to understanding why Matt is telling this story in such detail. It also comes at the point where Matt is realizing there was more going on in his brother's life than he was aware of.

Lorelie, the grief counselor, asks the family to talk about the day Denny died, what they were doing, what Denny was doing, as a way to acknowledge the difference between this Saturday and the one on which Denny died. Matt, who has a near-perfect memory, thinks this is stupid and tells her he remembers everything that happened that day.

In my initial draft of the scene, he rattles off the details of the day starting with waking up at 7:08, taking a shower, smelling his step-dad's burnt toast, eating cornflakes from the blue bowl with the big chip out of the rim, watching TV (with specific shows, of course) and then going up to his room to play on his computer, hearing Denny wake up at 12:18, etc. etc. All written out in dialogue:

"I woke up at 7:08. Alan was making breakfast in the kitchen, I could smell the coffee and burnt toast. I got out of bed. I went to the bathroom then took a shower and got dressed. Then I had cornflakes and watched that TV show where they make warriors from different eras fight each other. It was Marines versus Samurai last week. The Marines won. Then I went upstairs..."

The problem with dialogue like this, besides being really, really boring, is that it made Matt sound psychotic and unbelievable. No one, no matter how good a memory he or she has, can really do this unless there is something else going on for them like a form of autism or a condition known as hyperthymesia, which Matt does not have (when I was researching eidetic memory for my novel, I ran across Jill Price who has near perfect recall of every day she's lived for the past twenty nine years. This article from Wired Magazine explores her exceptional memory, but talks about it as a form of OCD, the product of an obsessive recitation of the events that have happened in her life, so she has perfect recall of everything that has happened to her, but not for events that happened in the world around her - good info, but not what I'm exploring in the novel).

The recitation of Matt's day, complete with time stamps, didn't ring true. Plus, there were other things I wanted to be calling the reader's attention to, like Matt realizing, as he's rattling of this list, that something was different about the music Denny was playing when he woke up. It was a country song not heavy metal, and Matt didn't notice it in the moment of experiencing it (again, really important for one of the themes of the novel about memory and reconstruction of experience). To write it in scene, with Matt's dialogue being given to the reader as it's happening, made this moment clunky. I had to do one of these - 'and I noticed, while I was speaking' - types of things, which are awkward. So I knew I had to narrate the dialogue, tell the reader what Matt was saying rather than showing it:

“I remember all of it,” I say, and start to list everything that happened that day. I include the toast Alan burned, the chipped rim on the bowl I ate my corn flakes out of, mom asking for the laundry in my room. Even as I’m burying them in the details of that day, I recognize how much I’m leaving out, like mom throwing up in the bathroom because I’m not supposed to know she’s pregnant yet. I know, already, I won’t tell them about Denny going out the window or the look he gave me when I get to that part of the day, but I don’t know if that’s because I don’t want them to know it or because I want to keep it for myself.
As I’m talking, I also know how crazy it is that I can remember all of this, how it sounds like I'm obsessed, but I can’t stop. Now that I've started, I need to purge myself, to get it all out.
When I get to Denny waking up, I start to shake, my teeth chattering so it’s difficult to form words as I tell them how Denny started playing music right after one, which is how I knew he was awake. But even as I say it, I feel in my gut how something’s off, the music was different.

In the odd way of writing fiction, the narrated scene feels more real even though the reader no longer gets Matt's exact words.

This is one of the most difficult things to balance as a writer: writing something in a less-than-realistic way in order for it to be more true-to-life. It reminds me of a mantra that we used to repeat in a critique group I belonged to many years ago: Just because it really happened, doesn't mean it makes a good story.

Only from the mind of a writer...

2011-06-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

From the "how do writers spend their time" files:

Sometimes, when I'm trying to get the creative juices flowing on a particular scene, it helps to look things up. Some of those things are helpful, some turn out to be just a way to procrastinate. This morning, stuck with how to get from the scene I'm in to the scene I want to come next, I noodled around with a few ideas, came up with an analogy between the way you can be suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that the person you love is no longer there after a death and the way it feels to drown. Great. Nice. Works well.

But, my conscious, and always helpful, brain pointed out, you've never drowned, you should look it up.

So I did. I found a couple of citations that gave me great information.
From a lifeguard of 15+ years who has seen lots of people drown, die, and been revived.

A compelling description from someone who was shipwrecked.

Unfortunately they only served to show me that the actual details of drowning weren't really necessary for what I wanted to write.

But then this caught my eye in the Google search results:
What does it feel like to drown? If you're decapitated, how long do you remain conscious? New Scientist has a fascinating feature on how it ...

And I just had to take a look.

How it feels to die.

The answer, it turns out, is seven seconds if the blade that severs your head is sharp and makes a clean cut.

So there, in a nutshell, is what writers do with their time. Aren't you so glad you asked?

Ain't No Cure for the Summertime Blues

2011-06-23T23:26:00.001-07:00

Been feeling somewhat low and at odds with myself lately, which pretty much means I haven't been writing as much as I need to. I don't mean 'need' as in needing to get work done, I mean 'need' the same way an athlete needs to work out in order to feel fit. But that's largely due to the start of summer vacation. Okay, full disclosure, it's also due to my near-obsession with reading the first four books of the Game of Thrones series twice (that's roughly 6,000 pages in the past two months) before the fifth book comes out on July 12th and reading The Inferno for my work with Home-Schooled Teen.

Mostly, though, it's the beginning of summer that's thrown me off my stride, as it does almost every year. It's difficult to make a smooth transition from having my days to myself to having two kids hanging out at home. This year, we had planned to be away from home for most of the summer on a cross-country trip. Unfortunately, the rising cost of gas increased the cost of that trip enough that we've postponed it until next summer. So the kids are home and decided they didn't want to do summer camps this year. Which means they're home. Full time. They're good kids and pretty used to their mom's crazy insistence on being left alone for vast stretches of time as well as her lion's roar when she gets interrupted while she's writing (I do allow interruptions in the case of life-threatening situations, if blood has been spilled, or the house is burning down. Other than that, you take your life in your hands if you come into my space while I'm working). As much as they leave me alone, it's still difficult to write when I know they're there. So I haven't been. And it's starting to show.

Which means that it's time to commence the Emergency Summer Plan of Action: waking up at 4 am to work on the novel for a few hours before everyone else's day gets going.

I've done it before. Several years ago, I finished up another novel by getting up at 4 am for three months straight, and it was wonderful. It wasn't so much the blissfully uninterrupted hours of writing time, it was sitting down to write day after day and observing the ebbs and flow of my creative process. There were productive days and non-productive days. Days when the writing flowed and days when it was stuck in the mud. The work responded to that schedule, too. It seemed to like the extra attention and the additional commitment I was making to get that book finished. The other thing I noticed, when I get up at 4 am and start writing immediately, I don't get that niggly, annoying half hour of self-doubt while my conscious brain gives up the idea that it's in control. When I start writing at 4 am, my conscious brain is still asleep and doesn't notice that anything's going on until I'm half an hour into the work and then it takes a look and goes, okay, everything's under control.

So back to 4 am wake-up calls while I get this novel finished.

There are other things on the summer docket. I'm putting together an Etsy store to sell my cards and pins. Fingers crossed I'll have that going in the next month. I'll make an announcement here when that happens and direct everyone to my store.

The big excitement at the beginning of July is the arrival of my mentor, Alice la Plante's first novel in bookstores. Alice is an amazing writer and this book gotten some serious buzz - it's the #1 summer Indie Bookseller's pick - finger's crossed it'll do great. The book is about a woman with Alzheimer's who is accused of murdering her next door neighbor and can't remember what she was doing, just that there was blood on her hands and the police arrested her. You should definitely go look for Turn of Mind by Alice la Plante and help it become a best seller.

In Defense of Fantasy

2011-06-14T22:45:00.000-07:00

(Quick note: I started this post back in April, then got sidetracked by reading the rest of the George RR Martin series and working on my own novel, as well as some family stuff that needed to get done, the start of summer vacation, and plans for the arrival of a new puppy. Since I started this post, I have finished the series and am now almost done with my second read-through of it (there were some things I wanted to investigate and figure out a little more while they were still fresh in my mind) in anticipation of the release of the fifth book in the series on July 12th.)

For the past week, I’ve been indulging an ancient passion of mine: reading fantasy. I picked up A Game of Thrones after watching the first episode of the HBO miniseries last Sunday night, and was completely in thrall to the book from the first chapter to the last. It’s one of the few books I’ve read in the past several years that I have devoured, pretty much bringing all other work to a halt so I could swallow it in one gulp (I even took my car in for service just so I could read for two hours without feeling guilty that I wasn’t getting anything done – the car needed the work, but still…). It’s a pretty big book to take in that way, more than 600 pages long, and Thrones is just the first of a series. It took me two and a half days. I finished this morning and have already started in on Book Two: Clash of Kings. Yeah. It’s that good. Sweeping. Epic. Told from multiple points of view with a cast of thousands. And the action never stops from page one onward. I can’t even imagine the mind that could conceive of a plot this elaborate and intricate and able to keep everything straight. And the writing is beautiful.

Which brings me to the real point of my post. Give me a moment while I climb up on my soapbox. Okay. Here it goes:

I don’t understand the bias against fantasy (or any genre, for that matter) in most creative writing programs. Many of you, if you’re regular readers of my blog, will remember the letter I wrote to Neil Gaiman that he posted on his blog about my experiences in creative writing programs and their response to genre writing. The bias is that serious writers don’t write fantasy because fantasy can’t explore the depth of the human condition as deeply or as truthfully as realistic (ie; literary) fiction can. Any fantasy writer is, by virtue of writing fantasy, not a good writer.

Which, I think, is a load of hogswallop.

I was twelve when I discovered my dad’s collection of classic science fiction/fantasy – Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Clark, Le Guinn – all the biggies were there, and I read most of them. The first book I read, after I was done with fairy tales, horse stories and a brief, though thoroughly embarrassing, stint with romance novels (though, in my own defense, I probably learned a LOT about how to write a good sex scene from those novels, good enough to get one of my grad professors to write ‘Hot!’ in the margin of my novel)…but what I consider to be my first REAL book was Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s dystopic book burning classic. I went on to read Stranger in a Strange Land (and learn the meaning of ‘grokking’ something), 2001, I Robot and the Foundation Trilogy, Dune, Andromeda Strain, just about anything I could get my hands on. I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so much I developed an English accent (my dad, thank you so much! decided to tape the BBC radio play when it was first broadcast on NPR back in 198?, ’81, I think) and I have first edition copies of all the books in the series except the first one (darn!).

At one point, I wanted to be write fantasy, but I gave it up because I realized my ideas just weren’t good enough. Yes. You heard that right. I turned to literary fiction because I couldn’t write fantasy. There’s my deep, dark little secret. I am a failed fantasy writer.

While I think the true source of the bias lies in the fact that fantasy writers have an easier time making money from their writing than literary writers, I’ll set that aside for the moment in order to comment on why I think the quality argument is a bogus one and how the genre of fantasy is a more legitimate descendant of western literature than literary writing, and one with far deeper roots.

One of the reasons I think fantasy is seen as a facile is that it is closely aligned with fairy tales, myths, the fantastical stories we read as children. Just as the stuffed rabbit we couldn’t go to sleep without embarrasses us as adults, so to, the literature we adored as children does not seem to be the stuff serious adults who want to be taken as serious intellectuals should be reading.

I’ve read a lot of the western canon’s foundational work – Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Inferno, and I read a lot more classic work than I do contemporary fiction (there, another deep dark admission). Dostoyevsky, Austen, Elliot, Kafka, Woolf, etc. My favorite time period is fiction written between the two world wars. Most classical work, at least until the industrial era, has some kind of fantastical element to it. In fact, I think a lot more work that has stood the test of time has fantastical elements than doesn’t.

Now, I haven’t done any research on this, and it’s a developing theory of mine, but I think the insistence on a strictly literary genre (and yes, it is a genre) of fiction has come about with the rise of the middle class, especially the educated middle class. The middle class is extremely concerned with manners and the correct way of doing things. Think about Austen and the concern about marrying correctly – who do you think she was writing for? So the rise of literary writing seems to me, to have come about with the rise of an educated middle class, concerned with seeming to be smart, savvy, ahead of the curve, and vitally concerned that others recognize these qualities in them. Hence the need to denigrate the things that might have been enjoyed as children, like fairy tales. Sophisticated people do not listen to ghost stories or believe in knights in shining armor. Horrors if a dragon should show up! Or a robot!

But the insistence that literary fiction somehow has the corner on a true reflection of culture or is somehow deeper or more meaningful because it shows us as we truly are drives me nuts. I love Andre Aicman. His Call Me By Your Name is one of the most amazing works of contemporary fiction I’ve read in a long time. However, when I read his latest novel, Eight White Nights, I found myself wondering who on Earth actually acts like this? Who thinks like this? Yes, it’s rendered in excruciatingly accurate and realistic details, but really, I know very few people who imagine standing on the street gazing up at the lighted window of a woman they’ve just broken up with within hours of meeting said woman, or who are so enamored with the future past tense of their lives that they forget to live the present moment. Is it a valid point? Sure. I’m positive there are actually people who think like this, but, you know what? They’re not very interesting to read about for several hundred pages.

Another problem contemporary writing has is an inability to deal with the present moment. In a Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury said that mainstream writing ignores the major ideas of our time. “The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen or twenty years late,” he said. You can see this played out in the tendency for literary fiction to place stories in the near past, at a time when computers, cell phones and the internet were non-existent. Ask any writer about the “cell phone” problem and, most likely, you’ll get a list of ploys that writer has used to get around the ways in which ready access to a phone would solve a necessary plot complication. The phone is lost. Cell service is spotty. The phone simply isn’t turned on. The battery is low. The phone’s gotten dropped in a toilet and is no longer working.

Seriously, wouldn’t it be simply easier to put your characters on another planet?

But really, what those who denigrate fantasy miss is that the best fantasy writing is allegory. It treats the issues of our day in a way that we can hold them in our hands and examine them up close. Genocide? War? Tyranny? Evil? The just use of political power? These are all issues that exist in our contemporary world, but they are difficult to transform into realistic novels without becoming preachy or pedantic or, worse, boring and issue-driven. But fantasy can deal with them in ways that are interesting and draw direct comparisons to our real world. One of the things I admire about the George RR Martin series is how he shows war from all sides – one side’s murder is another’s self-defense. Wars (and political careers) turn on a decision made in the heat of the moment. The series is an extensive contemplation of what justice means. And it’s fun to read. And it has dragons.

And it is the legitimate descendant of the foundations of western literature in a way literary fiction is not. I am reading The Inferno right now. At every turn, there is a monster or a mythical creature or some character out of legend. It is tied into our ancestral memory of sitting by the fire, listening to the stories of heroes. It taps deep into our subconscious to reveal a deeper truth about ourselves and who we are. Which is probably why, after more than 700 years, it is still being read.

We abandon these myths and folktales at our peril. We impoverish our literature by insisting that the only true literature, the only legitimate form of expression, is that which renders our world in realistic detail. Because it denies the essential fact of writing – writing, by its very act, transforms our world into symbols. It isn’t realistic no matter what we do. No matter how realistically a writer renders a world, there is still the fantastical, alchemical process of taking these words you are reading and transforming them into pictures in your mind.

Post of Quotes

2011-05-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my favorite quotes about writing in no particular order:

‎"Whatever I think is radical and interventionist and different about my work in terms of American literature...a book has to work as a book for someone who just isn't going to pick up on all these clever things you think you're doing." - Toni Morrison

‎"Every writer should have tattooed backwards on his (or her) forehead, like on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor'." - Michael Chichton

I don’t think it’s the poet’s job to witness only tragedy. I think it’s a poet’s job to witness joy in the world, no matter how much tragedy also exists. - Ilya Kaminsky

A scream is but a scream unless you shape it with feelings and put names to the meanings. - Donald Hall

Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are. - Anton Chekhov

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning. A meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. - Virginia Woolf

To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. - Haruki Murakami

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein

If you don’t tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people. -
Virginia Woolf

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. - Bernard Malamud

When you're stuck, close your eyes and make a mark - it's not the object, it's the process, the exploration. - Sara Cole

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether. - Thomas Carlyle

If you are a poet, you will see that there is a cloud in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. - Thich Nhat Hanh

The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities. -
Daniel Day-Lewis

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. - James Stephens

I don’t trust my abilities as a writer nearly as much as I trust my instincts as a person. - Jonathan Safran Foer

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. - Cecil Day-Lewis

There are no bad words or good words, there are only words in bad or good places. -
W. Nowottny

I never write exercises, but sometimes I write poems which fail and then I call them exercises. - Robert Frost

The organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind. - John Gardner

The moment we stop caring where the story will go next, the writer has failed, and we stop reading. - John Gardner

Learn your theories well, but lay them aside when you touch the reality of the living soul. - Carl Jung

We cannot think about things but only the names of things. - Hobbes

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. - C.G. Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. - C.G. Jung

I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks.
Wallace Stevens

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man. - H.L. Mencken

The main difference between an experienced writer and an inexperienced writer is the ability to work on a bad day. - Norman Mailer

Poets tell many lies.
Solon c638 – 599 B.C.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. - Stephen King

A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. – Chinese proverb

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp. - Terry Pratchett

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself. - Terry Pratchett

Killing Your Darlings

2011-05-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

"In writing, you must
kill all your darlings."
— William Faulkner

Well, Bill, it's been a bloody day. The darlings are lying in tatters around my feet. I have hopes that one of them will be resurrected somewhere else in the novel, but, for now, it's been cut from this draft of the novel.

What are darlings, you may ask? Darlings are those well-crafted pieces of writing every writer adores when they're created. We cherish them, nurture them, and protect them through draft after draft, honing the words around them so that we can keep them just a little bit longer. Unfortunately, they don't fit in the work. They may be lovely sentences or finely wrought scenes. The writing may be some of the best work you've ever done. But, when it comes right down to it, they don't work. They have to go. And the only thing you can do is take out the scalpel and start cutting.

Today's been that day for a couple of scenes in my novel. As I said, one of them may find a home elsewhere in the novel. There's actually some information in it that has to show up for something else to make sense later on, but, I had to cut it from where it was.

The lesson I've been learning lately is that my editing has shifted from honing the writing to making sure that the writing fits the story. It's the difference between worrying about the quality of the writing and realizing the quality is no longer the issue, it's a matter of whether the writing is doing the work it needs to in the scene or if the scene fits. Something may be written very well, but, if it's in the wrong place, it will be as jarring as playing the wrong note in a piano recital.

So the darlings fell today. One by one. And it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

Inspiration Point

2011-04-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

I am extremely grateful to have a secondary art form I can fall back on when the writing (and the writering) gets wonky. Photography. It's been a way to keep the creative fires stoked while the writing decides to go off and sulk for some reason. Over the past couple of decades, photography has been the saving grace, keeping me from falling into a long, dark teatime of the soul many, many times. When I finished my undergrad degree and couldn't write a word without a paralyzing sense of futility and worthlessness, photography was how I kept connected to my creative self for the seven years it took to get beyond the destructive words of a couple of professors. Many times, photography has helped me overcome the small blocks that come during any creative project, or shown me the solution to a particular problem by putting it into a different language, a visual one.

This past week was such a time.

After weeks of the novel rolling along just fine, it all came to a crashing halt in the past couple of weeks. Suddenly, the words were not flowing. It was taking me days to write two pages and, worse, I was starting to doubt that I remembered all the things I wanted to do in this draft sufficiently to make this final revision achieve the full vision I had for the novel. It just sucked. Even beyond the thirty minutes it usually sucks. What was getting written was fine, but the experience was as if I was writing the words in my own blood. It was agonizing. I became a horrible, bitchy person, too, snapping at everyone, falling into a dark pit of despair and not knowing how, nor really wanting, to get out.

So I took a day off from writing and went to take pictures. I chose to go to a place I love: Fort Point, the only remaining Civil War-era fort on the West Coast. It figures into my next novel, but it's also such an amazingly evocative place for me (it is, quite literally, right underneath the SF side of the Golden Gate Bridge), I thought, if anything can get me out of my funk, Fort Point can. Only I didn't know Fort Point wasn't open during the week. So I was stuck. And pissed.

But can you see the symbolism here? Here I was, locked out of a place I'd found creatively inspiring, just as I was locked out my novel.

I accepted the challenge the universe was offering me. Okay. Can't photograph inside, I'll see what I can find outside.

My first attempts were not inspiring. I'd wanted to photograph in black and white, but it wasn't working. And my eye wasn't there at all. I could feel it just looking through the viewfinder. I wasn't finding the image. As I said in my post How Do You Know You're A Good Writer, you can feel when you get it right. This is one of the main things photography has taught me because the feedback is so instantaneous in photography. You don't have to read 200 pages of text to know if you've got it right, you can see it immediately. With digital photography, the feedback is even quicker. And it's helped me learn what that moment feels like when I know (or rather, my subconscious knows) it works.

Then I switched to color and the results were a little better.

Then there was the image that's at the top of this post, and I felt things begin to shift. I remembered my interest in patterns and the edges of things.

I started thinking about what was going on with the patterns I was photographing, what made these photos more visually interesting to me than what I'd started out doing that day, and realized I had stumbled on some craft ideas that were applicable to writing:

Juxtaposition works as a way of showing how two disparate objects rub up against each other, the tension comes from the degree of difference between them. For example, black and white creates a much greater sense of contrast than two shades of blue. It's also a way of showing how two objects can be affected in radically different ways by the same process.

The same idea is true in fiction. How sentences, scenes, and chapters are ordered can create radically different effects because of what happens before it and after it. Juxtaposition of characters is also important. Nothing bothers me more in a story (especially TV shows or movies) when story lines are essentially the same - different characters going through the EXACT SAME THING. Shakespeare used subplots to echo the main plot line. There were similarities, yes, but he showed different outcomes through his subplots, the dynamics of each plot were different. Putting too many similar characters together makes a story very bland, although I also have a problem with a lot of contemporary fiction where characters are quirky for the sake of being quirky. So it's a delicate thing. But back to the photography because here was my visual art form showing me something I was forgetting in my novel - the juxtaposition of two characters in a scene.

I also noticed that what makes repetition interesting is when it's broken. It's the unexpected surprise that really makes us aware of the pattern.

And then there was the moment I found a small project, and really felt my inner artist kick in. Many of the bricks on the exterior of the fort have names carved into them, some of them dating back to the 1930's or earlier, so I created an alphabet by finding each sequential letter in the names on the fort's facade. It was a challenge, and I'm sure I looked quite deranged scanning the bricks and saying, "'X', there's an 'X,' I have to remember that." When it was done, and I had found all 26 letters, I felt great.

Which was another lesson for me to remember: if the big project isn't working, give yourself a small assignment. A scene, some dialogue between two characters, a scene written from another character's point of view.

And, ultimately, the big lesson of the day for me was about giving up the illusion of control in the creative process. I'd been trying to control my novel too tightly, and it was rebelling. I'm dealing with a pissed off fourteen-year old narrator, sometimes my novel takes on that personna, and I have to remember that when I'm dealing with it.

There is an adage that lots of writers like to repeat about discipline and the necessity of showing up every day. While I agree with that, I also believe it's more important to honor the way you want to write. For me, when I try to adhere to a strict, every day writing schedule, my writer shuts down. I have to let my writer guide me, trust that she knows what she's doing and, if she says she needs a break, to take that break even when it's frustrating or doesn't make sense. Thank goodness I have a second art form that makes it possible for me to be creative and figure things out while in the act of creation.

And the last thing I learned. When you're really stuck, steal someone else's artwork and make it your own:

What Do You Want?

2011-04-06T09:43:00.001-07:00

Home-schooled teen and I finished our discussions about The Aeneid yesterday. I've talked about HST before - she's the youngest daughter of a friend of mine who decided that, after watching her two older children graduate from high school without a passion for learning (or basic knowledge of science, which is my friend's field), she was going to take matters into her own hands. I offered to take on HST's literature class, an offer that was met with a great deal of enthusiasm since it's not my friend's area of expertise. HST and I started out reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, then went several thousand years back in time to Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, both of which I've talked about in previous posts for their surprisingly "modernist" story-telling as well as my unabashed passion for The Odyssey. HST decided we should move on to The Aeneid and has since requested that we read The Inferno next.

I must admit, when HST asked to read The Aeneid, I wasn't overjoyed. I'd somehow managed to not have read it for the entirety of my literary life including an integrated Western canon-based Lit/History/and Rhetoric program during my first semester in college. We read The Odyssey, The Inferno, The Oresteia, Utopia, Richard II, and Plutarch, Euripides, Suetonius, Machiavelli, and, of course, Virgil. I know this because a friend of mine and I created a literary journal for our program and made the cover out of a photocopy of the spines of all the books we read (or were supposed to have). Despite this, I somehow missed reading The Aeneid, although I remember our classroom discussions about the death of Dido very well.

So, HST and I embarked on Virgil's master epic, a literary work that is, without much argument, the single most influential work in all of Western literature. Although Dante is the best known example of Virgil's influence, Shakespeare also borrowed heavily from him (I'm reading Henry V right now as I tutor an AP English student, reading these two texts in tandem has made it very clear how much the Bard borrowed from The Aeneid - the motif of fire, the struggle of a leader coming to terms with the inner desires versus the public responsibilities, the promise of a foreign bride who, though the ultimate prize of a war, is nothing more than a pawn in the masculine game of nation-building), as did Tennyson and George Bernard Shaw (his Arms and the Man is a direct reference to Aeneas). Virgil's battle scenes are a model for Tolkien and have probably influenced filmmakers as well with their blow-by-blow action that freely floats from one face to the next (with some pretty gory deaths, like warrior who's head and neck is split in two by a sword) and then homes in on one particular glorious battle, like the one between Pallas and Turnus - action, action, action, and then close-up. Even Harry Potter ends with a battle scene like this between Harry and Voldemort - and I do not doubt JK Rowling knows her Aeneid - she makes references to it throughout the series including the brother/sister Death Eater duo Amycus and Allecto - Amycus was a poisoner in The Aeneid and Allecto is the fury Juno sends down to inflame the Latins to war against the Trojans).

Anyway, we embarked. We read. We discussed. And, yesterday, we concluded, which leads me to share these thoughts.

First, some history about The Aeneid for those of you reading this who may not be familiar with it. Virgil was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to write a national epic for Rome somewhere around 29 B.C.E. Virgil was already a well-respected poet, having published two previous collections of work that were both popular and well-received. In The Aeneid, Virgil created the foundational myth for the Roman Empire, a way to explain the empire's greatness as having been pre-ordained by the gods. The basic plot is that a prince of Troy, Aeneas, escapes from the burning embers of that doomed city with the remnants of the Trojan people. His destiny is to found a new Troy in Italy. His mother, Venus, tells him this. In fact, there's a wonderful scene when Aeneas is recounting the fall of Troy where Venus pulls back the veil that shields the gods from mortal eyes and shows her son the gods themselves, Neptune, Juno and Minerva, tearing apart the walls of the city with their bare hands. And don't forget, Venus herself was the cause of the Trojan war because she bribed Paris (Priam's son) with Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, if he would chose Venus as the fairest of the goddesses (Paris got this honor because, at the wedding of Achilles' parents, Thetis (who was a sea nymph) and Pelleus, Eris (goddess of discord) rolls a golden apple into the midst of the banqueting gods declaring that the apple should go to the fairest of the goddesses. Juno, Venus, and Minerva jump on the apple and then ask Jupiter to decide. Faced with choosing between his wife, his war goddess daughter, and the goddess of love (who in Roman myth is also his daughter), he defers to a human, Paris, to make the choice). So Virgil shows how the entire Trojan War was just a set-up for the ultimate founding of Rome.

Aeneas travels with his refugee population, gets shipwrecked in Carthage, shacks up with the queen of Carthage (Dido) and then leaves her a year later when the gods send Mercury to remind him that Carthage isn't the city he's meant to found. He leaves, Dido commits suicide. Aeneas sails on, has a few more adventures, and then his father's ghost asks him to come for a visit in the underworld, which Aeneas, the dutiful son, does aided by the Cumaen Sybil. Anchises, Aeneas's father, reminds him, once again, of his future, showing Aeneas the future souls of Roman leaders who are waiting to be born including Cesar, Augustus, and the doomed Marcellus (he was Augustus' nephew and chosen successor who died very young - the story is, when Virgil first read The Aeneid to Augustus and his sister, Octavia, she fainted as he talked about the tragedy of her son's early death). Aeneas sails on, lands in Italy, presents himself to Latinus, king of the Latins, gets offered Latinus' daughter, Lavinia, who, whoops, was already engaged to Turnus. War breaks out between the Latins and the Trojans - Virgil essentially refights the Trojan War in order for the Trojans to finally be victorious, which they are. Aeneas kills Turnus, wins Lavinia, and the Latin and Trojan people are united under the leadership of Aeneas, but, because of a deal Jupiter works out with Juno so she'll stop delaying Aeneas' destiny to found the Roman people, the Latins get to keep their name, their language, etc, and the name of the Trojan people dies instead.

Structurally, Virgil modeled his epic after BOTH The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both of Homer's epics are 24 books, The Aeneid is 12. The first half of The Aeneid is modeled on The Odyssey, with Aeneas wandering while he searches for a new home, being "held" by a woman (with Juno's help), and visiting the underworld. Aeneas even visits some of the same places Odysseus (or Ulysses, as the Romans called him), actually rescuing a stranded Greek Odysseus left behind on the Cyclops' island. The second six books, with their focus on war, is modeled after The Iliad.

Most modern readers prefer the first six books - the tragic love story, the adventures, the glorious visit to the underworld (in and of itself, the best-known section of The Aeneid, and rightly so. It's magnificent. HST and I spent a couple of weeks on Book VI alone), and find the endless repetition of names and battle scenes in the second half both confusing and boring. And I definitely approached Book VII with trepidation, having detested The Iliad when I read it in high school. I have to say, I found the second half of The Aeneid glorious. Virgil's tone and words beat out a rhythm as relentless as a war drum. His passages that read like a soccer announcer calling a game as he lists the names of who slayed whom and are followed by the action coming to a halt as two worthy adversaries face each other, are stunning. A model of how to build tension and modulate pacing to create a heightened effect.

(as an aside here, while I was reading this section, I listened to a radio program about dehumanization - the way in which turning an "enemy" group into animals (like rats or cockroaches) or making them less-than-human makes it easier to kill another human being and allows the genocides and atrocities of our modern era to continue. It struck me that both the Greeks and the Romans found it an honor to face a strong enemy. They did not take death lightly - they recognized what it meant to take a life, even in war, and took no honor in killing the weak. Glory in war, making a name for oneself, was the goal of every warrior. Odysseus, adrift in the ocean after leaving Calypso, laments that he could not die on the battlefield so he could have died in a way worth remembering. In The Aeneid, the woman warrior, Camilla, is taunted that her death will not bring the glory that killing a male warrior would (this despite the notches on her war belt). The contrast between the modern need to make an enemy weak, to turn them into an animal, in order to kill them versus the ancient desire to face an enemy who was your equal and prove your strength, was profound to me.)

Ultimately, though, I have to say I am not enamored of The Aeneid. Virgil is a masterful writer. His imagery in Book VI is beautiful. His command of his subject and his ability to not only tell a good story, but also fulfill a much more didactic purpose, is extraordinary. But the epic leaves me cold, and I think I know why.

Aeneas is never at risk for losing what he desires.

In The Odyssey, by contrast, Odysseus' happy homecoming is ALWAYS in doubt. Not only does he have to survive a war, he also contends with homicidal monsters, a vengeful god, TWO goddesses that want to keep him as their boy toys, and a houseful of suitors who would like nothing more than for him to be killed in front of Penelope so she'll finally have proof her husband isn't coming home for dinner ever again. Even though we're pretty sure Odysseus will survive all his trials, Odysseus doesn't know it. The risk of his death, or the death of his son, at the hands of 120 suitors is real to him, so it becomes real to us, the reader.

In The Aeneid, we know Aeneas will succeed. Virgil has taken great pains to make sure we know Aeneas will succeed. The gods tell him his future over and over again. Venus and Mercury both tell him he needs to leave Troy and Carthage, respectively, because it is his destiny to found another city in Italy. Aeneas is shown the pageant of Roman heroes in the underworld. The river god, Tiber, tells Aeneas his son, Ascanius, will found another city, Alba, along his banks thirty years after the war is over. In Book 8, Aeneas goes to Pallanteum to ask for help from King Evander, and the king shows him his city, essentially giving him a tour of what will become Rome, pointing out a grove his people believe is favored by some god (this will be the future site of Jupiter's temple in Rome) and other places that will become famous Roman landmarks. In the same book, Venus has Vulcan create armor for Aeneas to wear including a shield which shows scenes from the Roman history (history to the readers/future for Aeneas) to come. Aeneas does not know what the scenes portray, but he knows he is hoisting his future as he raises his shield. And we, the readers, know it, too. The entire book is predicated on the conceit that Rome, and Roman supremacy, is inevitable. There is no tension. There is no fear that Ascanius will die like Pallas (as there was fear that Telemachus might be killed in the battle with the suitors) - he can't, he's going to found Alba and his descendant will be Romulus who will be the founder of Rome. There is no fear Aeneas won't succeed or will succumb to any inner desire on his part to do something contrary to his destiny. He won't. Even Juno eventually yields to the inevitability of Aeneas' fate. There simply is no risk, no danger, that Aeneas will lose the thing he desires.

It is this that makes The Aeneid, as technically brilliant as it is, ultimately unsatisfying for me. It's a lesson, too, as I move forward in my own novel, to remember how powerful the threat of a character NOT getting what they want is. It's the question I come back to again and again as I write drafts of query letters for Altar. What does Matt want? Up until this week, I kept answering that question by saying he wants his brother back. Which was unsatisfying. He can't have his brother back. His brother is dead. He knows he can't have his brother back. So I knew that wasn't the right answer.

Last night, in a workshop I'm taking from a really brilliant teacher (here's his website: http://www.matthewclarkdavison.com/), we talked about connecting and disconnecting, desire and the intensity of wanting something. Then, as usually happens when I take a class with Matthew, he gave us an exercise that was so perfectly attuned to the scene I'd been struggling with in my novel yesterday, it was as if he'd been sitting on my shoulder the whole time and said, "Hey, I've got exactly what you need." I got it. And I got what Matt (my character) wants more than anything. He wants connection. It's why Denny's death affects him so deeply - Denny was his connection to the world and, especially, to his family. It's why his girlfriend becomes so important to him (she's the first person he connects with in his entire life who wasn't part of his life when Denny was alive - she's his lifeline into a post-Denny world). And why, when he's standing in his mom's bedroom trying to do something for her and she keeps shutting him down, he is wounded. And there, in fifteen minutes of a writing exercise, was the answer to the essential question of my query, the lack of which has been preventing me from writing a satisfying query letter. What does Matt want? He wants connection. What keeps him from getting what he wants? He has to learn how to connect without Denny. (Okay, that's a little weak yet, but it's in the book, I just have to come up with a snappy, unique way of saying it).

I guess, in summing up, I want to say, this is why we read. Because the things we read can explain our own work (and our own minds - there are things I realized about myself and what, within myself, created this novel) to us, can lead us to think about what we are doing and how we are doing it. When I write about conflict, I can draw on this model of pacing from Virgil now. Bam, bam, bam, exhale.

So now, HST and I are taking a short break from the classics to read some short stories, and then we're going to hell with Virgil as our guide.

(P.S. I also want to give a shout-out to my friend, Traci Chee, who's putting up some really great posts from the other end of literary time at I'm Traci Chee and This is My Blog)

In the Name of Love

2011-03-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, when I finished reading the seventh Harry Potter book, my first thought, upon closing the cover of that magnificent book, was not about how the series had affected me, but to wonder what J. K. Rowling felt like now that she was done writing about Harry, Ron, Hermione, Snape, Dumbledore, and all the other remarkable characters with whom she had been living for the past fifteen years.

Writers have a much different experience of their characters than do readers. While I can appreciate the many layers of Snape's character and envy Rowling for creating a character like Dumbledore, I'm an observer only. It's much different on the inside.

Writers feel their characters. We hear them whisper to us, know what they long for, experience their sorrows on a deep, visceral level. They are like our children, but more than that. They live inside our bodies and minds, and we watch them develop and grow, become multi-layered, complex beings. Like children, they start out as single-cell organisms, simple. Something happens to them, they react. Then, we figure out why they reacted that way. They acquire history and a backstory. We write about their actions, what they look like. A simple change of hair color or the way a character stands, can reveal an entire strata of meaning we didn't know about before. And that moment of understanding, of looking into the character's eyes and figuring out just what this person (because that is what they come to feel like after awhile) has been trying to tell us, feels like falling in love.

The relationship is far from one way, either. Because our characters seem to know they need us to tell their stories, they come to us willingly. They want us to know things about them. Many, many years ago while I was working on another novel, I was having trouble with the female protagonist. I couldn't get her exactly right. I wasn't understanding what would cause her to act the way she was in the story (yes, I was creating the story, but, sometimes, in the act of writing, things flow onto the page you didn't expect, and then you've got to figure out what to do with them). So I set up a meeting. I was freelancing a lot during this time and doing one or two interviews a day, so I decided to interview her.

We met for tea in my office. If I remember correctly, I actually did set up a tea cup for her opposite my own. Then I sat down and started asking questions in my notebook and writing her answers as they came to me. "Why do you keep pushing Peter away?" "What did his drawing mean to you?" "How do you feel about the time you saw each other in New York?" As I did this, I heard her voice in my head, more clearly than what I'd been hearing while I was writing the novel (which was told primarily from the male protagonist's point of view), and I started to get a picture of her in my mind as she sat across the table from me. And then, I realized, she was holding her right hand in her left and massaging the back of her hand. It was a stress reaction, something she did when she was uncomfortable. So I asked, "What's going on with your hand?" And she told me. Her mother was an alcoholic who had thrown a copy of Gray's Anatomy (her father was a doctor) at her during a drunken rage (she'd been sent home from private boarding school because alcohol had been found in her dorm room, left there by a roommate who had moved out). She'd put her hand up to protect herself but the force of the book falling against her hand had broken it. Furthermore, she wouldn't let her mother touch it, but waited several hours until her father came home so he could take care of it. Several hours in excruciating pain. This told me a lot about why she'd been so reluctant to speak to me before this, why she was such a difficult character to get to know. She didn't trust people easily. But it also told me, this woman could be incredibly resilient, incredibly strong-willed. It told me, in short, the things I needed to know to be able to write her effectively and compellingly.

I write this because, in the chronology I've worked out for Altar, this is the weekend Denny dies. March 12. The funeral is the 16th. All this past week, I kept thinking I needed to get candles to light for Denny. While it made sense in a certain way, it wasn't something I'd felt such a strong need to do in previous years. Then it hit me. This is the last year I'm going to be with Matt and Denny. The book is almost finished. And, even though I'll most assuredly be doing revisions if it sells, I won't be creating these characters in the same way ever again. These are our last days together in such intimate company. While I feel as sense of joy and accomplishment at that, there is still a measure of sorrow that these characters will no longer be my constant companions. I'll be moving on to a new set of characters, falling in love with them in the way I have fallen in love with Matt and Denny and Alan and Rachelle and all of them.

So I have two candles on my desk, one for Matt and one for Denny, and I light them when I start writing and blow them out when I'm done. Nothing magical has happened because I've done this, it's just enough that it's been done.

Writers sometimes talk about a mourning period after a book is finished. They talk about needing a period of not writing to give the previous book some honored space, or of not being able to move forward right away with the next project no matter how hard they try. Which is why, after the seventh HP book was released, I read interviews with Rowling with increasing disappointment, and would have loved to have interviewed her myself. I would have asked her how it felt to no longer be in such close contact with her characters, if they still came to her with lines of dialogue or thoughts about the action, and if she worried about being able to fall in love with a new set of characters as deeply as she had with these. Because, it was clear from her writing that she loved each and every one of them, and understood that if you don't love your characters, no one else will.

On the Act of "Writering"

2011-03-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

I decided today that there is an act of being a writer which is different from the act of writing.

The act of writing is pretty straight-forward. You put words together. You can write on paper, the computer or even in sand. It's pretty easy.

The act of writering, on the other hand, isn't.

The act of writering is constant juggling - balancing the needs of the story with the needs of self, as in when one needs to go to the grocery store but the story is going so well you don't get there for weeks and the only thing left in the refrigerator is a wilted piece of lettuce and your spouse is looking at you like, "Really? You couldn't get to the grocery store?" Or wanting to call in sick to work because the story is going really, really well, and you don't want to stop and needing to balance your desire to write with your desire to make money so you can go grocery shopping.

Writering involves a great deal of self-assessment, too. Am I feeling tired because I was up until 2 am working on the story last night or because I'm afraid the story isn't going well and I don't want to deal with it? Am I jumping out of my chair every five minutes because the story isn't going well or because I'm writing such an emotionally tense moment I can't sit still for longer than one sentence at a time? Am I running away or engaged? Do I want to go take pictures because I'm procrastinating or because I need to recharge my batteries? If I stop writing for the day here am I going to be able to pick it up tomorrow? Am I feeling blocked because the scene doesn't belong here or because I'm afraid of it? Am I afraid? Am I afraid? Am I afraid?

I think writering is where most writers fall apart. We think writing should be easy, but we fail to understand that there's writing and then there's writering, and so we beat ourselves up because writering isn't easy at all. It takes constant vigilance, constant attention, and, sometimes, it's exhausting.

I writered today. I writered a lot, actually. Yesterday was one of those incredible writing days where I was able to concentrate for hours and the words flowed and seven pages got written. Those days always make me think I'm going to be able to wake up the next day and dive right back in for another productive day, but that rarely happens. Instead, I get days like today. Sitting at the computer and typing a sentence and then getting up and doing something else. Wondering if I should go do something else again, and if that will help the words flow better or if I should keep my butt in my chair and muddle through.

I chose to muddle through, and I've got another couple of pages to show for it. But it was a very writeringly day.

So When I Stare at You...

2011-03-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

I am extremely distractable. You can probably tell from the number of times I complain about dogs barking or hammering from construction sites in my town or my inability to write well when people are in the house. I'm even worse in a crowded room or at a party where I'm likely to stare blindly at the person with whom I'm having a conversation, not hearing a word he or she is saying, because I'm listening to the five or six other conversations going on around me. This post from Jonah Lehrer's blog "The Frontal Cortex" makes me feel so much better about being highly distractable.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/against-attention/

Creative Response - Maps III

2011-02-23T22:01:00.000-08:00

Sending You My Love

Creative Response - Maps II

2011-02-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

Impossible Roadtrips

Medicine Hat to Horseheads

Aztec to Atlantic City

Creative Response - Maps

2011-02-23T21:46:00.000-08:00

Maps of Light

This is What it Means to Be Writing

2011-02-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

I haven't gotten much work done on the novel in the past three weeks. Several family members have been sick, other projects have been a higher priority, and, well, life just basically got in the way. It happens. But it's always difficult climbing back into writer mode after a break like this. I've been tracking my thoughts for the past couple of hours as I've started to work on the novel again. So here, for your reading pleasure, is what the mind of a writer at work actually looks like.

Wake
Shower
Eat breakfast
Check email and Facebook
Write sticky note reminding self to stay mindful of being online - Facebook and other writers' blogs can eat up my writing time
Open binder with current draft
Open binder with completed second draft
Laugh because the scene I'm working on next occurs on page 45 in the current draft, and page 3 in the completed second draft.
Open both documents in Word.
Stare at screen.
Think: I wish I was writing this faster.
Think: I'm forgetting all the amazing things I wanted to add into the new draft, all the links and layers of meaning.
Think: I've let it go too long before getting back to it.
Read Chapter 3 in current draft to get back into the flow of the work.
Think: If I keep rereading this every time I stop writing for awhile, I'm never getting it finished.
Write: edits in Chapter 3
sound of hammering in the distance
Think (and say out loud): REALLY??????? Now????????
Grit teeth and continue reading/editing
Think: Maybe if I stare at the screen long enough something will happen.
Think: Maybe I should go do something else.
Think: I need to send an email to X
Start my "to do AFTER I finish writing" to do list with "Send X email."
Think: I also need to send an email to Y
Add, send email to Y to to do list.
Think: It's 11 and I'm going to need to stop writing at noon, so maybe I should stop now.
Staring at screen some more, thinking about the scene that needs to be written. It's the funeral scene, it takes place in a church the mother likes because of the stained glass.
Think: Hm...what's the history of stained glass windows in churches?
Go to Google, type "History of stained glass"
Find information
Think: Wait, I just may have found a way into this story again.
Read more
Notice: There is no hammering while I'm looking up the history of stained glass.
Think: Hm. Cello music not doing it today, change the iPod to white noise.
Think: Doing something visual might be kind of fun. Maybe I should stop.
Read more
Break down, do some visual art.
Read more.
Think: Hey, this actually relates to one of the major themes of the novel.
Write
Think: 84 words! Whoot! I think I'm back in the story.
Read
Write
Think: Oh, that line resonates beautifully with the last scene in the novel.
falls in love with writing all over again

How Do You Know You’re a Good Writer?

2011-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve noticed in my blog’s stats that the post getting the most views is the one titled “Being Told You’re a Good Writer Makes You Feel All Warm Inside.” Since that post is about when one of my professors told me she thought my novel was good and not about how you know when you’re a good writer (which, I think, is what people are really looking for when they look at that post), I thought I’d write the post everyone wants to read.

So how do you know?

The short answer is, you just know.

Which, I know, sounds glib, frustrating and unhelpful.

The medium length answer is, when you’re work starts selling or people start telling you they like what you write. But there are a couple of things wrong with this idea. One, we all know many, many writers who aren’t very good but are incredibly successful, and two, it means relying on other people to identify what’s good. Most people can identify what’s popular or trendy very easily, but not necessarily what’s good. Then again, a lot of what gets labeled as good writing just isn’t (oh, do I have a list of names for that one!).

Good writing and financial success don’t always go together. Sometimes, the best writers of a generation don’t get published because their work is too different, or they don’t find a wide audience because their work doesn’t resonate yet. Sometimes, the audience needs to learn how to read the work (the best example of something like this comes from music. When Stravinsky debuted his masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, with its discordant notes and chaotic rhythms, the audience rioted. A year later, when it was performed again, the audience loved it. In the intervening year, they had learned how to listen to the music and hear it as music rather than cacophony).

So how do you know if your work is good?

Here’s the long answer: you practice, practice, practice. You read, you write, you read what you’ve written, you read what other people have written, and you read some more. You take classes by people who know more than you do and you try the things they talk about. You listen to what they say about your writing. And you write, and write, and write. And you get honest with yourself about how close the writing comes to what you want. I mean, drop dead, no shit, honest. None of that, “it’s close enough” BS. I’m talking about pedal-to-the-metal honest with yourself about what you’ve written.

There are a few writers, an incredibly small number of writers, who are so talented everyone knows they’re good from the get-go. The funny thing is, though, the writers are usually the last to know. They usually have a teacher or someone along the way who tells them how good they are and then helps them get better.

I got my undergrad degree in creative writing. I went to school with a lot of talented writers and yet, I’m the only one still writing. Am I that much better than them? No. I just haven’t given up yet. I took a lot of classes and workshops and read voraciously about the craft of writing (my writing bookcase rivals that of any bookstore or library) and, when I wasn't finding anything new, I went to grad school and got my MFA. The professor who told me my novel is good told a class that there were many talented writers in the class and there were many who weren’t as gifted but who worked hard on their craft, and the ones who worked hard would probably find success more easily than those with sheer talent on their side. Talent only gets you so far. Then you need to work.

What the working gives you, what all that practice and reading gives you, is the ability to know when you get the words right. You may not know why the words are right, but you start to get a feel for it. You know it. And it’s not the hopeful knowing, the longing wish that it’s right, it’s the moment when you get it right and you don’t care if a single other person on the face of the planet ever agrees with you because you’ve said EXACTLY what you wanted to say in EXACTLY the way you wanted to say it. You can’t fake that moment.

You just know.

Oh, The Odyssey

2011-01-31T22:41:00.001-08:00

Finally, the blog post I've been meaning to write for over a month. I know you've been looking forward to it just as much as I have. I figured I need to get it done before home-schooled teen and I get enmeshed in our next epic, The Aeneid, which, startlingly, I have never read before (although I was supposed to have in Lit 101, not sure how I got away with not doing it).

So, onward.

As I said in my previous Odyssey post, this is my fourth or fifth time reading the epic and each time I read it, I notice new things. This time, I was noticing the way the story is structured and found myself completely surprised by devices I thought were more recent literary developments.

The Odyssey was written around 700 BCE about events which occurred around 1500 BCE. There's debate over whether The Odyssey and its companion epic, The Iliad, were written by a collection of oral poets who came to be known as 'Homer,' were the work of one poet who worked only in the oral tradition and the works we know were transcriptions of his performances, or if the works we know were actually written by a single author named Homer. There's evidence to support any of these views. That they were originally performed from memory as oral poems is shown by the repetition of certain set pieces - the putting on of armor, the washing of hands before eating, the pouring of libations to the gods - all of these devices gave the bard time to organize his thoughts before beginning the next sequence of events. There's also evidence that the works were written down, namely the length of the poems. The Odyssey would have taken three full days to be performed as it is written (kind of like watching a production of Hamlet in which all of Shakespeare's lines are used - it's very rare to see productions like that these days).

I support the view that the works we know today as The Iliad and The Odyssey were probably transcriptions of performances (again, the Folios of Shakespeare were transcriptions of performances since there were no traditional scripts from which to make master copies) that Homer (and I do think there is a single author, a single, organizing consciousness at work in the poems) used as the basis for his written copies. The Odyssey, at least, is too complex, too layered, to have been composed in the moment of performance. And I'll come back to this thought in a bit.

Many people think The Odyssey is only the fantastic voyage Odysseus made on his way home from the Trojan War. They remember the cannibalistic Laistrygonians and Cyclops, the Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus Eaters, Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs, and Odysseus' descent into the underworld. James Joyce, in writing Ulysses, only used this portion of the story. But this part of the story takes up only a small part of its telling - only four out of the twenty-four books, or chapters.

The story opens on Ithaca, with Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope's son, who is on the threshold of manhood at twenty one years old. Odysseus has been gone for twenty years, and Telemachus is getting fed up with the suitors who have been sniffing around Penelope for the past three years and partying on Odysseus' tab. Athena comes to Telemachus and tells him to go visit two of Odysseus' comrades, in fact, the only two kings who made it back from Troy and are still alive - Nestor and Menelaus, which he does.

So the first four books of The Odyssey don't start out with Odysseus at all. They start with his son and the stories about Odysseus - how cunning he was, what an amazing warrior he was, and, oh yes, you look just like him, Telemachus, you are truly his son. We get to hear all about Odysseus from Nestor and Menelaus and Helen (who seem to have a pretty strange relationship - one of my favorite scenes is when they're telling Telemachus about the Trojan Horse and Helen basically says, oh yeah, remember when you guys were all in the horse and I came around pretending to be your wives and calling out to you in their voices and trying to get you guys to come out so the Trojans could kill you? And, yeah, only Odysseus kept his head and told everyone to stay where they were, which was a good thing because I was really ready to come home to Sparta. I don't know what came over me. And then she drugs everyone so they go to sleep and forget their woes.)

The first look we get at Odysseus is in Book Five when the gods send Hermes to tell Calypso she's got to give up her boy toy and let him return to Ithaca. She goes to tell him and finds him where he always is, sitting at the ocean's edge, his eyes fixed on the horizon, looking for even a shadow of his beloved island. This is not the great warrior, the cunning thinker, we've just been hearing about. This is a man stripped of everything that makes him who he is. None of his skills, his bravery, his intelligence, can get him off Calypso's island. The best his intelligence and brave heart can do is keep him from accepting her offer of immortality. And when she first tells him he is free to leave and return home, his first lines are "I don't believe you. You're plotting something new. I won't get on a raft until you swear you are letting me go." He is completely powerless at this moment.

And this is the first thing that struck me in this reading of The Odyssey - how modern this opening is. The build up of the hero by others so that we have one picture of this man in our heads and then the reality shattering that expectation, so that we can see how much this journey has taken from him. We don't need to be told at this point everything that has happened to him, the evidence is right in front of us that it's been bad.

Another aspect of the first eight books I found interesting was that the timeline is not linear. Homer does this a couple of times. He sets the clock ticking with Telemachus leaving Ithaca to visit Odysseus' friends and leaves Telemachus as the boy is telling Menelaus he must return to Ithaca. Then Homer rewinds the clock a few days to show us Odysseus on Calypso's island making preparations to leave. What this does is allow Telemachus and Odysseus to be starting their respective journeys at the same time so that later they will reach Ithaca at almost the same time. If this were a movie, you can almost see the cuts from father to son, both performing the same actions but in different locations.

After bringing us to Calypso's island, Homer keeps us with Odysseus until Book 15. Odysseus builds his raft, sets sail for Ithaca and is waylaid by Poseidon who is furious that Odysseus is being allowed to return home. He shipwrecks Odysseus on Scheria where he's found by the Phaeacians princess, Nausicaa, and, using those wits, gets himself treated as an honored guest at the palace without revealing his true identity to his hosts. He's able to keep this up until the last night of his stay. The Phaeacians are going to give him parting gifts, put him on a ship, and return him to Ithaca. At the feast, Odysseus asks the bard to sing about Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, which the bard does, and Odysseus begins to weep openly. At this point, his host looks at him and says, "Okay, who the heck are you? We've got a pretty good idea that you're one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War, but you've got to tell us." And Odysseus does. In a first person account.

Again, this was another place that stood out for the way in which Homer chooses to tell his story. Up to this point, the bard is narrating the story in the third person. Now Odysseus steps forward to tell his own story in his own words. He is the hero acting as bard and the bard (when this would have been performed) acts as the hero. It's a neat bit of doubling which underscores the doubling that occurs in the story Odysseus tells. Every event in Odysseus' journey has a double or mirror image.

Leaving Troy, Odysseus and his men sack a small city. This city was an ally of Troy, so sacking it wasn't a bad idea, it kept the risk of retaliation to a minimum. The first place they stop after that is the island of the Lotus eaters where the men forget all about their journey home and Odysseus has to round them up and drag them back to the ships. The Lotus Eaters are actually congenial hosts - sharing what they have freely and generously (as the Phaeacians will do at the end of Odysseus' journey), although the result is that the men will never leave, while the Phaeacians will help Odysseus return home. Then they reach the Laistrygonians who capture all but one of Odysseus' ships and eat his men. Again, consumption, but this time with bad hosts. Then the Cyclops who also eats several of Odysseus' men and would have eaten all of them if Odysseus hadn't blinded him and had his men hid beneath the bellies of the Cyclops' sheep.

But, of course, Odysseus has to tell the Cyclops his name. He shouts it as his ship is departing so that the Cyclops will know who has gotten the best of him. At this point, the Cyclops calls on his father, Poseidon, and curses Odysseus' journey home. The mirror of this? Odysseus' unwillingness to reveal his name to the Phaeacians. He only reveals it once he trusts they will take him home.

They travel next to Aeolus' island where Odysseus is given the bag of winds which contains all the winds except for the one which will take them home. They are within sight of Ithaca, they can see the fires on the shores, when Odysseus' men open the bag which blows them back to Aeolus, who is no longer a happy host and sends them on their way with angry words and threats.

They travel to Circe's island, where she turns some of his men into pigs (which can be seen as a doubling of how the Cyclops treated them, they were like livestock, now they are livestock), Hermes gives Odysseus a magic herb so Circe will have no power over him, and he ends up staying with Circe for a year until his men remind him about Ithaca and that they want to get back there (like the Lotus Eaters). Circe tells Odysseus he must consult Tiresias in the underworld before going leaving which he does.

And here's another interesting thing. In the underworld, Odysseus sees the ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon. He knows Achilles died at Troy, but he has no way of knowing that Agamemnon is dead at this point in time. Remember, he's telling this story to the Phaeacians after being on Calypso's island for seven years. Agamemnon returned home from the Trojan War to find his wife had taken up with a lover and conspired with him to kill Agamemnon. This story is told and retold several times in The Odyssey. Telemachus even says he wishes he were like Orestes who avenged his father's death because then he would have the strength to take on the suitors and drive them from his home. But in the underworld, we finally come face to face with the man himself. He tells Odysseus how he died and warns him to assess the situation at home, make sure of Penelope, and take nothing for granted. Not only does he give good advice, but he also provides credibility for this fantastic story Odysseus is telling. Could he have heard about it while on Calypso's island. Yes, he could have. But he relates another event (and I can't think of it right now) that he heard about and tells the Phaeacians the round about way in which he came to possess this knowledge. He doesn't do that here. He saw Agamemnon with his own eyes and learned, from him, something he would have no way of knowing otherwise. It is an ingenious bit of storytelling on Homer's part.

Returning to Circe, Odysseus learns about the rest of his journey - that they will be stranded on Helios' shores and under no circumstances are they to eat the sun god's cattle (which, of course, the men will do), they will need to pass by Scylla and Charybdis (which Odysseus will do twice - once with his men, once on his own - again, a mirror journey - the first time, he passes close to Scylla and loses six men, the next time he is swallowed by the whirlpool and then tossed back up).

After all this, Odysseus ends up, alone, on Calypso's island, the mirror of Circe who willingly gave Odysseus up when he said he needed to go home.

Having brought his story full circle, Odysseus ends his tale, and the Phaeacians send him home. But remember that doubling? Remember the city Odysseus sacked as he was leaving Troy? Poseidon can't take revenge on Odysseus, he's fated to reach Ithaca, but Zeus lets him take revenge on the Phaeacians by walling their city off by tall rocks so they will never be able to help another lost traveler.

To me, the layers of narrative created on this journey, the way in which all things encountered are encountered twice, speaks to the way a writer works - that layering of elements. I don't know that it can be created by an oral performance no matter how many times the story is told. I also found the elegance of its telling pretty stunning. Another thing I realized this time is that Mr. Johnson (my freshman high school teacher) was right when he taught us that Odysseus is stripped of his identity, piece by piece, until he is this shadow of himself. In the underworld, Tiresias tells Odysseus he will never reach Ithaca until he learns to master himself and his emotions. By not telling the Phaeacians who he is immediately, by exercising caution when he is found, naked and encrusted with salt, by Nausicaa and following her advice to make his supplications to her mother rather than her father, Odysseus shows that he's learned this lesson. And his reward? The Phaeacians give him more treasure than he would have brought home from Troy.

To me, this also speaks to the foundation of the Greek society as a culture of thinkers. Odysseus' reward is for his story rather than his prowess as a warrior. He tells his audience a great tale. When he tells of the underworld, he speaks first of the women he saw there (a nod to Arete, the queen, who is the one he has to please most to get what he wants), and Alcinous, the king, asks if he saw any of his fellow heroes from Troy there or any of the great heroes of legend, and Odysseus immediately adds them to his tale. In return, Alcinous tells his people they need to give Odysseus even greater treasure than they were going to give him before and sends them all back to their homes to bring better parting gifts to their honored guest.

There is one last time shift. After Odysseus is brought to Ithaca and meets Athena on the beach, she tells him to go to the swineherd, Eumeus, and she will make sure Telemachus meets him there. We follow Odysseus as he encounters Eumeus and starts to learn what's happening in his palace. Then we back up a day to follow Athena while she goes to Sparta to tell Telemachus he needs to leave and, oh, by the way, you might want to visit the swineherd on your way home. Just 'cause.

From there, it's pretty much straight-forward story-telling. Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar, he enters his own house, sizes up the situation, meets Penelope, tells her he thinks the arrow through the axe head contest is a REALLY good idea, all the while keeping his disguise in place, demonstrating that he has learned the control Tiresias told him he needed to learn. He reveals NOTHING. Though I am convinced Penelope recognizes him, knows him from the moment he steps foot in the house, but also knows the danger they are all in if Odysseus can't get rid of the suitors, and therefore follows his lead even if she doesn't know what his plan is.

And that, I think, pretty much wraps up what I was thinking as I read The Odyssey this time around. More than any other reading prior to this, I found myself marvelling at the way in which this story, written almost 3,000 years ago, was put together, at the internal organization of it. I find it a stunning work of the imagination and can't wait to read it again in another couple of years.

Taking My Brain for a Walk

2011-01-20T23:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, the most frustrating part of being a writer is dealing with a reluctant brain. My brain decides quite frequently that one really productive day means it can take the next three or four days off and refuses to engage when confronted by a computer screen full of my novel. This week was very much like that. I had a good writing day on Tuesday and haven't been worth a brass farthing since then. So I did the only thing I could under the circumstances.

I gave up and took my brain somewhere to take pictures.

Borrowing from my friend's family's idea of keeping a creative blog, I decided to start doing creative investigations each month and posting them here. My brain decided today was the day to start the endeavor. This month's theme is patterns. And the best place I know of for patterns is the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.

May I Direct Your Attention...

2011-01-13T18:08:00.001-08:00

I've added a new blog to my list of blogs by people I know, and it's well worth checking out. To Be Shouted (www.tobeshouted.com/) is a collaborative venture by am incredibly talented playwright who is currently studying for his PhD in England, and his family. Each month, they chose a theme (January is "home") and James, his mother, and his sister each take a week to interpret the theme with artwork, poetry, whatever moves them. The family is very talented (check out the links page and drool over the bed and breakfast James' mom owns in the Perche region of France and her printmaking studio). The fourth week of every month is reserved for a guest blogger. Yours truly will be guest blogging in August when the theme is "rivers."

Unintentional Radio Silence

2011-01-10T23:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the stale blog I've been dishing out for the past three weeks. First I was sick (really sick - I came down with bronchitis two hours after getting to the cabin for my writing retreat. What should have been a week of uninterrupted writing time turned into an endurance test of me actually getting work done despite feeling totally awful and having a coughing fit about every five minutes), then I was recovering, then it was winter break for the kids, and then I was writing again.

So, this week, I'm finally getting back to my normal routine. Was in with the eighth graders today teaching them about different types of lead paragraphs and will be doing the same with the seventh and sixth graders later this week. I'll be meeting with the home-schooled high schooler, too, to talk about the Odyssey some more, which means I'll probably get to the Odyssey blog post I promised. I need to write that post, actually. While I was away, I talked to one of my professors and told her my observations about the way the Odyssey is constructed. She suggested I put together a course proposal and submit it to the department because it would be wonderful to have a course using the Odyssey as a model for contemporary writers. So...that's now on my to do list, as well.

I had a brief shining moment, at the end of December, where I actually completed my to do list. There was, quite literally, nothing left to do (with the exception of the ongoing novel revisions). I've never done that before. Then the new year started and a whole bunch of new tasks came and populated my to do list and seem to be procreating and making even more tasks. And they're big ones, too. Like applying for grants and residencies and writing class proposals and a proposal for a nonfiction book I want to write.

The novel revision is going well despite the bronchitis and this past week's migraine - I'm starting to look at physical incapacitation as a challenge, something to overcome, rather than a reason not to write. It seems to be working quite well. That small change I made on page 3 has reaped huge benefits in the way it opened up the first 50 pages of the novel, and I'm quite happy with the way things are going. Although I love how this novel has developed, I can't wait to start the next one so I can put to work everything I've learned about first drafts and revision.

Well, back to work.

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

A short post just to say Happy New Year and wish everyone the best for 2011.

Why YA?

2010-12-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

I finished reading a friend’s manuscript earlier today. It’s a stunning novel, and she’s getting some interest from agents, which, after reading it, isn’t surprising. More about that in a moment, but first, I wanted to talk about one of the things that struck me while I was reading.

The protagonist is a talented violinist in a youth symphony who’s faced with the choice between pursuing her music or choosing another field of study when she goes to college. There was much in the novel that reminded me of my own struggle as a writer to find justification for continuing to pursue this impossible dream of becoming a Published Author. One passage in particular reminded me of what it’s all about: the trying, the process or, to use a well-worn cliché, it’s the journey, not the destination that matters (Not that my friend’s novel is about a cliché. It’s not. It’s amazing and original, and her writing is gorgeous).

Anyway, the passage reminded me that art for the artist is never about the finished piece – it’s not the painting that matters, or the performance, or any given book. It’s about the finding of it, the engagement with the material, the struggle to make it be what you see or hear or feel in your mind and your body. Yes, it’s satisfying when the painting stops people in their tracks, or the performance brings people to their feet, or the novel makes them think and feel things they’ve never considered before – but all of that is beyond the artist’s control. What is in the artist’s control is bringing him or herself to the act of creation completely, wholly, and with joy and reverence for the incredible gift it is to be able to do this thing.

My friend’s novel was a nice reminder of that on this Christmas day.

Now, the other thing I wanted to talk about was that one of the agents who’s shown interest in her novel is asking her to consider the Young Adult (YA) market for it. Would it fit? Yes, very nicely. I think it would be a stunning YA book that would be a contender for some of the YA book prizes.

While I could talk about how agents are really pushing any book with a youthful protagonist into the YA marketplace because YA is selling right now, that isn’t the soapbox onto which I’m climbing. Nope. I’ll concede that there’s some good YA out there and there are enough literary novels that have been discovered by teenage readers that the publishing industry is taking notice of the crossover potential for new releases and, sometimes, coming out with dual adult/YA releases.

But it’s that last part that has me concerned. So here’s me, climbing up on the soapbox to talk about what bothers me the most about the whole YA phenomena in publishing.

I think it takes away the thrill of a young reader discovering the world of adult literature.

When I was 11 years old, I discovered my dad’s science fiction collection in the guest room in our house. He had the classics – Asimov, Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein. The first non-kid’s book I read was Fahrenheit 451, and I never looked back at the kids’ classics my parents and grandparents had given me – Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women, my collections of fairy tales (although, to be very honest, those books and stories were not intended for a child’s reading when they were first released), those were put by the wayside as I delved into the fantastical and philosophical worlds of the masters of science fiction and fantasy. A year later, I was reading James Mitchner, a precocious 7th grader carrying around the 1,000+ page Centennial and eagerly devouring it at every opportunity (the mini-series was on that year and, at a chapter a week, it was moving too slowly for me, so I got the book, and I remember one of my teachers looking at it and commenting that she was impressed because she would never read a book that long).

I remember getting a library card that allowed me to take out books from the adult section of the library. A major milestone in my life.

I fear that the desire to promote literature that is geared toward young people, marketed toward them, with characters who are similar to them and situations they can related to, will rob them of one of the great pleasures of growing up: that wonderful moment when you cross out of children’s literature and into the adult world of grown-up novels.

I don’t mean to imply that YA books are not well-written. Many of them are incredibly well-written presenting complex characters and situations in fine, nuanced prose. In many cases, I think the publishing industry’s desire to cater to young readers is wonderful. Yes, it’s driven by a desire to make money, but it’s also driven by the desire to create life-long readers (even if, in my more cynical moments, I think that it’s that “cradle to grave” philosophy so many businesses aspire to) by giving young readers good things to read rather than risking them turning off from literature forever by being cast adrift in the sea of Important Books.

It’s an impulse I see at work in my older son’s high school curriculum – no Scarlet Letter or Canterbury Tales for him, his reading list is comprised of YA cross-over titles, those “published for an adult audience but with a youthful protagonist that appeals to a younger reader” books (this young man is, even as I write this, reading Gulliver’s Travels – he was motivated to pick up the book after listening to an interview with Jack Black talking about the new Gulliver movie earlier this evening. I commented that he probably wanted to see the movie now, and he said no, but did we happen to have the book in the house? He’s been reading it ever since).

But I think this denies young readers the opportunity to truly understand what literature is about, to challenge themselves, and to have that secret thrill of gaining access to the previously unknown world that adults inhabit.

It feels like yet another way in which, in our eagerness to provide our children with “advantages,” we have co-opted their lives instead, pulled the curtain away and revealed the Great and Powerful Oz as just another guy from Kansas trying to make a living, by making it all so accessible for them. Just like the plethora of child-sized furniture that is available now, we have cut our literature into easily assimilated bite-sized morsels that are safely on display in the children’s and YA sections of the bookstore. No need for the teens to go wandering into the wilds of the literature section. Who knows what they’ll stumble upon there? But if we make these books available in another place, tell them it’s for them specially, we can keep them in this insulated cocoon of childhood longer.

And maybe that’s what worries me the most.

Those books I read when I was a teen, the ones with adults struggling to figure out their place in the world or coming to terms with different philosophies or impossible situations, those books prepared me for the adult I would become. They showed me that adults don’t have all the answers. They made the adult world that was rapidly moving towards me a place in which I could envision myself. I didn’t need someone to show me what my own world looked like – I was living it every day. But I did need someone to show me there were other ways of seeing the world than the one I lived in and that I didn’t need to have all the answers even when I was a grown-up.

I worry that YA makes our kids too comfortable - it gives them visions of their own world, hands them characters to whom they can relate, but it doesn't offer them something more. It doesn't ask them to envision the world as it could or will be. And it absolutely doesn't give them the thrill of discovering it on their own.

What These Ithakas Mean

2010-12-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

I’m helping some friends home-school their high school-aged daughter by taking on the literature component of her curriculum. I volunteered for this, actually, because I think it’s important that young people have a grounding in the classics upon which our Western literature is based. I can’t tell you how many of the creative writing students, both grad and undergrad, don’t know The Odyssey, haven’t got a clue who Virgil is (either in his own right or as Dante’s guide in The Inferno), and can’t identify why they know the name ‘Gabriel’ nor what its significance is. Yes, I view these as serious deficits for writers and also anyone who is studying literature. So much of our literature is based on these earlier works, that not knowing them cuts out a whole level of understanding. I also believe that all art exists in conversation with what’s gone before it. To me, not knowing these earlier works is like not learning the alphabet and being expected to read.

The reading list I designed, follows the development of one of the major motifs of Western lit – the journey. Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Aenid, Candide, Huckleberry Finn, The Lord of the Rings, Siddhartha, and a few others I can’t think of right now.

Which is not what I wanted to write about with this blog post. This is:

We’re working on The Odyssey right now. It’s probably my fourth or fifth time reading this book, and my next novel (the one I actually went into grad school for so I could work on it) is based on it. Simply said, I love this story.

The first time I read it was as a freshman in high school, a really bad prose translation. I’ll admit, the book didn’t make much of an impression except for my teacher’s insistence that Odysseus’ naming of himself as ‘nobody’ in the Cyclops’ cave was an expression of his loss of identity (this is also the same teacher who later declared that a minor character in a Hemingway novel would succeed while all the rest were doomed because he was wearing green pants when we meet him – I love Mr. Johnson, he was one of the best teachers I ever had, but…he played a little bit on the heavy side with symbolism) (okay, in full disclosure, there was another thing I remember about that reading. Because of the bad translation – which substituted ‘no one’ for ‘nobody’ and my slight dyslexia, I read the name as ‘Norman,’ and couldn’t figure out why this was such as especially good trick on Odysseus’ part. I mean, so what? When Polyphemus’ friends are asking, “Who’s hurting you?” and he says, “Norman is hurting is me.” where’s the cleverness in that?)

I read the book in my freshman year of college, too. This time, it made a much greater impression on me, largely because my class was in open rebellion about calling Odysseus a great hero. It was 1983, and we were a generation that had grown up with our country’s disgust about the Vietnam war as part of our daily routine. That Odysseus lost ALL 600 of his men on the way home from Troy, spent a year living with one goddess and seven living with another, and kept falling asleep at the most inopportune times, was more than we were willing to accept in a hero. My professor finally gave up trying to have discussions about the book and we turned to The Aeneid, a book I gave up on reading, though I don’t remember why. What I do recall about The Odyssey, though, was that Professor Vos gave us a poem by C.P. Cavafy titled “Ithaka” which I have carried with me ever since. It’s a beautiful poem about living for the journey not the goal that ends with the lines, “And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you/ Wise as you will have become, so full of experience/ you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.” (from the translation by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I read The Odyssey and started recognizing how extraordinary it is. Maybe it was because I was almost the same age as Odysseus is in The Odyssey. Maybe it was also watching Troy and being struck by Sean Bean’s portrayal of the man and his friendship with Achilles. Maybe it was also a phenomenal series of lectures on the book by Elizabeth Vandivier (by the Teaching Company, if you don’t know about them, you should), and the classics kick my husband and I were on (still are, actually). Maybe it’s because I realized I have the same scar on my leg that Odysseus has on his. (This is how the servant, Eurycleia, recognizes him – from the scar he got boar hunting as a boy. The boar charged and caught him across the left thigh with one of its tusks. My scar comes from running into a 2 x 4 my dad used to balance the window air conditioner in my room – the year I was in 7th grade, my dad left the boards and air conditioner in the hallway after he’d taken it out. I didn’t notice the board sticking into the hallway when I went running back to my room one day. I still have a lovely 4 inch crescent-shaped scar on my left thigh. Not as exciting as Odysseus, but still…an odd thing to have in common). So I don’t know what happened, but this time, the book hit a chord.

Most especially, on my third read-through, I was struck by how amazing Penelope is. A lot of feminists dislike her because, while Odysseus is off sleeping around and taking 10 years to get back from sacking Troy, she is calmly sitting at home, tending the farm, and being endlessly faithful to him. I think she’s extraordinary. First off, this is an incredible love story. Odysseus loves Penelope. He loves Ithaca, but it’s Penelope he’s longing for. Calypso knows it. She asks him what Penelope has that she, a goddess, doesn’t, and Odysseus, ever the cagey one, tells her that really, it’s Ithaca that he wants, but he’s also just been told he can go home after this goddess has been trying, for seven years, to convince him to let her make him immortal and never-aging (good thinking, there. Dawn, with her rosy fingers, made the same offer to a mortal, but forgot the never-aging part – not pretty) if he’ll consent to becoming her husband. Odysseus has been holding her off for seven years, which has to mean something in the Penelope department, as far as I'm concerned. If it's just Ithaca he wanted to get back to, I don't think he would have been so reluctant (yes, he sleeps with Calypso, his "unwilling flesh" alongside her "flesh that was all too willing." Then again, she's got him captive. What's he going to do?)

To me, Penelope is every bit as clever and intelligent as Odysseus. She’s surrounded by duplicitous women in The Odyssey, all of whom offer a cautionary tale about what havoc unfaithful wives can wreak. Helen, who’s infidelity caused the Trojan War, and Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, who conspired with her lover to murder her husband when he returned from war, are pretty powerful warnings about what not to do as the wife of a king. She speaks bitterly of the Trojan War, calling the city Des-troy, because so many lives were destroyed by Helen's folly. This is not a woman who is going to be unfaithful to her husband. But she's not just faithful, she’s smart. She holds off the suitors until her son, Telemachus, is old enough to defend the family fortune and property, to take his father’s place as head of the household. She’s kept the fortune together for 20 years, too. Odysseus’ holdings, while diminished by three years of the suitors partying, isn’t even close to being gone. And when this guy shows up and kills all the suitors, she doesn’t rush into his arms immediately. She tests him.

I love the moment when, after the suitors and disloyal servants have been dispatched, and Odysseus cleans himself up, Penelope and Odysseus are sitting on either side of the hearth. Just sitting there. She’s looking at him, and he’s staring into space. Telemachus rushes in and declares that she’s got to be the hardest-hearted woman on the face of the planet, but she just tells him she and Odysseus have other ways of knowing each other, and Odysseus sends him out to go do something else. That’s when Odysseus says he’s tired and wants to sleep, and Penelope tells the servants to take his bed, the one from his bedroom, and make it up in the courtyard. Odysseus made this bed so that one post is a living tree, still attached to the ground. The only way this bed could be moved is if it got cut down at some point. Odysseus explodes, accuses her of being unfaithful, and explains how the bed was made, by his own hand. Only then does Penelope know her husband has come home and greet him as a loving wife.

Hands-down, I think she’s one of the most extraordinary female characters ever written. She's smart, strong, passionate, and faithful.

Anyway, this is getting long. I’ll continue my observations about my current reading in my next post. Because this time, I’m noticing a lot about how the story is constructed, and it’s amazing me all over again.

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame

2010-12-09T13:17:00.001-08:00

Today, Neil Gaiman posted a letter I wrote to him about creative writing programs and genre writing on his blog, which you can read here Neil's Blog

And, since I'm getting some of Neil's fans coming over here to check me out, I want to expand a little bit on my letter to him. If you look through my previous blog posts about grad school, you'll see I had a phenomenal experience getting my MFA. It was very different from my undergrad experience. I loved my professors, my fellow students, and every class I took in grad school. Getting my degree was, hands down, the best thing I’ve ever done for my writing. Ever. I would not be writing the novel I am today without this program and the people with whom I worked. They have my utmost respect and gratitude.

I don't write much fantasy or science fiction anymore. My work has always alternated between realistic fiction and fantasy (as does my reading tastes), although even my realistic fiction has fantasy elements. The novel I'm currently working on, The Altar of Dead Pets, is about a 14 year-old boy who's brother dies on page 1 in a car accident. It began as a ghost story, with a decapitated body, but has grown into more of a symbolic ghost story (no decapitation) that culminates with an attempt to contact the dead brother out in the Nevada desert that doesn't go exactly as planned.

My comments to Neil are about the relationship of genre writing and creative writing programs and based on my observations having been in two such programs. While I understand the frustration some professors feel at having to read bad fantasy or science fiction work, why is that frustration any greater than when they have to read bad writing of any kind? I have never seen a professor seek to ban stories about drugs, violence, partying or relationships gone bad UNLESS they fell within the categories of genre fiction no matter how atrociously the students wrote them.

Even though 20+ years have passed since I got my undergrad degree, the academe has not changed its bias against genre writing. I think it is destructive of professors to denigrate, limit or inhibit what their students write, especially their undergraduate students. No one has the right to tell another person what they should or should not be writing.

Young writers are especially vulnerable to the influence of professors. I know I was. I wanted their approval. These were published writers. Authors with good reputations. I wanted them to anoint me, to tell me I was worthy of joining their club. Having someone like that tell me what I was writing wasn’t even worth my bringing it into class was devastating. I stopped writing for seven years after I got my undergraduate degree and it was a long, long road back even though there is nothing else I ever wanted to do.

When my husband and I were in Australia for our honeymoon many, many years ago, I was told that the Australian aborigines believe that you have a story and you are the only one who is allowed to tell that story. While I think it actually means you become the guardian of a particular story, say the story of Odysseus, and you are the only one allowed to tell it. No one else can tell the story of Odysseus, and when you die, someone else takes over that story. I took it to mean something a little different.

I believe everyone has a story to tell that is theirs and theirs alone. As writers, we are guardians of all our stories, and I don’t think anyone has the right to tell another writer which stories are theirs and which aren’t.

(if you’ve found my blog because of Neil’s post: Hello, and welcome! Thanks for stopping by. I hope you stick around and come back soon.)

The Hallelujah Post

2010-11-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

Okay, I love The Hallelujah Chorus and, since this is the season where you hear it all over the place, I decided to round up all the You Tube videos of unique renderings and put them all in one place for you to enjoy.

This may be my all-time favorite: The Silent Monks Hallelujah Chorus
by a group of high school students.

Here is a flash mob in a mall food court. Amazing voices.
And I just love the expression on people's faces.

A kazoo chorus:

A nice version by The Roches, a female acapella group I really like:

And what would a collection of videos of the Hallelujah Chorus be without bell ringers?

Or electronics:

Interpreted in fireworks:

And the fountain at the Bellagio in Las Vegas:

And typographically (I like this one a lot):

And in Christmas decorations:

For fans of 300 and Lord of the Rings:

And last, a true San Francisco version of the song:

NaNoWriMo Musings

2010-11-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

So another November is ending, and I haven't participated in National Novel Writing Month yet again. Each year, I tell myself I'm going to do it. It seems like such a no-brainer for a writer, right? Especially a writer who is actively working on a novel. I've come close to participating. I've signed up twice and last year I led a group of young writers in the junior version of NaNoWriMo. But I've yet to take the plunge. This year, I didn't even sign up.

The deal with NaNoWriMo, for those of you scratching your heads in puzzlement, is you attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Over the past decade, it's grown from one person's attempt at finding the motivation to finish his novels to an international movement. There's a Web site where you can sign up and track your progress. Well-known authors write pep talks that are emailed to you once a week. Many cities now have NaNoWriMo groups and there are sponsored writing marathons to help participants make their daily or weekly word count goals.

This year, an element of snarkiness entered the writing world. Larua Miller penned a particularly nasty opinion piece for Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/11/02/nanowrimo) entitled "Better yet, DON'T write that novel" in which she reveals that agents and editors hate December because it now brings with it a deluge of novels fresh from the word processors of NaNoWriMo participants. I can see her point, to a point. It is possible to write a salable novel in 30 days, but not probable. And there have been sales generated from novels composed during NaNoWriMo. It can be a tremendous kick in the butt for a lot of writers. Miller surmises that many NaNoWriMo participants just want to put a check mark next to one more thing on their lifetime to do list. Possibly.

I suspect it has something to do with a more primal urge. I suspect NaNoWriMo has flourished (this year, more than 200,000 people around the world have already written more than 2 billion words) because of our desire to tell stories. I think the desire to tell stories is one of the basic human drives - we are story telling animals.

I find NaNoWriMo heartening because it gives people a way to do something they've probably been wanting to do for a long time. Write. While I feel sorry for the agents and editors who will soon be deluged by eager Wrimoers (who have forgotten one thing about writing - it's a profession - just because you've managed to put 50,000 or 100,000 words together doesn't mean you're a writer), I am thrilled that the desire to tell stories is still going strong.

This month, I am rereading the Odyssey for the fourth or fifth time. This is a story that was written down almost 3,000 years ago about events that happened more than 4,500 years ago. Yet we still know the names of Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Helen, Paris. We still know about the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Scylla and Chyribis, about Circe and Calypso, and about the 120 suitors who plagued Penelope and her trick of weaving and unweaving her father-in-law's funeral shroud in order to hold them off until Odysseus returned from his 20-year odyssey. We still tell the stories of the ancient Greeks even when we don't realize that we do.

Perhaps NaNoWriMo flourishes because of the desire for an epic battle, a supreme test of our desires, our fortitude, our worthiness. A way to tell the story that makes the storytelling as central to the effort as the story itself.

The ancient Greeks began every artistic endeavor with an invocation to the Muses, a plea that the artist's efforts would be pleasing to their ears, would honor the gods and bring glory to the artist's name. So in the dreary month of November, let's be thankful that 200,000 people are out there praying for inspiration. Maybe a little of it will rub off on the rest of us mortals.

Measuring Success One Thimbleful at a Time

2010-10-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

Today, I have had a good writing day. I have a new scene shaping up nicely, and I have managed to get horses into the story on page seven.

No, really, this is a big deal.

Nevada's wild horses figure very prominently in the climactic scene of the novel, but the image of horses hasn't been sewn deep enough into the fabric of the story for it to feel completely organic. One of my challenges during the revision is to find new places for horses to show up. But not just show up. I could stick horses all over the place until the novel feels like Black Beauty, but that's not what I mean. I need horses to become a symbol, have a deeper resonance so, when Matt encounters this particular horse at the climax of the novel, it's tied into his brother's death in a way that brings the entire novel and everything Matt's gone through, into the reader's mind.

Now I have horses on page seven, and I'm very happy.

I'm also amazed by how much has opened up because of one, seemingly small decision I made two weeks ago. This story has always opened up with the very dramatic death of the brother. And then, after a page and a half, um..."Four days later, we're sitting in the church for Denny's funeral." I've never liked that transition, and kept trying to fix it. Two weeks ago, I was staring at this transition again, thinking, how do I fix this, make it smoother? And then I asked myself, why do I jump from the death to the funeral four days later? What purpose does that serve? So I slowed it down, I moved to the phone call that lets Matt and his family know there's been an accident. And suddenly, I discovered, I had the time to introduce Matt a little more fully, then introduce his mother and step-father, give each a little space, delineate their relationships a bit. And then I've got him at the hospital, his mother and Alan going to identify the body and Matt left in the waiting room, and there, up on the television set, a news story about the BLM wild horse round up. Ah! I've now had the space to introduce one of the major images and themes of the novel. Next, everyone's going back home and I'll be able to introduce Alan's family and give them the space the reader needs to make connections with these characters, to be able to know who they are.

Only after I started writing these sections did I realize what wasn't working in the original sequence. By jumping to the funeral (and telling myself, well, Matt was numb, the funeral is where he starts to come back into a conscious sense of the world around himself), I was trying to compress all these characters and relationships into a very small space. There's Pam and there's Aisha, and oh, I'm looking for Ray, but not seeing him here, and now I wonder, where's Katami? And how come I think I can remember Monica at this funeral even though I didn't meet her until later?

Do you have any idea who any of those people are? Right.

And it's not like I'm adding a lot of pages. These scenes are compressed, not because I'm trying to give you the world at once, but because the world already exists and I can show you a little bit of it at a time. Kind of like when you showed the new kid around school on her first day - here's the lunch room, and here's the gym, and here's the vice-principal's office, but you don't want to go in there. I know where everything is, and now, I can show you in the most efficient way I can.

Right. Back to Matt in the waiting room about to say something truly adolescent and macabre.

(Incidentally, the photo above was taken by me of a photo at the Nevada Historical Society of Shoshone cowboys on the Fort McDermitt Reservation)

No, Really, This IS Me Working on My Novel

2010-10-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

So, I'm working on my revision for Altar right now. And yes, I mean, right now. Which is one of the reasons I'm actually writing a blog entry. Believe it or not, this is part of the writing or revising process. It's the part writers rarely talk about because it's the part that makes it much harder to justify ourselves to people who wake up at six in the morning, get in their cars, and work in an office until five in the evening (though, I will say, if you look at the time and date stamp on this post, you will note it's almost six in the evening on a Saturday and I've been working, more or less, all day, since my spouse and kids are out of town this weekend).

Why am working on this post, you may ask, getting back to the matter at hand, when I should be working on my novel?

My answer, dear reader, is that I am. It just doesn't look like it because writing doesn't always take place at my desk with pen and paper at hand, words falling from my fountain pen's nib like raindrops from the sky. Sometimes it takes getting up, moving around, writing in my journal, making bread, taking a walk, listening to music, taking a bath, and yes, even writing a blog entry. Sometimes, the more difficult or emotionally deep a section is, the harder it is to sit in my chair. Those are the times my house gets REALLY clean or all the kids' outgrown clothing goes to Good Will or the dog gets dragged on a five mile walk. I had one section of Altar where I would write a sentence, jump up, walk across the room, straighten a book shelf, come back to my desk, write another sentence, jump up, dust, etc. All day long. When I told one of my writer friends this, she said, "Wow, that must have been some pretty deep writing."

She understood what this process looks like because she's been there. The process happens so slowly sometimes. For every sentence put down on paper, you'll spend fifteen minutes cleaning out a kitchen cabinet. For every paragraph, the bathtub gets cleaned. And for a chapter, maybe the rug has gotten shampooed by the time you're done.

Is it Drafty in Here, or is it Just Me?

2010-10-19T20:06:00.001-07:00

That's Altar in the photo over there. Every hard copy version of it. 8.5 inches of paper. Plus 1.5 GB on my computer. I think it’s quite impressive. And it’s growing. I’ve embarked on the next leg of the journey, ripping open the seams of the novel, rewriting, reworking, re-envisioning how the novel and its component scenes are put together.

I recently read an essay by a poet who doesn't keep drafts at all. She burned everything except the finished piece years ago in one great bonfire and felt so freed by it that she refuses to keep drafts anymore. She mentions that most writers have a belief they’re going to go back to all those "tidbits" and mine them for the few gems they hadn't used, but never do.

To a certain extent, she's right. You won't ever go back to those drafts because there's too much to go through, most of it is dreck, and you don't have the time.

But...I see value in keeping those drafts.

I took the picture of Altar’s drafts to show my students how much writers write to get to the final book they read (and to illustrate that I don't expect them to write perfectly, wonderfully manicured prose in 5 minutes time). I'll show it to the college students, too, when I do my presentation on revision in a couple of weeks because I think it's an incredible picture, and it reminds me of what I've been doing for the past 12 years.

It's like looking at archeological strata - there are the yellow, handwritten pages on the bottom, then becoming typed pages, and finally ending up with the binders that contain the completed drafts 1 and 2. Without keeping all those pages, I would never have been able to go back to my original freewrite and recognize how far the work has come since the moments of its birth (it really was like looking at Matt's baby pictures, to see that freewrite).

This past week, as I started on the writing phase of revision, I decided I would keep EVERYTHING as I worked through my 3rd revision. I've printed out the opening pages of Altar about 3 times now with successive changes, stapling together each group of pages so I can go back to earlier versions, and added a handwritten yellow page as I've stopped to work out a particular paragraph. I think it's kind of cool, though possibly psychotic, but it helps me see the work I've done in a tangible way.

Which, I suspect, is the real reason writers keep their drafts so obsessively. There may be a smug zen-ness to ditching your drafts, but I suspect the rest of us hold onto what we've written because it helps us see, in real, tangible terms, what we've been doing. When you’re writing for yourself (as opposed to having someone waiting for your work), I think it’s important to see what you’ve done in a real way.

And thank goodness most writers do save their drafts, because it has yielded wonderful studies and allowed other writers to see what, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald started with when he was writing Gatsby, which was pretty damn lousy writing. Or to see how many times Virginia Woolf reworked the opening of Mrs. Dalloway (many, many, many times) before she hit on opening with Mrs. Dalloway deciding she would get the flowers for the party herself.

Plus, in the back of my mind, I think, if I do become a famous writer, aren't my drafts going to become valuable? Isn't some college going to swoon over the gift my sons will make of my letters and notes? So I'm really doing posterity a favor by keeping all my drafts, rather than creating a fire hazard in my house.

2010-10-14T14:00:00.001-07:00

Revision ROCKS!

Everything Old is New Again

2010-10-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

As a young writer, like many young writers, I was obsessed with making my work unique and new, striving for a story that had never been told before. The adage about all stories having been told already antagonized me, as if the world had been desecrated before I had a chance to enjoy it. It was like an adult telling a child to just give up, everything worth doing had already been done.

In recent years, I’ve come to a different understanding about this adage as I’ve delved further and further back into the foundations of western literature. Art is a conversation between the contemporary culture and what’s come before it. There is no vacuum into which art can be placed and exist in a pristine, virginal state. It is an outgrowth, a reaction or reply to what has been done in the past simply by virtue of being done by a human.

In writing, we know the stories of our past so well. They surround us even when the source is buried or unknown to us. An example of this is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I’ve just finished reading for the first time.

Gilgamesh was a Mesopotamian king who ruled the city of Uruk sometime around 2700 BCE. The earliest versions of this poem were written around 2100 BCE, 500 years after Gilgamesh’s death (that would be like someone writing a biography of Shakespeare now), but the version that is commonly recognized as the Epic of Gilgamesh was written sometime between 1300 and 1100 BCE. The poem was handed down from the Mesopotamians to the Babylonians and finally to the Assyrians. Somewhere along the way it was lost to the conversation between cultures and did not surface again until the mid-1800’s when an Englishman, passing through the Middle East, decided to explore some mounds just outside of what is now Mosul in Iraq. He found the lost city of Ninevah, the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire. In the king’s library, he discovered thousands upon thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform. Twenty-five thousand clay tablets were sent back to the British Museum. It took another decade for cuneiform to be deciphered and another twenty years for a curator to notice that one of the cuneiform tablets contained a reference to a great flood and a man who had built a ship, gathered animals, and rode out the flood until the ship came to rest atop a mountain. Suddenly, the story of Gilgamesh was known again. The Victorians, who were looking for proof of the Bible’s historicity, embraced Gilgamesh. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke proclaimed the work to be “among the greatest things that can happen to a person.”

And yet, more than a century later, the western canon still began with Homer. In high school, we read the Iliad and the Odyssey and were taught these were the earliest known works of western literature. Perhaps the solitary heroes of Achilles and Odysseus fit our American ideals better, the individual battling against injustices or struggling to come home after a traumatic war. I was in school during the post-Vietnam era. It is possible Achilles’ battle rage and rebellion in the face of an unjust leader and Odysseus’ post-traumatic stress wanderings resonated with our teachers more than the buddy epic of Gilgamesh and his struggles to come to terms with his mortality.

Whatever the reason, what interests me about the resurrection of Gilgamesh and its return to the head of the western canon, is how much the poem influenced western literature even while the poem itself remained unknown.

The poem concerns the king Gilgamesh and his friendship with Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods out of clay to be Gilgamesh’s equal and teach him how to be a civil and just leader. Enkidu eventually dies and Gilgamesh, in his grief, tries to learn the secrets of immortality by travelling to the ends of the earth to meet the man whom the gods made immortal (as a thank you for building that ark and saving the humans and animals from the flood). What Gilgamesh learns is that you can’t become immortal, humans have been made to die and have to accept their fate. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and becomes a just and beloved king.

The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the civilized man and the wild one, is a pattern that shows up repeatedly in contemporary literature and, especially, movies. It is Lenny and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, it is Victor and Thomas-Builds-the-Fire in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals. It is Han Solo and Chewbacca in Star Wars. It is also Abbott and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy.

Gilgamesh is also the original journey story, the model out of which has grown our epic quests. King Arthur was after the Holy Grail which would confer immortality. Our current reality shows all focus on the participants’ quest for the supposed immortality of fame.

Even the hallmark of contemporary literature, the way in which contemporary literature is self-reflexive, calls attention to itself and the artificiality of story-telling, lies in Gilgamesh’s opening lines: Find the cornerstone and under it the copper box/that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid./ Take out the tablet of lapis lazuli. Read/ how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all. (from the Stephen Mitchell translation) Open the box, take out the poem, and there is the story which you are about to read here.

There is truth in the adage that there are no new stories. We have been telling the same stories to each other since the dawn of time. Luckily, we find new ways to do it, new avenues to explore that keep the stories fresh or give us new perspective on the old ones. Shakespeare didn’t come up with new plots or stories, but he was a genius at taking what was out there and reshaping it so that it made us look at it with new eyes. Which takes a heck of a lot of pressure off us writers when we understand that originality is a fool’s errand. It’s all been done before.

A Platform Isn't just a Place to Stand

2010-09-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

I finished the read through of my second draft last Friday. Yesterday, I officially started on the third (and hopefully final) major revision by copying the novel into a new document, now named “Altar – Revision 3.” Before I start the actual writing, though, I’m going through all my working notes for the project, selecting the ones that are relevant, and adding them to my revision notes. It’s actually a pretty major task. I have 23 pages of notes that are typed, plus about half a spiral-bound notebook with handwritten notes.

Today, I grandly outlined my to do list for the next several years. Okay, I wrote the titles for my next three novels on a Post-it note and stuck it to my desk where I can see it. But still…it reminds me that after I’m done with Altar, there are other books waiting to be written. My list reads Choice (which has been Altar’s working title since 1999 and what I call it around the house), Ithaka, and Grandmother’s House. There’s also a title in parenthesis, (2nd Son), because it’s a fantasy novel and I’m not sure where it’s going to fit into the mix. At the moment, it won’t leave me alone even though I tell it there’s no way it’s going to be the next thing I write because, if Altar sells, I can’t genre hop. Not if I want to have a career in this industry.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing lately. The days of writers simply writing their books, turning them over to a publisher, and having the publisher do all the work for promoting the author and his or her work are over. Gone, buried, probably never to return again, and now just a fairy tale that older authors tell to younger ones to make them despair about the likelihood of ever getting a book published in this economy. Which means writers have to do more and more work to promote themselves and their books. I’m not talking about arranging book tours (although Jacqueline Susann did that very successfully for Valley of the Dolls, famously writing letters to bookstore owners on purple stationary). I’m talking about “platform,” which is a word that’s come into wide-spread usage, though it basically means, “how big an audience are you bringing to the table?” Blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter feeds, publication credits, teaching credentials, awards, etc. Anything that a writer has done that can increase your name recognition and, potentially, your sales, becomes part of marketing him/herself.

As Altar nears completion, my thoughts are turning increasingly to this question. As a novelist, I’m at a slight disadvantage in the publication area. While I have a few short stories that have been published, that happened ages ago. I don’t write short stories anymore and was never very good at them to begin with. So I’m looking in the direction of nonfiction. The right article in the right publication can do wonders for a reputation (that, folks, is how Jonathan Franzen became the towering literary figure that he is – a well-placed article in, I believe, the New York Review of Books several years before The Corrections came out that cemented Franzen’s reputation among the literati as a SERIOUS WRITER and paved the way for that book’s critical acclaim). I’m not in a position to write for the NYRB, but I have my eye on a couple of places and am formulating my plan of attack.

Though, for the time being, my real attention is on finishing the book and getting it into the hands of an agent. Which is where it should be.

Gems from the Archives

2010-09-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm going through my working notes for the first half of the year, pulling out what I need for Altar or images I've found that I want to incorporate into the novel. Rather than post the one-liners on Facebook, I decided to collect them all here:

You create yourself as a writer each time you sit down to write.

Foundational myths - Genesis and the Big Bank. (that was a typo, but I really like it)

"No one wants an artist with no talent." - said by a senior at Oceana High School during the senior exhibitions last year.

"When it's your religion it's belief, when it's someone else's, it's superstition." Isabel Allende

"Without dragons, what is left to burn away our false selves but overspiced food?" from Eight White Nights by Andre Aciman

"There was an elephant in the room and no one was talking about it." (I know what this refers to, but, somehow, when the line is stuck out there all by itself, it sounds absurd and makes me think there's literally an elephant in the room, but that would be a different story than the one I'm writing)

The Fundamental Uselessness of Schedules

2010-09-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

I just made out my schedule for the week. I keep it on a color-coded spreadsheet, and it always ends up being more of a guideline (in the Pirates of the Caribbean sense) than a hard and fast thing. What’s always depressing about it is how little time there is set aside for writing.

I have this problem often, actually. Left to my own devices, I find time to write. I don’t know how, but the writing always gets done. Not as often as I like, nor for as many hours as would seem to be necessary, but the writing always seems to get done. Two drafts of the novel in two years is a testament to the fact that I do write.

But when I actually sit down and put together a schedule, the very thing that should make me wonderfully efficient and result in my having a stress-free and focused week, all it seems to show me is the utter impossibility of my getting anything done. Douglas Adams probably would have written very wittily about this being a fundamental operating force of the universe, but I’m left with the depressing realization that there simply are not enough hours in the day.

Yes, there are gaps in the schedule that I’ve put together. I’m not booked solid from sunrise to sunset, but those gaps are usually in half hour increments. I’ve noted in a previous blog post that the first half hour of any activity sucks, so that usually means I’ll pass on trying to get anything meaningful done during those 30 minutes.

And yet…the writing gets done. Somehow.

And the writing is getting done. I’m finishing up my read-through of the second draft this week and am very happy with where the novel is. I’ve left myself lots of notes throughout the draft – there almost isn’t a page that doesn’t have blue ink on it and most pages have extensive notes ranging from questions like “What emotional shift does Matt make in this scene” to exercises I want myself to do like “List 10 things Matt’s feeling here and 10 physical actions that would show how he feels.” I rewrote some scenes while I was doing the read-through, even though I was trying to keep myself from doing that so I could move through the draft as quickly as possible. I’ve loved having a bound copy of the draft (my thesis) to read from while marking up a copy that’s in a binder and think I might do that in the future. The bound copy feels much more like reading a book and makes me think in terms of “is this were in a published book…” and be more merciless with my own words.

We were back in Reno this past weekend, which always helps get me thinking about Matt and the world of the novel. I found myself looking at the city many times and seeing it through Matt’s eyes and thinking how the space of the city relates to the structure and themes of the novel and how I can use the setting more fully.

My ETA on finishing the draft revisions is the end of this year/beginning of next, and then it’s onward to the agent search.

I’m sure I will still be struggling with my schedule and shaking my head as I complete the novel and wonder what fold in the space/time continuum allowed me to get it done.

Lessons Learned after Procrastination

2010-07-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am working my way through the interview I did about a month ago now with Mario about his creative process (yes, it’s actually been that long - how I dislike summer because it is so difficult to get anything done during these months) and noticing some interesting things.

1) it’s not as painful as I thought it would be to listen to the interview. Part of me has been cringing, both because of hearing my voice on the recording and also because, in my memory, I talked way too much. Usually, I hate listening to my voice. When I was freelancing, I tried not to listen to my questions too much. I took copious notes as well as writing down the time when certain comments occurred that I knew I would want to use as quotes, so I didn’t have to listen to myself too often. The interview with Mario evolved as more of a conversation and limited my ability to take notes. So I knew I’d have to suffer through hearing my own voice. But it’s not awful. Maybe it’s the quality of the recording. A couple of years ago, I invested in a high quality audio recorder that allows me to encode the data files as MP3 files (it was for a reading series I was curating, so the readings could be recorded and put up on the series’ web site - because of recording glitches, it never worked out, but I now have a great audio recorder).

Which leads me to the second thing I’m noticing.

2) Transcribing the interview like this is forcing me to pay more attention to the actual language being used. I’ve never done transcriptions of my interviews before, but I’m noticing that often, I think I’ve got the phrasing right, but when I listen to it again, I’ve substituted my own diction for that of my subject’s. It’s an interesting exercise in noticing how individual dialogue can be. The placement of words in a sentence is very specific to the speaker.

I know that’s probably fundamentally obvious - every writer knows this. Every writer has been drilled in the idea that dialogue has to reveal character. But it’s one thing to know it, it’s quite another to see it in practice and to recognize how my listening is dictated by the rhythms of my own speech, how I will subtly mold Mario’s speech into my own patterns and think I’ve recorded it accurately, but, when I go back over that sound segment to check my accuracy, I find I haven’t gotten it quite right.

This intense scrutiny has me eager to do more of these interviews just so I can listen to the way more people speak. It also has me thinking about the dialogue in my novel and the ways in which I can tweek it so that it is more representative of the speakers.

And just a note about the interview itself. Mario Mendoza is an MFA playwriting student at San Francisco State and one of the most extraordinarily gifted writers I’ve ever met. It often left those of us in class with him speechless. I told him, when I asked him to do this interview, that I often watch his work and think, “I have no idea what it’s about, but I like it.” Mario’s pieces are often as full of silence as they are of sound, part performance art, part stage play. I have seen other pieces like his, but they often leave me cold with a sense of “WTF?” Mario’s pieces never have. We talked about why that is, and what he’s trying to achieve with is work, as well as how those pieces come about. He’s got amazing insight into his work, which is even more astounding when you understand that he’s only 25 years old. I’ll have the interview up in another week or so. I promise.

Everything Sucks for the First 30 Minutes

2010-07-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

This is my new mantra. I’ve found it quite useful this past month as a way of getting over that awful, deadening “I don’t wanna” feeling that often interferes with me actually doing things I really want to do. I discovered this new philosophy while on the treadmill. Walking on a treadmill is not often something that makes my top ten list of enjoyable activities, but it had become a necessity in the past month after I had one of those doctor’s visits that included the words, “if your blood pressure were any higher, I’d be sending you to the emergency room right now.”

Oh.

That got my attention really quick and definitely provided the motivation I’d been lacking to get back into workout mode and start dealing with the results of the last three years. Between grad classes, writing, teaching and taking care of kids, exercise usually remained unchecked on my to do list. I literally went from the doctor’s office to the gym and hopped back on a treadmill. I also reupped my subscription to Weight Watchers online later that day and went back to counting points and measuring serving sizes. Both are things I’d been trying to get myself to do for months, but, somehow, it wasn’t happening.

Since that fateful day, I’ve lost 7 pounds and have walked more than 25 miles, most of them alongside the San Francisco Bay while Kid 2 has been at chess camp. Let me pause for a moment and say that, if you are looking to lose weight, WW online is an AMAZING tool. I lost a significant amount of weight using it about five years ago, but trying to track everything while on the go proved to be really tough. I now have WW mobile for my phone (it works for Droids, Blackberries, and iPhones), which makes it sooooo easy to keep track of what I’m eating. What I love about WW online is that you get to eat what you want. I mean, I love good food. Emphasis on food. I attended a few WW meetings a couple of years ago, but, when the leader told us that if we wanted apple pie, we could slice up an apple, shake it up in a baggie with cinnamon and Splenda and microwave it for 15 seconds, I quit. I’ll just have the smaller slice of REAL apple pie, thank you, very much. Which is what WW lets you do. It also is a nifty way for keeping myself in check at restaurants - that entrée is probably worth about 15 points, which is all the points you’ve gotten for all the walking you’ve done in the past 2 weeks, is it really worth it? Really? Okay, end of commercial.

Anyway, the revelation came to me while I was on the treadmill. Earlier in the week, I’d done two walks of 4 and 5 miles each. I was TIRED. I set my workout for 45 minutes, but 10 minutes in, my legs were complaining, and then my feet, and then my brain was suggesting I cut the time down to 30 minutes because, really, I’d done enough that week, I didn’t have to kill myself. I had recently finished the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by the novelist Haruki Murakami. In one of his chapters, he talks about running a double marathon, more than he’d ever run before. At one point, pretty far into the race, his various body parts started complaining, one by one, of all their aches and pains, but, while acknowledging the pain, he never gave into it or allowed it to distract him from his focus on the race. So I tried that, telling my body that I was going to do the 45 minutes no matter what, suck it up. No good. I was still hearing that “do I have to?” whine in the back of my head. So I gave in, 30 minutes, that would be it. I’d do the 5 minute pre-programmed cool down and head for home.

But just before the 30 minute mark something amazing happened. I felt great. My body stopped complaining, my energy level shot up, and I was suddenly and enthusiastically changing my time back to 45 minutes, and even upped it a second time to make it a full hour. I got off the treadmill with another 3 miles under my belt and felt, not only the endorphin rush from the exercise, but the satisfaction of having accomplished it.

I also realized how much like writing my day on the treadmill had been. Those first 30 minutes are sheer torture with my brain telling me how awful everything I’m writing is and wouldn’t my time be better spent doing something like, oh, I don’t know, making bread? It’s also why I think it’s so difficult for me to write during the summer. I often have only half an hour to an hour of time to write, if half of that time is spent with my brain complaining how much it hates the activity at hand, why should I bother? I’m going to spend all of my writing time wrestling with my brain the way I’d been wrestling with my body, trying to cajole it into leaving me alone long enough to actually get some decent words down on paper.

More than likely, I’m probably going to choose not to even start rather than put up with the chatter inside my own head and the awful, nagging sense of dragging myself through molasses.

Which is where my new mantra came in.

I realized that the first 30 minutes of just about everything suck. It’s not just the writing. Everything. It’s probably a variation of Newton’s law. Objects at rest stay at rest until acted upon. Something I prove to myself over and over again every time I put on my walking shoes or pick up my pen.

Knowing this has made a difference over the past couple of weeks in both walking and writing. It’s a lot easier to get myself to do something knowing that it’s going to suck for 30 minutes, but after that, it’s going to feel great.

Ain't No Cure for the Summertime Blues

2010-06-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, there is. It's called 'August 17th' and 'August 23rd.' Those are the dates on which the kiddos return to school.

Summer always presents challenges, some summers more than others. This one is proving to be quite thorny and troublesome. Probably because I've got something that I really, really want to get done. The challenge is, of course, balancing family activities with my own schedule and figuring out how to get things done. It's the kind of scheduling at which I am particularly bad. The kind of scheduling where Child A has to be in San Francisco from noon to four Monday through Friday. It's a trip that takes an hour without traffic to accomplish. Care to hazard a guess how many times I can travel north on 101 into San Francisco without hitting traffic? My alternative route is via surface streets, but also includes a stretch on a street where I am convinced I am going to hit a pedestrian someday because there are waaaaay too many things to pay attention to - pedestrian crossings where the pedestrians stroll into traffic without waiting to see if you actually see them, cars pulling out from parking spaces, cars that suddenly stop to wait for another car to pull out of a parking space, MUNI buses that half-pull out of a lane to pick up/let off passengers then pull out into traffic WITHOUT looking (I kid you not, I've almost been hit by more MUNI buses than I care to count), traffic lights that line up so I'm seeing a green light that's really down the street and not seeing the red light right in front of me, etc. It's a scary stretch.

Anyway, what consistently gets me is trying to figure out how to organize my time when it's broken up into small segments - an hour or two in the morning, then an hour in the car, an hour or two at home, then an hour (at least) in the car. This summer is easier (in a way) since all of Child B's summer activities involve away-camps. When home, Child B spends most of his time skulking around on the computer, chatting with friends on Facebook and shooting things in online games - obviously, Child B is a teenager, so I'm not juggling two schedules of summer activities as I've done for the past several years.

And I know it doesn't sound like my time has severe limitations on it, but I find it very difficult to let myself get involved in working on the novel when I know I will have to cut it short just as I'm getting deeply connected to it. It's like I can't let myself go into that deep, deep creative space because I know I won't be able to stay there until I run out of oxygen.

In past years, it hasn't bothered me that much. I've put the writing to the side and gone about my mom/chauffeur duties with the idea that any work I get done during the summer is just icing on the cake. This summer is different, though, because I have a novel that is almost finished and that I want to be able to start sending out to agents in the fall. It doesn't make me feel very relaxed, but more like a ping pong ball shuttling back and forth from one thing to the next.

It'll pass. I know it will. And then it'll suddenly be the fall, the kids will be back in school, and I won't be for the first time in three years, and I'll have all the time in the world to work on the novel. How much ya want to bet I'll be complaining about having too much time then?

Pomp and Circumstance

2010-05-16T14:07:00.001-07:00

By this time next week, I will officially be a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I’ve been making the rounds to see various professors and say thank you to them for the wonderful contributions they’ve made to my writing and, maybe more importantly, my confidence in myself as a writer and artist. So I thought I’d make a more public thank you as well and talk a little about what these fellow writers have given me over the past three years. I urge you to look up their work and give them a read or, in the case of the playwrights, go see their shows if you have the opportunity. They are all fabulously talented writers.

I took Donna de la Perriere’s “Business of Creative Writing” class my first semester in school. It was my fall back class in case I didn’t get into the novel writing workshop. What could a class on the business of creative writing offer to me? While I would have loved to have a class like this as an undergraduate twenty years ago, I wasn’t sure there was a lot I could learn – I’d been a freelance writer, taken lots of workshop classes (some even from agents and editors themselves) on how to query, knew a lot about how the publication business worked, and had recently closed up my part of a corporate communications agency. While there wasn’t a lot I didn’t know about the content of the class, Donna’s class helped me see that I had spent the twenty years between my undergraduate and graduate years as a WORKING WRITER. I had gotten fixated on not being a published fiction writer and not giving any credit to myself for continuing to work with words as a way of earning money.

My favorite moment in that class came the day we were discussing freelancing. The format of the class was always to have a panel of two or three speakers, writers, reading series curators, agents, editors, etc. The panelists would speak for about an hour to an hour and half, followed by a question and answer period, and then, sometimes, we’d break into our small sections for more discussion and going over the previous week’s assignment. For the freelancing discussion, Donna had arranged to have three writers speak to us, but one of the writers didn’t show up. I was sitting in the front row and, just about the time I was thinking to myself I should talk to one of the panelists after the class, Donna started motioning to me. Thinking that she was suggesting the same thing (because, of course, she could read my mind and knew what I was thinking), I nodded in agreement. I was caught totally off-guard when she told the class I’d be joining the panel as the third panelist. But I went with it and had a blast. If I had any lingering doubt about the legitimacy of being a professional writer, this class completely dispelled them. Further proof came the following week when one of the TA’s told me many of the undergrads in her group had quoted things I’d said for the three things they learned from the panelists on their homework.

That first semester, I also took Michelle Carter’s “Teaching Creative Writing” class. While I was interested in learning to be a better teacher, this class helped me excise any lingering ghosts of my undergraduate program. We got to talk about destructive workshops, what NOT to do in a classroom of young writers, and how to respond to creative work in a way that is helpful without trying to rewrite the work the way we’d like to see it done. This class also helped me be a better reader of other people’s work in my workshop classes. While I didn’t get the chance to teach at State, I did take a lot of what I learned into the 4th and 5th grade classroom and, I think, am a better teacher of writing because of it. Michelle was also my cheerleader while I was doing my residency at the dump and totally overwhelmed by the prospect of it. When she came to take a look at the show, she said she didn’t know how I’d come up with the work I’d done. When I demurred, she said, “But this is really difficult,” and I countered, “As opposed to composing a ukulele opera?” which was one of Michelle’s recent projects. It was a nice validation that an artist of Michelle’s caliber would respond to my work that way. And I am also grateful for Michelle’s guidance throughout my time at State, especially because she recommended I take the short fiction workshop with Alice La Plante during the spring 2008 semester.

I took several classes with Alice including two fiction workshops. I TA’d for her “Works in Progress” class and finished the first draft of Altar of Dead Pets (then called Choice) while doing directed writing with her. It’s entirely possible that Choice would not have blossomed into the novel it is without my taking that first fiction workshop with her. Totally stuck for a second submission to the class, I asked Alice if I could bring in the original 25-page short story. I’d been working on it off and on for several years and it had recently grown into a novella. I wanted to know if my edits were on track. Fortunately, Alice said yes, and I got the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track. When I finished the first draft of Choice, Alice asked me to send it to her agent, the best validation I could have received about the quality of the work. Though the agent declined the novel, knowing that Alice had felt strongly enough about its quality even in that skeletal form has helped keep me engaged and passionate about it.

A funny thing about taking that first workshop was that, not knowing she was an instructor at State, I had picked up Alice’s book The Making of a Short Story, while taking Teaching Creative Writing (it’s an excellent book. If you’re a writer, I urge you to get it) and used many chapters of it for the syllabus I had to create for that class. With it still fresh in my mind, I found myself quoting Alice to Alice during the workshop. Fortunately, she seldom noticed unless I said, “Oh, shoot, I’m quoting you to you again.”

Fall of 2008 marked my first foray into playwriting since high school with Brian Thorstensen’s “Architectonics” class. More than any other class I took, this one helped me focus on my creative process, to observe myself creating, track what worked and what didn’t, and learn how to be a more focused, productive writer. It also introduced me to the most supportive group of writers I’ve ever met. I dearly love the playwrights and their generosity with each other while still holding each other to a high standard of excellence. To a large extent, I lost a lot of my guardedness in Brian’s class because of that generosity and support. Brian also didn’t comment on the creative work we produced (he didn’t even put a mark on the scenes we wrote until I asked him if he was actually reading the work. The next week, all our scenes had gold stars), which took a lot of the pressure off me, allowed me to experiment without fear of snarky responses from fellow students, and to focus more fully on how I was going about creating the work. It was a liberating experience and has a great deal to do with the confidence I feel in my work and in my sense of myself as a creative person.

And, of course, Nona Caspers, who was my thesis reader. Nona is an exceptional reader of other people’s work. She is the first truly gifted editor with whom I have worked. I was fortunate to take two classes with her, both completely focused on my work and her reading of it. While I wish I had been able to take other classes with her (there are writers at State who seem to be getting a degree in Nona), I am very happy to have been able to work with her in this way at the end of my time at State. Nona does not read in terms of good or bad, or even working or not working. She has a way of finding places where the work isn’t fully developed and pointing them out so that you start thinking of how all the pieces work together to create a unified effect. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is a scene in Altar that I was nervous about. I felt that it might be too heavy-handed, that it might have been a holdover from the first draft when I needed something more dramatic to generate the energy necessary to push the novel into the final scenes, that it might be too over-the-top. A friend of mine, who read the book, told me she didn’t know why that scene was there and urged me to cut it. Nona said no, the scene was necessary because it’s what stops Matt from following Denny’s path. It had to be dark. It had to show how horrific Denny’s world really was. The problem was that I hadn’t gone into deeply enough, probably because it was scary to me. I needed to go deeper, not eliminate it. Her comments made total sense. They come from a place of respecting the creative impulse - that if you put something on paper, there's a reason for it. If it isn't working, it may be more a matter of not going far enough with it than with it being wrong for the peace.

What I learned from Nona was how to read my own work. I learned about honoring the creative impulse that led me to put something on the page in the first place. I also learned about trusting my instincts. I know what I'm doing.

Which may be what time at State has truly been about. Learning to trust what I already knew about myself and my work. That, and making some really great friends. And hopefully, Nona’s prediction, that I’ll have no trouble selling the novel, will come true in the next year.

Research Con't

2010-05-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

I didn't have a chance to post the second entry I wrote while I was in Reno, but here it is now, with the added bonus that I can include pictures with it.

5 May
Went out to see the petroglyphs yesterday and was shocked at how much vandalism and deterioration has taken place at the site. The rocks have darkened so badly that it’s difficult to see the petroglyphs, but that’s due to nature. The vandalism on the other hand…there are places that look like the rocks have been shattered and a couple of places where it looks like people chiseled off the top layer of stone to steal the petroglyph (see left. Below, how this same rock looked in 2007). I would say it was natural forces, the work of water and temperature causing cracks in the rocks, except that there are no pieces of the surface on the ground. It is terribly disappointing that people would do this. Those petroglyphs are 400 to 1200 years old, and they’ve been destroyed. Even if the thieves were careful about removing them, they’ve been removed from their context. Yeah, they’re cool prehistoric art, but so what? Part of the magic of this site and the designs was that there were so many of them in this one place. Literally hundreds of them on this small hillside. It is disturbing to come across evidence of the greediness and selfishness of people.

I also wonder if I was in anyway responsible for alerting these people to the presence of the petroglyphs by writing an article about them for one of the Reno publications. It makes me think that any kind of publicity for sites like this is not a good idea - the fewer people who know about them, the better. As much as I love having seen the petroglyph site, there’s a part of me that wishes the site hadn’t been opened up for public access. And as much as I would like to see other sites, it might be better if other sites were kept secret and off the public radar.

Today was a happier day - I went to the historical society today, looking for more information about the Reno story and how the narrative is constructed. What I was really looking for was whether the narrative begins with the Native Americans or with the westward expansion of the United States. There’s a little bit about the Native Americans, though most of it has to do with their history after westward expansion with examples of items that had been created for tourists. There is very little about the Shoshone and Paiute cultures as they existed prior to expansion. They have made an effort to represent the various ethnic groups that moved into Nevada with exhibits about Chinese and African Americans, but nothing about Mexican/Hispanic people or anything about gay culture. The latter really surprised me because Reno had a gay rodeo for many years, but the museum didn’t even mention it.

The trip has given me a lot to think about for the novel. As I’ve said before, I am an accumulative writer. My first draft is a skeleton. Then I put on the muscles and then the clothing. Last comes the accessories. I’m working on the accessories right now, the details that will underscore the themes of the novel.

And now, time to go to bed so I can get up and drive home tomorrow. And then…back to work putting words on paper.

Hitting the Town

2010-05-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

2 May 2010 - sitting in a hotel room in Reno, Nevada. I’ve come here to do research for the novel. There are places I need to go because I’ve looked them up on the web but don’t’ have first-hand knowledge of them and places I want to see again to refresh my memory of them. To some extent, a trip like this feels unnecessary at this stage of working on the novel. After all, there are many writers who write about places they’ve never seen and the work is fine, great, accurate. For me, though, there’s something about coming into Reno and being able to look at everything with the eyes of my 14 year-old narrator. This is something that I find easier to do in person rather than relying on my imagination.

For example, walking into the El Dorado today, I realized how perfect this place is for Denny. This is the casino where Denny worked and the entrance is all mirrors and gold and tiny lights cascading from the ceiling. A place of fantasy. But it’s also a place where you can lose yourself. Casinos are set up to be disorienting - the lighting doesn’t give you any information about the time of day, there are no straight sight lines, the flashing lights, the cacophony of sound. The entrance to this particular casino also works well with one of the themes in the novel about the historical marketplaces and palaces and their modern-day equivalents that have been “fauxed” to appear luxurious.

There’s also the false history that’s created by the casinos as part of their fantasy experience. The Silver Legacy, for instance, created an entire false history of a fifth silver baron on the Comstock Lode (there were four of them) and the décor is built around the mining history of the state complete with a replica of a mining rig in the middle of the casino. I’d forgotten about that aspect of Reno. The myth-making, the false history, the borrowing of legendary lands - El Dorado, Atlantis, etc. But being here has reminded me of really using the location of my story to underscore its themes. I mean, the location of the novel is important to the story in terms of a place where Matt can go out to the desert, but using Reno’s history and present day, really using it, creates another layer of meaning for the novel.

3 May
You can never tell where information you can use is going to turn up. Tonight at dinner is a perfect example of this. The timing of this research trip coincides with a trip by a dear friend of mine who used to live near me but now lives across the country, and we had dinner tonight with a mutual friend who still lives here. In the course of our dinner conversation, my friend starts talking about a dynamic that existed in his family that is EXACTLY the relationship I’ve got between Matt and his mother. But it’s very difficult to show because most of the dynamic exists in Matt’s mother keeping her distance from him. So I questioned my friend about his experience and how he came to understand what was going on in his family (and was very upfront about it, I would never NOT tell someone I was asking questions for research). It helped me figure through some of what I’m doing with Matt.

Today was largely about driving around and visiting places in Reno like the mall (a pretty significant scene takes place there and I wanted to make sure I got it correct - picked up a good idea that adds another dimension to the scene while I was there), the hospital and the cemetery. All good stuff. Tomorrow, I head for the petroglyphs to see if I can milk some more out of that location to use in the novel. And then on Wednesday, I’m heading to Carson City to find out more about Nevada history.

Again, I know I could have just continued to use what I had in my head, but coming here and seeing the places and thinking about them in this way, seeing them through Matt’s eyes, helps me more fully visualize the world of the novel. And I think it’s important because if I can’t picture it or see it the way Matt would, I can’t write about it in a way that feels real to the reader.

The Creative Process – the Story Thus Far…

2010-04-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Thought I’d do a quick update on where things stand with the novel and grad school.

Grad school first because it’s easier. Basically, I’m done except for the physical act of the graduation ceremony. My thesis is complete and being bound, probably even as I write this. I should be getting an email this week from the campus copy center letting me know my copies are available for pick up. So, all done. There’s no way I can screw this one up at this point.

Now the novel. As loyal readers will remember, my thesis is the completed second draft of the novel. Despite all the lovely things my professor had to say about my thesis, there’s still a lot of work to do before I’ll feel comfortable sending it out the door to agents. It’s more a case of fine-tuning the whole thing rather than the complete overhaul/rewrite of the second draft, and I’m planning on having it ready to go in the fall. That’s provided the dreaded demons of summer don’t get me (my personal demons are the children being in the house and needing to provide chauffeur services to get them to their various activities – I may need to become nocturnal again).

So…where things stand. I did a read-through of the second draft and was very happy to find that it holds together wonderfully. As I said, there are still things that need work. I’m noticing that my creative process is one of accumulation. There are writers who throw everything they can into the first draft and their subsequent drafts are a process of paring away what doesn’t fit. I’m the opposite. My first draft is like a skeleton, very little flesh. It’s not much more than the outline of the plot and the actions of the characters. It was in the second draft that a lot of the themes and imagery started to appear, connections occurring between images and scenes – things like the recurrence of snake imagery – and my understanding of what the novel is really about letting me more fully develop characters and the shape of the novel.

For instance, the second draft was broken into three sections. When I tried to create chapters as I wrote, I found the divisions becoming artificial, so I stopped and just wrote. During my read-through, I found the sections breaking down quite naturally into chapters, which, in turn, allows me to see where there are place for expansion because a few chapters are very thin. The actions within these chapters need to have their own space, so it’s not a question of tacking them onto the end or beginning of the surrounding places, but one of needing additional development to give them the impact they deserve.

I also just finished typing up my working notes for the novel. These are the notes I make to myself as I’m writing about ideas, questions, images that need to be included in scenes. It encompasses everything from the philosophical (“Don’t suppress the metaphor” or “Anger is never non-specific, it has a direction, a focal-point, someone or something on which to place it, real or otherwise”) to ideas for specific scenes (“telescope scene – use the weather – it’s cold”) to reminders about things I need to track on my read-throughs like the way Ray’s appearance deteriorates or how Matt’s voice changes depending on with whom he’s speaking. My next step will be to go through the draft and make notes on the text on where I need to go back into the text and flesh things out.

My next next step, though, is a quick trip to Reno to do some research. There are some place I need to visit again while thinking within the world of my novel and some new places I need to explore to make sure I’ve got the feel of them right. I’ll be doing that this coming week.

A funny thing about going through my working notes: when I was in London in my junior year of college, my professor took our class to the British Museum and showed us, among other things, James Joyce’s notebooks for Finnegan’s Wake. The pages of the notebook were covered with scribbled notes, all of them covered by big red X’s. My professor told us, laughingly, that it was a commonly held belief that each one of those x’ed out places was in the book. (see above) His understanding was that Joyce had initially chosen not to put those ideas in the book but then reconsidered since Finnegan’s Wake is one of those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of books. Hm….not exactly, Jack. Looking over my own working notes (see right), the X’s are those things I’ve already included in the text, the highlighted portions are those I’m still going to be using, but will be X’ing off as I go along. My professor was a poet. I don’t think he understood the mechanics of working on a novel and how to keep those ideas present for the marathon run of writing a novel. I know I didn’t understand a lot about writing a novel until I was working on this one.

Reading is Fundamental

2010-04-12T21:41:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of days, I’ve been compiling a list of every book I can remember reading. I’ve done a lot of it through memory and more by searching for lists of “books you should read before you die.” So far, I’m closing in on 300 books read in my lifetime, going back to Harold and the Purple Crayon. I’ve got no idea what the first book I ever read on my own actually was. The accomplishment of reading that first book didn’t leave a mark, but the impact of learning to read has had a tremendous impact on my life.

There have been a few surprises as I’ve looked at the growing list. Interesting clusters of books by the same author that show where I became enamored and read a great deal of a particular writer before moving on. Hemingway and Faulkner both appear on my list with multiple titles, as does Woolf. I also feel a sense of satisfaction at the number of women writers (thanks, in large part, to lit classes that focused on women writers and exposed me to many fine writers I would never have had the pleasure of getting to know). Non-western writers make the occasional appearance, as do writers of diverse ethnic heritages. I’ve also got a nice smattering of science fiction/fantasy, I’m happy to say, so my list isn’t comprised exclusively of Penguin Classics titles.

Though, I am pretty well read in the classics having read the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as the Aeneid, the Inferno, many, many Greek plays and histories, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf. I’ve also read an extensive amount of Austen. My next step in reviewing the list is to look up publication dates so that I can see what time periods I haven’t read yet. I know I’m pretty thin on the 1700’s and there are some pretty interesting books there. I also haven’t read a great deal in the early 1900’s, though I’m great with Modern writers.

Which is the interesting thing about this exercise: seeing where there are gaps in my reading time line and my reading geography.

What’s also been interesting is to see how many of these books I read during high school and college. I started doing this list because I was trying to remember the reading list from freshman English in high school. My memory says we read 13 books that year, and I’m closing in on the full list. So far, I remember reading The Iliad, The Odyssey, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Watership Down, Romeo and Juliet, The Human Comedy, Animal Farm, Siddhartha, Night, and Grendl. Other possibilities are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1984, and Heart of Darkness, mainly because I remember reading them in high school and think they might have been during Mr. Johnson’s class. During high school, I also read: Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, Death in Venice, Crime and Punishment, and so many more. Books I remember very clearly to this day. Books which became a part of me and who I am today in a way no current reading does. They etched themselves on my DNA. I’ve already talked about the influence Catcher in the Rye had on me even though I didn’t recognize it until I reread the opening pages of the book a few months ago.

Creating this list has also saddened me a great deal as I think about the books my older son isn’t being exposed to in his high school experience. They’ve read two novels this year - Nectar in a Sieve, which is a YA novella, and Animal Farm. After he finished Animal Farm, we gave him 1984 and Brave New World to read. He devoured both books. I know that there is a great deal of effort on the part of the schools to keep the kids interested in literature. Although, actually, that’s not true. The schools have emphasized “reading,” with required amounts of time the kids needed to read each night and reading logs that had to be filled out and turned in (which we could never remember to do). A couple of years ago, the elementary and middle schools instituted a new “Accelerated Reader” program that rewards the kids with points for each book they read. Sounds good, but you get points by passing a multiple choice test, and the kids with the most points get awards. When they first started using AR, reading became a total competition, with kids reading lower level books so they could get the points. When our older son read A Tale of Two Cities in 8th grade, it asked ridiculously pointless questions like what was the color of the heroine’s dress in a particular scene. My son failed the test. This was after having an in-depth discussion with me about the influence AToTC’s had had on another book he was reading for class. So I know he understood the book on a deeper level.

There are actually two points I want to make here. One is that I think the schools are missing the difference between encouraging reading and understanding (and loving) literature. One does not necessarily lead to the other. While I think encouraging kids to read as many words as possible may have a place in the lower grades, by 8th grade, the kids should be learning to talk about literature and how to really read for deeper meaning. Asking about the color of a dress (unless it is truly symbolic of a larger theme in the novel) is irrelevant and misses the point of reading a book like A Tale of Two Cities. And learning to read deeper isn’t necessarily a function of reading a lot. It’s something that needs to be learned and takes practice to do well, but the schools aren’t doing this. They aren’t even trying to show the students that there are different ways of reading a text. Believe me. I work with the kids often enough to know. It blows their minds when someone shows them what else lurks behind the text. They get excited about it. It makes the books more interesting. And they want to read more.

My second point is this: I know the schools are trying to make reading more engaging for the students. I know they face lots of competition from computers, TV, video games, texting, and just kids being kids, but I am worried the schools are squandering good opportunities to engage the students with challenging work. I know, sometimes school ruins books for people. I agree. I will never be able to read Herman Melville because of my junior year in high school, nor can I read Heart of Darkness (or even think about it) without feeling the chagrin of having to have read it THREE times in four years (high school and college included). I hate, hate, hate that book. But…what my list showed me was the importance of that exposure. And I think this is what the schools are abdicating by trying to use more engaging texts or limiting the number of books they ask the kids to read. The exposure is important. Letting the kids know the full range of written works that are available in the world, even if they don’t understand everything they’re reading, is important. Challenging them to read more complex works is important. Risking that they will dislike something or hate it even, is important (we tell our kids it’s okay not to like something, you just better be able to articulate why you hate it to us). And it’s important to teach them how to read and that they aren’t stupid if they can’t understand what’s been written. Heck, I read Ulysses, but the only way I got through it was to read a chapter, listen to a recorded college lecture by a leading Joyce scholar about that chapter, then re-reading the chapter, and finishing off by re-listening to the lecture. And I still don’t understand all of it. But…I now know why it had such a tremendous impact on the way stories are told now, and I can see its influence when I’m reading other work and can talk about the novel quite well. But…give me a multiple choice test on the book, and I’ll probably fail.

I Can't FIght this Feeling Anymore

2010-03-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

Today I did something I rarely do. I gave up on reading a novel. There are very few novels I have ever decided not to finish as I’m usually a pretty forgiving reader. I’ll stick with a novel all the way to the end even when I get so aggravated I throw the novel onto the coffee table and walk away from it for a bit.

Jacqueline Mitchard’s Deep End of the Ocean was like that. I read it, like a lot of people, because it was the first novel Oprah picked for her book club and because I’d met Mitchard at a writer’s conference. The book aggravated me sufficiently that I put it down repeatedly (I remember at least three times in the final 100 pages), but I kept coming back to it because there was some good, deep emotional stuff in there. Even though, ultimately, it’s not a novel I would ever go back and reread, I stuck with it because I’d already read most of it.

The first book I remember not finishing was The Trial by Franz Kafka. I was a junior in college and had been reading it over the summer break. I was fifteen pages from the end and so frustrated by not being able to follow what was happening that I closed the book up and declared I was not going to finish it. One of my housemates, and a fellow writer, said, “Wow, I hope I never write a book that causes someone to do that.” I keep meaning to go back and give the book another try, but probably won’t ever get around to it.

Recently, I failed to finish Gilead by Marilynn Robinson. I’m not sure if the issue was the book or the timing of me reading it. The book was assigned reading for a class I was TAing the semester I had four other classes and my student residency at the dump. I was, quite simply, SWAMPED, and kept falling asleep every time I tried to read the book. After a week of this, and realizing it was interfering with me getting work done for my other classes, I gave up. I do know I had a really difficult time getting involved in the book and reading an essay the professor assigned (an interview with Robinson) completely turned me off on her as a writer. So maybe it was a combination of things. I don’t know.

In this case, the book in question is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, and I know exactly why I stopped reading it. I couldn’t get into the story-telling world of this book. Set in post 9/11 2001-2002, the book is narrated by a young woman in college somewhere in the Midwest (okay, point 1 – I can’t tell you what the narrator’s name is. Not good.) The voice was totally off for a 20-something young woman. And, I kept forgetting that it was right after 9/11. The only reference to it was when Tassie (that’s it, Tassie – couldn’t she have given the narrator a real name?)…Tassie’s roommate (who, incidentally, hasn’t made an appearance in the book as anything other than a “witty” disembodied voice in Tassie’s memory)…the roommate calls after sleeping with a new boyfriend for the first time on the night of the 10th and declaring that their lovemaking was the cause of the towers coming down. That’s it. Only reference. And if it has an effect on Tassie, I can’t see it. Then, Tassie goes home for Christmas. Her family is some mixture of Jewish and Christian, but, here again, totally off. I don’t buy it. The only hint of Jewishness here is in the relentless serving of “Jewish” food for Christmas – latkes, kugel, brisket. It’s like Moore went to a dinner with a Jewish family and this is what they served so she assumes this is what all Jewish people eat all the time.

The latkes gave me particular fits because Moore describes how one makes matzo balls rather than latkes. Tassie’s mother offers her latkes when she first gets home, but Tassie doesn’t want them, so the mother says, okay, I’ll put the latke mix in the fridge and we can make them tomorrow morning (1 – you don’t make latkes from a mix, and 2 – you put latkes in the fridge overnight and the next morning you have a soggy brown mess from the potatoes releasing water and starch). The next morning, Tassie’s making the latkes and complaining about the egg whites and oil making her hands slick and sticky (1 – you make latkes from shredded potato and flour, maybe a little egg, the only oil is the oil you fry them in and you definitely don’t want HOT oil on your hands, and 2 – matzo balls are made from a mix to which you add oil and eggs).

I know. I know. This is such a minor detail. But the problem is, it was enough to throw me out of the book. And every reference to the Jewish food afterward just threw me out of the book again. I gave the book the 50-page test, and then generously decided to give it the 100-page test because of Moore’s reputation and the positive reviews the book received. I didn’t make it to page 100. I ended on page 71 because Tassie and another character are about to board a plane. It’s January 2002, only three months after 9/11 and there are no references to the attack, no references to the insane security precautions, no anxiety on the part of the characters, nothing. I had to remind myself that, oh yeah, this novel is post-9/11, at which point I decided if I was having to do that much work, the writer wasn’t doing her job. And I put the book down. For good.

I don’t do this lightly, like I said. I tend to be a generous reader because I know how difficult it is for a writer to make sure they get every single detail correct. Unless writers are only going to write about characters who are exactly like themselves (which would be really boring), they’re going to get details wrong. I’m not a 14-year old boy. Now, I’m fortunate that I happen to have one in my house, and I’ve talked to him extensively about what high school is like. But I’m not a 14-year old boy. I’ve probably gotten some things wrong. Nor am I an African American Iraqi war veteran or a meth addict. In all those cases, I’ve done research. I’ve been reading quite a lot about these things and talking to people who can give me first-hand information about what their reality is like.

The question I kept coming back to in Moore’s book, and ultimately couldn’t answer, was what’s the payoff in the book for her creating characters like this. What’s the value of having Tassie’s mother have this pseudo-Jewish ancestry? What does it add to the book? Because it has to add something. These details have to add up to something that gives the book additional dimension. Otherwise, you’re better off sticking with the world you know and getting the details correct.

And, having written this, I hope I never read someone’s blog complaining about all the inaccuracies in my book. But I’m sure I will.

(Incidentally, in keeping with my last blog post: Moore's book received 23 reviews, most of them positive. It debuted at #10 on the New York Times bestseller list and was at #1 on several other major lists, as well as starting out at #43 on the Amazon list, continuing to stay in the top 500 for more than a month after its release. Six months after its release, it's still a better seller than any of the debut novels I talked about in my last post.)

Big Advances are No Guarantee of Success

2010-03-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

As I get ready to enter the labyrinth of pursuing an agent to represent my novel and then, fingers crossed, the lion’s den of publication, I’ve been doing some research. One project is tracking the success of a group of six debut novels that were featured last summer in Poets & Writers Magazine’s annual first fiction survey.

Several of the novels received lucrative deals by major publishing houses including Reif Larsen’s $900,000 deal for The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Another, Swimming by Nicola Keegan, garnered a six-figure deal somewhere between $250 and $500 million with an initial print run of 100,000 copies. Of the remaining, two others signed two-book contracts with their publishers with similar print runs, and a third signed a two-book deal with a small press and a limited print run of 3,500. I could not find details on the sixth book, other than that the initial print run was 25,000.

These six writers probably represent the last books bought before the economic melt-down changed the way in which the publishing industry works. This fact was actually the main focus of every review of Larsen’s book, that his nearly $1 million advance represents a publishing world that no longer exists. And, indeed, that assessment looks pretty accurate. There seems to have been no major publicity campaign for either of those books and, a quick look through the book store revealed only one copy of Spivet on the bookshelves and, though Keegan’s book was initially included in an end-of-aisle display, it was quickly relegated to the shelves where the three copies have remained. Neither of these books showed up on the New York Times bestseller list, though Larsen’s did make it to number seventeen on the extended list. His book also rose to #3 on the San Francisco Chronicle’s best seller list about a month after its release, falling to #9 the next week, and then disappearing.

Only three of the books generated major reviews. As I said above, each of Larsen’s four reviews focused on the size of his advance and the likelihood that such advances are a thing of the past. The best reviewed of the six, A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, received five reviews including one in the New York Times, but it failed to show up on any of the major best seller lists. Rakoff’s book was released the month prior to the Poets & Writers article, while the remaining five were released several months after the feature.

The sales figures for all the novels look dismal. Larsen’s book was the only one to rise above a sales rank of 1,000 on any online seller’s list, clocking in at #636 on the Barnes and Noble list. Its best week on Amazon was a jump in mid-November from #7,205 to #2,289, quickly falling back to its original rank and dropping from there. Keegan’s book never rose much higher than around the #6,000 mark. And the remaining novels have risen no higher than the mid-20,000 in sales rank.

Far from being dismayed by these figures, I’m actually heartened because it takes the pressure off of thinking that a large advance means instant success. What it shows me is that a small advance with a modest print run coupled with a lot of work on my part to promote the book will probably serve me in the long run better than a stunning six-figure advance.

I am also following the progress of one of my professors as she makes her way through the labyrinth of publishing. Her first novel did receive one of those six-figure deals and is currently being considered by a major Hollywood actress with serious box office and critical cred (you know who I mean. Yes, her.), which, if the deal goes through for the screen rights, will help the publishers get behind the novel with major publicity.

It has been interesting following these six novels and looking at the fate of a debut novel. It’s a rough world out there and, I think, it’s more important than ever for a writer to take a proactive stance in regards to promoting their work and finding ways to reach readers directly.

Well, Bugger

2010-03-06T14:39:00.001-08:00

I was going to post something I wrote a while ago, but just discovered that I had already done so several months ago. Bugger.

What I was going to post was the essay I had to write for as part of my application for a scholarship to the San Francisco Writers' Conference. Well, I found out this past week, I got the scholarship when I received an email asking for me for the story I'd submitted so it could be included in the conference anthology. Only problem is, the conference was in mid-February. Somehow, emails directed toward me and one other scholarship recipient went awry (the third did receive the group email, so go figure). Disappointment abounded. I was quite upset about the lost opportunity to practice pitching my novel to agents and editors and being able to strut around the conference with a ribbon on my chest proclaiming me to have been the fiction scholarship winner (I don't know if they have ribbons, but I've seen them at other conferences, so I'm assuming). The good news is, I get to go next year for free to make up for the techno screw-up. Which is fine with me, even though I'm hoping I won't need to be pitching my novel by then, having found an agent and sold the novel for a fabulous sum of money. Hah! The realist in me says, yes, next year will be much better timing.

Anyway...Altar got its first "virgin" read and the response was largely favorable. It wasn't a total first read since my reader knew the novel in its infancy as the short story "Choice." So, she knew the shape of the story but not all the ways in which it's filled out and grown in the intervening years. The best response was, after I sent it to her, she told me she'd opened the document in order to save it on her computer and started reading. Thirty minutes later, she was still reading and telling herself she'd just read until the end of the first section. "I did have other things to do today," she told me.

Now I'm doing some research. I still feel as if I am writing this book backwards, doing the bulk of my researching after I've finished the second draft, but that's just the way it's working out. I didn't know what I'd need to know until I'd written it. Or something like that (and I wonder what verb tense I just used?) A lot of what I'm researching has to do with making sure I haven't fallen into easy stereotypes of "ethnic" behavior. In an earlier draft, I got called out for Katami being the "stereotypical magic ethnic" character, which I'll agree with. He's less so now, but I still want him to be as real as possible, want the journey he's on to be authentic even as it fits within the context of the world I've built up. I want his journey to be emblematic of the journey Matt's on while still being true to his particular history. It's not so much being politically correct as it is wanting to make definite choices on who this character is so that his actions are correct for both my story and his story. I'm finding that a lot of the raw material is there already, the research I'm doing is allowing me to pull those elements forward and weave them more meaningfully into the themes of the novel.

I've also begun a new short story based off of the experiment I've been doing with Textual Archipelago - writing creative responses based off of the stories in Best American Short Stories of the Century. I've been a little stalled on it, so haven't kept up with TA again. I hate it when stories start to back up on me like this. It leads to a type of neurosis peculiar to artists - too many projects clamoring for attention at the same time so you wish you had three heads and six arms to take care of them all.

Oh, well, back to work.

Who is Allowed to Make Art?

2010-02-18T20:55:00.001-08:00

Throughout the day, I have been following an ongoing discussion in the comments on Amanda Palmer's blog about the validity of one of her current projects. She's getting a lot of flack for the project because she portrays a person with a disability. I won't go into all of it here, but if you want to check it out, go to her blog http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/396762227/evelyn-evelyn-drama-drama (once again, I apologize for not being able to do direct links from within the text of my blog - I'll put the link in a box to the right).

One of the underlying threads of the comments seems to be that Amanda is not allowed or entitled to create nor perform as this character because she is not disabled.

I am an educated, white, middle class, middle-aged woman. By this criteria, I can only create characters who are also educated, white, middle class and middle-aged women and that, any time I step outside of these parameters, I am being disingenuous or disrespectful to other groups of people, or that I am suggesting someone from the other group can not represent themselves.

If artists are restricted to representing only their own group, then most works of fiction would have to be trashed immediately, including my current novel.

I have wrestled with this a lot, especially during my time in grad school. The discussion on Amanda's blog seems to turn on the idea of privilege. The idea being that as a white person, or as an able-bodied person, or as an educated person, I have privilege, and am therefore, not entitled or allowed to create art based on non-white, non-privileged groups. Someone even suggested it would have been okay for her to do this character from the perspective of her own privileged position as a non-disabled person. Hunh? Someone else suggested the problem lay with Amanda performing with a disability she did not have in order to make money. Well, let's strip Daniel Day Lewis of that Oscar for My Left Foot, shall we, since he doesn't have cerebral palsy.

The essential part of being an artist is being able to put yourself in someone else's skin. When someone does it well, it can be stunning. Jeffrey Eugenides is not a hermaphrodite, and yet, Middlesex is an extraordinary novel written from the perspective of a hermaphrodite. In fact, it is so well done, many people insist he is part of the intersexual community, but he isn't. By this same token, Dostoyevsky was not a sociopath, nor George Orwell a talking pig or Virginia Woolf a suicidal WWI veteran suffering from battle fatigue. But they all created these indelible characters because they were amazing artists and writers. They did what artists and writers are supposed to do, make these characters real to us as human beings (even the talking pig) so we care about them, so they matter to us. We cannot dismiss them because we care about them, and we cannot limit writers and artists from creating them just because they are not part of that group.

The flack she's getting reminds me very much of something that happened in my very first creative writing workshop as an undergrad. I wrote a story, first person, teenage male narrator who tries to commit suicide because his girlfriend had an abortion. One of my classmates (he was also one of my best friends throughout college), went off on me about how could I know how this character felt? I wasn't male, I couldn't possibly know what it felt like, etc, etc. He was so venomous in his attack, the professor actually stepped in and stopped his tirade and checked in with me after class to make sure I was okay. I was. I realized what happened was actually a compliment. My friend was uncomfortable because I'd hit too close to home, gotten my character too realistic for him to feel safe. He reacted in the only way he could, to attack my ability to KNOW what it felt like to be in his skin. Basically, I'd done my job as a writer.

And Here Comes the Self-Doubt

2010-02-17T23:11:00.000-08:00

I dropped off Altar with my thesis reader today. Walking away from her office, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I got the draft done, and it's a good, solid draft. When I finished the first draft last March, I knew there was a lot more I wanted to explore with this story. It wasn't complete to me (despite the fact that my professor insisted I send it to her agent, I knew it wasn't ready to go out into the world. Had she agreed to represent me, I would have been thrilled, but I also would have felt as if I hadn't served my characters well enough). Now the story feels complete. But now, too, my focus needs to shift from the story to the storytelling.

And here's where the self-doubt started creeping in even as I was walking away from her office.

Is the story good? Or have I worked too hard to give it forward movement, increasing levels of complications, and raised the stakes to unrealistic levels? Does it become too plot driven in the last part of the book?

I am worried there are too many moments where I have my characters go somewhere just so something can happen to them, too many times where I haven't found the delineating detail, thin spots when the narrative dissolves into stage directions and moving the furniture around.

I am also worried that I have overthought my inter-sections, those moments when the narrative becomes about history or death to deepen some of the underlying themes of the piece - I worry that these are too obvious a device and should be woven into the narrative more seamlessly.

My biggest concern is that I have strained the narrative in some way by pushing it to completion in order to meet the deadline, that I didn't let the next moment in the book surface in an organic way, and that intellectual decision-making will show and weaken the storytelling.

All these things, sitting in my head. So I've spent the day just surfing around on the web, letting things come up by chance, not even thinking about what I'm doing, just killing time. I've found some fun links - like a great performance by two FAO Schwartz employees on the big piano that leaves the scene in Big in the dust (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNi5MIXsEsA&feature=related). And, in the course of noddling around, I have started to come across things that could be useful - like the family tree of the Greek Gods, which has led me to looking up Thanatos, the grandson of Chaos, child of Night (Nyx) and Darkness (Erebus), and twin brother of Hypnos (Sleep). Good stuff, that. And that's led me to looking up Thanatos and coming across a really great site about grieving and...well, it's the serendipitous finding of information I didn't have time for while I was working to deadline coming back again.

So I guess I'll be gearing up for the third round of revisions. Which I knew I would be doing before I start querying agents. And which I want to be doing because I want the storytelling to be as good as my story.

The Necessity of Cognitive Dissonance

2010-02-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

I've been working very diligently on finishing up the novel so I can meet my February 16th deadline. Yesterday was a phenomenal day with 20 pages written. It was also a weird day because I had to do something very strange - write the ending scenes before I got there.

It's the benefit of working on a second draft. I know where I'm going, I know what my ending is, I have the ending already written and it just needed tweeking to make everything line up with the changes in the draft. And...I wasn't going to do what I did with the first draft which was get to the point where it had to be done so I just cut and paste what's already written and call it done. The ending has pretty much stayed the same since Altar was a short story called "Choice." Most of the action has stayed the same, though the subtext has changed radically. So I wrote out the ending, knowing what I know now about the characters and the dynamics.

One of the reasons I did this was because the novel was meandering and threatening to go off on strange tangents - and I simply don't have the time to do this. I could feel the tangents gathering, but I think they were largely being built out of fear and a slightly sick need to self-sabotage when things are going well. So I wrote the ending to remind the novel where it's supposed to end up. Anything that doesn't get me there is not necessary to the novel right now. My task over the next couple of days is to write the scenes that link this final section to the part I was writing before. Fingers crossed, it will work.

As I write, I've been thinking about cognitive dissonance, the ability of a person to usefully lie to themselves in order to get something done. I think I read it in Jonah Lehrer, but I can't remember if it was on his blog, The Frontal Cortex, or in his book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist. And I may have completely scewed the meaning in my head, but the theory I'm thinking about says that having the ability to lie to oneself about one's abilities is apparently partly responsible for the success of athletes and artists. You lie to yourself, or distance yourself, from thinking about how difficult or impossible your task is. If you're a runner, stopping to think about how difficult it will be for you to beat 25 other people to win a race basically ensures defeat. Instead, athletes practice visualization, they train hard, they get themselves into a state where they are convinced they are the fastest or the strongest or in the best shape.

The same is true about being an artist. I have to put aside the thought that this novel, which has totally consumed me for the past couple of months and on which I have spent thousands of hours over the past decade since its inception, will never have a wider audience than my immediate family, friends, and thesis reader. At times, when the writing is going well, it's easy to do. But right now I'm stuck in what a friend of mine calls the Eeyore Place of a novel under construction. It happens to just about everyone even after they've got several books published and are doing very well for themselves.

(I refer you here to Neil Gaiman's pep talk for NaNoWriMo writers:
The last novel I wrote, when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm---or even arguing with me---she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, "Oh, you're at that part of the book, are you?"

I was shocked. "You mean I've done this before?"

"You don't remember?"

"Not really."

"Oh yes," she said. "You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients."

I didn't even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.)

It happens to the best of us.

I don't have an answer about the best way to get through this Eeyore Place, just that it involves a lot of cups of tea and an almost inhuman ability to lie to myself about how good the book is even though I feel like it's total crap.

Sometimes Stories Just Do That

2010-02-07T22:18:00.000-08:00

I've begun the long continuous climb to the climax of the novel - it's all uphill from here for Matt, no more light spots, just one tough thing after another, which makes it slow going for me. As I wrote last time, I write from my body and when my characters feel things, so do I.

This morning, I sat down to write and the novel had a little surprise in store for me. The scene I'm working on is supposed to end with Matt and Ray getting arrested. Well, I'm working on it and Ray's being all remorseful and stuff, not as dark as he usually is, and then, my brain says, maybe they don't get arrested. And I think about it and think a little more.

Mostly my thinking was considering how the novel changes if this plot turn doesn't occur. If I can take it out and the novel doesn't change, then, yes, taking it out is the right decision. But, if it does change the novel significantly, than it shouldn't be taken out, the novel needs it.

I think I know what changed to bring this about. In the first draft of the novel, there's about 100 pages of what I call Matt wandering around in search of a plot, and I needed something really big to give the plot enough forward momentum to bring things to a head. With the front part of the novel now carrying more dramatic weight, I don't need this scene to be as big. A lot of the information that was in this scene has already been dealt with. But there is still a reason for the arrest, so I've decided to leave it in. Only Matt gets arrested, though, Ray escapes, and Matt's arrest is really Ray trying to save him from something else. Which I like very much. Matt sees it as betrayal, but he has to make a decision to ask Ray for help later. Actually works very nicely, I think.

Pondering the Roots of Procrastination

2010-02-03T22:17:00.000-08:00

I am completely procrastinating right now, and I have been for a couple of days, which is not a good thing when I need to have the second draft of the novel to my professor on the 16th, but there you have it. I sit down to write in the morning and think, oh, I want to write at night, then at night, oh, I'm really tired, I'll be better in the morning. I think I'm trying not to get this scene written.

Why?

Because after this, things get really bad for Matt, and he's already in so much pain. I think I may be trying to keep him from hurting. Or me. When the writing is flowing, I write from deep within my body. I feel what my characters feel. I cry when they cry, and even when they're trying very hard not to (which is what Matt's doing right now). It is as exhilarating as it is exhausting, as excruciating as it is exciting.

So I think I'm trying to postpone the inevitable - that things are going to get worse before they get better.

There may also be a little bit of fear in here that I won't do Matt justice when I write the ending, even though I have what I think will be the final paragraph already written. It's sitting at the end of the Word document, and I am simply filling in the pages in between, and it is a beautiful final image for the novel. And heartbreaking.

Anyway...I will get over this moment. I have to. There is no other option.

Two interesting things have happened this week, the way interesting things happen when I am fully engaged in writing. I'll start with the second, which happened tonight.

I was listening to Terry Gross interview Colin Firth about his role in A Single Man, and they were talking about the scene where he receives the phone call telling him his partner is dead. Firth said that his character was stoic and observing all the social protocols instead of becoming hysterical or crying because this was his way of keeping himself living in the moment before he got the phone call. If he were to start crying, that would be an acknowledgement of the death.

I realized this was why it is so important for me to have Matt not cry until the end of the novel. It has become increasingly difficult to keep him from breaking down, but I think it's important that he doesn't because he hasn't fully accepted Denny's death. As much as he wants to believe that he's accepted it, it isn't until the end that he really takes it in and lets it become real.

The other interesting thing was a bit more intense and happened at the beginning of me working on this current scene. I wrote a pretty emotional scene between Matt and his mother, Rachelle. The next scene has Matt being woken up in the early morning by his girlfriend, Monica, coming into his room. I needed to indicate it was early morning, so I had him look at the clock. The first time that popped into my head was 2:15, but that was too specific a time, so I changed it to 2:18, then thought, I wonder what verse Matthew 2:18 is.

"Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."

In the much of the first draft, Matt's mother was named 'Rachel,' but I changed it to Rachelle.

For me, the bizarre part of this is that I knew this passage because of a Peanuts comic I read years ago. It's one of the only New Testament verses I know, but I had no idea where it was in the Bible, and would not have been able to find it if I looked for it.

These things do just happen.

And now, I am off to make Matt's life awful.

The Literary Conversation

2010-01-31T11:36:00.000-08:00

I did a reading on Friday night, reading a portion of my novel to an audience for the first time. It went really, really well. Afterwards, several people complimented me on it, on my reading, and asked when the novel will be published so they can read all of it. All things considered, I'd call that a successful reading.

One person noted the similarity between my narrator's voice and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, which was gratifying to me. I hadn't set out to write in a narrative voice like Salinger's, the voice sprang into existence during a freewriting session and the very first thing it said was, "Shrink says everything's a choice, and I think he's full of it." The voice was there first, the story followed. In recent years, thinking towards needing to find a way to explain the novel in an agent query, I have been playing with billing the novel as "The Catcher in the Rye meets The Lovely Bones."

I read The Catcher in the Rye, like most American school children, in ninth grade, when I was fourteen, and have never looked at the book again until just a few weeks ago while I was on my writing retreat and wanted to read something other than my own words. Our friends had The Catcher in the Rye in their bookcase and so I opened it up. I was shocked at how much of Catcher I had assimilated into Altar, at how deep an impression Holden Caulfield seems to have made on me. I don't mean to say I have copied, or even tried to copy, Salinger's work. That's not it at all. Matt is not Holden Caulfield. I think the similarities strengthen the novel because they make it part of the literary conversation, an extension of what Salinger was doing with Holden Caulfield, which was an extension of what other writers before him had done.

All writing, all art for that matter, exists in response to what's been done before it. It exists in a conversation with the work other writers and artists have produced. It may be overt, as in the case of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses or most of Shakespeare's plays which referenced Plutarch, Chaucer, and many pre-Elizabethan stories, folktales and legends. Or it may be more subtle, taking character names or themes from previous work and combining them in new ways. This is one reason why, I think, we do ourselves a disservice when we throw the existing literary cannon out the window and stop teaching the classics in school just because the cannon was comprised mainly of Dead White Males. Instead of pitching out Shakespeare and Salinger, we should be adding the literary traditions that reflect our country's diversity. We are a Western civilization. Our culture goes back to the Greeks and Romans and Europe and our literature is a reflection of that. Now that our culture also includes Mexico, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and a multitude of other traditions and cultures, we shouldn't banish the traditional cannon in favor of these newer influences.

The cannon gives us a common frame of reference, a common conversation. Yes, there's a lot more to read now than there was in Shakespeare's time. There are many more options and fewer people are actually reading. Movies and music have become our common cultural currency.

One of the things I'm doing in my other blog, Textual Archipelago, is exploring that conversation by writing stories in response to other short stories, specifically those stories published in the Best American Short Stories of the Century. It seemed like as good a way to get a cross-section of writers as any. And it's been kind of interesting to read what was being written and published almost one hundred years ago and find a way to write a contemporary response to it.

Yes, I've given this a lot of thought. Not just since I realized how much I'd assimilated Catcher into my current novel, but because my next novel is a much more overt nod to an earlier work. Namely The Odyssey. It's also because I read and study a lot about what came before me. I'm interested in the history of literature, its various movements and the way in which contemporary literature has come to be.

It is strange to me that, given all the people at State who have read portions of Altar, this man Friday night was the first person to mention the similarities (for instance, I'd completely forgotten that Holden's older brother, D.B., was dead and that's what sets Holden off, until this man reminded me), maybe even a little distressing since it means we're losing the common thread of the literary conversation. I see this in my classes, too, my fellow students who know nothing of their literary antecedents and are not interested in it at all. Which is another soapbox I'll get on some other day. But I will just ask the question, how can you be trying to subvert the conventional forms of literature when you don't even know how those forms evolved in the first place?

This is getting pretty long, so I'll stop here, but just point you to an excellent blog entry that Neil Gaiman wrote about literary cross-pollination and how many writers work on the same ideas. It happens all the time. He loves it when his work gets borrowed in new and inventive ways for good reason. It means he's becoming part of the literary conversation and that is the surest way that your work will endure.

Here's the link to Neil's blog: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/fair-use-and-other-things.html
You have to scroll to the bottom where he starts talking about fair use and the Harry Potter trial in 2008 where JK Rowling successfully blocked the publication of an HP encyclopedia because it simply copied what she'd written in the HP books.

Scruting the Inscrutable

2010-01-22T22:23:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I got interviewed and filmed for a short documentary about the Brisbane Art Sharing Evening. I got to talk about my work and get filmed typing at my computer, but it started me thinking about writing and the creative process because, let's face it, watching a writer actually write is...well...boring. (Unless you happen to love the person very much and everything they do is fascinating to you.) It is infinitely more exciting to watch a painter paint or a sculptor sculpt or a musician make music. Writing can be boring even for those of us who do it and love it. Half the time, when I "sit" down to write, I am pacing around the room, making tea, looking out the window, making notes to myself about other parts of the story, remembering that I have to make an appointment or an errand to run and writing that down, or doing other physical acts. But, the actual sitting in the chair with a pen or typing into a computer is only a portion of the creative act of writing. Which is part of what I talked about for the film.

While it's true that there is no story if the words don't make it onto the page (a regrettable fact, I am waiting for the invention of a brain to text interface that will free me from having to physically make the words appear so I'll just have to think them and wa la! there they'll be), the moment of sitting at the desk is preceded by a lot of other stuff and followed by even more.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my novel - making notes about the characters, the plot, the imagery that I want to use, the themes I think I'm going to be working on, getting to know as much about the story I'm telling as I possibly can. I fill notebooks with this stuff.

One of the questions I got asked was about inspiration and where my ideas come from. My answer was that it's about being out in the world. I know I'm engaged with the story I'm telling because everything hits, everything tells me something about the story. For example, when I was at the cabin last week, one of the neighbors was fascinating to me. He owns a big equipment construction company and has lots of BIG toys. He was constantly doing things on his property, in his bulldozer, moving trees and earth around. It rained while I was there and he went out to regrade the road. As this was kind of distracting for me, I went out and sat on a boulder and watched him. While I was watching him, it hit me that the step-father in my novel is like this, always fixing things, trying to remake the world so it's no longer broken. He's an Iraqi war vet who lost a leg in Basra in 2004. Now he's back in Reno, married to his high school sweetheart (my narrator's mother) and trying to have the life he lost when racial pressures broke him and Rachelle apart.

The idea about him fixing things triggered me thinking about Alan's backstory in more depth, and I decided that he works as a supervisor for a call center (which I knew), but he's also getting his degree in psychology at UNR so he can help people (which I didn't until that moment on the boulder, but it fit perfectly). Thinking about this led to a line I'll use at the end of the novel where Matt says, "You tried to fix us because you thought we were broken, but we were never broken." Which is the moment I need where Alan allows Matt to head out to the desert where the climactic scene of the novel takes place. But that moment where Alan turns was really weak in my first draft, very flat.

If writing was only about sitting at my desk, I never would have had that moment on the boulder and never had the inspiration about Alan wanting to become a psychiatrist.

The actual act of writing is sometimes really difficult. I realized that writing differs from other art forms because each day, when I sit down to write, I'm writing into a void. The shape of the thing I'm creating doesn't exist yet. Yes, a painter starts with a blank canvas, a sculptor with a piece of marble. The difference is that when a painter makes a brush stroke or the sculptor makes the first cut, something exists that can be built on, shaped, refined. That something doesn't exist for me until the draft is finished. Each day, I'm creating the world of my story, the scene, new. Like these words I'm writing now. They don't exist until I think them and then type them. Staring at the blank screen or sheet of paper can be very intimidating because it's a void in which nothing exists until I put it there.

After the physical act of writing, comes rewriting, revising and editing. The second draft I'm working on right now, although it's the same story, has mostly different words. I'm estimating that, out of the 80,000+ words in the first draft, only 25,000 will remain when I'm done with the second. Some of the scenes will be the same, but the way they're written isn't. Periodically, as I write, I print out and edit what I've done, which is where shading happens, where I make my choices at the word level, finding those words that do more than just tell you what happened, they tell you about the person who did the action, the story, are specific to this particular world.

It's the difference between writing that someone signs papers and writing that she holds the pen so tightly, the bones and veins stand out on the back of her hand while she signs the papers that give her uncle control of her father's farm.

Those moments of shading are where the theme of the novel becomes clearest. Those are the details that carry the greatest weight because they are so specific to the story and paint the most vivid images in the reader's mind.

The writing process is so amazing to me. And it's also so amazing to me how much I am learning about it as I write this novel. In some ways, this exploration of process is as compelling to me as the story I'm telling and is part of what keeps me coming back to the page.

Still Life With Children

2010-01-07T22:38:00.000-08:00

It is a delicate balance, the balance between being a parent and being an artist. I'm adding this post just after saying good-night and good-bye to my older child who will have left for school tomorrow morning before I wake up.

There is always a part of myself that longs for the kind of unlimited freedom I will be experiencing for the next week, for that unfettered, uncluttered ability to descend, body and soul, heart and mind, into the world of my writing, and that wants to have that kind of freedom all the time. A fellow MFA student at State was given a three month residency at MacDowell. Three months at MacDowell sounds like absolute heaven.

I envy her, but I can not imagine being able to do that. Not that my family wouldn't support me in it, but I can not imagine not seeing my kids for three months, not seeing my husband, not seeing my dog. But especially my kids. In three months, their lives could change completely. As maddening as it is to juggle the disparate demands on my attention, time, and energy, it is what I have to work with. And by my own choice. I freely admit that.

I have my dark moments. Those times when I think about what could have been if I did not have kids, if I had not met my husband, if it could have been only my needs I was dealing with on a daily basis. Those times I think I would not be working on what will be called my first novel, if it gets published (fingers crossed, knock on wood), but my fifth or even sixth by this point. Those times I think about where I could be instead of where I am.

I once heard Joyce Carol Oates say she would not have been able to write as much as she did if she had had children. I totally agree with her. And there are dark moments when I think, yeah, I could be Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood if I hadn't had children.

So I go, and I have my week, and I think, wow, three months would be amazing. Think what I could accomplish with three months of this. Think what I could experience. Think what I could write.

But then again, think what I would miss. John Lennon once said life is what happens while you're making other plans. And what I want to be writing about most of all, is life. Real life. With children. And spouses. And dogs.

Howling at the Moon

2010-01-07T22:17:00.000-08:00

I am about to head off for at least a week of uninterrupted writing time courtesy of some very generous friends who have given me the use of their cabin. Just thinking about it makes me giddy. A week to be alone with my characters, to live within my story without needing to surface for grocery shopping, forgotten homework, doctor's appointments, even phone calls. There will be no TV, no Internet,and very limited cell service. The closest town is 30 miles away and the road to get the main road is down several miles of dirt road. Once there, I am there. And it's just me and everybody currently living in my head.

Believe me, this is a writer's idea of heaven.

It's seldom that I get the chance to live so completely within my story and it is a wonderful gift. My goal is to come back home with the second draft of my novel finished. And I'm so ready to be finished, let me tell you.

So, there will be no new blog posts for a bit, but when I return, watch out.

Scuba Diving

2009-12-29T21:21:00.000-08:00

Opened up Choice tonight for the first time in what seems like ages. I've been noddling through this one scene that wasn't working and figured out how to fix it. So, done. But then what to do? The fear set in, the panic - I've lost Matt's voice! The thing I've been dreading the most has finally happened!

So I panicked at the page for a bit. Panicked into my journal for a bit longer.

Then remembered...

I've been here before.

It's a little like what I imagine scuba diving is like. Letting yourself slowly submerge. Letting yourself float. Letting your body and mind forget that you live on land, that you're not an ocean creature and you are totally out of your element. Okay, I imagine it's a little like what I would feel like if I ever scuba dived (scuba dove?).

But I remembered...

I've been here before, and it's just a matter of relearning (again) to let my conscious brain have its panic attack and let my writer brain get on with the business of writing the novel.

Musings on Mediums (not to mention Smalls and Larges)

2009-12-28T16:38:00.000-08:00

Betcha couldn't get enough of that stale blog I've been feeding you for the past couple of weeks, huh? Sorry. Holidays and all, you know? And nothing much has been happening, either. So it didn't seem worthwhile to fire up the blog just to sit starting at a blank post screen.

To catch you up - I did a couple of end-of-semester readings that went pretty well. Missed one of them due to having no voice, and was still hoarse for the other two, but, all in all, they went well. I always love reading my work.

And then the semester ended, and I let myself take it easy. Got ready for my younger son's birthday party (overnight gaming party at our house - big hit, plus we excavated the downstairs so it's a usable part of the house again), did the Chanukah thing (dog loved it - this is her holiday - by the second night, she had the pattern of candles and then presents down and was heading up the stairs to choose her present as soon as I started putting candles in the menorah), and then laid low for a bit. My grades came in and I'm finishing up my course work with a 4.0, which, to put it mildly, thrills me to no end.

I haven't written a lot over the past couple of weeks - I did a bit of noodling, but nothing substantial. I had a section that wasn't working right, so I just let it sit. Read Wolf Hall, the Booker Prize winner by Hilary Mantel, along with a couple of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics (calling them comics is like saying Leonardo Di Vinci drew pictures, they're definitely graphic novels). The novel germinated. Finally figured out what I'm going to do with it yesterday, which is good because I will be doing a week-long writing retreat starting on the 4th, and I'd hate to be spending all of it thinking about what to do next.

I broke out the paints today so I could work on our New Year's cards, something I haven't done since my residency ended. What I like about painting is that I get to see the result of what I've done almost instantaneously. I can see the whole piece, see what my changes have done to it, make corrections, and gauge their effectiveness immediately.

It's very different when I'm writing. Like the past couple of weeks while I sat here knowing something wasn't working and trying to figure out what I needed to do - because I couldn't see exactly what wasn't working. It's not like looking at a painting and seeing the shape of an object isn't right or the proportions aren't working or the color of blue in the shadows is at odds with the rest of the painting's palette. This is more of gut feeling that it isn't working or falling short of what I want the scene to do. And knowing how to fix it is much different than looking at an object and what's on the canvas and seeing that the handle isn't round enough. I know. Painting also involves gut reactions to what's in front of the artist - knowing where to put the extra line that's so subtle only the artist knows what's been added, but everyone who looks at it says, "ah, yes." Every art form has its intuitive process. I'm not claiming a special level of artist's hell for writers. We all go through it.

But...when you are dealing with an object you can not absorb in one moment, you're dealing with a slightly different animal. The novel is difficult precisely for this reason - I think it's more akin to making a full length movie, with its multiple moving parts that must be kept in mind and under control and contained within consumable parameters, than any other art form. Even a full length play can be assessed in one sitting. There are very few people who can read an entire novel in a few hours and absorb it in the degree of detail necessary to remember everything. And when something isn't working, it's difficult to diagnose for precisely this reason - you can't keep everything in your head for the length of time it takes to read through it. For example, Wolf Hall, which is 530 pages long, took me over a week to read it. Imagine being the writer who has to remember that on the tenth page of the novel there's an image that you want to come back to in 400 pages, and then you get to the 400th page and think, hm, there's something missing here, what was it? Oh, it was the image of the dying dog. That's right. You don't have a blank spot on a canvas to remind you that you wanted to put something in just that place.

Anyway...it's nice to have another medium to work in, sometimes, to exercise different creative muscles and remember that, even though I can't see all of my novel at one time, at least I do not have to risk destroying my work every time I pick up a brush. I have multiple copies of my novel, copies of scenes that have been deleted in both data and hard copy forms. If I delete something, I can always retrieve it. Unlike the painter who, while trying to correct the shape of that handle, discovers that it looked better the first way and can't, no matter how many attempts are made, get back to it.

Incidentally, the photo accompanying this post is from the spring of 1986 when I was in London. I loved this guy, I even bought his pamphlet after I took the picture and had it for a long time (it's one of those objects that appears and disappears at intervals. I haven't seen it for many years now, but I'm sure I will find it eventually). The "Less Lust" man would appear all over London. It gave me a great deal of pleasure, when I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, to discover that Neil had seen him, too, and recorded him in text.

Waxing Poetic about Reading

2009-12-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

I gave the last of my scheduled readings last night in the Poetry Center at San Francisco State. After having no voice for most of the past week, it was a relief that it returned enough that I was able to do a good job because the audience was fairly large and my spouse and kids were able to attend this one.

I have to say, I LOVE reading my work. Absolutely love it. Actually, I love reading. Anything. I would read the phone book in front of an audience if someone asked me to do so. Seriously, if anyone needs a reader, call me, I'm available.

I know a lot of writers who hate readings and, while I can sympathize, I don't really understand it. Yes, I understand the nerves and the anxiety about standing up in front of an audience. I felt them last night. This was a new audience for me, filled with a host of unknown faces, professors, classmates and even students I had taught as a TA a few semesters ago. I wanted to do well. I wanted to show off. I wanted to WOW them all. Even with the laryngitis, I did pretty well. People laughed in the right places (including one that, though it always gets the biggest laugh, I swear, I don't quite understand why it's so funny to people) and stayed with me to the end. I can tell when the audience is with me. There's a special electricity, a feeling of connection with the audience, that is incredible. I love it, it gives an extra bounce of animation to my voice.

I find reading my work to be valuable for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it gets me out there, lets people know who I am, what my work is like, and, hopefully, helps build me build an audience. But it's also a valuable part of the creative process for me. The time limit imposed by most readings has helped me cut and edit and hone several stories, made them razor sharp. I also listen to places where I change wording as I'm reading, listening for the flow of my words. As I rehearse pieces and as I read in public, I'm paying attention to the cadence and rhythm of the writing in a way that's different from how I hear it in my head. I tend to read my work out loud before I begin rewriting or editting anyway, so this is just a continuation of that process. And then there's the immediacy of the feedback. Writing is an artform that usually takes place at quite a distance from its audience, usually in private, and the writer rarely, if ever, gets to hear or see how the work is received. A public reading is different. The audience is right there in front of you, you can see and hear how the words are received. You can feel when the audience is with you and when they drift away. That instant feedback is valuable information for any writer.

So...if you are a writer and you dread reading, how do you get comfortable with it?

Above all, practice, practice, practice.

Way back in the misty reaches of time, when I was trying to be a good corporate worker, I spent seven years honing my speaking skills in Toastmasters. It was an incredible learning ground for becoming comfortable in front of an audience. The main thing to remember about being in front of an audience is that really, they're on your side, they want you to be fantastic.

I also had another phenomenal learning ground, though I didn't realize it at the time. I spent at least five years reading the Harry Potter books out loud to my kids for bedtime stories. I've read the entire series out loud at least twice, once to each child. That was five years of practicing reading out loud every night for five years.

For a specific reading, I practice reading the pieces I'll present over and over again. Last night I presented two short pieces, one of which I'd never read out loud before and, because of the laryngitis, I didn't practice that much before hand. I could tell. Practicing your own work does a couple of things - it helps you get into the rhythm of the piece so you're more comfortable when you get up in front of the audience, but it also makes it so you know where you are on the page. I had to keep putting my finger on the lines so that I didn't lose my place last night, which makes it harder to use my body to give added emphasis to certain lines.

Practicing the piece also means that you can lift your eyes from the page and make eye contact with your audience. Guess what? That means you're connecting with them, you pull them in more because it seems like you're speaking to them. And, because you know the piece so well, you don't have to worry about finding where you were or forgetting the next line.

If you don't like to make eye contact, and I don't, here's a Toastmasters trick. Look at the top of the person's right ear. The ear is at the same level as the eyes and people in the audience can't tell the difference when you're looking at them, the focal point is so broad at a distance, it doesn't matter. I'll make "eye contact" even when the audience is sitting in the dark and are just gray balls out there because I think it helps keep them connected.

Above all, when you give a reading, speak up. Take pride in the words you wrote. This is my biggest pet peeve at readings. Writers who mumble, rush through their work, don't let the words have the weight and magnificence they deserve. Make sure you breathe from your belly while you read - it makes a difference. I always try to use my chest voice as well, it's deeper, carries further, and has a resonance that my thin, high head voice doesn't have. It sounds much more confident, too. Speak slowly, carefully, and show the audience that you care about the work - it helps them care about it, too.

One of my professors this semester, Anne Galjour, offered great advice for reading. The nouns carry the information of the piece, but the verbs carry the emotions. When you read, put the emphasis on the verbs.

And, seriously, if anyone out there wants me to read, give me a call.

On the Validity of Subjective Experience

2009-11-18T12:26:00.001-08:00

I posted my essay on why I write yesterday, and in it, I mention that I had had a horrible writing day. It really was. I have the tail-end of migraine, which makes me feel as if my brain is burning from the inside out and always makes me feel slightly out of focus and disorganized.

While I was writing, I kept thinking I had completely lost the voice of the novel, that I'd been reading too much of other people's fiction (I tend to read non-fiction when I'm actively writing) and their voices were coming through. The scene felt stilted, dead, and would probably have to be scrapped.

Reading through it yesterday before I took the pages to my professor, I realized it wasn't that horrible after all and then, today, rereading in preparation for moving forward in the novel, I'm thinking it's actually really, really good. Very strong. The voice is still there and the scene (which I'd cut mercilessly from the first draft and moved to a different place) works better in this stripped down version than it did in the longer one.

So I am actually a terrible judge of my own work in the highly subjective moment of its creation and this reminded me that the EXPERIENCE of the writing is completely separate from the QUALITY of the work. Reading through the novel, I can not find places where I say, "Oh, yeah, that was a really good writing day and it shows in the text." Nor can I find evidence of the opposite.

A workshop leader many, many years ago offered this advice: Write hot, edit cold. Which is very valuable advice, and probably why most writers put their work to the side for a bit (days, weeks, months) before going back to it and beginning to edit and revise.

I know this is another lesson I keep remembering and forgetting and relearning. But it's the main reason why you can't wait for inspiration to hit, you can't wait for the muse to descend and that perfect writing day to happen. You've got to be writing all the time, every day. Rain or shine. Because, in the end, good day or bad, it doesn't show up in the text. And thank goodness for that.

Why I Write

2009-11-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

I had to write an essay about why I write for a scholarship for a writers' conference. When I first read the question, I was totally uninspired, but then, I had a lousy day writing yesterday and found this:

I write because there are days when the writing flows. My fingers fly and words fall into place creating layers of meaning far beyond my original invention. This was not one of those days. This was a day when my course work reached critical mass and the stories I have been assigned clogged my brain until I didn’t know if I was writing my own story or channeling Lorrie Moore. My novel plods along and each word choice seems uninspired, dialogue languishes without subtext, and it seems unlikely I will be able to get my professor the required number of pages by tomorrow evening. The jig is up. It is clear. I don’t know what I’m doing.

It seems an odd day to pick up my pen and ponder the question of why I write. Today, were I to have come across one of those enthusiastic strangers who say, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” I would have looked him or her in the eye and said, “Really? Trade you.” Because the truth is, there are more days where I’m likely to sit in front of the computer and find making tea or brushing the dog more interesting than my characters, a trip to the grocery store of more pressing necessity than getting my protagonist to speak to his estranged father. And yet, more often than not, I am sitting in my chair, day after day, asking myself, what happens next? What does that handprint really mean? What aren’t my characters willing to say to each other?

Established writers often tell those of us struggling for our first publication and contemplating eating Ramen noodles for the rest of our lives, if you can do anything else, and feel satisfied doing it, do it. Because if you can walk away from your characters, if stories are not pressing themselves against the gray matter of your brain until you think they will come out your ears if you do not write them down, if you can make yourself stop listening to the woman on the bus who says, “It’s a bad thing to die of, but I have that effect on people,” and inventing a dozen stories by the time she gets off at the next stop, then you may have what it takes not to be a writer.

I have friends who stopped writing and have satisfying lives, and, to some extent, I envy them. My life would be easier if I could stop, but I can’t. I don’t know why I write, I only know something is missing when I don’t. I simply don’t feel like I fit and nothing in my life works correctly. Even on days like today, when the words I am putting words on paper appear to be the wrong ones, I am connected to the world in a way that is deeper and more secure than anything else I have ever done.

And, then, today, the writing went very well. Plus I read over what I wrote yesterday, when it seemed to be going so horribly, and it wasn't bad at all. And, even though I was convinced I had lost the voice of the novel, I hadn't. Which all goes to show, I am the worst judge of my work while I'm actually doing it.

Another lesson to tuck under my hat where I'll probably end up forgetting about it next time I'm faced with a horrid day of writing and convinced everything is just dreck.