What is Good Writing?

This week I had the (always) frustrating activity of helping one of my sons pick a book for a book report. His school uses the Accelerated Reader program which, no offense, I detest with a passion. It's not that I don't think AR is worthwhile - it is to the extent that it helps the teachers steer the kids who are not proficient readers toward books that may be more challenging than they might otherwise read and it lets them easily track how much their students are reading. But my issue with AR has always been trying to find books that challenge an extremely proficient reader that are also on the AR list and eligible to be used for book reports (and don't even get me started on what it's like to find historical fiction for a boy who reads at the 12th grade level that is both interesting to him and on the AR list).

Our issue this week was finding a science fiction book for him to read. The only books that AR had listed at the 8th grade and up level his teacher wanted him to read were those in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey series and Alan Dean Foster, neither choice thrilled me having read both. The book I thought he would enjoy, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was, alas, rated at 5.2. And here is where I really take issue with AR. It's rankings are based on the length of the book and the difficulty of the vocabulary, not the complexity of issues in the book. So books by Bradbury, George Orwell and, believe it or not, Shakespeare (who wrote plays, yes, I know) are ranked below those of the Series of Unfortunately Events by Lemony Snickett. Again, please, I'm not disparaging. Really, I'm not. But when Hamlet is ranked lower than the first book in the SUE series, something is wrong. Fortunately, the teacher agreed with me and my son will be reading Fahrenheit 451. In fact, he'd already started and really loves it. But then, this is a kid I read Kafka's The Metamorphosis to as a bedtime story when he was in 2nd grade because he asked me to after I told him it was about a guy turning into a cockroach. He loved it and he understood it, too.

But here's what I really want to get at, the thing that AR misses. Books do not have to be long or contain complex vocabulary to be good. The best writing is clear and concise. The best writers are those who can take complex ideas and explain them in the simplest of ways so that the most people can understand them. (Shakespeare is complex only because we don't speak like they did in Elizabethan England, but, once you get beyond the changes in the language, you realize he's actually making quite clear some of the greatest mysteries of the human heart. Ideas that are so universal, we understand them at once.)

It's always subjective (which is the element the AR ratings are trying to get beyond - those questions of good writing versus bad). Is it bad writing because it doesn't appeal to a wide audience? Or does that mean that it's ideas are so elevated only a few people can (or should be able to) understand them? It's Ray Bradbury (who always wrote at a 6th grade level) vs. Arthur C. Clarke. All I know is when Richard Feynman talks, I understand physics because he's able to express those complex ideas in ways that are comprehensible.

Which is what I think my job is as a writer. I am supposed to make complex ideas accessible. It is my job to communicate to my readers what it feels like to be inside another person's head, another person's heart, and make them understand that person from the inside out. I think there is no territory so foreign as another person's heart. Make that comprehensible to another human being, make a reader feel as if he or she is not alone because someone else knows how it feels to be inside this skin, make it accessible and real, and that's what good writing is all about. Good writing takes the specific and expresses in a way that it becomes universal. Shakespeare knew that. That's why we can relate to a Danish prince or an English king or a pair of teenage lovers in Verona and feel as if they speak to us. It is my job to be human and to write about what it means to be this human in this particular skin in this particular time and place as clearly and simply as I know how so you, the reader, can understand it, so you can feel it, so you can live it, so, after you're done with my book, you understand a little more about the world than when you started reading. That's my job. And when I succeed, that's good writing.

The Story So Far

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

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

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 than Anticipated, Your Patience is Appreciated

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

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

(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.