The Liebster Award

Wow, my good friend Susan Woodring -- who is totally biased and so very encouraging to me -- has awarded 50 shimmering pages the Liebster Award! How nice you are. Thank you :)

This award is actually pretty cool. It's designed to bring new readers to small blogs like this one, with fewer than 200 followers. The best part is I get to bestow the award on five of my own favorite blogs, which is really tough because I have many favorites. Blogging has really become its own interesting art form. That said, I'm thrilled to tell you which blogs I visit most often (some of which may have more than 200 followers -- I'm not sure??). But they're great blogs, and I encourage you to visit them.

First, I'm supposed to tell you stuff you don't know about me. I don't know why you'd care about any of this, but I'll try to make it as interesting as possible. This is why I write fiction, after all, and not memoir.

Here goes:

1. My love for writing might've been sparked by a love for school supplies. My aunt Jane owned a school supply shop, and whenever we visited her, she loaded me up with fat crayons, gold star stickers, wide-ruled paper, and Elmer's glue. I liked the other glue better, the rubber glue with the brush inside the lid, and she gave me that, too.

2. The first thing I attempted to write was a play about Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad. I was in the fifth grade, and I had a teacher who set my mind on fire with stories. She read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh aloud to us each week, and I couldn't wait for that next 30-minute reading. I dreamed about those field mice day and night for the whole year. In her class, we also watched a TV program on PBS where an artist illustrated a story as it was being told. I can't remember the name of the program now, but I loved it so. I began lurking around in the school library, self-consciously poking around in the stacks for Hardy Boys books. I liked Nancy Drew, too, but I think I preferred the boys. I liked books about magic, too. I still like books about magic and mystery. My first success at writing was a poem I wrote in the 7th or 8th grade. It was about Christmas, and it was rhyme-y and awful, but it established me as the family writer even though I didn't actually attempt to write again until I was in college. Mostly, it got me thinking wrong-headed about writing. It became another way to show-off. But I was better at other things that garnered me lots of attention so I put writing away until I could get really good at it. Then I forgot about it.

3. I was the kind of kid who preferred hanging out with adults. They always had stories to swap. I loved it when relatives would come and everyone would try to out-tell the other. The stories were rich in those weekend-long storytelling marathons. Usually, though, I found myself with one adult at a time. I was often a helper of some kind. I helped my mom clean the house and string green beans on occasion. I helped her clean the pool we had later when I was in high school. Helped her in the big garden she maintained. I fetched wrenches and small tools for my dad and helped him sort things in his shed. I went with him to flea markets and served as his assistant, fetching sausage biscuits and coffee or holding down his booth when he needed to hit the jon and check out the competition on his way back. When I was really young, I would clamber up the steep hillside to my granny's house and help her water all the flowers in her yard. I loved to bring in the coal in the cute black pail that set beside the stove. I liked to sweep up around the stove with the tiny broom reserved for that purpose. It was not the tidiest house, nothing like my mom's. And I especially loved opening the stove and running the grate back and forth with the end of a poker until all the ash settled down and I could either scoop out all the old ash with a little square-headed shovel (I was meticulous in this work) or add new coal to the fire. I loved working with that stove. I also made instant coffee for anyone who wanted it and carried it to them, sneaking sips that would eventually turn into a full-blown caffeine addiction by the time I was ten or eleven. Being the helper made me more or less invisible to adults. I could watch them without their knowing about it.

4. The first manuscript I ever saw belonged to my baby sister. She was in middle school, I think -- maybe she was a freshman in high school -- when she began to read Harlequin Teen romances at a staggering speed. I had forgotten about writing altogether, but here she was secretly writing her own novel. I don't remember how I found it or if she let me read it. But I remember being jealous and proud at the same time. Here she had done this thing, my baby sister, all on her own, in private. I wanted to be just like her.

5. Every now and again, I would hear about a speech writing contest -- I guess this was in high school -- and I wanted to enter it, but I didn't know how. I didn't know the first thing about writing a speech, and besides, I didn't like the idea of having to stand up and deliver it. I sort of did like that idea, actually -- if I was any good at it, I would get a lot of attention -- but I was afraid. I don't want to blame my teachers, but I wish someone had read my mind and encouraged me. I wish, too, that someone had taught me then -- right then -- that writing is not about perfectionism, A+ papers and shiny gold stars. It has taken me decades to come to this knowledge on my own.

Now it's my turn to share five of my favorite (liebster) blogs. Check these out, and don't forget to visit Susan Woodring's wonderful blog, The Habitual Writer. Thanks again, Susan, for nominating 50 shimmering pages.


Okay, here they are. My top 5 favorite blogs!! Enjoy.

1. Katrina Denza
2. Livia Blackburne: A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
3. Jeff Goins, Writer
4. Home of Baggot, Asher, & Bode
5. Write it Sideways

Looking for a Hero: The Call to Adventure

In the second stage of the hero's journey, the Ordinary World is threatened or disrupted in some way that requires a hero to step forward and embark upon a journey that in the end will restore order.

A monster is threatening the town. A damsel is in distress.

The problem is identified and with it a goal to reverse the problem. The One ring must be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Other key players are introduced, including a messenger. The messenger may be someone from within the Ordinary World or outside it, but it's his job to explain to the hero that she is the only one who can go off and set things right again. Though the protagonist is often an underdog and the least likely to pull off any kind of heroic endeavor, the messenger is certain: There is no one else who will volunteer, or if there is, there is no one else as well-suited and equipped as the protagonist to undergo a journey such as this.

Often, the hero is already drawn to the Special World because her chief wish is related in some way to this place. Though she resists it (fears it), her destiny is tied to the Special World, and so she must answer the call and embark upon the journey.

In his novel Winter's Bone, author Daniel Woodrell treats the call to adventure a little differently. His protagonist, Ree Dolly, is a 17-year-old girl whose father, a meth cooker, has jumped bail. The sherrif shows up to explain to Ree that unless her father turns up in court when he's supposed to, their house and land will be handed over to the bondsman who stood good for her father's bail. No one can find him, but Ree tells the sherrif she will do it. (She volunteers for the call to adventure, whereas most heroes refuse the call, at least initially.)

The hero's journey isn't a formula guaranteed to produce something artful. You can't punch in A x B and get C. That's certainly not what I'm looking for anyway. I doubt you are either. It's a pattern of life as it already exists. Joseph Campbell merely pointed it out, said 'Hey, look what we've been doing. Look at our stories, the way we tell them.' Plotting feels so unnatural to some of us, but it's part of our craft. We're obligated to understand how art works. The beautiful thing about the hero's journey is you don't see it lying on top of stories. Sometimes you do. There are stories that are obviously constructed around the journey myth. But there are plenty of others that don't show their neckbolts quite so apparently. Art is artifice. There's no way around that. We are cobbling things together. But if we're good enough, we can go back and hide the ugly stitches. We can do what really great actors do, and that is we can make an audience forget we're there or that the whole thing is make-believe. Or else we can inhabit a story so completely that a reader doesn't care. This is what Daniel Woodrell has done. It's what Faulkner did and Nabokov and Tolstoy and Salinger and almost every writer you can name.

So stage 2: someone or some thing tells the protagonist to man up, to get to getting. It's scary as hell (sort of like writing a novel), but it must be done. And there's only one person who can do it. You.

Getting Started: Creating the Ordinary World

In my last blog post, I outlined 12 stages I intend to focus on as I complete the draft of my first novel. My goal is to write 12 chapters, one each month. To accomplish this, I am following the mythic structure of the Hero's Journey as identified and made famous by Joseph Campbell. My plot structure is a simple one cobbled together using Linda George's wonderful little book called Fill-n-the-Blank Plotting, which marries Joseph Campbell's hero's journey with the three-act structure. George suggests creating two storyboards, one to track the hero's journey and one to outline the three-act structure. All I've done here is mesh the two into one storyboard. See my earlier blog post "12 Chapters in 12 Months: Or How I Will Write a Novel this Year."

So my objective for January is to write the first chapter. Since I have already written 10 chapters to my novel, I am going to work on two fronts simultaneously. I'm going to push on through toward the long middle section of my novel and then on toward the end. At the same time, I am going to do some soft revising on the first section, which I wrote last fall. As I gently comb back through the book, I will be looking specifically to see how much of the hero's journey I have or haven't included in my story. Joseph Campbell identified a pattern that many stories follow, a shape or structure that he referred to as the hero's journey. This mythic structure, he said, can be seen in stories from every culture in every period of time all over the world, and embodies universal truths about the human condition.
My chief goal for chapter one is to introduce my protagonist and to show her life in the ordinary world she occupies. The purpose of the Ordinary World is to orient my reader in time and space, a place that will soon be contrasted sharply with a Special World. A world she will soon enter as she embarks upon a quest of some kind.

But first, the Ordinary World.

The ordinary world is home, whatever that may be. It may be a good home or a bad home, but it's always a place of normalcy for the protagonist. What's normal for one may not be normal for another, but whatever it looks like, it is life as usual for the hero. Though there may be dangers present, the Ordinary World is relatively safe for the protagonist. And even though it may at times be difficult, life in the Ordinary World is reasonably comfortable.

And yet, it has its problems. One of which seems to dominate the hero's life in some way. This is the obstacle that must be overcome.

Often, the hero will seek refuge from the problem by escaping into a fantasy life of some kind. He or she may long for an adventure. He may daydream or escape the Ordinary World in books, movies, games (or in some other fashion).

Once the Ordinary World is introduced, the hero unwittingly catches a glimpse of another world, a Special World that has been hidden from her until now. This is the world she is about to enter, though she does not know it at the time.

____

And that's it for Chapter One. Our goal is to introduce the protagonist, living her life as usual in the ordinary world, and to allow her to accidentally catch a glimpse of the special world, a world she may be dreaming of though she doesn't realize it.

12 Chapters in 12 Months, or How I Will Write a Novel This Year!

Last October I made a lot of progress on my novel when I went away to Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines for 10 days to write in seclusion. After months and months of talking about writing, blogging about writing, thinking about writing, planning how to write ... I actually locked myself up and wrote and wrote and wrote. 80 PAGES in one long dizzying stretch!! And it felt wonderful. But here's the thing: I haven't written a single word on my novel since. Not one.

I'm good for a short period of time. A few days or a week is something I can manage. But the day-in day-out thing is overwhelming. A year? Two? Three?! How does anyone ever press through something that big?

I'm inspired by my friend Karen, who has been working diligently on her own novel for a good while now. I've watched her take on one chapter after another as if each one were an entire book. "The way to eat an elephant," she is always reminding me, "is one bite at a time."

Because my New Year's resolutions are already mushrooming (I want to learn to cook, to become a recycler, to run a 5k) I am going to make this as simple, simple, simple as I possibly can. My ONLY GOAL this whole year is to write ONE CHAPTER A MONTH. Period. Nothing else. 12 Chapters in 12 Months. And though it will be the ugliest, little premature novel born this year ... it will arrive on or before December 31, 2012.

So here's the plan, which I will elaborate on each month and blog about here so you can follow along if you would like to join me:

ACT I – 25%

Jan / Ch. 1           Conflict introduced          (Ordinary world)

Feb / Ch. 2          Goal identified                  (Call to adventure)

Mar / Ch. 3          Characters equipped      (Refusal of the call) 

ACT II – 50%

Apr / Ch. 4           Quest begins                    (Meeting the mentor)

May / Ch. 5         Rounding up help            (Crossing the threshold)

Jun /Ch. 6            Obstacles                          (Tests, Allies, & Enemies)

Jul / Ch. 7             Confronts enemy            (Approach to the inmost cave)

Aug /Ch. 8           Black moment                  (Ordeal)

Sep / Ch. 9          Apparent victory              (Reward)

Oct / Ch. 10         Betrayed                           (The road back)   

ACT III – 25%

Nov / Ch. 11       Showdown/climax            (Resurrection)

Dec / Ch. 12        Resolution                          (Return with elixir)

There you have it: the simplest plot ever in the simplest language. Remember that we are only planning and writing the central storyline. If a subplot emerges, we'll deal with that in another way later on. For now, I'm thinking we'll take good notes on index cards and let them simmer in our pretty pink timeline box (see "Timelines & Storyboards"). But we'll get right back to the main storyline as quickly as possible. No points will be given for anything except our 12 basic chapters. No extra credit will be given either, so don't even ask. This way, we shouldn't be tempted to stray too far from our monthly writing schedule.

Speaking of the schedule, there is none. Write as often as you want, or write in one long stretch like I will probably do. Sit for 5 hours a day, or go for 15 minutes here and there. Write 500 words every morning or 10 pages a week. I don't care. All that matters is that you hand over that chapter at the end of every s-i-n-g-l-e month.

Looking at it this way, like 12 little assignments rather than one gargantuan burden, might be just the solution those of us too terrified to really tackle a novel head-on need. If we break it down into bite-sized portions, we can eat an elephant this year. Bon appetit!

Why Voice Speaks to Us

Voice is one of the most important narrative devices to compelling storytelling. Voice is what draws us in, and also what holds us, even when plot may be failing us as readers.

More than the other narrative devices, voice elicits an aesthetic response because it is more immediately registered through the senses. Plot, characterization, point-of-view are filtered through the intellect. Voice is the closest thing we have for casting spells, for luring readers (and ourselves) into our dreams.

But what exactly is voice? In talking about writing, the term "voice" is used to mean many things. Sometimes we're talking about the voices of our characters. Other times we're talking about the voice of our narrator or storyteller. Still other times we're talking about our own voice, our "writer's voice."

It's the latter one we usually find most difficult to pin down. How do we know if we have one, a distinctive voice that separates us from other writers? What if we don't? Can we develop one? Do we even need to worry about it?

Listen to Frank McCourt in the video below. It isn't just his wonderful accent, which we can audibly hear when he's reading aloud to us. Pay attention to the words he uses, and you actually begin to hear that lovely, hypnotic Irish accent, that voice, even if you're reading it from the page, which is all any reader ever has. This is a spell-casting voice, a voice that pulls you into the writer's dream.



When I'm writing, I HEAR before I SEE. Maybe you do, too. Some people get an image, a glimpse of something, a visible object that pulls them into their stories. This rarely happens to me. I hear voices long before I can see objects around my characters. Unless a voice names an object while it's speaking, it requires a deliberate act on my part to go back and describe things, to flesh things out. What comes first, without too much bidding, are voices.

Maybe it's because my favorite pasttime as a child was to sit under the feet of the adults in my family and listen to them tell stories. I grew up surrounded by great storytellers, all of them colorful and animated. I seem to be the only one who has never been able to tell a good story. That wasn't my role. I was appointed the listener. And I'm still the listener. Ask me to speak, and I make a mess of a good story. When I write something that seems to be working, when I'm not forcing too much, it isn't me at all who speaks but someone else entirely, someone separate from me. I love the video Katrina Denza recently posted on her blog where Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this very thing. The voices we hear, the images we see come from a source outside of us. Go check it out.

Here are some thoughts on what voice is and where it comes from:

First, what is it?

Voice is that "tribal narrator" E.M. Forster refers to in Aspects of the Novel, which I wrote about in an earlier post. The writer's job, Forster says, is to "transform the reader into a listener to whom a voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones."

This is exactly what happens to the writer as well, BEFORE it happens to the reader. This spell of the tribal narrator is cast first upon the writer, sitting at her desk, eyes staring through the monitor in front of her as she listens to a voice, not her own, who begins telling a story.

This voice of the tribal narrator may be the same voice that appears again and again, recurring in one story we write after the other as a means of understanding what John Gardner calls "[our] tics and oddities, so that [w]e can present them to [our readers] by conscious art." These writers, Gardner tells us in On Becoming a Novelist, "write from a bold idiosyncratic vision." And maybe also we could add, from a bold idiosyncratic voice.

Or maybe we've noted that our work doesn't seem to have one recurring distinctive voice. I think when we speak of writers "having a voice," what we mean is we recognize a voice pattern in their work. If we don't have a clear voice pattern, it doesn't mean necessarily that we don't have a voice. Every successful story we write yields authentic character voices and also a compelling narrative voice. If they didn't, we couldn't count those stories as successes, could we? Because we don't have a signature voice pattern across our work may only mean that we have many voices, that we are the kind of writer John Gardner might consider of the higher order, those who "move like a daemon from one body -- one character -- to another. Rather than master the tics and oddities of his own being and learn how to present them in an appealing way," Gardner says, "he must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human -- and inhuman -- point of view." In essence, he must speak for everyone and everything.

So where does voice come from?

Our voices, they say, are as distinctive as our thumbprints. None of us sounds like anyone else. We may share certain characteristics with others, but what we say and how we say it are based on all the qualities that make us unique beings. When a voice stands out to us in literature, it's often because the speaker comes from a distinct place and he transports us to that place and shows us a world we may or may not know.

Place plays a critical role in who our tribal narrators are or will become. Place, perhaps more than anything else, affects not just how we speak -- what we say and how we say it -- but whether or not we say anything at all. What we don't say. Place is not only about landscape but also about culture, for we know that landscape determines culture. Sometimes my own tribal narrator says "Mama." Other times it says "Mommy." Yours may say "Mother" or "Mum" or "Ma" or "Madre" or "Meuter," or "Ma'am," as Frank McCourt's storyteller does.

Time is also important to voice. Except for the voice of God, no voice exists outside of time and place. The specific details of any particular time and place will yield a very particular voice.

Finally, what I think of as mood is also closely tied to voice. Some may call it style, but mood is the resulting effect of style, I think. What kind of trance does the voice cast over you when you read? What mood does it conjure? Here's where exposition, narrative summary, comes to play. What is being described, and how is it being described? What kinds of metaphors are used? What thoughts are revealed? What particular words have been selected? How long are the sentences, and what effect does their length have on the story's mood? What connotations are being made? What allusions?

Point-of-view is not so much a determining factor of voice, I think. A writer can use any POV, even the omniscient viewpoint, and still maintain a consistent voice across his work because the particulars of time, place, and mood will still work, if the author chooses, to create a voice that may sound very similar to other work he's written in other POVs.

Try this:

Look back through a story you've written and underline words and phrases that seem distinct to a time and place or that capture the mood of a character or of the time and place in which the characters live. Try to isolate anything you think really sounds like voice to you. See if you can determine why this or that snippet of language sounds in your head like voice. Is it stylistic? Is it the sentence construction you've used? The figurative language? Is it the dialogue your characters speak? Is it the distinct objects and images you've selected that ground the story to a specific time and place? Now look through other stories and do the same thing. Are you repeating certain images, settings, character voices? Are you repeating stylistic choices you've used before? Does one story seem to have a stronger or weaker voice than another? See if you can isolate why. Is the language any less specific? Have you switched up something? Does anything ring flat in one story or the other? Could it be sharpened a bit more? Do you have a storyteller in any of your stories who casts a spell and pulls you into the story? Which ones do and which ones don't?

Voice, like theme, is one of the more elusive narrative devices. It's hard to teach and it can be tricky to study because it's the one element of writing that is fundamentally unique to every writer. It gets lumped in with POV often, which makes it even murkier. I think we "find" our voices by modeling other writers we admire, who seem to be speaking our language, and then by working to refine and distinguish our voice from the voice of the mentor or model.

No one wants to be a parrot. We all want to speak with our own authentic voices. But we don't always know exactly who we are when we first set out to write. We hear a trace of our own voices in Raymond Carver. A little in Joyce Carol Oates. John Updike. Toni Morrison. But not even those great writers can speak for us, say for us all that we have to say in the utterly unique way that only we can say it.

In the end, there's only so much we can do to develop a voice. It can't be forced. It's the sort of thing, we are told, that matures on its own. But what we can do is learn to be attentive, to sit quietly and listen.

Discovering Electricity: Dissecting Great Books for Live Wires

Here's another old post I never published. Maybe it will be helpful to you as you begin writing a novel.
________________________

My nephew Luke likes to take things apart. He's a curious little cat. He likes to fit things together. He wants to see if my cell phone will plug into the computer, the tv, the karaoke machine, the GPS, the toaster. One day he says to his father, "I can take the muffler off your truck, Dad. It's just two little bolts." He's nine. Yesterday, he was installing my mother's computer in a different room of her house (one he won't be allowed to enter). A few weeks ago, he stuck his finger in a light socket and discovered electricty. Little Ben, we ought to call him. He is going to be an electronics tycoon, we tell him. He's already developed a logo, picked out a company name.

Writing is tactile, hands-on. We are parts collectors, rummaging through the tool sheds of our minds and the world at large. We gather up a bunch of stuff, good stuff that we know has practical value. This is a gesture I can use later. There is the image I need. Over there in the produce department is the dialogue I need. We collect and stock-pile, and then we don't know what to do with it all. We plug this thing into that one, try arranging it one way then another. But what good is a banana hot-wired to a cell phone?

There's only so much other writers can teach us. Even after you have a good grasp on the elements of fiction writing (plot, character, setting), there is something missing, that spark that makes story. And the only way I know to discover electricity is to tear apart all the books I love and touch all the wires, run them down. Oh, yes, here's the cog that turns that wheel that presses that spring that fires that cylinder. This is why READING is so important to learning how to write a novel. It takes us a while to realize this fact sometimes, but sooner or later we have to recognize that reading is probably the single most important thing we can do to make us better novelists (or short story writers, or essayists, etc.).

Having someone show you a story's heart on a chart is not enough. Here's the aorta, the left ventricle. See? Yes, but seeing is not knowing. To know, we must choose our own cadavers, for starters. Dissecting work I don't myself have a heart for is the equivalent of performing open heart surgery on a crock pot. It may be useful in terms of understanding circuitry, but my own heartbeat has a role to play in making a book come alive. Writing isn't so much about imitating, I think, as it is understanding. We can imitate without understanding, and we can sometimes pull it off. But don't ask us how we did it. To know is the thing. How? How?

I think we sometimes set off prematurely to write a novel. I know I have. Twice before I have wandered around, shopping aimlessly, filling my shopping cart with things that look interesting-- plastic flamengos, pinatas, Celtic crosses, orchids, carnival glass, cherry lip gloss, organic lettuce. But where's the story? Which aisle will I find that on? It never occurs to us to ask for that. Why not?

Story. This is the thing I find most elusive about writing fiction. I have finally learned, after years of practice and dissection, what a story is in the shorter form. At least I think I have. I'm no ace at it, but I do know that generally speaking, a short story involves a single incident or a limited series of incidents that are tied to a single experience of some kind. There has to be change or revelation in some manner.

But to understand story in terms of writing a novel, we have to stand back and take in the bigger picture, not just of our story, the one we're trying to write, but all stories. The same writing instructor who urged me to hand over 50 shimmering pages was notorious for saying, "Your [short] story starts on page 14" -- ouch. He warned us not to write what he called "navel gazers," whereby our characters sat around thinking and daydreaming and complaining but never actually did anything. Back then I thought he was talking about plot, and partly he was, I think. But more importantly, he was trying to make us understand what a story is. "What does your character want?" he would ask in frustration.

I'm still struggling with this. What does your character want? want? want? What do any of us want? Life doesn't come with neon signs lighting up our single, innermost desires. But fiction isn't life either. We can trust experienced writers who pass on what they know. One of my favorite observations about story is John Gardner's: "There are only two stories— someone takes a journey or a stranger comes to town."

Beginning novelists should start here, I think. Don't try to reinvent. Simply trust this piece of advice and be grateful for its simplicity. We have too many options these days. And options are distractions. Listen to Gardner.

Now, re-read the novels you love most and try to determine which kind of story each one is. Some are easy to spot. Others appear to be both a journey and a stranger comes to town. Look closer. You don't have to be right, but pick one or the other and trace the story line backwards through the novel. See if you can boil it down to one or two sentences or a short paragraph. Don't cheat by reading the jacket copy. The author has already done this exercise, but that won't help you any more than looking at a diagram on the blackboard. Understanding comes from doing. Jot down what you have on an index card, and then pick up another novel you love and do it all again. When you have an odd number of index cards, five or nine, count how many are journey stories and how many are stranger comes to town stories. Set aside anything that doesn't fit one place or another. Save those to study later.

Hopefully, what you'll discover is that you're drawn more to one than the other. Isolating things in this way broadens your vision. You shouldn't feel obligated to model after one or the other, but don't deceive yourself by thinking your story is original either. Just as in life, fiction is circular. It's all been done before. The important thing is to train yourself to look down at your novel from some distance, not to burrow through it blindly. You may never come out the other side.

Huckleberry Finn is a journey story. Mark Twain was aware of this as he was writing. The river runs through the story like a thread. Twain allows Huck to get off the raft at various places and explore, but he was fully aware of the need to bring his protagonist back to the raft and move him down the river. Apocalypse Now, as one of my friends has pointed out, is the same story under totally different circumstances.

For me, understanding this at the outset of sitting down to write the novel is critical. I like Jesse Lee Kerchaval's book Building Fiction because it explains the importance of whole-system thinking rather than looking at story as an accumulation of parts.

An outline is not a story either. It's not even a part to be dropped in at some point. It's safety glasses to keep dust and flying particles out of our eyes so that we can always see what we're doing, where we're going. Some writers worry that outlining is the surest way to kill the juice in their work, and I agree that it can be tricky to monkey around too much, to try too hard to nail everything down before the writing. But soft outlining can keep us from vascillating.

The electricity itself will come sometime later by some fluke we can't anticipate until we get in there and write. But just knowing that the wires have been properly installed before I start plugging in the appliances, before I start placing the furniture and making things look good (whether anything's working or not) helps me sleep a little better at night.

What I'm Happily, Gratefully Unlearning from Robert Olen Butler

1. Unlearning how to read - Forget symbolism and theme, what the writer is "trying to do." Forget all that. What do you feel when you read something? Reading is an emotional experience (created through the senses), not an intellectual one.

2. Unlearning craft - "Talk to the page," he advises. Craft/technique is the antithesis of the creative process. Write from your white hot center. Later, go back and read what you've written. Don't think about what you've written, but try to assess it through your senses. What feels out of tune with the rest? Re-dream that part.

3. Unlearning how to teach - Thinking analytically about literature is an artificial and secondary response to the work that must be forgotten in order to really engage with it emotionally.

Watch this video. Maybe you'll unlearn a few things, too.