50 shimmering pages

Getting Started: Creating the Ordinary World

2012-01-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

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!

2012-01-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T03:24:00.000-08:00

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

2011-09-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Fanning the Embers: The Necessity of Continuous Meditation

2011-09-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Good writing comes from what Robert Olen Butler describes as the white hot center of the unconscious, a particular area of the mind that can be difficult to access, the place from where we dream. Dreaming requires our full immersion. To dream, we must pass through the stages of sleep to the unconsious mind where dreaming takes place. The writer must enter this same space in the unconsious. With one obvious caveat -- to get there, he must remain fully awake.

Of course, the thing that makes it difficult to enter this kind of writer's trance is the constant disruption of our waking lives. The sleeping mind has no trouble focusing on the dream. The dream is all that exists in the sleeping mind. But for the waking mind trying to dream, it is a constant struggle that only some writers ever gain mastery over.

From my observations of other writers who are successful at accessing that white hot center of the dreaming mind, this is what I've concluded (and Robert Olen Butler has said as much in his book From Where You Dream): the fire that burns at the white hot center must not ever be allowed to go out.

For some of us, entering that dream zone means building a new fire every time we sit down to write. We spend most of our energy collecting kindling and opening the damper. Going into and out of the white hot center takes so much energy and concentration that we give up in frustration.

Interestingly, it doesn't take any special powers of concentration to dream when we're asleep. The sleeping mind does not struggle to dream. It happens as a natural matter of course.

Some writers have figured out that the white hot center requires a sort of pilot light, a small steady flame that is continuously being fed so that when he needs to turn up the heat, the fire is already lit. The ember must be kept burning even during the most mundane (or chaotic) moments of the writer's life.

This is why some writers can write anywhere, anytime. Even during a busy touring schedule that's physically and emotionally draining. If they see an opening of three hours, they take full advantage of it. It's a discipline that becomes reflexive. That fire that feeds the writing also feeds the writer. It's also why that same kind of writer will get agitated, I think, when he can't write, when he's called away to do anything else, even things he would otherwise enjoy doing. The writing has become white hot, a fire too intense to be ignored, and it draws the writer back to it.

Writers can't afford to let that fire go out, not even for an hour. It takes too much energy to re-light it once it's gone cold. We must continually fan those embers. Here are a few common characteristics I've noted in the successful writers around me:

1. Total immersion. In order to access the waking dream at will, the dream must be continuous throughout the day and night. A writer must work to stay fully immersed. Even when life demands attention elsewhere, the writer can never afford to completely come out of that dream space. He must be there inside his writer's mind continuously.

2. Conflict avoidance. Ever see writers who seem to be only half listening to conversations going on around them? The fully immersed writer knows the danger of being sucked into debates, petty arguments, and family dramas. Even into conversations or hobbies that may be too interesting. Anything that risks dividing the stream of energy that feeds the writing. Instead of being drawn in, they become detached observers, watching with interest what is happening around them, giving the appearance of participation without ever really yielding their writer's mind to the moment at hand.

3. Valuing the work. Fully immersed writers who prize their writing above all else earn the respect from others who don't write. People looking on see the importance of the writer's work and dare not disturb him with tasks someone else can do. Writers who struggle staying immersed feel the demands of everyone around them because those writers are sending out the signal that says, "I'm available; the writing can wait."

4. Cool distance. Some of my favorite people brush me off when they're working hard to stay immersed. They're polite, but they're very direct. They do not squander their time. They keep people at arm's length. They isolate themselves. They don't reply to emails or phone calls. They go in deep, and they stay there.

5. Calming activities. Fully immersed writers often like to run or walk. Some pray or meditate. They look for activities that turn off the noise around them. Some garden or cook or knit or paint. And they're careful not to let their calming activities become chores. They don't compete or strive for achievement there. They simply let it carry them into their writer's mind.

How do you fan the embers?

Walk by Faith, Not by Sight

2011-09-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

Lately, I'm finding that one of the best books on writing -- on anything -- is the Bible. So much of what I hear at church and read in my Bible speaks to my journey as a writer.

Take this verse from 2 Corinthians 5:7 "For we walk by faith, not by sight." The New Living Translation says it this way: "For we live by believing and not by seeing."

Our young pastor delivered an inspiring sermon on this verse last Sunday, referring to a scene from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade where Harrison Ford comes upon a sheer cliff. His path picks up across the way, a cavernous gulch standing between him and the other side. Here's the scene:

One of the most often quoted lines about writing a novel comes from E.L. Doctorow who said, "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

He also said, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."

Faith is the writer's most important tool. Without it, no amount of instruction matters. Believe that you are called to do this thing called writing and it shall be so. This is what Christians call one of the keys to the kingdom. When you act on your faith, it begins to work. You begin to feel something, power.

Stop doubting. It expends so much of your creativity, your physical strength.

Walk by faith and the bridge will appear under your feet.

How Would You Feel About a Writer Who Wrote About Your Suicidal Mother's Ruined Teeth?

2011-09-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a story I heard last February at AWP that floored me. Did it bother anyone else that Douglas Unger admitted to a room full of Raymond Carver fans, myself among them, that good old Ray "took things from [him]"? I'm not sure it did. In fact, to many in attendance and to many who read this, it may only add to Carver's reputation, to his swagger as a man, his bravado as a writer.

And yet there was Unger, himself a writer, a colleague of Carver's. Family practically, Unger having married Carver's sister-in-law. They'd formed an all-male writers group together, a tight-knit handful of men who trusted each other to share their work and their most intimate lives.

Bret Lott was on the panel, too, telling of what it was like to be Ray Carver's protege, a glorious experience from Lott's account, echoed by C.J. Hribal, a student of Carver's later in his career. They were all three generous in their praise of the man, and my interest in and appreciation of Carver was only enriched by their stories.

"I had many good teachers," Lott said. "But the best teacher I ever had was Ray Carver and those stories."

"We thought we were going to be taught by a mild-mannered axe murderer," Hribal said. "He referred to himself as the 'good Ray.' I was becoming a Ray Carver character myself when he saved my life when he called me and said a fellowship was waiting for me."

"He spoke [of his students] not so much as students," Unger told us, "but as equals, and he was going to do all he could to make sure they got where they should be. He believed that writers are better than other people. Ray gave to student-writers that sense that they’d had a chance, a shot. He made young writers feel anointed, confirmed."

High praise. Deep reverence from the whole panel. It was amazing.

And yet I was drawn back to Unger, who seemed clearly not okay with this breach of trust at the hands of his old friend. It broke my heart listening to him.

"He took things from me. Little things I’d told him," Unger said, "or other people had told him. That shameless word thief stole my mother’s teeth and put them in 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.' My mother’s teeth had been damaged after she drank ant poison. Amy told the story. How would you feel about a writer who wrote about your suicidal mother’s ruined teeth? Take it and use it first, before anyone else," Unger warned.

Where do writers get their ideas? We steal them, of course. We "appropriate" material from other people. We are all of us a bunch of thieves when you get right down to it. Robert Morgan tells the story of a relative who came to one of his booksignings who said, "The only fiction in that book is the disclaimer that says all of this is a work of fiction." (Or words to that effect.)

As fellow beings living in the world, we feel entitled to taking whatever is ours -- ours in the sense of it having intersected in some way with our own lives. We take what is ours, and then some. As writers, we are, in fact, charged with the responsibility of making meaning from experience, our own as well as others.

Still, it's one thing to pilfer certain uninventable details from our own lives, even to "borrow" from the world sleeping around us. But to swindle a guy out of his mother's ruined teeth? Another writer, no less, fully awake, who is earnestly trying to make sense of those nightmarish teeth himself? I'm not talking about homage or inspiration or even voice creep here, though maybe I'll talk about those in a later post. No, this is worse than "shameless." Worse than arrogance even. It's misanthropic. It reveals one of Carver's deepest, darkest sins, I think -- his doubt in his friend's ability to handle his own story. And beyond that, his true estimation of their relationship, which is not much estimation at all.

Because Carver wanted those damned teeth more than he wanted a friendship with Unger. And that's the saddest thing; it's high treason, betrayal with a kiss. First, there's the stealing. And then there's the careless handling of the friendship, the sacrificing of the relationship. For all his generosity later, he took from Unger what could never be replaced.

http://www.douglasunger.com/

But the story doesn't end there, with the friendship. It doesn't even end with Carver's death. Because Unger is still very much alive. Best of all, he's still writing.

And perhaps he gets a bit of revenge in a story called "The Writer's Widow," from a recent collection published by Ontario Review Press, which is said to paint a damning portrait of Tess Gallagher, Carver's second wife.

I haven't read it yet, but wouldn't that make for an inevitable and satisfying conclusion?

Maybe that's the moral of this unfortunate story.

Escaping the Distractions of Home: Planning a Writer's Retreat

2011-08-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend two weeks of uninterrupted writing time at a Writers-in-Residence program on the other side of the state, my most productive two weeks ever. This particular program, though not advertised, is highly sought after by writers who know about it -- including this writer, who has just sent another application for consideration and gotten a quick acceptance! Hooray!

Since I'll be teaching again this fall, I'm planning a series of writerly get-aways to keep myself as fully immersed in the novel I'm working on as possible.

Where do you go to get away from the distractions of home?

Do Not Lean on Your Own Understanding

2011-07-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths." -- Proverbs 3:5-6

People who know my work well have said that my process, when it's functioning as it should, is intuitive. They caution me not to think too much. But I am a conditioned worrier and thought is the kingdom unto which the worrier lives and toils.

Intuition. Don't you love that word? Just saying it makes me feel as if my arms are being thrust open wide, as if I'm about to embrace someone. Or some thing.

Thought. Can you feel yourself drawing in, tightening?

When I'm not worrying, I'm galloping wildly, jumping fences, feeling the blood course through even the hairs on my body. I'm muscle and nerve conducting electricity. I'm free.

I don't think about the million physiological or neurological events/stages/steps that must be taken to achieve this.

I simply run.

Trusting that my heart will pump the blood that will profuse the muscles that will innervate the lungs that will supply oxygen to the brain that will release the endorfins that will signal a response ...

Imagine if we had to do this, be in charge of our involuntary systems. Look at the chaos and destruction I would have just wrecked upon my own body. I don't know all the intricate nuances of how the heart works in conjuction with the brain and the lungs. I could study it, learn how it works. There are those who do know. But to pull those strings that make the whole marionette dance? Impossible.

And yet it happens all the time. It's happening right now in billions of bodies the world over. Except for the man laboring to breathe or the woman lying in a pool of her own blood under a car in a ditch, not one of them is willing their bodies to act. And even those who are willfully making demands -- for the lungs to fill with air, for the blood to clot -- they are helpless to the body's deep-seated intuition.

I don't know if a novel can be written automatically, wholly intuitively, though there have been writers who explored automatic writing. Painters as well have tried different methods for getting to the level of impulse. Throwing paint on the canvas. Working furiously, not minding the brush strokes. Robert Olen Butler addresses this in his book From Where You Dream, outlining methods whereby one brings about a kind of self-induced hypnosis that moves the writer deeper and farther back into the mind.

The writer's trance is akin to REM sleep. It's the deepest, innermost terrain of the creative innerworkings of the mind and yet it feels as if one is sitting right in front of the mind, like a driver peering through the large window of a bus. It's a doorway into which the writer passes and comes out the other side onto a new landscape.

When we "think" about any of this stuff, it closes. The door slams. The mind seals itself off from us.

Is it necessary to know how the sun rises and sets to reap its benefits? Perhaps. But there are mysteries that seem to work only by the exercising of one's faith. Who knows what fuel is produced by our deepest intuitions or how it fires the cylinders that turn the pistons in our minds.

Do not lean on your own understanding. Trust. And just run.

How Bad Things Happen to Good Characters

2011-07-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

It's not a matter of why bad things happen to our characters. Bad things, we know, must happen or else there is no story. But distinguishing between how it's done in the short form and how it's done in the longer form is key to successfully building conflict appropriate for the stories we want to tell.

We speak often of tension in fiction. What do we mean? Tension, if you will recall from fourth grade science, is the force applied to an object when it's being pulled in opposite directions. Sounds like a good definition for our purposes, but is it truly? What form of fiction are we talking about?

Compression vs. Tension

Short fiction is, well, short. Think about it that for a moment. It's brief. It's intense, compact. It demands a higher torque of pressure to be exerted on characters. If we could measure conflict per square inch or determine by some other such formula, we would find, I believe, that short story characters know better than their novel counterparts how to bear up under extreme compressive stress. When we write short stories, we squeeze our characters, we apply pressure, not tension. We pinch them until they say uncle. We press down until they buckle and break.

Tension, however, is the appropriate term, I think, for what happens to characters in a novel. Given the larger expanse a novel must cover, novelists don't so much squeeze their characters as they pull on them, always in many directions at once, stretching and twisting them to the snapping point. We think of novels as having "threads" or strands, multiple storylines that must be woven together. As the novelist works, she pulls each thread tautly.

But let us stay with the image of the bridge. Is it too much of a stretch (ha ha) to say that each strand in a novel forms a rope upon which the novelist continuously applies greater and greater tension until a bridge is erected that safely delivers a reader from one side of a dangerous gulch to the other?

Protagonists and Heroes

If you buy this idea of mine that stories work under the principles of compression and novels work under the principles of tension, then perhaps you'll venture a step further with me.

We use the terms "protagonist" and "hero" interchangably to mean the main character in a work of fiction, a misunderstanding, I think, which has been confusing to me as I switch to novel-writing. There is a subtle distinction between the two.

A protagonist, as I will try here to define it, is the most important or central character in a short story, whereby the plot is not incumbent upon any sort of "heroic" attributes of that character.

A hero, on the other hand, is the central character in a novel who exhibits certain heroic qualities (courage, sacrifice, honor, perseverance) upon which the action of the story depends completely.

Obviously, these definitions are drawn very loosely and don't hold water in every situation. Please bear with me.

I don't know about you, but I never think of short story protagonists in heroic terms. They don't have to be courageous, necessarily, or selfless or honorable. In fact, the ones I like best possess none of those traits. When I'm developing characters for stories, I don't think of any of that stuff. I think in terms of empathy, and motivation. Desire. Change. Revelation. I think of quiet desperation, bumblers, people who can't pay their rent and never will, not in the span of a single short story and certainly not in the length of a 400-page novel.

Can you imagine one of Raymond Carver's characters trying to occupy a novel? Of course, it's possible, and in fact, it happens all the time. But the result is episodic. And while episodic novels are fine, I'm thinking here of the more traditional unified structure of a novel whereby one of two stories is told (according to John Gardner): a hero goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Some people argue that every story is a journey story. Even if a stranger comes to town, he brings with him a whole new set of circumstances that forces the hero to embark upon a symbolic journey.

So, what am I saying? To transition between writing stories and novels requires a few big shifts in perspective. Some writers switch between the two effortlessly while others, like me, find it more of a challenge. It's slowly dawning on me that it's not as simple as stringing together a bunch of short narratives. Nor is it as straightforward as constructing one giant story. Just as writing short fiction is sometimes dismissed by novelists as being an easier form to master, so too is writing a novel a whole different animal, one that requires a completely different frame of reference.

What has your experience been like?

The Novel Tells a Story

2011-07-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

"Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense--the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. Great novelist though she was -- exquisite in her descriptions, tolerant in her judgments, ingenius in her incidents, advanced in her morality, vivid in her delineations of character, expert in her knowledge of three Oriental capitals -- it was yet on none of these gifts that she relied when trying to save her life from her intolerable husband. They were but incidental. She only survived because she managed to keep the king wondering what would happen next. Each time she saw the sun rising she stopped in the middle of a sentence, and left him gaping." ~ E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

As Forster goes on to point out, this is all that ultimately matters in writing a novel. Encouraging words as I circle and circle and circle my first draft, hesitating at every decision. Which person? Whose point-of-view? What sequence of events?

All I'm required to do, at least in this first draft, is to tell a story that will "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."

Further, Forster has this to console the anxious writer: "Unlike the weaver of plots, the story-teller profits by ragged ends."

Ah, ragged ends. Surely, even I can do ragged ends. What a relief.

Timelines and Storyboards

2011-06-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

To outline or not to outline? Some do, some don't, but I am. I must! Organizing all the information I'm writing about in my novel is not something I can juggle loosely the way I would in a short story. Historically speaking, a lot was going on during the period of my novel's setting. So I have decided to give in and lay it all out in a visual manner that keeps it right in front of me while I'm writing. I've tried several storyboard programs designed to be used on the computer, but I need to be able to touch things.

Here's what I'm trying (thanks to tips from friends who know what they're doing!):

1. Timelines -- I need one enormous timeline to keep track of all the historical information that may or may not be needed while I'm writing. It's hard to know up front what I'll need, but I want a very long view of all the important events surrounding my story. Most of this will be background information, but I have to have a firm handle on it so that I fully understand the context into which I am placing my characters. To accomplish this, I'm doing a few things:

a. Research Binder -- As much as I hate to waste ink and paper, I'm printing out anything I think may be useful and organizing it in a giant binder divided by tabs: period calendars (I'm using a combination from Rocket Calendar and calenderwerks); state, county, city maps (google images and gov. websites); historical timelines found online; newspaper articles separated by topic (politics, religion, etc); photographs; miscellaneous.

b. Timeline in a Box -- As I gather information, I'm transferring what I think I'll use onto colored notecards: blue = historical events; yellow = character development; purple = relationships/love; green = description/setting; red = action/conflict; white = other. I will probably add more colors once I begin to tease things apart further. You can use the notecards in many ways, but I'm trying to think about all the threads that I will need to weave through my novel.

In front of the box, I have labeled notecard dividers with the month and year of the period I think my story will take place (Jan. 1955, Feb. '55, Mar. '55). I'm being generous with the dates, including the year before and after my story just to give myself wiggle room if I need it.

As I transfer historical information onto a blue notecard, I place it behind the corresponding tab in the box. As I flesh out my characters, I jot notes on yellow cards and place those where I think they will fit. If I'm not sure, I stand the cards on end until I know where they go, leaving the timeline in the front of the box neat and orderly. Using notecards in a box this way allows me to move things, toss things out, add things and still keep everything tidy. While I'm writing, I can bring out a few cards at a time and spread them out over my desk.

2. Storyboards -- Linda George has written the best little book I've seen on storyboarding. It's called Fill-in-the-Blank Plotting: A Guide to Outlining a Novel Using the Hero's Journey & Three-Act Structure. The title says it all. This book is wonderful because it's small and gets right to the point so you can get to it without reading a long book that mostly repeats what others have already said. The key to her approach, too, and this is very important to me, is that she marries the steps of the Hero's Journey, outlined by Joseph Campbell, with the three-act structure. I have been banging my head against the wall for years trying to do this. Get her book. She makes it super simple!

a. Storyboard 1: The Hero's Journey -- To explain briefly, there are twelve stages in the hero's journey (if you haven't read about Joseph Campbell, you should). After I create a corkboard with the 12 steps listed on the far left, I begin filling out cards for my own protagonist. Because my boards are only medium-sized (there are larger ones if you want to use larger cards), I am using old business cards on my boards. This may change if I feel the need for colored cards. I may cut standard-sized notecards in half, etc. Everything is flexible. It will probably change a lot as I go. For now, the smaller business cards are working.

b. Storyboard 2: Three-Act Structure -- Once I know roughly what my protagonist's journey looks like, I begin transferring cards from board 1 to board 2. Linda George outlines it all very well in her book, so grab a copy if you're interested in using this technique.

**Let me be clear**-- I don't have the whole story figured out yet. I've been knocking around on this book for a long time, and whenever I come back to it, as I am doing now after an interruption to finish my SSC, I'm lost again. I'm hoping that better organization will keep me on course as I re-enter and find my way through to the end. The binder, the box, the boards -- everything is work in progress. Notice the many gaps on my boards. Board 2 is completely empty. Some people are highly suspect of outlines, arguing that they stifle the creative process. I don't want to debate it here in this post. Instead, I want to share with you one writer's system for managing information during the unfolding process of writing the first draft. I would love to hear how you do it. Please chime in! I need all the help I can get. And good luck to you!

Love the One You're With: Promiscuity in Writing

2011-06-23T05:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote this blog several months ago, but being the chicken-hearted writer that I am (perhaps this blog should be called The Chicken-Hearted Writer?), I never posted it. While I've been revisiting short stories and finishing up my story collection, I put the novel on hold. For the past week, I've been entertaining the idea of scrapping the novel altogether and starting yet another one. I thought of this blog post and wondered if it might not help even just one of you out there the way it has helped me this morning.
____________

Are you being faithful to your novel? Are you tempted by other writing projects such as short stories, interviews, and book reviews that promise quick gratification? Do you keep guilty secrets from those who would hold you accountable, including yourself? Do you compare your novel to others' and secretly wish you could swap books? Has that certain something that first attracted you gone cold?

Commitment crises abound, not just in our relationships with people but also in our relationships to the things that matter most to us, like finishing the novel.

A few years ago, I met a woman in a residency program we were both participating in who asked me what I was working on. Simple enough question, but I didn't really have an answer. I was between projects, I replied, or words to that effect. What was your last writing project? she pressed. Oh, I've been working on some short stories, I said, and a few other things. A novel? she asked. I've started a couple, I said, but I can't seem to find my groove. I get confused and then bored and then something else comes along. "Love the one you're with," she said, matter of factly, her novel stacked neatly on the desk behind her as she spoke, all 600+ pages of it. Granted, she seemed to have committment issues of another kind (can't let go?), but I'll save that for another post. What matters to me, and perhaps you, is how to faithfully commit to one book at a time.

Trust me, I know all the ways of getting around writing a book without letting on to anyone that I'm stepping out on the novel. I write stories and apply for grants and submit to contests and seek out internships and workshops; I lead workshops and edit manuscripts for other writers; I start up writing businesses and programs; I meet regularly with not one but two writers' groups; I go away to conferences and beach houses with writer buddies; now, I'm even blogging-- all to keep up the appearance of fidelity when I know I'm not really fooling anyone, least of all myself.

So how does a promiscuous writer finally settle down and marry a novel? I'm not sure, but here's what I'm doing to break old habits. Maybe these will help you, too.

1. Come clean. Until everything is out in the open, you won't commit. List every bad habit you can think of that has let you off the hook in the past.

2. Find someone to hold you accountable and ask her to call you to the carpet when you mess up.

3. Forgive yourself and then work to build back the personal integrity you've sacrificed for so long.

4. Look for good role models who are working faithfully on one book at a time. Consider the progress they've made by being monogomous.

5. Set small, doable goals you know you can accomplish. Write for 15 minutes a day. That's it. But stick to it faithly every day for a month. Keeping small promises to yourself re-builds integrity and confidence.

The Green Lantern: Thinking vs. Doing

2011-06-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it -- not that I think I could. Like Thor, also recently out, I was underwhelmed. Note to filmmakers trying to make a fast buck on comic book heroes: Develop your characters. Please! Think Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. The reason Spider Man is my all-time favorite comic book hero is because I care about Aunt May and Mary Jane and Spidey's best friend/sidekick Harry Osborn. I can't even remember the name of Hal whatshisname's girlfriend, let alone his dweeby sidekick--and I saw the movie LAST NIGHT. I can't even remember the (minor) evil dude's name, and the major evil dude is not even a character really.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Aside from the fact that Ryan Reynolds actually does make a perfect superhero, the only thing I got out of the movie is the premise behind the Green Lantern story. I didn't read the comic books, so I hope it won't spoil it for you if I talk here about the green energy that powers the green lantern and the green ring.

SPOILER ALERT! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK:

Okay, so here's the jist of it: The source of the green light is the human will. Fear, represented by the color yellow, is the enemy of will. Ryan Reynolds' character, Hal Jordan (I had to google it), is the first human lantern. There are lots of other alien lanterns across the cosmos fighting fear with their green lights of impenetrable will. The minor evil dude on earth who is, what else?, a scientist is a sad-sack whose pathetic life, we are to assume, is the result of succumbing to his own fears. He comes into contact with matter from the major evil dude out in space and his fears begin to grow from his own thoughts. He can hear the thoughts of other people calling him names, which further feeds his fears.

Bear with me. I'm getting there. The minor evil dude is the son of a handsome senator played by Tim Robbins who is embarrassed of his son. During a party, he draws a comparison between the hero and the villain. The hero is a man of action, a do-er. The villain is a thinker. As the minor evil dude's fears grow, his head becomes larger and larger.

What has this to do with writing? Just this: Sometimes we think too much.

Before I take a long plane ride across the country or across a vast ocean, I google airplane accidents. When my husband is away on occasion, working out of state, I gravitate toward television programs about serial killers and home burglaries. And when I sit down to write a novel, I google my idea until I find another book already out there exactly like it only better, or else I conclude from my research that I'll never get my head around it all.

I am the queen of self-sabotage. I am my own worst enemy. Sometimes I can hear other people's thoughts about me, and they're all bad.

The Green Lantern is not much of a thinker. He's a do-er. Do-ers just do it. They feel fear like the rest of us, but they don't think about it.

Here's what I found out recently when I sat down to finally at last once and for all finish my short story collection: Don't think! Do as my friend Susan Woodring advises and just make it all up, everything, even the stuff you know is going to be wrong. Save google for your second or even your third draft.

Here's something else: Move your body. I know -- this is me talking, self-made physical antithesis of all things exercise. But I mean it: Move it. Every time you have the urge to google or check Facebook or submishmash or Zoetrope, get up and do something, anything. Just move away from the computer and DO. There's a freaky cool connection between the body and mind (you know this stuff) that makes doing laundry and making beds as much a literary practice as sitting down to outline a 400-page novel or reading a book. You don't need Freedom. Okay, maybe you do need it (I know I do--Thanks again, Susan!), but even so, writers should move their bodies more often. Henry Miller rode a bicycle. Hemingway walked the quais of Paris. He hunted the plains of the Serengeti, for criminy's sake. (And wrote "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" about it, among other things).

My husband is a marathoner. I like to make fun of him about it. I send him YouTube animations like this one that parody runners as mindless droids. We share a laugh at the truth of them.

But there's a truth behind the truth of my making jokes: I'm afraid. Or rather, I'm intimidated, which is the same thing. Running a marathon truly is an act of will. So is writing a novel. To do either one takes superhero-level courage, not your ordinary "I think I can" courage of the little train that could, but all out I WILL DO IT! courage of the Green Lantern.

Jump up right now. Stop thinking. Go do something, and then WRITE!!!

Overcoming Resistance: Learning to Trust the Power of the Water

2011-06-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

My writing mentor is the brilliant biographer Penelope Niven (Carl Sandburg: A Biography). Over the years, she has shared many pearls of wisdom with me, but one that always comes to mind readily is something her daughter Jennifer Niven, herself a wildly successful author (Velva Jean Learns to Fly) said to her when she was just a little girl. As Penny relates in her memoir Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, when she was forty-four years old, her then fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer taught her how to swim. "There's this mysterious power in the water," Jennifer said. "If you fight it, you sink every time. But if you relax and give in to it, it will support you. You have to trust the power of the water, Mom."

My writer friend Karen McBryde recently turned me onto a great little book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. In it, he lists all the ways we resist pursuing the goals that matter most to us. "Resistance," he writes, "is the most toxic force on the planet... To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be." "Hitler," he goes on to say, "wanted to be an artist... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him... [I]t was easier for him to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."

How can we combat such a powerful force? Master our fears. Learn to trust the mysterious properties of the water that will support us if we will only relax and let them.

Or as Anne Lamott advises in Bird by Bird, turn off "radio KFKD," that station that plays in your head twenty-four hours a day telling you in one speaker how gifted and special you are and in the other what a giant disappointment you've turned out (or will soon turn out) to be.

I often think I have a weird and unique gift for cultivating resistance. At times, I take a perverse kind of pride in it practically, joking with friends that I am destined to pen a book about it, something like Mastering Writer's Block for Dummies: 401 Ways to Sabotage Even Your Most Attainable Dreams. The feeling that everyone is watching me, waiting on me, expecting something magnificent from me shuts me down completely. It's grandiose to think anyone cares what a nobody like me is up to, but there it is staring back at me like an eight-hundred pound gorilla. I don't understand why everyone around me is so cavalier about it. Just do it, they seem to be saying. Plant your butt in the chair and stop your complaining and just get on with it already. Writing is fun, they say. A joy. Something they can't wait to get back to every day. It's the way they reward themselves, blah, blah, blah. The more chipper they sound, the more curmudgeonly and self-deprecating and self-loathing I become until I work myself into a truly dangerous funk. Whatever little confidence I had before that has made the stakes seem so high is now a distant memory.

I agree with Steven Pressfield: resistance is evil. When I'm fearful, I'm mean and I hurt people. Like a scared swimmer, I'll take down even those trying to save me. Lots of functioning fearful writers get by for a time, treading water, but no good ever comes from fear (or its aliases: pride, greed, and jealousy).

But as the wise young Jennifer Niven reminds us, if we take a deep breath and fill our lungs with air, we're unsinkable. If we relax, the water will carry us along a course that flows freely. Trust the power of the water.

More on Pity and Fear in Fiction

2011-05-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

"As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity." ~ Ernst Toller

David Payne gave me lots of good advice at Queens. One thing he told me was never to take crack shots at my characters. In my efforts to write what I thought was humor, I teetered on constructing, too often, a condescending narrative voice.

I understand fear, perhaps we all do post 9/11 because it looms so large in our collective psyches. Fear is exhilerating, though, and attractive to me as a conduit for telling stories. It has shock value. It makes headlines. We like to scare ourselves, we need to. Fear reminds us we're only flesh and blood, that the trappings of our lives are illusory, that the rug may be swept out from under us at any moment, maybe right now.

But fear without pity is the stuff of snuff flicks. More than we can gaze upon. Abject terror without meaning is unreal, and we're not interested in unreality. We don't know how to engage with it.

It is pity that gives meaning to suffering and misfortune. Pity silences us, shames us, snatches our breath away. But only for the moment it takes us to connect. Something is transferred to us when we feel pity. We become the suffering, the underdog, the misfortunate. We take hold of the other end of the stick, or rather it takes hold of us.

So back to Aristotle's observations about the nature of tragedy and the cathartic process. Tragedy succeeds, he says, when we arouse pity and fear in such a way that it creates a cathartic experience for those looking on.

We want more than spectacle. We want catharsis, spiritual cleansing, a brush with mystery. This is what satisfies.

Pity can be tricky, though, for too heavy a hand and what you have for your character is contempt. Why else do we ourselves loathe the idea of being pitied? Our characters don't want to be pitied any more than we do. Our aim is not pity; it is the arousal of tender feelings that draw readers near.

How to arouse pity, then, without condescension?

Short stories don't allow much room for full-blown tragedy and human suffering. In the length of an average short story, suffering can take on the qualities of abstraction. It's just too big.

Two smaller, more subtle things we can do: First, give our characters something to regret, an "if only...". In Charles Baxter's story "Gryphon," if only Miss Ferenczi hadn't brought out those tarot cards. If only she had not said that Wayne would soon die. Even if your character does not regret her actions, show us someone else who regrets on her behalf.

Or, exact a measure of cruelty. Last night I read Steven Rinehart's story "The Order of the Arrow," which begins: "Heitman, the homosexual, the insane, is my tentmate. Again." Immediately we feel a measure of pity for the narrator who must suffer at the hands of Heitman, the insane. And we learn soon enough that Heitman is a troubled kid. He howls and refers to the narrator as his "hunch buddy." Consequently, the narrator is viewed by the other scouts as Heitman's girlfriend. I can think of few other cruelties doled out upon a young boy worse than this. But we later pity Heitman as well. He's scary, but he is insane, a vulnerability that makes him the object of scorn and cruelty at the hands of an unknown other, most likely his father. His back is scarred with stripes.

We are taught as children not to laugh and jeer and point at hairlips, missing digits, glass eyes, mental retardation. But that's exactly what we must do as fiction writers. Cruelty is a perversion of our fantasies. We want to stare at the hairlip. We want to feel the nub of the missing limb. We want to mock the infirmed. But it is shameful to do such things in the waking world of our daily lives. It is only permissable in our dreams, and in fiction.

Exacting small cruelties, giving our characters regrets... these are the things that create in onlookers the impulse to approach, to rubberneck, as it were. To look on in anguish, perhaps even horror, and then breathe a sigh of relief. But for the grace of God... Catharsis. Release and satisfaction. The feeling of having seen something we shouldn't have seen. And then gratitude for having seen it.

The Intersection of Pity and Fear

2011-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

For my craft thesis in the MFA program, I wrote an essay called "The End is Near: Examining the 'Satisfying' Ending in Short Stories." I'm currently revising my short fiction in hopes of pulling together a collection, so I dusted off my thesis to look at it again. It's long, but perhaps you will find some of it useful to your own writing.

January 8, 2004

In short stories, what makes for a satisfying ending? Just as in the novel, a short story ending must be believable, and to use a phrase we're all familiar with, it must "grow organically" from the story. We know as well that a short story ending must not look orchestrated or contrived in any way. It must not draw "pat" conclusions. It should not deliver any sort of moral. It cannot be "rushed"; the pacing must be so that a reader is ready or prepared for the ending. And finally: It must come as both a surprise--that is it must not be predictable--and yet it must seem inevitable.

In his book Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure, Jesse Lee Kercheval says, "[T]he end must bring about the resolution of both the external and internal conflicts, and, beyond that, it must combine the inevitable with the surprising. It must be inevitable because readers have lived with the conflicts through all their ups and downs and want them resolved; it must be surprising because the conflicts should be solved in a way readers cannot have entirely foreseen."

Conflict. I don't know about you, but when I realize I'm writing close to the end of a story, a worry sets in that isn't present at the outset of my writing. I realize that everything I have done up to this point had better start adding up. "I am ending," I think. "I'm getting ready to DO the ending. It has got to make sense now if it ever will."

Mark Richard, the author of the wonderful short story "Strays," says we do this because we're afraid. We're afraid of the weight of the short story's ending, which unlike the novel's ending, bears significance on whether or not the story as a whole succeeds. Joseph Novakovich says in Fiction Writer's Workshop, "It seems many writers agree that endings give them more trouble than beginnings do. That's partly because in the ending -- especially in short stories -- everything needs to fit; in the beginning, we don't yet know what needs to fit, so almost everything appears acceptable. It is particularly true that short stories must end appropriately; all the strings must tie in." Then he quotes David Lodge in The Art of Fiction: "One might say that the short story is essentially 'end-oriented,' inasmuch as one begins a short story in expectation of soon reaching its conclusion, whereas one embarks upon a novel with no very precise idea of when one will finish it."

"The difference between writing a novel and writing a short story," Mark Richard says, "is that the short story is more exact and more exacting. There is not as much latitude for cumbersome language, sloppiness in the work and getting off track. Short stories are quick burns, and the clock is ticking more in a short story so you know when you must begin, you know when the middle is, too, and you have a sense that the end is approaching."

Let's look again at what Kercheval says about the purpose of the ending. "[T]he end must bring about the resolution of both the external and internal conflicts."

Conflict, again. Endings are rooted in a story's Conflict. More than that. They are rooted in everything else. Open a craft book and pick any chapter. Endings are rooted in Character, in POV. They're rooted in Voice and Setting. In Dialogue and every single Scene. They're rooted in Plot. And in Theme.

Katherine Anne Porter said that "Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation--what the Greeks called catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true."

Aristotle was the first to use the word catharsis in regard to literary theory. He used it to define the function of tragedy, which he said succeeds by "arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish catharsis of such emotions." Pity is our impulse to approach. Fear is the impulse to retreat. Tragedy excites the emotions of pity and fear; then it dispels them through the cathartic process.

If we want our readers to feel satisfied with our endings or any other part of our stories, we must arouse pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish catharsis of such emotions. For it is through this cathartic experience that wisdom and insight are distilled and emotional calm is restored in readers.

Catherine Brady's essay "A Cage in Search of a Bird: The Elusiveness at the Heart of Story Structure" appeared in a recent issue of The Writer's Chronicle. There she says, "Conflict exists in order to generate conflict within the reader." She's talking about a cathartic response, is she not? Conflict, she says, is generated within the reader by "paradoxically working against resolution at the level of meaning at the same time as it works toward crisis and resolution at the literal level." In other words, conflict arises when a story works toward a resolution of action, but at the same time resists a neat summary of any meaning.

Charles Baxter says in "Against Epiphanies," "A story can be a series of clues but not a solution, an enfolding of a mystery instead of a revelation. It can contain images without the attached discursive morality."

Brady refers to this evasiveness of meaning throughout "A Cage in Search of a Bird" and speaks of the circular logic of stories. "Freytag's pyramid and other notions of story that depict a linear, forward drive prove inadequate because they are incapable of incorporating the circular logic of story--the roundabout evasion of indirection in order to generate experienced meaning; the careful spiraling of a story's events around a central tension that is never stated; and the recurrence of essential elements that establish a pattern, thus helping the reader to recognize the parameters of the story's silences. Story structure depends on this fundamental tension between dynamic forward drive and the circularity of evasion and repetition."

Imagine a black line running through the center of your story. This represents the linear or forward drive, the plot. Now imagine a blue spiral coiling around the black line. This is what Brady calls evasion and repetition.

Now consider this, also from Brady's essay: "--a writer must concede to the limits of structure if she is to write a story at all... Plot structure exists in order to generate what Flannery O'Connor called 'experienced meaning.' Plot enacts idea, embodies it rather than declares it."

Brady goes on to explain: "The basic formula for plot structure provides a template for devising a story, not its raison d'etre. Though suspense is a necessary part of the fun, a story satisfies not because it pursues a literal chain of events but because it manages to make those events stand for something else, a something else that eludes the reader, yet compels response."

Stories must maintain "silences," that is they must offer no judgment or detail that is unequivocal, as Baxter puts it. The central tension of the story must never be directly stated.

Rust Hills says that "A reader is always more willing to guess than to be bored: if he is puzzled, he is at the same time intrigued. The reader's desire to find out 'What is the explanation of all this?' can drive him along nearly as well as the old 'What will happen next?'"

So it boils down to this: plot on one hand and theme on the other. Brady says that plot enacts idea or theme. It embodies it rather than declares it, she says. "The pressure for economy in a plot demands a writer make choices about gaps and ellipses in the whole of a story because such interstices require the reader to share in the process of invention."

Underline this part: "Plot is an attitude toward the subject as much or more than it is technique--an instinct for selecting those moments in the story line at which events offer the greatest promise for forcing uncertainty on the reader... Stories can sustain a wealth of certainty and passionate conviction on the writer's part, but the question at their heart must be open--must be exactly what troubles the writer's own conscience if it is to forestall, detour, or violently sunder the reader's readiness to pass judgment."

So how do we bring about catharsis in readers? We pull them in, we arouse pity and fear in them, so that at some point it is necessary that we must forestall, detour, or violently sunder their readiness to pass judgment. By evading with gaps and silences in terms of what a story means, we build tension and compel our readers to share in the process of invention.

Read this again: "The action of the plot builds tension around this question"--the question at the heart of the story, its meaning or theme. "A story writer... can--must--rely on narrativity, a chronology of events as well as a pattern of imagery to shape symbolic import."

In "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," Flannery O'Connor says, "[T]he word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader--sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated... I think that for the fiction writer himself, symbols are something he uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that these are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction."

In another of her essays, "Writing Short Stories," the great Flannery O'Connor adds: "In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the ACTION of the story itself, and when this happens they become symbolic in the way they work." She goes on to explain how in her story "Good Country People," Joy/Hulga's wooden leg comes to symbolize some wooden part of Joy/Hulga's soul. "Now of course this is never stated," O'Connor says. "The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes the connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning... If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction."

John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, "Theme, it should be noticed, is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it--initially an intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer. The writer muses on the story idea to determine what it is in it that has attracted him, why it seems to him worth telling. Having determined... what interests him--and what chiefly concerns the major character... he toys with various ways of telling his story, thinks about what has been said before about (his theme), broods on every image that occurs to him, turning it over and over, puzzling it, hunting for connections, trying to figure out--before he writes, while he writes, and in the process of repeated revisions--what it is he really thinks... Only when he thinks out a story in this way does he achieve not just an alternative reality or, loosely, an imitation of nature, but true, firm art--fiction as serious thought."

In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway adds, "This process--worrying a fiction until its theme reveals itself, connections occur, images recur, a pattern emerges--is more conscious than readers know, beginning writers want to accept, or established writers are willing to admit. It has become a popular--cliche--stance for modern writers to claim that they haven't the faintest idea what they meant in their writing. Don't ask me; read the book. If I knew what it meant, I wouldn't have written it. It means what it says. When an author makes such a response, it is well to remember than an author is a professional liar. What he or she means is not that there are no themes, ideas, or meanings in the work but that these are not separable from the pattern of fictional experience in which they are embodied... Students irritated by the analysis of literature often ask, 'How do you know she did that on purpose? How do you know it didn't just come out that way?' The answer is that you don't. But what is on the page is on the page. An author no less than a reader or critic can see an emerging pattern, and the author has both the possibility and the obligation of manipulating it."

Finally, on theme, Rust Hills says, "What the beginning of a short story should do, what the beginning of most successful modern short stories do usually do, is begin to state the theme of the story right from the very first line... This is one of the ways in which the reader is prepared, however unconsciously, to accept the inevitability of the action which follows."

Now let's turn again to plot. Brady says plot is attitude as much as it is technique--an instinct for selecting moments that force uncertainty on the reader. Later on, she mentions a story of Grace Paley's, which she says "demonstrates the notion that plot requires" what Brady calls "'right action'--action that functions as objective correlative for the ideas that remain unstated in the work." "Right action" she says "doesn't take the obvious route, doesn't shape a neat one-to-one correspondence with idea, because if it did, it would function in the same way as telling that gives away a story's meaning rather than implying it, describing emotion rather than making it." "Right action is more likely to suggest two opposite directions at once--to deepen ambiguity rather than diminish it." The gaps or silences she refers to allude to the tension at the heart of the story.

Rust Hills says of plot, "The word [plot] has little relevance to the modern short story, for the plot--the episodes of the action--of a short story seldom get that complicated, or certainly shouldn't. Complexity or ambiguity of theme is another matter entirely."

So then, resolution, Brady contends, "must propel the reader in opposite directions at once--it must convey a sense of the literal consequences and yet ultimately reassert the uncertainty of meaning." Rust Hills adds this: "Whatever resolution occurs at the end [of a short story] is not so likely these days to be brought on by some final development of the plotting as it is by the introduction of some thematic note: a new image or symbol (of say hopefulness or despair) or a bit of dialogue or description indicative of a new attitude."

In Charles Baxter's story "Gryphon," the forward thrust of the action is easy enough to recognize: Mr. Hibler develops a cough, which necessitates a substitute teacher, Miss Ferenczi, who arrives and behaves oddly and tells strange stories. She comes back the next day and speaks to the class about death. The next day Mr. Hibler is back. A month later, Miss Ferenczi returns and this time tells the children their fortunes with a pack of tarot cards. Wayne, she says, will soon die. Wayne reports her to the principal and Miss Ferenczi is dismissed.

The crisis moment occurs when the narrator confronts Wayne and starts a fight. But then life goes back to normal. Or does it?

Baxter creates suspense in the story by creating a central tension that is never stated. He maintains silence, simply presents the story without offering judgment. The heart of the story, its theme, eludes us yet compels us to keep looking.

Consider the "gaps and silences" in Baxter's story. One girl in the class, Carol Peterson, we are told, is a bad person because she blows her nose on notebook paper. We're not told why that makes her a bad person, yet we sense it's true. We're also told that despite being "evil," Carol speaks the truth in times of crisis. We are not told what is so critical about a fourth grade class getting a substitute teacher; in fact, it would seem as if getting a substitute is a good thing, not something to fear. After all, the class is familiar with the pool of unemployed community college graduates, about four mothers, who generally "provide easeful class days, and nervously cover material [the class has] mastered weeks earlier." This mention of a time of crisis is otherwise sort of shrouded in silence and thereby forces us to share in the process of the story's invention; our imaginations supply whatever information is missing.

Notice that there are all sorts of gaps and silences surrounding Miss Ferenczi's odd conduct. Right away she unexpectedly announces that the class may stare at her for a few seconds, until the bell rings, but then no more. From there, she launches into a fantastic story about her family's heritage, again for no apparent reason. Then she refuses the class permission to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which they are accustomed to doing every day. Later, she talks about higher math and tells the class that sometimes six times eleven equals sixty-eight. Consider it a substitute fact, she tells them. Throughout the rest of the school day, she behaves more and more strangely: her pronunciation of spelling words makes them sound foreign; she refuses to eat with the other teachers; she says strange words--"quit fossicking in your desk"; she changes Mr. Hibler's lesson plan--instead of reading about ancient Egyptian irrigation, she will simply talk to the children about the pyramids. She speaks quickly, jumping from pyramids to George Washington to religion to the solar system to Genghis Khan and finally to a creature called a gryphon, which she writes on the board as if this were the point she was leading up to all along. But, of course, we know it isn't. We know because we have quickly become acquainted with the gaps and silences surrounding her behavior.

And on the story goes, driving forward to some destination but at the same time evading ever deliberately stating what any of the action means. The question at the story's heart is left open. As Brady says, the story "forestalls, detours, or sunders our readiness to pass judgment." Tension builds around the question: What is this woman all about? What are we to make of her? The frustration felt by the narrator and his classmates to understand Miss Ferenczi is also felt by us. We feel as though we are being shown what's happening, that we are seeing the plot unfold. But at the same time, we are puzzled by it.

When the narrator confronts Wayne for telling on Miss Ferenczi for reading the tarot cards, we are forced to now make some judgment about the woman and what happens to her. We have seen enough of her by this point to have felt both pity and fear of her. The literal story comes close to the story's secret but the two never intersect. The closing moment leaves us with a question: Does the world go back to how it was before Miss Ferenczi? As Catherine Brady says, we are propelled in opposite directions at once. We know what has literally transpired, but we are uncertain of its meaning.

Undoubtedly, we can say the ending is both a surprise and inevitable, but what really makes us feel "satisfied" is that we have come close to glimpsing the secret of the story without it ever having been deliberately exposed. We have a sense of understanding the imagery and recurrence of symbols: Pinnochio, who lies but is also not a real boy; Frankenstein, the master of permutations, who is made of mixed parts; the gryphon, a mythic creature that's half one thing and half another; the chameleon; the pyramids-- we have a faint understanding of it all, and yet it is just beyond our reach.

We might generally say that the story begs the question: What is knowledge? In the final paragraph, the class studies insect life as it occurs in ditches and swamps. Facts as the class has previously known them now seem strange. The story ends: "Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge."

Writer Paula Fox says a story starts with a small question and ends with a big question. "Gryphon" starts with "Who is this woman?" -- a simple enough inquiry, though we never really find out. But the story ends with a much larger question: What is knowledge? We are uncertain about either, yet we feel as if we've witnessed some mystery, what Charles Baxter claims is the purpose of a story. "A story, as Borges has shown, can be a series of clues but not a solution, an enfolding of mystery instead of revelation. It can contain images without the attached discursive morality." We are purged of the ill humors that plagued us throughout the building of tension, where we experienced pity and fear of Miss Ferenczi, and now feel as if some wisdom or insight has been bestowed upon us. We are, in a sense, spiritually purified, emotionally restored. We have a feeling of reconciliation because the ending is right and true.

Another way of looking at "Gryphon" is in terms of internal and external conflict and its resolution. The visible crisis action or the external conflict is the basic plot line. In Building Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval says that external conflict in short stories usually ends in one of two ways: either with a symbol that was established in the beginning of the story that now alludes to the main character's fate, or with a gesture. Gestures don't have to be established at the outset of a story, Kercheval says, "because our understanding rests on human behavior." "Gryphon" ends with the line: "Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge." Knowledge has taken on symbolic meaning in the story. It may seem like an ambiguous ending, but I think the fate of the class is pretty clear, at least the narrator's is. Consider the internal conflict first. We can say that what the narrator in "Gryphon" wants is for Miss Ferenczi to be the class's regular teacher, even though he knows she can't be. But from his defense of her in the end, we can safely say he comes to realize that he has a choice in what he will learn from here on out. He doesn't have to use a word if he doesn't like it, after all, and we can imagine that he won't. He has changed. And so have we.

WORKS CITED

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1997.

Baxter, Charles. "Gryphon." Through the Safety Net: Stories. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Brady, Catherine. "A Cage in Search of a Bird: The Elusiveness at the Heart of Story Structure." The Writer's Chronicle, Summer 1997, vol. 30, no. 6, p. 20.

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: A. Knopf, 1984.

Hills, L. Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular: An Informal Textbook. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

"Katherine Anne Porter: The Art of Fiction, No. 29." Interview by Barbara Thompson Davis. The Paris Review, Spring 1963.

Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure. Cincinnati, OH: Story, 1997.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. New York: Viking, 1993.

Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer's Workshop. Cincinnati, OH: Story, 1995.

O'Connor, Flannery, Robert Fitzgerald, and Sally Fitzgerald. Mystery and Manners. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989.

Richard, Mark. "Strays." The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories. New York: Anchor, 1991.

Learning Mandarin

2011-01-17T06:42:00.000-08:00

My friends joke that before I will sit and finish a novel, I'll have to take up learning Mandarin. And then after that, there will be cancer to cure, world peace to address.

Okay, so I have a little problem with focus. All right, a big problem.

While others in the MFA program at Queens were burrowing in, concentrating solely on learning to write, I sought out an internship at a local small publishing company. It was one summer. No big deal. And it was a great experience. But then they needed someone to write a book of ghost stories for them, and there would be a book tour and the whole works, and that sounded like such fun, and it was a great opportunity, so Yeah, I said. I'll do it. Working on the ghost book set my thesis work on the back burner for a few months, and I wound up deferring a semester to graduate. But it was no big deal really. What was one semester when I had already postponed starting college at all by three years to join the army and then had taken another three off in the middle to settle into married life?

After graduate school, I took a year to oversee the construction of our new home. I loved watching it come together day by day, board by board, and I took the planning and budgeting and problem-solving of its construction very seriously. That's what I did for a year, fourteen months actually.

After that, I thought I'd get back to the writing. All I needed was a job in the industry to keep me focused. Maybe I could start a small magazine. The universe has always been reliable about providing me new and exciting opportunities, and just at that moment, a former classmate was getting a small press up and running. Perfect. I became co-owner of Press 53 and we did all sorts of exhilerating things for three years.

In the interim, there were lots of illnesses and deaths and heartaches and adventures and worries and joys in my immediate and extended family. I was teaching whenever and wherever I could. Writing sporadically on short stories, which I submitted even more sporadically or never. Good stuff was coming in at the press, great stuff, much of which we were having to turn down. Not enough room, enough money, enough time.

Then my father died, and for one instant there was clarity: write.

I read an interview somewhere several years ago with Josephine Humphries, and in it she listed all the things she sacrifices to write. Friendships, soccer games, gardening, and so on. And I thought, Oh no. Is that the price? Knowing full well it was, it is. All the writers I know who are making headway are the ones who want to write more than anything else in the world. Anything. Focus, my pastor often reminds us, is the ability to neglect everything else. I don't like the sound of it, but I know it's the truth.

For the past couple of months, I have closeted myself away, hoping to break old habits, form new ones. My good writer friend Susan Woodring, whom I speak of here often, says she does two things: she homeschools her children and she writes. That's it.

If you don't see me out and about much anymore, it's because I'm learning Mandarin. I hope you are learning it, too.

Writing Challenge: 500 Words a Day, 5 Days a Week

2010-06-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a writing schedule I think I can maintain. If I consistently write 500 words a day, five days a week, I will finish the rough draft of my novel in 28 weeks. That's figuring for 70,000 words. By January 1, I will have it licked. At least the first draft.

Who is up for doing it with me? 500 words a day, come hell or high water. That's a mere 2 pages.

Here's the deal: 500 words a day, 5 days a week -- no excuses. You get your 500 words in even if the kids are driving you up the wall. Even if you're fighting with the spouse. Even if the boss let's you go. Even if the sky is falling, you wrestle those 500 words down onto the page.

Deal?

Why 50 Pages?

2010-05-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

While the answer may seem obvious, it's important to know what our goals are for the first 50 pages. When my writing instructor urged me to send him 50 shimmering pages of a first draft, he was likely thinking of several reasons I should write 50 and not say 25 or 100, or even a complete manuscript.

For starters, as most writers know, agents usually request the first 50 pages of manuscripts they're interested in. Fifty pages allows them to determine several things about your book: Is it a good fit with their firm? Is the story compelling? Does the prose suggest that the rest of the book will hold up? Is the book one they can market? Does the writer have a unique style or voice?

But more important than finding an agent at this stage even is that writing those 50 pages helps to establish a rhythm in our writing regimens and seals our commitment to finishing the entire novel. Fifty pages requires us to stretch more than perhaps we have ever streched before without overwhelming us. Fifty pages is realistically do-able, even for the most entrenched procrastinators like yours truly; it's the equivalent of a mere two or three average-lengthed short stories-- a large enough investment of our creative energy to ensure that we follow through and finish, but not more than we can accomplish in a relatively short span of time.

Finally (and this is why agents request this much), 50 pages is just enough room to sufficiently set up a novel, to orient your reader, and to introduce the story's conflict and important through-lines. Most readers, including agents, lose interest if these basics needs aren't met quickly. Most of us are willing to hold out for the first 50 pages, but if a writer hasn't hooked us by then, we're seldom interested in reading more.

So... 50 pages is ideal for writer and reader alike-- not too much, not too little. And, an added benefit is that while you're still working toward finishing a first draft, those 50 pages will probably represent about one-fourth of your finished book. The 50 shimmering pages you wind up sending to an agent later will more likely be only one-fifth or one-sixth of the book, but either way, fifty pages is a solid beginning, a promise (to yourself and others) of more to come.

Whether or not you intend to outline your novel, it's a good idea to think about what you hope to accomplish in those first 50 pages. Here are a few things a good novel usually does:

1. Introduces the protagonist.
2. Establishes the setting and grounds the reader in time and space.
3. Establishes the POV and the storyteller's voice.
4. It may also strike a certain mood or create an atmosphere that permeates the entire novel or some portion of it.
5. Introduces other key players who will (or have already) influence/d the protagonist in some fashion.
6. Identifies the protagonist's chief wish or some problem he/she is facing.
7. Begins to raise questions that cue readers in to where the story is heading.
8. Illustrates certain characteristics, often strengths or weaknesses, of the protagonist which will determine her decisions and actions later.
9. Establishes rotation patterns, usually between chapters, in narration and plot.
10. Establishes conflict and sets the protagonist on a journey toward change.

This isn't by any means an exhaustive list but merely some of the things I've noted in my own reading, which I am mindful of as I work toward completing the first 50 pages of my novel. For instance, one of my goals in this opening section is to introduce and contrast two female lead characters and to prepare my readers for chapters that rotate from one POV to another. At this point, I'm trying to keep things simple: Introduce them. Illustrate how different they are. Enter the POV of first one and then the other. And so forth.

What are some of the goals you've set for your opening pages?

The Sky is Not Falling

2010-05-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

If you've been peeking in here, you've probably noticed that I've taken down the first three posts I've written, and no doubt you've wondered what the deal is. The deal is this: I'm a chicken-hearted writer, and part of the reason I wanted to start this blog was to take a leap of faith, to set up an accountability system of some sort, to report in regularly and honestly on the progress of my novel, and to encourage myself and others like me who begin strongly and then start to think the sky is falling.

The sky is not falling. You're just losing your nerve.

I am convinced that writing is 90% confidence. Maybe 95%, 99. In two days, my husband will attempt his first half Iron Man. He started doing triathlons after his father died eleven years ago. Though he's always been athletic and healthy, he was in no shape to enter such a competition. What I didn't realize is that it wasn't a competition at all. He has never competed with anyone but himself.

He barely finished that first race, but he did finish. And he finished proudly, which I didn't understand. I had stood on the sidelines watching him struggle, re-al-ly struggle, thinking to myself, Oh no, he wasn't ready for this kind of exposure; he's going to be mortified. But none of that ever entered his mind. He was training his eyes on the prize, the finish line. That's all.

Admittedly, I am often too guarded, self-conscious, and critical. He wasn't the only one, I noticed, wearing a get-up that wasn't exactly flattering. He wasn't the only one who needed to shed a few pounds. He wasn't the only one whose bicycle was a piece of junk. He wasn't the only one who appeared to be on the verge of a heart attack.

There are whole categories for athletes far bigger and heavier than he ever was. Men are called Clydesdales. Women are called Athenas. And there they go, proudly displaying their AGES as well as their divisions on the backs of their calves -- A 42. Jogging and jostling and perspiring and digging out wedgies and spitting and climbing on bikes ready to collapse beneath them, then stripping down into speedos and bathing suits and galloping into icy lakes at o'dark thirty. While I sit with a blanket and a cup of coffee and wince, ever so kindheartedly, on their behalf.

I wasn't always chicken-hearted. As a child, I was a tomboy, riding motorcycles in the woods with my father, doing back flips off the high dive, arm-wrestling anyone who'd try me. I took great satisfaction in being what my father and his brothers, my beloved uncles, considered to be tough as a cob. I would accept any dare and never E-V-E-R cry if I got skint or took a lump that was harder than I expected. I climbed trees, climbed on horses, climbed in go karts. I fired handguns at pop cans and potatoes lined up on porch railings. I was absolutely intrepid. And I try, sometimes, to pinpoint the moment when fear became bigger than me, Girl Wonder.

No matter. I'm reclaiming whatever's been lost, here and now. I'm re-posting those old blogs in all their triteness and imperfection and sentimentality. Blogging is a fascinating mode of expression. I'm drawn to it and repelled by it at once. So much of what we say and do online is cringe-worthy. But there is something remarkably bold about it, too, that draws me to it, beckons to me to just let it all hang out, to push beyond vanity for something startling and dangerous and real.

I will still be examining books and trying to parse out what makes them shimmer. After all, there's a good chance I'm talking to no one here but myself, so I may as well do what's useful to me. Maybe it will be useful to some of you as well. But I will also occasionally ramble about other things, writing in general or the current state of my mind or the progress of my book. I will need you to hold me accountable. Don't let me flinch, even if my gut's hanging over my speedos. Even if the sky actually is falling. It's a staring contest, writing is. DON'T FLINCH.

The Call to Write: Undertaking the Hero's Journey

2010-04-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

When I first boldly declared that I was a writer, family members and friends clamored to tell me their life stories. I always smiled and nodded with what I hoped appeared to be genuine interest as they revealed to me the great journeys of their lives. Often, their stories were indeed interesting, but I had a story in mind to write about already and quickly tired of hearing about theirs. "You ought to write it yourself," I began telling them, and some of them did enthusiastically undertake the challenge. Then they wanted me to read about their fascinating, utterly absorbing lives, and what could I do but oblige and encourage them? Naturally after a while I began to cringe inside at the mention of yet another gripping personal life story. Perhaps you can relate.

Joseph Campbell recognized a pattern universal to all stories, which he referred to as the hero's journey. Even those of us who don't write can see that we are all characters in our own lives. Life honestly is stranger than fiction. At some point, we begin to stand apart from our experiences and marvel at them for their sheer creativity, for their utter surprise and revelation, their drama and heartache, their adventure and joy. My God! we think. This is incredible. Someone should see this!

This is why as writers we recognize that every life actually is remarkable and worthy of being written down. We know, as my good friend Susan Woodring has so eloquently said before that "[i]nside every character, even the most ordinary — boring, even — there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly — the something that longs to be expressed."

Writers too then, lest we forget, are characters, heroes of our own journeys. Consider Campbell's first stage of the hero's journey, the "call to adventure," whereby we are plucked up from the ordinary world and given the mantle to do this thing which we feel so ill-equipped to do. Some of us may refuse to answer the call, but sooner or later, it is thrust upon us again and we are forced now to submit to what we begin to see as our duty, our great commission.

Who will deny that we really do meet "guides" along the way, that the universe offers up to us what we need if we will but open our eyes and see what is there before us? Look around right now and you will meet your mentor, the evolved hero come to assist you.

On it goes with "trials and temptations," "the magic flight," until at last we become the master of two worlds. The ordinary world where we continue to struggle with the novel, the family, the day job. And the extraordinary world where we stand back and look at the mystery suspending it all in time and space and think, My God! Take a look at this, would you?

Nothing happens to us in the ordinary world that does not also figure prominently in the extraordinary world of our writing lives. Parents age and pass on. Marriages grow stale and sometimes bitter. Kids disappoint and abandon us. But there are births as well as deaths. Meetings with strangers. Close calls. Forgiveness. Be glad you're a writer on whom nothing is lost. Your steps are ordered. Keep walking.

It Takes a Strong Stomach to Build a Road

2010-04-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

WIn John Ehle's novel, The Road, Weatherby Wright is driven by a single-minded pursuit to build a railroad through the mountains of western North Carolina. Right away, an engine and the engineer inside it are sucked into a mud sluice. There is a fire, a devastating cave-in, a pneumonia epidemic, and obstacles throughout the novel that are hard to imagine, let alone overcome. Weatherby himself is marked by the mountain when he falls and breaks a leg and is forced to spend the night in a cave infested with snakes. For a time, he takes to his sickbed and wishes he could be shut of the road, once and for all. It's a great burden; his conscience bothers him. The road has taken the lives of men and brutes alike, and will take many more. Reluctantly, he returns but the morale of the convict laborers is low. Some resent Weatherby for sending them into the caves and tunnels when he himself is too scared to enter them. They are making little to no progress. He needs the engine in another location, four miles up the mountain, but there is no way to get it there. Another character named Cumberland muses about the possibility of dismantling the engine and re-assembling it at the other site, but Weatherby says it would take too long. The group recalls the heroic efforts of the men pulling the first engine out of the mud sluice by hand. Would it be possible, Cumberland asks, to pull the engine up the mountain to the other site? Yes, Weatherby says, and they undertake the impossible task of pulling the machine four miles up the untamed mountain. As they attempt to drag the engine over a weak bridge, the big power wheel breaks through the planks and threatens to topple the whole machine over into the creek. "It takes a strong stomach if a man's to build a road," Weatherby tells the new engineer. "Everything fails a time or two before it succeeds."

So it is with writing. I like this idea of having a strong stomach to accomplish something gargantuan and treacherous and important like building a road or living a life or writing a novel. When I think of my own life, I'm grateful for every heartache, every bad decision I've made.

In an earlier chapter of the novel, Weatherby awaits news about the number of deaths from a cave-in of one of the tunnels he's building through the mountain. Ehle writes: "Weatherby ate nothing, nor did Henry Anna. Her father ate as much as usual. 'It brings us up short agin the wall, don't it?' he said, chewing on the food greedily. 'We go through life not thinking about it, and suddenly we're up agin it, and it gives me heartburn. Don't death give you heartburn, Weatherby?'"

Strangely, I remember just this same kind of experience when my father was dying, a sharp pain in my stomach like none I've ever experienced before or since. A pain that pulled me inside myself and out of the hospital conference room where the doctors were delivering us news I didn't want to believe. I was virtually incapacitated.

A sour stomach can make it impossible for us to write, too. I'm not talking about butterflies. We ought to be smitten with our work and feel a little fluttery inside when we think about it or sit down to it. I'm talking about that pit you sometimes feel in your stomach when someone asks how the novel's coming along, that acid reflux that creeps up on you as you stare at the blank page, that nervous bowel that threatens to embarrass and utterly destroy you.

As creative types, we are perhaps better at imagining our impending doom than others. We foretell in gory detail the dangers ahead, the rejections, the laughter and scorn, the wasted years of our lives, the drinking and dissolution of our marriages, the estranged children left to raise themselves while we finish the damn novel, the realization 300 pages in that we still don't have a friggin' clue where we are going.

A few years ago, I had a once in a lifetime chance to see a coral reef, purportedly, the second most beautiful reef in the world. Had I known we'd be trailed by a "curious" barracuda or that I would become confused and ascend too quickly and possibly get the bends or be left stranded in the ocean like that couple in Open Water, I would never ever have even considered doing it, let alone taken those quick lessons in the pool.

To write a novel, you have to get in the water knowing it's teeming with wild creatures with barbed tails and serrated teeth and jaws that unhinge, knowing you're only an adequate swimmer but hoping you'll get stronger with each incoming (or outgoing!) wave. Realizing you might be left stranded, or kidnapped by Somali pirates demanding a ransom you know you're not worth. To stick with the road metaphor, you have to anticipate the bears and wolves and snakes, the laurel slicks that twist you up and trap you fast, the mud slides and cave-ins.

Your novel, sooner or later, will very likely make you sick at your stomach. You'll have to toss out hundreds of pages of drek. You'll have to scrap that outline you've been holding to fast or realize three drafts later, you've needed one all along. You'll have to kill characters and reward others who don't deserve it. The whole thing might become diseased and need to be burned. You might finish it and lose it on the subway. You might finish it and wish you'd lost it on the subway. You might show it to an agent who tells you it's writers like you who are to blame for global warming (all that wasting of paper).

When that happens, think of Weatherby. Tell yourself, "I'm building a road" and remind yourself that "everything fails a time or two before it succeeds." Expect casualties, anticipate set-backs, learn to think on your feet, draw up new plans, strategize with trusted confidants, scrap whatever's not working, but persevere. You can never tell how close you are to breaking through until it's done.

50 shimmering pages: Writing the First Novel

2010-04-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in graduate school, my thesis advisor implored me to begin writing a novel. "I don’t want to put ideas in your head; you know, and I know, that I’ve been trying, telepathically, to get you to write a novel for two and a half years… close your eyes, but don’t think novel… that’s right, don’t think, novel, novel, novel, novel. When I see you next May, I expect you to hand me 50 shimmering pages of that novel... No pressure, though."

Yeah, no pressure. Fifty pages. Anyone can manage that. Oh, and be sure they shimmer.

My two biggest fears when I was in boot camp were that I would be handed the road guard vest and sent to the front of the PT formation and that Drill Sergeant Divine would point at me with that thin, black open palm of his and say, "Drop and give me fi'ty."

Being pushed is sometimes a great motivator for me. Sometimes a daunting challenge is just what I need to dig in and surprise myself. It worked in basic training, perhaps because I hated Divine as vehemently as he hated me. I would show him who was weak.

But writing has been altogether different, and far more difficult than packing a 50-pound rucksack through the sandhills of South Carolina. That was the summer I turned 18, and although I still can't believe I actually did it, I do know how I did it.

I still have the SMART book I was issued that summer in BT. "Soldier's Manual Army Testing (SMART)" is printed across the front, a 4" x 5" pamphlet we were to carry in our BDU pockets at all times. The SMART book's purpose, like basic training itself, was to make us look and act like soldiers and to teach us basic survival skills should we ever actually see combat.

I had no intention of ever seeing combat, nor, do I suspect, did any of my comrades in arms. Most of us were there for college money or to escape our parents or both. But that didn't make it any less terrifying. The previous summer I had been away at cheerleading camp, of all places, learning how to P-R-O-J-E-C-T my voice and earning "spirit sticks."

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd be loaded up in something called a cattle car (were we livestock?) and be asked to stand bare-armed, barefaced in a tent filled with a poison the likes of which I could only compare to breathing and bathing in EasyOff. Not once in my whole life did I ever see myself disassembling and re-assembling an M16A1 rifle or learning how to decontaminate my skin of chemical and biological hazards or self-administering nerve agent antidote into my own thigh. It didn't take long for it all to become real, very real. At night, I slept in uniform on top of my made-up bunk so that I would be ready for inspection the next morning on time. We were never prepared, and when suddenly a few of us had gotten wise, we were expediciously busted and the whole platoon paid for it. I called my mother on Sundays, begging her to notify the Red Cross that there was some emergency back home that required my presence, anything, just so long as she got me out of there! "Mama, Mama, can't you see," was the cadence we sang, "What the Army's done to me?"

One day we were marched to the PX to buy white cotton underwear so none of us would get yeast infections, one of many humiliating episodes that sweltering August, and the squad leaders were busted for buying candy and trying to sneak it back to the barracks. We were all guilty. I hadn't spent a cent of my payroll the whole time I'd been there except on white panties and black shoe polish, so I splurged along with everyone else, stuffing my pockets with Twix candy bars and M&Ms and something new, Rolos. But the drill instructors stripped the squad leaders of their arm bands and gave them to the four weakest recruits in the platoon, a mousy little thing named Charlotte, a nerdy redhead named Margaret, a sweet but heavy-set sloth of a girl named Irene--the same girl who was routinely made to lean against my back while I did push-ups off the wall--and me. The funny thing is, I thought the squad leaders were being punished.

As the newly appointed squad leaders, we four weaklings were sent to the front and back of every PT formation. Running in front of the pace-setters was hard enough, but running behind the group was impossible, for the pace is quicker in the back. What was worse than that was that we, the "road guards," were made to run all the way to the front of the formation to stop traffic at intersections, and then once the entire platoon had passed by, we had to book it back to catch up again. And there was no stopping, either. Oh no. When we reached each intersection, hearts pounding, we were made to run in place until all the others, the stronger girls, passed by. It was the most grueling experience of my life, but I did become a better runner for it.

Then one day it all became a joke. After being slowly tortured at drill and ceremony on the blazing black asphalt, we were sent for hand-to-hand combat training where we were to learn how to defend ourselves with an unloaded weapon. We were paired off and shown various holds and counter maneuvers for a time. Then the instructor told us to attach our bayonets to the ends of our rifles and proceeded to show us how to joust with an opponent. At some point, the instructor began shouting, "What are you going to do!" And our very expected response, "Kill, Drill Sergeant! Kill!" There we were, teenage girls, gouging bayonets at each other and screaming like banshees. "Kill! Kill, Drill Sergeant!" Suddenly it dawned on me how ludicrous it all was. For the first time in weeks, I laughed. And that's when I knew I had discovered the most valuable survival technique of all: not to take things too seriously. Ain't nothing but a th'ang, Drill Sergeant. Ain't nothing but a th'ang, we'd learned to say somewhere along the way.

I am often reminded how ineffectual we are when we succumb to fear, when we white-knuckle anything, our lives, our work. Writing demands more fortitude than anyone can ever properly prepare you for. MFA programs are boot camps (in the sense that they're total immersion communities) designed to make us look and act like writers, to teach us a few basic survival skills. But the battle with our own faltering confidence comes later, and I can tell you that no drill instructor or writing instructor has ever been so disappointed with me as I have been with myself. Writing, we're often told, is a muscle we must stretch and develop. It takes discipline, yes, but something else, too: courage of heart, trust in the powers that be, faith, one deep breath at a time. Fifty shimmering pages? Ain't nothing but a th'ang.