Friday Filler: A Look Into Bailey's Brain!

I am beginning to outline a new book. The overall structure that's emerging seems to be fairly non-traditional, with the timeline cut into bits and rearranged. It's been hard for me to describe it to people, so I'll attempt it with the assistance of HTML font color tags!

Imagine that the following row of letters represents a continuous, linear timeline that tells the entire story of my novel. It starts at A1 and ends at D4. You can think of each letter/number pair as a chapter, if that makes it easier:

A1A2A3A4B1B2B3B4C1C2C3C4D1D2D3D4

Time, as in calendar time, moves from left-to-right, like this:
---------------------------------->
so that if A1 was January 1st, D4 would be December 31st. More-or-less.

You can also think of the As as being the story of preparing for a journey. The Bs will be the story of the journey. The Cs will be the story of the adventure at the end of the journey. The Ds will be the state of the world after the adventure has finished. With me so far?

So my near-brilliant idea was to take this linear story and cut it up into four big chunks, like the acts in a play, and each chunk of the book, or act, will contain part of each of the colored sections of the story. All the 1s will be in the same act, all the 2s, etc.

The first act would look like this:

A1B1C1D1

The second act would look like this:

A2B2C2D2

Et cetera. So the entire structure of timelines would be this:

DA1B1C1D1A2B2C2D2A3B3C3D3A4B4C4D4

Yes, it starts at the end. The "D" sections are sort of the big structural markers that recur throughout the narrative. Anyway, that all seemed kind of cool to me, and there were going to be parallels between the action in each section. You'd see how the way things were at the start of preparing for the journey affected the actual start of the journey which affected the start of the adventure, etc.

I realized, however, that I didn't want to actually be foreshadowing things like this. I wanted realization to dawn on the reader instead, by giving confusing information and then showing how things were destined to happen that way (this is going to be at one level, I think, a book about mistakes). Which means that I have to show the results first, and then the events that foreshadow them. In other words, I don't want to (for example) have a couple fight, he says something harsh, she slaps him, they break up. I want to have the breakup scene first, then her slapping him, him saying something harsh, then the couple fighting. So I have to reverse all the time-sections within each act of my book, like this:

DC1B1A1D1C2B2A2D2C3B3A3D3C4B4A4D4

As you see, at the very end of the book, you get the last bit of the "preparing for the journey" state right before you get the last bit of the aftermath of the entire story. Which I think will be pretty cool. If I can bring this off. My plan is to simply write out the entire story, in chronological order, and then cut it up into sections and put them into my possibly-near-brilliant almost-backwards narrative structure, and then see how it goes from there. This will either be great or just a huge mess. I have no idea what revisions will be like. But it looks difficult and interesting and so, you know, I can't resist. I am also toying with the idea of having the 4s come first and the 1s come last. I remain undecided.

Anyway, that's what I think I'll be doing with my winter and spring.

Also! Happy Halloween! Also-also! I am once again not doing NaNoWriMo! But good luck to any of you who are! You're braver than me.

Whom Do You Hate? Er...Unlove? Strongly Dislike...

I received an email from a reader, Lindsay Samuels, a few days ago asking us to plug her site, and I must say it's worth plugging. She's pursuing a degree in Library Science (no easy task, I assure you) and has a site up which is informative and entertaining. Her latest post is great - 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History. 

Lindsay begins the post with the disclaimer that literature is highly subjective art. Yeah, we all know about that around here, don't we?

I found it interesting and disturbing that the 1st hated characters on Lindsay's list were Twilight's Edward and Bella. Following in the list are Beth March from Little Women, Hamlet from Shakespeare, and Robert Langdon from the Dan Brown novels. I liked Lindsay's little blurb about him:

Historical and religious inaccuracies aside, one of the biggest complaints that readers had against Robert Langdon is his veritable Mary Sue status. The man can do no wrong and has no discernable flaws, making him exceptionally boring and frustrating to read about.

Ah, so true.

Lindsay's article is a fun read. You should check it out. And if you don't see a character you hate (or love to hate...) in the list, add them here! And tell us why. It might be fun to compile our own list of hated characters and put it up somewhere alongside our most loved characters (we'll save that for another day).

One character I strongly dislike is Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair because the reader spends a good portion of the book rooting for her only to see her turn into a scheming, devious murdering (murdering is debatable) liar. That wouldn't be so bad if one views it all as her position as a woman in that time period - and that her terrible deeds are all crimes of circumstance (haha) - but the fact that she never truly loves her child and remains un-devoted to him at all is what makes her unlovable to me. I love the book, though. Go figure. I do think the fact that Becky is unlovable in so many ways makes her an admirable tool in the literary work. We can save that for another day, too.

Magic Fixes Science

I'm feeling liberated. This last week, I was jotting down a bunch of notes for a new story. It's science-fiction--odd because I don't think I've ever managed to read through a science fiction novel before. I was going over details of stem cell research and solar power, all to set up a situation that I find interesting. Then, it struck me: I was working on a lot of stuff that I don't actually enjoy writing or reading about.

I wanted to get to the actual situation created by the science and not get bogged down in the science itself.

So, I'm taking a new approach. Magic. Well, not really magic, but a good deal of hand waving at the very least. I'm going to skip through the details of the story set up, and just have the situation take place, even the science behind it is completely non-existent. I feel quite good about it!

Character Change, or Discovery?

I was talking recently to Domey about one of his stories, and we were discussing the idea of character change. It occurred to me that, possibly, I don't actually believe in change. I don't believe in "developing characters." I know, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but bear with me. This isn't a revolution; I'm not offering to throw out character arcs, but I have maybe a different way to think about character arcs.

So there's a general expectation for a lot of fiction that the protagonist will have a different worldview at the end of the story than he has at the start of the story. The protagonist will have changed. Usually in genre fiction this is couched in terms of character growth. Often in literary fiction this is couched in terms of the character learning a bitter lesson about life. Either way, external forces come to bear upon the protagonist and he seems to change.

The character in question in Domey's story was not the protagonist, but Domey still needed to find a way to justify what looked like a dramatic shift in his behavior. Which got me thinking about the idea of character change.

My current theory is that characters don't actually change. The way they are at the end of the story--the endpoint of the character arc to which we're moving--is actually no more and no less than how the character really is, already. His true self, if you will, is already there, but it is hidden or repressed somehow. The dramatic action, the primary conflict of the story, is created because the protagonist is unable to express that true self. Or, it can only be resolved once the protagonist expresses that true self.

Yeah, this sounds very much like new-age bullshit, but I think it's a useful intellectual construct. Let's attempt to illustrate what I mean by falling back upon that ancient tale of the hero's transformative journey: George Lucas' Star Wars.

Star Wars (by which I mean the original film, not any of the five awful sequels/prequels) tells the story of Luke Skywalker. Luke does not know it, but his true self is a Jedi Knight, a guy who is attuned to the primal energies of the universe and a force for good. Hey, that's pretty cool. The trouble is, Luke's true self is wrapped in layers of adolescent snottiness and annoying low self-esteem and a kind of general stupidity about life. The character arc of Star Wars is Luke learning to shut the hell up and accept that some folks are smarter and more experienced than he is and that life is about more than his desire to go fly rocket fighters. He is only able to destroy the Death Star at the end of the film (and resolve the outer dramatic arc of the story) when he listens to the disembodied voice of Sir Alec Guinness: "Let go your conscious self; trust your feelings." Luke lets the Force take over, becomes a Jedi and blows up the bad guys. The end. He has not changed at all; his behavior has changed. Luke has stopped acting like someone who he is not.

I sidestep the entire Aristotelian debate about whether action is in fact character and say that "we are what we do" is not as true as "we are why we do." Motivation is everything, and what motivates a character is her true self.

So think about that and see if it's helpful with your own stories. Let me know if you think this is a Bad Idea or just completely off-base and nutty.

Use Pacing to Create Shape

Lately, I've been encountering two types of flawed stories. In one type, the contents of the story are great, but the emotion in them feels lacking. In another type, the emotion somehow seems to be there during the first read, but when I look back, I find that I've somehow been tricked into feeling emotion that wasn't actually there.

The first story suffers from lack of structure (in the stories I've been reading). All of the pacing is the same, or the pacing is working against the natural highlights of the story. A climactic scene, for example, is sometimes hidden away or summarized. A less significant detail is oddly magnified, calling more attention to itself than it probably should.

The second story, while lacking in content, will initially feel like it works because the structure has been manipulated in such a way that certain highlights exist, even if those highlights don't have any substance behind them.

What I've decided is that a solid structure, regardless of content, is sufficient in making the reader feel like they've been taken on some sort of journey. It can take a reader on an experiential roller coaster ride, including ups and downs, even if the actual writing isn't saying anything of meaning.

Remember Mad Libs?

Once there was a ___________.

But the _________ was _________.

It wanted ___________.

For many years the ___________ __________, but one rainy day, a _______________ arrived and ________________.

The ______________ thought that surely all hope was lost.

Then, suddenly, _____________________________!

Even though the stories that came from our random collections of nouns and adverbs and adjectives and verbs were almost always nonsensical, we felt like we had heard a complete story. I think that goes back to the solidity of structure and pacing that go to create shape.

Do you focus on story shape in your work? Has reworking the shape of a story given it more emotional impact?

Story and Nested Structures

Lately I have used a the idea of interrupting the dramatic action of a story with an explanation to give shape to my writing. I know, this sounds like a good way to ruin the flow and pacing of a story, but bear with me. This is a structure that I have found useful in everything from bits of dialogue to full scenes to entire story arcs across the length of a novel. It’s scalable and you can build nested story structures with it and It Works Really Well.

Here’s the basic idea, as applied to the act of writing a very short story. Imagine you've started writing something new, and you've got the initial action and image down on the page. Maybe it goes something like this:

The blood on my hands made the wheel slippery and the car slewed into the left-hand lane before I regained control. I’d put off replacing the old wiper blades and they were almost useless in the heavy rain; I was driving nearly blind through the night, driving much too fast. Christ, there was a lot of blood on me. It was serious now, and I had to get out there to the house as soon as I could. I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way this time. I was going to finish this, all of it, tonight.

You, as the writer, already know how the story will turn out, what’s going to happen at the house on the edge of town, and why. The main dramatic action of the story is What Happens This Night At The House Outside Of Town. But you have to explain it; you have to give meaning and context to that action. So you cut the story of the drive and confrontation in half, right in the middle, and you go backwards in time to give the events leading up to your protagonist getting behind the wheel of his car. So maybe we’ll take an intermediary step backwards, somewhere between the story-present and the backstory. Maybe it goes something like this:

Juliette had tried to stop this before I was even born. All of that crap with the Moon and all of that time in the asylum hadn’t changed anything. Juliette had been a good mother, but she couldn’t prevent this.

So I think that’s a fine transitional passage. The story-present has mentioned some mysterious “it” and this passage refers to that same “it” but gives more (though vague) information about whatever “it” is, invoking the Moon and an asylum. Maybe something to do with werewolves? I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along, but if this was your story, you’d already know. We've given a lot of information in nine sentences, and to me it doesn’t feel like an info-dump, even though almost all of it’s been exposition so far.

We have also pointed the narrative in a new direction at this point, at a new character: the protagonist’s mother. From this intermediary passage, which already steps us outside of the story-present’s timeline, we can go to the important bits of the protagonist’s backstory, if we want. Maybe something like this:

The first sign that something was wrong came when I was five years old. We were living in Chicago at the time, in a crappy one-bedroom apartment in one of those ugly tombstone-like tenements on the South Side. One morning I was sitting at the wobbly linoleum table in the kitchenette, eating my cereal. Juliette was in the bathroom, getting ready for work. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and turned to look up at the kitchen counter. Right beside the sink was a greasy black rat, reared up on his back legs, his shining red eyes looking straight at me. I felt like I'd been hit in the chest, right in my heart, with a hammer.

I don’t know what happened next. Something scary, I’m sure. But at this point, we have established a nested structure of storylines:

1. The external dramatic story, of the House Outside Of Town.
2. The story of Juliette, which is also the larger historical story of whatever “it” is.
3. The personal history of the protagonist, who I have just named Dick Raley because I can.

Having established this overall nested structure, we can move between the three timelines at will. The thing to remember is that, if you want to do this right, you have to keep the action moving forward. Everything that happens in whatever level of narrative has to foreshadow and set up whatever happens next in whatever timeline. The story keeps moving forward, always. You do not stop the story. Ever.

My favorite place to insert these interruptions is right when the dramatic action has reached a fever pitch. That is to say, right before the climax and resolution of the action. For example, if a story of mine had this passage during the Final Confrontation between Protagonist and Antagonist: I pointed the gun at his head. He asked me not to, he begged me, told me there was no other woman. I didn't believe him. He started to run, and I pulled the trigger. I would be tempted to stop right there after the word "trigger" and loop backwards through time for a paragraph or two to give an image (always dramatized, not just internal monologue or whatever form of telling) that either shows how the woman with the gun is mistaken but doesn't realize it (Irony!) or how she and the cheating bastard were once happy (Pathos!) or something else depending on what's going on in the story.

It’s also possible to use these nested levels to discuss different things about the story. For example, you can use level 3, Dick Raley’s personal history, to tell the inner story, which is going to be Dick’s coming to terms with some truth about himself or the world that he doesn’t want to admit. Or whatever. You can use level 2, about Dick’s mother Juliette, to explore the theme(s) of the story, where this truth of Dick’s causes some kind of conflict between Dick’s personal reality and the rest of the world. Or whatever. And you can use level 1, the “gosh, but I’m covered with blood and driving too fast” story, to tell an action-packed suspense story. So you can have three stories all at the same time, linked together and nested like Matryoshka dolls. There is no limit to how many nested stories-within-stories or moments-within-moments you can have. There may be a limit to how much of this your reader can take, depending on how sudden the shifts are.

I actually wanted to talk about the subtle things you can do with this nesting of timelines, but I realized I should talk about this in a more general sense first. Maybe next time.

Also! Contest! Yes, a quick contest, if anyone wants to enter. Take my three paragraphs above and finish the "bloody hands" story I’ve begun! Keep it to about 1000 words or fewer! Winner gets a valuable prize! Likely a stinking Amazon gift card, because that seems to be what people give as prizes in the age of blogs. You have until, I don’t know, Tuesday, November 2nd to enter. I am sole and final judge, and I reserve the right not to award the prize. If you have an entry, email it to me at scott (at) scottgfbailey (dot) com. If you don’t have an entry, I still like you.

Revealing...

A fellow blogger over at Obsessions of a Workaholic did a post today about her secrets. It got me thinking about what we reveal in our blog posts, and even more importantly, what we reveal about ourselves in our writing - consciously and subconsciously.

Fear is something I deal with daily. It's constantly nagging at my heels, keeping me on my toes. I constantly try to turn around and stare the beast in the eyes. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think doing something drastic will kill the beast, when in reality it just gets larger in ways I didn't think possible.

For instance, I decided to write a book just for me. I told myself I didn't care what anyone thought of it. So I wrote it and published it despite stigmas existing against the method I chose. Finally, after the book has been out for a few months, I've realized how many secrets about myself are in that book. It's actually quite frightening. It's even more frightening when I read reviews and listen to some readers who didn't like the book or the character I portrayed.

That aside, I think it's important we put ourselves into our work and our blog posts. People respond to honesty in all its forms. Honesty creates artistic integrity. It's essential, in my opinion.

So. A few of my other secrets?

I don't understand politics. At all. If someone brings up presidential politics, I try to blend into the wall because I'll look stupid if I open my mouth.

I really have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to writing. I rely a lot on my gut instinct and what I've learned in the past. If you ask me how I write a book, I'll answer with something that sounds smart, but in reality I'm just winging it. Seriously, good writing is just lots and lots and lots and lots of practice.

Although I love them dearly, Scott and Davin scare me because they are amazingly intelligent and I respect them more than they know. I often feel like I'm a clownish figure fumbling in the corner when I'm around them.

I am deathly afraid of being forgotten.

I know some people are much more private than others. I think I fall somewhere in the middle, and because of the last secret I just shared, I tend to share more than I'm often comfortable with - both in my writing and online. Do you have any secrets you'd like to share today?

The Boy Who Was All Alone Pt. 2

I got some nice news a couple of days ago. I met up with my family to celebrate my brother's birthday, and my nephew announced that he was able to read the novella I wrote for him all the way through on his own.

For those of you who don't remember, this novella initially resulted in a rather traumatic experience for both my nephew and me. See the post here.

Well, as some of you predicted, time has seemed to mend some things. Not only did my nephew reread it and enjoy it, but he took it to school for show-and-tell, and now both of his teachers have asked to read it as well.

I've decided to allow the little guy back into the family again.

Significant Details and Set Dressing

One of the little twitches I have when I'm revising a novel is that I will mercilessly go through and cut out everything that's not essential to the story. Part of this is just to clean up after my first draft. I like to throw odd things in that strike my fancy while drafting ("maybe the two big guys are actually twins, and I can do something with the idea of twins later on!" or "maybe Fredrik has one leg shorter than the other, and I can do something with that later on!") and see if they develop, and sometimes they become gorgeous symbols and set pieces and sometimes they're just rubbish I need to clear off the page later.

What this means is that at some point during my revisions process, I have a fairly tight narrative with no extraneous material in it. Which is a good thing, to a point. There is a danger--always realized in my case, I think--that all of the cool details that make the fictional world a rich experience for the reader are removed, because the number and type of buttons on someone's gloves is not a significant detail so I have cut it out, just as I have cut out the discussion of the tightness of the wood grain on the arm of a chair, and other things. Which leaves me with a sort of empty world, where characters are floating a bit in a vacuum. I don't know why I do this every time, but I do.

I am forced then to go back into the novel for another round of revisions, putting in all the details of the fictional world that I've removed. I pause to note that it's never quite so extreme as I'm making it here; possibly I only cut out about half of the details of setting and place and appearance that I put in during the first draft, but it seems like a lot to me. Anyway, I am currently in this stage of revisions with my novel Killing Hamlet, and I have always sort of disliked this stage of the process. I have felt that, in a way, I am betraying my own rules about a proper narrative by larding up my prose with stuff that the story can live without. But I also want my story to have the flavor of the time and place, without the level of detail found in novels of the historical fiction genre, where things can be--in my opinion--a bit excessive, reading like a catalogue or an encyclopedia.

Last night I was weaving in little bits of trivia about 16th-century beliefs regarding the planets in our solar system, just a sentence or two here and there through the novel (the protagonist is an astronomer/astrologer), and it occurred to me that I was not choking up my story with unnecessary detail so much as I was going around the house I'd built and furnished and putting flower arrangements and objets d'art in the rooms. Mighty Reader makes sure we have fresh flowers year round, and I have no complaints about how pretty this makes our house, and were the flowers to go away, I'd miss them awfully much. So I have decided that this is what I'm doing with my book, and that it's a good thing, as long as I don't pile in so many bouquets that you can no longer see my characters.

Anyway, and I stipulate in advance that "it's all in the execution," but what are your thoughts about details that are only in the story as set dressing, as props? I have railed against them in the past on this very blog, but I'm older and more mellow and, frankly, a bit tired today. But how much is enough, or too much, and when in the writing process do you put them in, and how much do you remove? Et cetera.

Reinvention

I was talking to a friend about Proust a lot this weekend, and it reminded me of how unusual his novel In Search Of Lost Time was. It's different from anything else I've read, not only in the sense of the plot or the voice, but more totally, it feels like a whole different type of novel. As if Proust had reinvented the novel form.

Of course Proust isn't alone in that. I think many of the great classic writers succeeded in doing this to some extent. I'm not as well-read as I could be, but I think Marquez, Woolf, Nabokov, Hemingway, Faulkner, Yoshimoto, Updike, Kawabata, and Shakespeare (though not a novelist) have all succeeded in making me think completely differently of what a novel could be.

I think what led these brilliant writers down this past of reinventing the novel form wasn't necessarily the drive to be new. In thinking about Proust, it seems like he HAD to reinvent the form to make it fit the story he was trying to tell. He reinvented out of necessity.

It all makes me wonder if contemporary writers are pushing themselves as hard to find a novel form that best fits their needs.

A few months ago, I went to a seminar that talked about the use of story as a framework. The idea was that the story wasn't the main thing a writer was striving to create. The story was more of the vessel that held the thing the writer was trying to create. I really liked that. It rang true for me somehow and managed to ease the process of writing for me. Now, I'm more excited to get in touch with a deeper material I've been trying to share and then develop a form around that material.

Do you feel like you reinvent things as you write? If so, what?

Friday Filler: What Are You Reading Right Now?

Yes, this is a game everyone can play! Just tell me what book you're reading right now. If you're loving the book, tell me why. Hopefully we'll all turn some of our writer neighbors on to new books. Because we are a community, right?

I'll start. Don't laugh. I'm reading "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne. It's like 250 years old, and it's hysterically funny. It claims to be an autobiography, but really it's a comic look at life in 18th-century England and a comic look at the art of writing a book. The narrator claims that in order to give you the most accurate portrait of himself, he must give you every detail he can imagine, and so it takes him a whole year to write about a single day of his life (that is, the first day of his life). Meanwhile, you get a bunch of amusing anecdotes, dirty jokes, political broadsides that are still funny 250 years later because politics doesn't seem to have changed, and a whole lot of fun. Don't let the fact that it's a classic work of literature put you off, and never mind those people who say it's "difficult." It doesn't take itself (or the idea of a linear narrative) seriously.

I'm also reading one of the Paddington Bear books, but I can't remember which one.

Your turn. What are you reading?

Firsts. Perhaps a Re-examining is in Order

1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

4. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

5. I am an invisible man. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

6. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

7. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

8. For a long time, I went to bed early. - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

9. It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

10. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

________________________________


I took these from a site that listed the 100 best first lines from novels.

So, you are writing a novel. A short story. Something fiction. You must have a first line. Do you panic? Do you just write it and not care? Do you run around reading blog posts and writing books about first sentences? First paragraphs? First pages? First chapters? First novels? Do you freak out about firsts?

I think many of us worry so much about these firsts because we feel we must snag an agent or publisher with them. Everything hangs on them. Our queries must be perfect. Our partials must be perfect.

Well, let me tell you something. After judging entries in college for the literary journal, and then for Genre Wars, and then my own short story contest, and then Notes from Underground, I can honestly say that I don't think writers should worry so much about those dreaded firsts. As a reader judging entries for publication, I don't open up the entry, read the first line or paragraph, and just stop or move on from there. I always keep reading. I read until I get a sense of what the writer's style is, how strong of a writer they are, if the story is headed anywhere interesting (to me!). It differs for every piece, but I can tell within the first few minutes of reading (or hour if I'm reading a novel) whether or not the piece is going to work for me. It has nothing to do with the first sentence or paragraph - it is everything pulling together. And more often than not, I will read the entire piece before making a decision.

What writers, including myself, should worry about is telling a good story. If the first line is vague, it doesn't matter. It won't end up on the 100 best first lines of the century. So what? Actually, I think all those great first lines up there aren't up there because the lines are so fantastic so much as the stories themselves are fantastic.

Besides, if you put so much darned effort into your firsts and not the same amount of effort into the rest of your story, you're going to have problems with the rest of the story. I've read one too many of these examples. Great, fantastic, blow-me-away first lines and paragraphs and pages, but then it all falls apart from there. This may partly be why many writers get requests for fulls from partials only to receive rejections.

And trust me, I've been through the first-trauma myself one too many times. It has only been lately that I've realized I need to stop worrying so much about it.

Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le!

Let's hear it for the rescue of the Chilean miners! For those of us who have claustrophobic tendencies, this has been a very disturbing 70 days. I'm happy for the 15 or so men who have made it out alive and hope the rest of them get out without any problems.

Spontaneity. Do you do anything to ensure that your writing has and preserves a layer of spontaneity? I think for me, I lot of energetic writing happens in my first or early drafts. And lately I've been working to not lose that energy. I know with Scott and his outlining, the spontaneity also can come in the early drafts, when he allows himself to deviate from the outline.

What about you? How do you keep that energy alive? Do you even want to?

Compliments You'd Love To Get

So yesterday Domey asked about what compliments your work receives that you don't want to hear. Today I'm going to go the other way. What are the things you've labored over in your work that make you proud, that you want someone to notice and tell you is exceedingly cool?

I'll start. I work hard to create symbolic frameworks in my novels, where for example an action is repeated by different characters in different contexts and has different meaning, or where a single image runs through the narrative and gathers meaning and weight along the way. I want someone to say, "Ooh, and the thing with the eels! That was cool!" I also sort of do this with dialogue: a single word or concept will be batted back and forth by two or more people like a tennis ball and each speaker will change the meaning of the word and imply all sorts of things. Hey, this is really just the shaping force of my narrative structure; what I do is take a story and tell it over and over and examine it for different meanings depending on how you tell it. There, the secret's out. Anyway, I want people to notice the subtle structural things I'm doing with patterns and repetition and then congratulate me on my near brilliance.

I also want people to tell me that the jokes make them laugh.

You?

Also! Next week, I promise I will write more substantive posts! Honest! I'm revising on a deadline and very busy at work, so I haven't got a lot of brain left. On the upside, though, that makes me only a secondary target for roaming zombies. You are all in more danger than I am.

Compliments You Hate?

Happy Monday, everyone!

Is there a compliment you hate to get?

Lately, I've been hating it when people tell me that they love my details. I've been getting compliments on my details since I started writing ten years ago. I used to love hearing it. But, it just makes me wonder what people think about my characters, my plots, my emotions...in other words, everything else.

Revisions and the Writerly Eye

Every novel is in part the result of decisions the author has made and most of the time, I am sure, those authors have made different decisions than I would have made had I been writing their book. Sometimes this results in my surprise and delight as a writer comes up with something much more cool than I ever would have stumbled into. Most of the time these decisions are invisible to me and I'm just caught up in the narrative.

Sometimes, I find myself thinking along the lines of, "Gosh, I wish he hadn't done that. I hope there isn't going to be a lot more of that as we go along." This is what I think when, for example, the author telegraphs a punch or gives a clumsy explanation for character action or lays out a slab of prose that doesn't flow well with the surrounding prose or just uses a word I dislike (for not all words are created equal, and some words are just ugly in the ear and invoking them destroys the poetry of the passage).

Anyway, this is what I think of as reading with my writerly eye: remaining vigilant to lapses of craft in whatever prose is before me. It's an irritating way to read and frankly it's caused me to read much more slowly than I did in the past. This writerly eye is, I am sure, a by-product of my own writing and revising, because it is the way I read my own works.

This doesn't mean that my inner editor is my primary reader, though. I read first and foremost for pleasure, like any other sane person. Reading just feels good in my head, and I love the simple process of converting graphics into concepts and stories and gosh, but whoever invented the alphabet and writing is my best friend forever. I also read for surprise, for the delight of character and plot and theme and all the other values I have learned to appreciate in fine writing. The writerly eye is more like a separate and parallel process that goes on in the background while I read. Sometimes I think of a narrative as a river through which I am wading upstream and my inner editor is like a hand trailing in the water and sometimes things that don't belong in the river get caught by the fingers of that hand. If it's my own narrative, I pull the seaweed or tin cans or other junk out of the river and throw it to shore and then admire the clean sparkling water flowing around me. If it's someone else's book, the junk remains caught in my hand until--if it's not a well-written book--too much of it collects and I decide to shake all the crap off my fingers and go find a different river to wade.

What I'm doing here, of course, is searching for the proper metaphor for the process of revisions. Some of it is like trailing your hand in a moving river, but some of it is like untangling a knot of string, and some of it is like taking in the waist of a pair of pants and some of it is like patching a hole in a wall and some of it is like planting bulbs in the fall and hoping they'll all bloom beautiful flowers in the spring and some of it, of course, is like trying to decipher Linear B when you have no knowledge of ancient Minoan.

The Pained Artiste...

I had a conversation with my friend last night about how long it takes her to write a novel. She's pretty fast at it. I'm pretty slow. At least I think I'm slow. In actuality, looking at what I've accomplished in the last few years, I think I write at a good pace considering I have a kid hanging on me all day.

My friend brought up a good point, though, about how some people take forever to write books and she gets a annoyed sometimes that these people think because it takes them forever and that it's a painful process that the book is some sort of artistic masterpiece.

I can understand that. I've fallen into that trap myself before as I huddle over my keyboard for the 18th month in a row still slaving away over the same novel. In the back of my mind I'm thinking, This is going to be freaking awesome!!! Because, you know, it's taking me FOREVER....

It's a consolation. Right?

Of course I know this just isn't true, especially if it's a first novel, which tend to take longer. Sadly, I have one novel I'd like to publish that I've literally had hanging around for 16 years. That's scary, isn't it? I haven't worked on it for 16 years straight, but I have worked on it for a lot of years. YEARS. It will be a masterpiece!!! *shakes fist in the air*

Yeah. Personally, I think everyone just writes differently and 3 years for one person might be like 6 months for another person - with them producing similar quality results. Sure doesn't seem fair, though!

What do you think about this? Because I honestly think it just takes me a long time because for a long time I had no idea what I was doing. Sometimes I wonder if even know what I'm doing now!
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Also, one of our readers, Erica M. Smith, emailed me about a blogfest she's holding. Check it out, especially if that novel you've worked on forever needs a beta reader!

Click Here

Includes Giveaways! (Beta readers! Not the fish!)









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And I have some BIG NEWS over at my personal blog. Check it out here.

Show, that bully manipulator

I've been in a show don't tell phase lately. The last story I wrote was almost all show, and I've been cutting out a lot of telling from my older work. I don't think there's anything wrong with telling things, especially if you're a good teller, but, like I said, I'm in a show phase lately.

Showing for me has been a way to get readers to pay more attention. If you are showing, the reader has to constantly be picking up clues about the characters. Readers are also more likely to get engrossed with the story that is shown. The details are more engaging on a sensory level. It makes the suspension of disbelief work better.

What I realize about showing a story, however, is that it forces your characters to act a certain way. Or, to be more precise, it forces your characters to ACT. If you are trying to show emotion without telling it, you are forced to make your character reveal the emotion through some action.

This is a problem for me.

See, for the few of you who have read a lot of my work, you may have seen that I'm often fascinated by characters who are frozen by their own fears. They're stuck because they either don't know what to do or they don't know how to do it. With these inactive characters, I had to tell a lot because the external view of them wasn't nearly as interesting as the internal view.

If, however, I start showing all the time, my characters aren't allowed to do nothing anymore. They have to act, otherwise it's 300 pages of a man (or woman) sitting in a chair (or couch). Forcing a character to act sure does make a story more interesting. (Hey, don't panic, but I think there's a plot standing...right...behind you.) On the other hand, I feel like I'm losing those characters that interested me. Or, maybe I'm just not providing as much insight into them as I would have liked. For example, though I wanted to provide insight into my cannibal character, I think a lot of that was lost through my decision to not tell. We'll see what the critics say on that.

Let's face it, a lot of people don't act. A lot of people are on the verge of acting, or wish they could act. I've been trying to capture those people, because I think there's a wealth of emotion bottled up inside of them. And, I wonder if I lose the depth of those characters when I show instead of tell.

So, the question I'm asking all of you is: Does showing (and not telling) force you to write about a certain type of character or a certain type of story?

My answer at the moment is yes, unfortunately.

Writing Face to Face

There are only a couple of people on Earth who read my works in progress: Mighty Reader, Domey, Michelle and my agent (and his reader). I don't have a group of "beta readers" and I don't belong to a critique group, online or otherwise. I am not taking any sort of writing class and so, in general, most of my writing is done alone, with as little feedback as possible from other people. The main reason for this is that I know very few people who read the sort of fiction I write and will talk about the issues in my own work that concern me. If I ask someone to read something, I don't really want to hear about misspellings or split infinitives. I want to hear if the story and the characters work in the way I want them to work. In general, I trust my own instincts and taste more than those of anyone else, though I will of course listen to my agent and the three other people listed above.

Lately, however, I have begun to write more short stories, and I'm in a loose sort of online writing group who share our bits and bobs of stuff every two months. That's very cool, especially because I continue to struggle with the short story form and it's nice to have feedback from people who do it better than I do. It's also nice to be part of a writers' community that meets, virtually anyway, every so often. I also have a standing invitation to go drinking with a group of writers here in Seattle, but it's on a school night so I haven't gone yet, though I have gotten together a few times with one of these guys and it's a blast. He and I talk about writing in very similar terms and I get what he means and he gets what I mean even though the waitress and the folks at the next tables think we're just insane. Which is fine.

The thing is, then, that while I still see writing as primarily something done alone, in isolation, it is an activity that's brought me into contact with others doing the same thing. There is a lot of value, certainly, in the online community of writers. But the interactions I've had with writers in real life (and I include the groovy Skype conversations I've recently had with Domey and Michelle), including going to readings/book signings, means that writing has become something larger to me than just writing down stories. Some folks I know here in Seattle are thinking about organizing a regular series of public readings, and I think that would be a lot of fun and I think I'd like to try out my short stories in that venue.

Anyway, my point--if I have one--is that I think it's important to have real-world interactions with other writers if you can. So I'm wondering how many of you have met any other writers in real life? How many of you are taking a class or are part of a critique group/reading group that meets in person? How many of you take part in readings on a regular basis, either as audience members or as readers?

Unexpected and Inevitable

Scott's post Friday and my own revising this weekend had me thinking about story endings again. I was revising, Bread, and I had gotten to the last few pages. The two possible endings I arrived at were both fine in the sense that they were plausible and gave the story closure (and really, how hard is that when you're dealing with a cannibal?). But, neither of the two endings sat quite right with me.

I realized that the reason I didn't like either one of the endings very much was because they represented the two most obvious outcomes to my story. In my case, my main character was committing a crime, and it was either going to go well or it wasn't.

While chatting with Michelle, I was reminded of two Jhumpa Lahiri stories in her most recent collection Unaccustomed Earth: "Hell-Heaven" and "Only Goodness". What I loved about both of these stories was how they were ended. In reading these stories, I will say that I was fairly underwhelmed a good 98% of the way through. They were deftly written, and in general the characters and conflicts were engaging and emotional. But, what bothered me about them was that they felt boring.

Until the last line.

In both cases, Lahiri managed to catch me off guard with the final sentence. They are both unexpected and inevitable, meaning, they led me to a new conclusion I wouldn't have guessed at, even though all the clues were there.

I think a reader wants to be surprised without feeling cheated. An unexpected and inevitable ending accomplishes both of those goals. It gives them a journey that they can relate to, but then something catches them off guard and makes them see things in a new light (something I think all good art should do).

So, in going back to Bread I ran through my entire story and dared to avoid the two endings that came most naturally to me. Using the earlier material, I decided to come up with that I hadn't thought about before. I wanted to surprise myself. I wanted to learn something new.

I'm happy to report that I like my current ending. I like that it makes me revisit the story again and sort of go, "Huh."

What about you? How do you go about approaching your story endings?

Ending a Short Story: Some Thoughts

I will admit that I am not the most brilliant short story writer, but I've read a lot of them and I have made some observations about things that writers of good short stories never rarely do. So this is one of those proscriptive posts that annoy me so much but here I am, writing one anyway. Go figure. But here are the things I'd keep in mind were I working on a short story:

1. Never directly explain the action. People read partly for the pleasure of figuring things out for themselves. Don't deny them that pleasure. Which is to say, avoid things like Jimmy picked up the bundle and stormed away because he was angry. We can figure out that Jimmy was angry, really we can. If you write a sentence using the word "because," you might be well advised to just delete it.

2. Never sum up. Readers are bright. See above comment, but mostly I mean don't sum up the story for the reader at the ending. Don't tell your reader the meaning of your story. The "meaning" of the story might be different for the reader than it is for you. It's also highly likely that you don't know what your story actually "means" in a deep thematic sense while you're writing it (unless you are deliberately writing didactic or moralistic fiction, in which case your story probably really sucks will probably only appeal to a limited audience; I'm just saying).

3. Leave them wanting more. Go out on a high note. Don't drag the ending out. Have you finished the necessary action of the story? Then get the hell out of it. You can get to the moment of crisis, assure the reader what's going to happen next, and then stop without even showing the crisis resolving itself. That's a cool trick.

Also! I am not even here today! Through the magic of the internets, I wrote this post last week or so, and this lovely Friday morning I'm on vacation! I will not be looking at this blog until, say, next Tuesday, so have a good weekend in my absence, and I look to Domey and Michelle to keep the commentary cracking with humor. So get cracking.