Take Two

I wrote a book in November.

Correction: I wrote the first draft of a book in November.

Okay, it wasn't a "book" exactly. More like 65,000 words molded into a book-like shape. Characters. Scenes. Pieces and chunks of scenes. A possible beginning. A foggy middle. A glimmer of an ending.

This is a typical first draft for me, my way of exploring a couple of ideas and watching, waiting for those seemingly unrelated strands to come together, wondering the whole while if they WILL come together and then marveling when they inevitably do. It's the bizarre and magical aspect of writing a story and I don't even pretend to understand how it works.

What I do know is that if I go In each day, write my words, trust the process, follow the characters and the story strands-- something will eventually spark and catch fire, and if I keep going with it, if I keep showing up on the page, pushing, while at the same time letting go and not pushing at all--

I will find myself at the end of the process with this Thing that I did not have at the beginning,

a first draft.

By definition it is a mess.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird calls them "shitty first drafts" and the first time I read that I loved Anne Lamott. The first draft, she says, shitty as it may be, is perfect, because it is finished. Because you made it to the end of it and now you have something to work with, something to revise.

Which is where I am now, at the beginning of the Take Two leg of this novel-writing marathon.

I'm okay with that. Even a little excited. I have methods that have worked for me in the past. Strategies.

*Put the first draft away for a while.

*Print it off in a different font from the font that you wrote it in.

*Read it. Which is always a challenge. It's hard to face this thing you wrote-- see the actual words written on the page vs the beautiful complex amazing brilliant story you had floating around in your head, and then come to grips with all of the work you're going to have to do to get the draft on the page closer to what you envision.

I take notes as I read. I write questions to myself. I make a list:

What I have/What I need

So far my list sounds like this:
What I have: characters, a voice, a back story
What I need: a plot


A few months ago I was at a party and an aspiring writer asked my opinion about revision. "I bet you don't revise as much anymore," she said, "now that you're more experienced."

I shook my head. "No," I said. "I revise even more now."

She looked at me quizzically. I could tell she didn't quite believe me. Some beginning writers assume that it gets easier. (Spoiler alert: It doesn't.)

I can't remember where I read this, but a student asks a teacher:

Do good writers revise?

And the teacher answers: Only good writers revise.

Every writer has their secrets. 

Lately, I've been thinking of revision as a kind of puzzle. I empty the pieces onto the table. I turn them over and study them. I group them by color, by shape. I click together the obvious ones, assemble the larger chunks, maybe stop every now and then to string the border, identify the corners, trying not to get overwhelmed by the pieces that don't seem to fit, all of those empty spaces that will have to be filled in eventually.

And then there's nothing to do but start writing.

Take two.

Thoughts on (not) Cleaning, Potential Writing Topics, and Weird Places to Grow Pumpkins

So my readers often ask me why it is that I write so much about cleaning my house (or rather NOT cleaning my house).
Okay. That is a total lie.

No one has ever asked me that. But it's entirely possible that some of you have thought about it. Perhaps you are wondering how messy we are talking if this woman (me) is continually bringing up the subject: here. Here. and Here. It does seem to be a persistent problem, how to balance out writing with other obligations.

Perhaps you are wondering if cleaning (or rather, NOT cleaning) is an appropriate topic for a blog post about writing and reading and all things related to writing and reading. Well, yes. I think it is. Stick with me here. It has to do with school lunches.

There's a great book by Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, which is pretty much THE manual when it comes to writing inspiration and craft, where she recommends writing about school lunches whenever you are suffering from writer's block. Her point is that writing something--anything--even about the contents of your seventh grade self's lunch bag can miraculously break down your walls and get the creative juices flowing.

I am not suffering from writer's block at the moment. But I am in this floundery phase between projects. My publisher accepted my revision (woot! woot!) and the manuscript is now in copyediting. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking about how cool that sounds while at the same time I am thinking that I don't know exactly what the copyediting phase entails. But I am certainly excited about the prospect of figuring it out! If you've been following this blog with any regularity, you know that after many many years of toiling, I've snagged a book deal. My YA novel is due out next year around this time (Sept. 10, 2013, if you'd like to mark your calendar).

So I'm wondering what to work on while I'm waiting and I'm also feeling kind of floundery because of stuff going on at the home front. Specifically, last weekend my husband and I dropped our first born child off at a college 648 miles away and now we're back home and son's bedroom is sadly empty but somehow I am still finding his clothes in the laundry. Also he didn't quite clean out all of his toiletries and whenever I walk by his bathroom I note the half-used deodorant and the squeezed up toothpaste container on the sink, and I wonder if I should clean that up (or not).

Which brings me to the actual point of this blog about cleaning (or rather, NOT cleaning). Because, this, dear readers, is what is preoccupying my mind and I must get it out of my head by writing about it: my realization over the weekend that I have likely failed big time in one very important parenting area. I never taught my brilliant boy how to clean a bathroom.

It is a stunning oversight on my part and someday his future wife can berate me, but today there is a more urgent cause for worry. My son lives in a suite with seven other boys and they share one bathroom and somehow the college neglected to tell the boys that they would be responsible for cleaning and stocking that bathroom. Well, as you can probably imagine, all of the parents had hearty laugh about that. What is 55,000 dollars a year paying for, etc. Then we ran out and bought toilet brushes and cleaning supplies and toilet paper and piled that up in the boys' bathroom and then wondered if any of that stuff would ever be, uh, actually utilized. I suppose we will find out at Parent's Weekend in October!

One of the moms told me that she overheard the boys talking.

Conversation:
Boy #1: "Do any of you know how to clean a bathroom?"
Boys # 2-7: "No."
Boy #8 (who is not my son): "I, uh, do, sort of."

I'm sure that kid is probably kicking himself now. Oh, we mothers (and I say mothers, because geez, isn't it the mothers who clean the bathrooms? and isn't this THE problem in the first place?) are kicking ourselves too and feeling pity for boy # 8 who should not be saddled with this job himself.

So, doing the only thing I know how to do, I told my son a story. This goes back to my own freshmen year a gabillion years ago, but I remember it vividly because it was so disgusting. It was Halloween and I went to a party hosted by a bunch of boys who lived in a very cool apartment-like dorm room, complete with a lovely kitchenette. I remember walking by that kitchenette and noting the splattered remains of a large pumpkin the boys had carved in the sink. Seeds, guts, and pumpkin entrails spilled out onto the counter, and there was the awesome carved pumpkin grinning over the mess.

Cut to: the end of the year. The same boys had a party and I walked through the same kitchenette, with the remains of that same mess spattered on the counter. But this time there was a plant growing up from the sink drain like Jack's Beanstalk, the vines climbing across the counter around the corroding mess, and sprouting darling little pumpkins. Yes. These boys had never cleaned up the carved pumpkin from back in the fall. Had never, I guess, used that sink again. And now they had a bizarre garden to show for it in their kitchenette.

My son seemed appropriately awestruck by my story.

But now that I think about it, he may have been contemplating potential chemistry/biological experiments brewing in his bathroom.

Breaking through Writer's Block

As far as writer’s block goes, this one wasn’t so terrible. I was only paralyzed for a week or so. But it was just enough for all the old self-doubts to come crashing back. Why am I doing this? What’s the point of writing these books that no one is ever going to read? What if I can’t write after all? Blah blah blah.

But I’m here to say that I pushed past it. At least for today. The answer, big shocker, was to write. Now I know that sounds counter-intuitive. Writer’s block implies that you can’t write. Like your fingers are in little casts or something or your brain has frozen up and no words will materialize out of the ether. But I had to learn the lesson once again that it wasn’t that I couldn’t write, it was this paralyzing sense that I couldn’t write right. I was so caught up in trying to work out my story that I lost sight of the fact that it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be put down on paper.

Writer’s Block is really about perfectionism. Julie Cameron says in The Artist’s Way: "Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things…Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop… It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough.”

But how do you let go of the crippling feeling that what you’re writing is crap? Answer: write anyway. Quantity not quality. I don’t know who said that. Probably Julie Cameron in The Artist’s Way. (If you’re a writer and you haven’t read this book, go buy it. It’s THE manual for creative people.)

So that’s what I did the past few days. I wrote. Just a bunch of blather. Questions I had about my book. Worries I had about plot holes big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. Pages of boring backstory. I wrote over 3000 words and kept going. And somehow, miraculously, the process took over and I felt better. It didn’t matter anymore what I was writing, just that I was. In Bird by Bird (another must- have writer manual) Anne Lamott says that whenever she’s stuck she writes about school lunches. She doesn’t know why this helps. It’s simply the act of getting something down on paper. You start talking about the smelly tuna fish sandwiches you ate when you were in second grade or the lukewarm chicken noodle soup spilling out of your thermos and the next thing you know you’re off on some weird tangent that turns out to be the kernel of your next story. Try it. Really. It’s cool. If nothing else you might get new lunch ideas for you kids.

Okay. The second key to my breakthrough is another big shocker: reading. I read a great book, a truly amazing, impossible to put down YA novel that reminded me what the point of it all really is. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff won the Printz Award in 2004.

Don’t know how I missed this. It’s about a fifteen-year-old troubled girl who goes to live with her cousins in England. While she’s there war breaks out and the kids get separated from each other. The book becomes a kind of post-apocalyptic journey as they try to get back together. But this explanation doesn’t do it justice. The girl’s voice is funny and snarky and thoroughly original. There’s a fantasy element too—because the cousins can read minds and understand animals. And it’s a love story. Which seems weird, because we’re talking about two cousins, but somehow it works and you want so much for these kids to find each other again. I literally could not put it down, and I read the whole thing marveling at how brilliantly it was put together while at the same time being caught up in the story and just loving these characters. I finished the book and instead of feeling despair that I will NEVER be able to write this well, I was inspired to write anyway.

Imagine what an awesome thing it is to be able to capture a story and put it out into the world so that even one reader has a life changing experience or even just a couple hours escape into another world.

Hey. It’s enough to keep me going for another day.

Searching for a Mentor

Here's something I wish I knew fifteen years ago: how helpful it would be to have a mentor--a kindly, wizened writer to take me under her wing and guide my career. Okay. I never found that person, exactly. But in some ways, over the years, I have. My first few years, unfortunately, were spent floundering alone. I was the perfect mix of arrogance and ignorance. I thought I knew everything about writing (I had majored in it, after all! I had won awards! What could someone teach ME?)

A lot, as it turned out.

My first glimpse of a mentor came in the form of meeting other writers at conferences. No, none of these people ever took me on as a project, but just seeing real people, real women like me, living a writer's life, was important. They showed me that being a writer wasn't some unattainable, magical, crazy dream. These women were like me--they had husbands and children and went grocery shopping and ran errands. They weren't strange characters living in turrets ala Emily Dickinson.

I asked these writers how they worked--nuts and bolts about inspiration and revision and craft. They had different methods but I found that there were things that I could apply to myself and my own work.

Which led me to reading about writers. There are tons of books out there on writing, some more helpful than others. My favorites are: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, (hilarious and God, I wish I had read this book 15 years ago); On Writing by Stephen King (even if you don't like his books, you will find helpful advice on the craft of writing); anything by Natalie Goldberg (very New-Agey but so inspirational); and The Artist's Way by Cameron (also New-Agey, but this book literally changed my life with its ideas about creativity and inspiration).

So I never found my in-the-flesh guru. But over the years I have learned so much from a community of other writers--those I know personally and those I know only through their books. And now I am extremely grateful to have found a writing partner--a woman who is roughly at the same stage I am who reads my drafts and give me much-needed advice. I met her in line at a Port-a-potty at a writers' conference. Which just goes to show--I don't know what. Be open to meeting writers. Be receptive to learning new things.

Writing is such a solitary activity. Never close yourself off from reaching out. You might find a mentor. Or maybe you'll just make a new friend.