A Secret Insanity

Many, many years ago, at the beginning of my life in Portland, Oregon, my life as an adult in the "real world" (which is what we called it to contrast it with college), when I was living on my own for the first time and I was wrestling in secret with this notion of what being a writer meant, I wrote a strange, waking daydream of a piece. I wrote it on my old Brothers brand electric typewriter, because I had no computer at the time and back then people used typewriters not just because they were retro.

My waking daydream was about the act of creation. It described an ephemeral sprite-like creature wandering with a lit torch through the caverns and echoing hallways of the mind. As it rounded the corners and went up the stairs and followed the twists and turns, the flames of its torch touched on hidden beings and their shadows leapt up across the walls. Some of them came out of hiding and followed the sprite in a sort of parade. The sprite kept wandering until at last it found the right place, the right beings, to illuminate, and then the light changed and grew to elucidate the details and open a larger story.

This short description ended with an imperative of sorts, an invocation and a caution. It went something like this: You cannot tame this beast, but if you catch hold, ride it, ride it for all your worth, ride it until it throws you off again.

At the time, I saw that piece as part of a longer work that cobbled together many short sketches and mental wanderings I had put down on paper, a longer piece that I thought, for lack of a better plan,  was an experimental novel, though I had no idea whatsoever of how to write a novel. I cut and pasted (with actual scissors, and tape) the elements from these many mental wanderings and stored them in a special notebook, crafting them in isolation, never showing them to anyone, because I did not believe in myself as a writer, did not believe I could publicly call myself that. I believed my writing was a secret insanity that both elevated me to some sort of special status and exiled me to the land of fools. I believed that if I exposed my insanity to the world, it would result in humiliation and failure and mockery. I'm not sure why I believed this. God knows I had supportive people in my life. I can only posit it was a reflection of how my sense of self had gotten bogged down at that stage, perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of our oh-so-practical-minded world, or the heightened cynicism, intense self-examination and daily practice of critique that were a part of my undergraduate experience.

It's been about three decades since I wrote that piece and pasted together its subsequent parts. I finally showed someone my secret notebook, and they did not lock me up, laugh in my face or run screaming from the room. I've found narrative homes for many of the disparate sketches and meanderings that I carried in that notebook. Some of them have even turned into published stories. I've embraced the public identity of writer, with all its rejection and heartache and wonderful companionship. And I've read a lot about writing and the creative process. I've learned that my strange waking daydream of the sprite and the cavernous hallways matches with surprising similarities many descriptions of the elusive creative process by folks far more talented or successful than I am.

My older self is often quite critical of my younger, more naive or inexperienced self, that self whose sense of perspective could be wildly out of wack. But in this case, I'd like to go back and congratulate her. I'd like to say, "Yes. This is how it is. This scrap of a daydream is what it's like. You're onto something. Only these words aren't the beginning of some strange experimental novel. They are a map. They are directions. They will help you recognize the journey when you are on it. Your fellow travelers have been there, too. They know the way. Come out of the dark and find them."

My Hard Drive Having Died, I Can Now See the Moon

I once gave my father a card with this quote on it:

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.

I've been thinking a lot about that quote this week.  You see, my computer hard drive died on me.  I had backed up my work a few days earlier, so I didn't think I'd lost too much, but there were no guarantees.  What could have felt like a disaster left me oddly dispassionate and philosophical.

Not having a computer for a week gave me a chance to come at my writing life from a different angle.  I had fallen into the routine of sitting down in front of the computer, opening my existing work, rereading and then revising.  Nothing wrong with that, mind you, and having a writing routine or habit can be good for you, but sometimes a routine can become a rut, and lately I've been feeling like my writing has been a bit lackluster.  Maybe it's all the focus I've been putting on submitting and querying and trying to get published.  Maybe it's the pieces I've been working on.  Maybe it's the nature of revision over drafting.  Maybe it's the intrusion of the rest of my life.

With my computer gone, I took a few steps back.  I revisited some things in my iPad.  I skimmed over old notebooks.  I did a little mental writing, marinating of ideas, and reading.  I felt relaxed, open minded, curious to play with projects.  I've been afraid to follow that impulse, or even acknowledge that impulse, because I've been so anxious to finish existing projects and submit them.  I've been afraid that if I take a break from the hard work of revising, or pushing through the muddled middle, on existing projects, I would be copping out.  I've been viewing the "play" of writing as a distraction that would keep me from my professionally-oriented goals.

By the end of the week, the hard drive had been replaced and through the magic of Time Machine most of my work had been restored.  So I fell back into that routine again.  Open the laptop, open the document, begin re-reading.  However, the universe wasn't done with me.

I realized I had, in fact, lost more revisions than I thought.  I was seized with frustration.  "I really liked those changes, and they were subtle stuff and I can't remember how I did it and I don't want to sit there massaging my way through it all over again!"  So I went looking for my thumb drive, the repository of my back-up to the back-up, in hopes that it had the more recent draft.  Lo and behold the thumb drive was MIA.  (Still is, as of this writing.)

The Zen attitude that had prevailed in my psyche when everything might have been lost now gave way to a frenzied panic at the thought that some minute massaging of text was irretrievable gone.  I ransacked of every nook and cranny, as if by finding the missing thumb drive I would find my missing writer's mojo.  No thumb drive materialized.

At last, I stopped ransacking.  A voice inside me kept saying "Step back.  Step back.  Step back."  My rut has gotten me so locked to technology that I no longer seem to trust my own creative brain.  I have begun to value the individual words, and the time spent massaging them, over the hard muscle work of creation, the daredevil plunge of discovery, the greater arc of story and character. Is this just the nature of the revision phase or is it a symptom of some larger paradigm shift I need to make?

My husband told me the story of a writer pre-computer-era whose housekeeper mistakenly used his manuscript to stoke the fire.  Engulfed by flames at a time when there were no back-ups - a far more violent, visceral, and permanent fate.  What did that writer do?  Wrote it better.

Has my computer caused me to develop a disconnected relationship with my own stories and ideas, one in which they exist in some ephemeral and insubstantial ether instead of residing in the marrow of my own bones? Maybe it's time to step out of the digital world, print some hard copies, grab some pens and notebooks, and immerse myself in the old-fashioned, hand-cramp-inducing, physically present act of writing, brain directly wired to the instruments with the only glowing illumination being that emanating from within myself.

Playing with Order

I tease one of my critique partners because her number one thing to do is change the order of things.  Sometimes it makes me crazy.  But sometimes it's exactly what's needed.  The other day, I showed her a couple of short stories that I like but that just weren't getting the kind of responses I wanted to see, despite numerous submissions.  With  all my other shorts, I'd at least had a nibble here or there, but these two?  Nada.  It was time to get some fresh eyes on them.

My CP did her usual order switcheroos and, as we discussed the whys and wherefores, two things came clear in my mind, both related to the process and where these stories were in their development.  When you "pants it," writing without an outline and exploring an image or character or idea for the first time, as I tend to do on my short stories, the structure and order of the story is at first driven by that exploratory process.  There's some scene setting, some getting-to-know-you as you ease into the beginning of the story.  Sometimes, the crux of your theme may be right there from the beginning, because that's the nugget of idea that got you started on the story in the first place.  All of that is fine, but it doesn't always create the most effective experience for the reader.

Take the beginning.  A short story doesn't always have to have the kind of high-impact hook that you want in a high-concept novel, but it still needs a sense of tension from the get-go.  Instead of easing into the moment on one of the stories, my CP pulled a line from the bottom of page 1 and said "This is your opening.  This is where your tension is."  Spot on.

On the other hand, you don't want your beginning to give away the whole story.  You're going to build the conflict and build towards that thematic lynchpin that pulls you through the middle and brings the pieces together.  Get there too soon and your story turns redundant, covering that thematic ground over and over until your reader is, well, bored.  That was the fundamental problem with my other story.  Said my CP, "This whole section seems like it belongs closer to the end so you have somewhere to go."  And she was right.

In both cases, the original structure of the story had solidified too soon in the process, getting stuck at that exploratory draft stage so it wasn't serving the forward pull needed for the reader's experience, rather than the author's discovery experience.  Something to keep in mind when you're a "pantser."

Breaking Up the Logjam of Mid-story Writer's Block

In the old days, breaking up a logjam was incredibly tricky and dangerous. Loggers carefully removed one or more “key logs” (a little like reverse jenga, I guess) and if it was a really bad jam, they had to use dynamite. These days, they use a machine to haul out big chunks until the logs start moving.

I've been working on revisions for my YA novel, THE SPARROW'S SECRET HEART. It was my first novel, and it's been through more rewrites than I can count, including a complete point of view shift from third person to first person, but I keep coming back to it because I still love the protagonist and he just won't let me give up on him.

Recently I hit a logjam. I'm trying to rewrite a pivotal scene that introduces an important character, the protagonist's Aunt Megan, a complete stranger to him until this moment. My critique group demanded a better description of Aunt Megan and her house, as well as a restructuring of the scene to raise the tension and conflict. I kept coming at the scene and stalling. Over and over and over. Finally, I realized I really didn't know enough about this aunt of his. So I sat down and started working on the backstory.

Now, I'd worked out a backstory for Aunt Megan before, but it really was surface stuff, more about plot logistics as they affected my protagonist than about Aunt Megan herself. I realized I didn't even have a clue how to get inside her head yet. So I started with the timeline, her age when certain key events took place. I pieced together the ways those events affected her and her life. Then I wrote my problem scene in first person from Aunt Megan's point of view. Mind you, I have no plans to rewrite the novel in her point of view. This was an exercise to help me find my way into the scene.

I wish I could say the words flew from my finger tips, but they didn't. With each key log I thought I'd removed, new ones took its place, new questions about who Aunt Megan was. I wrote scenes that had nothing to do with my protagonist. I followed lines of thought well beyond the necessary conclusion. I got out my sketchpad and drew a complete floor plan of her house. It was a little terrifying to make such a commitment to the interior world of a character who isn't my protagonist. Why was I spending all this time on stuff that wouldn't even make it into my final draft?

But it was worth it. Bit by bit, the logs began to break free. Aunt Megan came into focus. Critical motives and subtexts revealed themselves. It's taken me a good week or so, and a lot of words that won't end up in the novel itself, but the logs are floating downriver again.

Mine was definitely a case of removing key logs one at a time, gradual and painstaking. But I've also had those dynamite situations - just sit down and power through it with some insane, off-the-wall notion. I've even used the chunks at a time method - cut this chunk, move this chunk, and soon it makes sense again.

When you've faced writer's block, how did you break up your logjam? Chunk-chomping machine? Key logs? Or dynamite?

Overworking the Clay

On my latest project, I found myself worrying away at the same spot over and over, bringing the same chapters to my critique group, rewritten, revised, renewed and tweaked, week after week. Every week I'd say to myself, "That's good enough for this draft. Now it's time to move forward." My group would echo the sentiment, reminding me not to "overwork the clay." But every week, when I sat down to write, I found myself rereading and rewriting that same section. My logic brain told me I was caught in a quagmire and rereading those same sections was a trap, but some other slippery spirit in me kept insisting on going back.

I didn't really have this problem on the first two novels. Here I am on my third, thinking "I should be getting better at this. In fact, I should know better." I began to think the genre was what made the difference. The first two novels were realistic fiction. This one is magical realism, and the rules and process feel completely different, more metaphorical, less linear. I've written a full draft and about two-thirds of it is useless. I've written multiple synopses that seem to make perfect sense only to have the story hijack me into some other direction. Every rewrite seems to change the metaphorical elements or the psychological landscape just enough that I have to go back and alter imagery, scenes, characters. And each tiny change in choice or motivation has a potentially seismic impact on the physical landscape, the symbolic magical objects and the otherworldly characters.

Okay. Let's say this genre demands a spiraling approach to drafts and revision. Even so, at some point you overdo it. At some point you have to let go and move on or you risk "overworking the clay" - leaving your characters and story limp, exhausted and nearly lifeless from obsessive attention to one section. How much is too much? What signals tell you to move on? What if you go too far - can your story be rescued?

I am reminded of watching my third graders attempt watercolor painting using non-watercolor paper. They just don't understand the idea of exhausting or overworking the paper. I'll watch as they paint and paint and paint the same spot until the paper is coming up in little nubbins or falling apart in their hands or they've worn a hole right through their favorite section of the picture. Then they come to me in despair believing it's ruined. I tell them to let the paper rest and dry and then we will try to repair it by transferring what's usable onto a new, fresh, stronger piece of paper. Perhaps I need to heed my own advice.

Of course the best way to prevent the ruined watercolor situation is to use the right kind of paper to begin with. Proper watercolor paper can handle the kind of stress placed on it by diligent and overly enthusiastic third graders, or by techniques like watercolor wash that involve tons of moisture. It's strong, thick, heavy and durable.

So what's the metaphorical equivalent of "the right kind of paper" for a novel? Setting? Point of view? Pre-drafting strategies? Plot outline? General structure? It has to do with the foundation you lay before the intricate, in-depth work of drafting and revision begins.

What do you do to lay a good foundation before you dive into the serious drafting process?

Write Like a Third Grader

I've learned more about the craft of writing in the nine years since I became a teacher than I did at any time in college. Granted, I am thinking more like writer, and seeing myself as a writer, which helps. But in teaching my third graders the craft of writing, I have received an education myself. By teaching the process, I think about my own process. When I teach my students strategies for planning their writing, I discover my own strategies. When I talk with my students about revising by identifying whether they have a good balance of dialogue, action, internal story and sensory details, I must ask myself the same question. Have I oriented my reader to the setting? Introduced and described the characters? Am I writing in scenes, stringing together small moments, or just telling what happened? Have I chosen a story or topic that I care enough about to spend time with?

I have to give a great deal of the credit to the writing curriculum we use in our school, a curriculum developed by Lucy Culkins. Culkins' curriculum is designed to help children think and work like real writers. As a teacher when I conference with students I must hone in on what they're doing well and what they need to work on. In a conference, I ask them "What are you working on today as a writer?" "What are you trying to do with that story?" "Can you show me an example of where you did that?" I teach my students to be the boss of their own writing. When they sit down to write each day, they make a plan, asking themselves where they are in the writing process and deciding what they will work on that day. Are they generating ideas? Organizing their thoughts, perhaps with an outline or storyboard, a timeline or a story mountain? Maybe they're writing a discovery draft or rehearsing their story. How can I not become a better writer when I ask these questions day after day and hear eight-year-olds telling me, "I noticed I didn't have enough dialogue and I didn't orient my reader to the setting?" If my third graders can hone their craft, so can I.

Every third grader in my class, and most of the younger students in our school, also know Lucy's mantra "When you're done, you've just begun." I finished my novel and sent it out. Now what? "When you're done, you've just begun." Go back to your writer's notebook and start thinking about ideas for the next piece.

If you are not a teacher but you are a writer, I encourage you to find some of Lucy Culkins' work. THE ART OF TEACHING WRITING is a great place to start. You might even use it as a template for your critique group if you have one.

Fearless Revision

"What if I rewrite the whole thing in first person?"
"What if I cut this chapter entirely?"
"What if death is the narrator?"
"What if there are 4 different narrators?"
"What if I write it as a blog?"
"What if she turns into a hippo instead of a moose?"

There was a time when I revised like an ancient, nearsighted clockmaker, turning over every word and phrase, tinkering with the minutest mechanism, making miserly revisions as if each change cost me and each letter was crafted from grains of diamond dust. I love treating words with so much affection and care, but I'm thankful that I have finally developed the courage to make more fearless revisions, skydiving, bungee-jumping revisions, the kind of revisions that change the entire landscape of a manuscript.

My whole critique group seems to have entered this phase of development together, which makes it ten times more exhilarating. When one of us announces, "I think I'm going to cut that whole section and move the important parts here instead," we cheer, we exult. It feels like we've all gone cliff-diving together.

Perhaps the support and safety of this long-term critique group has given me the foundation of confidence to take those plot-shattering leaps. Or maybe this liberation comes with writing novel-length pieces. Perhaps it's a function of exposing myself, over a period of time, to multiple critiques. Or maybe being in the habit of writing has made the words less scarce and therefore less precious, the process less like mining gold and more like cultivating a garden.

What is the most fearless, radical change you've ever made in a piece of your own writing? How did it affect the story?

If you've found yourself saying, "What if I ....?" or "I wonder what would happen if ...." then I challenge you to grab the hands of some fellow writers and take that vigorous plunge! What have you got to lose?

How You See It and How You Say It

"It's all in how you see it," some people say. For writers, that means point of view, which has to be one of the more challenging, complex and, to my mind, fascinating topics of the writer's craft. Point of view is more than just first person or third person. Point of view is about immediacy and risk. Whenever I learn about or explore point of view, I find myself thinking in cinematic terms. Where is the lens of my reader's camera located? Where is their microphone located? How tight is the close-up? Does my story need a more panoramic or epic scope?

Even tense can play a role in point of view. I just made the risky move of rewriting the first scene of my latest novel in first person, present tense. It has a level of immediacy, intimacy and high-risk involvement like no other, but it comes with a price. You have to place all sorts of limits on your access to information, since you can only share what your narrator knows at or before the point in time of the action. But I have to say, my pulse is racing and I feel like I'm going for the jugular a lot more in the first person, present tense. It's almost an adrenaline rush.

How you see it can also drive how you say it. I'm thinking about that elusive quality known as voice. So hard to define. You just know it when you see it. Too often I reread my stuff and am disgusted by how flat it seems, the way it lays there on the page after being run through my critical, analytical, disengaged and dispassionate mill one too many times. Then I'll write something for a workshop exercise and it just leaps off the page. Voice.

When I shift point of view, it can blow voice wide open. To me, finding the voice when you're not writing in first person seems so much harder, and when it comes to YA literature, I keep coming back to the first person point of view. No intermediary between the reader and the protagonist.

At a minimum, if you're struggling to find the voice of your story, I think it's worth it to rewrite a pivotal scene from a variety of points of view. You may be amazed by what you discover. If you're lucky, you'll find the right voice before you've finished an entire draft. If you're like me, you might end up rewriting your whole novel from a different point of view. But the risk is worth the pay-off. At least, that's how I see it.

Written In Stone

I'm taking another whack at the magical realism novel I started a while back and I've discovered that the process I'm following for it seems different than for the last project, which was straight-up realistic fiction. My office looks like a giant craft project. I find myself immersed in cut-and-paste, sticky note extravaganzas, drawing pictures, taping things together, and paper-clipping bits and pieces onto eachother. I can't seem to stay in the realm of the computer. The world of the computer feels too small, as if its physical size and shape imprisons the story. It got me wondering, has writing changed as the tools of writing have changed? Do our tools affect not only our process but our product, too - that is, our stories themselves? Would the great writers of the past have produced different stories if they worked on computer?

A typewriter sends the words onto a page that flaps freely in the air. The words have a physical reality the moment you type them. Writing by hand has a messy, lively, organic flow to it. Writing by hand with a pencil, a pen, a quill - each tool seems to connect with different experiences in the brain and body, a different sense of artistry, permanency, open-ness.

On the computer, we can write and delete huge chunks of text with such ease. The words come and go like will-o-the-wisps. But their ethereal spirits are trapped inside this skinny little two-dimensional box.

How would my work change if I wrote on stone tablets? How would your work change?