BlogLily

Last night, I took to my Thursday night workshop a chapter I’d written a few days ago, something I’d had little time to think about after writing. It’s enormously helpful to bring unpolished work in. When you do, you get big comments, very useful for filling in what you need to do after you’ve pushed through to the end of a very rough first draft. That would include comments like: the character doesn’t react to this provocation and really, he should. Or: Perhaps you should move this moment of revelation to the end of the scene, when he is alone, rather than in the company of someone he’d never reveal himself to. That sort of thing.

Because I used to bring in chapters that were already thoroughly worked over, I am accustomed to a different kind of feedback, more micro-editing: this word is confusing, this line might work better earlier in the paragraph.

Which brings me to the subject of editing. My fellow workshop writers have been most helpful when they address the larger issues of a piece of writing. The other things, the word used twice in a paragraph, the unintentional rhyme, I suspect I’d catch anyway on a re-reading. But because there is a bit of turnover among the participants, few of them (maybe only four) have seen my story from the beginning. And so they do not have a sense of the whole, and do not know if what I am writing makes sense in light of that larger whole.

So, that’s the first thing, come November, when I begin editing, I’ll need to do. I’ve never done this before, but I suppose what you’d do is read the whole thing again with an eye to how the story should be shaped, where there is building up and revelation and resolution. I imagine you’d want to scribble down what happens in each scene and figure out if that’s where those events should occur.

That scribbled list would then be your guide in re-shaping and re-arranging and also, while you’re at it, continuity fixing (the hero cannot be bald in the first half of the book and have a healthy head of hair in the end), and maybe the addition of a little foreshadowing you forgot to do because you didn’t know what was going to happen. After that, you’d want to fix the glaringly bad sentences, straighten out the grammar and spelling and collapse on the couch, a wet washcloth pressed to your forehead, but with one eye trained on the kitchen, for the moment the huge chocolate cake arrives — the one with all the sprinkles on it, the one that’s been prepared by people who really, really, really want you to stop typing on your computer and play Parcheesi.

Having never revised a novel before, I actually have no way of knowing if what I’ve described will work or if it’s foolish in the extreme. It’s just my best guess. One thing is certain though: I’ll be glad to have a novel to edit. Which is to say, I’m hoping I’ll get through to the end in a few days — maybe not day ten, but quite close to that.

I wrote two scenes today and it was so much fun! Honestly, you’d think that awful day of writing a few days ago, when every word was agony and the final result was an embarrassment, had never happened.

BikeProf, who’s busy writing the world’s scariest novel, wrote something the other day about one of the most extraordinary things that happens when you write fiction, something that keeps me going. And no, it’s not the candy I held back from my son’s earthquake kit. (Although, come to think of it, a little sugar, judiciously applied, is sometimes just what’s needed.) But it is something sort of like candy in the rush of pleasure it produces, although I hope not in the crash that comes after consumption peaks.

Here’s how it happens. You’re writing along, up to the point where you’ve sort of figured out you want to go. But when you get to the end of the known, you find yourself continuing. It’s as if you’ve chosen to go over a cliff. But you don’t perish. Instead, you find out there is something under your feet after all. (I have this terrible feeling I might have described this very experience at one point in my blog. The stepping into the air and finding something solid under your feet happens in an Indiana Jones movie, I’ll admit right now. But it happens in writing too.)

What’s under your feet are things like a revelation a character makes that you didn’t think would be made at that moment, but then you see that there is such a powerful motivation in the scene you’ve set up for that revelation to happen that it works right there. Or a character says something about the past that you hadn’t known happened. But indeed it did, and necessarily so. Or your writing suddenly becomes felicitous, and you find yourself blurting out something that could not have been written by a pedestrian soul like yourself.

I don’t do drugs. But I do like the mind expanding quality of stepping off the edge and finding out what’s there.  It’s a ghostly and cool experience. It’s a big reason why I write.

Today I wrote 3,000 words — two scenes. I know they’ll be longer scenes when I go back to them, but for now I’m leaving them as they are. I figure if I can get in two or three more days of this kind of writing, I’ll be knocking at the door that says Exit before too long here.

I’ve been sitting by the road for the last two days, pumping up my tires and putting my chain back on.  Which is to say, I’ve spent the weekend looking after my children and cooking.   

In lieu of a description of the soaring prose I did not write, I’d like to record that the following things kept me from the next two scenes I have in mind: 

• Earthquake kit.  (n.  a gallon sized ziplock bag filled with candy.  To be used by a child in the event they have to stay at school for a while, after a big one hits.)  Friday afternoon, a concerned teacher called to say that one of my sons had failed to turn in an earthquake kit.  Now, it’s an exaggeration to say that those kits are full of candy.  In fact, they are supposed to be filled with nutritious food that will keep for a whole year.  A salami sandwich is out.  Also, water, a flashlight, and a space blanket.  (I think that last item is optional.  I hope so, because that’s not something I’m willing to go and find.)   We have lots of candy at home, but the nutritious food that will not rot after a year threw me a bit, until I realized that could include energy bars.  That, and a can of slightly dodgy beef stew I found tucked behind some marshmallows, a lot of dried fruit, and a flashlight, and I feel I can hold my head up high when I pick up my child after the earthquake that is unlikely to occur during school hours.
• Field Day.  The same child whose school makes you put together the aforementioned earthquake kit, has a huge Sunday family event, one that involves egg tosses and sack races, an astonishing amount of food and an epic tug of war battle between parents and children in which the parents always lose, because they are too busy chatting about their children’s genius and eating when the time comes for the tug of war, so the children overwhelm by their sheer numbers.  I did not feel it would reflect well on either me or my family if I’d shown up with my mac and written a scene or two while everyone else was sack racing and bragging about their children.  Plus, I feel it did me a great deal of good to see how gleeful the head of school was when the parents actually did win one round of tug of war — against the tiniest children at the school.  When they added the teenagers, we parents were toast.  Is this not a metaphor for parenting so obvious it would hurt if it dropped on your toe?
• Work.  Have I ever mentioned that I have a job?  It’s actually a great job, intellectually interesting, wonderful co-workers, a boss with the best manners of any man I know and a very unAmerican amount of vacation time.  So, I actually had to do some work, because I haven’t been as productive as I’d like lately.
• Banana bread.  I made some.  I wonder how many words I could have written while I was smashing up those bananas.  You can’t eat words, though.

Today I don’t have to do any of those things, except work.  After work, more scenes. 

Well, let’s just say that yesterday’s scene was not my finest work. I pushed on, even so, through the irritated voice in my head that says things to me I’d never, ever say to another human being.

The wonderful Susan Ito knows about this sort of day. (Don’t we all?) But she has the good sense to post something very funny about the struggle it can sometimes be to get words down on the page that say something even remotely like what you want to say. Check it out. I’m glad I did, because I have to tell you that even on my worst day of writing, it is not as bad as it is for this little guy.

The moral of the day: Sometimes you just have to keep going. It will get better. And now, I’m off to do just that, because Day Three of the Great Downhill is not over yet and I have another scene to write.

It’s 8:30, my children are in school, and I’m at a cafe in my neighborhood with Bob Dylan and the whoosh of the espresso machine in the background. But for the couple who just sat down near me to discuss their relationship, it’s an ideal place to write. (Oh good, I’m glad they worked that out. They just need to HIRE someone to do the housework.)

I know some of you are writers, and most all of you are readers, and so I hope it will interest you to hear about how someone (well, me) goes about writing a novel, or at least the end of one. And if this is not your cup of tea, I’ll be back to other things in a week or so. But for now, this is it.

It’s very true that you write a novel one word at a time, something people tell you when they sense you’re worrying too much about what you’re going to write, and this worry is keeping you from actually writing. But it does help someone like me (obsessive, anxious, list-making) to at least have a sketch of where a scene is going before I begin writing it. And that’s what a stepsheet is for.

It might not be called a stepsheet (heaven knows I can never remember the words for writing craft techniques), but when I say stepsheet, I mean a narrative I write that describes what’s going to happen in the scene. This is not anything that will become what I write. It’s written in the tone and with the speed you’d use when you send an email in response to a friend’s question: so, what’s going to happen next in your novel? It’s a testament to the tact and delicacy of my friends that no one has actually ever asked me this question. Maybe they know I’m busy asking myself this very thing and so we can turn instead to the interesting question of whether the Oakland A’s might actually win the entire World Series.

But say I had been asked this question. In answer, I’d say something like this in that hypothetical email: The main character begins the scene wanting to make amends for having so thoroughly messed up with the woman he’s discovered he really likes and naturally wants to sleep with. He also knows she might have some information about the victim and he’d like to get her to talk about that. He goes to the cafe where she works (one of those wonderful european cafes with the little machines that deliver candied peanuts, a foosball table, and bottled coke) and tries to get her to sit down. At first, she pretends not to remember who he is. But then her brother…

It’s that sort of thing I’m talking about. Now this would make a terrible novel, because a novel does not narrate events — it dramatizes them, its goal being to get you to feel like you’re within the story. (Unless you’re writing a meta-novel, which thankfully I am not and never will.) But it’s a great way to get yourself into the scene. (A scene, by the way, begins with a character having some goal in mind and, in the end, he or she has either achieved that goal, or been thwarted in an interesting way — either way, this scene should end with your readers begging for whatever follows.)

There you have it then — a sketch of how you go about sketching your chapter. It’s enormously helpful, by the way, to then launch immediately into the chapter itself. That looks sort of like this:

The cafe where Anja worked was like all the other cafes on the square, the same umbrellas advertising [must look up name of bavarian beer], the same [must ask sister what the chairs looked like? rush?], the same mix of American soldiers and German students.

One final note on going downhill without brakes: Even if it’s not perfect, your chapter will most likely be way, way better than you ever dreamed if you, like me, begin with a stepsheet and low expectations and then almost immediately launch yourself into the blank space of the page. Because what will happen — I promise — is that you’ll get to a point where you’re zooming through places you didn’t know were even there, describing a dress or a movement of the air, or a look on a face or a line of dialogue you didn’t know you had inside you. That’s what I love about writing, and the stepsheet gets me there.

Until tomorrow, BL

Perhaps you are too young to remember Robert Redford before he became a craggy monument to independent film, but he was really lovely in the movie Downhill Racer, which was all about a guy who liked to ski fast downhill. I liked looking at him, but I didn’t like the racing scenes. I was afraid he’d get hurt. I just wanted to see him in his nice turtleneck sweater, flirting with healthy-looking women.

Turns out, I don’t like being at the top of a hill on anything: certainly not on skis, or a bike, and not even when all I’m doing is hiking. On my bike, I wear out my brakes and watch my knuckles turn white when I’m going downhill. The whole time, I’m thinking about brain injuries and how I can never get the straps on my helmet to fit and so if I crash there’s no way my helmet will cradle my brain. I’m toast. Or an egg in a defective egg carton. I am also the slowest downhill skiier I know. I traverse a lot. Tiny children whiz by me, singing. I grit my teeth. And even hiking, I slip and slide down the hill, and hate it the entire way.

Uphills are just completely different. It was a happy day when I discovered that the function of a multi-gear bike is to enable you to pedal slowly up almost anything without wearing yourself out. I much prefer the quiet of skiing up a slight incline in the snow on a nice trail through the woods. If I’m in the shade, I can hike uphill pretty much forever. So, if you were to class the world into those who like to gain altitude and those who love the rush of losing it — I’m in the first group.

However, it turns out that the scenes I’m writing now in the novel I’m working on are downhill scenes. They’re the scenes of a rapidly unravelling mystery, of revelations that are significant even if they don’t lead to the answer the hero thinks he is seeking. Each scene of detection in this section of the mystery has the swoosh of the downhill about it. In fact, if you look at the arc a novel makes, the scenes I’m writing take place on the long downhill that comes after the uphill climb of the mystery I’ve been setting up for a terribly long time.

I’ve decided to write them quickly: in recognition of that steep downhill, thinking if I do so I might capture some of that rushing energy. To be honest, I’m also writing them quickly because I’d like to be done with this group of scenes, and maybe even the novel itself by the end of this month. (I have another novel lined up: one that’s in the first person, something I never thought I’d want to do, one that’s set in Paris after the second world war, one that explores the nature of love, one that will involve a lot of good food, sex and maybe some decent clothes.) This means I’ve got about ten days of fast scene writing ahead. That means writing without brakes, without traversing, slipping and sliding downhill. I’m a little nervous about it, but I keep reminding myself: nobody’s ever been seriously injured while writing too fast.