Thursday, July 21, 2011

Slowly, but well.  That’s how it’s going.  It is very easy to lose the thread, but I feel that I have it now.  The number of things one has to keep in mind all the time is reduced when one knows the characters and their stories the way one knows real people.  One doesn’t have to rehearse these stories when one knows them at a historical, sort of molecular level.  Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about their characters being alive.  What seems to be true is that one does, at some point, know them well, know their stories, their reactions, their speech patterns, their fears, their pasts — both their recent, story-related pasts, and their long ago pasts that have nothing and everything to do with the story one is telling.  It is the best work I have ever done, the work that has ended in an understanding that all this need not be carefully balanced in my head to to get it down properly as long as I understand the people I’m writing about.  It is true that I began by wanting to say something about post war Germany and memory and the suppression of it.  But I find that, in the end, what I have to say is about these people, who are not me at all and whose stories do not exist to illustrate a point, but to illuminate something about being human that is, at its best, particular.  Today it seems to me that no matter how long it takes to do, writing a novel is worth all the difficulty, because when one writes like this one lives so fully and immediately and one’s life seems so long as one does it, which is such a comfort on days when it seems that there isn’t much time left.  And then I know that I will be able to make the story work and to make my life work as well.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Today on the phone, my son, Charlie, who is about to turn sixteen (I can’t believe that, I really can’t), told me that I should leave all of them for two weeks and not come back until the revision — which really is the final revision, more or less — is finished.

Today on the phone with my friend, M, who hasn’t seen us for two years, she observed that Charlie is the child who is most like me.  Oh, he gets in the most trouble, I said, so yes, he’s the most like me.  But really this generosity and kindness on his part, this ability to see things from someone else’s point of view, is really extraordinary in a boy of sixteen and something that I value more than anything else, the thing I try hard to do, in life and in fiction.  So he gets in trouble every once in a while — he also gets it so right so many more times than he gets it wrong.  He is going to have a wonderful life.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

I need an “I have a lot to do on this murder case” macro.  I do indeed.  This means I have to go to plan Q, the one in which I stay up later, get up earlier or — probably more effectively, stop procrastinating, which is my default position when I am overwhelmed.  Also, it does no good to think of new books.  They too must be written, and it will be just as hard to write them.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Today I thought of an idea for a book — a story about a woman who comes into some money and decides to rent a floor in a large house that’s around the corner from her house:  it’s the “scary” house in the neighborhood, but it’s been renovated by a charming French couple and isn’t so scary anymore.  The things is, she doesn’t tell her family she’s done this.

And then I realized:  of course — it’s Portrait of a Lady, it’s Margaret Drabble’s Seven Sister (which I’m reading right now), it’s that Anne Tyler book whose name I can’t remember.  It’s a whole genre, really.  Women who come into some money, or an unexpected infusion of courage, and leave town and start a new life.  Sort of.  It’s so true, what I heard Toni Morrison say once when I was in graduate school:  you write the books you want to read

Monday, July 4, 2011

On the porch.  Chapters 18-22.  Making the middle less middling.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Have I mentioned that I’ve decided I need to meditate?  An actual medical doctor told me that when I complained about being crazy.   So, like all sensible people, I googled “help me meditate so I’m not so crazy and can finish revising my novel.”  And I learned that I need a meditation pillow.  Actually, I learned that I could put off meditating while I waited for my meditation pillow to arrive from Amazon.com.  Today it arrived.  I looked at it — an absurdly vertical, small round thing — and realized that there is some danger I might fall off this thing while meditating.  So I ordered a meditation mat, so if I do fall off I won’t hurt myself.  It’s not here yet.

Stay tuned for more meditation news.

Monday, June 27, 2011

On the last, most difficult 100 pages.  New scenes to write, a new ending to cantilever into the book, and then sweep up the construction dust and out it goes, maybe the first week in July.  (Work on that construction metaphor:  I don’t think cantilever is right.)  And maybe not.  It is very hard to tell what event will knock me over, or at least off.  Maybe I should keep a  list, so I can avoid those things.

Later in the evening:  Gack.  But must not freak out.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Up at Lake Tahoe alone.   Here, I get a lot done.  And that is all I have to say.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

I keep forgetting that I actually do know pretty much everything I have to do to finish these revisions.  In fact, I have a list.  It is numbered.  God knows, that is about all the certainty that exists for me some days.  Every season has its distractions.  Summer raises the problem of teen running around without supervision and getting into trouble.  Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a man, specifically Dickens.  To have the children offstage, cared for by someone who’s better at it than you are, to sit in your library and think and write.  But then, I like being around my children.  They make me better than I would otherwise be.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Today’s the last day of school.  It’s also the last day of my 80% time work week and the day I have to finish a project.  I don’t work on Fridays.  And so, I will revise.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

It’s actually, technically Wednesday because it’s 12:49 a.m.  But I’m going with Tuesday.

Playing:  The only sounds in this part of the house are:  snoring dog, the fridge, and the keyboard.

Tonight, I went to William’s school play.  The Tempest.  Maybe these are not any longer my favorite lines of poetry, but they’re so good.  They’re about transformation, and my guess is that they’re about how life can become art after death.  Or maybe they’re not.  But  here they are:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Work:  Today, I was a lawyer, not a fiction writer.  And that is okay by me.  It will be good to get back to it, though.

Sunday June 12, 2011 — evening

Playing:  Bruce Springsteen.  Shenandoah.  Which is appropriate because the Missouri that is the case I’m working on is feeling awfully wide.

Drinking:  Aha.  You thought I was going to say Tall Vodka Tonic, and you can be forgiven for that guess because if ever a TVT was called for, now would be the time.  But, in fact, I am drinking peppermint tea, which is the only herbal tea I can drink without feeling like somebody’s made a mistake.

I’ve been thinking about truth telling, which is a subject that comes up pretty often in my work at the court.  This is what I know:  If you can’t write something cleanly, then you haven’t gotten to the truth.

That’s it.  Simple.  When a paragraph won’t get written, or it’s hopelessly tangled and makes no sense, it’s probably because you’re ignoring something that you need to face.  This is true in my own work and it is also true in the work of the people who come to us with their appeals.  If I don’t get it, it’s probably because you’re missing something.  And if I don’t get what I just wrote it’s because I’m not there yet.  Sadly, I’m not there yet today.  Maybe in another hour.

Sunday, June 12, 2011 –morning

Listening to:  Rosanne Cash and Bruce Springsteen:  Sea of Heartbreak.  Wonderful.  Springsteen sounds a little bit like Johnny Cash on this, but that’s just me, I’m pretty sure.

Eating:  Pumpkin seeds with some kind of spice flavor mix on them.  I like these.  I didn’t even know you could actually eat pumpkin seeds if you weren’t a hippie willing to roast the innards of the pumpkin you carved for Halloween, until Nathalie, who is French, put some of them on a salad and it woke me up to the fact that there are other seeds out there and some of them are better than the ones you used to eat.

I’m in my office in the city right now, finishing something up.  It’s been an eye-opening week for me, the eye opener being this:  there will always be distractions, no matter who you are or what you do, and there will always be time to write.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Big law work project is almost done.  Thing is, work is always there.  (Next up?  Unspeakably violent crime case.)  Like snow and sleet and rain.  And I guess that makes me the postal worker, who gets through it.  Looked at that way, I think I can hack my way through the weather that is my day to day life and deliver my revision to Donald Maass, agent extraordinaire, by the end of the month.  Back to work.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Yesterday I was so absorbed in the case I’m writing for work that I forgot one of my kids was upstairs, still asleep, and not up and getting ready for school, like he was supposed to be.  The friend who was driving the carpool that morning showed up at the door and, well, let’s just say he was a little late to school and a couple of people told him that an alarm clock would be better than me for getting up on time.

Yes, I’d like to be absorbed in my revisions, not in the sorry tale of someone’s money problems.  And yet it is true that yesterday, today and tomorrow I have to work on the money problems.   I didn’t realize, not until I began writing this page, that when I have a lot of work to do, I do not write.  The writing I do for my job takes a lot of brain power.  And I don’t have that much left afterwards.  (See “forgetting child was still asleep” anecdote, above for evidence of brain power’s limits.)  Come Saturday, though, I’ll be back to it.

wait wait!  I’m home from work.  it’s 5:40.  Why shouldn’t I revise some?  William is watching South Park.  (He won the English and Spanish awards at his school today.  He was told he is going to be a writer, but I think he already knows who he is.  Why shouldn’t he watch South Park?)  All other family members are windsurfing.  It’s NOT RAINING OUT THERE!!  No more sitting around moaning.

Tuesday June 7, 2011

I can hear my neighbor mowing his lawn, which means it’s not raining at this exact moment.  And this is my last weather report.  I think I’d rather have a record of what I had for lunch.  Or what my favorite fruit today was.  Note:  it was big fat blueberries from the Star Market.  Pesticide free.  That doesn’t mean you don’t have to wash them, because pesticide free doesn’t mean some guy with really dirty hands didn’t comb through them right before you came over and picked yours out.  Not to sound phobic or anything.

Music:  Lady Ga Ga is singing something in German.  Beats me.

Revision status?  Okay.  Today’s a work day.  And I’m working away.  That does not mean, however, that I will revise nothing.  I will come back here in a couple of hours — or six as things go — and report that I did in fact revise a chapter.  Go me.  I did not, in fact, revise anything last night.  But I read, which is good enough for now.  

Monday, June 6, 2011

Really, I need a weather macro, one that says, “what do you expect?  yes, it’s raining.”

Phil Collins is singing about the end of the night — or is it the edge of the night?  Who can remember?  In my office at this moment, I’m just glad I managed to get Pandora to work on my computer.

As for writing, well, I don’t revise on Mondays, unless a miracle happens, because it’s a day I’m in the city all day.  We’ll see.  Maybe a miracle will happen.   Maybe it will stop raining.

Sunday June 5, 2011

Weather:  Oddly enough, it is threatening rain but not actually raining.  W is taking all sons windsurfing, no matter how wet it is.  He also washed the dog this morning.  Dog not used to being so clean, and really, honestly, he doesn’t SMELL clean.  In fact, William’s first grumpy words on waking were, “what is that awful smell?”  How is it possible for a clean  dog to smell awful?  Dogs are mysterious.  The ways of the dog impossible to understand.  Still, I love him, smelly or no.

Music:  The Verve (not just Verve, I guess that got then in trouble) are singing a Bitter Sweet Symphony and I realize I’ve been a lot more bitter than sweet for the last couple of days as I bitch about my life.  It doesn’t help when the boy who thinks the dog smells bad asked me if I was finished with my “2001 novel.”  Sheesh.

Status of revisions:  I’m doing some.  I’ll walk the dog and think some more.  I’ll write back in here at the end of the day if, in fact, I did any of those things.  Later:  I did those things, including the thinking.

Saturday June 4, 2011

Weather:  The usual.  Wet.  Raining.  Puddles.  Wet.

Music:  Emmylou Harris, Wayfaring Stranger.Someone’s lonely, far from home, sad.  God.

Spoke to a friend this morning over coffee about self-sabotage.  (And the bad behavior of our sons, who are friends, and troublemakers.)  After, I picked teens up from sleepovers, dropped them off at their next destinations, drove William to get a gift, drove him to the place where he could give the gift and spent the rest of the day, prostrate on the couch, reading a how-to book and eating popcorn.  That way lies vodka tonic in the afternoon and coma in the evening.

Really, after a day like this, I badly want to lie about how it went.  But really, what’s the point of that.  The truth is at least specific:  the popcorn, the how-to book, the driving in the rain, the dog looking disgruntled, the feeling that something isn’t right and I don’t know what it is or how to fix it.  Tomorrow, I will stop thinking about it, stop listening to Emmylou Harris and get back to work.

June 2, 2011

Weather:  Let’s just get right to it, okay?  It’s 8:47 a.m. and I’m about to begin a day in which there is no time to concentrate, no time to revise, no time to do anything but keep moving forward.  I have a lot of work to do and have just learned that next month I will have an enormous amount of work to do.  This is not always the case, but it is often enough the case as to be an explanation about why I have been working on this one, single, not particularly long book for eight years.  If I might be permitted to bitch:  I work, I have three kids, a dog, a husband who’s easy in some ways and impossible in others.  I am often depressed and without medication I would not be able to get out of bed some days and remain married on others.   Oh, and also?  I began writing a novel before I actually knew how to write one.  Which means the last eight years have been kind of like getting a phd in creative writing.  Which I began when I was in my forties.  While I was having kids and working.

But here’s the thing:  although I’ve decided I’m not going to be cheery about this any more, I would also like to note that I am among the luckiest people I know.  I have a lot of money, relatively speaking.  (And not even relatively speaking — we’re in the upper middle class, a place I never thought I’d be in, or even knew much about except from books, when I was a child.)  I’m well educated, thanks to the meritocracy.  I landed a really good job with a good boss and a great retirement plan.  I will never grow old and have to eat cat food.  I’m persistent — but only about the things I love, and writing is one of the things I love, so I persist.  And I’m pretty good at it, and will get much better.  The things  I don’t have aren’t much when weighed against the things I have.

And yet… I’m still so angry with  myself and the world on days like this.  Because life is looking shorter and I so badly want to just sit and write and tell the stories I want to tell.  That I can’t is entirely my fault — I chose this life, and I can unchoose it.  It’s just that then I’d have to maybe not be quite so much in the upper middle class.  No harm in that, right?  Except it was so hard to get here, and it was so enormously comforting to arrive, that I am very afraid of what it might mean to not be here.  I’m petrified, in fact.  I don’t ever want to return to the life I had as a child, when every thing we bought seemed to mean more than it should, when not having hurt.  (It needn’t have — but it did and it was scary.)  It is one of my life’s greatest joys that my children will never know how that feels and they will never be afraid to do with less so they can do more.

I have worked my entire life — from the time I was fifteen until today.  I worked in high scohol, in college and in graduate school and in law school.  I’ve been a waitress, a secretary, the girl who handed out samples of whiskey to drunk college kids, a babysitter, a library clerk, a reader for a college class, a teaching assistant for another.  I wrote chapters  for a legal publishers.  I am a lawyer.  I have never not had a job.  I took off five months when I had twins and four months when I had William.  I have worked part time, full time and almost full time.  But there has always been a job that I don’t love (except the library job, which I did love, but I was fifteen..) that I have to be accountable for.   Most people have worked their entire lives, of course.   And I don’t not want to work.  I just don’t want to work, plus write, plus raise three sons, plus try to stay married and physically healthy,  while I also try to get out of bed in the morning without wanting to cry.

And that is all I have to say today.

June 1, 2011

Weather:  It will rain in the Bay Area for the rest of my life.  It was even raining inside when I dripped water on my keyboard in my office.  The “h” key doesn’t work very well any longer– not unless you’re very firm with it.

Music:  None.  I am in my office in San Francisco.  I don’t listen to music here because I forget that I can get Pandora on my computer.  Anyway, it’s not a very music-y place.  Also, when I write legal things, silence and the constant but faint sound of the hvac system seems appropriate to the task, which makes it sound like I have an awful job, which I don’t. It’s just a very quiet one.

You didn’t revise today, did you?  Don’t sound so judgmental.  On a day like today, when I have a lot of work to do, I don’t revise that many chapters.  That’s okay.  I earn a living.  I like earning a living and people depend on me to do it.  I have never been able to figure out how I could NOT do this job, but today I ordered a book from Amazon about how to take a year off.  Sometimes I buy how to books just so I’ll feel like I’ve done everything in them.  If that were true, I’d be thin, well-dressed, organized, calmly achieving all kinds of sh*t, and raising children who sew their own clothes, make their own lunches and never talk back. That these things aren’t true is evidence of how little help these self-help books are.  And yet I still buy them.  Maybe the take-a-year-off one will be the one that comes true.

But, on the topic of revision:  when I get home tonight, I’m going to try for one.  Just one chapter.  And tomorrow will be another day.

And then I came home and the single chapter I was going to revise is already in just fine shape, so here I sit and I think, well, I’m doing okay.  But.. But.  This is what concerns me:  the trouble with my book is in the last 1/3.  I am now in the first 1/3.  This is where I set up all the revisions in the final 1/3.  And that turns out to be a matter of reading what I’ve written and making slight changes.   It’s easy so far.  Maybe that’s not so bad.  For the next couple of weeks I have a lot of work to do, and I will not be able to do too much at night after work.  The four chapters a day pace might not have been such a do-able goal.

Okay, it was a stupid goal, one I wouldn’t have made if I’d been really paying attention to those how to books on goal setting.

May 31, 2011

Weather:  How come it’s raining so much? is what I want to know..  I walked the dog today in the pouring down rain, which actually isn’t that bad because he’s such a pain in the ass when he sees other dogs.  He looks like a snarling, barking… sheep.  No dogs out today to snarlbark at.  It’s too wet.

Listening to:  Not really sure.  Someone made a radio station on Pandora called Joao Gilberto Radio, and someone is singing in a language I don’t know.  I like this, actually.  No less than Roland Barthes wrote something about how lovely it is to be in a city where you don’t speak the language.  Or maybe he hated it.  That’s the problem with a good education given to a woman who can’t remember what the refrigerator is called.  (Put that in the ….. you know, that thing.)

No one Cares What You’re Listening to, What Did you DO?

I revised three chapters, not four.  But I’m not going to sleep until the fourth is done.  It’s surprisingly pleasurable so far, this revising.  Because I spent a month pondering, making notes, working and re-working the beginning, I feel like I have a map.   Last  night, before I went to bed, I made myself answer the “in each chapter” checklist I made for myself last year for the chapter I wrote today.  It helps me a lot to know ahead of time what the point of view character is feeling.  Peaceful is out.  Conflicted?  Much better.

The thing is, my notes are full of ungraceful, messy, clunky sentences  – I try to ignore how pedestrian they make my story sound.   I don’t think what I’ve done is pedestrian, especially not now that I’ve figured out what happens to everyone and discovered that I didn’t really know this before, even though I certainly wrote an ending.  Let me tell you, this is where an agent who edits comes in handy.  The ending doesn’t work, he said, and he also said why.  And he’s right.   I wrote an ending that didn’t grow out of the people I was writing about, probably because I didn’t actually know them.  So I kind of forced them to do what I wanted them to do.

I always thought that was such a crock, the thing people say about how they “know” their characters.  Not me, I’d say to  myself.  I OWN these people, I don’t know them.  Wrong, in fact.  There is a way in which your sense of your characters does in fact expand from a list of characteristics, a history, a series of events the longer you stay with them.  Hard to put my finger on it, when they became real to me.  But they are.  Funny.

(I just opened this page to note:   Do not re-read what you’ve written right after you’ve written it.  Those pages are DOA.  They’re not as good as you thought they were, but they’re also not as bad.  Just trust me on that.  And also — I finished that last chapter right before I went to bed.)  

Monday, May 30, 2011

Weather:

(Someday, you’ll be interested in what it was like in Berkeley the spring your mom finished revising her novel for the VERY LAST TIME):  Breezy.

The last thing W said to me this afternoon had the  phrase “blowing 20 knots” in it and included a reference to going windsurfing, which means W’s not here supervising William’s use of the black spray paint to convert his orange nerf gun into something that looks like it could hold up a grocery store. (To be honest, W did supervise the initial spray painting.  He did not, however, supervise the followup spray painting or William’s internet research about how he can make a youtube video that looks like he really is killing people with that gun. And yes, I’m well aware that the police shoot kids who have realistic guns in their hands.  I did a risk assessment on that one and am going with revising rather than supervising.)

What I’m listening to:  Yup.  I am not listening to the Tyler the Creator channel somebody made on my Pandora account.  I’m also not listening to the Piano Sonata channel I made on my Pandora account because it’s too irritating.  I’m listening to Folk Rock Radio, on which Creedence is currently asking me if I’ve ever seen the rain, to which I want to reply, “s**t, yeah, dude, don’t you  know where I grew up?”  But I don’t.  Because I’m too busy revising.

Did I Do a Single Thing Today?:  It depends on what your definition of “revise” is.  I revised four chapters today.  It is true that they are the first four chapters of my novel and I have already revised them to a sheen, but today is a new, first day, and I am entitled to get those first four chapters into Super Sheen Revised state,which sounds kind of like what Charlie Sheen would say after he emerged from rehab — like 60 seconds after he went in.  ”I am in Super Sheen Revised State.  Wanna hear about my relationship with the goddesses now?”

Tomorrow is another day, more like going into a coal mine than sitting around on the beach.  So be it.