Writing
This is where I keep track of how much (and whether) I’m writing.
July 19, 2008. (Saturday.)
Yesss! I am done with that hard chapter. I wrote some good sentences, a couple of really good paragraphs worth of sentences, in fact, and I’m happy to see the last of that for now. Tomorrow — Sunday — is for getting much further along. I’m optimistic. I know where I’m going now, after a full week of living in the novel almost every single day.
Here’s something for those who’re writing a novel right now — it’s Mary Kay Zuravleff’s “Novel in One Semester” newsletter. Each of these newsletters contains something useful about writing. Worth looking at. Very inspiring. And she has a great, fun, encouraging voice.
July 18, 2008. (Friday)
I’m well into the middle of my novel, well into making up new scenes and rounding out characters. Except for a brief stop to put another story in the mail in a few days, and then a day or two to revise the story I’ve just written and get it out in the middle of August (and ready to go out on September 1,when a lot of literary journals open up for reading), I’m shooting for the end of the summer to get the revised novel out of my house and on the desks of other people.
What did that translate into today? I’m almost beyond the tricky chapter that’s had me trapped inside it all week.
July 17, 2008. (Thursday)
This page, like my first submissions page, has now, officially gotten so large that everything I type crawls along, the letters lagging behind my typing, which makes me think I haven’t actually typed them, and then I go back and try to type them again, which further messes up the page and then I have to start again. Maybe I shouldn’t be using these pages for such long journal-type entries. Except, I like them, like having them up there as a reminder of what daily life is like.
I’ll have to think about this.
As for Thursday’s writing, it went like this: I had a seat on the train in the morning and one in the afternoon and I worked on the same chapter I’ve been looking at pretty much all week, after I went back to the beginning and polished things again, just to remind myself of where I was. So. Today I have more time, and I’m hoping I’ll get beyond THAT chapter and further into the book.
Revising is slow. It’s not always like that, but for some reason, it’s been difficult this month to really get going.
July 16, 2008. (Wednesday)
Writing today occurred during a 25 minute one-way trip from the Ashby Station in Berkeley to the Civic Center Station in San Francisco. Mostly, I re-read what I’d done to a chapter to make the characters more who they are, including a description of a character I’ve never completely described. I still haven’t “completely” described her — I generally skip that kind of thing when I read it, so figure I shouldn’t write it, but I did like giving her hooded eyes, the ones you see on renaissance women. And then a little more filling in, and I looked up and suddenly I was at work.
July 15, 2008.
Tuesday’s report: An easy report because I did not write a word of fiction. I read it, plenty of it, and talked about it, and thought about it. But I did not write it. That’s because of how crowded the train is in the morning, which must have to do with the price of gas, and also because I did something else on the way home and then went to the gym and made dinner and played games with the boys after dinner and so to bed.
July 14, 2008.
I thought I’d write something every day this week. So, here it is, Monday. I was on BART at around 7:40, and OTHER PEOPLE, people who aren’t writers, people who don’t have stuff to do, were occupying the seats, including the one I should have been sitting in. I leaned against the seats next to the door, and read a book, which I will talk about in my reading page, because I have to talk about something over there. The reading was good, because it made me think about some writing problems I’m working on, so this was not really wasted time. I always get a seat coming home, and today on the way home I added a bunch of stuff to the chapter I’m working on, stuff intended to make my main guy seem more real — which is a fun thing to do, even though it forces me to think hard and make decisions and use, gasp!, my imagination, which to be honest some days I seem to be lacking a little bit of because I’m on such a forced march to get this done. Reading is good because it seems to get things started up again, and then the pure pleasure of telling a story kicks in.
And that, ta-da, is Monday.
July 12, 2008
In what is surely a triumph of multitasking, spare the air brilliance, I’ve been a very productive BART commuter this week. While it is true that the story I wrote this week was written almost entirely at home in the afternoon after work, I did a lot of editing on the train, and some revisions to that story.
One unintended benefit of having so much editing work to do is that it really spurs you on to new stuff. Now, there are forms of procrastination that aren’t so great — drinking, gossiping, watching really bad stuff at the movies, reading the website of People Magazine, for example, are not good forms of procrastination. But writing a short story because you can’t get your novel edits going? That is good procrastinating. So is cleaning the fridge, come to think of it. As long as you do get back to the novel someday. For me, that day is today, Saturday. After our family morning (all weekend mornings are “family mornings” which means that’s when we clean the fridge together, or do yard work or go grocery shopping, or play games), I’m down in my office moving along in that novel, the one I’m actually going to sell someday.
I’d also like to record some specifics about this writing week:
- I realized, writing in the first person, that there has to be room in the story for more than just the tight closeup. In fact, a first person narrator can notice the world around her and spend some time talking about it — also, she’s allowed to be metaphorical, in ways that are consistent with her voice
- I read this story with the first person narrator out loud a few nights ago. It’s so helpful to do that. In this case, I basically cornered my book group when we were supposed to be talking about Moby Dick and read them the story. It was useful to know where the story dragged (you can tell, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, when you’re losing your audience), and also good to hear the involuntary laughter of people who’re truly being entertained. Also, I’m pretty sure I heard an intake of breath at the moment in the story when something surprising happens, so that was good. A gasp: good. A yawn, or little shifts of movement that indicate someone’s hoping this will end soon: bad.
- I’m sure there’s other stuff, but as always, other things have just intervened, so I have to bring this to an end.
July 8, 2008.
Yesterday at work, B told me he’s reading Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, about a man who’s a juror in a trial and realizes he knows the defendant. (Or at least that’s what I think B said the novel is about.) What a great premise for a story — what happens if you’re on jury duty and a guy you know gets up on the witness stand? When I came home from work, I wrote a story from start to finish — 2600 words — answering that question. It’s in the first person, which is a first for me. And it was fun to write. I’m glad B comes into my office and tells me about the stuff he’s reading.
July 3, 2008.
How could it possibly be Friday again?
Oh.
It’s Thursday.
Still, I’m going to do my week’s writing accounting now, because tomorrow’s a holiday and I’ll be away, someplace where there is no internet connection.
So, what have I written this week? I began a new story, about six paragraphs of it, and then put it away, where it now resides next to the beginning of several other stories. Maybe they’ll combine somehow and write themselves. I mean if Borges’s monkeys could write all of western literature (did they do that? Or am I not remembering that correctly?), I see no reason why my hard drive can’t begin to spontaneously create fiction.
That’s the trouble these days — I’m not spontaneously creating any fiction. I’m laboriously creating revisions. And for some reason I went back to the beginning to do it, because I’ve been distracted for the last week or so by travel. Next week there’s a little extra time. I think I will might need to set some firm revision goals — I want to be done soon! The only trouble is that I don’t know what’s reasonable. I guess I’m going to have to figure out what’s reasonable, though, or I’ll never be able to get back to novel number 2.
July 2, 2008.
This, from writer reading
The Art of Disappearing
When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.If they say We should get together
say why?It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.–Naomi Shihab Nye
July 1, 2008.
What will come of my ambitious plan to finish these revisions soon (to be honest, I was going to be finished today, and I’m only half through)? The reason to finish now is so I can get on with the next novel, the one I keep thinking about and can’t get to yet. I want to be done with it by the end of the year so I can celebrate by going to London again — during the exact time period it takes place — and seeing a lot of theater and adding things that make it a richer, more interesting book.
I’m a month off — being only half through, rather than all the way through. Still, there are a lot of good days for writing ahead this summer and it just doesn’t help to panic. Also there’s that thing I keep hearing about how your first book has to be so good — and how you have so much time to get it to be that way, more time than you’ll ever have again, because no one is paying attention to how long it is taking you, which is certainly true in my case.
June 28, 2008.
First of all, a ‘fess up Friday post. It’s actually 12:20 a.m. on Saturday, but still…
Here’s the thing. Every time this week that I turned to this page to write about writing I stopped myself and went back to revising my novel. Yup. Still doing that. It’s a big job. Lots of words. And there’s nothing else to say, I don’t think. It’s what I do when I’m not otherwise doing the things I’m committed to doing. Some days that’s a lot of revising, some days it’s a little. I’m on chapter 18. There are thirty-some chapters.
When I was in New England last weekend, Debbie and I went to Hartford and did something I’ve been trying to do for years and years. Every time I go east, I always think that this will be the time I walk from 118 Westerly Terrace, which is where Wallace Stevens lived, to the Hartford, which is where he worked. It’s a two mile walk, some of it very urban, some of it quite country-like and lovely. Although it was raining, Debbie and I walked parts of it. We also walked around Elizabeth Park, which is close to Stevens’s house.
Why have I wanted to do this? Stevens wrote poems in his head on the walk to work and the walk home. Sometimes he walked to the park from his office. I wanted to know what that felt like. Here’s my rough impression: It was a substantial walk. Long enough to allow a person to work out some serious questions about god, and the imagination, about life and about abstraction.
Here’s his house:
and here’s the Hartford, that temple to insurance.
June 21, 2008.
More revising this week. I like revising so much, like having things already on the page to work with, like having my notes to guide me, and my calendar, so I know what day of the week it is for my characters.
I’ve made three major shifts in the novel through revision, all shifts designed to make the relationships among the characters stronger and more logical, more honest, I guess. On the plane yesterday, I worked on just one chapter, a chapter where this big shift happens. It’s very hard to do on demand — knowing that this is the time it has to get done makes me a little anxious and the writing feels forced as a result. I’m having a hard time imagining what’s going on in the head of my male character. You know, male writers have done the insides of women’s heads for centuries. I think I can get in there and see what he’s about if I just relax and remember the things I do know about men and about him. I think this might be a good thing to do in the morning. In the meantime, I’ve left that scene to percolate, and moved on to the next, easier scenes where the rewriting work is just a matter of sharpening sentences, removing awkward words, clarifying plot things.
June 16, 2008.
It’s Monday, not Friday, and a little late for the ‘fessing up Friday event. What I have to say is utterly unremarkable: I am revising. Pages and pages and pages. Some days not so much, some days a lot. Soon I will be done.
Thoughts on revising? My favorite phrase “something better here” is NOT actually the same thing as writing something better, although at the time it feels like it. Must stop doing that.
June 5, 2008.
There’s been a lot of fiction writing going on this week, just not novel writing. I revised a story by adding a new section to it — very satisfying. And I began two others. I remember Thaisa Frank pointed out once that an anecdote is not a story, although an anecdote can be the seed from which a story grows. For example, a description of a practical joke that went awry is an anecdote. The story of the fallout from the practical joke, the way it reverberates through the lives of the people who participated in it, and how years later, over the course of a few days when the people involved in the joke see each other, and realize how this practical joke changed their lives in ways they not only didn’t expect but never really understood — that is a story. It’s also the story I’m writing, a story that is called The Unreliable Associate.
May 30, 2008.
I should really be writing these reports on Sundays, because Fridays are the beginning of my short writing week. Most of the actual production of words begins Friday and ends Sunday. During the work week, I mostly seem to spend writing time making notes for revisions, and thinking up ideas for new scenes. I should probably take a photo of some of that stuff.
My own writing in my law job has been going well this week. People sometimes ask me whether writing as a lawyer makes it difficult to write fiction. I don’t think so at all. Wallace Stevens, for example, wrote a lot of lawyerly things and look at what he managed to pull out of his hat while walking to work in the morning. My legal writing — when I’m wide awake and trying my best — is clear and lean. I don’t write a lot when a little will do. Beyond the satisfaction I get from making complex ideas accessible, there is a reason for not writing a lot when you write for a court. You want to only say as much as is necessary to decide a question before you and not a bit more. Much mischief is done by saying more than you need to — people can get the wrong idea of what you mean, for example. There’s no transition necessary between that kind of writing and fiction writing. They’re like two native languages — and both are my voice. I think you know when your voice is in tune, by the way. It just sounds right, like you.
Getting back to this weekend — it doesn’t look terribly promising for writing, but I’ve known that for months. W is away with his father, and there are a ton of kid things to do: William’s got a school performance tonight, I have to take Jack and Charlie out to windsurf, because that matters to W, even in his absence, Charlie has a party Sunday, Jack and William have a concert Sunday night. My cousin’s coming to that, which will be nice. In there, though, I’ve got a pretty decent three hour block of time on Saturday. And then on Sunday, I might be able to get some time in during the morning. It’s nice having children who are a little older and can entertain themselves without having to worry too much about physical injuries beyond the normal falling-off-skateboard kind of thing.
I’m not setting big goals for the weekend — I just want to make some progress. A chapter, maybe two and I’ll be happy.
May 26, 2008
Great day yesterday. First, I managed to revise a lot — six or seven chapters. My vision of who the characters are and what the book is about seems much clearer and it’s such a pleasure to be able to write that into the book.
And I did some more stuff for Verna’s pitch sheet — a biography and some thinking about “endorsements,” which I think are blurbs from other writers and maybe editors about the book. For a woman who couldn’t sell a girl scout cookie to save her life, I don’t think it’ll be that tough to ask people to do that. It’s a good book, a good read, and it’s on a subject that’s worth writing and reading about. Why shouldn’t I do as much as I can to get it into the hands of people who’d want to read it?
May 23, 2008.
Today’s the day to talk about how the writing went this week. The trouble is that instead of talking about how it went, I would rather take out the story I recently submitted and fix it, now that I’ve spoken to someone who’s given me the clearest possible description of how that might occur. And so that is what I’m going to do. (Last week, by the way, the writing went pretty well. Sunday, I got a fix on the novel, and added some new scenes. I spent a lot of time writing six sentences, six important sentences that blurbed my book in a way that is pretty accurate and not totally ridiculous. Does it count that today I had someone take my picture? Naw. Still, what a pain that was. I’m off to write.)
May 21, 2008.
Here’s something I didn’t know — if you go into the icalendar on your mac, you can transport yourself back in time to the two months when your novel takes place — June and July 1969 — and write in the little boxes all the events you’ve made up. And then you’ll see that maybe it’s not so good you had so many things happen on a Saturday and, in fact, some of them could wait until Monday or Tuesday.
I’ve calendared the novel before, but never with so much clarity. And now I can see where the new scenes can go, there being a lot of time in one of those weeks for things to happen and people to tell each other stories. Very excited about this.
And here’s another — a little piece about the novel, which I have to send to my agent today, can be written using four index cards after spending several hours on the Powell’s Books website, looking at the synopses of several years worth of monthly booksense picks. Essentially, this blurb is a six line poem, given shape not by rhyme scheme or syllable count but by what must happen in each line:
Card One: It is 1969 and Ray Kineally…..
Card Two: Then he is ……
Card Three: Two sentences about the complications that wait him
Card Four: This is the story of (theme goes here), a story that leaves us — or is — shaken, changed, surprised, mesmerized, thoughtful, moving, gripping, profound, enlightened. I’m going to go with meditation on the buried past and the power of love to do something or other.
I do not mean to sound cynical about this blurb. It is a wonderful exercise, to distill your novel into this form. And now I am off to do it. I’ll just repeat, though, for anyone who is trying to do this, that the best way to accomplish it is to read the synopses of books like yours, abstract these synopses to common elements, and then plug your book’s specifics into each of the common elements and, well, bob’s your uncle.
May 19, 2008.
I’d first like to record today’s triumph: I found the missing three chapters I had scrawled my edits on. They were in my office, wedged between a set of briefs and three transcripts. Whew.
And then I’d like to say that yesterday’s writing was better than Saturday’s. I wonder if it’s common to think that you won’t be able to do it this time — that the words won’t come. But they do, they really do. I’m so grateful for that. I liked what I wrote, enjoyed rounding out the characters, making things clear.
May 18, 2008.
At the end of the day yesterday, a Saturday and the day I expect to get a lot done, I felt so let down, so unproductive. I couldn’t find the next two chapters of The Secret War, the ones where I’ve got my editing notes written and ready to be input, along with some expanded scenes. Bad. I didn’t do a single revision. Before that, I spent two hours with a writer whose work is exceptional, a woman who’s a good teacher and a kind person. We went over the next chapter of my second novel. I do believe that part of the work of writing is learning to write well. And certainly in these two hours, I saw a lot of things I didn’t really have a name for — the way you can use the physical “business” between lines of dialogue to more effectively communicate who your characters are, the way a scene in a chapter works, the timing of things, the role of weather. She is not a person who praises too much, although when I talk to her I don’t at all feel condemned either. But I’m so wordcount oriented that this time spent working on my second novel seemed not to count. Maybe it’s having a soft deadline — early June — for my revisions that makes me anxious and hard on myself. I’ll try to avoid that today.
May 16, 2008.
‘Fess up Friday. It’s fascinating to look back on a week of not-writing. I wrote in my blog, but not any fiction, every weekday this week. On the weekend, I edited like a madwoman, but a very happy one.
And yet, even when I am not writing actual words of fiction, I have so many thoughts about it and about my work. Things like this:
- Olivia, the woman I’m writing about in my new novel, is single. It’s a book about loving well, loving badly, wanting love, not needing love. Shakespeare, who wrote so much about loving well/badly was married the whole time he wrote plays exploring love’s beginnings. I think he embedded in these plays his own feelings about what happens after one finds love. That interests me very much and makes the book more interesting to me. Even when the main character is seeking love, there are other characters who have things to say about what happens after you find it. That’s something I want to be sure to include in this book.
- I am so happy to be revising. I love filling out my book.
- There is so much happiness to be had, right in front of me. My room, my husband who believes in me, my children, who crack up at my rejections, my kind boss, and good friends. And every once in a while, I write a sentence or two and think, “not bad. not bad.”
May 14, 2008.
If you guessed that today, Wednesday, is another work day, you would be right about the amount fiction that is getting written: not much. That’s not because it’s a work day, though. It’s because it’s a day (like the rest of this week), when I’ve had to drive to work because my timing for picking up children and dropping them off places is so tight and my need to get to work as quickly as possible to get the most done I can is so great that I’ve had to drive. Also, when my husband’s out of town, as he is this week, it just feels better to drive. It has to do with being a bridge away from my children and thinking that if I need to get home for some reason, it’s better to have a car than to have to take BART. And, when I drive, I do not write. That would not be safe.
I did look at the edited version of my book again for a while this morning though. There are very few line edits. That’s good, huh? The writing’s fine. It’s the story. I love that. I love writing more story. I can’t wait until the decks clear and I can do more of that.
May 13, 2008.
Tuesday. Very similar to Monday. A workday. And I’m just too tired to write anything else after writing the icky thing I am working on. But maybe it would be good to clear my head to spend an hour tonight, while the boys are asleep, and get another chapter of my revisions to The Secret War finished.
May 12, 2008.
It’s a Monday. Not a day to write fiction. A day to write like a lawyer. I don’t mind, really. The best legal writing is clear, invisible, helpful. There’s nothing at all wrong with a day laboring to produce that sort of thing.
May 11, 2008.
I discovered yesterday that it’s not all that helpful, and in fact it makes me anxious, to project how many chapters a day I’m going to revise. I finished (which means I don’t need to look at them again) four chapters yesterday. What was I thinking to aim for ten? That’s a little insane.
It took me pretty much all day to do those four chapters, with a break for tea with a friend in the middle. I really like revising. The editor’s comments are very helpful in this process, triggering as they do almost exactly the right changes and additions. And I feel like each revision makes the characters come that much more alive, and the story that much more what I’d like it to be. In the end, I’m terribly grateful to Verna for suggesting I work with this particular editor (his name is Alan Rinzler). When she sends that book out to people it will be ready.
The other thing I did late last night is look at a bunch of blog posts about writing a book blurb, which is what she needs to put in a pitch sheet for my novel. (A blurb is the six or seven sentences on the back cover of a book — or the inside of a hard cover — that make you reach for your wallet or your library card.) The posts over at PubRants were helpful. Reading them, it became obvious that the best way to do this is to start with the blurbs of books that most resemble mine. Many of the ones I’ve seen — of books I’m not crazy about — aren’t well written. They’re correctly written, in that they have all the elements of a blurb, but the language is so stilted and cliched that it wouldn’t get me to buy the book because I’d assume, rightly I think, that the book is written in the same way. The challenge here is to not only write the blurb correctly, but to do it in language that resembles the writing in the book. Here’s an example that’s closer to what I have in mind. It’s from Snow Falling on Cedars.
And I also have a (gulp) big work project to do today, an icky project, involving as it does a sexual abuse prosecution. I do like my job. I just don’t like this part of it. But it’s so important to do it carefully and conscientiously. Which is what I’m going to have to do for a couple of hours today so I can keep up with things at work this month.
May 10, 2008.
It’s 5:40 a.m. and I’m awake. There’s no internet access in my writing space. I’m going to go down there in a minute and input changes to The Secret War before everyone else gets up. I won’t finish, but I might get half through if I’m lucky. It’s a triumph, of sorts, being up this early and only being a little bit tired.
And then there’s this afternoon, when W takes everyone to the skateboard park. More Secret War changes. It’s entirely possible to be finished with everything having to do with the first ten chapters by the end of the day today.
But first I have to make some tea.
(Added later): Wow. I can’t say I whipped through the revisions this morning, but I did get chapters one and two done(ish). And what an amazing thing it is to make such major revisions (although with not a ton of words) — ones that make the purpose of the journey clearer, and the hero’s character easier to discern. This sort of revising is like looking into somebody’s suitcase before they go on a trip and realizing they forgot where they were going and packed the wrong stuff. So, I put in the right things — and off he goes. Later this afternoon, he arrives in Germany with a new name and a slightly different personality. He’s excited and happy and a little nervous, rather than depressed and frozen. A far better way to embark on a journey.
May 9, 2008.
So here it is, Friday, a day for summing up.
Words written: I have no idea! I wrote 1/4 of a story, and a bunch of revisions to The Secret War. I feel like I’m moving forward at a good pace (which is to say I’m on chapter 10 of about 36 chapters), even if I can’t quantify it. I want to finish revising that book by the end of the month, and all I can say is I’m glad I have a lot of weekends ahead of me. The way revising works is I scrawl my changes on the manuscript, either on the train, or in bits of time at home. And then this weekend, I need to input the changes, and write some new scenes I’ve blocked out. I also have to do a clear timeline — days of the week, weather, who’s where when kind of thing. One of the editor’s comments about the book is that the plot is not clear enough. I think the way to fix that is to be clear myself about what happens and when it happens. So, that’s something I have to do tomorrow. the good news? I love revising. The book is coming along well. Sometimes I catch myself reading little bits of it as though someone else had written it and I think, “well, this is pretty good!”
Stuff accomplished: Let’s see. There’s that story I began on the train, and then the revisions to chapter 10, and also I did some fiddling around with the first chapter of novel number 2, because I’m sending it out pretty soon, and it wasn’t working. Interestingly enough, two people who read it (my friends Debbie Freedman, and Gail Ford) seemed to think that the trouble was in the first paragraph. So I began with the second paragraph, which is where things are happening, and moved the scene-setting observations into that paragraph and the next one. Much better. I know I’ve said this a million times, but I love this book. It’s fun, and has to do with things I care so much about, which means that it’s not so heavy no one will be able to get through it. Portentious is not my thing. And I have in the back of my mind a third book, which is the one I thought I’d write second, a book set in Hartford and maybe in London, all about Wallace Stevens, and I wrote down some ideas about that I had (in the shower, of course), just so I have something to do someday when, you know, I can’t think of a thing to write. I can’t believe I get to write all these things and that I actually pretty much know HOW to write them. (I know there are dark nights of self doubt and times when I wonder what on earth I’m doing. But mostly I just want to tell these stories, and make myself laugh and think and other people too.)
I’ve also e-mailed Verna (my agent. Can you believe I have an actual agent?!), and we’ve talked about where I am on the revisions, some ideas I have about where to send it (she doesn’t seem put off by that in the least, lovely woman that she is). I like it that she wants to know where I am, and what I’m doing.
What I have to do that I don’t want to do: I have to write a pitch sheet and have my picture taken. Enough said. (Actually, one more thing to say: this might help.) I have about a week and a half to get this to Verna, because she’s going to a conference in Los Angeles at the end of the month and talking up my book to editors and she has to hand them this thing. I don’t know why my heart sinks at the thought of writing this blurb, but it does. Maybe I need to have a martini, and put on something fabulous, and some fabulous shoes, and pretend like I’m fabulous and THEN write the pitch sheet blurb.
May 8, 2008.
Another really productive BART morning. Last weekend in Sonoma, a friend told me a story that really got me thinking. This morning, I took out that orange notebook and sort of balanced it on my hand and found a pen (my favorite kind of cheap pen, the blue medium BIC round stick (why they feel like stick should be spelled “stic” is … oh, it’s because it ’s the same as BIC!) Gawd. Another digression. Interestingly enough, the story is sort of digressive, or it gets at the thing in a variety of ways, in that Faulknerian way (or like the story of the whale is told in so many different ways in Moby Dick, which is not spelled Dic), which is a good way to tell a story of an event that’s so appalling it reverberates through the narrative and the narrator’s life. I’ve never written a story in the first person before, but this one seems to be right for that point of view.
And before I wrote up what I think is the first quarter of that story, and outlined the rest of it, I wrote down some more stuff about the way the relationships in The Secret War work, and how they are going to work better than they do now. Fun.
It’s weird writing standing up, but when you’re in the middle of something, you could be upside down and not notice as long the bic round stic is working, which, fortunately, it was.
May 7, 2008.
Standing up on BART today, with one of my favorite notebooks (orange plaid, Clarefontaine) and a really good pencil (mechanical, mid-century Parker tortoiseshell that once belonged to Jack Bare, my husband’s great-grandfather), I wrote up the premise and some ideas about how to shift a crucial thing in the plot from something that worked okay to something much riskier and more deeply felt. Yow. Or something like that. Very exciting to push people into situations where they (and I) are over their heads. Sometimes the buzz of BART, and my headphones (I was listening to Feist, I’m pretty sure), makes me so focused. It’s weird, but true, that having people around you makes you very productive.
May 5, 2008.
Two things. It doesn’t actually count as getting up early to mistakenly set your clock an hour earlier and then wake up at 6 a.m. and think it’s 5 a.m.
I love revising my novel. I have it all in one of those cool thesis holders they use at Cal (my friend Gail gave this one to me), and I can sit there and go through it page by page, and add stuff and make notes and change things around. I’ve done that through chapter 7. Tomorrow, I’m going to input those changes, and write up a new scene and then keep right on going the next day. It seems to be going so quickly. Maybe that’s because this new stuff is icing and the cake is so well baked it just slides right on top. Or something like that.
May 3, 2008.
The Literate Kitten — who happens to live within walking distance of my house — has made the brilliant proposal that, on Fridays, there be a sort of accounting of the writing week. She’s calling it ‘Fess up Fridays. Now, I already account for my writing time here, but I like the idea of doing something fuller on Fridays, some summing up of what worked and what didn’t. So next Friday I’m going to give that a try.
Today’s truncated version of a ‘fess up Friday post would just be the observation that I am about to embark on the very intense job of re-writing The Secret War. I know that once I get back in there, and remember the world I created, and lived in for so long while I was writing it, I will enjoy creating new scenes in which my characters have room to breathe, to see each other and themselves more clearly. One man — and three women — and a host of secondary characters will all get the chance to do that. There is plenty of space for this kind of expansion. The novel is just about 60,000 words which is very short indeed for a novel. So I figure I can add at least 20,000 more words to reach the typical length of a book like this. What’s interesting is that is exactly the amount of space I need to accomplish this project of deepening the book. The other task I have in front of me is much simpler — a matter of clarifying plot elements. I think I’ll do that last, after I’ve got my characters to live again. Or maybe not. I don’t know if it matters, but I’m sure to find out. I’ll have to try to remember what I discover.
I’m still in bed — it’s 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday and I’m away for the weekend with friends. I’ve been reading The Elements of Style in the most brilliant edition — illustrated by Maira Kalman. If you don’t have this, you should. And you should read the whole thing, but not straight through. A little at a time, so you can enjoy it for a long time. This is from a section called “revise and rewrite”:
Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.
May 1, 2008.
Getting up early is not, actually, physically impossible. It’s just hard. But every morning I find myself awake earlier, and this morning I was up and about at 6 a.m. So, in a week, I should be able to write at 5 a.m.
I’m finished polishing chapter 1 to a high gloss, and am ready to send it out. I have my doubts about whether it’s good enough to stand on its own, but I see no harm in trying.
May is for two things: a few hundred words a day on novel number 2, so I don’t forget where I am come June, when I get to work on it in earnest. The most important thing for May, though, is to do the last editing on The Secret War before it goes to editors. (I also need to write something for Verna’s pitch sheet. I figure when I’m well into editing, I’ll take a break and do that.)
Writing today? Not really. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, a lot of stuff to do at work, — and I’m going away this weekend. But maybe I’ll find some time in the morning tomorrow: early. I guess it’s obvious why I need to get up early.
April 30, 2008.
Getting up at 5 a.m. appears to be a physical impossibility. Instead, I worked last night in my office from 7:00 p.m. - 10:30 p.m. That’s a LOT of time. In that time I pretty much managed to clean up the first chapter of my new novel, and make it into something that also works as a stand-alone story. Yes, it’s true: I also managed to wipe out the software on my phone and had to rejigger it, and I cleaned up paper and put things in the right place and read a non-fiction book about men’s sexuality. Why am I doing that? Well, I am curious about what it is like to be a man, seeing as how I’m going to be writing from the perspective of one quite a bit as I revise The Secret War. And then this morning I had a clean, clear runway of a story on which to taxi down — this metaphor is not really working — anyway, I had this beautifully printed out story and THEN I saw all kinds of small, wonderful things I could do to really go deep, and to make a difference. I love the little things you can do in a story. The way something appears and then echoes. The jokes you can make, like the one I made about the modern-day virgin mary mother everyone loves and forgives. Oh, I do so like this new novel. But soon comes the dark time of having to put it to one side to work on the first novel, which I’m not loving so much. I think I can though — I just have to get myself a little more worked up about it, that’s all.
April 28, 2008.
Yikes. It is really, really hard to get up at 5:00 a.m. I think what you end up doing is setting your alarm for 5 a.m. and then not getting up a bunch of times until finally one morning you drag yourself downstairs to your beautiful office, and open the curtains and realize it’s so beautiful out that early and then you make some tea and you love it down there and from then on you can’t wait to get up at 5 to write because it is absolutely the best of times.
Until then? No writing.
And that is not good. I want to get The Secret War buffed up by the end of May. I want to keep moving on novel number 2. And I’ve got to figure out whether the short piece I’ve just finished works well enough as a story to send out.
April 24, 2008.
I think the first chapter of novel number two is almost nailed down. I have a few more things to do there — but just want to record that taking out all that stuff was easier than I thought. I saved it all, just in case, and the whole thing is just better. Simpler, faster, more engaging. And the good things in it shine — they’re easier to find, I guess. I really like my character. And I feel like she and I and the other people in the book are about to embark on this great adventure, one in which we all find out what it means to love well.
Tomorrow, I begin my final edit of The Secret War, one in which my hope is to make the main characters more real — more related to each other. That, and fixing a few other things, things I hope are not THAT hard to fix.
April 23, 2008.
Images, lines of dialogue, plot twists. I write them all down. Sometimes, I e-mail them to myself. A woman saying something inconsequential in a soft voice while she lies in bed with her loved one and he falls asleep. This is a comedy, not a tragedy, she tells him. I am writing this one, and I know it will end well. He is not so sure, but he is wrong. The person who does the writing gets to decide. It is good writing in a different way than the 10,000 words a month way.
Next up, a little more work on that first chapter, and then some thinking about whether it is a good idea to send it out. At the same time, I received back editing comments on The Secret War. Incredibly good comments. Ones that really push the book in good ways. And me too. I’m thrilled to have them, and can’t wait to get going on making the book work as well as it can. It’s a little difficult to leave novel number 2 sitting there with its mouth open, but I’ll keep e-mailing myself images, and lines of dialogue and plot twists. That should be enough to keep it alive. Oh, that, and reading more Shakespeare.
April 17, 2008.
5:21 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon is not, maybe, the ideal time to re-write the first chapter of your new novel so it moves more quickly. But it is the time available. I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, because I can’t repair to my office — somehow it feels like I might be a little upset if I have to jump up and go outside to deal with a brawl. But if I’m only on my bed, with my computer on my lap, maybe I won’t mind being interrupted.
The chapter is 3,482 words. For once, it will be better if there are fewer words at the end of my hour of writing. And so there are, in fact there are now 2,914 words in that trim chapter. Ouch, though. I had to take out things I loved. But they were backstory, and it is not good to have your first chapter weighed down like that. Maybe I can work them in somewhere else. Or maybe they will just have to be my secret. Or maybe those words, which are, essentially, a story within a story, might have some life of their own as a short story. Now there’s an act of literary recycling.
April 16, 2008.
I spend a lot of time re-writing. I’m thinking about whether the first chapter of my new book would work as a short story. As I went over it, I realized that it doesn’t yet work as the first chapter of a new book. It’s fun, and fine, but it takes a little too long to get where it needs to go and it meanders a little too much on the way there.
That seems very normal for the first draft of something. But I’d rather that it didn’t do that. So, I’m rewriting it. The most helpful thing in this rewriting has been my reading this week — I’m about half through two Elizabeth Taylor novels, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and In a Summer Season. She’s a wonderful storyteller. And she gets right to the point. I’m going to try to be more like Elizabeth Taylor this week.
April 14, 2008.
I woke up at 4:30 a.m., and went downstairs to my very quiet room. I had the loveliest morning — I wrote about 400 words, sent some e-mails, and read a story in an anthology of love stories called My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead — it’s edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. The story I read was disturbing and wonderful. The writing I did was exhilarating. I can see the plot taking shape. On the train into work I read more of Measure for Measure. I skipped ahead to the end, having forgotten who marries whom. I love this play. If I continue to get up early, I think I may be able to read again. I’ve missed reading. And I have a plan to write 10,000 words a month of my new novel, finishing a draft by October. I’m more than on track this month so far.
April 13, 2008.
I wrote 1,400 words today. I so love my new novel. I made up seven new people – the Mayor of London, his wife, two guys who stock food at the Paddington Station Marks & Spencer, a Swedish guy and his girlfriend, and the Swedish guy’s sister. They made me laugh. They seemed real. They move the story in good directions, give it so much depth and life.
I felt like I’d made some friends, or like I was watching a scene unfold that was full of promise and delight.
It’s enormously fruitful to accompany my writing of this novel with my re-reading of the comedies. This week I’ve been reading Measure for Measure, a play I never thought much of except that I found it cruel and inexplicably harsh for a comedy. But now it looks different, maybe because I am older, maybe it is because of spending so much time working as a lawyer – but it is a play of big, important ideas – not least of which is the mercy/justice problem (which is also an issue when you are a parent). And that gave me an idea for a wonderful subplot, one that was so easy to write. Similarly, the subplot involving the mayor just came flying out.
I also had a nice conversation with the brilliant guy who’s going to be doing some developmental editing on my book. He’s so smart, has a long history of working with interesting people, and he seems like a lot of fun, to boot. It’ll be wonderful to work with him. He’ll begin this week, and he’ll be finished by the end of the month. After that, I have a few weeks to digest his suggestions and get things in order. And then, ta-da, Verna goes to work finding a buyer.
I love how quickly the whole thing is going. It’s a lot of fun.
The other thing I enjoyed doing today during my office hours (it gives my husband a huge amount of pleasure to refer to them like that, as though I’m some kind of academic down there in our little rental unit) was make a list of things I want to do in 2008. It’s a big list — get The Secret War into Verna’s hands, write a good draft of novel number 2, send out a story every other month (which means edit one thing I already have and write another), and plan a proposal for a non-fiction book I’ve beenthinking about, one that has to do with blogging. That’s something I’d like to do when I finish novel number 2. And, who knows, maybe I’ll try to put together the stories and sell those as a collection, even though yes, indeed, I do know that NOBODY buys story collections. I’d buy my short stories — I love writing them, they’re fun and interesting, and they are united by a strong theme: that of women in the middle of their lives making choices that change the direction in which they’re headed. What’s not to like about that?
April 11, 2008.
I’m not sure how long it took, but I spent a long-ish time going over the manuscript of The Secret War today. I found some things I missed the first few revisions — including one glaring continuity problem — and some places where more would be better. I think it’s going to be such a pleasure to buff up this book. It’s already in good shape. I can’t wait to see how it looks after it goes through the editing equivalent of a lot of weight training and healthy eating. Tomorrow, being Saturday, I have afternoon office hours. And Sunday too.
April 9, 2008.
I spent several hours yesterday on the business of writing, rather than on writing itself. I wrote thank you notes to people who’ve been helpful in looking for an agent (most heroically, my father in law, who contacted a writer he knows and gave him my book and got the names of some agents from him), and e-mails to people about my stories, and then I wrote cover letters to journals who’ve asked to see more work. And then I spent a couple of hours looking at agency contracts, so I can be sure I’m doing the right thing with mine. I’m sort of obsessive, I find. What’s funny is that I’m not obsessive about very many other things in my life — so I guess I save it for things I love. I hope I’m not a total pain in the neck to deal with.
April 7, 2008.
I love my new writing space. I have a half hour glass on my desk and I turn it over and allow myself only that much time to move the furniture around and make the kitchen even tidier than it already is.
This weekend, I spent several hours down there going over the final draft of a story called The Centerfold Club. I talked to a writer I know who’s very good at shaping short stories. She gave me a couple of incredibly valuable pieces of advice about where to cut and where to move around. She suggested a better way to end it. That story is way better than it was a week ago and it’s going out in the mail today — to a lot of literary journals, including the ones where they asked to see more of my stories.
Next up: revisions to The Secret War. And some work on the first chapter of my new novel, the one with no name. I think it would stand alone as a story, so I’m sending that out next.
April 1, 2008.
I brought a cold back with me from the southwest. It’s an awful cold, one involving my throat mostly. Swallowing is a stressful affair because it HURTS.
I brought my cold skiing this weekend with my husband — the last time this year. My cold and I cross-country skied on Saturday, and we also wrote 1100 pretty much incomprehensible words. Other than that, my cold and I have been napping and working on a big murder case.
Oh, no, that’s not right. I actually wrote six words at about 4:00 a.m. today. The Mayor keeps cars off the streets. I solved a major plot dilemma with this six (sorry, seven)words. (There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. The Mayor of London is an environmentalist. He hates cars. If it snows like it’s snowing in my novel, it’s a golden moment for him. He keeps the plows off the roads — if there are even plows — and he makes people figure out other ways of getting around. No cars! Now my character OWNS the roads, because she is a fabulous cross-country skier. I know, I know. It might sound a little stupid. But trust me. It’s funny and fun.) I need to wake up at 4:00 a.m. more often.
I seldom have writing gifts-from-the-gods while I’m asleep. Usually they come when I’m awake and in my chair. You know those gifts? They’re the small details that bloom into something really great and interesting and useful. You get that stuff if you’re receptive, and if you’re in your chair with your pencil in your hand or your computer turned on.
It was cool to wake up with a thought that completely solved something that was really giving me trouble — the kind of trouble that was keeping me from moving too much further forward.
March 28, 2008.
Back after a week’s vacation, after reading an entire book (Death Comes For the Archbishop) and dying to write more of my own. Getting back into the world of the novel is as simple as reading what I’ve written so far, looking at my notes and remembering the problem I have in the next chapter. It’s harder than that, though, because the whole thing recedes a little. I don’t like that. It’s much better to do a little every day — for me anyway — so I don’t have to recreate the mood/the place/the trajectory of the characters.
March 20, 2008. Today, waiting to see my oncologist, I made small but, I hope, important changes to a story I am writing. I waited an hour. I wrote two lines of dialogue and about four sentences. I changed the word “home” to “the hotel.” My oncologist said, “You don’t have cancer any more. You can move on to the Survivorship Clinic.” I’m not kidding. I felt like I’d won a role on a reality television show.
Right now, it’s 6:01 p.m. I’m sitting on my bed, all other surfaces in our house being covered in detritus. I’m going to write a little bit of my novel. I can’t even say how excited I am about this. I love my novel. But first I had to tell William he can’t play his drums. I’m trying to write, I explained. He’s browbeating Jack into bringing his drum downstairs so he can play them in a place far from us. I get up, shut the door. Try to ignore them. Drums are loud. Maybe I should put in headphones. Charlie’s downstairs, having a guitar lesson. That’s loud too, but it sounds nicer than drums. The drums are so loud. My novel will have to have loud things in it. Or a very, very quiet, moonlit night.
7:01. It is insane to try to actually write under these conditions. The good thing though is that earlier this week I thought of a fun plot twist. I wrote it down on a random piece of paper and forgot about it. I remembered it again and wrote it down on my file. The one that’s for the novel. The one that’s permanent. The plot of this novel is twisty — it’s full of mistaken identities and lost property, people who don’t understand each other. At some point, I’m going to make a list of events. But not now. I’m still making up events.
March 18, 2008. I am never going to quit my day job to write. For one thing, it pays for my family’s health insurance and it is how I sock away money to keep myself in warm wool socks when I’m an old lady. But that doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t fantasize about selling our house for a lot (or maybe ten percent less than that now that the market’s tanked) and moving someplace awful and hot and full of Walmarts and living in a little ugly house and writing a lot. We’d put our children in some small, isolated local public school that they’d hate because it’s not Berkeley, but would come to be okay with . . . when they’re in their twenties and living back in the Bay Area. Right now, my job is demanding and my life is demanding and I am not writing very much. The way I keep myself from making big changes so I can write more is by picturing the change in the grimmest light possible as I have just done. Still, I feel like there must be a way to write more if I just had time and enough sleep to really look at my life clearly. I know I’m not ruthless enough. I know I fart around too much. I know I should not write a blog. But still…
March 13, 2008. Shameful really. I’ve written a bazillion law words in the last week. It’s all I’ve been able to do, except for the occasional blog post and whining thing about being rejected. And I have this great novel waiting to write. I can imagine my characters, frozen by the “pause while I work” button, their mouths open, prevented from saying the witty thing that makes me laugh even to think of it, if I could only think of it, have time to think of it, I mean, and then more time to write it down. Moan. Whine. Sigh.
March 6, 2008. I am aware that it absolutely shouldn’t count that I spent an hour last night transforming a story that was written in the present tense into the past tense. What a lot of verbs there are in a 3,000 word story. I’m off to the train, to snag a seat and write some more words in novel number 2, which urgently needs a real name.
March 4, 2008. It was an “all good things come to those who wait for the next train” kind of morning. The first train was so crowded you needed one of those train pusher people to get everyone on. I waited. The next train, which came about four minutes later, had tons of room. I sat down next to a guy who was scrolling through what looked like hundreds of e-mails (oh, I’m so glad I don’t have that kind of job!), popped open my computer and wrote a bunch of dialogue, and some other stuff, in the new novel. At least two pages worth. And, best of all, I could feel those characters, as though I knew them. Of course, I do know them, modelled as they are on people I, um, know. Of course, I’d add the standard disclaimer that these aren’t real people. I’m not a biographer.
March 3, 2008. Some statistics for you.
Number of children who claim they have a “sore throat”: 2
Number of children who have ski injury: 1
Number of children allowed to stay home from school: 3
Number of husbands who have lunch meeting in Palo Akto and cannot watch children in the morning so wife can go to work, so wife has to go to work in the afternoon and miss a burrito dinner with “sick” children: 1
Number of hours I have to work today: 6.4 (I work 80% time — that works out to 6.4 hours a day, five days a week.)
Number of hours worked: 6.4-ish; I’m on my way home.
Number of words written: why 0, of course.
But that’s okay. I have, at least thought about that novel, about my character, about the scene I’ve left her in, the one in which her twin’s girlfriend, a Latvian beauty queen, mistakes my character for her brother (they are twins and even though they are a girl/boy set, they look alike) and kisses her while she sleeps on the sofa. The Latvian beauty queen smells like my current favorite Jo Malone perfumes — nectarine and honey with some jasmine and mint thrown in. All that perfume research is really paying off. Someday, some graduate student will have a field day writing about scent in the trashy fiction of Lily Hamrick. Maybe they will get funding to buy perfume to see what that combo smells like. One can only hope one’s literary influence leads to such happy results.
March 2, 2008. Sunday morning, 8:02 a.m. Why shouldn’t I go downstairs, make myself a cup of tea, bring it back up here and take one hour to write the next scene of my new novel, which I’ve got to think of a name for pretty soon? Why indeed not?
March 1, 2008. Saturday morning, 8:40 a.m. There is no milk in this house — so I am using evaporated milk which gives my tea a nostalgic sort of 1950s flavor (or at least it gives it what I THINK is that flavor). There is also no butter for my toast, so I improvised with cream cheese. Yes, we are running out of the staples because I am a neglectful mother. On the neglectful mother front, I want to here record that W took Charlie and William to a ski race yesterday morning, and yesterday William hurt himself in a big crash on the mountain. His knee is swollen and he is having trouble walking. W called this morning to say he thinks I should drive up there and meet him half way and get William. I think W should figure it out for himself and not make me drive anywhere. More evidence of the conflict between mothering and writing. I would like to be ruthless, but cannot. And so I will drive up to meet him if he needs me to, or hopefully my alternate plan (of having a good friend watch William for the day) will be a go. But no way I will write 29 more pages today. And, in fact, I did not. Instead, I sent out the first fifty pages of the novel I HAVE written, and a short synopsis. But having this deadline was good for this new novel, which is further along than it would otherwise have been. Rushing it, though, seems like a bad idea. When I don’t rush, it is much more fun to write.
February 29, 2008. I am just going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’s very, very hard to write fifty pages — just fifty pages — in a month, which is how long I gave myself to do that. I’m up to page 19 and, before Jack went to bed he said, “Mom if you get to 25, I’ll be so proud of you.” Now there’s a new motivation. And, of course, I need to remember not to be too hard on myself. Has such a reminder ever, in the history of time, worked? I think not.
February 26, 2008. I promised myself that I’d write something on this page every day — even if it’s just to report that I didn’t have time to write anything. Here’s what today looked like: I set the alarm for 5 a.m., so I could finish printing out the manuscript I needed to mail out today. I’ve been putting off this printing out because I’m sure there are still more things I can do to make it better. And so, anxious about it (an anxiety I don’t feel today), I woke at 2 a.m., then 4 a.m., then shut the alarm off and got up at 7 a.m. But it did get printed out and taken to the copy place today at lunch — where, for the staggering cost of $90 some dollars, I made three copies of the whole damned thing, and a copy of a partial, just so I have it ready to go. Oh, plus, I got a parking ticket, paid $6 or so for postage, and then bought $41 worth of “forever” stamps — ones that will never cost more than the .41 I just paid for them. What a good idea. I think I’m going to stock up on those, for return envelopes, the ones that come back from journals six years after you sent them your story.
It’s now 3:15 p.m. and I’ve picked William up from school, packaged up the query I’m mailing to Matt Bialer at Stanford Greenburger(he’d be a terrific agent for my book), and another package for my nice father in law, who’s volunteered to hand my stuff over to a writer friend of his. He asked for the whole manuscript, but I’m going to send him just the first fifty pages which is all I really think a relative should be expected to read. If he wants more, I’ve included the synopsis.
But there’s the small matter of novel number 2 — and the 35 pages I want to write before Saturday. I wrote the first chapter on Sunday and yesterday I outlined the next four or five. But today I need to write five or ten pages into the next chapter. And I am puzzled about whether it would be better to write this in the first person, so I sort of want to try that. I think it would be more efficient, though, to write in the third, and later try the whole thing in the first person voice. I suspect that voice, the first person, of allowing for too much self-indulgence and being boring. But it’s the voice I write in here on the blog, and it’s one that can be so much fun. Given that it’s a fun book — maybe I should write it in that voice. Now it’s time to pick Charlie up from school, and then I’m going to the gym from 4:30-5:30, making some dinner, W goes to the climbing gym tonight, so maybe when everyone’sinbed at 8, I can do two hours of writing. If only I didn’t feel so wiped out by the time we’re done eating dinner. Maybe I can skip dinner with the boys tonight and go upstairs. Yes, I’ll try that — have W take them out somewhere fun, and I’ll go upstairs and see how far I can get.
Honesty here: It’s 4:14, I’ve been home for about twenty minutes and I’ve managed to write a distracted 96 words. Still, that’s 96 words more than I’d written at 3:28, when I left to pick Charlie up from school.
February 25, 2008. Today? I am still working on printing out my novel. The trouble is that I can’t just print it out, I have to tinker. Never mind that I’ve been told by someone I should listen to that it’s a fine manuscript. I still feel like it needs something more. And that’s what I’m doing, this afternoon at 4:52 p.m., when I should be clearing off the table and putting dinner on it, domestic goddess and mother that I am not. My poor family. I know it’s not my entire responsibility to make dinner, but if I don’t, we end up eating a lot of burritos or poor Weyman has to put something together at the last minute. What to do? How to do anything well is the problem of this time of my life.
February 24, 2008. I think, on the weekends, it’s best to write new things as early in the day as you can. So, after arriving home this morning at 10:30 a.m. from the mountains, where I went snowshoeing yesterday for a very nice day, I’ve put my computer on the dining room table and, after a moment here, I’ll find my document and write more of that novel. This afternoon, when I’ve gotten some things done on that, I’ll print out a copy of The Secret War, for that agent who wants it, and then go to a copy shop and make two more copies for people who’ve asked to look at the whole thing. So far: 0 words. 11:10 a.m. Let’s see how that goes.
6:00 p.m. 3,000 words. 15 pages. I am 35 pages away from having a draft for that novel fellowship thing. I like what I wrote, see how to up the ante a little when I revise. If you can write 3,000 words a day, then you can write a lot of novel in a short time. You just have to keep going.
It means, though, that you do not (a) cook a Sunday dinner for your family, which makes at least one child wistful and sad — okay, and angry, because he is a teenager almost; (b) pay attention to your child who is at home with you, which makes him a little sad and wistful; (c) go grocery shopping, which is not so good when you haveto eat and make school lunches for the week; (d) exercise, which is not so good because you want to live a long time so you can write a lot of words; and (e) print out your manuscript — so you will have to stay up late to do that tonight. I feel sad that every time I write I neglect something else and I can FEEL IT. It is as though I have to be a thief in order to write. I wonder if that is common.
February 17, 2008. When you live in a family, you can’t really control your time — I mean, if you were a Victorian patriarch, and were okay with everybody tiptoeing around the house while you holed up in your study and wrote, you could control your time, but otherwise, you can’t. So, if someone gets sick, you don’t write. If you have a lot of work to do, you don’t write. And what’s interesting is that, even so, you do get a lot of writing done, if you just wait for it and then grab it. Today, it’s 2 p.m. and I’ve got two hours. The new novel, and this idea I have that I can write 50 pages of it by the end of the month, is what has me going this afternoon. So far: 0 (obviously, I’ve just begun…)
Okay. 1328 words. What’s hard is that this novel has always seemed so fun — and today it seemed to be about something else, some moral choice about plot. That’s a first. I think I’ll re-read Mary Wesley, who never seemed too concerned about morality in writing about love. It’s true that there aren’t that many plots, and that comedy generally resolves all things in marriage. That this plot isn’t one that always serves women well is clear enough. What other resolutions there might be is the question of the day.
February 15, 2008. What have I written? A five and a half page synopsis. Too long for some, too short for others, so it seems to me it is fine to send it off because there are no hard & fast rules with this particular writing product. I think that agents read these not so much to see if you’re a terrific writer, but to make sure you haven’t done something really weird to your characters or taken a turn so bizarre a book can’t be finished, much less sold. And since none of these happen in my book, I am fine sending out a synopsis that’s not a piece of magic, but workable nevertheless.
February 13, 2008. A seat on the train. My battery full of power. My story easy to locate. I love this story. Trouble is, I love it so much I keep going over the first six paragraphs and admiring it. There is something keeping me from ratcheting it up a notch — maybe some fear that I won’t be able to find the right next event to express the thing I want to say. The answer to that, I’m pretty sure, is to reduce the whole thing to six point font and spend both train trips — a total of 50 minutes — writing without being too concerned about where I’m going. In the past, something has almost always happened when I do that. And there’s no reason why it won’t happen now. Sum total of words written on 50 minute train ride (not counting words polished to a gloss you could see your face in, I mean): 15.
February 12, 2008. Yargh. Or something like that. I’m spending so much time sending things out, that I don’t have much time left to write. In the last two weeks, though, I’ve: rewritten carefully the first 50 pages of The Secret War. Nothing big, but nice small touches I think make the whole thing even better. Re-written a story called The Centerfold Club. This is my favorite story so far. (I’m up to THREE!) And I made it end differently, something bigger. I like it, am fond of the woman I wrote about. Finally, began another story called, tentatively, Yes, Mr. Mayor, I’d Like to be Your Friend. This story cracks me up. I’ve written about 1,500 words of it. And I haven’t quite decided how to end it. Fun, fun, fun.
Novel? Here’s how I’m going to get the first couple of chapters written by the end of the month: the James Jones Fellowship Contest. It’s good to have that deadline. Now, no way someone’sgoing to give me $10,000 when I send them the first 50 pages of as-yet-unwritten novel number two. But who cares? I’ll have written it and that’s what matters. I love this novel — it feels like it comes from a place I know intimately, but will be surprised by too.
January 27, 2008In London, I did not so much writing as making notes — lots of physical descriptions, sights/sounds,etc. And a lot of reading, beginning with Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen. It’s wonderful to have this vision of Austen as a working writer, and a woman in some historical context — a life that could have been, and maybe was, tragic on some fronts, triumphant in others. One of the lessons of maturity is that so many things we are dealt are not what we thought, and many disappointments await us. And yet, we can make something of these disappointments and need not be stuck in them. Thinking about comedy, and about love — the way Shakespeare’s lovers are interchangeable in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is the nature of young love. More mature love in Much Ado, a lovely play at the National, and lovely to read ahead of time.
These last few days have been spent in the business of getting work out. Today, a Sunday, everyone has gone skiing and the dog and I are home in the house in the rain and I am trolling agent websites, and resisting distilling my novel to a one page query. The query letter feels so dishonest — at least the ones I’ve seen that are so gimicky. I can’t write that kind of letter. So, I guess I won’t. I’ll write the best one I can think of and leave it there.
and a note added later in the day How did I forget that I’d actually ALREADY written a query letter a long time ago? I found it in my computer, looked it over, decided it was good enough and emailed it to a few writer friends to make sure it’s not obviously awful. Later today, I’ll do ten email queries. And then tomorrow, I’ll print that letter out and the first chapter of my book, and send out five or so letter queries.
But now, while the black bean soup is cooking on the stove, I’m going to write. It’s a different way of keeping track, not so much by words as by time. 55 minutes, in fact. Actually, 50.
January 9, 2008 It’s good to be back at work. The trains are crowded in the morning, full of dripping umbrellas and long faces, but all that sluggishness among my fellow riders means that I can snag the seat that opens up, because they are too stunned by the morning to move when it does. I am a vulture, watching people for any sign that they are getting off at the next stop. And I don’t care. I wrote almost 1,000 words this morning in the twenty minutes between the 12th Street Station in Oakland and the Civic Center Station in San Francisco. I wrote in tiny font because I was writing about foolish, foolish behavior and didn’t want to look and see what I was saying. I don’t think I can use much of it, but I can see how it will lead to something much better. I love writing on the train.
January 6, 2008I had a boyfriend in college who thought the whole idea of an epiphany was the most wonderful thing ever. (Not the same boyfriend who discovered existentialism, the epiphany boyfriend was a lot more fun.) Anyway, today being the feast of the epiphany, you’d think I’d at least get one handed to me. But no, instead, I am stuck finishing up a work project. It is 10:44 a.m. and if I work for two hours it will be done. Two hours straight. God. I love my boss, and I love the idea of my legal work, where I help keep the system honest and straight, but sometimes I really, really hate doing it. No more whining. Two hours. I can feel my brain being shifted into the gear it has to be in to do that work. Ka-lunk.
(Oh, and one thing before I forget: for the last couple of weeks I have noticed that my blog is frequently on the wordpress front page, in the news department. That anything I have to say is news of any kind is, well, news to me. But it is nice, nevertheless, to know that perfect strangers might want to read about the things that amuse me and give me pleasure. If you are one of those perfect strangers, welcome!)
January 3, 2008I write today only to record the utter absence of any writing. The vacation makes writing impossible. It is really that simple. And I want to work so badly. I keep thinking about how, when I am in London from the 11th through the 18th, I will write every day, in one of those 1950s cafes. I will write little sketches full of weather, interiors, fashion, speech, buildings, sky. I will create a landscape in which the winteriest winter in hundreds of years hits London. When it is so cold the Thames freezes over and power is lost, and people huddle around fires on the Thames and in pubs and then ice skate and have a huge carnival. When identities are switched, and debts have to be repaid, and cruelty abounds, but so does kindness and compassion. I want to write about desire and longing and confusion and losing oneself, but not in that week. That week is for the sketches of place. And winter.
December 19, 2007 The story of my getting to write on the train is also the story of why it is that no one in the crowded train would sit next to the African American guy who was in the back of the car, a seat next to the window empty on his other side if only someone would ask him to get up and let them in. Why are people so afraid of men like him: men in working clothes, a little sweaty, a little tired looking, black men? He was in his thirties, and he displayed none of the warning signs of someone you really don’t want to sit next to — the guy whose zipper is undone and who smells strongly of alcohol at 8 in the morning, for example, or the woman who has twelve plastic bags filled with paper and is talking to herself and waving her hands in the air. If you want to write, you don’t sit next to people who will give you a hard time. I asked him for a seat, he got up in the most gentlemanly way to let me in, and then got off three stops later. In the meantime, I had written a page of stuff for my new novel. And what a roll I am on! Character names! Plot points! Shakespeare! It is wonderful, planning and writing a new thing that’s set in a place I know, and follows the adventures of people I think I’m going to really like.
December 18, 2007 I can see that this month’s log of time spent writing is actually a log of time spent wrapping presents, and going to children’s holiday events, and trying to choose the right gift for people without driving myself crazy. When I drive into the city, I don’t get to sit on BART, don’t get to write. This morning, though, I took BART, and there was a seat, ‘way in the back. I wrote two pages. I thought about why it is I can’t write in the first person. And wrote about that too. It all counts.
December 14, 2007 I am not quite sure if re-writing counts as writing, but I am going to be strict and say it doesn’t. That will mean that I haven’t actually written anything at all for four days, because I have been rewriting a short story. But that is okay, because things move forward, even when you rewrite. I am almost finished rewriting, so maybe this weekend I will get in those two pages a day. Oh, it is also the case that my laptop has been in the shop all week, and so I can’t write new things, although I can scribble all over old ones.
The other thing that has happened is that I have figured out what I am going to do with my next novel — where it will be set, what the event is that sets things in motion, how it will be structured. I have discovered that it is not a good idea to talk to people about it. It’s a little like what happens when you tell someone the name you’ve chosen for your child. Obviously, when you give someone this information, you are not asking their permission to name the child this name, and you do not actually want to know that the name you have chosen happens to be the name of the child who bullied them their whole third grade year. But someone always does do that. It is the same with telling people the idea you have for your novel — invariably, someone will tell you to be careful, and not do X or not do Y or add in Z. And it just isn’t helpful. But it isn’t debilitating, and so I now have a policy — no talking about the novel in specific terms. Just writing. I will begin in January.
December 10, 2007 A miracle! There was actually a seat on the 8:15 a.m. train. And even though I don’t much like the story I’m trudging through at the moment, I made myself type, and some things came out that surprised me and that I liked a lot more than the things I THOUGHT I was going to be writing about. That’s the best thing about writing, I’m pretty sure. The stuff that’s in you that you aren’t aware of until you reach the end of the path you’ve laid out for yourself.
Also, everything I am wearing is clean and unwrinkled. It is a triumph of a day.
December 8, 2007 Here it is, the end of the week, and I have written two pages, this week. It is harder than it sounds, two pages a day. And that is entirely due to the way my train ride works, because that is really my writing time. This week, it became my reading time, as I struggled to finish Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart — a good enough book, but something I read because it was an obligation: my neighborhood book group met on Thursday, and I wanted to finish before we met. The trouble is that it is more important to write two pages a day than it is to finish the book for the neighborhood book group and I was not ruthless enough to admit that to myself and deal with it. So, my insight this week is that if I am going to get done the meaningful writing that matters to me, I am going to have to be more ruthless about what I do on the train. And although I can’t always find a seat for the half hour ride into the city, I will always have a seat on the way home. That is good enough.
It is also perfectly fine that I’ve only written about two pages this week. Keeping track of it makes it possible to see how that could be different. And I don’t feel at all bad. I sent two stories out into the world, let it not be forgotten. That matters.
I am reading though. It isn’t okay not to read. Last night for an hour instead of cleaning up piles of books and newspapers, I read a couple of chapters of the Pevear/ Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. It is a magnificent book. Tolstoy is so good at lovingly describing his characters, even the silliest of them. If I’m going to read, it should be things like this, necessary things.
December 6, 2006. Writing on a crowded train is tricky. I hardly ever think about it, though, because there’s no other option really. But I did come up with a trick for what to do when your seat is on the aisle and there’s a guy hovering over you and looking down at your screen and you’re writing a story about a woman who takes $1,000 out of the bank after she drops her kids at school, drives to the airport and takes the next plane available, which happens to be to Vegas. Now really, I like reading out loud, but I’d rather be public with a story after I’ve fixed all the typos. So you know what you do? You decrease the font size to 6 and neither of you can read what you’re writing. It’s a little like writing in the dark, except you still get to write in a straight line, the computer takes care of that.
All this is a long winded way of saying that I wrote almost two pages of that story in the 25 minute train ride between the Ashby BART station and the Civic Center Bart station yesterday and even though I didn’t like 2/3 of it, it shouldn’t matter.
Today, though, there was no seat. In fact, there was barely room to open a book, which in this case was Elizabeth Bowen’s Death of the Heart. I don’t like this book very much. It seems so labored, and old fashioned, so half in the 19th century and half in the 20th. She reminds me of Arnold Bennett (or at least I think it’s Arnold Bennett). They both have the same concern with sexual morality that’s neither frank enough nor guarded enough (as James is guarded) to be truly interesting.
December 4, 2007 Writing in the blog, and writing at work do not count toward two pages. Neither is fiction. Or at least, that isn’t my intention. I would probably have written more on the train today if I’d actually remembered to bring my computer with me. Instead, I stared out the window and daydreamed. Which I liked doing. I did go to the post office in the Federal Building across the street, a building I loathe because (a) it is the ugliest building in San Francisco by far, built in some fit of non-inspiration in about 1972, an uninspiring year if there ever was one, and then made even uglier after the Oklahoma City bombings by a determined effort to erect hideous concrete barriers on every conceivably restful place so that when the Quakers come to protest the War (which they do every week), nothing untoward will happen. A more barren place I cannot think of; and (b) they always make you take off your shoes to get through security, and today I was wearing thigh high zip up boots, forgot about the shoe-taking-off requirement and so was not wearing something more practical, and had to unzip them and take them off in front of the creepiest security guards of all time. But, I did make it to the post office, dignity sort of shredded, and I mailed out my stories. Soon, I will be getting a lot of rejection letters, and I will keep thinking, “shots on goal, shots on goal.”
December 3, 2007 No seat on the train into work, so I read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart. I don’t read anymore. I used to read such big, long, delicious books. And now, I just don’t. I cannot remember the last such book I ever read. The new War and Peaceis languishing on a table in our living room. Vargas Llosa’s Bad Girl is right on top of it (which is where it should be, i guess). Richard Russo’s latest? I managed one chapter. This is what happens when you work/raise children/write/exercise. There just isn’t any more time in there to read. All I can say is it’s a good thing I’ve spent most of my life reading, and I’ve read a lot of books already, or this would be Very Bad.
As for writing, today I put together packages to mail out two short stories to literary journals. Fifty submissions. I’m not even thinking about how these stories are a little raw, and maybe a little ridiculous. I loved writing them and that’s all that counts.
Two pages? Hah. Still, look at those stories that are going out into the world! Today, that’s good enough. Plus, I finished figuring out how I’m going to try planning this month, and before bed, I’m actually going to blog about it.
December 2, 2007. This next year is for writing a series of short stories about women around my age, women who make decisions that change the direction of their lives — not always wise, which is why they are so interesting. And then, after — or maybe while (probably better to do this while) writing those stories, I am going to begin a second novel. I’ve been thinking about this novel for a year.
So here is this page is again.
Today, two hours at Cafe Roma. Great foam on my latte! Table next to a power outlet. A guy a couple of tables over got up and showed me how to get the plug to work, which involved the somewhat exciting process of unplugging the protective thing on top of the plug so an imac power cord would fit in without falling over.
I wrote the end of story number three, which is called The Centerfold Club. That I have written about a visit to a strip club astonishes me. When Charlie asked me today if he could read my stories, I told him no. Who knew I was going to turn into a pornographer this late in my life? As for word count, I don’t know. But it was enough words to get through the end.
December 1, 2006. I’m moving into a cleaning up and editing phase with The Secret War and so will not be updating this page for a while. I have a second novel in mind and will be starting that after the new year and then will be back to keep track. I’m leaving up this page though as a reminder to me that there is writing to do and to pay attention to. And I wish all of you the very best in your own writing projects.
September 21, 2006. It feels like I’m on the top of the hill and it’s very, very steep. I can see the bottom though. When the dust clears (I’m guessing in late November), I’ll post again.
September 17, 2006. All done with surgery. The stitches are out. Things are healing nicely. After three weeks, radiation therapy starts. And I’ve got two small work projects that’ll take all my time between now and September 21. And then I start my ten days of writing. I’m curious about whether I can finish my novel in those ten days. I’ll be back on the 20th to report on what it feels like to be on the starting line.
September 1, 2006. Oh, I do so like writing the date of a new month, one of my favorite months because here in California, although everyone has to go back to school, the weather is so sunny and even blazingly hot, that you feel as though you’vebeengiven a little extension on summer. It’s a nice mixture of the industriousness of autumn and the freedom of summer. And it only lasts for about a month until it begins to rain and we’re well into what fall is really like.
This morning, one of the BlogLilyboys, the one who generally watches me like a hawk and asks me tons of questions, had a proposal for me. First, he observed that I spend a lot of time blogging. And it’s keeping you from your novel, mom he said. Here’s the bit I was shocked by and then utterly taken with: Mom, he said, you could finish your novel in a week, couldn’t you? Of course not!
And then I thought about it for, oh, ten seconds. He’d mentioned that it takes me a week to write a chapter. But the truth is, I’ve written a chapter in a day of writing plenty of times. It’s not great, but I’ve done it. As is so often the case, he is a very wise person.
That’s what I’m going to do then. My surgery is September 5. After a few days of getting up to speed, I’m going to blaze through a chapter a day, for ten days, not caring whether they’re any good, and finish up by the end of September. Until my surgery’s over, I’ll keep writing my narrative of the book’s end, so I have something to cling to when I dive into the deep water that will be those ten days of writing. (He thought a week of writing — something about ten days appeals to me. Maybe it’s that it’s three more days than seven.)
August 31, 2006. Time Spent on BART: 25 minutes. Time Spent Writing: 20 minutes. Words Written: 600. I realized this morning that I’ve got a month to go and a lot to do. First order of business is to write a narrative of the rest of the book, not the book itself, but just a spurt of writing to no one in particular, describing roughly where things are going. I see things are going all over the place, which makes me nervous, but then I tell myself, editing is where you make sure things fit just right. It feels so great to be back to it.
August 29, 2006. Ah, what a shameful monthofnot writing this has been, a month utterly unlike July when I breezed through a lot of novel writing. I’d wondered, back in July, when all the health news and the need to parent and work would squeeze out my writing time and now I have my answer: August. A time when there aren’t a lot of camps for children to go to (so they end up needing more of you) and then you have to find rulers and binder paper and socks and pants that fit and do some decent work for pay and tend to your anxieties about maybe being sicker than anyone’sreallytelling you. Plus, cakes to bake and parties to give. Still, I don’t want to be dragged so far under by the rest of my life that there’s no room for this work that matters so much. Anyway, being dragged under is a terrible description of the lovely life I have.
August 24, 2006. Words written since the last words written: zip. A wonderful visit from my friend Debby (a good reason), an infection from my surgery (yikes), cleaning out my office (yay), and 48 hours without an internetconnection, which you’d think would make for more writing but in fact, meant a lot of time spent finding out that we need a new modem. I’m not making any resolutions here, but it is my sense that I’m just about done with this little break I’ve somehow decided to take without really deciding to do it.
August 16, 2006. Last night, I read parts of my novel to a group of writers who’re taking a writing class. Looking at them all, I realized how much it means to be able to write and write well and how many fears you have to get through before you can even write at all. I don’t know why that is, exactly, what happens to us that we find it difficult to get back to the essentially entertaining and pleasurable act of writing a story or a poem. But after I read, they had a chance to read, and I was so impressed by how much was going on in that room. Good for them! After an evening of talking about writing, all I really want to do is make some of my own. We’ll see how that goes today.
August 14, 2006. No! It’s the middle of August and I’ve been faffing around writing about tuna mousse and not my novel. (I don’t actually know if “faffing” is a word, but if it’s not, it should be. It perfectly describes the fun of writing larky, silly things that amuse you, but don’t actually add to the other things you’ve been planning to do.) I’ve got to get back to The Secret War. My characters are closing in on the bad guy, and instead of drawing the noose tighter, I’ve just left them standing around, mouths open, motionless. That’s not a very nice thing to do.
Tonight, I’m supposed to be reading excerpts of The Secret War to a UC Extension class my writing teacher, Clive Matson, runs. I think I perfectly demonstrate this very important point: if she can do it, anyone can. All you have to do to become a writer is, well… write. That he’d ask me to do this is so kind and encouraging that it just increases my devotion to him and his wonderful wife Gail by a factor of a million. And you know what? I actually got paid $50 the last time I read. It took me months to cash that check, because I was so amazed anyone would actually pay me to read to people.
August 9, 2006. A busy few days of working and husband traveling. This is a no-novel zone. Next week, far fewer distractions. Words written in between work and making lunches: about 500.
August 4, 2006. A day of writing at a writer’s workshop withClive MatsonandGail Ford. Very productive day from 10-5. In the morning, I revised a scene I’d written earlier. In the afternoon, I started the next scene (they’re more scenes at this point than chapters.) it went pretty well. The thing I didn’t do, because I didn’t have time to reflect on it, is prepare a little better for a significant decision the point of view character makes in one of the scenes. When someone has a major shift in direction, you need to see that coming, see a strong motivation for that happening, and see a little bit of their reluctance before their turn in the new direction. That’s something I didn’t do, although the scene has room for it.
But it’s okay to leave these sorts of things to revision. What’s great about reading your stuff out loud to people (as I did this new chapter) is that when you do, you can see the gaps. So that bit of revision is next, and then another scene after that. I like this rhythm of revising and then new writing, especially when it can be done in one day. I’ve discovered that when you go back into a scene, and apply more words, you’re ready to go onto the next one. Words written: about 3,000. yippee.
August 2, 2006. The honest truth: I’ve been working all day on something for work, and the amount of anxiety I’m experiencing about tomorrow’s meeting with my cancer surgeon is really high so you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put on a nice nightgown (blue) and get in bed with a cup of tea and Barchester Towers. And then I’m going to sleep. And also I’m never, ever again going to engage in any kind of discussion with anyone about (a) pornography or (b) censorship. I get to write about what I want to. And I don’t want to write about that kind of stuff again. It’s depressing. Words Written: Not counting internet porn debate and the law, you can guess. Zerooooo.
August 1, 2006. Tomorrow I’ll have some time. For the last four or five days I’ve had none. I’ve done a lot of other good things, just not my novel. That’s about as long as I want to go between working on it. Any longer and I forget who’s who and what they were thinking and doing.
July 30, 2006. My husband’s been away all weekend. I so enjoy hanging out with my boys. And when I do, I don’t write, because that doesn’t work very well around here. Unfortunately for me, I can’t work unless I’m in a place where no one needs me. That’s why I like cafes, especially ones with big tables. And the subway. There are some people who can concentrate standing on their heads, I guess, but knowing I’m not one of them just means I have to try to get the conditions I need when I can get them. Next week I’ll have them, and then I have a few more chapters to get under my belt. Things are looking good to finish by October 1 at the very latest, September 1 if things go exceptionally well.
July 28, 2006. More on that scene. Sort of like a painter, applying more layers. It’s interesting work, fleshing out a scene. For example, there wasn’t, the first time around, enough reaction from the main character to the provocative things other characters were doing and saying in the scene. And I needed to sneak in a little bit of physical description, so the characters are easier to see. There are four people in this scene, and quite a bit more dialogue than I usually write. It’s funnier than the rest of the book, but I’m going to leave that in and see if it’s jarring when I read it over again. I do so love writing. Words today? About 300.
July 27, 2006. I re-wrote a chapter I worked on in the Sierra — chapter 20. It’s a pivotal scene, and I’ve got one more thing to fix and then it’s done for a draft. I keep thinking about how good it will feel to be at the end — maybe ten or twelve scenes from now. And how much more I know about what I’m doing than when I began. There are a lot of things I still don’t know, but I can feel them within my reach. I’m full of plans for books after this one. I have in mind the next chapter, which I’ll get to tomorrow and today, in the time that’s left, I want to make sure I’ve sketched out things as far as I can. Every time I finish a scene, I can see ahead just a little more. And I can also see little bits of the scenes that are much further ahead. It’s wonderful, piecing it all together.
July 22, 2006. How funny. Somewhere in there I lost a day. Like a dropped stitch or a button put in the wrong buttonhole, the 20th was not yesterday but two days ago. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve been traveling, and yesterday was spent at the hospital, going from blood drawing to x-rays to having my arms measured for a study they’re doing. I wrote a post about the house I grew up in and I read more of Barchester Towers. And I went to the library and checked out a book of essays by Susan Cooper (of the Dark is Rising series). I read some of it this morning in bed with tea, nursing a cold. It wasn’t very good. I can’t think why. Certainly, her intentions were good. But the essays were really speeches and didn’t dig into writing enough. I am, though, happy to think about how drawn she felt to her chosen subjects. That’s what you look for when you write — something you don’t want to stop talking about, a story you can’t get away from. Today, a lovely Saturday, I’m hoping to have a two hour stretch in there to find that feeling.
Later: In fact, I wrote about 300 words — the revisions to the last chapter I wrote at family camp. (I wrote two chapters there, which isn’t too bad.) Now, I need to sketch out the next scene, which I’ll do next Wednesday, if I’m feeling up to it, after my operation.)
July 19, 2006. A driving day, not a writing day. Well, I did write about driving, but that doesn’t seem to be what I had in mind when I started this particular page.
July 18, 2006.
Chapter 22 or 23 (I’ve lost count) is done. It’s about 2,500 words. I like some of it. There’s a moment when the point of view character, a young man, looks through a window and sees an embrace. I loved writing this — both about the embrace and the character’s reaction. I don’t have any statistics today. I just feel happy and productive. Okay, here’s one: Library words: 1316. That’s the beginning of the next chapter. Seems like the first thing I do is write up a rough version of a chapter, one that sort of charts the way to the end of the scene. And then the next thing is to flesh it out, add description, fix dialog, straighten out sequence and make sure the plot is going in the right direction. Check it against what came before and think a little how it leads into what comes next. It helps to have a good solid coffee drink in you when you do this.
July 17, 2006
How odd, to write in a little cabin with a wooden floor, a plain wooden table and a small stool. It was hot and there wasn’t anything to do except drink cold water and write. The funny thing is that it worked as a writing environment this morning — I had an hour and wrote 1036 words. The only trouble is that now, after lunch, I’m in Quincy, and it’s such a sweet little frontier town and I’d really like to walk around drinking a cold coffee drink. I’ve been imagining buying a little house up here. Especially when I discovered that the PlumasCountyPublic Library is here and it’s an amazing place — air conditioned, with lot of room to write, a power plug next to where I’m sitting and free wireless internetaccess. It’s open every day. Most days from 10-6. It might be closed Sundays. I could liveina little craftsman house with a wrap around porch and a garden that grows tomatoes and walk over to the library every day to write. What a life that would be. Why is it that other lives are so lovely to imagine? The other great thing about the library? You can’t eat or drink in here. Not a lot of distractions unless you count the thousands of books. I have an hour and half for more scenes of my novel. What richness. Library words: Another 532. Amount of usable words: Now, really, need we think about that at this point? I’m off to get a cold, blended coffee drink and then back to camp, and a round of ping pong.
July 15, 2006. Packing, packing. We’re off to camp! Today’s issues: what books to bring, getting clothes that fit the boys, and outlining the work I want to do while I’m there. All that is done and tomorrow morning we drive up. Possibly I’ll get to write tomorrow afternoon after we move in.
July 14, 2006. Ah. This is more like it. My injured sportsman is at the house of a friend, having arrived with a large green army tank, a lot of American GI Joe guys and a huge number of French action figures that are far nattier than the Americans, and might storm the tank, in honor of Bastille Day. Me — I’m at a cafe. Number of words written (so far, and I’m not even DONE!!): 1,149. Happiness level: Pretty high.
July 13, 2006. I never thought, back when I was wasting time mooning around in cafes, pretending to write, talking about writing, reading about writing — doing everything but writing, that I’d find myself wanting to write really badly and being prevented from doing it because I’vehadto tend to a six year old with an athletic injury. There you have it: my six year old son was pushed so hard by the madman who runs his soccer camp (The whistle mom, he shudders at the memory, Carlos kept blowing the whistle and telling us to RUN) that he developed a physical and probably psychological injury that’s been slow to heal this week. Never mind that we paid almost $250 for the damned camp, but I’ve had to listen to his older brothers complain about how their younger sibling is clearly faking it and why do they have to go to tennis camp, while he lounges around? I havenoanswer to this beyond a snarl. I am not at my best with these things. It doesn’t help that my husband is of remarkably stoic and unempathetic stock and so has left injuries and the injured to me because he hasn’t the least idea of what to say beyond, Everybody in the car! It’s time for CAMP!! Number of words written: Twelve?
July 12, 2006. A child not well enough to go to camp, a late afternoon doctor’s appointment, a wonderful, restorative evening with women friends. I’m feeling happy and content in my daily life. As a writer, I’m feeling less than productive. An optimist, I’m hoping tomorrow will be a better day for writing.
July 11, 2006. The business of life: doctor’s appointment for me, work at my lawyer work. Later a trip to the library. Moving novel forward: You could say that sitting at one of those small tables the library reserves for children and their parents and drawing a diagram of the three characters who’re about to fan out and do a little investigating for Will — that moves the novel forward. Drawings and diagrams will become words soon enough.
July 10, 2006 Today was a working mom day. The first day of new camps for the boys, a trip into the City to check in with work. In the afternoon, a doctor’s appointment for one boy, and then a bit later, a date to build the world’s largest train track — one that stretches across several rooms and involves complex engineering. Number of novel words written: goose egg. Amount this bothers me. Not much. Not every day has to be a writing day. Some days you need to play with your children.
July 9, 2006
My husband says our back yard has become my summer office. It works best, though, when i have headphones on. Songs that helped. Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne — a sort of soundtrack of that time and place. Words written: 1154. Most of the scene. A lot of dialogue. I tried to keep in mind that dialogue is not so much back and forth (how are you/I am fine…) but a way to demonstrate how characters are at odds with each other. It’s a scene where the characters are at odds, so the dialogue was about that. Stress level. Pretty low. My three boys are arriving at the airport in about an hour. I had only an hour & a half to write, and I told myself I’d do that without worrying if it was bad. Turns out, there are a few good things in what I wrote, the sort of things that surprise you, the things you didn’t plan to write. And yes, there’s a lot to work out still. But it’s easier to do when you have a draft down on paper. And now, to the airport.
July 8, 2006
It seemed silly not to spend part of the day outside. Here’s the place I work. it’s also the place we eat dinner in the summer, and where the boys bang baseballs into our neighbors’ yards. I love that lawnmower. It’s always ready to be pushed.
Time spent in the backyard: It seemed endless and relaxed. I love it out here. In reality? A few hours. Words written: 764. It is okay that most of these words were a sort of stepsheetforthe scene I’m working on. It’s an important scene and writing a narrative of it is a helpful way to back yourself into it. There are three other characters in this scene, and they’ve only appeared in one other chapter, a long time ago, a problem I’ll fix when I edit. It was great fun deciding a little more clearly who they are and what clues and secrets they’ll lead Will into. I’m ready for a much wordier day tomorrow. I can picture the scene. Stress level: A little bit high. Should never look at the web sites of writers I admire before I write. I like my story a lot. That’s the place to live in for now. Also, there’s this: A novel is about 80,000-100,000 words. I’ve already written about 50,000. If I write 700 words a day, I’ll be done close enough to the end of the summer. And then, a fall of editing, and a winter of sending out queries and working on novel number two — a book about Paris after the war, a book in which the main character is a woman, the daughter of a poet very much like Wallace Stevens.
July 7, 2006
Time Spent at Cafe: 11:30 a.m. until 1:30p.m. 2 hours. Pretty good. Except….; Time Spent Writing: Only a very small part of that time. Distracted by things I’d brought with me, almost like having a friend come along and talk about very interesting things. It’s just that none of it involved writing. Note to self: next time, don’t get distracted;Chapters Revised: One. (Chapter 2, as a matter of fact.) But not all of it; Novel Words Written: Oh, how I hate to admit this. I wrote a thing for my blog, some emails and a bit of the revised chapter, but that doesn’t count. So… zero.;Plan for Tomorrow: Well, duh, as my boys would say. No distractions. Write the whole time. It’s not like I don’t know how to do that.
I too have a great deal of trouble making use of the writing time that I’ve got. I’m very easily distracted. Your “Writing Stats” section sounds like a wonderful way of making sure that you’re accountable to yourself. I may try it myself. I feel a bit panicky at the very idea, which is probably a very good reason to do it!
Same. I’ll only do this as long as it’s fun. And helpful. The second I start to feel oppressed, I’m deleting this page. So far, when I’ve been looking up from the computer, I’ve been thinking about whether it would go too far to take a picture of the spot where I’m writing and post it. And then I say, well, only if you write 500 words. It’s funny the bargains we make with ourselves to do what we basically love doing. Silly.
I think three hours a day is the ideal amount of time. When I was getting up very, very early before work and writing a book project, I could get in about that and was amazed at how productive I was. (Now I see I have no excuse.) Even when I had a whole day, I wrote really well for about three hours and then lost my focus a little. Sometimes I had to trick myself and “start over” by going to a new location. I imagine that three hours a day will do wonders for your novel… you’ll finish it sooner than you think.
This writing stats page seems like a great idea. You can keep track of the good days and the not-so-good days and then look back and see what works and what doesn’t.
All the best of luck to you!
Hello BL
I rec’d your package today and want to tell you what a sweet person you are.The sharpener is impressive and your sentiments lovely..
I am glad to see you writing away on the novel and that your happiness level is high. Lanyard making avoidance will do that.
Herb
hello Qazse, I’m so glad you liked it! Yes, the key to all things likes in avoiding the lanyard and its ilk. I see lots of new poetry at your site — you must not be making key chains either. Best, BL
I’m sorry that you didn’t enjoy the Cooper essays. It’s been a number of years since I read the book, but I remember feeling quite inspired by some of the essays in it. I hope that your revisiting of Cooper’s fiction doesn’t prove a similar disappointment!
Oh no, not at all Kate — I like her very much. The essays I read were things like commencement speeches which are wonderful in their own way — and inspiring indeed. But what I was hoping for was more on writing itself, the daily work of it, the sorts of craft things that might be helpful right now as I’m getting through my novel. Reading Cooper’s fiction is another way of getting that sort of thing, isn’t it?
I really appreciate the opportunity to follow along with your progress like this. It’s very inspiring! Congratulations on the excellent work that you’ve done this month.
Hi Kate — I sneaked a look at your short story, the one about the dinner party and so enjoyed it! It’s very accomplished writing. Sometime, I’d love to hear how you manage to do so much reading while still writing. I’ve been finding it hard to get to the many books I want to read.
Faff is definitely a word! Occurs fairly often in British novels. OED defines it as to fuss or to dither. Great word — along with “strop”, it one of my favorite British colloquial words.
Your novel sounds wonderful. What an accomplishment!
Oh Bloglily, I’m faffing around right