Writing

i have a confession to make

Posted on Feb 9, 2012 in Productivity, Writing

I’ve been unfaithful. To my work-in-progress, to my magazine work, to blogging, you name it. And it’s all because I started another story.

I’m obsessed with it.

I had been plugging away at what I thought would be my second book, but every time I sat down to work on it, I got bored. It was a perfectly good story–a great idea, I think, actually–but I dunno…it just wasn’t working. The timing was off. A certain spark was lacking. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

I’d also written this other scene that I couldn’t get out of my head. It was just three pages, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Two weeks ago, I finally went ahead and submitted. I set the WIP aside and started working on this one. It’s exactly what I was looking for.

I’ve heard a bazillion writers talk about how you need to be madly in love with a story to make it work. It’s obvious, of course, that if you’re bored while you’re writing, it certainly doesn’t bode well for your readers. I just think that giving up is easier said than done. Every story has it’s moments–there are many, many times you’ll want to give up on a MS and have to push through. Some of my best writing moments happen that way. And, let’s face it, this isn’t supposed to be easy. It wouldn’t be worth doing if it wasn’t a challenge, as far as I’m concerned. The key is discerning when something’s worth sticking it out for, and when it’s time to move on.

So I’ve moved on. It feels really, really good.

And because this new story is constantly on my mind, I’ve started collecting images related to it while I poke around on Pinterest. Here are a few:

Images courtesy of: TripAdvisor, VillainouslyVintage.wordpress.com, thisnext.com, consideryourselfathome.blog, flickriver.com

details

Posted on Jan 18, 2012 in Writing

In search of  a little inspiration recently, I read this NaNoWriMo pep talk by Jonathan Lethem, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Here’s the part that I’m hung up on: “Write like you’d read—and notice how much you customarily skip as you read. Raymond Chandler said that when he was at a loss for a plot development he’d have a man walk through a doorway with a gun in his hand. Good advice I’ve heeded a hundred times or more, but it wasn’t the doorway, it was the gun that might solve your problem.”

In essence, he’s saying don’t get hung up on the little details. Ignore the “nose-blowings of everyday circumstances.” Keep it moving. Focus on the big stuff.

It’s good advice. I think.

The problem for me is that I adore writing about the little details. While I obviously don’t want to painstakingly enumerate every single thing that a character does all day—the boring commute to work, the deciding what to eat for lunch—I do think that it’s the aggregate of all of those things that help me understand my characters. Whether my character listens to NPR or Metallica during her commute matters to me. What she cooks, how she talks (or doesn’t) to the person ringing up her grocery order, what’s in the bag she carries—maybe I don’t want to pore through these things with such detail that a story becomes a chronological journal of everything the characters do all day, but still…the little stuff matters. A lot, I think.

But the question I keep asking myself is whether the little details that I so love writing about are essential to my writing process, and solely that, or whether they’re just as essential for the reader, too? In other words, when I’m dreaming this stuff up and having fun writing about all the extraneous stuff in a character’s life, is it primarily a first draft thing? Is it part of chipping away and figuring out what the essentials are? And if that’s the case, what’s extraneous, really? Is that the toughest part of the job?

Maybe it’s partly that I think of myself as a writer who’s primarily interested in ordinary people and ordinary lives and the way that we handle what looks like the mundane sort of day-in-and-day-out that makes up a life. The mundane is sort of essential, no?

But then I read, “Notice how much you customarily skip as you read.” This makes me wanna barf, because I know how much I skip as I read, and I also know that, in contrast, I am a world-class tinkerer when I write, fretting over every last word choice and getting lost in descriptions that…what? Maybe don’t matter so much?

I’m (quite obviously) working this out in my head as I type. The bottom line is that I think it’s interesting and worthwhile, as a writer, to think about how you write versus how you read and what the differences are between the two. This seems obvious, but I’m discovering that it’s something I haven’t examined too closely.

NaNoWriMo

Posted on Nov 30, 2011 in Productivity, Writing

It’s November 30. Hundreds and thousands of exhausted writers are crossing the finish line.

Typing, “The End.” (For now, at least.)

Badasses.

Today is the last day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages folks to write a 50,000 word rough draft of a novel in one month. “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon,” as they say. I wrote the first draft of my book during NaNoWriMo. One of my closest friends and fellow writers strong-armed me into doing it with her. I was newly pregnant with my first child. I was tired.

But at the end of the month, I had the beginnings of a book. Man, it sucked. The few times I’ve allowed myself to look back at it, I’ve had to sort of shield my eyes. But it was a start. And that’s really all you need.

I love to read the pep talks from the “all-star team” of authors that NaNoWriMo emails to participants. Chris Cleave’s is pretty brilliant. I particularly like this passage:

My point is that the job of a novelist is to explore human emotion and motivation. You learn more about your protagonists as you write them. If you are not very often forced by your characters to bin your masterplan, then you are a wooden and a formulaic writer indeed. So, better than having a planned structure is to begin with a character or two, and a theme you intend to explore, and an initial direction you plan to start exploring in. Don’t be alarmed when, on arriving at what you thought was your summit, you realise you’ve climbed up the wrong mountain. That’s why novelists go through drafts – because plans go brilliantly awry.

If you participated this year, a big, fat congratulations from yours truly. Put your feet up, drink something bubbly. You deserve it.

(photo source: cultofpretty.com)

on ignoring your work

Posted on Oct 26, 2011 in Productivity, Writing

So.

How’s it going?

Whatcha up to?

Because of a magazine deadline, a couple of “teacher work days” that kept my big girl at home with me, and, you know, life, it’s been several days since I so much as glanced at the story that’s on its way to becoming my next book.

Here’s my dirty little secret: As busy as I told myself that I was, I kind of just wanted to take a break.

In the past, this would have sent me into a tailspin of guilt and self-loathing, but I’ve fortunately eased up. And smartened up.

Let me pause to say that I believe strongly in the notion that to be a good writer, you need to write every day. Or nearly every day. I’ll never forget the lecture that one of my MFA profs gave right before our graduation where he said that the most important thing we students needed to do the day after we graduated was write. And then keep at it. If you’re an athlete, you have to put in your workouts. If you’re a pianist, you practice your scales. Same goes with writing—you gotta put your time in. This is especially important, in my opinion, if you’re in the middle of a project, because the more time you spend away from it, the more you forget about what you were trying to write in the first place. I don’t believe in waiting in my muse to show up—that kind of oogy, la-la, head in the clouds stuff just isn’t how I roll.

That said, I believe strongly in taking the occasional holiday from your WIP. For me, it’s an “absence makes the heart grow fonder” kind of thing.  Pre-break, I was at a place with my story where I just wasn’t feeling it. I’d tried to plug through but it wasn’t happening. So I just stopped.

We went to the park and fed ducks.

Made an apple cake. And chicken pot pie. And applesauce.

Had dinner with some girlfriends.

Did my magazine work.

Watched bad television.

Sang “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Twinkle Twinkle” and “ABCs.”

Researched a magazine pitch.

Lazed.

And in the process, I found my enthusiasm for my story. Because in the midst of all of the other stuff I was doing, I thought about my character and figured out some things about her and now feel back on track. And then I started itching to get back to my work. And now it feels new again, in the best way.

Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open is one of my favorite writing books (yes, in part because she has a chapter of recipes in the back), and in it, she says, “If you have the calling to be a writer, it’s not going to go away any more than the shape of your nose will.” And that’s what I finally got about breaks. Not writing for a few days doesn’t mean you’ve lost it—really, in a lot of ways, it means that you know yourself well enough to know when you need one, and when your work will benefit from it.

So ease up. Take a day.

my imaginary friends

Posted on Oct 18, 2011 in Writing

Not long ago, I was venting to a close friend about the fact that I was dreading having to spend time with someone who’s historically negative and, if I’m being honest about it, not particularly nice. You know the type—snaps at waiters, silently appraises you with that awful head-to-toe scan, tosses out backhanded compliments with a big smile on her face. As I bemoaned having to see this person, my friend said, “Doesn’t so-and-so realize you’re a writer?  And that behavior that bad could end up in your next book?” We laughed about it, and I said something along the lines of, “Oh, I’d never do that.”

But that, my friends, is a lie. Because when it comes to creating characters, I steal material from the living, breathing people in my life all the time. In my defense, it’s not all that conscious or intentional, but it of course happens.

When my husband read an early draft of my book, he noticed a paragraph where Waverly, the protagonist, is complaining about the way her boyfriend leaves sections of the newspaper all over the house. “Jerk,” my husband scribbled in the margin. He may or may not also do that. There are aspects of another character’s temperament that remind me of an old friend.

Inventing characters is probably my favorite aspect of fiction writing, of course because it’s the point from which everything else in a story (or my stories) stems, but also because the little details are so much fun. And those little details always come from real life. I once asked an acquaintance who’s from a small Southern town where she grew up and she said something like, “Well, you take a right at the Cracker Barrel and then a left by the Wal-Mart.” I wrote it down the second I got home. (How could I not?) I have notebooks full of this stuff—cryptic notes like “hippy dippy mother” and “she misses the sound of his baseball game in the background” and “cross-country coach with bad stubble and a sweaty yellow tee-shirt” and “woman with a boy’s name” and “never cussed in front of her father” and “local radio station traffic reporter.” I fully realize that if something happens to me and someone finds these notebooks, they will surely—maybe, probably, rightfully—think I was nuts. But it’s these little gems that become the people who become my stories that become my work. It’s not news that writers get so close to their characters that it’s as if they’re real people, but it always takes me by surprise, nevertheless.

For the record, the ones with bad behavior are the most fun to write—not that that’s a warning or anything.

a sense of place

Posted on Oct 11, 2011 in Writing

So let’s talk about setting. I’m working on my next book, and the more I dig into the story, the more I’m struggling with whether the setting will be an actual, can-find-it-on-the-map place. Real vs. imagined hasn’t mattered much yet, but it will before long. There are elements that look a lot like where I live—old tobacco warehouses, vast farmland five miles outside of the city—but I just can’t commit to writing about my town.

There are so many examples of wonderful novels that handle real places beautifully, where the setting is as intrinsic to the story as the characters themselves. I love books like this, where a place is described so carefully, and often with such obvious reverence, that I finish the book feeling like I’ve traveled there. I’m thinking of novels like Tracy Kidder’s Home Town (Northampton, MA), Sarah Jio’s The Violets of March (Bainbridge Island, WA), Janelle Brown’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (Silicon Valley), anything by Peter Mayle (Provence) and Pat Conroy (the South Carolina Lowcountry). But when you write about a real place, you’re bound, to a certain extent, to sticking to the facts. No matter what, you’re almost definitely going to have readers who disagree with your depiction.

In How Lucky You Are, I did a little bit of both: I fictionalized a D.C. suburb, so I had the freedom to imagine the mood and feel of my made-up Maple Hill, but I also spent a decent amount of time writing about real places in Washington, and there’s an atmosphere to the story that’s reflective of D.C. in terms of the characters’ interests, motivations, and attitudes.

And that’s the thing: The setting influences so much of who your characters are and who they become over the course of your story. There’s a big difference between writing about a native New Yorker and, say, someone who’s just moved to Brooklyn from Southern California. For better or for worse, your roots define you. The protagonist in my next novel’s a military brat who’s lived all over the world, so she lacks an identity that stems from a strong sense of place and home, and this is a big part of her self-discovery over the course of the book. The question is, should the place where she finds herself be an actual one or something I dream up?