Let's talk about process

"When I start a book, I always think it's patently absurd that I can write one. No one, certainly not me, can write a book 500 pages long. But I know I can write 15 pates, and if I write 15 pages every day, eventually I'll have 500 of them." --John Saul, American novelist

John Saul writes thrillers, and I'm not familiar with his work, although I recognised some titles when I did a bibliography search. Even though I don't know the guy, and I imagine we don't have very much in common (particularly since he's published and I'm, you know, not), I think I understand that feeling of being completely inequal to the work I am about to do.

I suspect that unlike most people, I don't just feel this way about big things, like writing a 500-page novel. I feel this way about almost everything I have to do in life. A task always looks so much bigger to me before I begin it. Sometimes it looks so big that I sometimes can't bring myself to begin it.

Over the last 30 years, I have begun more novels than I care to think about. I have finished only two of them, and one of them is twenty years better than the other. That doesn't mean it's good enough to be published, and I am beginning to fear that it really may not be, but that's a topic for another day.

Sylvia Louise Engdahl, who wrote some books I loved as a teenager and then had a number of them republished a few years ago, says that the great mystery is not why she stopped writing books for publication, but why she was able to write books at all.

Over the years, with my first notebooks and then computer files worth of novel ideas, character sketches, location sketches, moved from notebook to notebook to computer to computer to PDA to computer and back again so many times, I've wondered if that wasn't true for me as well. Maybe I just couldn't write books, couldn't write novels, wasn't cut out for it, should stick to songwriting. And then one year my husband got sent to Singapore on secondment and my son and I tagged along. The secondment lasted four and a half months, and I really hated Singapore, felt exposed and foreign there, and just didn't find a way to fit in or feel at home.

On the first of May, 2005, my husband, son and I went to a used book sale at the expo centre in Singapore, and we came away with a ton of stuff. The exchange rate was so good and the books were so cheap! One of the things we left with, a book I didn't even blog about at the time, was Natalie Goldberg's Thunder and Lightning. Natalie Goldberg is a sort of writer's writer. Her book Writing Down the Bones was one of the textbooks used in my college creative writing classes, and I still have my college edition of the book, torn and dog-eared and loved and carried around for years, through moves all over the US and then the world. Writing Down the Bones is about writing practise as meditation, and it's a great creativity spark, along with a whole bunch of other things I discovered in my 20s and still use today. But Thunder and Lightning is about plotting novels. Or at least it was about plotting novels to me. There are other things one could take away from the book, but I took away the essential elements of what someone like me, who started my writing life wanting to write novels but turned into a poet somewhere along the way and then a songwriter, needs to write a book, from start to finish, what needs to happen inside a book.

You can study literature for years, read books voraciously for years, and not know what that thing is. And I don't know if I can tell you what it is. But it's something about plotting and pacing and having an idea in mind of where things are going before you get there. When you come out of poetry, or even songwriting, places where all is sometimes revealed in the all-important last line, or the bridge is your exposition, pacing is less important: a three-minute song may have most of the elements of hundred-thousand word novel in miniature, but stretching those elements without making them go on forever, making action happen without going over the top, those are things you just can't figure out without doing them.

I'm glad I wrote a crap novel in my twenties that convinced me I shouldn't be writing novels at that point in my life. I'm glad I got that out of my system and started living and learning to think of writing as something I loved to do and would love to do more of, rather than something I got to do all the time as a university student. I didn't appreciate writing time as a kid, and I almost didn't appreciate it in Singapore. We arrived in Singapore in February, and it took me until the end of May, twenty-nine days after I bought Thunder and Lightning, to figure out that what I was supposed to be doing in Singapore was writing a novel. I mean, sure, I got a lot of knitting work done, but in our last month in Singapore, I wrote twenty-two thousand words. That's thirty thousand less than you nanowrimo people, but I'm not really sure that I'd have produced anything of quality with thirty thousand more words to play with. And it was a good foundation for something that, a little more than a year later, had become a hundred and five thousand word novel, for real. With a plot and a villain and conflicts and everything!

I wrote an outline. I did. It was sketchy, but I wrote an outline. I defined my villain as strongly as I could ahead of the game. I had huge questions about how the book would end; it was almost a choose-your-own-adventure in my head. Protagonist could choose option a and get ending a, or option b and get b ending, etc. In the end, I took a couple of weeks and produced a timeline. Before long, I was sitting down to write with not a word count but a plot goal in mind. "Today, I will write until the refrigerator falls from the sky and hits Jake on the head," for (lame) example. My goal for each session was to get to the next bend in the plot road. Thinking about it, that is a good way for me to structure a novel, I think. Even if the outline is written only a few days before the story itself, it still gives a guideline. Even if the plot synopsis is sketchy, there's still a map to follow. Of course, when the first draft was finished, I had to go through and add things and edit for continuity and smoothness and all that stuff, and I've spent what feels like the last six months agonising over the first five pages, but I hear lots of people do that. Right now, in between sending query letters and sample chapters off to agents (and invariably hearing nothing, except for one very bad experience), I'm tightening dialogue and descriptions and hoping these improvements will make the book more palatable to the people who have to matter right now.

At the same time, I'm starting to feel depressed about the whole thing: why did I bother writing a whole book about such a ridiulous subject, particularly when academics on the subject can't stand the kind of thing I'm writing about? And at the same time I'm busily mulling over the plot of another book centred around the same place and characters (but not a sequel).

In a world of formulas, I suppose I need to find one if I'm going to succeed as a writer. Writing 500,000 pages fifteen pages at a time isn't a bad place to start, when you think about it. Neither, I suppose, is the ubiquitous thousand-word-a-day plan that some authors embrace. Getting focused, of course, is half the battle, and I'll tell you something else: procrastinating is part of that focus for me. Writing things like this blog entry counts as what I think of as "productive procrastination." So does cleaning up my desk, or streamlining the sweeping timeline of my setting, or finding a character sketch template I like and using it to determine who the protagonist of novel number two (yes, but we don't talk about that other one) should be.

I'm going to ask anybody reading this to outline their process for me at the end of this entry, so let me try to put mine down in words. I'll skip the germination and idea stages, since those are the things we all have in common: you look at a tree and you think, that tree looks like it has a face; I wonder what kind of a person it would make-- and then your brain just goes off. So, with an idea already in hand, here's how it went for this book.

1. Identify main characters


2. Identify villain


3. Sketch characters


4. Find villain's motivation


5. Find conflict


6. Find climax/crisis


7. Discover how the story ends


8. Make a sketchy outline of all that


9. Start writing


10. Refine outline


11. Keep writing


12. Continue refining outline


13. Concentrate on writing to the plot


14. Finish first draft


15. Tie up loose ends


16. Add colour and interest where things are sparse


17. Streamline prose and tighten up loose writing


18. Ask people to read


19. Start sending out query letters and sample chapters.

And in my case, that's where the story ends, as nobody in the business has expressed even the slightest interest in what I'm writing, except for one extremely negative response.

What's your process? C'mon; fess up. It's not like anybody is really reading this. ;-)

Semicolons

If you write, or if you read a lot and have Opinions about writing, or if you teach and have Opinions of writing, could you please spend a few seconds thinking about the semicolon? Although I have my own opinion, I am curious what you think. Here are my questions about the semicolon.

1. In your opinion, when and for what reasons is the semicolon properly used?
2. Are there points of semicolon usage that bother you or disrupt the process of reading for you? What are they?
3. Does the semicolon have a place in contemporary writing, and if so, where? Feel free to use examples, if any spring to mind.
   

I am interested in seeing a variety of opinions on this topic.

"There are very few writers who are not cranks in some way."

Paul Theroux, an American writer and novelist, said that. Given his checkered reputation, he probably said it in his own defence! I chose this quote this morning because the one I skipped would have led me into the vertical takeoff rant again, and getting embroiled in that would have made me grumbly all day, thus satisfying at least one of the definitions of crank.

Are all writers cranks? I suppose it depends upon your definition. I've been accustomed to using the word to mean a bad-tempered person, but according to my dictionary, crank can also mean, "an eccentric person, especially one who is obsessed by a particular subject or theory." If you use that definition, I think writers need to be cranks.

How can you possibly spend the kind of time it takes to write 100,000-plus words on the same subject or around the same theme without becoming obsessive about it, at least in the short-term? My first complete novel, written mumble years ago and now consigned to a box on the very top of the tallest bookshelf in the house, where it stays so I can remember that I did complete a novel at twenty-two and so no one else will have any idea it's there, concerned tarot cards. I was interested in tarot cards at the time, but the writing of that book sparked a fifteen-year obsession with the fool's journey that led me no end of interesting places. That obsession failed to help me write a good book, but it sure was an interesting digression.

Similarly, other writers I know do what they can to either write about their already-healthy (or unhealthy!) obsessions, or they cultivate the art of becoming an instant expert. I do both these things, and if you write, I'll bet you do too. We are all familiar with the adage, "write what you know," but how does one become an instant expert?

Let's see. Once upon a time, I heard a song on WUMB by Richard Thompson. It was called Beeswing. Now, the song was from the album Mirror Blue, which piqued my interest because at the time I was an active Loreena McKennitt fan, and one of my favourite Loreena songs was her adaptation of Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, which contains the lines

And sometimes thro' the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shallot.

I bought the CD because of that one song and the fact that some of the lines from the poem appear on the CD cover. The rest of the CD was completely worth listening to, and when I had an opportunity to see Richard Thompson in Atlanta, I jumped on it. But I didn't want to be one of those fans who came to a concert because of one song. I wanted to understand Richard Thompson. I bought the 1993 compilation Watching the Dark, and listened to it nonstop for three weeks before the sold-out concert. I scoured the internet, boned up on my Fairport Convention lore, and found myself, on show night, singing along with bikers and English expatriates and feeling accepted in a really big general admission crowd I'd wilfully entered alone.

Years later, when I discovered Anne Briggs, I was delighted to learn that many people believe Beeswing is about Anne Briggs.

One obsession ties in to another, you see. My current writing projects, while they do not centre around Anne Briggs as a person, hold her and the influence she had over the folk revival (and the people who had significant influence over her) very, very close.

So that's how I became an instant Richard Thompson expert, why I can still sing a lot of those songs today, how I stopped being afraid of bikers, and one of the many ways it all ties back in to English balladry. I think it's OK to be a crank, if being a crank can lead me to such amazing music, stories, and places. It's a circuitous route, isn't it, the way we come to things and weave them in to our personal mythologies.

You might even say it's like the Fool's journey.

"Read, read, read..."

“Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the mast. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” --William Faulkner


Right now, I’m re-reading Little, Big, by John Crowley, thumbing through First Draft in 30 Days, by Karen Wiesner, and spicing things up with King Rat, by China Mieville. I try to keep a comfort read going almost all the time, but even though I’m re-reading Little, Big, that doesn’t make it any more comforting-- I had a hard time getting through the book the first time and I’m afraid it’s no easier now. First Draft in 30 Days is a book about outlining novels, which is something I’m thinking a lot about lately, as I’m starting work on a new fiction project and I have to structure those pretty carefully. King Rat was recommended to me by my husband, and I have to say I don’t like it very much; it got taken out of the purse rotation this week because it just wasn’t engaging me. It’s not that it isn’t a good story, but I think Neil Gaiman wrote a better version of a very similar story in Neverwhere. That’s just my opinion, of course. People are so excited about China Mieville as an author that I probably will go back and finish the book, but, ih. It’s not doing much for me.

As for First Draft in 30 Days, it’s not an example of great writing, but it’s a nonfiction book designed to lead readers through a process, and it does that reasonably well-- although I must warn you that the author doesn’t really mean you can turn out the first draft of a novel in 30 days (they just made that the title in order to sell books). What she’s really trying to do is teach you how to write a cohesive outline of a novel in 30 days, which is much more realistic. (Sorry, NaNoWriMo fiends!)

Little, Big was (and is) difficult not because it’s slow (I like slow books) but because I think Crowley’s language sometimes gets in the way of the story Although I understand the writing style, some of those parentheticals seem to go on for pages. I absolutely love the story, though. Now, Little, Big was published in 1981, when it was, according to people who look back at such things, possible to get a quiet, quirky, lyrical book published, but I cannot applaud Crowley enough for managing to avoid that thing that really gets me grumpy about contemporary fiction: the ubiquitous and apparently compulsory vertical takeoff, that thing where you’re supposed to write the first chapter of your book like a television murder mystery that starts with a violent killing and then the whole rest of the film you’re backtracking, trying to figure out what just happened. I often feel assaulted when I read books that begin like this: I scour bookstore shelves and sample pages until I find books that don’t start out with “Boris lay in a pool of his own blood,” or some such nonsense. If I wanted to read a boys’ adventure novel, a Heinlein juvie, I’d go out and get one of those. I almost never want to read books like that, alas. And it sucks to be me, because I haven’t seen a lot of quiet books making it big (or making it at all) lately. Of course, these vertical takeoffs could all just be false fronts, like the fronts of American frontier town stores-- made to look big and impressive and tall, when actually the interior of the place was little more than a shack. Maybe some of those books that start out with a bang get more humble after Chapter One, but I suspect they really just get shabby.

I remember breathing a huge sigh of relief when I first opened Peter S. Beagle’s Tamsin, a lush ghost story that kept me captivated for hours and which I have read again more than once. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman was an equally welcome change: I discovered it long after it was written and was lucky enough to acquire the illustrated novel; the other versions just aren’t the same. Your mileage may vary, standard disclaimers apply.

What does this have to do with Mr. Faulkner’s suggestion to “read, read, read?” Everything. Do it, but recognise what you like and what you don’t like. Know what you want to sound like, and read that (but not exclusively that). Don’t be afraid to say what you don’t like, but careful when you call what you don’t like crap; there are people out there who absolutely love the stuff you hate-- and it’s their right to love it, but you don’t have to read it (you certainly don’t have to finish it!), no matter what Mr. Faulkner says.

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

Jack London said that. Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild, which I had to read in middle school like everybody else. I don’t remember much about the book except that it had some vague business to do with wolves, but this quote, the first one in A Writer’s Notebook, always makes me happy. Lots of people who write writing pages use this quote somewhere, but I am not sure how many of them really understand it. Obviously, there are many ways to interpret the things other people have said, and Mr. London isn’t here to defend himself, but I interpret this to mean we must find our own inspiration.

Jack London was that rarity of rarities, the artist who is both profitable in his own lifetime and remembered well after his death. Like other writers who share that distinction (Shakespeare, for example, or Charles Dickens), he wrote popular literature in a way that sold while still managing to create great art. I don’t think it’s possible to do that by wandering around hoping the muse is going to drop an inspiration water balloon on your head.

One of the things I try to get across to people who ask me about writing or any other creative enterprise is that this idea that creative endeavours are somehow magical events that only occur when some goddess or muse shines upon you seems ridiculous to me and always has, although I am a religious person who is capable of believing in things beyond the self.

I also believe in my own creative power. There’s no buzzing fairy out there dragging her wand of inspiration through the night and letting the sparkles fall where they may: that’s my creativity, my ability, thank you very much. I have occasionally bemuse people by admitting that it’s possible for me to sit down at my desk, say, “I will write a [story/song/poem/novel] now,” and just be able to begin. I think it helps to imagine a world in which that kind of magical inspiration were possible, and if we imagine it hard enough, it can come to pass for us. But chalking it all up to some detached power handing out ideas for artwork like lollipops to the kids who’ve been good at the dentist? I don’t think so.

When an inspiration “comes” to you, when an idea pushes its way into your consciousness and won’t let go, don’t think about what a magical experience that was: try to predict it or create circumstances that will make it come about more often! Remember, our ancestors were amazed and fearful when they saw eclipses and comets-- things we can now predict and explain. Inspiration is predictable and manipulable. Magic is what you make of inspiration.

Where do you go for inspiration?

Yesterday, my husband and I went through all the books on two of our massive bookshelves, and we managed to identify enough books that we didn't think we'd ever want to read or read again to fill four boxes. (I said the bookshelves were massive, didn't I? Wait 'til we get to the paperbacks!) During this task, we found things we had forgotten about, found things we'd been looking for, found things we didn't know we needed, and laughed at stuff we'd never want to look at again. I do feel the need to inform you that we did keep a couple of books that were just too bad to throw away (we're the same way with films)!

So much of our lives' histories were present in the books we went through. We identified closed chapters in our lives that we'd want to remember, and we kept those books. Other things, things that meant less to us or were only important for a very brief period in our lives (I kept The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, for example, but got rid of What to Expect When You're Expecting), those things were put into boxes. Soon, we'll donate those boxes to charity shops or libraries, after we've given friends a chance to come round and see if they want anything.

One of the books that came to light yesterday was A Writer's Notebook, copyright 1984 by Running Press, which has been absorbed into a larger press conglomerate and probably doesn't remember this book at all. In fact, it was a fad book, a cheaply put together "blank book" with fancy, textured paper. I never wrote a word in it. It cost $4.95 in 1984, and you can buy it today for £1 or so via Alibris. But I kept it, through all the years and all the moves. Why did I keep it?

I kept it because on every page, there is a different quote about writing.

Now, I know you can do a web search for quotes about writing any day of the week and come up with more pithy writing advice in two minutes flat than you could ever manage to read, even if you disallowed redundant results. But there's something about thumbing through this book that I must have had since I was seventeen or eighteen years old, and choosing the first quote I come to, that just gives me a little thrill.

What happens when I try it now? I get this:

Each author is in every essential a foreigner but lately emigrated from the one land which is comprehensible to him. --James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), American novelist and essayist

A foreigner but lately emigrated from the one land which is comprehensible to him. Do you feel that way, when you're deep in the landscape of your current project, and the phone rings, and you have a hard time taking yourself out of your world, the one you're writing about, even if it's a twenty-one line poem? At worst, I suppose that means that as writers we live in our heads. At best, it's a metaphor about life and work and how real those worlds we live in when we're writing become to us.

It makes me want to go into my world again, even though the clock says I have only about an hour and a half before my son gets home from school. The trick is to know how to conjure up that world and enter it whenever we need to, even if it's only for a little while, to get a little bit done, or to put in a detail that it wouldn't do to forget.

But how do you create that temple-in-an-instant? How do you call it down for just thirty minutes or even less, when you might be interrupted or called away? Well, there are a million little tricks, aren't there? Everybody says, "Use music," which works for most things. There's a bird singing outside my window, and that's a good one. Staring at the tree outside my window helps, too. Evocative smells, like baking bread or a particular flower essence, those are also good. In a world where so many things conspire to distract us and we don't always have the freedom to just get away from it all, being able to recreate bits of that lush world inside our heads is sometimes the best creative inspiration there is.

How do you remind yourself that your creative mind is only waiting for you to head down that path?