writerjenn

 "You want to winch the book out of your balky mind.  As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head.  You try to liberate it.  You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be--what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be."

This is Susan Sontag, in her essay, "Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite.  Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed," from WRITERS [ON WRITING]: COLLECTED ESSAYS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES.  I've never heard the process described so well.  And it's exactly what I was doing last night, figuratively hammering the marble away from the sculpture.  (At least, I hope it's marble.)  

I was working on a one-page scene.  I wrote and discarded pages' worth of drivel to end up with that one page.  The characters kept going off into long speeches about how they were feeling, and I would let them ramble and then chop it all out.  By this point in the novel, we can figure out how they're feeling, from much more subtle cues.  But I didn't know how else to write this scene except by the ramble-and-chop method.  Anyway, I have my one-page scene.

Are we having fun yet?  Yes.

The same neighborhood as described by four different characters:

1. There's the house with the scary dog. There's the house with the car that's the color of a lime popsicle. Here's the sewer grate where I lost my ring. That's the school bus stop on the corner . . .

2. Over there is the house where the cute guy lives. There, that blue house, is where the other cute guy lives. Ick, don't even go over there! That's where the creepy guy who snapped my bra strap lives. And this is the house where I babysit the twins . . .

3. The people next door blast blast their stereo all night. They never shovel the walk when it snows, either. On the other side of us, that man is always home and in his sweats. Doesn't he have a job? Behind us somewhere is a house with a dog that never stops barking . . .

4. There's the smell of cut grass, and dog turds baking in the sun. There's the sound of the ice cream truck, "Pop goes the weasel!" tinkling all day until you could go insane. I'm saving up to go to Rome.

These characters aren't part of any WIP of mine. This is just a brief exercise in point of view, and the relationship of character and setting, based on some voices that came to me while I was walking down the street. If I were going to turn the above into a story, I would work to make the voices even more distinctive. But here's what I wanted to get at with this exercise: what each character notices about the setting is related to that character's identity. Once when I was blogging about description, cedunkley of the blog Ten Thousand Years left me a brilliant comment about "describing what the specific POV character would notice. This allows me to personalize the description or choose even what gets described."  I think today's exercise helps illustrate that point.

Sometimes we think of setting as static, a backdrop into which we plunk our characters.  But setting changes depending on who's experiencing it.  Characterization and setting play off each other; we learn about both through their interaction.

 

I have a couple of news items, before I get to today's episode of My Life as a Writer:

First, a book giveaway: Kate Messner is giving away an ARC of Judith Mammay's KNOWING JOSEPH, the story of a boy dealing with his autistic brother. For more details, follow the link.

Second, the Shrinking Violets are celebrating National Independent Booksellers Month (although frankly, they've gone international already, by featuring a bookstore in Toronto!). Every day this month, the Violets will feature a different indie bookstore. Besides Toronto, they've already hit Santa Barbara, CA, and Durango, CO, One of this month's stores is bound to be near you! You can celebrate by stopping in at the Shrinking Violets blog, nominating your own favorite indie, or (best of all) stopping in to your local indie.

In my last post, I referred to the pieces of paper that litter my desk with ideas about my WIPs.  I must say, my blog readers have exhibited very little faith that anyone besides me could decipher them.  Handwriting issues aside, allow me to share some of these gems with you:

On slip of paper #1 (this is written on the back of a Trader Joe's dark chocolate candy wrapper):
Is the metric system poetic?
prot-jerky
C. re S. in car: People never know what the hell is really going on.

Slip of paper #2:
how to snake a drain
A. takes T. to ER
good + evil

So you see, these are entirely clear.  I will tell you they refer to different WIPs, and I have shortened the characters' names to initials.  It's very likely the characters' names will change anyway.  The line about the metric system has nothing to do with either WIP; I was just thinking that you can use measurements such as inches, yards, pounds, and miles in effective fiction writing, but most metric terms have a more formal, technical sound to them.  Therefore, if the US ever finally goes metric, we may have to deal with this in our writing.  You can have romantic tension when the characters are only an inch apart, but doesn't some of the romance drain out when they're "centimeters" apart?  Or try these lines: "But I have promises to keep/and kilometers to go before I sleep . . ."

Anyway, I digress.  I often do.  Which is why I need little slips of paper to remind me of things I would otherwise forget.


 

Today's entry is a pop quiz.  Please answer fully and do not look at your neighbor's answers.

1. If it's 45 degrees out when I leave in the morning but it's going to be 68 when I'm coming home, should I wear my heavy coat and roast in the afternoon, or my light jacket and freeze in the morning?

2. I have deleted 3 very minor characters from my WIP.  Is that enough, or will more heads be rolling?

3. This year I'm going to prune the lilacs for the first time, since they're getting too tall.  What are the chances I will inadvertently kill at least one of them?  Bonus Bayesian statistics question: If I kill one, what then is the probability that the other will die too?

4. That Thanksgiving-night scene that I wrote for my WIP and am keeping in a separate file: does it belong in the book or not? Please give your answer in quantitative form, showing the confidence interval.

5. If 24 hours in a day are too few to get everything done, what would be the right amount of hours?

6. What are the chances that the faucets in a public rest room will gush forth only COLD water?  (Heck, I'll give you the answer to this one: 50% in the summer, 95% in the winter.)

7. How many passes through my WIP will the current revision require?

8. How many little slips of paper do I have on my desk, each containing a scribbled thought about my WIP?  How many people in the world besides me would be able to decipher these little slips of paper?

9. Does anyone else remember when taking a test like this would require a Number 2 pencil, or am I just hopelessly old?  Do you remember that instruction about not putting any "stray marks" on your test paper?  Didn't that make you just want to put crazy stray marks all over it? 

10. And what did they have against Number 1 pencils?

Time's up.  Thank you for participating.  Grades will be assigned randomly.

Artist a. fortis of Finding Wonderland has done a cartoon series called "The 7 Stages of Rejection." Now, I know we writers are supposed to pretend we're so cool, rejection never happens to us.  Ha!  The fact is, it's just part of the long apprenticeship, an acknowledged occupational hazard.  If you want to laugh about it, follow the link here.  One note: they're posted in reverse order, so I recommend scrolling down to the bottom first and following the stages upward.

I've been told not to protect my characters too much--that is, not to be afraid of letting bad stuff happen to them.  Because after all, if the characters aren't in jeopardy, where's the tension?  If they don't suffer, who can relate to them?  Another piece of advice I like: to let the characters do bad stuff.  Sometimes we like our characters so much, we don't ever want to let them be cruel, selfish, or vain.  But there's forward momentum in their flaws, as well as realistic depth.

It's amazing what crops up during a revision.  New scenes, heretofore unsuspected character motivations, secrets from the past.  Some of which will end up in the manuscript, some of which won't.  Sometimes I add great chunks of writing just to cut them out again.  I'm pruning out certain scenes and making room for others.  It's awfully busy in here--you can almost hear the figurative saws and hammers going.  I hope the finished product looks good when it's time to take down the scaffolding.

In his book, ON WRITING, Stephen King describes his wife Tabitha as "critic and first reader" of his work.  Which has always boggled my mind.  I know there are couples who work this way: one reads the other's work, or they read each other's.  And if it works for them, bless their hearts. 

Then there are the rest of us.  I find that I don't need my spouse to read my work, especially in its first ugly stages.  He likes to read science fiction, which isn't what I write.  Apart from that, I now have a circle of reliable critiquers.  They can help me figure out where a character's slipped out of character, where I've mangled a metaphor, where my theme has gone fuzzy.  What I need my husband to do is all the other lovely supportive stuff he does, like keep my computer running and my morale high.  The value of a domestic partner who takes on extra housework when you're working on a major revision, who doesn't complain about the hours you spend at the keyboard, is not to be underestimated.

So I'm sending out angel wings and haloes to all those friends, relatives, and significant others who help support writers in what we do, in all the various ways they do it.  Thank you!

Iceland Eyes posted my favorite photo this week (Care, first uploaded by blue eyes):  a young couple gazing dreamily into one another's eyes--and one of them is dressed like a penguin.

Now, for an exciting behind-the-scenes peek at this writer's life, here are the highlights of my day yesterday (not necessarily in chronological order or order of importance):

Read poetry over breakfast.
Finished character sketch for WIP.
Took long walk, thinking about character.
Revised several scenes in WIP.
Caught up on blog and email.
Toured the part of backyard that's at the bottom of a hill and can't be seen from the house: ferns up!  bluebells blooming!  wood poppy blooming!  wood poppy seems to have spawned a new little wood poppy!
Revised more scenes.
Pulled out CDs that I listened to over and over while writing earlier drafts of this WIP, for revision inspiration (Tom Waits's Beautiful Maladies and The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac; strange bedfellows?).
Revised.
Sat in backyard, wrote a scene in longhand.
Got hairy eyeball from bird who thinks he owns backyard.
Decided to make bean and pasta stew for dinner.
Realized one critical ingredient for stew was missing.
Made chicken pie for dinner.
Wiped chocolate off computer mouse.
Cleared a few items from floor of writing room; felt virtuous.
Worked on new scenes: ego deflated.
Looked up many words in thesaurus.
Revised more scenes.

Today's plan: Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've been working with character motivation.  My favorite way to do this is by turning the keyboard over to my characters and letting them tell me what they want.  Even if my story is told first person from the POV of Character A, at some point I will let Characters B, C, and D have the mike.  That doesn't mean I put their first-person narrations into the book, or even use everything they tell me.  At least not explicitly.  I like to think that information leaches into the book in a subtle way.

I don't usually ask my characters to answer specific questions, beyond this big one:  What do you want?  (or sometimes, Why did you do that?)  I let them ramble.  I let them talk about what interests them.  Sometimes they tell me their bios; sometimes they just go over a critical scene in the book from their POV.  Sometimes they tell me about scenes that happened in between the scenes in the book.  I find that no matter how long these characters have lived in my head, they can still surprise me.  No matter how much I think I know about this series of events, this fictional town in my head, the characters still let me in on a few new secrets.

Now I'm off to take a walk, and let them whisper more in my ear.  There's a character in my WIP who does a very generous thing and a very nasty thing.  I love his complexity, but I'm working on a scene where he plays a big part, and I need to channel his voice more.  There's nothing like moving feet to turn the gears in my brain.

If you're thinking of going to LA SCBWI this summer, the fairy godsisters may be able to help you get there.  Not with a pumpkin coach, but with scholarship money. The link is courtesy of my beloved Shrinking Violets, those gals who know that introversion is not a disease, but just the way some of us are.  Especially the some of us who sit alone in our rooms, writing stories.  

Anyway, to win their contest, you don't even have to have to try on shoes!

Revising away.  I can't talk too much about it yet, because I don't want that energy to dissipate.

But I do want to share a couple of gems I've stumbled across in recent days:

Last weekend, I was in a bookstore.  While waiting to pay for my books, I noticed a kid in front of me--a boy about 12, I would guess--reading, oblivious to the world.  When he got up to the register, he barely wanted to let go of the book long enough for the cashier to ring it up.  I love seeing that!  It's why I want to write for young people, too.  When they love books, they love books.  

The second gem is this quote from Anne Bernays, on Vladimir Nabokov's use of adjectives: "[E]ach of his is chosen as carefully as an engagement ring . . ."  I adore this line, and not only because I agree that it applies perfectly to Nabokov.  Adverbs and adjectives get a bad rap nowadays, but when sparing and well-chosen, they can carry as much worth as that singular diamond.  (The Bernays quote is from her essay "Pupils Glimpse an Idea, Teacher Gets a Gold Star" in WRITERS [ON WRITING]: COLLECTED ESSAYS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES.)

Here's hoping my word choices measure up to those of Nabokov.  Or Bernays.

Yesterday was my confetti day. Yippee!  Did I get tired of typing "thank you" to all my well-wishers?  I did not.  The publishing world does not rain confetti upon us every day of the week.
But today it's back to work.  Back to the revision.  Of course, my brain has been working on it already, and I'm excited about it.  There's just one problem: it's primary day here in Pennsylvania.  Must . . . tear self . . . from TV election coverage . . . 

Rolling up the sleeves now.

I'm the guest at  Nathan Bransford's blog today.  So now I guess I can admit it: I have a book deal. 

I've been unplugged for the past week. Not only have I been away from the blogosphere, I've been away from the Internet altogether, and TV, and my beloved computer.  Had flocks of radioactive-mutant flying giraffes terrorized the rest of America, earning wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, I would not have known it.  I have even been writing in longhand, which is something I don't do much any more, but which became part of my whole "back to nature/reconnect with your writing roots" thing. (I did not go so far as to harvest wild greens for my food, however, since the wild greens were largely covered by snow.)

It's been amazing. I started off with a weekend at the New England SCBWI conference in Nashua, NH, and continued the week on retreat with two other writers at the Fortress of Semi-Solitude, a condo up in the mountains of New England. (My invite to the Fortress of Semi-Solitude was courtesy of the ever-gracious Kelly Fineman, who's been celebrating National Poetry Month in style on her fabulous blog.)

On retreat, I wrote a draft of a short story, and a poem which shall never blight the eyes of anyone other than myself, but which was fun to write. But I spent most of the week revising a NIP (novel-in-progress) based on my agent's notes. And for all the trouble this NIP has given me, I feel like I finally put my hands on something that has been eluding me with this story. What helped me get there:
They were excellent notes.
I had just been to an excellent conference, where J. L. Bell gave a terrific session on plotting, including a handout that I used in my revision.
I was able to take daily walks.
I had hours of uninterrupted time to think about this book and nothing else. Not my day job, not current events, not the million little household chores that need my attention at home. The only people around were two other writers, who were not going to be offended if I went off into a room by myself all day, and who were not going to break in on my train of thought because they were following their own trains of thought.
I had hours of uninterrupted time to delve into the world of this book, to stay in its emotional grip. Which was not always comfortable, believe me. At one point, at the end of a break, I said, "Well, time to go make [main character] face what he doesn't want to face," and Kelly said, "Time to make [main character] face what Jenn doesn't want to face," which was rather outstanding, I thought, as perceptive comments go.

So I have come home with a new draft of this NIP, which I will now put aside for a bit while I deal with another project. I'm slowly reentering the world. I have done a mountain of laundry and caught up with my blog-reading--which I enjoyed, as usual, though I decided not to comment on all the witty and wonderful things I read, because it would probably take another week to do so, thus negating the week I just gave myself as a break. Good to see you all again!

I'll be unplugged for about a week.  Until then, talk amongst yourselves.  Enjoy the spring, read some poetry (it's Nationl Poetry Month), recommend some books for me to read upon my return . . .

I recently finished reading E. Lockhart's THE BOYFRIEND LIST.  What I specifically want to mention about this book is the way it showed the events from multiple perspectives, even though it was told in the first person.  This parallels the development of the main character.  At the beginning of the book, we view things from one position.  By the end of the book, the vista has opened up so that we see things from many different angles; we can understand better why characters act the way they do.  Part of comes out in dialogue--that is, a couple of the characters explain things in their own words, but much of it is done through the main character's increasing ability to observe others and consider multiple interpretations for what she sees.  This is a good example of how to stretch the limits of first-person narration, how to get into other characters' motivations without making an awkward POV shift. 

Weatherwise, it seems like we've been living the same cold gray day over and over for the past two months. I'm a big fan of recycling, honestly. But isn't there a sunny 70-degree day that we could be recycling instead of this raw, dismal one?

Nevertheless, the flowers know it's spring. Violets, hyacinths, tulips, weeping cherries, and forsythia have joined the daffodils as the most recent bloomers. And here are a few more items to brighten the day:

The latest Edge of the Forest is up, as you've probably heard, but I want to give a special mention to the interview with Peter Cameron about SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU, which I've raved about here. I loved this book so much, I wanted to run around pressing copies into the hands of friends, family, and complete strangers.

The Author2Author authors (does that become Authors cubed?) are giving away more books this week! 

Check out this post from rosefiend.  It'll teach you how to garden.  Or how to write an advice column.  Or at the very least, will provide some comic relief on this (did I mention it's dark and depressing today?) lovely spring day.

Finally, I am counting down to the New England SCBWI conference in New Hampshire next weekend.  Any of you going to be there?  I'm putting up one of my userpics today so you will recognize me.  That will help you say hello or steer clear, whichever you prefer.  ;-)

Yesterday, we saw the Tamagawa Taiko and Dance Ensemble.  I have seen many taiko performances, and I'm trying to think how to explain it succinctly to those who've never seen it.  Taiko groups center around Japanese drums, although the drums may be accompanied by other instruments, such as cymbals, whistles, and bamboo flutes.  Sometimes the performers use masks and costumes and pantomime to introduce a story-telling element.  But foremost, it's about the drums.  The drummers use dramatic arm positions; they drum from several different positions (standing, sitting, lying); they use leaps for emphasis or to change position; they often switch instruments with one another in mid-song.  Overall, it's like a combination between an athletic performance and a concert, and if you have even the slightest liking for percussion, I highly recommend it.

Tamagawa doesn't quite approach the spectacle of Wadaiko Yamato, whom I've only seen once, but they are loads of fun.  Yesterday was my second Tamagawa experience, and here's what I like best about them: they seem to have such a fantastic time.  You get the impression, watching Tamagawa, that they can't possibly imagine anything better than performing this music.  It's not just their smiles, but their body language, the way they commit to every move, their continual reaching out to the audience.  And at the end of the show, when you walk out of the theater, you walk past a line of Tamagawa performers, who thank you for coming to the show.  I can't recall any other concert I've been to where the main attraction is hanging around in the lobby afterward to say farewell.  Now that's the way to put on a show. 

In between posting about National Poetry Month and Chuck-shaped Cheetos, and taking care of actual business during this incredibly long week, I've been writing.  It's a first draft, a meandering mess, full of brackets and notes to myself and other flotsam and jetsam. I like the narrator's voice. I suspect that's what is carrying me through. I have an idea where the story is going and where the characters need to end up, but they're still surprising me. They keep saying and doing things I didn't expect, and revealing motives I didn't know about.  I'm just letting them run, to see where they take me.  If you see them dragging me off in a cloud of dust for parts unknown, don't worry.  I'll be back, brushing the dirt off my shoes and pulling the briers out of my hair.