Resolve

Due to a strategically timed vacation I started my New Year a little late. I'm normally not the type of guy to make resolutions but this year I made one: I resolved to stop doing the dishes.

If you happen to drop by don't get all judgy when you're meal is served on a paper plate with the finest plasticware for utensils and yes, I did just fill a sippy cup of wine 'specially for you.

So the dishes...

Agatha Christie said, "The best time to plan a book is when you're doing the dishes." Heck, she'd know, I mean she only wrote 80 some-odd novels.

The problem for the rest of us mere mortals is all that planning goes to waste if you never actually sit down and write!

After setting aside my last work (tentatively titled The Myth of Parking Enforcement but Paola made such a weird face when I said that it may have to change :-/), I started immediately, feverishly, churning out prose on my new piece. It was still Christmas break so I had a lot of time to get things done. Funny how that works when the job doesn't get in the way.

Work started again though and I found myself slipping back into the old habit of paying lip service to ideas rather than formulating them into the written word on the page.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE WRITING. Rough math suggests I probably crank out about 500 words a day of non prose from social networking, job reports, carefully worded emails and the like but getting into the groove after a long day of doing boiler guy stuff ain't easy.

Usually I'd come home, do the dishes, catch up on all my internet stuff and then write. By this point in my life that means I'm making prose at about 6:15pm. Paola gets home a little bit after that and of course I want to spend some time with her so you can see the dilemma.

I decided that, in the near term at least, the most important thing is to write and so that is how it came to be. I walk in the door, make a cup of tea, go upstairs and hunt and peck my way to victory... or stalemate. In some sports you get a point for a tie, you know, sorry dirty plates.

It was timely that I heard the profile of Isabel Allende on the Writer's Almanac shortly after I made my choice. She starts a novel every January 8th by locking herself in a room for 10-12 hours a day. She doesn't use an outline, she doesn't talk to anybody about what she's writing. and she doesn't look back at what she's written until she's completed a whole first draft.

I've never read her work, if you have please recommend something. If I had the luxury of time I'd be all over that approach.

Something she says to her Creative Writing class, not mentioned in the article, is to write a page every day for a year and by the end of year you will have a book. Blew my mind to hear that. It's something I never thought about too. Anyone that dares to take themselves seriously as a writer should be able to put together 250 cohesive words a day without a strenuous effort.

And if you can't, well you need to at least get to there. Take it from good old unpublished me.

If I can do it so can you. 6800 words and counting...

Lazy Reading

I hate when someone takes my or another writer's fiction at face value and reaches the conclusion:

HE IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT.

Who are we to decide anyone is like anything?

It is safe to say if someone is writing about it then yes, they've probably thought about it and I think that's about all you could ever discern without additional information from the writer.

Which may or may not even be true, if you really want to know.

Envy

I've been trying to organize an Algonquin Round Table style elitist lit group where we would gather at certain snooty establishments, sip the finest cognac out of gilded snifters, discuss and more importantly deride the current state of literature. Except for the good stuff which (of course) would all be written by us. That would be universally praised, ad nauseum and so forth.

I would be the Edna Ferber of the group, obviously. So far no takers. I'm serious about it too. Most days I want to suck the creativity from other writers' brains and set it in a jar for my own personal use at a later date. This would be a convenient way to surreptitiously accomplish the task, like herding sheep. Not that I'm generally surreptitious but supposing I were I certainly wouldn't be advertising it, if ya know what I mean.

I'm kidding...

?

The Hunt and Peck Diaries (Continued)

We're doing a little dance now. 36,064 words only one instance of the word 'hurried'. That is certainly worth celebrating.

'Point' and 'pointed' however will need to be phased out in revisions. Guess I'm fond of characters that hand-talk.

On to other things.

A couple of Fridays ago, talking to my homie on IM about the new Quentin Tarantino movie... actually it wasn't a real conversation. It had some elements of conversation; more than one person involved, dialogue, etc. but mostly I berated him about getting to see Inglorious Basterds first.

SO THERE.

Have you seen it? Don't tell me you're one of those people that hates Tarantino because of something he said or did one time or his excessive use of violence and the N-word, THE EAR SCENE, etc.

You might want to stop reading here.

I was probably an average Tarantino fan until Kill Bill Vol 1. One of my all time favorite scenes in a moviefilm involves Beatrix Kiddo (funny that Tarantino triggers the spell check and Beatrix Kiddo doesn't lolz) dispatching 88 crazed NINJAS with a samurai sword, even plucking the eye from that one idiot stupid enough not to wear goggles that day. Not to mention all the other elements of uber stylized coolness in that film.

Also, when it comes to suspense, especially of the Hitchcock kind, he's on a whole nother level with that. I squealed and grabbed Paola's arm during the diner scene in Death Proof. The camera does a slow pan and low and behold, Stuntman Mike is sitting at the bar, enjoying a coffee apparently listening in on the ladies' conversation. The camera finally pans back around and he's gone making you wonder if he was even there in the first place. Foreshadow much?

QT happened to be on Tavis Smiley doing the standard movie promotion tour. Didn't get a chance to see the whole thing but I caught this little snippet in which he talks about the art of storytelling.

Hold that thought for a second.

In constructing my epic novel in lyrical prose, Man Loses Hat, Man Finds Hat, I've discovered that I'm the type of writer that really likes to wander in the woods. Writing fiction, some say is an exercise in problem solving. The writer asks a question that they don't know the answer to and creates the prose to discern a solution.

I create situations for my characters sometimes that completely stymie me and spend days agonizing over how to resolve them while moving the plot forward. I have a general idea of where I'm going. Now that all the major players are in action it's just a matter of moving the pieces around until I reach the desired outcome.

Easy like Sunday morning?

Having a general idea is nothing compared to taking that same idea and stretching it out over the span of 80,000ish words. Which is where the clip comes in. As I muddle along through this thing, allegiances and motivations change, certain characters become superfluous and the plot becomes more convoluted. I know when I'm finished there will be a lot of stuff stricken from the original draft and scenes will be ordered in a manner more conducive to plot development.

QT talks about coming into the theater in the middle and sticking around after the movie to watch the beginning until the rest of the movie makes sense. This is what writing the novel feel like to me.

The beginning isn't really the beginning. All the important back story that makes the characters who they are constitutes the beginning and we're not going to dwell on that. We're going to dwell on the story which is what's happening NOW and in order to do that I've realized that writing everything in a chronological order is to my detriment.

It is small epiphany but one that I think will really help me down the road. Write the scenes worry about the chronology and plausibility later. This I can handle.

By the way. I did outline this thing, heavily and it's not even close to what I'm ending up with. Think I'll send a copy of it to the brave souls who volunteer to beta read for me. Just for giggles.

Death by a Thousand Epiphanies (on Macguffins)

While watching the dreadful movie Push with Paola this weekend I asked her, about midway through, "Do we really need to know what's in The Case?"

She said, "For the purposes of this movie, yes."

Which in my mind is an instant fail.

The existence of The Case should be enough. If you have to stop and explain to people what is going on and why something is important then it means the supporting elements surrounding the central theme aren't doing enough on their own to convey this message.

As a viewer/reader, I only need to know The Case is important, the protagonist and/or antagonist desire it enough that they're willing to make each others lives hell in order to get it. Or some variant of such. Pick your trope.

Getting inside the case presents the problem of building up to a gigantic anti-climatic moment. Once the stakes are raised too high, opening The Case may at best please some of the audience but you ain't gonna get them all, especially me. If a tangible, physical value is attached to the items within then the questions start: "You're kidding me! I don't know if I would've done all of that for that."

The Case represents our deepest hopes and dreams, a solution to the meaningless drudgery of our everyday situation, an escape from the normal, a new beginning. The Case, in order for it to be important to everyone needs to be all things to all people. The Case is only a means to an end, not the end itself. It is how we get the ball rolling, how we nudge the protagonist forward to make sacrifices and to change. Make your story good enough and nobody will care what's inside that case.

More on Epiphanies later.

Breaks are for the Broken

Beginnings are easy, endings are hard, middles are tedious.

This is all you need to know about writing a novel. Those darn middles are where good ideas go to wallow and become mediocre.

WALLOW.

If you add an s to that it becomes swallow, which could either be a graceful bird or action that one does when confronted with explaining what their idea is about (or when consuming a beverage(s) that makes you forgot about said idea).

I don't feel like anything I've ever worked on is so irrevocably broken that a healthy dose of editing couldn't fix. Even my first novel attempt, that I cringed at the idea of rereading for 13 whole years isn't that bad in retrospect. I would never do anything with it but it sure is nice to look at that thick sheaf of words and say "Holy crap, I wrote this and it doesn't make me want to puke."

That doesn't do anything for finishing though. In fact, a lot of what I read about the art of writing novels suggests that it's a bad idea to go back and reread, period. In the first draft portion, the writer should be focused with burping words onto the page, not even pausing to correct obvious grammatical and spelling mistakes. The first draft is for the writer to tell the story to themselves. Then go back and write the darn thing, already.

This is all conjecture of course. Lawrence Block says no one can really tell you how to write a novel, no one except you of course and you only learn by completing one.

So where does that leave me? 33,000ish words in but I need to take a break. I have a short story idea that won't go away and it must be indulged. It's about... well go read that older post if you don't know because it's always about love. I think this should take about a week or two to hash out, probably leave it in draft form and hop back onto the horse. Besides, I don't feel so bad when hearing about first time novelists that took more than 3 years to get it done.

In the meantime, finally got around to reading Scarlett Thomas. Loving the End of Mr. Y, the whole thought experiment thing is kind of cool. Gave me all kind of ideas.

I have a thought experiment involving money. Give me some. Now.

Discuss.

The Process

During the week, I try to write when I get home. This usually fails especially if I'm in the middle of a good book. Right now it's Filth by Irvine Welsh. Imagine Notes From the Underground except the "protagonist" has a tapeworm and you'll kind of get the idea.

I've found that I can crank out about 250 words without blinking. That equates to about a page which means at least a page a day. On the weekends I can do anywhere from 700-1200 a day depending on what else I have going on, depending on how my mind is oriented. Whether or not any of this is good we'll determine come revision time. Lazy math suggests a completed first draft by the middle of 2010.

Fiddlesticks. Maybe I'll know my plot by then.

Lately there's been an onslaught of writerliness. Jonathan Goldstein read at the University Bookstore on Monday. I met him, showed him the one magic trick I know (it involves putting a size 10 1/2 boot in my mouth) and got my copy of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible signed. Not bad.

Then Sherman Alexie sat in on Tuesday's Weekday. He reduced me to a quivering ball of fear after saying, no repeating something he'd said earlier about not making it as writer by the time you turn forty. No pressure.

On the Wednesday ride home, listening to All Things Considered, Sarah Pekkanen spoke about the three books that helped her land a book deal. I have one of the three and I'm aware of the other two. I suppose that's a start but I'm growing tired of reading books about writing. I never finished Plot and Structure either. What I read was good and I'd recommend it to all of y'all that aspire. Books on writing only make me want to write more. At this stage of the game I think the only way for me to get better is by doing, not dreaming about doing.

I keep Lawrence Block's Telling Lies For Fun and Profit under my pillow in case I'm wrong about that.

Ana Castillo will be reading at the Seattle Public Library Thursday 4/23. Hoping to come up with a new magic trick by then. I except to break down into a puddle of blathering nothing, going on and on about how So Far From God helped me realize what I want to do with my life.

It's okay though. I'd much rather leave it on the table than in my heart.