Working On a Novel

Returning to "second" book

2012-01-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

This week marks my return to working on the book I set aside about 18 months ago to work on the children's book. This one was at one time known as the second book, but it hardly exists at all and the book I wrote in the meantime is in fact the second one I ever actually finished. Someday there will be first and second books that gets published, which won't correspond with this order either, and my reading public will understand my first and second books to be different ones entirely.

Well, for perversity's sake, in this journal at least, which is supposed to be in the spirit of how I talk to myself about my writing, I'll keep using the terms that feel right when I talk to myself. I'm working on my second book now. For the second time. That's how I think of it, and to hell with what makes sense.

I don't recall how much I've shared about it before. For the record. It's an adult novel, not children's. I started working in the sense of making notes on it in Sept. of 2009. I started working in the sense of drafting just about 2 years ago in Jan. of 2010 when I was overseas for extended period. That went very poorly for about 9 months and then I started working on the children's book. (i.e the third book.) I returned to work in the sense of making a lot of notes and thinking about it a lot a couple months ago, and my goal was to return to drafting this week. Which I am, though it's been a less than wonderful start. More on that in another post.

As in the past, I don't like sharing too much of the plot in this space, but I guess the working title doesn't give too much away. Let be known hereafter as Backroom Records.

Here is an arbitrary and therefore tentative timeline. I'm going to aim for 150 working days, which is about 7.5 months. Let's say August 31 is my intended deadline for a first draft. Before the fall semester begins. That's based on a really wild guess that I need about 150,000 words of new material and a feeling that I'm going to average about an hour of writing a day. There's no reason to think that any of these estimates will hold up for even a week, but it helps me to have them.

I can say this: it feels to me like it should be a long book. So I'm starting off by giving it one good reason never to be published, and that's just one of the ways I'm trying to make myself worry more about the writing than anything else.

Draft 7 revisions

2011-09-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

Typically once the book is typed in a revision of a draft involves marking up a complete print out and then inputting all those changes into the electronic copy. I'm on the second half of that cycle now creating what I call the seventh draft.

This draft is going well, I think, but definitely a lot slower than I predicted. I thought I would have it done by the beginning of September, and it looks like I'll be about 3 weeks off. It's the first half of the cycle that was slow. Inputting the changes is, on the one hand, more tedious, but on the other hand, doesn't take the kind of creative energy that is available only in small doses. Today, for example, I put in about 5 hours versus 2 on normal working days. I feel exhausted, for sure, and am looking forward to the weekend. If I didn't have paying work to worry about, I'd probably finish up in one more long day. I do have a lot of distractions, though, at exactly the wrong time.

Judging by the pace over the last few days -- about 20 pp/hour -- I guess I have about 6-7 hours left. It's just a question of when I can get those hours.

So, when I'm done with this draft, what does that mean? I should know better than to try and answer that question. Every draft feels like it has to be the last one until I get a little distance from it and start to see a less rosy reality. But I feel like this draft is the last one.

I have a roster of readers lined up, and I'll distribute it to them. And in the meantime I'll probably start working on summaries and pitch letters and researching agents.

So, I guess I'm about a week from this book being done enough to consider sending it out. Yikes.

I really am very tired.

Summer report

2011-08-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Is that the longest layoff from this journal yet? Shame on me. There has been plenty going on that I could have written about.

The summer wasn't super productive. I had a real crisis with my first book, which I had planned to revise over the summer. I spent a lot of time on a completely new book idea. I had a few meetings of my writing group. I waited around a lot for my readers to get back to me on the "current" book -- the children's book. And I've launched into the revisions of that book.

Where it stands now . . . I continue to have problems with the opening, but it keeps getting better with each attack, I think. Of course, I always think I've found the solution with each draft and then get knocked down again. I'm set up for another knock down now.

After the opening, I feel like the book is in strong shape. I'm reading it through on paper and making revisions, and it looks like all sentence-level sharpening. Nothing major needed. Except for that damn opening.

That work is going slower than I expected, and I'm busy with other things, so I'm behind the schedule I set for myself. In fact, I was supposed to be done tomorrow. But I think it will be at least 2 more weeks, maybe more.

I call this the 6th draft, but as I've said before, the dividing line between one draft in another is mostly arbitrary.

The other thing I could talk about is the feedback I'm getting, particularly from child readers for the first time, but I'll save that for another post.

And the other thing I could talk about is some of the good books I've read as part of my ongoing learning about children's literature. I'll say just one thing now: Cynthia Voigt. How could I not have known about her before? I am so jealous of her talent.

Using Lulu to print copies for feedback

2011-05-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm trying something that might appear a little self-aggrandizing or precious but that I really think makes sense. I'm using one of the new online vanity/self-publish/print-on-demand services to print drafts of my books for my readers to comment on instead of just printing out the typescript.

After comparing prices and other factors I decided to use Lulu.com. What I should be getting in the mail in about a week is a few copies of a trade-paperback size version of my novel, formatted with margins customary for trade size, front and back, and perfect bound. I'm expecting to be pretty cheap-looking, on the cheapest possible paper with one of their boilerplate cover designs. (I could have taken the time to design or have designed a better cover, and I could pay more for premium paper.)

The first major reason I decided to go with this method is price plus convenience. My 294-page typescript at $.9/pg cost almost $30 to print at the copy shop, plus between $6-13 to mail it to a reader if they don't live nearby. Plus the cost of a mailer or the hassle of finding a box in the basement to pack it in. It's almost always at least two trips in the car.

Lulu prints it for around $10. (In the layout I chose, it comes to 234 pages.) Shipping is $5 on the low end for one copy. The big drawback is that I might lose a week -- still to be seen -- waiting for it to be printed and mailed. I sprung for some faster and more expensive shipping, and even with that it is a savings. Plus they have lots of different coupons floating around for percent off the order or free shipping over a minimum amount. I ended ordering 3 copies to be sent to me to hand deliver to readers nearby and another single copy to be mailed directly to another reader. Hopefully everyone will have them in their hands by this time next week. I might have lost a little time through this method, and maybe I'll end up thinking the week was more important than the $100 or whatever I saved.

The second major reason I decided to go with this method is because I have a hunch it will actually help my readers give me better feedback. For naive readers who don't normally work with draft typescripts, having a ream of copy paper dropped in their laps might be intimidating, and I think that might affect how they read it. It might be even more of a factor with children, which is an issue with some of my readers, since it's a children's book.

For example, I often coach my "naive" readers on how to develop feedback and give it, since they might be afraid to say anything critical. One of the ways I do that is to ask them to imagine that they are reading a real published book that they paid $15 for. Then I ask them to mark in the margin as they go along whenever they become aware that they are not in fact reading a published book -- where the illusion is broken. When you're reading 300 pages of single-sided copy paper, which looks more like homework than a book, it's harder to get into the illusion to begin with. Children might not understand that this thing is supposed to be a book instead of a chore.

This is all just a crazy theory. I have no idea if it's really true. But it just makes sense to me somehow that the more I can create the familiar experience of reading a book, the better feedback I'll get on it.

The process is maybe is just slightly time consuming, but not in a way that I mind. I had to download a template for the book size I chose. Then I pasted the typescript in there. Then I did some fussing with where the formatting I had didn't carry over. (Usually where it involves margins; I had to re-center the chapter titles.) I full justified the margins, fiddled with the line spacing. (I know for professional designers, this is a key issue, and I didn't really know what I was doing, so I just guessed. Same with the type size.) Assuming any future revisions happen in my usual typescript, then I'll have to redo all this work to update what is getting printed by Lulu.

Then I wrote a kind of intro letter explaining what this thing was. That replaced the memo I usually include with the printed typescript to focus the comments from my readers. Then I uploaded it to the website, which involved creating an account for myself -- careful to make the project private instead of for sale to the public. Then I designed the cover. Select from one of the template styles. Select a color. Select a layout. Type in the title and other info. (I have a draft summary, so I pasted that on the back cover like you would see on a paperback.) None of this needed to take much time, but I indulged myself in making it look as good as I could. I even played with having a cover illustration by doing a quick search on google images, saving one, uploading it Lulu and pasting it onto my cover.

It occurs to me that there's a third benefit to this. I've found that just the act of printing out my book in the past forces me to imagine how other people must see it, which fires up different critical faculties and helps me see it in a new light. Same for putting it in the mail to someone or just knowing that it's in someone else's possession. With this I think just seeing my work perfect bound with wide margins, etc. -- impersonating a book, basically -- will make me see it in a different light and give me some ideas about what else it needs.

Done . . . in a sense

2011-05-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

As I've said before, the lines drawn between drafts are arbitrary, and the "finish line" itself is somewhat arbitrary. I won't really think of it as done until it gets accepted for publication, the publisher is no longer accepting input from me and it goes to press. But right now -- since yesterday morning -- I do think of the book as done in an important sense, though that other finish line is still a long way away.

One, I finished what I was calling the fifth draft. In getting through that I probably had some of my lowest moments. For about two weeks straight I did nothing but go over the first four chapters repeatedly trying to deal with the preface/exposition/starting problems that I wrote about earlier. It was a lot of heavy rewriting and revising, printing it out, discovering it wasn't working and trying again. I was convinced I had written a catastrophic weakness into the opening, but I finally found the solution I was looking for, and I finally got my wife's approval of it.

Second, I finished up addressing every problem in the book I know how to identify on my own without sending it out in the world to some more amateur or novice readers and to hear what they think. By amateur or novice readers, I mean people who didn't see it in earlier drafts (e.g. not my wife), or people who I'm not expecting to coach me on the next draft (not other writers). It's ready for purely readerly responses -- including from child readers, since this is a children's book. I have some readers like this lined up and have set in motion the wheels that will put the work as-is in their hands for a response.

Of course, their feedback will lead to more work and the first of hopefully very few additional drafts, but I can't help thinking of this as crossing a threshold that, while not meeting the strict definition of "done," feels like it deserves the badge anyway.

And I met my timeline, too. Back in January when I was starting the rewriting and revision process, I anticipated that it would happen in fewer drafts in name but with essentially this kind of work in character, and my goal was to achieve that before the end of the college semester. Yesterday afternoon is when I collected final materials from my students. Later that afternoon I handed a printout of the typescript to one of my readers.

That means it took just about 8 1/2 months exactly with breaks and it almost exactly coincided with the academic year. As noted before, I forgot to record my exact start date, but it was approximately Sept. 1, 2010. The drafting vs. rewriting was split almost exactly down the middle. The first draft was done 4 months and a week after I started.

For the record, it is now 294 pages (with front matter) and 70,355 words. I had it down close to my goal of 65,000 words at one point. In the last few drafts it yo-yo'd between 66k and 71k. The last revisions I made in the last week pushed it up about 2k to the current. I'm not too worried about it being too long. 65k was a good goal, but 70k doesn't read too long I think. In general, I think it reads pretty fast. I was aiming for what I imagined to be a sixth-grade reading level, and I think I shot a little low. And, apart from the technical reading level, I think it's pretty punchy. It's certainly dialogue heavy, which always reads faster.

I'm not sure when the whatever is next will be. It will surely take a few weeks at least and probably half the summer to hear back from some of these readers. I'm sure it will be good for the work to let it sit as long as possible. I probably ought to have let it sit more during the revisions so far than I did. Of course, I'm eager to get going to the next stage, but I guess I'm feeling less impatient than I have between other drafts. It feels kind of like graduation day and the start of a deserved summer break, not least because of the coincidence with the academic calendar, and I'm not looking for excuses to start draft 6 tomorrow.

The schedule for the next step will be partly determined by the other project that I plan to focus on during the first month of the summer. More on that another time.

Aarrgghh!

2011-05-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

So frustrated.

My supposed solution to the opening didn't survive even a glance from my wife. The flashback, even with the bright lines of chapter breaks around it, feels too confusing still.

So I'm making another run at combinations of previously rejected solutions. One, I just cut out the preface. Two, the book starts with Chapter 1 in the present action. Three, "essential parts" of the preface are woven into the first chapter as exposition and flashback, hopefully without too much sense of interruption. Four, the major scene from the preface is salvaged almost in its entirety by putting it in a spot later on Chapter 3 where I had never considered it before.

The result, so far, by the way, is reduction of about 1,200 words. I guess that must be the sum of the preface that didn't cut pasted in anywhere.

It's a messy patch job for now, and I have no real sense of whether or not it works. Does the book get to the action soon enough? (Which was the whole point of having the preface.) Does the escalation of the character's understanding of her problem still move at the right pace? Does the interplay of internal and external conflict still work? Does it even make sense anymore at a literal level?

And my careful balance of the chapter lengths . . . gone. Ch. 3 is now 19 pages.

I'm a little bit exhausted by the work. And I'm not feeling great about having to do it. I want this problem to be behind me so badly.

Starting draft 5, struggling with opening

2011-05-06T04:54:00.001-07:00

It's been an eventful week. My wife read the complete book, as I wrote about earlier, and my new writing group had its first meeting. I'll write about the mechanics and the vibe of that some other time, but it was really really nice to talk seriously about our work together.

The important thing for now is that they read and commented on the first 20 pages. As it happens, those were positioned as Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 when I gave it to them and as Preface and Ch. 1 when I gave them to my wife. I've talked about my trouble getting the story started, and unfortunately this experiment showed no difference in that positioning. Both versions read with the same "start/re-start" problems.

So this morning -- the official beginning of my work on draft 5 -- I've been trying to tackle that, and it's not going great. First, I tried just cutting the preface to do without it. (I start another "experiment" doc in these cases and when I settle on something paste the result back into my main doc. ) That idea was no good, because there's stuff in the preface I really need. I tried changing where in the timeline of the story the preface event happens -- so it's during the present action and basically the second or third major episode instead of prefatory in tone or placement. That creates a bunch of other problems, though. I tried cutting it but blending in the stuff I didn't want to lose as exposition in pieces, but that takes us out of scene too much in the Chapter 1/present action.

Finally, I tried just swapping the preface (which, if I haven't made this clear, takes place two years before the main story) with Chapter 1. So the preface is called Chapter 2 and is basically an extended interruption/flashback from Chapter 1. Then there's a hard chapter break and we resume the story back in the present with Chapter 3, f.k.a. Ch. 2.

Described that way, it sounds awful, but so far that looks like the best solution. It's certainly the most intelligible. I'm going to let it sit and see if I can get feedback from my wife on it. I really only did a patch job, so if I go with this, it will require some a lot of revision to straighten out detail consistency and redundancies.

If this doesn't work, then what I'll need to do is not just rewrite the opening but completely re-envision it -- not a job I'm anxious to do. If my students could see me now, they'd be getting a chuckle, because it looks like I'm evading the kind of hard work that I've been haranguing them to do.

I have a feeling this is mostly going to be set to stew over the rest of the weekend without much actual work. That's OK. I need some more distance on it before really tackling the next draft. I just wish I was able to work on two novels at once so I could keep myself busy with the time I have.

Done with fourth draft

2011-05-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

I'm calling an end to the fourth draft and doing the "save as" and "create a new folder" and all that stuff to establish the fifth draft, which I'll start soon.

These are really arbitrary boundaries between one boundary and another. For example, during the "fourth draft" I went all the way through the manuscript twice. How is that not two different drafts? It has something to do without how much of a mental reset I'm doing. I guess a lot of the time, the stuff I'm doing on the second time through is stuff that I was aware needed to be done and that I postponed, so I consider it part of the same workload. I'm just not doing it in perfect sequential order. Like if a page needs for a paragraph to be added, a decision about whether to change a character's name, close fine editing of the sentences that are there and a read to see if there's a way that I can punch up the language, I might have the energy to focus on about half of that on one pass through and leave the other half for later. But since I was aware of all of it, I think of it as work on the same draft. Then, at a certain point, I either am aware of no problems any more or aware only of problems that I feel like I need some psychic distance from in order to tackle, then I feel like I'm moving from one draft to another.

That's where I am now. One major thing that has happened is that my wife read the entire typescript, front to back, for the first time over the weekend. (She had heard me read the first draft aloud as it was written and had looked at specific sections as I struggled with revision.) Discounting some for her bias, she has me convinced that I'm close to finished. The changes she outlined are not a lot of work, so my plan is for draft 5, whenever I get to it, to be a very short process and to look not terribly different from draft 4. (There were probably more differences between the two different passes of draft 4.) I have another reader lined up and I want to get it into their hands within a couple weeks if I can.

I'm also getting feedback this week from my writer's group, but that's only on a small section of it.

If I'm lucky, I'll get in three working days this week, but I don't know.

In any case, by not exactly the route I had planned, I'm getting to the destination in about the timeline I had hoped for last January -- to have it "done" by the end of this semester, which is in about 2 1/2 weeks. That's assuming I don't discover a crisis during work on the draft 5.

Regulating the chapters

2011-04-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

So far this week the work has gone like I planned it. Two days off for other stuff, and two days on the book. I worked on that troublesome section like I planned -- on paper and then on the screen -- and since then have been sweeping up other messes.

Mainly I've been following through on some ideas for how the chapters are organized. I think a couple drafts ago I noted that I had chapters as short as 4 pages and as long as 22. I got things a lot better organized than that awhile ago, but I still have as of now a range of 8 to 18, with a bigger stronger cluster around 11 pages. Before this morning I had gotten it down from 32 chapters to 27 chapters.

I had been considering the idea that my first chapter should really be positioned as a preface, and I made that change today. In addition to renumbering everything, it meant fussing a little with the tone in the openings of the preface and the new chapter 1.

And I had been considering re-slicing the breaks between some other chapters, which I went ahead with today. That leaves me with 24 numbered chapters plus the preface for a total of 25.

Meanwhile, every time I make these changes, I'm revising my outline. Too OCD, maybe, but it makes me feel better to know it's up to date. It includes details on page-length of each chapter, which changes whenever I combine or break chapters.

Thus I know the spread that I detailed above, and I know the flow is much more regulated. It also shows me some opportunities for revision. I had two chapters that are 18 pages long. They weren't necessarily too long, but that seemed as good a place to start with shortening the book as any. I tackled one of them and knocked out 3 pages and 1,000 words this afternoon. I plan to try the same with the other tomorrow. That would mean every chapter is between 8 and 15 pages, which seems really nifty.

That's tomorrow, and the end of the week, and then . . . I don't know. I'm getting close to printing it out again for a fresh read and/or to share with my next reader. Maybe it's time.

With all my revising, the total had crept up to 71,600 words. I'm at 70,600 words now. I doubt that I'll get it back down to my original goal of 65,000 words, but I plan to close the gap some.

Done, but not really, with fourth draft

2011-04-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

If I was kidding myself, I could claim to be done with this draft. Only in the sense that I turned through the last page of the printed out typescript and entered the changes marked there into my newest computer file. But like I was thinking about yesterday, what I really did was push through to the end on the superficial stuff so I can circle back around to focus on some harder stuff. I think I'll do that after breaking for the weekend. Actually a little longer because of some distractions from my paying work. I'll pull out the relevant chapters and just read them with as fresh a perspective as I can.

After that, I'm not sure, but I I'd like to see if I can find sentence level improvements before calling an end to this draft. I'll have to think about it. And there's always a certain amount of sweeping up to do of miscellaneous notes and corrections. Gotta check for consistency on the name of the character remaining when I combined two. Stuff like that. Renumbering the chapters. Anyway, I doubt it will be more than another week total.

Impatient

2011-04-21T08:09:00.001-07:00

I have about 45 pages to go to get through my notes on this draft, but I don't see it happening before the end of this week. I'm in a section that needs more careful attention, and I find that I keep neglecting it because I'm always impatient to get done when I'm at this stage. I need to slow down and take each part of it fresh, one day at a time and not to try to force it. It's too easy to talk myself into accepting the material as it is instead of pushing myself.

I have an idea that I could fix that process problem by going ahead and pushing through to the end of the draft and then returning specifically to this section -- printed out fresh to read with a clear mind -- instead of starting at the beginning and working my way up to this section when I'm in a state of exhaustion and impatience. Maybe I'll try that.

Funny the mind games a writer has to play with themselves to sneak up on the work.

A little slower

2011-04-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

I hit a section that needs more careful attention. That combined with distractions from real life are slowing me down. Right now I'm at page 152, so slightly over half way through. So far I've grown it by about 18 pages and 4,500 words. If I end up adding a total of 9-10,000 words, I'm going to be pretty upset. I think I've done the major sections that require new material, though. Everything from here on should just be the "creeping" additions, though I shouldn't underestimate those.

What I've been struggling with is the transition between Part I and Part II, which comes almost exactly at the half-way point in the book. The problem is that there isn't much in the way of suspense or unresolved mystery to call the reader over the bridge. I wrap up too many of the problems without establishing enough sense of drama about the main conflicts that arc through the whole story. I think I've got good fixes in place now, though, again, I won't really know until I've let it all sit for a time and then read it again fresh.

I'm also getting rid of a character by combining two. They were too similar, and their separate roles in the plot could easily be carried out by one person.

What I don't understand is what Charles Dickens did in those situations when he was writing in serial form. You get 2/3 of the way into a story and then realize you could/should pull one character out of the story entirely or that you haven't laid the groundwork for what you're going to have him do.

Cruising

2011-04-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

I'm still in the fast-moving stage as I discussed yesterday. Got through about 50 pages this morning. And I stumbled on one little change in a detail that, when I follow the ripples of it through the plot so far, add a lot of fun nuance, so I'm really pleased with the work this morning. It feels like I amped up the power quite a bit with some small changes.

So I'm at a little less than half-way through the whole thing in 5 days. I'll guess 5 days plus the weekend to get through the remainder. I do expect to hit some more slow spots later needing more careful attention as the conflicts I set up get resolved.

Writers group and picking up the pace

2011-04-14T08:39:00.001-07:00

As with the last draft, there are some spots in this draft that need more attention than others -- the same spots, really -- and so the pace of my revisions varies as I move through different sections. The first four chapters continue to be where I have to work carefully. I guess I don't establish the story as well as I carry it out in the middle. As a result, the work was slower going up until today when I passed out of the set up material, and now I'm cruising for awhile. I'm through pg. 77 and chapter 7. (The chapter numbering is going to be changing at the conclusion of this draft, and I've already grown the total by 5 pages.) It's hard to predict the pace in the future. I'd guess about a solid week of work without any interruptions, but I do have a lot going on in the next couple weeks.

I'm moving into an exciting new phase of my writing life. For the first time I'm in a writer's group, formed with a friend and some of her MFA classmates. We met for the first time last night to get to know one another and establish ground rules. Naturally, I'll keep their work in confidence.

I'm looking forward to it a lot, but I am struggling to figure out how best to use their attention. There's a limit to how many pages I can impose on them, and being a novelist who gets my work through several drafts before I start feeling the need to share, I'm not sure what is smart to give them. I don't expect to have any new raw pages. I'm not even sure which of the 3 books I have in play to give them parts of. I think I'm just going to have to make a choice without a lot of confidence behind it and go with the flow until I have a better sense of what kind of feedback I can get in this kind of context.

I expect to hear from my other reader (of the 3rd draft) before the end of the week. And I have another definite reader lined up for whenever I finish the 4th draft.

On to the fourth draft

2011-04-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

The last two days I've been doing the work I thought I would be doing -- trying to make the conflicts clearer, scene-by-scene, on the typescript. It involves marking up the paper copy adn then sometimes deciding the the cutting and pasting is radical enough that I need to be on the keyboard and then keying in all my changes from the paper copy. So far I'm through 27 pages and three chapters. It's hard to tell if I'm really doing any good or just plastering over serious problems that I haven't faced yet or creating clumsy solutions. I have a bad hunch that I won't be able to tell for a long time -- until I've gone all the way through, then let it sit for a few weeks to get some distance and then reading it again.

It's a time of great uncertainty.

I'm also making the whole thing longer, bit by bit. So far I've added one new page for every chapter and about 1,000 words. Hopefully that trend doesn't continue. At this same rate, I would 9,000 words by the end, and that's not gonna fly.

On to Chapter 4 next. Probably not tomorrow, though.

Focusing on conflict

2011-04-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't been journaling about it, but I have been working hard since last Tuesday, and I've been learning a lot that I do wish I had time to note.

I decided I had had enough time away or couldn't stand any more time away. So I printed it out and read it on paper for the first time. One good thing about working on a children's book is that it's easier to read it in a rush and get an overall impression. It took me about 7 hours over two days.

It's not easy for me to read that way, because as I go along I see lots of opportunities for sentence-level corrections and rewrites. On the one hand, the more I do that, the more I undermine the work of reading it for the overall impression, which is really important. On the other hand, I know that the more times I read it, the less able I get to actually spot errors and clumsiness, so you want to grab them when I see them. It took me awhile, but I really had to train myself to leave the editing pen sitting on the table. I ended up marking errors and putting a check mark next to anything that seemed clumsy and needing a revision so that I could keep close to a natural reading pace.

My overall impression was mixed. I didn't feel great about what I saw. There are a lot of moments in the book that I'm proud of, but there was something lacking that prevents it all from hanging together, and I realized I still have some significant work ahead of me.

I'm probably fooling myself, but I think I have a handle on what the problem is. The conclusion outshines the set up. It answers questions that weren't clearly asked, so the climactic scenes don't feel like they matter.

To fix that, I've been doing a lot of thinking about and freewriting about and notetaking on conflict. That seems like a pretty obvious aspect of fiction, but as I often have to point out to my students, it can be elusive. When we're struggling and just want the work to be done, it's easy to confuse a problem with conflict. The character has a problem isn't a conflict. The character has a problem AND something else may make a conflict. For my students, and now for me, it can be unexpectedly difficult to get clear on that.

And then when I have a good sense of conflict, it usually only works in isolation. When I start matching it up with what is actually going on in at different parts of the draft I can see a lot of daylight. Which leads to a lot of brainstorming and notetaking about the revisions I could make, once I get over the panic.

And I'm not sure I do have a good sense of what the conflict is to begin with. It remains elusive.

Anyway, I'm trying not to rush it, or I would have started the next rewrite yesterday. I keep trying to see if I can get a sharper sense of the story first. Once I do start the next draft, I think what it will be is going through scene-by-scene to make it focus on and further the central conflicts.

It feels like a long way to go. One mark in my favor so far is that the language felt pretty tight on the read through. I didn't have a whole lot of those checkmarks. I don't think there's a lot of sentence-level clumsiness or drag. When I do get to work on a polishing draft, I think I'll want to try and punch up the energy and playfulness of language.

Time off and working on a summary

2011-03-30T06:48:00.001-07:00

I'm in the middle of my second week off from the book. It's driving me a little bit crazy, and I'm having trouble turning my focus to anything else. It's a little bit like separation anxiety, I guess. I've done a lot of moping around. But so far I've resisted working on it any. Partly I don't want to nullify the work my first reader is doing; I want to wait to hear from her. And party I know the more distance I can create the better it will be for the next revision. As soon as I hear from that reader, though, I'm off and running.

Today I indulged a little by making my first attempts at writing a summary. I know from my previous book that I need summaries of different lengths for the purpose of soliciting agents, and it takes many many drafts to fine tune one, so it's good to get an early start so it can percolate. It's also a good exercise for the revision process, since it forces me to think about what is primary and to align the intentions with the reality. I'm probably fooling myself, but my first attempt at a summary seems to be in alignment with what's really in the book.

Maybe.

I don't really know.

First reader -- time off

2011-03-22T06:04:00.001-07:00

I guess I'm officially at the end of the third draft. I printed it out the other day for the first time and mailed it to my sister, who will be my first reader except my wife. I learned from the last book that this step helps shift me into a different critical space. Just the thought of the paper coming out of the printer and the image of some other person holding it usually helps me see the work differently. I start to imagine it through other eyes. Which means I start to see problems and issues that I was too tunnel blind to see before.

Still, I feel pretty good about it. Before we put it in the mail, I listened while my wife read a couple chapters out loud, and I liked what I heard. I could hear a few clunky sentences and one scene that still drags too long, but nothing that made me despair. My sense is that after 7 months and 3 drafts is in shape as good as the first book after 2 years and 9 drafts. (It's also half as long, so that helps.)

Which still means it needs work. I'm chomping at the bit to get more readers, but the smart play is to hold off for awhile and see what else I can figure out on my own. And I need to get some more distance for that, so I really am taking some time off. At least a week and maybe longer if I can find some way to keep myself away from it next week. We'll see how quickly my first reader gets back to me and what energy that sets in motion.

Crankin

2011-03-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

It's hard to summarize the work I've been doing, but there's been a lot of it to be sure. I supposed if I was putting in my usual 90-120 minute sessions everyday then my guess of 5 weeks for this draft would be accurate, but I've been putting in a lot more time than that. I can't seem to stop working on it. It's good to be in this space.

I'm kind of unofficially done with draft 3. I reached the end of it this morning. But as usual I have a certain number of items I want to consider and tidy up before drawing a line between this and whatever comes next. There's no rush, and given some of the other stuff I have going on this week, I'll probably take the rest of the week.

I think the book is a lot stronger than it was two weeks ago. I really like some of the changes I made. We'll see what happens after I get some distance and start seeing it through someone else's eyes. I hope that comes soon. I feel like it's close to time to get some critique from other readers. If that follows the pattern I'll be severely disillusioned before long.

One thing I definitely know is improved is the length. I expected to get some back in this draft, but I really thought I would have to make another focused pass later in the "kill your darlings" mode. That might not be necessary, because just in an organic way I made changes that brought it from 325 pages to 280 pages and from 76,000 words to 67,500 words -- 11%. My goal was 65,000 words, but I'm quite comfortable with the length of it right now. Any cutting from here on will be just because something doesn't belong.

I'm going to have to turn my attention to some of my paying work for the next few days, so that will be slowing me down.

Lots of progress

2011-03-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

When did I check in last? A ton of work ago, whenever it was.

I don't know how good the work is, but I'm feeling pretty good about it right now. There have been some ups and downs.

I did a few days of brainstorming, contemplating, digging until I felt I had found the main thread and started working to tie everything around that. In the process, for the record, the draft expanded to what I hope will be its maximum length -- 76,000 words and 320 pages -- mostly in the first 20% where I was doing a lot of careful work trying to make sure every scene in the set up was hitting hard.

I was feeling pretty good about it then and over the weekend asked me wife to read that section,a and she splashed cold water on me. She feels it's too slow to get started primarily and doesn't focus enough on the main story. That put me in the doldrums for awhile.

But I came up with three possible solutions and for the most part, up until this morning, I've been working really closely with that same 60 pages. The solutions included cutting out one prologueish chapter entirely, cutting out a plot thread that is set up in the opening and revisited throughout and reminding myself that less is more when it comes to characterization, which allowed me to pull out some anecdotes and backstory about my character. In the end, I decided to keep the first chapter.

The result was being able to subtract 12 pages -- 20% -- from the set up. I've kept moving in the right direction since then and have it down to 295 pages and 70,000 words. I'm up to around page 100 on this read-through and hope that the rest of it will go faster than work on the set up did.

I do have a nagging feeling that I can't really see it well enough to judge anymore. We'll see what happens at the end of this draft, but I'll probably have to consider seriously the idea of some time away from it to get some perspective. I'm getting pretty eager for feedback from readers, too.

Egyptian literature

2011-02-26T08:14:00.000-08:00

I know almost nothing about it. And to prove it, here is an old review I wrote of Being Abbas el Abd by Ahmed Alaidy, which is about the alienated youth of Cairo, abuse of power and cellphones.

Atmospheric Disturbances

2011-02-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

I started on Rivka Gilchen's Atmospheric Disturbances last night. I can't remember why it's in my to-be-read pile. Was she one of the New Yorker 40 under 40 or something? Notable book of 2009? Anyway, whatever it was that recommended it to me, I've forgotten it, so this is one of those rare occasions when I'm starting a book with almost nothing in the way of preconceptions or expectations. I didn't even read the back cover summary. (I have it in paperback.) That''s an interesting kind of reading experience that I would like to explore more some other time. (A truly random experience is pretty difficult to create. It would probably, just based on the numbers out there, lead to some kind of genre fiction that I don't appreciate. I guess the books in my to-be-read pile are at least pre-screened to be literary fiction in some sense. And I know it's not a classic. The price sticker on it reminds me that I paid full price for it using a gift card to a store I don't normally go to because it's not nearby. All of those details do set up kinds of vague expectations.)

Anyway, I haven't read enough of it to say much about it except that so far it reminds me a lot of my first encounter with Paul Auster's New York trilogy. Which is a good thing. I liked those stories a lot when I first read them about fifteen years ago.

Calling an end to the second draft

2011-02-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

I changed my mind about what I said yesterday. I'm deciding I'm done with draft 2 and am moving on to draft 3.

These are totally artificial divisions, so the milestone is similarly artificial. I guess what it really means is that I'm deciding that I need to focus on a different category of revision at this point, and it's comforting to tidy up the typescript, do a "save as," make note of the word count at this point and establish a schedule/time line.

The different category is what I guess should be called "developmental editing." I wish I had a developmental editor to work with me on that, but it's a self-help world now. The work I think would be most productive right now is digging in deep to find the heart of the story, find what the character really wants, figure out the arc of her emotional development and then figure out all the related writing and shaping that has to happen to bring that story into focus. It's scary work, because it can mean disassembling a lot of the machinery, and it can mean seemingly small adjustments that later turn out to introduce a fatal wobble in the machinery. It will almost certainly mean writing a lot of new material. My mantra during this stage of the first book was "don't fix -- dig." Well, I hope there's less need of that this time around, but formally that's the stage I'm at now.

This means ignoring a lot of the spackling work that's still left to do and that was the focus of the second draft. I've decided it's no longer productive or helpful to do that until I get the bigger picture questions sorted out. I guess I have been dealing with two kinds of problems -- basic intelligibility/consistency of plot and bringing some craft to the clumsy parts. I took care of all the first kind. The clumsy parts are better left alone for now.

It's hard to get a perfect bead on the word count and page count because each draft has different kinds of editing notes lingering around inside it. When those get cut out, I won't be actually shortening the book. The typescript is 317 pages and 75,000 words. My best estimate is that is actually about 73,000 words. So it grew by about 3,000 words in the last draft. Those are wild estimates, though. I'm a long way from my goal of getting it down to 65,000 words, but I suppose I'm a long way from finished.

Which takes me to the question of time line. Before the start of the last draft, I guessed that by this stage I would be concentrating on polishing, which would move along very quickly. Obviously, I'm not working on polishing and whatever I'm doing next can't go quickly.

I don't know. It's not just hard to predict the pace. It's hard to know what the work even is. It's a lot of sitting around thinking about the text instead of working on it. Let's say I had a definite object in mind like an image of the emotional arc of the character, which is probably way to simplistic a way to understand what I'm gong for. Then I might be able to say that I'll start applying that object like a stencil over the typescript scene-by-scene and re-cutting it, and that might take something like the 4 weeks that the last draft took.

I don't really believe that's how it will work, but let's use it as a basis. I'm going to guess that second part will actually go faster -- 3 weeks instead of 4. And I'm going to arbitrarily say that the "figuring out" part will take 2 weeks, which is incidentally how far ahead I am on my second draft time line.

That makes 5 working weeks total, starting from next Monday. (I have some paying work I have to concentrate on.) Which makes April Fool's Day my target.

Ok. That's what I'll do. I hope.

(Not really) Done!

2011-02-23T07:38:00.000-08:00

In the rawest sense, I'm "done" with this draft, having reached the end of the material this morning. That's in slightly under 4 weeks, which was my modified deadline, cut down from the original 6 week deadline.

It feels good to get to the end like that, but it's kind of a cheat and so I'm not not declaring myself officially done with this draft yet. I went flying by some pretty serious problems that it makes sense for me to bear down on before circling around to the beginning of the book again. I'll give myself as much time as it takes, but, especially since I have some interruptions coming from my paying work, let's say it's roughly a week.

So that would make in the neighborhood of 5 weeks total. Pretty good pace and pretty good estimates I made.

Here's hoping I actually am able to make improvements in the next few sessions. I'm still very worried about the stuff I mentioned yesterday.

I still love my ending, by the way. It's a risky ending that might not work for some readers, but I get a kick out of it.

Back to work, but not feeling great about it

2011-02-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

Back from the long weekend and trying to crank up the pace again. At the start of the morning, I basically had two major sections left -- the climax and the denouement. (The climax is really a "false peak" as discussed a few months ago when I was drafting it.) I anticipated few problems with the first and several problems with the second.

So I got through that false peak section today in one go -- 42 pages and 8 note cards. Great.

But it was a dispiriting experience. This was drafted most recently and therefore had the most nasty surprises in it. Going through it I found a lot of problems that seem pretty challenging. Actually what they seem is fatal.

I guess I'm going to have to get past that attitude -- buckle down and figure out what it will take to make it good. And part of that is going to involve stopping the clock watching. I'm not going to finish this draft this week and probably not next week either. I need to forget about that and focus on the work and take is much time as it needs.

Ugh.

Time out

2011-02-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

Alright, I'm going to say that this section I've been laboring over is good enough for this draft and move on. I have lots of notes in it about what still needs to be fixed, but I'll save those for the next draft.

And in moving on to the next big section of the book, I'm actually pulling over to a rest stop. Today is Thursday. The rest of the week I have to devote to some paying work, which I can hopefully finish before the end of the day tomorrow. Monday is a scheduled day off for other reasons. So, hopefully, I'll be back on it by Tuesday and from there on out move at the faster pace I had up until this last section.

I'm getting to that stage where I'm losing sight of it and can't tell what's good or bad. When I finish this draft the smart thing will be to take some time away from it, though I won't want to.

Falling behind schedule

2011-02-16T07:53:00.001-08:00

Well, now I'm thinking that it's not going to happen in 4 weeks. (End of next week.) I am working hard and making progress, but I've run into an area that is more time consuming than I calculated, and I'm hitting a point in my paying work where I'll have to take a couple days off. Plus another day I know of for personal business.

Crumb.

I'm working in this 40 page section that has so many moving parts to it and where so many elements of the story come together before launching toward the resolution. And it's like a house of cards where moving one thing requires a lot of rebuilding. It's interesting, but . . .

But I've put this totally unimportant and arbitrary timeline on myself that contributes to my sense of impatience. If I could forget that, I would be better off. I have to remind myself that there's nothing actually going wrong here. I'm working on my novel every day, just like I want. It's happening.

In the zone

2011-02-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

Damn, I've been working hard. I've put in the equivalent of about 4 of my usual sessions since yesterday afternoon, including most of today so far. It's difficult to count, but I'm guessing I've written about 6,000 words of new material. The total length has grown by a little bit, because I'm trimming other stuff out as I write some of the new stuff.

I forget how much I rounded down the last time I settled the word count. Let's say I have about 74,000 words now. Up from whatever I said a few weeks ago.

I'm working through the problem section I mentioned yesterday and it's requiring a lot of new material. Hard to know if it's any good, but it's at least a little more active than previously. I wish I could say I had it all done, but I've run out of energy just short of the finish line. (I hope.) I have one more short scene to draft and then that should transition me out of this difficult section.

Whew. So many moving parts to keep track of in something more plot driven like this project is.

Roadblock

2011-02-14T07:59:00.001-08:00

Well, I guess it's not as clear sailing through the rest of this draft as I thought. I've hit a section with some pretty significant structural problems that I had managed to overlook before. It's the kind of thing that in the past would stump me for a couple days then have me depressed for a couple days before I buckled down and figured out a solution, but I'm going to try and skip the first couple steps this time.

So much of this work is about psyching yourself out so you're in the mental and emotional state to keep going. For me, the timing of the pulses of intellectual energy is really important. I feel like I need to write first thing in the morning, and I feel like composing and figuring things out are two different aspects of writing that take up a lot of intellectual energy. So I've learned from experience to do my best to do the "figuring things out" work the day before so it doesn't rob me of my first pulse of intellectual energy in the morning.

So that's kind of my task this afternoon. This morning is a wash, but I can do a lot of the brainstorming and puzzling out and critical activity that's necessary for the rest of the day so that I'll have a good solution to work on tomorrow morning.

Moving scenes around

2011-02-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

The pace has slowed, because I'm in a section needing a lot of attention, but I'm getting good work done. About 13 pp. today, plus about 5 pages or so that were cut out. 4 note cards. I'm on pg. 201 and therefore 2/3 of the way through it. After this section, the pace should pick up all the way through the end I think. I have 2 weeks left to my target deadline, and I really think 1 week should do it if I'm aggressive.

I had a very uncommon satisfying experience today of moving a scene. Sounds simple, but honestly I don't know how other writers do it so cavalierly. You read interviews with authors who talk about getting the whole plot onto note cards, stringing the note cards a clothes line and moving them around like a jigsaw puzzle. I always find that any given scene is so thick with elements key to that moment in the story's development that it is impossible to move the whole scene to someplace else.

But I did come across a situation like that today -- one whole scene that could move as-is to another spot and really ought to be in another spot for the sake of flow. It was so gratifying to do the cut and paste and see that it fit right in there and then to swivel around to my bulletin board and move the appropriate note card. It made me feel like a pulp fiction writer.

Bringing down my average

2011-02-10T08:32:00.001-08:00

5 note cards and 17 pages this morning.

Well, I take back what I said about it being comparatively easy in the remainder of the draft. I've hit a section that needs a lot of thinking. That will bring my average down, but I still think my revised goal of 4 weeks for this draft is doable. It depends on how much I get bogged down in this section.

What I'm working on is the transition between Part I and Part II in the story at about the 60% mark, and in my first draft it's a really crummy transition. I seem to resolve everything of importance at the end of Part I and don't really have any feeling of suspense going to pull into Part II. Then the start of Part II is working in a really mechanical way to put all the pieces in place to create some suspense for the rest of the book. It all works like two different stories that are forced into partnership rather than two parts of a whole.

I'm counting on it being fixable, but I'll have to take my time, not worry about schedules, and really bear down on it. It's too easy to take shortcuts and talk yourself into the idea that it's working. That's how the first draft got written to begin with.

Same same

2011-02-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

24 pages and 5 note cards today. In terms of page numbers, I'm now slightly over 1/2 way through in slightly over 2 weeks. Feb. 25 remains a very reasonable deadline for this draft.

More of the same

2011-02-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

I'm plugging along with another day like the one I had yesterday. I got through the space of five note cards or 18 pages. Another two days like that, and I'll be over half way through in terms of page count. And I think the pace will only pick up, because I'm past the section the needs the kind of attention I'm giving in this draft.

Carrying on as planned

2011-02-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

Got the week off to an okay start. I'm in one of the sections of the book where I don't have a lot of notes about changes I need to make -- not that changes aren't needed, just that there were no obvious structural flaws that I noted as I went by in the first draft. So I'm really not doing much more than reading it over and making the few small changes that I did note.

As I go along, by the way, I make notes about things I need to work on in the next draft. I could work on them now, but they really are a different category of editing, and I don't want to be working on two different tracks. It would feel like frosting the third layer of the cake before the middle layer has come out of the oven.

So, I went flying by five of my note cards today (9% of the total) and 20 pages (about 6% of the total), which moves me closer to the end at a faster clip than my original schedule. Which has been true of every day so far. Add to that the fact that I am past the section that needs the most attention, and I really think my original plan of 6 weeks is way too conservative. I'm going to knock it down to 4 weeks, which would put at me at the end of this draft at Jan. 25. That's not a prediction, but a goal. My prediction is that I'll be done even sooner than that.

Which will be satisfying. The kind of thing I'm tackling in this draft is probably the least creative and artistic and intellectually stimulating and probably does the least to make the book actually any good. It's mostly about making it intelligible enough to work on. I'm looking forward to the next draft a lot more.

Good work for a week

2011-02-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

It's the end of Friday now, and I'm satisfied with how it's going. I don't know if I'm actually turning it into a good book, but I am getting it into shape at least.

I'm four days into my schedule, but really I have to say it's the equivalent of 6 "sessions" since I put in time in 2 afternoons. If I figure on losing a couple sessions later to errands, I'll be on my average. I'm about 90 pages in (a little less than one third) which suggests about 20 average working days, which would be lower than my original estimate by at least a week and a half. I'm through about 17 cards in my note card outline. (A little less than one third by that measure also.) I have a little post it flag on the card where I've left off so I know which scene to tackle first on Monday or the next time I return to it.

I'm most excited about the work I did this morning which was addressing the big space that I talked about yesterday. I created a new scene by writing some new bridge material and moving some material from later in the book, and that allowed me to cut out a bunch of other stuff and to remove about four note cards from that section of my outline. It makes a big beautiful blank space on the bulletin board where I have it spread out.

I'm feeling good about it. I can't wait to get through this "patch up" draft and start focusing on really trying to make it into something good.

Some difficulties with cutting scenes

2011-02-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

I think I'm progressing according to plan, as best as I can tell. I'm working with average number of pages in a situation where some sections need a little work and some need a lot. After three days -- three sessions -- I'm through about 11 of my note cards and at pg. 60 of the typescript, which is roughly 20% of the total. So 7%/day. 18 working days total if it continues like this. (Big if.) Which would round up to 4 work weeks instead of 6 as I outlined the other day. But I don't have enough good data to really count on accelerating my schedule. I can just hope.

The section I'm in right now makes it especially difficult to predict the process. There are about 4 scenes in a row that either got cut, rewritten, combined or moved someplace else. Some stuff must get cut because the material isn't relevant anymore. Some of it could stay possibly, and I have to decide if it helps. Whatever I do is going to affect the pacing. For example, if I cut a scene that comes between two big events, I might need that beat there for timing, in which case I need to write something to fill the space. Or it might be thought of as an opportunity to get in spread in some of the subplot material that might feel too rushed later on. Or it might be better without a break there and I should just keep things rolling.

Anyway, those decisions are going to bring my average down.

One of the difficult parts about cutting scenes is that there is almost always something in the scene that feels really important even if it's not the main point of the story. As I -- and the textbook I use -- discuss with my students, every line of dialogue and every detail should be doing more than one thing at once -- communicate the literal message and something else like building character or setting the scene or raising the stakes in some way. If you do that well, that makes it harder to cut something. If you cut a line of dialogue because you don't need the one thing it does, there's still the other thing it's doing. Now you need to find some other place to achieve that.

An example. I have a scene where my protagonist and her antagonist have a fight. When I drafted it, it's the first meeting between them that the reader witnesses in the present action. Because it was a draft, I didn't do a good job of making the scene serve the plot. It was really just an introduction of a character. I came up with a better way to introduce her and have them interact for the first time, earlier in the book, in a scene that also moves the plot forward. So this scene isn't necessary. Snip, snip. But it's not so easy. One, in the first draft version, that's where I put some exposition about the history of their relationship. So I have to find a way to weave that in somewhere. Two, and more complicated, I also had other characters in that scene getting in on the argument, too. That begins a process of bonding between those secondary characters and the protagonist that leads to their friendship later. If I cut this scene, the pacing of that emotional development and bonding is disrupted. It's not like exposition that I can just stuff in some place. It's woven into the tone of voice and how they talk with one another. The literal details of their dialogue isn't so important, but the other thing it is doing -- showing the kindling of their relationship at this moment -- is. If you lose that ineffable quality, you lose something in the rest of their interactions later on.

So it's difficult. I have to figure out how to hang on to what is best while I'm cutting out whole scenes.

This section, by the way, is the only one I think where there are whole scene that I know need to come out. The rest of the book is more or less laid out in the proper order after this point.

New scene and tentative schedule

2011-01-31T07:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote a new scene today totaling 1,000 words. That's the biggest new chunk that I have planned, though I wouldn't be surprised if during the rewrite I discover problems that make me develop scenes that long. But the outline calls for smaller additions here and there from now on.

That puts me one day behind the schedule I mentioned in the middle of last week. Oh, well. We're getting record snowfalls this winter, by the way, and it's been incredibly disruptive to every kind of schedule, not to mention just plain distracting. Wild weather has a way of making you want to look at the window all day and to dig around in the cupboards for comfort food.

From this point on, I expect to be tackling issues in the typescript in order. I'll start with the first scene and move through the book. I don't have any reliable way to guess how long the first rewrite (draft 2) will take.

But I'll venture a schedule anyway using this dubious logic: the book is outlined on a total of 55 note cards representing 55 episodes or events. Let's say it averages out to 55 scenes, even though some note cards elongate the time represented, and some of the note cards foreshorten the time represented. I haven't done a real account, but let's assume that 1/2 the cards have notes about some kind of significant revision that will require me to read the scene over carefully and think about it. Let's assume that on average that will exhaust the energy of one writing session, and that I average 5 sessions a week. That's 27 working days or 5 1/2 weeks starting tomorrow. Round up to make it 6 weeks starting from today.

That makes March 11 my target date to finish the second draft.

Here's an even more tentative schedule for the step after that. I'll make the next draft a polishing draft and try to cover 30 pages per working day. Roughly 2 1/2 weeks of that would give me a target of March 31 to finish that third draft. Then I'll have to move on to the serious and difficult task of reducing the length. Let's say I finish that next pass by the end of the college semester, which is the middle of May.

In other words I'm giving myself about 15 weeks to work through it three times and make three different kinds of rewrites and revisions with the hope that it will be in excellent shape by the end of that time and ready to start sharing with readers other than my wife.

That's a hell of a plan. It makes as much sense as any other plan and has about as much chance of working, which is not much.

Renaming characters

2011-01-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

So the main thing I'm working on today is brainstorming new names for a couple of my characters. I guess you could call one a secondary character and one a minor character. Let's call them B and C for now.

They come as a team. They work together and are almost always together when they do appear. But B has a bigger influence on the main characters. C is just a bit player.

So the first thing about their names is that they are a little bit "Dickensian," in the sense that I use a little bit of phonetic and lexical horseplay to make the names reflect or comment upon their personalities. Like how someone dishonest and treacherous might be named Grift. That isn't my usual style, but in this story it's more appropriate and I'm having a little fun with it.

I came up with B and C's names before I really began writing the story and certainly before I got to the scenes where they first appear. Which means I had an idea of what they would be like from the very start and the names B and C to reflect that.

But then they emerged on the paper somewhat differently from planned, so now their original names no longer suit them. Thus the need to brainstorm new names.

This is also important because for now the working title uses the names of these characters, even though they aren't the major characters. They are guardians of a central mystery. It's sort of like if Harry Potter wasn't titled Harry Potter but The Hogwarts Academy. You'd have to be sure that the name Hogwarts was what you really wanted for the academy.

That's probably not a good example, because it seems pretty dumb to name the Harry Potter story after the school he attends. It seems to miss the main point. . . . The Wizard of Oz. That's a better example. It's Dorothy's story, but the thing she is pursuing or searching for is what the story is named after. That's more like the route I'm going in my working title. And the situation I'm in is like if Baum had originally used a working title like The Wizard of Topeka before the story took off in a little bit of a different direction and he decided to rename it.

So anyway, the working title that I've been using for the last five months is now suddenly something else. Which is kind of a big deal.

Events in the news: Egypt

2011-01-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

I have the T.V. on in the other room while I work this morning listening to live reports from events in Cairo. It reminds me of doing something similar and also blogging about it during the protests in Tehran in June 2009. It's not conducive to work, obviously, but part of the benefit of working at home is that I get to be flexible and tune into news like this when I want to. I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

Back to work, starting second draft

2011-01-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

I'm returning to work on the novel today after about 2 1/2 weeks off.

In spirit I'm starting the second draft. Technically, there was one significant scene that I went flying by and left unwritten so that I could get into the scenes that were holding me up from the ending. So my first order of business today was writing some new material to fill in a gap. The result is 1,700 words of new material and about 8 pages. For the sake of consistency in the count, we'll just count those as part of the second draft. Emotionally or psychologically, that's where I was before today anyway.

That will probably be the biggest single new chunk added, I suspect, but I expect the typescript to grow and grow by little pieces if the experience of my first book is any guide. That went from about 135,000 words in the first draft to 225,000 words in the second draft without me having the conscious intention of adding anything. Just scene by scene as I clarified, developed and dug in deeper the material grew. I expect the same to happen here, but hopefully not to such a great extent. One, it just can't. I need this to be a much shorter book. Two, I still hope that my first draft is in much better shape than the first draft of my other book and so won't need so much digging and developing.

Still, I can't let those hopes get in the way. If it needs developing, I have to get out my own way and let it develop and worry about the page count later.

Next up . . . I have the beginnings of a to-do list here, and the next thing I need to do is to change the names of a couple of my secondary characters who lend their names to the working title of the book. They've gone in a different direction from what I originally imagined and need different names to reflect that. My plan is to read over the scenes that develop them with an eye toward renaming them and possibly the book.

After that I need to write a new scene early in the book made necessary by the direction the conclusion went. Hopefully I'll finish those two errands by the end of the week.

After that I'll start at the beginning of the typescript and start working my way through the whole thing. At that point, I think I can make reasonable prediction of the timeline.

Losing two weeks

2011-01-18T06:40:00.000-08:00

I didn't work any last week because I was away on vacation, and I don't think I'm going to work any this week because I'll be concentrating on other personal, household and paying job issues. I hate to be away from it, but I don't really think it's a problem. I shouldn't have any trouble generating momentum again, and the break is well timed in the sense that I'm transitioning from one draft to another. It's usually a good thing to let it sit for awhile. In fact, it's probably better to let is sit a long longer than two weeks, but I'm not going to do that.

Word count revision

2011-01-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

I forgot that for the best comparison to the previous book I need to count about 10,000 words that were written, typed up and already thrown in the scrap pile. The typescript stands at 70,000 words now, but I need to give myself credit for 80,000 words of drafting to get there.

So that averages out to about 1,600 words per weekday over 10 weeks.

Celebrating

2011-01-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Still on a high from passing this milestone. I can see a dozen ways to discount it -- that's my superpower, actually -- but I'm concentrating on giving myself credit and enjoying it.

Let's tally it up . . .

First of all, comparing this to writing my first book is has some apples to oranges conversion problems. In this case, the first draft is in much better shape I believe. More objectively, the first draft is completely typed, whereas in the last book I called the manuscript the first draft and the process of typing it in (and revising some as I went along) the second draft. That typing took probably about two months, so this is comparing two different kinds of time lines.

Another way I'm better set up this time is my outline. I had put it all on note cards when I got stuck a few months ago, and I've been updating them as I went along. I spent this morning getting them in shape. There are about 60 of them with good descriptions of each scene and lots of good notes about what needs to be revised. They should help a lot in the next draft. I had a less focused and helpful outline for my first book. (Still do, actually. Maybe that's what I need to fix to get that book back on track again.)

So, in terms of time line . . . I'm calling the official start date Sept. 1, 2010. (I actually didn't do a good job dating my notes and manuscript the first couple weeks, but that's close.) The official end date is January 6, 2011. That's just about exactly 18 weeks including pauses and interruptions. Figure a week off for Christmas and another for Thanksgiving. I'll put about two weeks of planned pauses for paying work in the same category -- let's call those pauses -- to get 14 weeks intended to be devoted to this. Everything else -- dealing with plumber, oversleeping, morning meetings that couldn't be avoided -- we'll call an interruption to the plan and just part of what you have to expect during the writing process. I'll guess there were about 2 weeks worth of those. Figure another 2 weeks of fear, boredom, self-doubt and generalized terror of the blank page where I didn't make any progress. That leaves an estimated 10 weeks of actual writing. I count a week as M - F. In reality I sometimes caught up with some work on the weekends.

My first book book took about 22 weeks before the subtractions, including a 2 week vacation in the middle of it. (Again that's without counting the time to type it in after the first draft was written.)

Length . . . this one is much shorter. The document with everything in it and in order is 300 pages exactly and just over 71,000 words. (My goal was to keep it under 65,000 words.) That includes a few pages at least of editing notes, though, so I'm going to round down the word count to 70,000 exactly and call it 295 pages. That doesn't count all the brainstorming, notetaking, character sketching and discarded material not worth typing in.

The first book was 135,000 words in the first draft. (And I was trying to keep it under 100,000.) It now stands at about 95,000 I think.

So, in terms of pace, it's not super great when I figure it up. It's about 777 words per week day over 18 weeks. 1,400 words per weekday over 10 weeks. Really I should add back in my freakout days, which would make it 1,166 words per weekday over 12 weeks. So the average is somewhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes of good writing on a typical working day. Which sounds slower than I remember the first book being, but, again, this first draft is in better shape at the end than in that case.

Well, this is what counts as celebrating for me. Pretty dorky. But I am reading the new autobiography of Mark Twain that was just published, which has a lot of discussion of working process and page counts and word counts, and it confirms for me, not for the first time, that other writers have this same kind of obsession.

I could make other comparisons to our working processes, but I better stop there before I embarrass myself.

Oh, by the way, no one is supposed to read this until a hundred years after my death.

FIRST DRAFT COMPLETED!!

2011-01-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it.

It feels good.

I don't know what else to say.

Getting very close to the end of the first draft

2011-01-05T08:11:00.001-08:00

I've lost track of what counts as new material and what's already been counted, but I can add in at least 1,500 words -- handwritten yesterday and typed in today.

That was key bridge material on the part that I've been struggling with, which feels good. It went a little more low key a direction than I wanted, and it creates some awkward seams that will take a lot of work to smooth out, but it gets me off the dime.

That puts me very close to calling my first draft done. I want to take care of those seams before I say I'm done with this section. And I need to draft the first half of the final scene. (The very very end of that scene and of the book I already wrote, but I skipped over the build up.)

I really want to finish by the end of this week, since I'm not going to be able to work on it at all next week and part of the following week. It would great to go into that break having passed this milestone. And I should be able to if I was focused, but there are some distractions around the house that are making it difficult the last couple weeks.

We'll see.

Books read in 2010

2010-12-31T07:33:00.000-08:00

It's time for my fourth annual totally irrational and OCD-driven list of all the books I've read for the year.

There are a lot of rules to this goofy mind game I play with myself, but the short version is that I count only books that I complete cover to cover, that I allow myself to cheat slightly with long reference or technical books if I read most of them, that I don't allow myself to pad the list by choosing short books and, on the other hand, if a short book comes up in the natural course of my reading life, I do get to count it.

Those rules were particularly influential this year. The reference/technical book comes into play with all the traveling I did. I have several guidebooks on my list that I read about 70-90% of. Also I have the textbook I used in my teaching.

More influential is all the children's books I read as part of the research I'm doing for the book I'm writing. That pushed my numbers to a record high. I added a new rule along the way that I would only count what might be considered a novel for its age group. I counted James and the Giant Peach and Harry Potter but not Where the Wild Things Are.

Take the 20 or so children's books on my list and convert that into about 5 adult novels I might have read, and the tally would be about the same as in previous years. So the list is skewed in a new way this year, but the list has always been skewey. In reality, I probably read a little bit more -- mostly because of the down time I had while traveling -- but since I'm counting books instead of pages, words or time, it's impossible to tell.

As always, there are dozens of books I started and didn't finish. If I gave myself a quarter credit for each of those, I'd be well over my goal of averaging 2 per week. (104). But those aren't the rules.

As it is, I came closer than ever. The tally this year is 96.

It sounds like a lot, but I'm hyper aware of how slow a reader I am and how much more ground I wish I was covering. I got another reminder of that this week. My wife -- who has much less reading time available to her but is a fast reader -- is on vacation this week and has knocked off four novels in the last few days while I read one. It makes me wanna holler.

Those 96 books include, as I said before, about 20 definite children's books, another 5 or so that I pitched as children's classics but that might be considered adult novels (Treasure Island), several books of theory and analysis about children's literature, a mix of nonfiction that satisfied some curiosity I had during the year (a history of Buddhism; a history of Paris), most of the Lonely Planet guides for Southeast Asia, all of Richard Price's novels for some reason, books related to research I was doing for the so-called "second novel" I was writing but that is now on hold and books based on movies I saw and became curious about (Winter's Bone; Atonement).

In the first half of the year, the list is a very strange miscellany of novels that I took with me overseas based on a complicated set of criteria plus the weird random books that came my way while I was over there. (The Pickwick Papers? I was really desperate for reading material there at the end.)

Well I won't list them all. Here are some highlights.

Favorite new books from the last year or two include The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Both highly recommended. I also read another backlist title by Hilary Mantel that has stuck with me -- Beyond Black.

Favorites from the near past that are new to me include Mating by Norman Rush and Transmission by Hari Kunzru and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

I re-read several old favorites with pleasure again, most of which I've written about on this blog before. Straight Man by Richard Russo gave me a new appreciation for the comic novel. My previous memory of it was of how funny it was, but now I remember it as much more than that.

Lastly, as always, the best part of reading is finally getting around to "classic" books that are new to me. I'll include The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow here for lack of a better place to shelve it. (Author deceased but the copyright not yet lapsed. I guess I could call it backlist, but not recent.) The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain still has me cracking up and amazed at his talent. Peter Pan might be my new favorite book. I was genuinely surprised at its thematic and emotional complexity, and I'm surprised it's not read more. I found The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad by confusing it with The Secret Sharer, to my good fortune.)

I read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It doesn't make me excited and it doesn't make me angry. I certainly don't resent the attention it's getting. If you benchmark the favorable reviews it has gotten at 100, I guess I would give it a 95. I would say it's overrated, but not by so much that it's worth fighting over. One way I think about it is that I consider it to have a similar ambition and scope as The World According To Garp, which I read for the first time about 20 years ago and re-read for about the 6th time this year. I don't see myself re-reading Freedom and having it stick with me the same way.

I read a lot of dogs this year, too -- books whose praise I don't understand, books that seemed pretty good when I read them and now can't remember a single image from, books that I can't understand why were ever published. But I won't beat up on those in public. I will say that there are two major authors that over the years I have tried and tried and tried to get into but that I am now giving myself permission to at least hold in lower regard than the conventional wisdom and maybe to give up on entirely. They are Charles Dickens and Henry James. And I'm not going to feel guilty about it.

Not on the list is any complete book of poetry. That's a change from past years, though I did read some in doses smaller than a book. I read a ton of short stories this year, so my list got gypped more than usual on that point.

Well, that leaves about another 40 books that I haven't mentioned that just kind of came and went. Pretty good books that I enjoyed reading but that I don't see myself recommending, returning to, recommending against or arguing about. That's kind of how reading goes, I think. We're lucky to find two really really good books in a year. Jacob de Zoet and Wolf Hall. Go out and get them.

Closer and closer to the end

2010-12-28T06:54:00.001-08:00

I'm getting closer to the end of my first draft. A few good working days, with luck. (And getting those days will take some luck. I have a few interruptions coming up.)

I added about 2,100 words to the total in the last two days. That's with a little bit of new material and typing in that and some older scraps that had never been typed in. It includes the actual last words, but I got there by skipping over some scenes leading up to the last scene, so I can't really say it's done.

I'm back at the point in the cycle with a lot of doubt and confusion that I need to work through. Just have to find the time. The only real problem is frustration from the sense that I'm missing self-imposed deadlines. If I don't worry about that, then I would have to conclude that everything is fine.

Shaping up

2010-12-21T10:35:00.001-08:00

Worked several yours today on the section I've writing and re-writing for the last few weeks. To extend my Frankenstein metaphor, I guess I've been trying to smooth out some of the scars. It's more or less functioning, now, but along the way I identified places where I need to do some more serious physical therapy to get it to move more naturally.

It's the kind of digging in and development work that really is the hardest part of revision. Trying to get to the heart of it and develop the full emotional power.

Two key spots where I want to work on that for now. I'll try to tackle those tomorrow -- the last day before the holiday -- and then I can call this good enough to attach to the first draft.

Tired.

Plus 3,000 words net

2010-12-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

I've lost track of what I've already counted and what was written but not yet part of the accounting, but anyway, I think the net result from the last week or so of work is about 3,000 words. That's after cutting out a lot of stuff, pasting in the new stuff (including about 1,500 words from today) and moving a lot of stuff around. The total of material now included in the first draft is 63,000 words. I was hoping to keep the first draft under 65,000 words, but I'm not going to make it. Maybe 75,000 if I'm lucky.

That leaves this section of the book that I've been struggling with at 10,000 words and about 40 pages in the second super rough rough draft. That's probably way too long, but I'm too close to it now to see how, and it needs to have bigger picture revisions before I think about cutting. I need to do some digging and developing and unifying. It's kind of a Frankenstein monster right now.

But I think it is on the path to working. I've punched my way out of the paper bag in the last week. In the condition it's in right now, I doubt anyone would agree, since it's such a mess. But its potential is clearer in my mind, so I think my next task over the next couple mornings is to pull into a better shape so I can show it to my wife.

I think I can probably get two working mornings in before the holiday interruption.

If that works, then I can start the week after Christmas driving toward the final battle scene. That would be awesome.

A couple of good days

2010-12-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

I'm cruising now.

I wrote 1,600 words today (longhand) and got them typed in. This material will replace some existing material, so the net word count probably isn't changing, but I won't know that until I finish up this section and do the related cutting and pasting.

I also spent a lot of time updating my note cards based on the changes I've made in the plot so far. That's a little intimidating, because it makes clear how many scenes I need to revise, rewrite, move or just plain write for the first time. Basically the whole book.

Last night I read what I wrote yesterday, the false peak scene, to my wife, and it made her cry. So that was a shot in the arm.

I still don't know exactly how this whole section is going to be organized, but I feel like it's doable. I wish I could work on it over the weekend, but it's that holiday weekend where there's not time for anything except parties. Then I have 2, maybe 3, days next week before the holidays cause a big interruption. Maybe with luck I'll have this section nailed down before then.

Satisfying resolutions

2010-12-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

I'm struggling quite a bit with the problem of how to resolve a story. (Still working on the so-called "false peak" section that I've been stuck on for a few weeks, so there's still the real resolution to come.) I've taken a run at it several times and am having trouble with coming up something that seems right.

Intellectually, I know what the ingredients must include, though there is probably some other required ingredient I don't know about. It has to involve an externally manifested action taken by the main character that resolves not only her external problems (e.g. the bear at the door) but resolves the internal issues that she is struggling with and that complicates her ability to deal with things. I think it also ought to -- or at least I want it to -- be an action that has some kind of resonance with the thematic issues of the story. It should also be visually vivid and surprising without feeling unrealistic or unfair or unearned -- like it is playing by the rules of the game set up earlier.

That's a lot of for one little moment to accomplish. I can' intellectualize it and I can describe how any given solution I've come up with is lacking some ingredient. But I have trouble imagining the right solution.

And imagining is what it takes. That's where the missing ingredient lies. Coming up with some fantastic vivid image. The slipper going on to the foot. Romeo tipping the poison back down his throat.

I think in my case I have an additional complication that's difficult to explain without giving away too much of the story. First off, it can't be the hero slaying the dragon, because the enemy resembles the hero too much. It can't be the hero winning a contest of wills or power against another fighter because in the rules of the world I've set up, the solution rests on disarming the opponent but there is no way to disarm them without disarming yourself. (That probably doesn't sound like it makes any sense. I hope it would if I was willing to tell more about the story.) In any case, I need a resolution with all those characteristics above and that work in the narrow space allowed by the rules I've set up.

It's probably the internal conflict part that interests me most. To my mind, the most satisfying stories don't just solve the internal conflict cut arise from the internal conflict. It's a two-way street. The internal struggle up to this point, while being a complication and an obstacle, also yields insights and resources that, if realized, become useful in the final resolution. If the character hadn't been dealing with that internal conflict, then they wouldn't have what they need to slay the dragon. I guess I can't think of any perfect examples of that right now, but it's still the ideal resolution for me, at least in the abstract.

One other idea that I think is relevant to this . . . Toni Morrison talks in one of her interviews about how if she has the key metaphor for her story that's all she needs to get it going and get it written. Just hold that metaphor in her mind. That idea has been on my mind this week. I feel like I need some kind physical manifestation of my story's themes. Some talisman that shows up at key moments, including at the resolution. The sword or the golden chalice would do that in a typical romance. Like when Harry Potter gets hold of the philosopher's stone or Tom Riddle's diary or a specific sword or whatever.

So I've been writing the equivalent of a master's degree thesis on these problems all week trying to figure out how to end the story, how to set up that ending, how to seed the book so that the ending bears the right fruit. I don't think I've come up with anything as ideal as I outlined here, but I've got an improvement. I think I know what the talisman could be. I've written another version of the ending that I'll read over and think about in the next couple days. And then we'll see.

About 2,500 words of new material. (And I ought to get credit for about 4 times that much of note taking and brainstorming and character sketching to help me break through.)

Revision -- uggh

2010-12-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't worked up the courage yet to start drafting the conclusion yet. (Mainly because I don't have confidence in the material I just finished. It feels like it will have to be radically different and therefore set up a different kind of conclusion.)

In the meantime, I'm doing some patch up work on the rest of it. I have my main file that most everything is typed into, and then I have another file where I drafted my new opening. (e.g. about 30 pages.) I started copying and pasting and cutting to put the new opening in place and take out the parts of my original opening that no longer work. That leaves a lot of jagged seams, which I spent some time trying to smooth over, but I can see it's going to be a lot of work. And not the most glamorous work, either. I'm not looking forward to it.

So, my main file, which has everything that I possibly could be using to create a first draft and from which I have cut out stuff I know won't be included, now is at 59,000 words and 250 pages. That, plus about 10,000 words of scrap material, all of it typed in and with some light editing, in the last 15 weeks approximately. Not bad. Not great. Not my goal. I really want to have an ending that I can believe in drafted before Christmas.

Tense

2010-12-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Verb tense, that is.

As a reader I have an aversion to the use of the present tense in fiction. I feel like it is often used as a gimmick to generate cheap energy through a sense of immediacy when vivid and singular writing in the past tense would do that more authentically. Sometimes when a writer uses the present tense it feels like a patch up to disguise the shortcomings in the writing such as there not being any active verbs, probably because the writer doesn't really know what's going on in the scene. Perhaps they've failed to get in touch with it.

There are plenty of counter examples and many many novels I've enjoyed that are in present tense -- usually pulling me in before I've had to become aware of technique. So, probably the most accurate thing to say is that in my opinion present tense is a technique that can have an interesting effect but that is overused. (I also feel that same way about first person -- that the technique is sometimes used to hide the shortcomings in the story behind a clever voice. I could go on forever about the neglected virtues of the third person, especially the third person limited.)

So I usually rely on the plain vanilla techniques of past tense and third person, my present project included. But . . . when I was drafting the other day I found myself slipping mid-scene into the present tense. Where is that coming from, I asked myself.

It actually happened during a parenthetical remark in the narration that explains some context about what is going on in the story. When I thought about it more closely, I realized that parts of this project might actually benefit from switching between present and past tense in an organized way.

To explain this I might have to give away more of my story than I usually like to do on this blog. How do I put this? Let's just say that in the abstract that the story takes places in two different "realms" in terms of time and space. Think of it as inside the castle and out in the forest, to use the romance model. The characters move back and forth between these different realms for big portions of the book -- several chapters in one, several chapters in another, etc. There are about 6 -8 switches total.

Up until my accidental switch to present tense, all of the book, on both realms, had been narrated with the same past-tense technique. ("The hero discovered this and decided that.") But I've been thinking that the changes in realm could be signaled with a change in tense. When the characters are in the castle, I would use past tense, and when they go into the forest, I would use the present. ("The hero discovers this and decides that.")

One advantage would be to heighten the distinction between the two realms. Another is that it would clarify for the reader where we are in time and space. Another is that the change in general and the use of the present tense in particular in those spots would reinforce some of the thematic structure of the story, but, again, to explain that I would have to give away more than I want to.

So, I'm experimenting with that. I wrote the rest of the section in the present tense. Even though it has the advantages I listed, I'm not sure I'm crazy about how it sounds. I have a theory that the present tense gives up some subtlety of meaning that the English language is capable of, and this material I've drafted feels that way to me a little bit, though it's hard to put my finger on exactly how.

Also, if I'm going to do this, it will mean a lot of tedious revision in about a third of the book changing all the saws to sees and wases to ises and saids to says. Just doing that for the 10 pages I already had done in this section about bored me to death.

So we'll see. This book has bigger problems that I need to figure out, so I'll be stewing on this in the meantime. In any case, it shouldn't affect any more of the drafting, because I'm past the last trip into the forest. It will affect rewrites and revisions.

Tough week

2010-12-06T10:26:00.001-08:00

Well, I guess the lesson of the last week is about the need for perseverance. When in doubt, just sit down and keep battering away.

So much of this work is resisting the intellectual impulse. Knowing when not to try and fix and understand and repair but just to keep building mud pies and float along on innocent, ignorant faith.

I think I'm at a crucial moment in the story where all the inherent weaknesses mixed in to the foundation cement stones at the very beginning are revealing themselves in seemingly catastrophic cracks as I near the climax. I can't bring it to a satisfying resolution so much as reveal how the "it" has all along been a muddled patchwork man dressed up like a real person.

That crucial moment can make me freeze up. The inclination is to try to find the right combination of putty and paint to make it all seem to work, but I know in my heart that isn't going to work, so I sit around fretting and doing nothing. Or trying to think my way out of the problem.

That's how most of last week went. Finally I remembered the core lesson -- just sit down, give up any agenda or expectations, and start writing something. The goal isn't to finish but to produce something. Don't expect it to work, and if you're lucky it will reveal a path to what could work.

And I think that's what I've got. I write about 6,000 words over 6 days of working last week. (Up to something like 63,000 now.) And what I wrote is near total crap. But that little bit that isn't total crap is my trail of bread crumbs out of this mess. It's the hint of the deeper emotion and deeper theme of the story. If I develop it, it will mean a million changes in what I've written already.

But the work so far is necessary to get to this point. I want it to go like a flowchart, like the perfect to do list. That's an idiotic delusion. Maybe this will end up coming to me 10% faster than the last book, but it won't be fast. Especially if I can't recognize these roadblocks as such and hope that I can think my way past them.

I have a first "zero draft" of my so-called "false peak" chapter. It's shit, but that's a better problem than being stuck.

Climaxes, false peaks, dragons and other metaphors for the final crisis

2010-11-30T08:06:00.001-08:00

I mentioned it's an adventure story, right? I think of the final climb to the climax as battle scenes. The main character has gotten all the tools in hand, knows what the obstacles are and moves toward a direct confrontation with the antagonist.

I plan for that confrontation to play out over three escalating battle scenes, the first of which I wrote today. That brings the story and resolves a kind of climax that I think of as really a "false peak," to a metaphor from mountain climbing with those traditional illustrations of plot lines that look like a mountain peak. When you're ascending the mountain, the angle sometimes makes it appear you're approaching a peak, when actually there is actually a higher point that you can't see until you reach the false peak.

The first "false peak" climax of my story resolves an immediate danger, but a larger overarching danger still remains. Confronting that should be the real peak or climax of the story.

To use another metaphor from my old college literature courses, consider the "romantic model." In the traditional romance, the hero leaves the castle for the countryside, where he slays the dragon and then returns to the castle, where all is right in the world. In my story -- and in many other less traditional versions of the romance, I suppose -- after the dragon is slain, the hero returns to the castle to confront the traitor who let the dragon loose to begin with and who still presents a danger to order.

With luck, I could finish the "false peak" battle scenes within a week, though I don't really know how. But yesterday I didn't know how I was going to do the first of the scenes. I spent yesterday brainstorming and problem solving, and today I write it in about 2,100 words. Here's hoping I can knock out the rest of it the same way.

More or less finished with my new opening.

2010-11-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

1,600 words this morning, again on the computer.

I was mistaken on my time line yesterday. I forgot that I needed one more new scene in my new opening before merging into the existing material. That's what I did this morning, so now I have all the new opening.

Kind of . . . depends on how you look at it. The scene will draw on existing material, but it will have to be rewritten pretty significantly to help splice the new material in. I guess there's no bright line where I can say that I've finished all the "new" material. The old material needs different degrees of revision as a result.

Anyway, I'm probably done until after the Thanksgiving break. Not sure what I'll start with next week -- more revision or jumping to the ending to see if I can draft that.

Finished new opening

2010-11-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

1,000 words this morning. That's 5,000 since Saturday morning and around 55,000 total, though I already know of a section of about 10,000 words that's going to be cut.

I forgot to time myself to test it, but I'm sure that I compose on the keyboard a lot faster than by writing longhand. More incentive to switch, as discussed before.

All the material from the last few days has been for my new concept of how the book opens, which I arrived at from studying my plot on note cards and drawing paper. Basically this 5,000 will replace about 10,000 words in my first opening and besides getting to the main action sooner, it is has the virtues of including more action of its own and introducing the two threads of the plot sooner.

A good week's work, I think. I can use tomorrow to tackle some miscellaneous scene that needs to be rewritten and then use the Thanksgiving break to stew on how I'm going to move into the climax.

The spayed computer

2010-11-20T08:10:00.000-08:00

2,000 words today -- on a Saturday, too, which is rare.

I composed on the computer yesterday and today, which is also rare. I didn't do a formal test, but I'm pretty sure that I write a lot faster that way. (Usually write long hand at about 900 words/hour, and I don't think I wrote for two hours in this session.)

And working that way has the advantage of already having it typed in, which saves a lot of time later.

So why don't I work that way? Mostly because of the distractions. Too much else to tempt me away. I've been over this before, and I'm not the first. Last summer I told myself that I was going to convert an older laptop into a "spayed computer" without access to email or the web to do the composing on. I never got around to that and ended up giving that computer away to someone who needed it more.

So now part of me wants to get my hand on something convenient for this purpose.

My wife has a netbook, which has the convenience of portability, so I could move around to other chairs when I feel antsy, and getting one new doesn't cost much. But I really don't like working on it. They keyboard is too small, and the weight is distributed in such a way that it's always tilting back in my lap.

Anyway, if I can find a cost effective way to get a spayed computer up and running, I might move toward that to help me with the drafting that remains on this book. Especially since the next draft will definitely be on the computer and be subject to distractions.

New opening and getting the plot organized

2010-11-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

1,800 words today, which is about the only word count this week, I think.

That material is for a new opening, which I decided on after spending a lot of time on plotting and brainstorming. I started to feel that the problems I was leaving in my rear-view mirror for the time being were too significant to ignore any longer and that pressing on to the end would be a waste of energy given what I suspected about how the opening would change. I just wasn't comfortable having these structural problems hanging over my head.

Basically, there were three big problems that affected the structure throughout -- the secondary plot isn't set up through action and is relying on exposition late in the game, the main action takes too long to get started, and my character's basic motivation was too superficial. That worked to get me started, but it was turning into a fatal weakness.

A few days I couldn't have said all of that so succinctly. I now see these problems because of a lot of work getting organized using notecards and poster size sketch paper. Nothing revolutionary in this. Just clear off the dining table and start trying different ways of drawing the story arc. I spent a full day yesterday going through my draft and boiling it down to note cards by scene. (I found it helped if I had mostly cards for scenes and a few for exposition -- action and information that is provided to the reader.) All of that helped visualize what I have and don't have and to bring the problems to the surface.

I knew I needed a different concept of how I started and got into the first rising action, but I wasn't getting any good ideas how. Put in a lot of time brainstorming and making notes. Finally, this morning I hit on an idea for two new scenes in the beginning that hopefully deals with all those problems I summarized above.

Then sat down to write the first of those. (On the computer instead of on paper, like usual. Felt like the right thing, today.)

So, a good day's work and by some measures a good week's work. If I can get the second of the two scenes written before the Thanksgiving break, then I'll have a sense if my fixes are going to hold and can go from there.

Plot and children's books

2010-11-11T12:52:00.001-08:00

Children's books have more emphasis on plot.

Duh or not duh? Is that true?

I don't know for sure, but the process of writing this book definitely has me more focused on plot. Is that because I have a comparatively good sense of my character already? Or is it because I am responding to an innate understanding that a child reader will require a faster pace?

In theory I don't really believe that. Instinctively I think that a child reader expects the same mix of character development and plot as any other reader. They know that some genre books with only plot are just a kind of brain candy, and they fall everlastingly in love with stories that successfully make character development an integral part of the plot complications and resolution.

Probably I'm thinking more about plot not because I'm writing a children's book but because I'm writing an adventure story. I'm working in a genre that promises the reader more than the usual amount of escalation and crisis.

Living up to that promise is probably my biggest challenge in this book so far. I've got a good concept, and I've done a good job of putting the characters in the jackpot a couple times, but I don't have a great sense of how to manage the build up and the exposition.

Let's take the Percy Jackson example again. (I always have books in mind as models that I can learn from, and for now that one resembles what I'm doing in some ways.) In that book, the reader at some point has to learn a lot of "rules of the game." A story can do anything, but it has to live within the rules it sets up. The "game" in Percy Jackson is that the immortal gods of ancient Greece are still among us and have offspring, including the hero of the story, who starts out thinking he is an average middle-school kid at the beginning. The story operates by rules that the reader has to learn -- how mortals react to the fantastic things happening around them, for example. Basically, we need explanations for all the ways the fantastic and the earthly realms collide in order to keep the illusion going.

That takes a lot of exposition, which can bog down the plot, so timing when and how to get it in is important. That's something I'm struggling with a lot in my story. Right now I have long passages where the rules are laid out without much elegance, so I'll have a lot of work to do in the next rewrite to fix that.

Then there's the pacing of the plot. How big and explosive do you start and how do you build up to the climax? I got myself started by writing the best scene I could think of, which risks leaving me with nowhere else to go, potentially. So I have to work on building up the drama from there in ways that are credible but also exciting.

Anyway, this is the stuff that's preoccupying me. Just the basics of what information has to get into the story and when.

Word count at about 50,000 now.

Process and progress on third novel

2010-11-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

This book, #3, has one thing in common with the first in that I have only a bare bones sense of the plot, and I'm following my nose from one day to the next, aiming for a resolution that is pretty abstract in my imagination still. That has been good for momentum, but in the first case it left a trail of chaos in my wake that took many rewrites to shape up. There's a lot of that going on here, which is frustrating because in my second novel I was determined to work with a more efficient plan. But the second novel isn't getting written, is it? No momentum. Nothing there to fix.

There are some differences this time, though. First, I have what I hope is a better sense of what the mistakes are that I'm passing by, so I'll be much more ready to tackle them than I was with similar problems in my first book. For example, I have a lot of "throat clearing" in the story's set up, so I know I'll have to go back and cut out about 30 pages and get the story started quicker and with more focus. Thematically, I can see that I'm planting little seeds of interest but not really developing them, so I'll have to go back and work hard on that.

Another difference is that I'm doing a fair amount of typing in of the manuscript as I go. (Dictating it in, actually. See my previous post on the voice recognition software I'm using.) This is because I have been letting myself circle back for quick visits to material already written to work out structural changes before plowing ahead. These are larger concerns like the characters having taken a certain path, and now that I'm down that road, I've decided it's better if they take a different path. I go back and revise the appropriate scene to see how that's going to work, and then return to where I left off. It's hard to do this on the manuscript, so I wanted a typescript to work with, thus all the dictating and typing as I go.

Creating the typescript as I go is slowing me down quite a bit. That's why I churned out "Part I" -- about 30,000 words -- in a month. I've written about half as much in the last 4 weeks. I estimate I'm at about 45,000 words now, counting what's not typed in yet.

Also, the structural problems become more obvious and significant as I go along -- like painting myself into a corner -- so the momentum gets interrupted more for revision.

My initial goal was to keep it under 70,000 words, and I think I can do that. I'd like to get it way under that number. I have two big set pieces to go, I think, though as I said I don't have a real good sense of how they'll work. I just know where I need my characters to be by the end of them. We'll see.

Announcing the third novel

2010-11-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

So the main reason I haven't been writing here is because I didn't have the energy to consciously work out and talk through the ambivalence I'm feeling about the work I've been doing.

And I have been working, steadily and with enthusiasm, on a completely different novel than the one I am supposed to be working on. My supposed second novel has been left behind like a first wife.

The ambivalence is partly because of the hopscotch itself. It feels sort of like unfaithfulness. ("The heart can't help what it wants. We just fell in love.") The second novel itself felt like an indulgence, since I really ought to be working on revisions on the first novel. This is starting to look suspiciously like a lack of commitment.

But I got excited about this idea and don't want to stop. I only meant to make a couple sketches to show myself what it would be like. That was in early September. Then I looked up on October 1 to find that I had churned out 35,000 words. It has gone more slowly since then, but I'm plugging along.

The other reason I'm ambivalent is because of the project itself. It's a children's book. (Let's call it a middle-grades novel for now.) Now, I'm not a snob about children's literature. I understand -- at least at an intellectual level --that it the form has all the literary and artistic potential of the kind of fiction I normally read and aspire to write. But part of me doesn't really feel that way deep down. Heretofore, I've never really connected with children's literature as an adult. It's like I can't access whatever it is that allows adults to inhabit the mind of a young reader and get enthused the way children do. The emotional development, even in the most critically lauded and serious children's stories, usually feels just plain childish to me, and not in a good way.

I know that says more about me as a reader than about the "genre" itself. For one thing, there are exceptions, most clearly when I re-read books that I remember from my childhood. When I re-read Tales Of a Fourth Grade Nothing or a S. E. Hinton book, part of me goes back and inhabits the mental and emotional and even physical territory I was in during my first reading. Partly I'm feeling the power of the books and partly I'm remembering the power I felt the first time around. In any case I know the power is there.

And I find that I'm growing as a reader. I think "discovering" the literature is too simplistic a way of thinking about it -- as if I am static as a reader and just need to stumble across these books. The reader has to have the right stuff of some kind. Familiarity with the conventions, if nothing else. I have a similar theory about sports. I can on rare occasions admire an unfamiliar sport -- cricket, for example -- but without having grown up with it almost like a first language, I'm unlikely to really connect to the sport and understand it without a lot of study. I don't connect to comic books or sci fi or any "genre" fiction really, because it's never been a part of my experience. (This is just happenstance, not snobbery. I connect to bad television and Mario Brothers video games just fine.) I think you almost have to train yourself to be readers of certain kinds of fiction. The older you get, the more consciously that training probably has to be.

Of course, I read and enjoyed children's literature once, but it was a long time ago. And I was an advanced and precocious reader who jumped to adult books when I could and never looked back. Also, I think the growth in YA literature is a real difference in the generations. That category just wasn't there. Before YA, when you outgrew Judy Blume, you went to adult books that were comparatively accessible and easy to read (Salinger and Harper Lee and Vonnegut) and to the classics assigned in high school English (Orwell, Twain, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pearl Buck.) These were considered appropriate for teenagers without being targeted to teenagers. Without the bridge of YA, we left children's literature behind earlier and so its merits are more remote.

I am coming to appreciate children's literature a lot more. (I've been reading a ton of it.) About 8 years ago I made a run at Harry Potter to see what the commotion was about, but I got bored after a few chapters. I tried again recently and really did enjoy the first book, and as a writer I really admire Rowling. I can learn a lot from it.

Another reason I feel ambivalent about this project is that part of me feels that I don't have the right. See, for example, my condescending attitude above. A person like that doesn't have any business writing a children's book. But I swear I'm not slumming, and I swear I'm not dabbling. Well, I guess I got started by dabbling, but I'm taking it as seriously as I can now.

Honestly, I started off in the most insincere way possible short of saying, "How can I cash in on a trend?" A few years ago I was talking with a young friend about the YA novels she was reading -- which re-purpose some classic stories -- and about a week after that I heard an interview with a different children's author whose books also put old stories in a modern dress. That time, I thought, darn, I wish I had thought of that. It seemed like a clever idea. So I challenged myself just to think of a clever idea using the same basic move -- bring something familiar to life again in a new context. After awhile I had an idea, and I filed it away, thinking it wasn't really worth my time. Then a couple months ago a conversation with my wife led me to describing this idea. She asked a couple questions about it. "But how would this part and that part work?" Which forced me to think through the concept a little more and then a little more and after a couple days I had the whole idea in my head.

It was very "high concept" at the time, and I was just curious if it could work on the page. So I wrote a couple of scenes, and away I went. It grew and grew. I ran into technical problems and tackled them and moved on. I still am, actually. The closer I get to the climax, the more lengthy my "stuck" phases are.

Anyway, I plan to finish it and to make a serious rewrite of it. (Because I am leaving all kinds of plot and character wreckage behind me as I race through it. There's a lot that needs to be patched up.) And then we'll see. I am anxious to get back to the other other two books, but I'm respecting the muse. If this is the story coming to me, I'm not going to fight it, and the more I get into it, the less I'm feeling guilty about it.

Voice recognition software and my novel

2010-10-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of explaining to do about what's been going on with my writing the last few months. Another time, perhaps. I have been writing, I promise.

I have not been typing, though.I've been using a voice recognition software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking eleven.

Starting from right here, in fact, I'm going to use it to dictate and edit this blog entry.

It definitely takes some getting used to. I got it to help me save time and effort typing in my handwritten manuscript. My usual way working is to write longhand and then to start my edits by typing it into the computer. The software isn't really designed for that purpose — it's more for the kind of dictating that professionals use in medical offices and legal offices, and a lot of the examples in the promotion materials and instructions have to do with dictating e-mail. When you're using it that way, similar to how I'm using it now, it really requires that you compose a complete sentence or a complete phrase at least in your head before you begin to speak. That doesn't sound much like much, but once you try it you realize it really is a different way of composing. I assume it would take some getting used to enough not sure I could do it. I know that some people use software to actually compose new fiction this way. (I believe I read an interview with Richard Powers the said he used this kind of software for drafting his most recent books.)

So, in a way, what I'm using it for perhaps is even more effective. The thoughts are already composed, pretty well I hope, on paper, and I just have to read them aloud. However, one drawback is that it doesn't seem really suited for dictating dialogue. One of the inevitable drawbacks of this kind of softwareis that you have to pronounce aloud all the punctuation and formatting commands. That includes periods and commas, which applies to almost anybody and any use of this software. And it includes starting a new line and entering quote marks, which a fiction writer has a lot more of that other users perhaps. Rita couple pages of dialogue allowed while pronouncing every new line and quote Mark, and you'll see that it can be pretty tiresome.

Still, I think that the software is saving me a measurable amount of time on my particular process.I ran a test— one hour of typing and one hour of dictating – and I think I increased the speed by about 14% using the software. That's measuring my fastest typing speed against relatively amateur use of the software. I assume that all get faster at it as I get used to it. Comparing the errors in each version is a little bit more subjective, but I believe they will require similar amount of correction.

The require different kinds of correction, though. Most of the errors that come from typing are a result of typing too fast and my word processor marks them as spelling errors, so they are easy to spot. The software, however, won't allow itself to make a spelling error. Instead, it makes it choice inputs and something that is at least spelled correctly. So, for example, and that last sentence, it input the word inputs when I said "and puts." That error will be harder for me to find, because it is not flagged as a spelling error. In some cases, what results is so nonsensical that I can't figure out what I actually said originally, so I have to flip back through my manuscript and find before I could correct it.

Still, I think it will keep trying to use it for this purpose.

There are several other ways in which it has been frustrating, but I think a lot of that will diminish with practice and as I develop strategies to use it more effectively.

For example, I think that I will end up using a combination of dictating and typing. I find that if I at least keep my hand on the mouse while I am reading from my manuscript I can quickly correct errors as they are made. More aggressively, when he came to the long passages of dialogue I have experimented with keeping my fingers in the home position on the keyboard and typing the quote marks and the hard returns (enter key) and dictating the actual speech. This saved my voice a lot, I think. Also, as I used it more I found faster and faster ways to make corrections. For example, it's pretty good at getting vocabulary right, but it often doesn't get capitalization right. Especially in dialogue. The formatting for dialogue and fiction follows different capitalization rules then in other writing styles, so I had to go back and capitalize a lot of words, and I eventually discovered some quicker ways for doing that. (Dragon should think about allowing a setting that would make this come out right to begin with.)

I don't think I mentioned at the beginning – and I don't have confidence in my ability to use this to go back and enter this word makes more sense like I would do if I were typing them –that I use this for a lot more than just the one hour test. I estimate it was about ninety pages of typescript that I dictated over a few days last week. Maybe about 20,000 words.

Okay, going to finish now and leave this raw. I made minor edits as I went along, but I have not gone back to read this and correct errors that I did not notice as I was going along. This took me about 15 min. to compose this way. I'll report more when I know more!

Character development and plot

2010-08-19T07:04:00.001-07:00

I'm doing very little drafting lately, which dings up the self-confidence some, but I am getting legitimate work done. I still have a lot to figure out about my characters and what their issues are at the start of the book. I should have gotten this done months ago, but that's where I am. The last few days have seen some progress, I think.

I got on this track a few weeks ago when a writer friend heard the summary of my idea and reminded me, "Do you know what her problem is? Make sure she's got something going on." What's key for me right now about that advice, is the timing of her problem -- of the something going on. Obviously, during the course of the story characters have problems. External and internal conflicts. But it's sinking in for me in a conscious way for the first time that it's better if they arrive at the start of the story's present action with problems. I want something going on with them that makes them open to whatever action is proposed to them at the story's kick off.

Let's say, for example, that a secondary character says to the main character, "Let's go rob that liquor store." It's easier to get going if the answer he gives is a new answer (let's say, "yes" for our example) and if there is a good reason for him giving a new answer that he never would have given before. What happened yesterday, the day before the present action begins, to make him open to going a new direction. Maybe a scolding by his mom about his choice of friends is making him feel oppositional.

And not necessarily a dramatic new direction. Just a little stepping off of the usual path can be enough. The secondary friend says, "Let's go to the movies for once. You sit at home too much." What makes the main character agree for once? They arrive at the story's start with some kind of vulnerability to change.

Thinking of it that way is helping me get focused and get my story going, right now. This is too new idea for me to insist that it's universal or very common. I'd have to go through some stories to see how it plays out. Let's try one real quick: The Great Gatsby. First of all, I'm going to treat Carroway is the main character, which I'll argue about another time. Given that, roughly, you could say that Carroway is open to being sympathetic to Gatsby because he's annoyed with Tom and Daisy. But that annoyance really is triggered in the present action. What he arrives on the scene with is a sense of disconnection from the east coast vs. the midwest. A heightened sensitivity to elitism. It's a problem for him because his circumstances are encouraging him to ally himself more with the elites, and he feels conflicted. That's set up in the first grafs of the book, and it's back story, not present action, though it gets developed during the present action.

What does the character want

2010-08-17T10:16:00.001-07:00

Knowing what the character wants is so elemental and obviously necessary that I don't really have much to add to that. I just wanted to record that I've been struggling with that question lately. Pretty late in the game, apparently, but you take it when it comes.

Word counts and typing

2010-08-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm typing in a few scenes from my manuscript. It's not a full-bore effort to get it all typed in. I just want to see what some of the opening pages might possibly be and what they could read like if I sharpened them.

In the course of that I notice and have counted more deliberately than I did with the first book the difference between the word count of the manuscript (which is an estimate) and the actual word count on the computer. Once I type it in, it's running about 30% longer. That's mostly because I type I add and clarify and expand upon. It's really a second draft with a lot more material. It's only a small sample so far, but I expect the rest of it to run something like that.

On the other hand, I don't expect to type it all in. I'll probably be more discriminating about what's worth the effort. In theory, I have 32,000 words, but the 4,000 words I've typed is probably the best of the lot.

Too much dialogue

2010-08-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

For work related reasons I'm re-reading Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, a book I highly recommend. (More practically oriented than most rah-rah writing guides. If you're beyond need encouragement and are ready for advice, this is a great guide.) One section that never sunk in before is resonating with me now -- to beware of too much dialogue.

I knew this in a less conscious way from my first book. After writing a scene, I would look at it and have an uneasy feeling about how much dialogue was in it. It didn't seem quite right, though I couldn't explain why. The rewrites and revisions happened blindly without really understanding what I needed to do about the seeming excess of dialogue, and eventually I got it fixed, but it was like punching my way out of a paper bag.

One, as Burroway makes clear, dialogue should do more than one thing at a time -- to convey the literal meaning of the words plus something else like complicating the story or characterization. She doesn't say this, but I think it's implied: dialogue that drags on and on tends to be dialogue only doing one thing.

Two, she talks about how dialogue loses its power after awhile, so you want to save it for what is key to have in the character's voice. Another way of thinking about is the relationship between voice and reader energy. It's the narrator's voice that the reader has signed on for and invested themselves in. It takes reader energy to switch your attention from that voice to a character's voice. (Even if it's first-person narration, that narrator narrates in a voice somewhat different from self that they quote in the dialogue.) You want to ask the reader to leave the narrator's voice only when they're going to get some energy back in the form of important developments.

This is on my mind now because as I draft my current project, I find myself writing pages and pages of dialogue, and I d0 so with a sick feeling that it all will have to be thrown out later. I realize that what I'm doing isn't so much writing -- not even in the sense of drafting -- as daydreaming on paper. I don't really know what's happening in a scene, so I imagine the two characters talking to each other and write down what they would say. It's like a real-time transcript. In other words, this is another symptom of the key problem I keep talking about here -- that I don't know the story. A real-time transcript is the opposite of a story.

Transcribing in this way may be a way of finding a story. (And maybe not. It feels like sorting at random through all the sand on the beach.) But it's not really writing. I think maybe my mantra of "just add sentences" might be keeping me stuck in a spot that is not very productive.

Word count update: Almost no work done last week because of deadlines on paying work. A little bit of work this morning, but no more is expected this week because of a family trip. I have 32,000 words now, but that has to be heavily discounted, as explained before.

Background versus story

2010-07-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

I'm up to about 29,000 words, which could be a third of a book if I was kidding myself. I know that all I have been writing is background without yet tackling story. That is, present action. And I know from experience with my first book that almost no background will survive into later drafts. In reality I probably don't have 2,000 words of usable material yet.

This is coming out of my own particular strengths and weaknesses. I'm good at coming up with scene, situation, scenario. I'm weakest at plot -- getting the characters off this interesting starting point and into more and more trouble. That's always been my hang up. I'm proud of myself for working my way through it on my first book, but it remains my hang up still.

I try to treat the "drafting" time as precious -- nothing is as important as adding sentences first thing in the morning when I'm fresh -- but I've been doing that in full consciousness that I'm not getting anywhere, so I decided to use my fresh time this morning to do more reflective writing and note taking and brainstorming, trying to get a handle on the story.

The main outcome of that was realizing that the story that has taken shape was a little off in a very important way from the story I thought I was working on. It's more about one guy than about a relationship between two guys. That relationship is still there, but the story has been focusing on what that means for one of them. I could re-balance it. More likely I'll go with it.

I'm not sure what to do next. Probably I need to try writing (again) an opening scene based on this new understanding. Perhaps I should do more brainstorming to line up some of the other major scenes in the book. But that can be a kind of work-avoidance. I need to get back into the "just add sentences" mode as soon as possible, or months could by where I'm indulging (for me) the easier work of theorizing instead of writing.

Small blessings

2010-07-10T06:47:00.001-07:00

Two full weeks of work behind me, all at a pace a fraction of what I expect of myself -- about 7,000 words total in 10 days -- but sitting down every day has to count as victory for now.

It's amazing how completely opposite this process has been to what I planned and expected. It rattles the confidence.

Trying to look on the bright side

2010-07-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Not much more than a few chicken scratches today. But I keep trying to count every day with any time in the writing chair as a success. Gotta have faith that if I sit there long enough I'll figure out a way to get it written.

Noisy neighbors

2010-07-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

Ugh, my neighbors. They really wrecked my flow yesterday. The kids are just regular noisy. Their mother only has one setting -- screaming threats. It's not the kind of thing you can tune out when they come rolling out into their backyard for a scene. I can pack up and go inside to write there, but in the summer with the windows open, that's almost just as loud.

400 words yesterday, which I consider a bust. 600 words today.

My tally so far is over 21,000 words counting everything from when I started last January. Sounds more impressive than it is. There's probably 3 pages in it all of it that will survive to a late draft. It's all about finding what to write about still.

840 words

2010-06-29T07:24:00.001-07:00

Not a great day, but having not great days is part of the process. I'm grateful that I was able to just add sentences.

I am getting a little concerned about my stamina. It seems forever since I went for more than an hour.

The warm weather writing chair

2010-06-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Good start to my restart today. 800 words. About 1 hour of solid invention. Finished off with a good place to take it up again tomorrow.

Felt like old times especially because I'm back in the chair that I wrote the first novel in -- a cheap outdoor glider on our screened porch. Hard to believe it was 3 years ago that I was doing the same thing. I'm not sure what will happen if the timing is such that I'm writing a first draft in the winter.

Yet another fresh start

2010-06-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my extended stay overseas and am just about back on a normal sleep schedule. Tomorrow is a Monday and as good a day as I'll get to recommit.

To what, exactly, isn't clear, but I'm going back to basics. Put the butt in the chair and pick up the pen and sit there until my time is up. No other expectations matter.

That said, I expect to spend the first-thing-in-the-morning energy drafting new material for the second novel. Meanwhile, the first novel is back in play. I think it needs to be revised some more. I'm going to give that the energy of later in the day for the time being, at least until I have a better sense of what work needs to be done.

Afternoons are devoted to getting back to paying work, which I gave myself a leave from during the last six months abroad.

It wasn't a successful trip in most ways. I thought it would be a writer's retreat where I got the second novel written, but that's not how it worked out, and I'm just going to have to let that go and not let the "ought to"s and the "should have"s keep me from JUST ADDING SENTENCES.

I really am back to the beginning.

On excerpting novels to make short fiction

2010-06-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

I ought to have remembered my previous theorizing about the difficulty -- and often unsuitability -- of excerpting novels to produce something that can pass as a short story. I worked through this just about a year ago when Lorrie Moore had what I thought was a very flat "story" in The New Yorker, only to discover later that it was an excerpt of her forthcoming novel in which context it made a lot more sense.

If I had been thinking of that I might have been more generous or patient with Jeffrey Euginides' recent work in the The New Yorker. He's one of my favorites. Or his second novel Middlesex is, anyway. He's not exactly the most prolific writer, and I eagerly await his next novel. In the meantime, he had a piece of short fiction in The New Yorker recently, which I read and was so disappointed by. That's it? What a lame ending.

It turns out I was mistakenly assuming it was a short story (I wish The New Yorker would account for this and just put add the words "excerpt from a novel in progress" at the start. Because they feel the work should stand on its own? It's the 21st century. People expect a little context.) The novel is apparently forthcoming. Eugenides discusses it and film adaptation and other stuff on The New Yorker book blog.

So the lame ending is presumably the end of a chapter and makes more sense read that way. I wonder if it's even the end of an episode in a longer chapter. In any case, I take it as further support for my theory. Maybe this will be an annual event -- a weirdly flat short "fiction" in The New Yorker in June and a long-awaited novel later in the summer. Maybe we can predict who it will be in 2011. Who else has been missing from the scene for several years? Maybe it will be Harper Lee.

The spayed computer

2010-06-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

I've written before about how easily distracted from my work I am by email and internet and how I ought to have a second computer that isn't connected. There's an interesting note about that strategy from Johathan Lethem on the Pen America site, and the New Yorker book blog summarizes it:

In an e-mail correspondence posted on PEN American's Web site that's been running this week, Jonathan Lethem tells David Gates his secret for writing fiction: an Internet-less laptop. "I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing," Lethem explains. "You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the Internet function out of the thing entirely. 'I can just hide it from you,' he said. 'No,' I told him, 'I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.'"

I've decided I'm actually going to do it. (In my case, this is more about the revision process, which I do in a word processor, than the drafting, which I do long-hand.) I now have a computer to spare that will work for this -- one I replaced because it was operating too slowly and because I wanted more memory for photos on the extended trip I'm on. When I get home, the new one will be my connected computer, and I'm going to spay the old laptop to use for the revision work.

Very minor progress

2010-05-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

Poor neglected blog. It's been awhile, I know.

I took that long trip referred to in the last post, had a couple weeks concentrating on paid work, and then took another long trip. So, lots of excuses for not working on the book. But the main excuse is that I don't know what I'm doing with it, so when I do have time, I'm intimidated and end up wasting the time. (I'm at GMT +7 right now, with very few cable channels and getting quite homesick, so when I see a baseball game is being broadcast live during my morning coffee, it's pretty easy to give in to that for a couple hours.) And it's so freaking hot here. It's just plain difficult to work.

But there has been some tiny bit of progress, though it is difficult to characterize. Basically, I've been stewing about the book now and then and taking a few notes. I've got an idea of a theme that I want to explore.

Which may be the kiss of death. Thinking too much about theme is probably fatal to the art. It's easy to drift over into graduate student thesis territory, and I'm better wired for that mistake than most. The way to avoid trouble, I think, is to keep thinking of it as an exploration. Exploring a theme should be OK. Presenting a theme is trouble.

In a sense, I've been feeling like the book isn't ambitious enough, even though I don't have a basic story yet and no prospect of ever finishing. I need it to be more worthwhile -- more worth the effort. The stewing I've been doing and the field of exploration I've come up with have been feeling a lot more reassured on that point.

In all honesty, I don't anticipate that I actually pounding out the pages for a couple months at least. I have a month more on this trip and some recovery time, and I'm thinking about returning to my first book for revisions during the summer. That's a big decision that I'm still thinking about. My plan is to get home and do a reboot and situational analysis.

Hiatus

2010-03-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't been making any progress for the last several days, because I've had to concentrate my morning energy on a work assignment, and I definitely won't be making any progress for at least another 19 days, probably longer, because I'll be on a long trip. In theory, a person can travel and write at the same time, but I don't think I'm that kind of person. I'll be thinking about it though!

750 words. Hard lessons

2010-03-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

I wrote 750 words this morning, which by my standards is nothing to brag about, but I'm recommitting myself to the basic thing -- just write something every day. I've been picking around the edges of different possible scenes this way, not really creating anything tangible, but hopefully doing some necessary seeding that will bear fruit later. I'm just trying to turn myself over to the idea of not knowing what I'm doing. It's been a hard lesson the last couple months. I thought a first draft would emerge as easily as with my first book and that the result would need less work on subsequent drafts. I've turned out wrong on the first item for sure and probably on the second item, too.

I read Jane Smiley's most recent novel the other day, which inspired me to go online and read some criticism of it, which lead me to an old interview with her from about 8 years ago. In that interview, she's basically summarizing what she says in Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Novel, which I've quoted here several times in the past already. But it was a kick in the pants to hear it again in a different way. She talks about just finding the energy and momentum to push through to the end. Make it as crummy as it needs to be just so long as it keeps moving forward. "Just add sentences." That was mantra the first time, and it has to be this time.

World's worst writer's retreat

2010-03-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

Well, the reason I haven't been posting isn't that I've been working too hard on the book. I haven't had anything to sayhere except to express shame at how little progress I'm making. I'm about 9 weeks into the project, and I've got a little over 13,000 words, not a line of which I expect will be worth even typing into the computer. This a very different experience from my first book.

And a very different experience from what I had planned. I was way off in two assumptions -- that I could plan the book out and then write it and that this period of time would be a naturally productive time to do that. On the first point, the honest truth is that I still don't really have any idea of what the story is and what I'm building. Second, this so-called writer's retreat has been anything but. I knew it would be a challenge -- I'm living in a temporary situation in a developing country with all the quirks and discomforts and failures (power failures, for example, which we had this morning) that go with that. Every errand takes 5 times longer than it would at home. Even if I can protect a morning to write, I have to beat back more than the usual share of mental list-making. And then there are other distractions like side trips that take some time to bounce back from.

So, I should probably give myself some credit and rethink what it is possible to get out of this. Maybe my goal should be to go home in a few months with a good story to work on. Or with all the background and character sketching worked out. Or with ideas for 5-6 major scenes. And to get there, I probably have to take some pressure off myself so I can be more productive with each writing session. I've been sitting down to work with the expectation that I know what the book is and am producing a good draft, so that every second that ticks by is a failure to live up to that expectation.

I don't want to give up on the theory that it is possible to plan out a book and then write it, but it's not what happened in this case. At the very least, I didn't take enough time to plan it. Probably it's something that will have to emerge through the writing.

My real problem, I think, is that I have a severe aversion to and sense of guilt about waste -- wasted time and effort in this case -- and the feeling that I am wasting them adds pressure and decreases pleasure. I'm not having any fun exploring and inventing. It should be more fun than I've allowed it to be. Not only is this is the world's worst writer's retreat. I may be temperamentally the world's worst candidate for a writer's retreat.

Lapsed

2010-02-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

It's not going well, obviously. I hope to revivify myself and the work this week.

Feeling better

2010-01-27T19:11:00.000-08:00

I've been working the plan I described yesterday and generating more material to work with. That's good. Some of it feels right, which raises the question of what's going on when it doesn't feel right. Is that a sign I shouldn't pursue that material? Anyway, my little stack of mud pies is bigger than it was yesterday.

For the most part, I have had energy for morning and afternoon sessions, though I don't always have the time for the afternoon session. It's adding up to 2 - 3 hours a day.

Reboot

2010-01-26T23:45:00.000-08:00

How to describe what I've been up to in the last week?

Basically, I'm rebooting the project. As noted before, I've let my personal timeline push me into starting to draft too soon. All I really have is a situation -- not a story. The advance work needs more attention. (For the process I want to follow anyway. I know there's a school of thought that says just start writing and work out the problems as they emerge. That's basically how I did my first book. But I'm inclined to plan this one more before trying to draft it.)

One thing I did that actually took a lot of time was to outline a particular book that is both a favorite and a model for this particular project in some ways. Chapter by chapter, I wrote out what was going on in it and every once in awhile paused to make notes on what I was learning that I could apply.

One result was I developed a kind of schematic to help me brainstorm some plot and character development and to ensure that more (if not enough) is going on in the story. It helps me create complication in a way that is integrated. I'm sure this idea has been articulated in similar language a million times before, but this is what dawned on me and that I'm using to guide me for the time being.

Think of it as a triangle, which I won't try to draw here. Three points.

A. PERSONAL/PRIVATE story elements -- goals and obstacles having to do with home and family.

B. PUBLIC story elements -- goals and obstacles having to do with career, work or the outside world.

C. CHARACTER elements -- strengths and weaknesses of the character/s.

Each of these interact and push and pull one another. The desire for success publicly is complicated by the desires having to do with home which are complicated by the character's qualities, which change in response to the ups and downs of reaching for their goals, etc.

These should generate some number of conflicts, some of which are external to the character and some of which are internal to the character.

So, basically I'm going through each of my main characters and doing a lot of brainstorming and story development on each of these points. Sometimes that leads to drafting in the book's voice for a little while, but I don't really take that seriously yet. I just regard it all as note-taking.

I don't know how long this is going to take. I just try to do my best to treat it seriously for a few hours every day, and hopefully I'll have a good story I believe enough in to write soon.

Now, there is a danger of planning it so much that I'm bored with it. I saw a quote from Margaret Atwood recently where she talks about never knowing the endings of her books and never planning them out, because if she had all that ready, she wouldn't be interested in writing it anymore. Maybe the process I'm working on is too controlling. But I'm trying to compensate for another weakness, which is the difficulty of developing plot. I don't want to end up with a draft with no plot, so this is how I'm going about things.

Trough of despair

2010-01-22T00:30:00.000-08:00

Hey, I passed 400 entries in this journal the other day.

It's not going well. I'm coming to the realization that I don't have much of a story at all. I'm knocking my head out to figure out one plot issue, under the mistaken idea all along that that one point is so key that it will carry the rest of the book. It's a trifle. I need a lot more story to make the book worthwhile.

It's helped me to remember that the core of the story has to be about relationships. (Did I already say this in an earlier entry?) Even if I know a lot about individual characters -- and I don't know much -- there's no story until they start to get intimate and have conflicts.

Basically, all I have is a setting. An interesting one, I hope, and not just a gimmick. But no matter how interesting it's not going to be a story until I start to pile on some trouble for the characters.

Figuring this out, as usual, is part of the process and ought to count as progress, but I can't help but notice the number of days passing by with not addition to my word count. Instead I'm making lots of theoretical notes.

Yesterday, I spent all day putting what plot I think I know on to slips of paper to shuffle. Boy, did that reveal some gaps.

Today I've been going through the exercise of outlining a book that is a favorite and that is inspiring this one. The point of the exercise is to see how that book works, where the sense of story comes from, the motive power, the interest. That's revealing all kinds of machinery that my story so far lacks.

It's the eternal problem with me. I've always gotten overexcited about scene and scenario without having any sense of plot.

Counting what I tend to discount

2010-01-17T18:48:00.000-08:00

I tend to categorize and pigeonhole and to put little mental asterisks next to things that don't resemble exactly everything else in a given pigeonhole. It's a bad tendency toward black-and-white thinking in a process where that is least likely to be helpful. Also, as you've seen, I measure my progress by counting things.

So I'm in a confusing period right now with nothing much to count but knowing that I ought to feel like I'm making progress anyway. I want to think of the work in two different aspects -- the preparatory/notetaking/journaling aspect and the actual drafting. I even keep that work in two separate notebooks, and I tend to count as "writing" what happens in the drafting notebook. But those two different aspects of the work are not so different at this stage. It's a blurry line, and out of frustration that I don't quite know what to write at the moment, I turn to my prep notebook to talk myself through it and end up doing a little bit of writing that I wish had emerged in my drafting notebook.

So for that reason, I can say I've made some measure of progress on the manuscript every day, including over the weekend, and I'm up over 6,000 words.

But still it is all background and character sketching and not yet tackling the present action plot. Which is the main challenge of this confusing period. I'm trying to figure that out still (it goes hand-in-hand with figuring out the characters, by the way) but my personal time line is to be drafting at this point. The story just isn't ready to be written. It's not that it won't be or can't be or that it's a flawed or lost project. My little tugs of despair or really only the result of an unreasonable time line that I've imposed on myself and the subsequent tendency to discount the necessary work that I am doing of finding the story and characters. That has to happen, and I've tried to rush it.

Building up stamina

2010-01-13T20:09:00.001-08:00

1,700 words today. That usually happens when I've got a scene with a little bit of action and development in it. Once I start finding the story more, I'll have days of 2-3,000 words. So far, it's really just background sketches, which is starting to worry me. I guess it's only a trap if I make the mistake of thinking it all will be a part of the book. It might be a necessary part of the process to write this, but I can't let myself get frustrated later when I figure out that it's unnecessary material. Still, I need to start tackling the actual story.

The joy of creation

2010-01-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

I just love writing the first draft. Perhaps if I loved it less I would focus more and not need to do so much work on the rewrites. But I get a kick out of making stuff up as I go along. When I started this morning (900 words today), I really had no idea what I was going to write. I thought I would establish a certain journey that my character makes by car over a couple of days. I didn't have a theme or anything -- no certain plot points to hit, no certain characterization I wanted to weave in. I didn't know what she would do on the journey. I just made up a first sentence, wrote that down and kept going. An hour later I had invented all kinds of interesting walk-on characters and background anecdotes. Doubtlessly, almost all of it will get cut eventually, but it was fun. It's fun knowing I'm able to.

850 words

2010-01-11T19:49:00.000-08:00

Nothing special to report. Typical working day - 850 words. Still sketching background material for now and avoiding the problem of plot. I have some ideas, but I also have some problems with the ideas. The same could probably be said of voice. I'm establishing a voice as I do this work, but I have some hesitations about what is being established. Pretty soon I'll have to come to some working decisions on this or I won't have work to do.

I started a novel today

2010-01-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

Today is the big day. I was scared as hell, and didn't have any sense of purpose, but I told myself what got me through the first one -- "just add sentences." And I also got to tell myself that I had done it once before. I sat down and wrote 700 words, a pretty light day by my standards, but I'll build up my stamina. So far, I'm ignoring the fact that I don't really have much of a plot, so for awhile I foresee myself writing a lot of overly detailed background material.

I was sitting on the couch in my new short-term rental in Saigon. Plenty to distract me -- it's pretty noisy here -- and I got up once to watch an old couple walking slowly down the street, the man playing some kind of traditional music adapted for Stratocaster and portable amplifier and the woman singing along and holding her hat out. They were tethered by the microphone cord plugged into the amplifier slung over his shoulder. How am I going to compete with that? How am I going to create anything as vivid as what's going on around me?

I think the length of my writing sessions is mostly determined by the natural breaks in the narrative. It's hard to come to a scene and then start a new one, so if it's a long scene, I have a day where I write a lot. If it's a short scene, I have a day where I don't write a lot. If I can train myself to restart again after finishing one scene, I could build up my word count a lot faster.

By the way, for the purposes of this journal, I think I'll refer to this book as BR.

OK, if I can find a satisfying lunch and get some household chores done, I'll have a routine. 100 days like that and I'll have a first draft.

New year, new novel

2009-12-28T05:18:00.000-08:00

I'm making a big transition in the next few days -- moving overseas for an extended stay and starting a new book. In a sense, it's a restart of this blog. I'll be back to where I was in 2007 in terms of the writing process.

I'll be living in Vietnam for about 5 1/2 months, and most of my energy for weeks has been focused on preparing for that. And I expect a lot of energy focused on getting set up there for awhile. Plus, I have several once-in-a-lifetime distractions during the stay, including some extended side trips.

But once I am settled and to the extent that I'm not socializing or traveling, I won't have a lot of responsibilities. So I plan to make it a writer's retreat. I've been stewing on this idea for my second novel since last September, sneaking in what research that I can, doing a lot of note-taking and character sketching and so on. I'm not as ready as I wanted to be, but I'm going with the flow. Sometime as soon as possible after the morning of Monday, January 4, after I finish a breakfast of cafe sua da and banh mi op la, I'm going to sit down in a quiet corner of our apartment with my notebook and start drafting the book. One way or another, with the information and skills I have. We'll see what happens. I think I'll be lucky to have it 3/4 drafted before I have to come home.

Stay tuned to see how it goes.

Books read in 2009

2009-12-28T04:30:00.000-08:00

As discussed at length at the end of 2008 and 2007, I have a peculiar and rationally inconsistent habit of keeping a list of all the books I read, but only counting them if I finish them. It is therefore a really misleading snapshot of how I spend my reading time -- no short stories unless it was part of a collection I finished, no anthologies I dip into, no literary journals and none of the dozens of books I start and don't complete. Some of those, it wouldn't be fair to count because I just read a few pages, and some of them it's really hard not to finish because I've already invested in 400 pages of time into it but there are another 400 to go.

For example, I foundered this year on Anna Kerenina about half way through, so it's not on my list. I read and loved War and Peace and was glad I did I finished it, but wished I counted for five books on my list. I forced myself to finish A Northern Clemency so I could add it to the list and regretted that much effort. For those reasons, I don't feel bad about counting much shorter books, such as all the S.E. Hinton books I revisited during a nostalgia phase last summer.

I don't have time this year to type out the whole list here -- more later on the reasons for my time crunch -- but I wanted to make a post here, partly to brag and partly to have a consistent record from year to year. My grand total this year is . . . 89.

That's probably the highest total ever, but my lifelong goal is to achieve 2 per week, 104 on the list for the year. I was always one step behind that for most of the year and sprinting not to lose any more ground. But about the middle of October I saw it wasn't going to happen --that I could maybe hit 95 if I kept sprinting -- and I started to coast. I don't anticipate doing any better in 2010 because of a new schedule coming up.

But how about the literary value of the list? There are fewer titles this year that were read to help me with my first novel, since it was really done. There are a few titles related to my second book (more on that later) which I plan to start soon. There is a Napoleonic Wars phase, really starting with The Charterhouse of Parma last year and continuing with War and Peace and a bio of Napoleon this year. There are several biographies, which my wife and read to each other at night. There are the textbooks for the classes I teach. I did count a couple audio books my wife and I listened to. I was reading more poetry at the start of the year and seemed to get focused on other things later in the year.

There a few graphic novels. I was partly inspired by the events in Iran to read Persepolis and partly inspired by The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay to learn more about comics. Kavelier and Clay was my great discovery this year. I read it twice and have it packed for another trip coming up, and I read a few other Chabon books. I especially loved Wonder Boys. Another new favorite is Middlesex, which I also read twice, and enjoyed The Virgin Suicides.

I read a bunch of dogs that I can't believe were so highly recommended. But I already complained about those enough. So I'll finish up with this short list of other fiction that I particularly enjoyed in the last year, in no particular order, some new books, some new to me.

-Oive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
-Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham
-Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun
-The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
-Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger
-Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
-American Woman by Susan Choi
-Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
-Paris Trout by Pete Dexter
-The Book Borrower by Alice Mattison

Well, one more word, for the sake of poetry this time. Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds. She kicks ass as always.

The right tools for the job

2009-11-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

Dork time.

I took a big step today. After much deliberation, I decided on and purchased the notebook and pens I'll use to draft the next book. 6 weeks in advance, but I couldn't wait. It's one of the few parts of the process that feels good.

The decision is a little more complicated this time because the supplies have to come with me on a plane trip where I am already pushing the weight limits for luggage. This much notebook paper means two fewer novels I can bring with me to read. They have paper where I'm going of course, but I want to have just the perfect thing, and I can't be sure they have that.

Actually I will have to find something else when I get there. The notebook is 3-subject, 200 pp., college ruled, and I required about twice that much paper on the first draft of my other novel. But I'll have a couple months of writing before I have to cross that bridge.

The spiral is heavy duty so I can flip it open and write on the backs of sheets comfortably, and the cover is heavy duty for long wear. The spiral has a nylon cover sewn over it for less mess, and there's a little loop sewn in to hold my pen! A few pockets are in the dividers, though I don't really clutter those up with loose sheets so much, so a few is just right.

When it comes to pens, I've figured out that I prefer fine/.7mm over xfine/.5mm. I've thoughtlessly bought the wrong size a few times. (They always seem to be the ones on sale.) So I've got a package of Uniball fine points that ought to last I don't know how long. They were too expensive to buy back-up packages. The notebook was too expensive, too. But you have to have the right tools for the job.

End dork time.

First words, second novel

2009-11-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

In the last couple months, I've been doing a lot of thinking about and note taking for my next book, and today I put down a few words for the first time. Oh, that felt good.

For the most part, I refrain from writing (a strategy I've written about before -- basically, I'm saving the mojo until the time is right) though the urge is strong. I do various kinds of prep work instead. Brainstorming exercises, research, character notes. Hopefully I'll get to the point where I can outline it some before I start.

Doing some research today, there were a few details I wanted to capture, but I wanted to get them in context to show how I'll use those kinds of details. So I indulged by letting myself slip into the voice of the character giving these details -- which are part of the backstory -- in narrative. It's a hell of a lot more fun than rewriting. Or searching for agents for my first book.

I'm doing all this prep work in anticipating of starting to draft the book shortly after the start of the new year. I'll have a big change in my schedule and environment then which I think will allow regular intense focus on writing a new book.

Probably not a lot of posting here until then -- all the work is pretty mundane -- but the few minutes of writing I did today seemed noteworthy.

Milestone

2009-10-01T09:58:00.001-07:00

I got my first rejection from an agent today. From someone named Caitlin. So it begins.

Back to graduate school

2009-09-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

No, not really. But I have been doing some reading that reminds me of being in graduate school -- back when I spent a lot more time trying to understand what Derrida was talking about.

This is prompted by thinking a lot about possibilities for my second novel. (I have a goal of starting a new project shortly after the start of the year to coincide with another big change in my work schedule.) And that thinking has led me to revisiting some of the literary theory I used to spend so much time with. Or, more accurately, to the theory that wasn't in vogue then and got skipped over or very aggressively dismissed. Like people wouldn't talk to you in the hallway if they thought you were curious about the wrong stuff.

Or, even more accurately, not literary theory so much as literary criticism. I'm trying to lay my hands on good examples of close reading of literature. People spend so much time articulating and defending ways of reading, that it's hard to get to the reading itself, never mind wading through the specialist's vocabulary (presuming that the writer actually intends anything intelligible, which I think it's legitimate to wonder about sometimes.)

I'm interested in what I'll call, until I better educate myself and figure out who has already discussed this, a classical rhetorical reading of literature--an analysis of how a novel achieve it's effect on the reader. What are the moves that a novel makes to create its effects? Maybe I'm looking for more of the kind of insight I got reading James Wood's How Fiction Works, but different. His other books were too thematically oriented to satisfy this interest.

How all of this relates to any novel I may write, it's hard to describe. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

So, I have a pile of books from the library from a lot of old-timers. I'm digging I.A. Richards and Leslie Fiedler. I'm intrigued by the thesis that Andre Brink proposes about self-consciousness about language in the novel as a form, but I don't see it in the examples he draws out. I get that the novels he surveys have play with language as part of their plot or theme, but I don't see how the novels are themselves self-conscious. So, I'm not yet finding what I'm looking for. Maybe when I start this Wayne Booth book, The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Additional reading note: I've been up late reading Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me and am enjoying it a lot. It has certain superficial elements in common with my book, so I'm studying it to see he achieves his effects and what I can learn from it.

Two new essays out

2009-09-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

I have two new essays out on arts/culture/literary websites:

"Decompensate your way to better fiction" on The Millions.

"Film adaptations: Short stories vs. novels" on The New Haven Review.

Revising Chapter 1

2009-09-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

Lots of stuff happening on the "getting out there" front, but the only actual work on the novel has been to start working on Chapter 1. I met with a friend who has some contacts, and she's going to look at this chapter before referring me, so I'm trying to get that as sharp as possible. The work I did last week on the excerpt for my website helped me get keyed in on some of the sentence-level bloat that I can do better on. I continue to be amazed about how much stuff can come out after so many dozens of readings already.

In general, I'm leaning toward revising the book one more time before starting to send it out. I'll decide next week I think.

I get a shout out on The Arts Council of Greater New Haven website

2009-09-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

In a run-down of cool New Haven writer's websites, I get a shout-out from Bennett Lovett-Graff, publisher of The New Haven Review, and contributor to The Arts Council of Greater New Haven's monthly newspaper.

“Working on a Novel” is a true author’s blog, being the online diary of the trials and tribulations of one writer engaged in the tedium and exhilaration of trying to make out of a sufficient number of words that thing we know as a “novel” — a story that will hang together over the course of several hundred pages. At this author’s site, visitors will see a record of false starts and episodes of writer’s block, as well as rushes of literary inspiration and adrenaline — all familiar to those of us who have always known how much mightier the pen is than the sword — and how much more difficult it is to wield.

Thanks Bennett. Those other websites look great, too.

FYI, if you go to the original, you'll see a note about protecting my identity. That's back when I was keeping this blog anonymously.

Draft query letter up for critique

2009-09-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

A draft of my query letter is up for critique at The Public Query Slushpile, a kind of workshop site. Thanks to Rick for running that. Feel free to drop in and add your two cents.