750 words. Hard lessons

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.

Cruising now

My theory that the remaining chapters will give me less trouble looks sound for the moment--at least until someone reads it and brings me back to reality. I put in another p.m. session after lunch and in 2 hours worked through and finished Ch. 13. I had notes from my wife reading it several months ago, which mostly amounted to cutting out a lot of background exposition stuff. I took out a lot of it but convinced myself some it is necessary. Regardless, I probably need to print out this and other chapters where I've done this level of work so I can look hard at the sentence-level some more.

The result for now is that I cut an additional 4 pp. That's minus 54 so far and sitting on 393 pp. This is from an already comparatively short chapter. Wow, it's only 11 pp. now. Shorter than I thought.

This chapter and the few following are heavily influenced by a point that Jane Smiley makes in Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Novel. She says that at about 65-70% mark, novels often have a feeling of gathering themselves up and directing their energy toward getting to the end. The pace seems to pick up. I knew that I wanted my Part I to end at about the 2/3 mark and that there would be significant shift in time and change in the character during that period. (I was thinking of To The Lighthouse as a model, when the death of the mother has happened off stage between two parts of the book and we return to characters have changed a lot.) So I figured this transition would be an opportunity to pick up the pace of the narration like Smiley says is often typical. I made a conscious effort when I was drafting (two years ago!) to have the episodes and the chapters come at a quicker tempo.

I guess my now 11-page Chapter 13 is a sign of that. Chapter 14 ought to be. It was once two separate short chapters and I combined them. It's 24 pages right now. I'll deal with that tomorrow.

A rut?

Woke up late today, got a late start and didn't do much more than tinker with the chapter for awhile. It ought to be comparatively easy to get this chapter in good shape, but I'm not mustering the energy for it. My mind is easily turned to other things and won't stick to the work in front of me.

Like Jane Smiley says, boredom with the work is really a symptom of something else, usually fear and uncertainty. I guess I'll have to go through this in every chapter.

Two part structure

As I was drafting, there was one way in which my experience was paralleling the advice of the experts, which gave me some comfort.

Jane Smiley in Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Novel talks about how at around the 60 percent mark in most novels it’s common for the story to fell like it’s taking a deep breath, gathering itself up and starting to move with more deliberation toward it’s conclusion.

When I read that, after I had been writing my first draft for awhile, I realized that the two-part structure I was using naturally set me up to do almost exactly what she was describing. I always knew that I intended to bring my main character to a crisis point mid way through the book that got resolved but at the same time complicated the larger conflict and that put the character in a different light. I imagined that sub-conflict as almost like a novella on its own and the rest of the story that would follow like a sequel, picking up the character at a later period of time.

If you’re familiar with To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, you might have a sense of what I mean. Part I in that book is a complete long story in its own right, a lot like James Joyce’s “The Dead,” but it is also a necessary piece of the larger story that unfolds in the rest of the book.

So I began to imagine the novel being two parts, the first part concluding with the crisis and resolution in my sub plot and the second part naturally concluding with the major climax of the story. And I always felt that part one would take about two-thirds of the total book to spin out and that part two would be the last third of the book.

When I finished part one and was planning part two, I could feel the shift in tone and in pace. Things were going to start happening more quickly, the chapters would have more numerous and shorter episodes in them. The book took on a different “mouth feel,” as the gastronomes would say.

I was right at the 60-65 percent mark and it was just like Smiley had said—the story was gathering itself up to make the rest of its march to the end.

Is it autobiographical?

Jane Smiley says,

“Almost every novelist, no matter how great, begins by portraying his friends and associates thinly veiled in his work. This is a very good idea, because the novel is a demanding interpersonal medium, and it is much harder to demonize or sanctify a character than it is to demonize or sanctify a relative. As soon as you put words in your dastardly brother’s mouth, you begin, at least in a rudimentary way, if only for the sake of the plot and future critical acclaim, to see things from his view, because if you did not, the character based on him would not be able to speak convincingly.”

Clever, but not really to the point. That tells why writing an autobiographical book is a good idea to come to terms with how you feel about your brother. It doesn’t say why it’s a good idea for the sake of the book. You could just as well write about totally imaginary characters and not be tempted with the lifetime habit of how you think about the real person.

Rituals

Jane Smiley says,

“ There is a difference between discipline and ritual, even though they sometimes seem similar. Discipline is a form of training, a way of developing good habits or breaking bad ones . . . . Rituals may encourage rather than deter, if the ritual is a type of formalized preparation for the day’s work . . . . But the dangers with rituals is that they can as easily prevent you from getting on with your work as enable you. Any time you begin to think that conditions have to be just right for you to sit down to your novel, chances are you are avoiding it rather than engaging with it”

While writing my first draft, I really tried to take the advice implied in this distinction. I think in the past I have romanticized rituals—feeling that I had to have a certain notebook, a certain pen, a dedicated space. This time I kept telling myself, nothing is important as adding sentences. All the rest is a kind of busy work. Just add sentences every day, no matter what. That means repressing the impulse to develop rituals.

I nevertheless ended up developing regular habits regarding the pen and paper and the chair, but it was without aggrandizing them. When it was cold on the porch in my chair where I spent most of the summer writing in longhand, or when it was noisy from lawn mowers in the neighbors yards, I went inside and found another chair and kept writing. I didn't let the ritual keep me from being disciplined.

Letting it stew

Work on my novel appears to have stopped completely. That's partly because I was sick, partly because I've been busy. But I know the real reason is fear and boredom. As I've written before, paraphrasing Jane Smiley, the fear and boredom are really a symptoms of something else.

So even though work has stopped, I'm trying to take comfort from the theory that it's continuing to stew--that I'm mulling it over and figuring out what the story can be and what it's problems are.

I'm pretty sure that my subconscious continues to work away at it, though you can never really be sure about that, can you? You just get the occassional hint when something pops through to the consciousness, and I'm getting those. Yesterday I had a moment when I thought, "Oh, what if my character . . . . "

The biggest danger is not respecting the work that it takes and making lame excuses. I know I sound like I'm in that space, but I don't feel like I am. So I'm not worrying about it right now.

Everyone's process is different. For me, right now I'm feeling like if I make progress on other parts of my life--shaping my professional responsibilities so that I can take advantage of the writing impulse when the opportunity comes--then that's a kind of necessary progress too.

Hopefully more honest work to report on about my novel soon.

Alignment of character and plot

Today I was thinking mostly about something Jane Smiley says--that when you look back on a plot you should see an extended argument for the character credibly taking an action at the end what never would have seemed possible at the beginning.

It's like a magic trick--the reader gets two contradictory notions of the character at the beginning and the end and the plot makes the connection between them believable.

I'm realizing more and more that my first draft ending--really most of my plot--doesn't have my character doing enough. Too much observation and not enough response to what he observes.

So my exercise today was really just basic brainstorming of possible plot developments, particularly at the end. What wild things could my character do that seem unlikely for him to do?

The idea is that if I came up with something--say for example he self destructs in some way--then I would need to make sure during the rewrite that the plot is sneaking in a persuasive case that he would do that, even though it might seem very out of character at the beginning.

And the real idea--back to thinking about character--was to see if I provoke some insight about what my character is not like at all and what he might secretly be like that I haven't put my finger on yet.

I think it was productive. I got a lot of loopy ideas for the plot but also got myself more comfortable with a couple developments that I had been stewing on and seemed too loopy. Now they just seem like they need the right persuasive case to support them. I'm excited about trying to tell a more energetic story in the rewrite. And it got me more in touch with the humanity of my character.

That last point reminds of the famous comment by Richard Ford about stories ending like supernovas. I'll try to write about that next time.

Can writing be taught?

I like the way Jane Smiley turns that question around in Thirteen Way of Looking At a Novel: Can writing be learned?

I assume that I learned to write somewhere. It’s hard to say where, but I must have learned it somewhere, right? And if it can be learned, it stands to reason that it can be taught.

That’s a flip answer and I don’t know that I’d defend it to the death, but I do lean that way. I’ve never liked the anti-intellectualism in the question “Can writing be taught?” anyway. It always seems to come out of ulterior motives—an urge to poke holes in “book learnin’” and a general hostility toward teachers. It’s really a very territorial question, as if I spend energy and time doing things my way, it might devalue what someone else has.

That’s not to say that the ways that writing is being taught in MFA programs or anywhere else are necessarily successful. I just don’t accept the presumption that writing can’t be taught.

But, the devil his due, whenever I see this discussed among writers who have taught—like in the Paris Review interviews—they always seem to answer that writing can’t be taught. So I postpone a final conclusion.

More moral support from Jane Smiley

Here are a couple things Jane Smiley says in Thirteen Ways that have helped me keep going:

“You have not been asked or groomed to write a novel. You have not gone to novel-writing school, . . . Chances are, no one wants you to write your novel—if they say they do, they are just meaning that you should get it over with . . . . The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write—they don’t want to read about themselves, they don’t want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore, free.

“The Only way to suspend [your own disbelief] is to keep adding sentences to the ones you have
already written. Sheer length persuades, at least to some degree, because it builds and object in the mind.”

“Boredom is only a symptom, and boredom with the material that at first inspired you to write a novel can mean any number of things, but it never means that your material is inherently unintineresting.”

She then goes on to offer several possible diagnoses for the symptom of boredom—not knowing enough about characters, confusion about plot, fear of failure—and some prescriptions to self administer. I strongly recommend reading this section of the book.