Two chapters in seven days

Real life has interrupted my work for the last week. Since then I've managed to get two more chapters marked up and corrected. That continues to take off about a page per chapter and to take about four hours for each one.

I think over the next couple weeks I'll be lucky to do a chapter every two days. I have to get going on some paying work assignments, so probably I'll just be able to put in a.m. sessions like the old days. We'll call that a conservative estimate, and calculating that way, I have about 14 working days to go. Let's call it 14 days total, since some of the chapters coming up are shorter and can be done a little quicker.

Tough couple of days

Last year I used to joke the day after my Tuesday night basketball games that the games were the biggest disruption to my writing schedule. But I'm playing again, and for real, it's no joke. I'm in a lot of pain the day after the games and besides that just mightily fatigued. I moved like a zombie all day yesterday and got nothing done, and today hasn't been a lot better. I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that--dramatically increase my coffee consumption or something, when I'm trying hard to decrease it otherwise.

I'm also going to have to do something about how OCD I'm getting about following the news. I'm having a lot of trouble resisting the endless media offerings online about whatever has my interest. (These days it's the election. Next month I expect it will be the baseball postseason.) I'm being very undisciplined.

Part of that is me, but I also know part if it is a response to the fear I have about the book right now. It rears up at different times--for instance when I have a lot of thinking to do to find my way through a really vague problem. It's necessary, but it means not making a lot of mileage, and the guilt and uncertainty makes me hesitate.

So yesterday, I didn't accomplish much except doing a little bit of that thinking--in the form of about 3 pages of freewriting about the specific problems in Chapter 7. And today I started to tackle Chapter 7, making a lot less progress than I should have for the amount of time I had, but some progress anyway.

So, unlikely that I'll finish the chapter tomorrow and therefore this week. But I'm determined to make good use of tomorrow. I see a path, and I'm going to walk it.

Nervous about Chapter 7

Not a lot of work today. I read Ch. 7 to prepare for the next rewrite, and I'm intimidated by how much work it needs. Right now it is a draft in the most customary sense of the word--a failed attempt at an unclear idea. To make it work I'll really need to dig deep, and the trick in these cases is not to think at all about making it work. You have to give yourself permission to make a mess.

Which means it's hard to set a schedule. Hopefully it won't take a lot of time, but this isn't like a to do list.

My schedule is about to change anyway. I picked up another paying gig today, so I'll be distracted with that until at least the end of next week. No more all-day sessions. Hopefully I'll be able to put in my usual 90-120 minutes each morning.

Back to work after a long break

I'm back to work on the novel and back to this journal after taking a full two months off.

I was out of the country for about 9 weeks, tagging along with my wife while she was on a work assignment. I had the mixed intentions of making it a writer's retreat and also taking advantage of every opportunity to fully experience my time abroad. Obviously "retreat" and "tourism" don't go together very well.

What actually ended up happening is the first two weeks looked a lot like a writer's retreat and then I put the book aside. I worked hard in our hotel room every day those first two weeks and plowed through to the complete the first rewrite of Part 2 and thus of the entire book. That was a big day and a big relief. Then I left the hotel to look around and haven't thought about the novel since.

I ought to be feeling guilty about that I know, but actually I think break's like that are appropriate and good for the book if it's not just a rationalization for procrastinating. The next batch of work--the second rewrite--should be stronger and more incisive because of the distance I've put between myself and the book.

That explains most of the break. Actually I was supposed to return to work a week ago, and since then I've been procrastinating. Partly I've been taking it slow in returning to this orbit and partly I was afraid. I have to build up the momentum and confidence again, and I didn't muster the energy for that last week. Now that I have, with about an hour of work this morning before needing to run some errands, I expect it will take awhile before the work is really going smoothly.

Other writing experience

It has taken me a long time to finally commit myself to write a novel. I’m a lot older than I thought I would be when the literary impulse was tugging at me in my youth. Work obligations and fear are probably the biggest reasons I delayed. But part of it was just not knowing how to go about it. Some people can launch right in when they are young and understand how stories are put together, but I wasn’t one of them. I would write a sketch of an interesting person in an interesting situation and couldn’t understand why it didn’t feel like a story.

Luckily I was always able to have writing as a part of my employment in some capacity so that I was at least keeping up and improving my chops at the sentence level, and I think some of that early experience has been constructive.

-Teaching ESL: First thing after college I traveled abroad teaching ESL. That’s not really writing experience, but (since there was no real curriculum and I had to wing it) I did have to teach myself a lot about grammar. I learned a lot about the different verb tenses just trying to figure out how to explain to people the different between He had done, He will have done, He was going to do, and He did.

-Grad school: Next was a lot of writing in an academic context aiming to get a Ph.D. in the humanities. (In the end, I didn’t make it that far.) Now, I am decidedly not an anti-intellectual. I think the values and goals and methods of scholarship and intellectual work are important. I treasure what it can be. But I’ve come to think that academia can’t be trusted with it. My problem is with the institution and the culture of arrested development it encourages. I think most academics have made bargains that betray the potential of intellectual work. This period was a giant waste of time for me, and I think it was generally bad for the writing impulse and bad for writing skills. Generally. I do think that writing can benefit from a certain amount of analytical skill, and graduate school was good for developing that.

-Bookstores: I had a period where I worked in book retail a lot. Customers would say to me, “Oh, it must be wonderful to work with books all day.” Right. Just like I love coffee so I would love working at Starbucks all day. Neither of those jobs are working with books or working with coffee. They’re working with customers, and since a lot of people when they feel anonymous in a crowded retail setting indulge their worst social instincts, it wasn’t usually very pleasant. All I learned about literature there was what was how much it weighs, since with my bad attitude with customers I spent a lot of time in shipping and receiving.

-Small town newspaper: My first real paid writing gig. It was the least glamorous thing a writer could do, but it actually was quite important for me. It was for a company that published a lot of small weekly suburban papers out of one operation. My first job was simply writing blurbs for the calendar column. I would take a pile of faxed press releases and retype that careful prose into some other careful prose that followed our format. Something like: “Square dance lessons, Monday, 7 p.m., Village Community Center.” It sounds horrible, but there’s something to be said for the close attention to copyediting and format that it required. A comma here, a hyphen there, bold for this kind of info, italics for that kind and so on. Paying attention to that helped later.

Each time somebody up the food chain left the company I would get assigned new duties. After that came “rewrite.” In this case it was taking the press releases that seemed slightly more worthy of attention and basically flipping the sentences around so we weren’t printing them verbatim. Now I was getting three-paragraph stories published—dozens of them a week—with no byline.

Next came obits. This was my big breakthrough. I had to call people up and ask them questions and turn their responses into stories of all new material. This was real interviewing and reporting. Usually I was talking to the staff of the funeral home. There were maybe six funeral homes or so that would regularly fax over their own write ups on the memorials they were handling that week. I would call up each one and get more information than they had sent over or get some clarification. And sometimes I talked to the families. The format was essentially three parts—the deceased’s unique story in two paragraphs or less, all the details on their survivors and predeceased, and where to send flowers. It taught me two things that were important: Listening for the story, because everything has to have a hook, even a 100-word obit, and making sure you spell names right. I never felt so bad as a reporter as the first and last time I got a message saying that the name of the deceased was misspelled. To this day, if you told me your name was Jones, I would spell it back to you to make sure I have it right.

Motivating character with the dragon

Interviewer: When you teach, you talk to your students about “the dragon” . . . . Could you please explain it?

Sue Miller: It’s an analogy for the writing of fiction lifted from Flannery O’Connor—the notion that every character in a story must struggle with something: his dragon. . . . My argument has been that if you really look at any given character, there is . . . a dragon for that character: something born of him that is the thing he ought to be confronting fictionally that you could make him confront. . . . If you look at each character, there is something that’s the pickle he needs to be in in order to make a story happen. . . . The character richly drawn struggles with something which emerges from himself that he ought to struggle with; or at least he learns that he’s going to have to struggle. In a way, what fiction does is watch people struggle.

Presumably Sue Miller isn’t talking about watching me struggle, which is what it feels like right now.

I’m looking at this explanation of hers carefully lately because it’s a really helpful metaphor for the aspect of the writing I have to work on next. In the first draft, I thought in terms of “longing.” What does this character long for? Trying to answer that was great for helping me build up tension from one scene to the next to keep the plot going.

Now that I’m working on the rewrite, I’m seeing lots of places where there still isn’t much going on with the characters--not much longing and not much struggle, places where the struggle doesn’t seem very significant or meaningful, places where their longing doesn’t connect to other places, places where they simply aren’t “richly drawn.”

So I’ve been using this dragon metaphor to guide my imagination in the rewrite. What’s the thing that is each character’s core that they need to struggle with?

Copyediting

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
--George Orwell

When I teach freshman comp I often talk to students about how writing is a recursive process—a series of steps that can circle back and repeat itself endlessly.

And in the meantime I’ve been influenced by writers like L. Rust Hills who describe the “integration” of all the elements of fiction.

That quote from Orwell reminds me to anticipate those qualities. If we take sincerity in fiction to be the result of fully knowing and respecting your characters, honestly and deeply imagining the situation they’re in and how they would feel about it and respond to it, then sincerity is presumably handled in early drafts of a book.

However, neglecting to do that and the insincerity that would seem to result in a given episode might only have its first symptom in the language refusing to be clear—something that presumably a writer would pay the closest attention to late in the process. An abstraction refusing to be made concrete, a tangled sentence refusing to come unknotted—I expect these to be wonderful hints that the story itself is incomplete and that I’ve taken emotional shortcuts. I expect the copyediting process to send me back wearily to try again to develop the story and make it more honest, seemingly endlessly.

Or to put it as Joseph Williams does in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, “When you revise your early confusion into something clearer you better understand your own ideas. And when you understand your ideas better, you express them more clearly, and when you express them more clearly, you understand them even better . . . and so it goes.”

Cherry blossoms out

The cherry blossoms are out, and I'm testing a new camera. I can see this tree from my office window when I'm working at my computer.

Starting on Chapter 4

I started on my next attempt at Chapter 4 this morning. Customary work and routine and nothing unusual to report. Mainly I was just reminded again of how delicate my attention is. I have a long list of errands to do and at about 90 minutes into my work I remembered that one of them was time sensitive, so after that point I couldn't make myself focus on the book until I took care of the errand.

Another thing I noticed recently that I was somewhat aware of is similarities between this work and grading student papers. Of all the work that I do, grading student papers is unique in that I really have to set aside everything and start on it fresh in the morning. I can't jump into it a little at a time later on in the day like I can with just about any other kind of chore. That's the same with working on my novel.

As a consequence, when I have student papers I always lose at least a couple days on the novel, which is why I got almost no work done last week.

Time constraints on my writing

Didn't work any over the long weekend and not much this morning. I had intended to write yesterday but I ended up taking a morning meeting that had been rescheduled several times. I try to treat that writing period as sacred, but I can see it getting infringed on a lot as I get busier with my freelance writing business. It was my choice to go ahead the accept that proposed meeting time, but I felt like I wasn't going to be able to juggle things if I postponed it again.

A similar thing this morning. I had only worked about 40 minutes, I was at a natural break in the work and was trying to psyche myself up for another push in a new section, and my phone rang. I ought to have ignored it, but my work involves so much phone tag I couldn't resist the opportunity to finally scratch off my list one of the several people I was waiting on to hear from.

I'm going to have to learn to be hardcore about it or . . . I don't know what. In general I have to figure out how to control the rhythm of mental and emotional energy I put into my freelance writing assignments. I'm not billing for all the time that I'm obsessing about things--just for the time I actually work--so I have to try my mind to compartmentalize a lot better.

Suffering for sport, some more

I had one of my least productive mornings ever. About 30 minutes of real concentration. It's all because of basketball. I have to take Tylenol PM to get to sleep and when I get up in the morning it takes hours to clear the fog, not to mention the pain that has me feeling beat down.

I really do hope to finish this chapter tomorrow though. At least to the point where I usually have my wife read it.

Suffering for sport

My regular basketball game was off for several weeks and resumed last night, so once again I'm waking up with a lot of pain and too little sleep on Wednesdays, which makes it hard to get to the writing desk.

Nevertheless, I put in about 1:15. At this rate, I should finish a complete slow read-through and tinkering of Chapter 4 tomorrow. There are some organization problems I have to circle back and straighten out. Those are annoying and time consuming, but they're not really intellectually taxing. I still feel like this Chapter is the strongest so far, so possibly it won't need any real serious thought and development and I can get past it quickly. I still haven't looked at the climax, so that's not definite.

My paying work is starting to accumulate a little more. So instead of feeling guilty that I don't work more than an hour when I have a whole morning available I might get to the point where I'm trying to protect the one hour so I can work that much.

Got a little done today

I hadn't expected to work any today, but grading student papers went faster than expected yesterday, so I had this morning available after all. I gave it a shot, but I guess I had already psyched myself out with the idea of a break--that and the lack of confidence I'm having about this chapter overall--so I ended up avoiding the real development work I still need to do and just did sentence-level tinkering with my draft for about an hour.

Regrettable, but not as bad as not working at all. I'm going on the theory that if I treat the daily habit as sacred it will get done eventually. Persevering through these days when it's hard to see the point is part of the process.

Nevertheless, I'm off until at least the day after xmas. Unavoidable commitments.

The blues

Not a very productive day today, not ending with a good feeling about how it's going and all the more anxious because I know this is the last day I'll be able to work on it for about a week. Intellectually, I know the time off is probably a good thing, since I'm feeling pretty stuck, but I'm so frustrated with how slowly this is going.

I wrote--I don't know--very very little of the new material I need to connect all the dots in chapter three and then seemed to hit a block. I did a little bit of rethinking about what needs to happen and made notes on that. But I couldn't get myself to actually work on the next steps.

I can't help feeling that all the improved clarity is an illusion, since the more clarity I get the less I actually do the work of bringing that clarity to the draft.

I have to grade student papers the next couple of days. Then baking for xmas. Then traveling for xmas. Hopefully back with fresh energy next Wednesday.

Is it autobiographical? II

Asked about if his books are autobiographical, John Updike said, “I count on people to know the difference between flesh and paper, and generally they do.”

Updike has more faith in the neighbors he was speaking of than I do in my family. I think they’ll see the similarities between themselves and my characters and assume that everything about that character is meant to be a description of them.

And while none of them are demonized or sanctified I hope (see earlier post on autobiography), the overall picture of those characters isn’t always flattering either.

That fear--that real people will see the characters as themselves and take offense--is another kind of self editing I had to repress while I was drafting. In fact, that form of self editing is a big part of what has taken me to so late in life to write anything.

I eventually just had to tell myself to worry about that later, that nothing mattered so much as finishing a draft. Now that I’m done with the draft and working on the rewrite, it matters a lot less. The characters have become more themselves and less like the people they were inspired by.

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.

A slog

Writing this morning took some discipline. Got the usual 90 minutes/800 new words in. Essentially added a new scene to Chapter 2 and set myself up for the next new scene I need to do. (Contrary to my hopes, this chapter is not going any faster than the last one, which means the rewrite could take 30 weeks or so. I'm not liking that idea at all.)

I'm proud of myself for making myself do that much, because I had plenty of disincentive. It's one of those days where I'm running on fumes b/c of lack of sleep. I was up late obsessing.

Have you seen any news stories in the last few years in the "kids these days" vein about college students who are less mature than back in the day and who go so far as to bring their parents to advocate for them with their college teachers when they're having a problem? The tone of those stories is always, "Can you believe this crap?"

Well, that actually happened to me yesterday. I caught a student plagiarizing a paper, and I told him to come to office hours, and when he showed up he had his mom with him. It was amazing! So amazing that I kept replaying it in my head all night.

I'm also off my game today because writing isn't actually the first thing I did. I'm backing bread for Thanksgiving and I needed to get the dough started first thing. That's why I usually bake bread on the weekends, so the necessity of starting the dough first thing won't interrupt the writing. Couldn't be helped today, so I had about an hour of work in the kitchen before I came to the writing desk.

Those are two fairly forceful energy sappers that could keep me from writing. They definitely did keep me from achieving as much as I wanted, but I'm taking credit for keeping the ball moving forward anyway.

Overslept--some progress

My weekly basketball game does a lot to erode my writing schedule. The pain afterward makes it hard to fall asleep, and I wake up very sore and without enough rest. And late today.

Still, I got in an hour of work. The good news is that when I'm short on time, I'm taking it out of other things (e.g. preparing for the class I teach tonight) and prioritizing the book. Too bad for my students.

Still on Chapter 1. Yesterday, one of the themes came into clearer relief for me and today I went to the scenes where it gets presented and revised/developed those.

Now I'm thinking two more days of work to finish up with Chapter 1. One to answer some questions about a secondary characters behavior so that one of the plot turns doesn't seem so mysterious and sudden. Another day to clean up some exposition and internal logic problems.

If so, that would mean three full weeks on Chapter 1 when I intended just one week. It certainly will be in a lot better shape than I intended. (And longer, though that's not necessarily a positive value.) More sentence-level revision got taken care of in the meantime than I had intended. So in theory then next rewrite/revision stage will require less.

But I really don't want then next 14 chapters to go this slowly. Hopefully the long struggle to straighten out Chapter 1 will pay dividends in making the necessary work in later chapters more obvious so I can tackle them quicker.

Jobs that suck up writing energy

Probably the key practical question for writers is how to support the writing. Usually we mean financial support--what kind of employment is going to allow me to pay the bills and work on this book?

But other kinds of support are important, obviously--mental and spiritual, for example.

If you read advice from writers a lot like I do, you'll see advice to get yourself a day job totally separate from the writing life. The idea is to make sure that the energy you spend on your day job isn't the energy you'll need to work on your book--imaginative energy generally and concentrated writing time specifically.

So the teaching profession is right out, because it presumably sucks up the creative juices. Journalism too. And marketing, advertising copywriter, radio jingle composer . . . what else? Court reporter. Soapbox prophet. Writing love letters for illiterate peasants at sidewalk cafe table in Bogata.

I'm breaking this rule myself, right now, working as a professional writer. I generally don't go by any hard and fast rules--everyone has to take their own path--but this is definitely something I worry about. Is part of the reason I'm having trouble turning my attention to the book at 9 a.m. because my subconscious is working on other writing I have to do later in the day?

Possibly, but on the other hand, the previous job I had--salaried, lots of hours, lots to manage, not a writing job exactly though of course with lots of writing needed to create the work product--didn't leave me any kind of energy, writing energy or otherwise. It sucked up all the spiritual and emotional and physical energy in a way my current job does not.

I'm curious to know what jobs other people find are most and least supportive of their writing, financially and otherwise.

August 30, 2007—Working for a living

I’ve been neglecting this for a little bit. It’s mostly because in the last week my attention has been on how to support myself financially. The first draft got written by totally ignoring that issue and having faith it would work out (if I didn’t take too long.) Now that I’m thinking about, I’m obsessing about it in a not especially healthy way.

I do have legitimate work to do. I’m going to be teaching some college writing courses, starting next week. So there’s plenty of planning to do that I’ve started and, even more important, navigating the mysterious waters of university administration. Millions of forms filled out, phone books of numbers dialed, and still no passwords or keys that will give me the access I need to actually meet and communicate with my students.

Less legitimate is my so-called planning for freelance writing. I let it take over all my mental space and neglect everything else. It comes out of an irrational fear of financial ruin. I need to learn to put it in its proper place.

All this is impacting my novel, but it’s probably not a serious problem if it doesn’t go on too long. Like I said before, some distance from the book is probably a good thing, and I am doing a little bit of the “review” work on it every day. Hopefully in another week I’ll have that done and then I can spread it all out on the dining room table and really take a hard look at it.

Oh, I wish I was back in the drafting stage. That was a lot more fun.