Getting Real

I accomplish very little that isn't motivated by an item on my to-do list. Sometimes I accomplish very little, period, but the to-do list keeps that from being all the time. What motivates me more, though, is deadlines, but I've learned they need to be at least in some way real and external, not arbitrarily self-imposed.

I don't expect even the people who consistently read this blog to put much thought into when exactly I publish posts. But there's an easily detectable pattern in the posts that are about my own writing, not other people's books. In recent years, these writing updates always appear in the last two or three days of the month. That's because they grow out of a to-do list item optimistically called "mid-month update" that gets postponed day after day until the end of the month looms. And it's because the end of a calendar month provides a real and unalterable, if silly, deadline that's made visible in the number of posts per month on the Archive section low in the blog's sidebar. I know my readers don't look at or care about these numbers, but I do, and it's a real enough deadline that I usually can't stand to miss it.

Only just, though. I delay writing about my writing because I approach the prospect with such ambivalence. I keep this blog to provide myself with both a record and accountability, and to give the people who care some insight into what I'm up to. For all those reasons, I want to post updates on my writing life, but the reflection involved is intimidating. And that's not only true when I'm feeling bad about not having any writing to report on.

I have been doing some writing work lately! In admitting that, I've created more pressure to follow through, augh!

First, I used a really real external deadline to push myself through an intense round of final edits on the short story I'd been fiddling with for a year. On the last day of a submission window, I submitted my story to a magazine. It was rejected. I immediately submitted it somewhere else, like a legit short story writer. Rinse, repeat. Someday this could end in triumph.

Second, I am just starting to noodle around with a new story idea that I like a lot. I know that sounds great, but it's scary and intimidating and pressure-filled, too. It's going to be hard work to get from the page of scattered notes to anything even vaguely story-shaped, and I never feel like doing hard work. But here it is on my to-do list, so I guess I'm off to try and accomplish something.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross covers The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books: "I read more books in 2020 than I had in years. I was not the only one; last year, more than a hundred library systems checked out a million or more books each from OverDrive's catalogue, and the company reported a staggering four hundred and thirty million checkouts, up a third from the year before."

Horror Story

For Halloween, I present a list of scary facts about my novel:

→ It was ten (ten!) years ago that I wrote the first draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE for NaNoWriMo 2007.

→ At that time, the 2026 portion of the story took place at the far reaches of the near future, while the late 1990s section drew on my recent memories. Today, the 90s are a historical setting, and by the time people can purchase my book, 2026 might be their credit card expiration date.

→ The first draft only took 30 days to write. Sure, it's 83,000 words of mediocre prose, the characters are simplistic, and the plot is a mere sketch of the story as it currently stands, but I got from start to end in a single month.

→ I'm now on the fourth major rewrite of the novel. Counting less extensive editing passes, this is at least the eleventh draft.

→ Despite all the research I've done over the past decade (decade!), there are still endless details in the manuscript that remain to be factchecked or rendered more accurately.

→ I've written or planned out several other novels in the years since beginning this one, and I'm still just as far away from finding a story that might eventually turn into something worth publishing.

These are the terrors that haunt me in the night. I wish you all a better sleep, a happy Halloween, and a successful NaNoWriMo!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Annalee Newitz explains for Slate How to Write a Novel Set More Than 125 Years in the Future: "Possibly the most difficult part of building a future was coming up with little details, like the euphemisms people use for slavery, or how they access the internet. Characters have to do things like eat, turn on the lights, and get wasted on a night off. These mundane details lead back to larger questions. What powers the lights? My novel is set after peak oil, so do the lights run on alternative energy? Batteries? Are the lights in fact just glowing bacteria living on the ceiling? Also, when would my character go out to a club? Do we still have the concept of weekends in the future? Do adults socialize mostly in the evening, or are work shifts so arbitrary that they might consider it normal to go to a raging party at 2 p.m.?" (Thanks, Jamie!)

Focusing Efforts

When I announced my intent to focus on revising my novel in November, I didn't anticipate that the results of the election would leave me staring at the internet in horror for so many hours this month. I suspect I was part of a nationwide productivity dip as I neglected my usual work to stay informed and get angry and wonder what I could do.

Like many, I fear that under Trump, our government will have the desire and the power to strip away rights from segments of the U.S. population who already endure daily hate and obstruction. My privileges mean my life will likely remain as safe as it's always been, so I want to use my resources and advantages to protect others. I've been determining which of the organizations prepared to fight I'll continue or begin supporting with donations. I learned about calling my representatives and made those calls for the first time. I've started to investigate how I might usefully take other forms of action. Check the end of this post for some resources on these topics.

I have also been forcing myself to continue revising my novel, not because it will help, but because we all have things to get done. My novel is no more or less important now than it was two weeks ago, which is to say, it's not particularly important. This book matters a lot to me, and I hope it will eventually mean something to readers enthusiastic about getting invested in the lives of my characters for a little while, but it won't be making any sort of real difference.

That's fine. While an occasional novel tackles such significant material with so much skill that it can have a large, positive impact on the way people think, most fiction doesn't do that. Usually the role of novels is to entertain and provoke emotion and maybe communicate a couple of tiny points about some small aspect of the world. That's all great and sufficient, whether or not it's also true that fiction makes people more empathetic. Stories (in every medium) have their own value, though it's not a more special value than all the other valuable things.

I understand how to make my novel better, and working on it leads directly to progress. As hard as it is to focus on fiction when a lot of ugly reality also needs to be dealt with, it sure is satisfying to tackle a problem that's so easily solved.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jezebel offers a comprehensive list of organizations to support with donations.

→ The Effectivism blog rounds up some tips on Talking to Congress (and getting them to listen).

→ Activist Kara shares a Google spreadsheet with detailed instructions for calling representatives, scripts for current priority topics, and a suggested schedule for making your own calls.

→ Anil Dash urges that it's time to get to work and presents "concrete steps we can take immediately, which can set up habits that we can sustain for the years of struggle to come."

→ Slate provides options for How to Channel Your Post-Election Anger, Sadness, and Fear Into Action with a collection of places to put your time and money.

→ Maya Prohovnik's Looking to Help newsletter sends an email each day with helpful actions you can take right now. Past messages are archived.

Fear Itself

I'm aware that the earliest examples of my childhood writing were fun because they involved cute drawings and hilarious story concepts. Now that we're into the high school era, I hope nobody minds that it's all death and angst. I was prolific during high school, and most of my work from that period has been preserved, so we're going to be here a while.

While the Steno notebook I reported on last time is nearly all stories (or at least, story beginnings), the next one contains quite a few journal entries mixed in with the fiction. Among the raw adolescent emotions on display in these, there's the ongoing pain of that unrequited love I mentioned before: "When I am away from him I am seized with terror, and I imagine that he is hurt or dead." Also of note is the admiration I express for a friend's writing, coupled with doubt over my own: "She showed me her poems and stories all the time, and they were so good that I knew she would think mine were pitiful. Next to hers, they were."

At other points in the notebook, I'm more confident about my writing. Early in the summer after my sophomore year, I enthusiastically proclaim, "Well, today I finally began committing some of my stuff to disk. It's so nice now that I have Puck, my wonderful little Mac." (Puck was a Mac Classic, a one-piece computer with a handle, easily portable at only 16 pounds!) I write about looking through my notebook entries and deciding what to type into the computer and revise, and then I reflect, "I realized that I've got some good stuff. However, nearly everything I like is about death or dying. How totally morbid! The problem is that this morbidity is so typically adolescent that it's embarrassing." Very perceptive, Teen Lisa.

Here's one of my rare stories from the time that's not about death, though I'll warn you, it is a little scary. I suspect it's no coincidence that I wrote it just before Halloween.

Fear Itself

There is nothing quite like the thrill of sheer terror. The American media thrives on the culture's love of being frightened. Stephen King, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Unsolved Mysteries spawn books, films, and episodes in rapid succession, making money off our desire for horror and fear. And I'm the biggest sucker of all.

After seeing The Silence of the Lambs, I couldn't sleep without the light on for a week. I haven't gone near a graveyard since reading Pet Sematary. "Laura, I wish you'd stop reading those ghost stories," pleaded my mother after I woke her up after a nightmare for the third night in a row. "They're really unhealthy, honey."

But I couldn't stop. It wasn't teenage perversity that drove me to devour every thriller in the library, but a burning need to feel my heart beat faster and my breathing quicken as I reached the climax, then slam the book closed and remember with relief that it was just a story. The terror is only fun, of course, if it goes away.

Except it didn't. It got to the point where not only couldn't I walk outside in the dark, even with other people, but I couldn't sleep with the light out, and finally I couldn't be alone, not even in broad daylight.

I tried to hide my fears from my mother. I would go along with her every time she ran errands, rather than stay home alone, claiming that I had to buy something or wanted to talk to her. I declined her invitations for moonlit mother-daughter walks, explaining I had too much homework. I waited until she had tucked me in and closed the door before turning on my bedside lamp. Sometimes I got my little sister to sleep with me, promising to tell her all the high school gossip as we giggled late into the night.

But still I read the horror stories. I couldn't explain why. It was my secret addiction, and I walked around with a guilty conscience. The stories were becoming more real to me, too. I would become so absorbed in the book that I would become oblivious to everything else. When I stopped reading, I would be drenched with sweat and shaking.

Fifth Grade Book Covers and More

We're almost done exploring the adventure-laden elementary school era of my childhood writing. Before we move on to angst-filled middle school, I have some remaining miscellany from fifth grade to share, including a couple of illustrated covers for book projects.

First off, I did get an early start on the angst in fifth grade for at least one piece of writing. In late 1985, I was assigned to write a haiku about my fears or hopes for 1986. Forget all those online lists and quizzes purporting to prove your legitimacy as a child of the 80s. This is the real deal:

Haiku About My Fears

Such a scary thought
Nuclear war is dreadful
It could kill us all

I also had less disturbing obsessions in fifth grade, such as Greek mythology. (On second thought, most of Greek mythology is pretty disturbing.) For what I imagine was a big final project for the year, I put together a pretty impressive report, complete with a cover depicting "Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods":

Fit to Print

It's well into October (in case you haven't noticed), which means that the bulk of the year is over. The most substantial thing I've accomplished in 2014 to this point is that I've read a lot of books. I've done some other stuff too, of course, but most of that remains stalled in a state of incompletion.

Reading books is great. You start at the first page, you move forward through the (hopefully wonderful) story, and then you get to the end, and it's over. Maybe you're sorry it's over, maybe you're a little bit relieved, but in any case, the book is done. You've had the experience of reading it, you get to add it to your list, and you can tell other people what you thought of it.

This is why all my posts for the past few months have been about books I've read. Reviews are a nice concrete chunk of prose representing a specific accomplishment that I know how to tell the world about. While I sometimes struggle to accurately (and diplomatically) express my opinions of the books, these are feelings I'm comfortable sharing.

The rest is trickier. I am still making gradual progress toward the new novel. I'm still actively seeking an agent for the completed novel. I'm always contemplating what other sorts of things I could write, or should write, or might do with myself and my time. It's all kind of vague.

I had hoped my accomplishments would be more thrilling by this point in the year. Any day now, I could have exciting new things to post about, and in the meantime I'm going to work on coming up with a bit of variety, even if it's not too new or too exciting. But when all else fails, it's a comfort to know that there are always more books to read and discuss.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki studies the metaphors in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: "Throughout the novel, Offred continually turns her body into something other than a body in this way. At the same time, she also regularly personifies objects. In this passage, for example, while she is a piece of a toast, the ceiling has a 'blind plaster eye' and the moon shines on 'the breast of the new-fallen snow.' In Offred's imagination, everything is turned on its head, or given one." (Thanks, The Millions!)

Something New

I have sort of begun a new novel. So far all I've written is a lot of notes on Post-Its, but it's a start.

I'm not ready to describe what the novel is about, because the aboutness hasn't yet gelled into a concise explanation, but the pieces have been knocking around inside my head for more than a year. I hadn't written down any of the ideas until this point, so what I've been doing this week is simply getting everything from my head onto paper. I find it very helpful to work with pen and paper at this part of the process, though I can't explain why (and my handwriting is atrocious).

I know quite a bit about the characters, but they're still lacking names, which means that in the notes they're all referred to by letter designators. I have many components of a plot, but not yet enough that all sticks together properly. I want to make sure I can construct a whole plot out of this idea before I start the first draft. There's also research that I'm going to need to do before beginning. So I may be in this pre-writing stage of writing for a while, in order to be confident I can get the writing part right.

Venturing into an unknown story is a little intimidating, but mostly exciting. It's a nice change to be at the starting end of the novel process after so much revision. It's been a long time since I was here, and I was a much less experienced writer the last time around.

I don't have a real title, but for the purposes of being able to refer this novel as something, I'm calling it INCONCLUSIVE. That's more fun than "Untitled", and it has some relevance to the story. I'll let you muse on that while I get back to scribbling on sticky notes.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Karen Bender writes at the New York Times' Opinionator about The Emotional Power of Verbs: "Form your characters in terms of actions that will reveal their interior lives. If you want to describe a dress your character is wearing, think about how she is moving out the door in that dress. Is the woman walking, hurrying, sauntering, floating?"

Remembering How This Works

I've had more than a month away from noveling, since I gave myself some time off after finishing revision at the end of November. And for the past two weeks, I've been in complete vacation mode, rarely typing up more than a few sentences at a time for any reason. It was a wonderful break, full of reading and family and friends and a week on the Mendocino coast. I'm grateful that I was able to take the time, and I definitely succeeded in relaxing and clearing my mind.

Now the issue is that I might be a bit too relaxed. A couple of weeks after I stopped revising, I reported how weird it was not to be working on a novel. Well, I'm quite used to it now. I think I could be perfectly untroubled by spending a few more weeks simply going through my to-read list.

However, I believe it's time to boot up my writing brain and get back to work. This little blog post was a start. Then of course I'll have to review the books I read during vacation. And maybe write some email or something. After that, once I'm really sure I still know how to compose a paragraph, I'm sure I'll make my way back to fiction.

I don't want to rush into it, though. I could strain something. I'm almost certain that's how it works.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Toni Jordan considers the question of where writers get their ideas: "I think 'write what you know' is the single worst piece of writing advice. Instead, write what you're really interested in. Write what is going to keep you awake at night; write what you don't understand; write to figure something out. Good novels are journeys into the unknown, for their authors as well as their readers."

It's The Little Things

Earlier this month I wrote about the three levels of problems that I'm addressing in my manuscript right now. I was most scared by the hard problems, such as ongoing character conflicts that my audience found unconvincing. These large-scale issues don't have a single source or a clear solution, and I was worried about how long they would take to fix.

I've been working on these problems for the past few weeks, and while it would still be lovely if I didn't have any huge issues to deal with, I've been pleased to find how well big problems can be addressed with little changes. When it's not really clear why a character keeps feeling or acting a particular, plot-important way, I don't have to rip apart and restructure the entire plot. Instead, I'm finding that small tweaks to the thoughts and behavior in each relevant scene goes a long way toward altering the overall perception of what's going on with that character. I'm accomplishing what I need to by adding and editing sentences or paragraphs, not by throwing out pages at a time. Sometimes even changing a word or two is all it takes to appropriately alter the tone.

I have a recurring problem with portraying characters in love, which I wrote about some years back (still a useful post, if I do say so myself). Once again I was faced with readers who pointed out, "He keeps telling us they're in love, but nothing is showing us they are, because we only see them fighting." A story is made out of conflict, so it's easy to gloss over the happy parts, and I do that too much, particularly when it comes to characters starting a relationship. I was concerned about needing to find room and reasons for long, lovey-dovey scenes. But when I got into analyzing the problem, I determined that half a page of the characters joking around happily was sufficient to change the balance of the chapter and make them not seem to merely fight all the time.

One part of the plot relies on the reader understanding that while a father and son don't get along, they had a good relationship when the son was growing up. While I was reading my manuscript aloud to my familial literary advisory board, I learned that my audience wasn't picking up on the backstory of the happy childhood. That wasn't surprising, because I noticed that I'd neglected to establish it much at all. I wasn't sure where and how I was going to show the situation of the past without adding a bunch of flashbacks to a novel that's already too long. But it turns out that a few sentences here and there mentioning happier times can plant the idea in the reader's mind so the scenario will be interpreted correctly.

Or at least that's what I hope. I won't be certain any of these fixes are working until I've run the new draft by some other readers. What I learned from the first set was that in some areas I was being far too subtle, while other ideas were beaten into the reader's head with way too much repetition, so I may not be the best judge of how the message is getting across. For now, though, I'm operating on the belief that these relatively small fixes are making a big difference. It's certainly making this round of revisions less scary.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Michael David Lukas writes at the Opinionator about When the News and the Novel Collide: "Fiction is supposed to reflect reality, in some way or another. But reality is constantly changing. It can take years to write a novel and in those years, history marches on. Wars break out and governments are toppled, perceptions shift and new gadgets are invented."

Defining the Problems

Last week I reported on my big step of finishing a draft, reading it aloud to my trusted loved ones, and trying not to fall into a pit of despair at the realization that I still have more work ahead. I had a wonderful vacation to visit my far-away family members and not think too much about my novel. I returned home not exactly eager for more revision, but at least ready to face the next step.

Reading my novel to a (very patient) audience turned up three levels of problems that I need to address:

The easy problems are the sentence-level issues that I noted myself as I read aloud. Whenever I stumbled over a phrase (and I did this a lot), I underlined the tricky area, and it will be simple and satisfying to fix all these rough patches. Reading my work aloud led me to notice words that were repeated in close proximity or awkward combinations of sounds. Occasionally in a long dialogue I'd become confused about who was speaking, and of course anything that's confusing even to the author is a huge red flag. Spotting these easy problems didn't really involve the audience, though I think having listeners caused me to read more slowly and thoughtfully than when I read aloud to myself, which I do often and highly recommend to all writers.

Learning about the medium problems was what I most wanted to accomplish by reading to my familial literary advisory board. At the end of each chapter, I'd ask them for reactions, and sometimes there were specific parts that they were confused about or found implausible. These are issues that I couldn't spot on my own, because I have the scenes and justifications inside my head and already know what I mean by everything. I find this type of feedback the most rewarding part of receiving critique, because when a complaint has a clear, distinct source, it's never too much work to fix it, and afterwards I know I've made a worthwhile improvement. Also in the medium category are the scenes that felt too long once I read them aloud, a problem generally noted both by me and by my listeners.

The hard problems are the ones I hoped I wouldn't encounter, and the ones leaving me discouraged. I'm grateful to have such a perceptive audience at my disposal, and I wouldn't have read my manuscript to them if I didn't want to know what they thought, but some of what they thought is that there are still large-scale issues in my story, and I agree. These are problems like a failure to convincingly explain and portray the anger one character feels toward another throughout the novel. A criticism of that type can't be fixed by making changes to only a scene or two, and I'm often not even sure how to fix it. The hard problems are hard because addressing them requires significant work, and at the same time, they are the most important issues to deal with, because they have the greatest impact on the novel.

So, right now, I'm sorting out the logistics of dealing with these three levels of issues, and I'm starting to make progress on fixes. The hard problems are still scary, but I'm figuring out a way to deal with them while staying out of that pit of despair.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund speaks out In Praise of Slow Writing: "With time on my side, what may have been a surface scene just to move things along becomes something much deeper; when I take things slow, everything connects in ways that matter much more than if I were going for speed."

Not Bad At All

I'll admit I had some concerns that when I got back from Squaw Valley and looked at my novel in the light of everything I learned, I was going to want to rip it apart and embark on a new giant revision. You'll all be relieved to hear that this is not the case. I'm still pleased with the state of the manuscript as it stands. I do plan to make some changes to the beginnings of the storylines based on feedback I received, but beginnings are always problematic things that need a million rounds of tinkering, so this is no big setback.

It took me a while after returning from the conference to actually get back to work, but I've been plugging away these last couple of days, and it's going great. What I'm doing now is what I've been doing for the past few months (with quite a few chunks of time off for travel and other activities): fixing continuity errors and tightening things up and dealing with all the other miscellaneous issues that crop up during two years of rewriting. I'm making excellent progress, and it won't be long now.

Today I added in a bunch of minor details that needed to be set up sooner than they were. I was pleased with how I worked these in. I trimmed some conversations that went on too long and fixed some sentences that didn't quite mean what I wanted them to.

Most excitingly, I read a scene that made me teary-eyed and another that made me laugh. I think I've got something good here.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Scott Lynch offers a strongly worded reminder that there is no shortcut to being good: "How long does the process of hard work + self-awareness + perseverance take? I don't know; how long is a string? There is no RIGHT path. There is no IDEAL way. There is no PROPER length of time. There is only your right path, your ideal way, your proper length of time."

Would I Like My Own Novel?

I'm reading a novel that I'm not enjoying as much as I'd hoped, and one of my complaints falls into the category of "wanting to read a different story than the author chose to write." I consider this a less valid or useful type of criticism than commenting on, for example, problems with pacing or believability, but it's a common reason that readers fail to connect with a book.

In this case, the story starts with a big disaster, and my complaint is that so far I haven't learned much about how the general public experienced the disaster or how the city is coping with the event. The reason I don't know these things is that the story is about one specific person and the unusual things that happen to him as a result of the disaster. It's not a flaw that the other stuff is backgrounded, because that's not the point of the story, but unfortunately, I'm feeling like I'd rather be reading about the other stuff than about what the author chose to focus on.

Even more unfortunately, as I was thinking about this problem I'm having with the book I'm reading, I realized that what I have described is exactly the problem a reader could have with the book I'm writing. How does the description of my novel start? "When an earthquake devastates the Bay Area." How much does my novel focus on the disaster scenario of the earthquake? Not a whole lot. The protagonist of that other book at least faces obstacles that originate in the disaster, whereas my characters mainly ignore the earthquake and whine about their family dysfunction.

Would I find my own novel supremely irritating? This isn't the first time I've been gripped by this fear. These are some reactions I've had lately to novels I encountered descriptions of and decided not to read: "Oh, it's about someone going home to see their parents, so of course they have to uncover some deep dark secret." "Ugh, it's misery heaped on misery. That sounds way too depressing." If you're not sure why I'm feeling like a big hypocrite, take another look at the description of my novel.

One thing that frequently annoys me in stories is when a problem could be easily solved if people would simply communicate. I'm one of those people likely to yell at the TV, "Just tell them what's going on!" And yet I've written a novel with a plot that revolves around people keeping secrets from each other, lying, misunderstanding, and repeatedly failing to divulge the crucial piece of information that would make everything okay. I'm in the middle of a bit right now that's all about Character A believing that Character B agreed to something that B didn't understand he was agreeing to. Just communicate better!

I would like to think that in all cases I've sidestepped these peeves and written something that transcends the potential flaws. I would like to think that as a reader, I would enjoy my own novel. But sometimes I'm afraid that I'm writing a story I couldn't stand to read.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ On the Office of Letters and Light blog, Susan Bell sings the praises of the revision stage: "Editing is not the clean-up, it's the meal. Look forward to it, because when you edit, the discovery of problems is cause for celebration (where else in life is that so?). Rejoice each time you find a sentence or character or chapter that doesn't work, because if you don't find a flaw, you can't fix it."

Ramping Update

A month ago I announced a goal for myself. I said, "I'm going to increase my hourly goal each week for the next four weeks. At the end of that time, I'm going to post about this again and tell you how well I'm doing."

Well, it's the end of that time, and I am now bracing myself for your mild disappointment, because I have to admit that I failed in my goal. Go ahead. Lay it on me. Really let me have it.

Done? All right. Now I'm going to rationalize why my failure is okay.

(I'm only partly serious about it being okay, because part of me hates that I failed to meet my arbitrary goal and doesn't see any way to live with it. But another part of me understands that one of the least productive uses of my time is beating myself up over past failures to make productive use of my time. I'm telling you this to assure you that I'm neither consumed by self-loathing nor bathing in zen-like tranquility, but somewhere in the mundane middle.)

First of all, I didn't fail to the point of not working on changing my habits at all. The first two weeks of the endeavor, I ramped up as planned, and in fact I even did one more hour of writing than I'd committed to. Of course the project grew more difficult as it went on, and the third week was just a flat-out failure in which I wrote less than half of the hours I was supposed to for no particularly good reason.

I made an important realization during that third week. Some time ago I began calculating my productivity by week, and since then I've developed a bad habit of thinking, "Ugh, this week has gone badly so far and I'm way behind, so there's no point in even trying until next week." To counteract this tendency, it would work a lot better for me to think about each writing day independently and adopt the philosophy that every day is a chance for a fresh start.

So for rationalizing purposes, I would like to put forward the theory that coming to an important realization to improve future habits is far more useful than meeting an arbitrary goal. Therefore, this week of failure was probably the most useful one of the experiment. Heck, I'm so convinced of this that it doesn't even feel like a rationalization.

In the fourth and final week, I was determined to make up for my failings of the week before, and I had a carefully laid plan to fit in my required hours. But my calendar had different ideas, and I was up against a greater than usual amount of competition for my time during the week. I might have met my goal if I'd skipped some of those appointments, but instead I fell somewhat short. I've decided that my failure in week four was only a technicality.

The way I was focusing that week, I would have made the goal if I'd been home a little more, because I spent just about every non-scheduled hour working on my novel (that's why there were no blog posts last week). In the past, I've usually accomplished very little writing during a busy week due to my distractibility. For me, this week was a huge success, despite not quite meeting my numerical goal.

Now here's the biggest rationalization of all: It's kind of a relief that I failed to do what I committed to. If I'd succeeded easily, I'd be kicking myself for going so long without writing more hours all the time. As hard as it is for me to accept, I'm already writing at close to my limit.

Once I've had a chance to recover from your disappointment, I'll try to share some more embarrassing admissions on this subject.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ In The Millions, Bill Morris looks at five cases of good and bad literary timing: "While Shakar's misfortune was that events [9/11] made his novel seem instantaneously dated in many eyes, Franzen's good luck was that those same events made his novel look prescient to just about everyone. Life is not fair."

I Am Uncomfortable Writing This

At various times, I've encountered the advice to not shy away from writing the things that make you uncomfortable. Jenn Hubbard touched on this topic recently, posting, "You must write about the thing you must not write about."

It's good advice. I often set out to write a scene one way, and then I think, "Oh, well, instead I could have them do THAT. No way, that's much too gross/shocking/ethically questionable. Well then, I guess it's perfect." I'm not proud of the twisted things my mind comes up with, and writing them sometimes gives me an icky feeling, but I know if I can produce the same feeling in the reader, I've created something powerful. (Yes, that in itself is twisted. Frankly, writing fiction is a sadistic practice. Also, I was lying: I'm very proud.)

Some of the uncomfortable stuff I'm talking about is of the obvious sort. For example, my novel contains more vomit than anyone really wants to read about. Including on the first page. In the abstract, I don't consider this an especially good strategy, and I know readers may find it off-putting, because I find it off-putting myself. But I've given that opening vomit a lot of thought (the writing life is so glamorous!), and I have clear, non-gratuitous reasons for including it. It's uncomfortable, but I believe it's good and effective for the story.

Last week I was contemplating a scene idea that made me uneasy in a very different way. There's a definite individual element to many uncomfortable topics -- some readers may be even more bothered by this story event than I am, and others won't give it a second thought. The incident involves an apparently atheist character who, in an extreme moment, is moved to prayer.

The character's beliefs don't play a large role in the story, but I have established that he's scornful of the idea of religion or a higher power. He is not a person who prays, and he would never anticipate that he might resort to prayer in desperate circumstances. But he does pray in this scene, and while it doesn't lead to a religious epiphany or anything like that, it affects how he views the outcome of the situation.

In the version of the scene from the previous draft, the character makes his appeal to God even while thinking that he doesn't know if God exists. When I reached the scene again during this revision, I wondered whether to keep the prayer at all, because the whole thing was fairly weak and uninteresting. Then I imagined the character actually getting to his knees and praying in earnest. The image of him down on his knees feels unequivocal to me. I was uncomfortable with the idea that he'd do that, because he would be uncomfortable with the idea. My discomfort made me think it might be good for the story.

As always, I won't truly know if it works until I get feedback from critique partners (who I hope won't be too biased by this advance out-of-context analysis). But for now, I like it. Because I don't like it one bit.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Rachelle Gardner explains the difference between foreshadowing and telegraphing: "When you foreshadow, the reader usually doesn't notice it when they initially read it. But later they might have an 'aha' moment, remember it, and put two and two together. Often foreshadowing can't even be detected until someone reads your novel for a second time. It's that subtle." (Thanks, Livia Blackburne!)

It's Not Just Me

I am insecure about my process. Sure, I make all these confident declarations about how everyone knows creating a novel takes a long time and that I'm committed to revising until it's right. But come on, would I really explain at such lengths if I weren't desperate to validate the fact that I'm still revising?

So it's always a relief to come across other writers talking about putting large amounts of time and work into revision. Yes, I know rationally that revision must be part of any successful author's process, but I still crave the stories of ripping a draft to pieces or starting over from scratch. Not every writer revises so extensively, because some manage to plan enough in advance that the plot and sequencing are more or less right the first time around. But I suspect that making huge changes between drafts is the more common phenomenon (and that when it isn't done, that can often be a mistake).

I was thrilled to read in a recent post by Jennifer R. Hubbard, "I spend 10% of my time drafting new material and 90% of my time revising." I thought, "Yes! I'm not alone!" Jenn's post is a response to one by Jane Lebak, who advises making drastic revisions by writing the whole story over again fresh rather than editing old material. Yes! I did that!

When the subject of big revisions comes up in author interviews, I always pay extra attention. Here's Michael Chabon's revelation about the first draft that eventually became THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION (a book I loved):

Mr. Chabon wrote a 600-page draft in the first person that he ended up trashing after a year. It had the same characters -- Landsman; his ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, also a policeman; and his cousin and partner, a half-Indian, half-Jew named Berko Shemets -- but a completely different story. He feels as if "Policemen's Union" is its sequel, he says.

And here's Joshua Henkin, author of THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU, which I'm looking forward to reading, discussing his process on an episode of Notebook on Cities and Culture:

I think you have to write a certain number of bad pages in order to get to the good pages.... MATRIMONY [his previous novel] took me ten years to write, this [THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU] took me five years to write, but in both cases I would say that the vast majority of the book that got published got written toward the end, like in the last year of MATRIMONY and the last six months with THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU. And it wasn't like I was sitting around eating bon-bons all that time and then I decided, "Okay, time to kick in." I think it's much more that you spend a lot of time making mistakes until finally something clicks and then in the last few months the book sort of miraculously starts to write itself. So I very much feel it's not throwing away stuff, it's more about investing all those days and figuring out who those characters are.

Yes, yes, yes! And also, see how speedy I am compared to him? At least so far, if I hurry up and finish revising?

I feel so validated.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jen Doll at the Atlantic Wire presents What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide: "For as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?" (Thanks, Books on the Nightstand!)

Ramping Up

Deadlines and goals are useful. I mean, duh, right? They certainly work well for me, so I always have this nagging feeling that if I were operating with a real deadline on my novel, I'd be a lot more productive and probably finished by now.

What qualifies as "real" in my head is a funny thing. I've successfully met the deadline for National Novel Writing Month many times -- and without it, I might never have written any novels -- but the penalty for failing is only self-flagellation and maybe some mild disappointment from friends. I'm great at self-flagellation, so I ought to be able to set up a personal arbitrary deadline at any point, and I can create the potential for mild disappointment by announcing it on my blog or even just telling a few people.

I guess I have done that at least once, when I committed to an hour count goal last November as a parallel challenge to NaNoWriMo. I met my goal, and it helped me be more productive than usual. I was kind of intending to repeat the challenge a couple of months later, but that never happened.

I'm constantly making goals for myself about when I'm going to finish this scene, this chapter, this whole damn draft. But I never make them real by telling anyone else, so they're meaningless.

Thinking about this more, I realize that I'm only comfortable committing publicly to a goal based on a certain amount of time (or in the past, a certain number of words), not to one involving progress through the story. That's because I can't know for sure if a scene or chapter will be painless to write or will require long thought and agonizing over every sentence. I'm afraid that if I have to meet a deadline, I'll rush when I shouldn't, and the quality will suffer. Which would be a counterproductive use of productivity, so of course that's why I'm not comfortable with it. I mean, duh, right?

Therefore, here's another hour-based goal. Back in the spring, I did an assessment of how much time I spent working, and I wasn't pleased with the results. I resolved to push myself to focus more on writing each day, and that's been going pretty well, if you overlook a summer full of breaks. I'm currently more satisfied with how much I'm getting done.

So now it's time to boost the numbers and raise the stakes. I'm going to increase my hourly goal each week for the next four weeks. At the end of that time, I'm going to post about this again and tell you how well I'm doing.

And if I don't, your mild disappointment will rain down upon me! Believe me, this is one of the scarier fates I can imagine.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Author Keith Ridgway confesses in The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog, "I don't know how to write.": "I've written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I'm doing." (Thanks, Nathan Bransford!)

A Typical Day in My Writing Brain

9:30am: I'm going to get so much writing done today!

11:00am: I guess I should probably stop [reading the internet/doing these somehow urgently important dishes/"carefully planning my week"/reading a different part of the internet] and get started on that whole writing thing.

11:03am: I have no idea where this scene is supposed to go next. I'm not going to produce anything good today.

11:07am: OHMYGOD that is the best paragraph I've ever written! This scene is going in such a brilliant direction.

11:16am: Well, I wrote that one really awesome paragraph. Isn't that enough of an accomplishment for one day?

11:52am: Okay, what if he says that to her, and that sets up the thing that happens in the next chapter, and it's also sort of parallel to what happens later in the other storyline...

12:13pm: Ugh, this chapter I wrote a few months ago is going to need so much polishing. No, wait, I love it.

1:31pm: Is this the best reveal ever, or what? Is it? Is it? Probably not.

1:33pm: Whatever, I'll fix it later.

2:00pm: Wait, what if none of this makes any sense because nobody did that kind of thing in 1963?

2:48pm: Now that I'm positive the situation is period-appropriate, I think I'm not going to use it after all because something else works better.

3:35pm: How is it that I'm still researching this when I thought I'd already decided not to use it?

3:41pm: Okay, it's decided: I'll do it like this, and later I'll go back and add a part to the other storyline where they talk about the same issue.

3:44pm: I will never ever ever be finished with this novel.

3:46pm: No agent will ever consider my manuscript because it's too long. But not like it matters, because I'll never be done revising it.

3:47pm: The time I'm spending on revision is worth it because I'm creating an incredible manuscript, and it doesn't matter that it's long because every word belongs there.

3:48pm: I'm delusional. I will never be successful.

3:49pm: Okay, what if in this scene, they're talking about that other thing, and then I take out that other scene?

4:53pm: Shoot, I spent so long writing that I'm not going to have time to [read/blog/do those urgently important dishes/read the internet].

7:29pm: Oh, I know, I should make that scene take place at the office.

9:15pm: What kind of desks would the office have?

1:47am: Ohmygod have I based that whole chapter on a glaring anachronism?

1:53am: No agent will ever consider my manuscript because of how the story opens.

This is a sample typical day, but not all of my days follow this pattern. On many days, these thoughts occur in an entirely different order! Also, I have totally exaggerated how long I typically spend working in order to make myself look good in this post.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ io9 offers a very cool chart that reveals how science fiction futures changed over time: "Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out)."

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Earlier this week I posted about the kind of outlining and notetaking that I'm using for this revision. The short version: To deal with the complex three-in-one structure of my novel, I've had to spend an awful lot of time keeping track of the story.

For this third major draft of the manuscript, I worked hard to plan all the big things in advance. But despite the extensive planning, I still periodically encounter gaping holes where I failed to map out the logic behind a required scene. These holes are particularly extensive near the end of each storyline.

As an example, say my outline indicates that in this chapter the narrator confronts his mother and father, separately, about the big family secret he's learned about from his sister. And that in the course of these conversations, he arrives at all the necessary realizations and decisions that will allow him to choose the actions that come next in the plot. Oh, and also that there should be some plausible reason for the topic to come up in this scene after everyone's avoided talking about it for so long.

Well, when I get to this point in the outline, I might be lucky enough to discover that Past Me left some suggestions about how to accomplish all this. But Past Me was a less experienced writer than Present Me, so the suggestions are likely to be pretty weak. And that doesn't matter anyway, because the earlier parts of the story have deviated so far from the outline that the suggestions no longer make any sense.

So then I worry that I may not be able to believably bring about the scenes and realizations needed for the plot to conclude the way it's supposed to. And I panic for a while and stop working and decide to give up writing and become a goatherd. Or maybe a dolphin trainer.

But I eventually convince myself to keep going. And somehow I write the necessary scenes in a way that makes far more sense than I planned, with far more important insights for the characters plus a bunch of exciting new connections for the reader to appreciate. It's perfect! It's brilliant! It might turn out to be horribly forced when I share it with anyone else, but for now, I'll continue deluding myself!

The storyline that remains to be revised is absolutely full of holes, and I intend to give the outline some more attention before I get started. I'm sure I still won't manage to figure it all out in advance. But I'm going to continue hanging on to the hope that ultimately, I'll manage to cram all the pieces of this puzzle together.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tim Parks writes for the New York Review of Books blog in defense of ebooks: "...are these old habits essential? Mightn't they actually be distracting us from the written word itself? Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without?" (Thanks, The Millions!)

The Revision Planning Stage, or Procrastinating

At the end of last month, I set out to explain what exactly I've been doing to my novel during this revision. As you may have noticed, I'm taking a long time and many posts to provide an answer. This is, of course, all a carefully designed way to demonstrate the slowness of the process. Show, don't tell, and all that. Absolutely my intent. No question.

Previously on this rambling account, after I wrote a second draft of the novel from scratch, I brought the manuscript to my critique group and learned where the story still fell short of what it could be. The work with my critique group took about three months in the spring and summer of 2010, which gave me a good break from actively working on the novel. I've reviewed the records of my life to figure out what else I did during that time -- it was mostly reading, real life stuff, and starting this blog.

My first step in revising the novel again was to plan out the changes I wanted to make. I recommend this step. Whether or not you use any type of outline or notes when writing a first draft, it's valuable to prepare for subsequent drafts by taking stock of what you've written and how it compares to the story you're trying to write. Without this preparation, it's difficult to know how to even approach a revision.

There are all sorts of ways to map out your story. You might want to use index cards and sticky notes, or you might prefer software. I used both in the planning stage for this revision, and both were useful.

Now, if you look at those two posts linked in the paragraph above, you'll notice they're dated six months apart. I would not, in general, recommend that you spend six months on the revision planning stage. Especially if the real delay is not so much the intense planning and research you're doing but instead your tendency toward distraction and your fear of getting started. To be fair, there were also a couple of months in there when life responsibilities consumed most of my possible writing time, but still.

During this prolonged planning stage, besides making notes on little bits of real and virtual paper, I also took the bold step of reading my manuscript so I knew what I was dealing with. And I wrote a detailed synopsis of the plot as I wanted it to be in order to test my intended changes in miniature before applying them to the actual manuscript. I recommend both these steps for anyone preparing to revise.

But again, I advise that you try not to take forever about it. There's a fine line between planning and procrastinating. I'm usually on the wrong side, and that's part of the answer to the question of why I'm not finished revising yet.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Juliette Wade discusses Completion, and Resonance: why the first chapter is like the last: "If you've been writing for any significant length of time, you've probably heard people say that last chapters should come full circle, and that they should resemble first chapters in some critical way."

You Can't Rush Brilliance

As I've vented about previously, sometimes I get frustrated that my novel isn't yet finished and out the metaphorical door. But just as often, I conceive of some new brilliant idea for the story that makes it so much better, I can't believe I might have considered the manuscript complete without it.

Over the weekend, at some random moment (was it in the shower? I get all my best ideas in the shower) I had a realization about a plot problem I hadn't even been thinking about. The solution is so obvious and fits so perfectly that I'm a bit embarrassed not to have thought of it before. Happily, it's even in one of the storylines I haven't started revising yet, so I haven't even created extra work for myself.

It's a little alarming to think that this idea might never have occurred to me, especially if I'd revised more quickly, and that my novel would have been worse off because of it. (Am I only grasping at any justification for my slowness? I'm pretty sure that I'm not.) And it's even more alarming to think that someday the book will be really finished and out in the world, and then I might still come up with ideas about how it could be better.

This is the kind of worry that keeps me awake at night. That and the constant flood of brilliant ideas.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Since many of my favorite books defy a genre classification, I enjoyed Alma Katsu's Beyond the Margins post on The Perils of Writing the Indefinable, Genre-Crossing Novel: "Publishers are often leery of these books because they can be hard to market. At the same time, these genre-defying books are often the ones that catch fire and become wildly popular because they are so different."