Would you read past this first page?

Here's the deal: I'm looking for people to tell me if they'd read past the first page if it were the beginning of a book they picked up.




1979

His little body burned Maizy's fingers. As soon as her husband closed the side door, drafts of cold air snaking around her ankles, Maizy lowered the infant into the playpen and let him drop the last inch, wringing her hands. He fussed, the scratchy radio static sound, but she turned away. Little good it did though; she could see his newborn blue eyes and his hair lightening from black to brown in her mind’s eye nonetheless.
 The old ceramic kitchen heater hissed as she stared out the windows etched with snowflakes as finely laid out as German shneirenshnidt paper art, lit pink and green and blue from Christmas lights lazily left out too long, lolling into this dark February morning.

Her fingers flew to the heat of her neck, scratching beneath the high neck of her house coat. The skin was red and dappled purple, all the way down her chest. She raked it nearly raw every time the baby nursed.

Maizy pressed her hands into her skin to still her fingers, heat surging from the spaces between them. As she paced, the old floorboards protested her every step, and her slippers on the new linoleum, harvest gold, squawked.

She banged through the kitchen door, sped through the living room and flung herself out onto the porch, gulping air that froze her lungs. She ran down the few steps, the cement roughing up her flimsy house slippers, as she glimpsed the towers of Three Mile Island. She was so close. In two minutes, she could be panting on the bank of the Susquehanna River. She could be frozen, numb, out.

She felt her eyelashes sink onto her cheeks. Something had to change. Itching began behind her ears and the back of her neck, and her face felt as hot as if she’d sat in the face of the fireplace’s open flames; but she’d not even struck the match to start the fire yet.

As she walked back into her hissing, protesting kitchen, she shivered, delayed. But she entered a different woman than the one who’d run from it minutes earlier. She'd made a decision. No one would understand, but she had to do it nonetheless. Just like no one had understood why she believed, before he was even born, that her baby would die, why she’d never expected to bring him home from the hospital, why she’d never put the gifts of clothes into drawers like he lived there, why she’d never even bought anything larger than three months, the age he was now.  Her husband couldn’t understand why she’d avoided holding him any longer than necessary, why she had to steel herself, why she had to work so hard to protect herself from a scrawny infant not even ten pounds yet. So he, they, wouldn’t understand this either.

She took a shower, leaving the baby in the kitchen, and when she dressed this time, she put on regular clothes. She would not be nursing again, she said aloud to calm the welts on her skin. Her doctor would be very concerned; he had impressed upon her from the beginning how such a low birth-weight, malnourished baby benefited from breast milk especially. But she just couldn’t do it anymore. She began devising how she could maybe even bottle-feed him without touching him. When she held him, her skin crawled, her mind raced, her heart beat so rapidly she couldn’t talk, move or even hardly breathe. She’d thought it was her penance to endure it, but she was beyond that now. The urgency to feed him breast milk for his health didn’t weigh so much, seeing that she knew so definitively that the thread of his life was to be cut short. Any day now.




Ok, so would you want to turn the page? Leave comments below. Why or why not?


Secondly, if you answer that, yes, you'd want to know more of the story, which of these descriptions of the whole story sounds like a better read?


1) You read the story of 2 couples who are connected, Maizy and Curt, and Ash and Ginny, all telling their viewpoints of the events in their lives in the year 2008-2009; Maizy and Curt's memories flash back to 1978 occasionally.


2) The book alternates between the story of Curt and Maizy in 1979, and the story of Ash and Ginny in 2008, both being told independently of the other, and as if each is the present (though you'll know by the dates that one happened earlier than the other). Instead of seeing an older Maizy and Curt remembering their young life, you'll see their young life, and you'll also see how Ginny and Ash view Maizy and Curt in 20008. While the 2 stories don't comment on each other, the reader will be able to make connections and draw parallels as they figure out how the two stories are intertwined.


So if you have any thoughts or find one more interesting than the other, let me know in the comments. I'm torn between continuing my writing as is or overhauling its whole structure.

Overhaul the way I'm writing my book???

Ok, I've written that a recent reading aloud of an excerpt from my novel put me in a moment of doubt (read here, if you wish), about everything from my ability to tell the stroy to wondering if it was after-all worthy of being told, or if I should be doing it differently. Then I read a column in Writer's Digest where debut novelists talks about how they broke into the business, and something one said tipped me off on a different way to structure my book.

For background info, what I've been doing is this: telling a story in 2008-2009 thru the points of view of 4 people--Ash and Ginny, a nearing-30 married couple, and Maizy and Curt, Ash's parents. One way of describing my novel is saying that it tries to show how Ash is affected by the way his parents lived their lives, and more specifically, how the choices they made surrounding his conception and his early childhood affected him.

How to start the story, as well as how to tell it, has been a problem from the beginning. Novelist Joyce Magnin read my prologue and didn't like how much backstory was in the opening (point well taken) and suggested maybe I'm trying to do what's a called a framing device, which she did for her first novel. I've determined I'm not doing that. Tracy Higley also read it, and I honestly forget what she said, other than that I should skip the prologue and just start it as chapter 1.

A writer's critique group has read the prologue and opening chapters, and I got a lot of negative feedback about the amount of back story there too. Also, after I'd reworked that prologue/chapter 1 ad nauseum to get it shorter, cleaner, I'd lost the immediacy of Maizy's experience. I'm writing in third person, so I can't use I to get the reader in her head, and all I'd done to shorten and cut backstory try to left my readers saying there was just too much distance between the reader and Maizy--exactly when I need to be hooking the reader, making it impossible for them to NOT turn the page! I cut so much out in my attempt to make backstory shorter, that I lost whatever good was going on before.

Then what hit me when I read the WD article was this: why does it have to even be backstory? What I've got is 2 stories, one suffering from the burden of being in the backstory, though I struggle and struggle trying to put too much attention on it, too many words in it. So why not have two stories running simultaneously, as if they are happening presnetly? That's not unheard of. All this time, I've been writing the 2008-2009 story, with the 1978-1979 story coming out in pieces as backstory through the remembrances of Maizy and Curt. But I've run into problems with this. 1) I regret that the 50-something year old Maizy and Curt remember their earlier life thru the lens of their experiences since--it's very difficult to get to the very naive and raw feelings they had in 1978 without casting whole long portions of the novel in flashback. My answer to this now is, why does it have to be flashback? I've read many a novel twining stories of two different time periods, each being told as if they happening in the present, and the reader can see connections as the 2 stories unravel, although they hardly comment on each other. I love stuff like that. Why can I not tell my story this way? Let us watch Maizy and Curt live their younger lives, and when the 2008-2009 story makes reference to them, we can see they are older and how changed they are. What I've been doing is backwards from that--all the present-happenings we witness are when they are older and I have to try to reach back in their lives to show readers why they are the way they are, when the real heart of the story, its impetus, is in the past.

2) Another problem I've mentioned before in this blog is that I like the germ of a gothic trope I've got going on with the house. But I didn't know how to carry it through in the second half of the book. I think I'm beginning to see though that if I restructure the telling of Maizy and Curt's story, that may be easier.

This is not a simple idea though. It's overwhelming. It requires I rewrite nearly half of what I've written!  (That's daunting when I was feeling I was barely 75% done with my first draft. But it also gives relief because it takes away some things I didn't want to do or didn't know how to do. I didn't really want to delve into Curt's inner world thru his long illness. If i have him be a teller of the story only in 1978-1979, then all I need write of his illness in 2008-209 is thru the eyes of his son and daughter-in-law. I won't have to be in the heads of them . Though I may miss being in Maizy's head at that age. I'll have to rework things I like about her so that other characters can observe them, if I don't let her eyes tell her part of the 2008-2009 story. (But then, who's to say I could have them as POV 2009

One thing I do see is that if I run both stories simultaneously, it will be very keenly dependent on how I interweave them, though initially it could be easy--I can just write each straight out without worrying yet for correlation points. I see already that the pacing will be very different between the two stories. The modern-day one covers a year, the second one may cover a few, but with more gaps, whereas the modern-day one will be a week-to-week plot. The big demand it will place on me, if I go forward with this overhaul, is that I will have to write a lot more of the 1979 stuff that I never did. I have a few scenes visualized--as much as I needed for flashbacks, but I've never really followed Maizy and Curt completely thru their experiences of that time. That will be demanding.

Right now, my principal characters are multi-generational--2 turning 30, 2 nearing 60. If I switch, all my characters will be in the same age bracket. That will definitely change the voice of the book.

But I'm really excited what this change could do for the one theme and using the house as a symbol of sorts.

What I dislike about big changes like this that get my juices flowing is that I can't really take advantage of it in one big gulp like my mind wants to. I'll just have to settle for working at it in sips, hoping the enthusiasm that will wane can sustain me thru the months of rewrites... And where do you start without feeling like whatever you do isn't futile?

I think I will start with my prologue/first chapter with Maizy. I'll see how i like the feel of just letting her story be the story, not backstory. (And here it is, the fruits of my short labor this afternoon: my new prologue. SO far, I like the new prospect. I feel better about this version of the prologue than I've felt about any. I'm hoping it gives the reader enough info to make them want to know more, with nothing extraneous. i want it to propell the reader to the next page.

Prologue

Prologue to my novel-in-progress

Stillhouse Road, 1979

Just touching his little body burned Maizy's fingers. As soon as her husband closed the side door, cold morning air slithering in around her ankles, Maizy lowered the infant into the play pen, dropping him the last inch and wringing her hands. 

He fussed, but she turned away. The old ceramic radiator hissed as she stared out the windows etched with snowflakes as finely laid out as German shneirenshnidt paper art, lit pink and green from Christmas lights left out too long, mocking this dark February.

Maizy scratched beneath the collar of her house coat. Her skin was red and dappled purple, all the way down her chest, as it was every time after the baby’s skin touched hers. She pressed her hands into her skin to still her fingers, heat surging from the spaces between them. As she paced, the old floorboards protested her every step, and her slippers on the new harvest gold linoleum squawked.

Feeling her chest squeeze beneath press of her fingers, Maizy banged through the kitchen door, sped through the living room and flung herself out onto the porch, gulping freezing air. She ran down the few steps, the cement roughing up her flimsy house slippers, as she glimpsed the towers of Three Mile Island. She was so close. In two minutes, she could be on the bank of the Susquehanna River. She could be frozen, numb, out.

She let her eyelids plummet to her cheeks. Something had to change. Itching began behind her ears and the back of her neck, and her face felt as hot as if she’d sat in the fireplace’s open flames; but she’d not even struck the match to start the fire yet. Something had to change, and she suddenly knew what she could do.

No one would understand, but she had to do it nonetheless. Just like no one had understood why she believed, before he was even born, that her baby would die, why she’d never expected to bring him home from the hospital, why she’d never even bought anything larger than size three months, the age he was now.  Her husband couldn’t understand why she didn’t cuddle him and want ot hodl him all the time, why she had to steel herself against attachment, why she had to work so hard to protect herself from a scrawny infant not even ten pounds yet. Why she didn’t name him. Her husband gave a name. Asher. Meaning joy. He cooed it to the infant a thousand times a day, but she never used the name.

She strode back into the house, stopping at the mirror on the wall across from the fireplace.  “You won’t be nursing anymore,” she said to the petite woman with wet dark hair, iced over from the outside cold. She said it to calm the welts on her skin. Her doctor would be very concerned; he had impressed upon her from the beginning how such a low birth-weight, malnourished baby benefited from breast milk especially. But she just couldn’t do it anymore. When she held him, her skin crawled, her mind raced, her heart beat so rapidly she couldn’t talk, move or even hardly breathe. She’d thought it was her penance to endure it, like enduring the pain would be absolution for her sins. But now she’d finally married the man. “That makes up for some of it, at least. Right?” she asked the Maizy in the mirror. She’d done what she could to correct things on her end. There was nothing else to do. The baby would die anyway, whether it got breastmilk or not, so why further punish herself?

As she walked back to the hissing of the kitchen radiator, she shivered. The linoleum squawked with each foot-fall—that linoleum Stephen, her first husband, had laid so hurriedly as he anticipated the birth of their child. The walls of the kitchen, wallpapered by Stephen too, seemed to close in on her. It wasn’t just that baby’s telltale little heart, beating out her betrayal—

it was this house too. It remembered everything she wanted to forget.

Doubting your writing after sharing it

So I read an excerpt from my novel at my writers group Christmas party. In another blog I talk of what necessary lessons I learned in cutting it down to read, but now I want to talk about how i felt really deflated after reading it to a group of 15 people.

I've long wanted to write a great holiday dinner scene. (I even wrote about it before, before I wrote it). I wouldn't say this draft (read it here if you like) has really achieved all I wanted, but I think parts are well executed. So I was a little disheartened by the lack of laughter as I read. But I should remind myself of a few things:

 1) I couldn't really expect hearers of that excerpt to get all the nuances of that scene; their appreciation and even understanding of all the nuances are dependent on reading the chapters before. The plot was mostly complete for what I read, but the listeners' knowledge of the characters was missing; they wouldn't know if something was remarkable or out of character for Ash or Ginny; they couldn't know the history with Allen and Thomas and how those characters' conversational comments would have affected others.

2) Perhaps out loud laughter was too much to expect. I have my characters engage in some controversial topics that, while I think humorously reveal their personalities, the topics themselves could be red herrings evoking emotional responses in the listeners that distract them from regarding the topics through the eyes of the characters.

3) It's really not an over-all funny chapter. I meant for some hints of humor, but it really is more about Ginny's constant tension, a building tension, that ends in a fight between her and her husband Ash.

4) This reading wasn't a critique or designed for feedback. It was simply a reading meant to entertain.

But I did feel disheartened after reading it aloud. (We writers are an insecure bunch when we reveal our art...) Sometimes, after spending years and thousands of words, I start to doubt of my plot is worth what I've put into it. I don't want my story to be silly, trite, expected, or ridiculous. I want it to have a message, I want it to keep people guessing and thinking. Sometimes I'm flattened by the sheer weight of the enormity of the project. When you work so isolated on something for so long, you know you lose objectivity and sight of some things that you really need, to keep everything in balance.

Reading made me wonder if I'm going in too many directions with the plot. I have a bit of a gothic thread that I love, but I'm not sure how to carry it through the second half of the novel. I've also got what some would consider just a plain romance thread I've got to solve, and I'm a bit gun-shy. I don't want it to be shallow, cheesy, or unbelievable. It's much easier to break up a marriage than to show people falling in love. I've been going the past few months on the idea that I don't need to know those answers yet. Just write, Renee, I tell myself. I comfort myself knowing that Stephen King waited until the second draft to pull out certain things and then write them more fully through the whole story. I'm hoping I can do that with some themes and symbols.

I'm taking this month off, as far as novel writing goes. (Because I just got too many freelance articles assigned and due, and because it's Christmas.) I hope to return in January, renewed, with a clearer sense about what's really important in my novel, and what to focus on.

Articles in print:
100% Whole Wheat Bread with Honey or Molasses, for a Bread Machine

"Beyond the Gifts: How to get your kids to see past the materialism of the holidays" Smart magazine


Are Schools Expecting Our Kids to Read Too Early?

Killing your darlings and cutting your words in half

Maybe my worst vice in writing is that I'm wordy. I've been learning a lot in freelancing for magazines, where I'm assigned 500 word articles and commonly have to cut my first draft in half, that I really can do it--I really can get across a lot of information in fewer words. But its' really hard. I probably get paid a mere few dollars an hour when you take into account how long I labor over cutting my articles down to the size required. But when it comes to my novel, I've not been constrained in that area--I write and write, with no thought to length. (I know I'll someday have to cut a lot, but it's not right now--I don't have a complete first draft yet.)

But the Christmas party of my writers group brought the challenge and opportunity for me to present an excerpt from my novel-in-progress. We were all to bring a selection Christmas-themed. I'd written, months ago, a holiday dinner scene where my main characters are hosting the holiday meal for the first time. I thought I'd easily print out that scene and be done. But no, it was over 4,000 words! I had to cut it down to 1500 at most so it'd be short enough for me to read aloud to the group. If you want to read it, the Christmas dinner excerpt is here.

I learned a few things.

1) I was amazed how much I cut, and how much I could cut--though it took many different sittings. On a particular day, I couldn't handle killing anymore of my darlings, as Hemingway called them, so I had to stop. I couldn't possibly imagine reading the scene without letting readers know the description of Tiffany's forehead scar, or hearing the anecdote about Ginny and nativity sets, or about how Ash confronts Ginny about her condescending comments to him during the dinner. Another day, I'd sit down with a less impassioned and attached mind, and cut a little more.

2) The cutting really did force me to pull out the focus of the scenes and helped me see some stuff wasn't necessary, or at least, was for another scene, but not necessary for this one. It made my writing better, sharper.

3) On the contrary, I learned sometimes that cutting a scene made the whole story less sharp, more muddled. I cut more than the chapter can really handle. I cut things that didn't matter for the excerpt reading, but now for the novel, I'll have to go back and add it back in to make sense of the whole storyline.

4) This wasn't a waste of time. It taught me a lot about how I'll need to cut my whole novel, shortening sentences, paragraphs, being less descriptive.

5) It was a waste of time in some instances--I now have to go back to previous drafts and add back in many details and even passages that the novel really needs. I saved many versions along the way, but none is the version I now know I need.


Articles I've published:

"Beyond the Gifts: How to get your kids to see past the materialism of the holidays" Smart magazine

Omega-3 Fatty Acids Protect Against Obesity?

Natural Deodorants: Do Any Work as Effectively as Popular Commercial Brands?

Christmas Dinner chapter excerpt

Here's an excerpt I read from my novel at my writers group's Christmas party. We were all asked to bring something to read that was Christmas-themed. It was a challenge; this 1500 word selection was carved out of a 4,000 word selection. For better or worse, here is an excerpt with a large section taken out, and the ending lopped off. (In another blog I wrote about what I learned from this exercise, and whether or not it was a waste of time...)

Background:

Ginny and Ash, married couple with no kids, hosting Christmas dinner for first time.

Guests: her mother Ruthanne and newish stepfather Allen, her cousin Ruby with infant daughter Namaste, and her best friend, pregnant Daniella.

            Then hours before the meal, Ash invites guests without asking her fist: Tiffany next door that has seven kids and a husband, and the neighbor on the other side, the bachelor scholar Thomas, with whom Ginny, unbeknownst to Ash, has recently had a very comfortable encounter.

            Ginny gasped when she opened the oven to check the turkey.

            “Ash! Asher, what did you do with the turkey?” She was staring at his pies—which weren’t supposed to be put in yet.

            “What?” he blinked innocently. “The turkey was done, so I put my pies in.”

            “It can’t be done yet! Where is it?”

            “Oh, there was no room, so I put it in the bathroom.”

            “The bathroom?’ she whispered in disbelief, racing to it.

            “It’s not like I stuck it in the toilet,” he laughed. “I just balanced it on the sink.”

            Ginny winced. That unused room smelled like stale water, rust and mildew. She threw Ash a look of disgust as she gripped the handles of the roaster.

Then she saw her sweet potatoes--the top a surprise pool of white goo.

            “What’s this?” she asked.

            “Oh, I finished them,” Ash said. “We’ve gotta have marshmallows.”

            “Ash—I was making a different dish than what your mother makes! They weren’t unfinished!”

            “Oh,” he said. “Oh well, we’ll get extra sweet sweet potatoes!”

            Wrenching back a turkey wing, she poked the flesh. Pink flesh.

            “Ash, it’s not done.”

            “What‘d’ya mean?’

            “What do I mean? The turkey’s simply not done!” She closed her eyes and slumped against the counter.

            “I was just trying to help,” Ash sighed. “It’s Christmas, Ginny.”

            Ginny felt his arm snake around her waist. She thrust it off.

            “It is Christmas. And I’m trying not to get really upset with you.” She shut her eyes until she heard the bang of the kitchen door.

            Soon everyone was seated, but herself and Thomas, who’d not yet arrived, but whose seat was across from hers. Her mom sat around the corner from her, she and Allen sharing that head of the table. Tiffany’s husband Don headed the other end and nearly shared his seat with the Christmas tree. Ginny shook her head, thinking how if Ash had his choice of tree, they’d never have fit the table at all.

            Ginny gasped; she’d forgotten the butter. Through the sound of her own hurried steps, she heard the knock on the side door. Out the window, she saw the light reflecting off Thomas’s glasses and the taut, side-skewed smile on his face.

            “Sorry I’m late.” He hung his head.

            “We didn’t start yet,” she smiled uncertainly. “Coat, there,” she motioned to the hooks by the door, then opened the fridge and swung around the door like it was her dance partner, the butter dish in hand a prop. As she hurried ahead of Thomas, her skirt swirling between her ankles nearly tripped her.

            As her mother lead the Christmas prayer, Ginny tried to breathe deeply, as Daniella did when stressed.

            As strangers passed dishes, Ginny worried that the baked corn was too runny and about the plaster dust on the nativity set on the mantle. (Thomas had offered to clean all his mess, but Ginny had been more eager to get him out of her house.)  Then she worried what they’d talk about. She’d spent all her worry on the food. She noted Ash had done well with the seating, putting all with or expecting babies together and not splitting family units.

            “Hey, Mr. Ash,” said three-year old Jaibee, who was sitting on her knees in her chair, “I can sing Jingle Bells and my ABCs.”

            “Well, sing for us,” encouraged Ash. So the little red-head sang in her tiny voice until the close attention wicked it down to a whisper and she turned her head into her mom’s shoulder.

            “Ginny, why don’t you sing them the Sunday School ABCs,” said her stepfather. “Tell that eternal E story!”

            Ginny felt her cheeks burn. In Allen’s eagerness to love her mother, he took a weird ownership of all her childhood stories.

            “No, no!’ Ginny protested.

            “What’s he talking about?” Daniella asked.

            “It’s really not that interesting,” Ginny rushed, deciding it was better to tell it herself. “There’s a Sunday School ABCs all about Jesus. The final rhyming line was, ‘a home eternally.’ Well, I was really young, so I thought the words were, ‘a home eternal E,’ as in the letter E was given special recognition as the best and everlasting letter, God’s favorite.”

“She drew Es all over her wallpaper,” her mother chimed. “She made a point of telling everyone ‘my name has four E’s in it!’ She wanted her middle name to be changed to Evangeline, and she loved eating eggs, eggplant, beets, and her favorite animal was the eel!”

              “Oh, Gin-Gin, that’s so cute!” Daniella gushed, rubbing her starting-to-show belly.

            Ginny didn’t dare glance at Thomas. Their relationship pivoted on not getting too personal.

 “This is really yummy orange stuff,” a pig-tailed girl said as sweet potatoes oozed between her lips.

“You like them?” Ash asked, winking at Ginny.

Ginny wanted to pinch him.

The kids resounded with assurances that they were the best thing on their plates. Ash’s face bloomed to them like a sunflower tracking the sun.

“But if we’d’a stayed home,” a boy perhaps seven piped up, “we coulda had Spam out of a can. I like Spam better’n bird.” His mother tried to nudge him.

            As Ginny took her first bites, conversation moved to baby things.

            “Disposables came out right before Ginny was born,” her mother directed to the middle of the table, “but I didn’t give them any bother.”

            “Yeah, my mom used cloth, and I plan the same,” Daniella said between bites of mashed potatoes she smoothed into hills of snow with her lips. Ginny noticed anew how beautiful she was, though she didn’t need the silver eyeliner. Daniella had let her hair go natural brown after years of coloring it, and it made her Italian skin tone rich and luminous.

            “Oh Lord,” Tiffany exclaimed. “If I had to wash diapers for the past fifteen years, someone would have to put me in my grave.”

            “They’re easier now,” Daniella said. “My sister swears by them, and now they’ve got ones with Velcro or snaps. No more pins.”

            “But you still have to wash them, right?” Tiffany asked. “Not for me.”

            “Well, we think it’s worth the benefits,” Daniella shrugged.

            “Benefits?” Ruby asked. As Daniela enumerated the health and environmental benefits of using cloth, Tiffany interjected.

            “The environment?” Tiffany asked. “I don’t have time to worry about that, and I don’t think we need to anyway,” she said, brushing her brassy hair off the face of her newborn who was sleeping in a wrap swaddled to her chest.

            “I’m curious why you think that,” Thomas said.

            “Well,” Tiffany said without hesitation, “we don’t put much stock in anything you can’t weigh, measure and paint John Deere green, but I think if there is a God, we can’t destroy his world.” Ginny could almost hear Pap saying “Worrying about the environment is for atheist idiots who haven’t read the end of the book. Only God can destroy this world.”

            Thomas responded, “But, accepting Revelation as literal, who’s to say that precludes our ability to severely maim the earth or destroy a large percentage of the inhabitants beforehand?”

            “Ooh, that’s a good point.” Daniella pondered. “There are many degrees of decline between health and death.”

            Tiffany’s baby cried, and she began to move out of her chair, lips a taut line.

“I agree with Tiffany,” Ash rushed. “He’s not going to let us live on an earth covered with soiled disposable diapers.” Just like Ash, Ginny thought, missing the point.

            “But,” Daniella said, “in third world countries that’s already true.”

            “That’s like all the worry about a nucular holocaust,” her stepfather laughed. “In my day, people protested it, fearing we could do each other off in some mishap. But we can’t nuke the whole world; God will destroy the earth, not us.”

            “But should we make choices to destroy portions of the world and unleash perilous health consequences we can’t reharness?” Thomas asked.

Ginny felt like warning Allen that he was arguing with a PhD in the philosophy of ethics. Her stepfather used logic like a four year old, repeating an unsound point as if repetition could change its veracity. But as Allen smacked his lips against his fork and jabbed it in the air to enumerate his points, she wished she had warned Thomas of Allen.

“Yes, but again,” Thomas responded patiently. “where does the Bible promise the world will function in health until the last day? Parts of our world are dying every day. We’re reaping consequences already. Aren’t we responsible for our choices?”

 “I just wish,”  Ash smiled and brushed his hands together, washing his hands of the discussion.  “that we’d lived in the good ol’ days—the fifties and sixties.”

 “The good ol’ fifties and sixties?” Ginny didn’t withhold her incredulity or her annoyance. “That’s one of my pet peeves—that level of ignorance! Even with 9-11, we are living in safer times compared to the Cold War with people building underground shelters.” Ginny felt tension in her fingers as her gestures grew larger. “And the sixties—well, that was the most colossally dangerous decade of the earth’s existence! And furthermore—”

Just then Ruby’s baby whapped Thomas’ drink into Allen’s plate, and everyone made much of it, seeming relieved for a change in subject.

I wrote here about how I felt after reading this to others...I was tempted to give up on the novel...

Other things I write:

"Beyond the Gifts: How to get your kids to see past the materialism of the holidays" Smart magazine

Organic Food: Eight Benefits for You and Your Children

Job Search: How to Make Your Application Climb to The Top of The Pile

Do Writers Commonly Feature Characters Inspired by Real People They Know?

Do other fiction writers make characters like people they know in real life? I know, there are many reasons to avoid representing real people in your fiction, but I mean, at least as far as appearances go, are there writers who secretly see a fictional character walking around with the face or body of a real person they know?

The other week, I saw a little red-headed girl whom I saw only once before, a year ago. She was so cute with her hair back in barrettes, her little teeth poking out between her teeth, her eyes heavily lidded. I wrote a preschool-age character in my novel and modeled this character, Jaibee, after this real-life little girl. Seeing her again surprised me, both with the passage of time, and the clash of the character I wrote and what this real little girl is like.

I am a very visual person, and what my character looks like really matters. I read that Stephen King really doesn't think that's important, and he keeps physical description to a bare minimum. That bothers me. I need to see a face and body because as I read, my mind makes a film for me to watch. I hate it when a writer keeps physical description sparse at the beginning, so I just have to make something up--and then, later, the writer tells you a detail about the hair color or some feature and it totally smacks against what I was forced to invent before!

I'm reading Anna Elliot's "Twilight of Avalon" novel right now and I appreciate how she introduces characters with physical description--not exhaustive, but adequate. The better I can visualize characters, the more real and distinct they are. When writers don't describe them in concrete ways, I run the risk of mixing them up because their physical appearances change and morph, they're so indistinct.

When I write, I sometimes can't help visualizing someone I know as the face of a character I made up. I'm the same way as a reader. I'll never forget, my entire life long, that a freshman I met in college, who is now a working musician, was what I visualized for the character Ransom in one of CS Lewis' space trilogy novels; the boy was a classmate in the class for which that book was assigned, and I think a small description of the character's hair matched this boy's distinct hair, and before I ever realized it, this unsuspecting person I barely know is forever running around in my literary imagination, living the life of Ransom.

In writing, the same happens. For instance, one of my supporting female characters looks like a mom I met years ago in a mom's group. We were not close, and I never knew her particularly well, but nonetheless, I found myself seeing her as this girl in my own in-progress fiction. Their personalities aren't the same, nor are their lives; it's just the face. The problem is, what was once a mere acquaintance when I began writing the character is now someone I know much better and see regularly! It's just a bit weird to see this now-friend walking around in the imaginary world, as a different personality, living a life I invented.

I try to invent my characters entirely--rather than inspired by living, breathing people in my life--even the face. (Though many writers may agree that is sometimes nearly impossible--but that's another blog entry.) In a previous novel attempt, I did lots of sketches of my characters so I had something to visualize without relying on existing faces in my world. That really helped. I didn't do this for my Asher novel, so I've run into these funny problems of real-life look-alikes. I just realized too that another of my supporting characters, a male neighbor, looks a lot like someone else I went to college with. My female leading character though, she's entirely her own. I've been successful in seeing her face and form and not letting her morph into someone I know in real life. Maybe because I don't know anyone in real life with her facial structure. The closest description I can give would be comparing her to the actress Emily Deschanel who plays the lead character in the TV show Bones. Her jaw line is something similar to my character Ginny's, but Ginn'ys features are entirely other than Deschanel's, and her hair is dark, heavy. This is good. I'm starting to wonder if there's a connection between a character in my book having a set, original physical form which I see clearly, and my understanding of that character's personality. Hmmm...

My main character, Asher, has been giving me the biggest problems, both in that his looks keep morphing in my imagination, and he gives me the msot problems in anticipating and understanding his reactions to events. (I don't clearly idnetifiy with him as ocmpletely as I do with my other characters.)  I've been writing him all these years and he's still morphing in my mind. I know I even have conflicting physical descriptions in my first draft of the novel. Some things stay the same, always; his hair is blonde and curly, he's short and well-muscled. But even in those parameters, there's a lot of latitude, and I find I don't even visualize him the same way in all chapters.

Last summer, while at the beach, my family took a little touristy boat ride tour of the area, and the tour guide had the right hair, and a face I liked. So I decided I'd let him be my face for Ash; I never knew him, will never see him again. he as a real person will make no impression of his own on me to conflict with this character I made up. But even since that, my mind is having a hard time not letting him morph. I ca go back to chapters I wrote years ago, and I realize now that Ash looks like what I thought he looked like back then--my mind made a film for me to watch of the scenes I wrote, and that "actor" is still there, even if I recast him more recently. (In one of the earliest chapters, his hair is even brown in my mind's eye, though it never was in the writing.)

But in writing this I've pondered if there is indeed a link between the facts that my character's face is hard to nail down, just as it's hard to nail down his personality. Asher is very much unlike me; I've been reading personality books and such to help wrap my head around his psyche.

This really matters to me because I'm so visual. Another fly in the ointment is the comparisons between Ash and his dad, Curtis. Curt was easy for me to visualize; he was created with the description that he looked like Michelangelo's David, with brown hair--complete with a funny story from his college days about that comparison.  I also have a very set image of Curt the age he is in the present time of the novel: he's got long white/grey hair in a ponytail, and his face is fleshy from age. But though Ash is said to look like his father, over the years, I've changed, in my mind, and in my writing, what exactly is retained from Curt's looks into Ash's face. Curt was easy to set in stone in my mind because his face was literally set in stone centuries ago!

Maybe I need to go sketch, to get Ash's face set firmly in my mind. It's a technique that works. But seriously, the last time I tried an honest sketch of a person was--? Years ago. 5 years? Ten years? That's a scary admittance. I grew older in a life where I couldn't sustain both writing and my visual art pursuits. I chose writing and let drawing fall completely away. (That too is another blog topic...)


In the meantime I also have written some nonfiction articles:
Natural Deodorants: Do Any Work as Effectively as Popular Commercial Brands?

Organic Food: Eight Benefits for You and Your Children

Veggie-loaded Meals Kids Like

High Fructose Corn Syrup: Thirteen Reasons to Avoid It

What I learned from Stephen King

I don't like reading thriller novels. (In fact, I cannot let myself, because I really need my sleep.) And I can't say I've read a single of King's novels. But I read his book On Writing this summer, and I got a lot from it about the process of putting a novel together.

First, I love that I'm now free of this weird burden I'd put on myself: while writing my first draft, I kept going back, trying to do everything all at once. But King reminded me that a writer is first a storyteller. I've got to worry only about telling the story in this first draft. Symbolism, beautiful language and style are things to worry about in the second draft. Whew. I don't know why I was expecting so much of myself in the first draft. (Or maybe I didn't like feeling like a crap writer making a crappy first draft--and so went back to older chapters, refining them, so I could experience the feeling of writing something really good, with style, with refined figurative language. Cuz writing a first draft for years can make you feel like you're in an interminable first-draft helll....) But somehow, the way King talked about it, it got through to me. No one is going to read this draft--it's not supposed to be stellar. No one is expecting it to be a measure of all my skills.

Second, he got me to see I shouldn't be letting anyone read my first draft. It led to the problem I just mentioned. I was letting a small group of novelists read my beginning--and what that did was stop all forward motion as I made the beginning better and better to present. But I realize I may have wasted a lot of time. Until I can tell my whole story, who knows how much of those first chapters I will completely ax out of the book in the end! King talks about writing the first draft with the door closed. I'm now committed to that. I'll not worry about workshopping and etc until the second draft.

The third thing I learned made me feel a lot of comfort. King thinks plot is very over rated. He swears he doesn't plot, but lets his characters work out their problems It's apparently worked for him. Now I'm not going to say all I've tried to learn about plot is useless to me now. I really needed to learn it--I've got to get the bones of storytelling down. But I now need to take a step back from that and not worry if I've got a 3-act storyline or that my climax happens where people say it should be, etc.

King talks about how he doesn't plot, but instead takes a problem and then watches to see how his characters get out of it. That's a pretty good reflection of what I'd say I do. King calls it "what if" inspirations. I wrote a short story called the Advent of Asher, and it was a what if story about two college friends who, years later, after they marry other people, meet again and confess they'd both been interested in each other. The story was a what if tale of the terrible drama that ensued. That story was about them. But someone in my writing group suggested maybe the story was really the beginning of a novel about the baby. Then it became a what if question: seeing the unstable situation the baby is born into, I wondered what happens to this boy as he grows and becomes a man.

I'm encouraged to know a successful writer has made this sort of "plotting" (I used that term very loosely here) work. But I am a little apprehensive still--for one reason. King is successful--but have you noticed how long his books are? That's my problem too. I've got a manuscript of over 128,000 words and I may have written only to the climax so far. But I'm trying not to worry about that now. My second draft experience might be about very heavy editing, after I see what the bones of my story really are.

But I have to say, I got a lot from King's book. Shortly after reading, I made myself a one-year deadline to finish my first draft.

Some other things I've written online:
How Much Genetically Modified Food Do You Eat?

Job Search: How to Make Your Application Climb to The Top of The Pile

Power Your Electronics with Your Body's Own Movement? The nPower PEG, The First Kinetic Energy Recharger

My Deadline to Finish a Complete First Draft

So, in June, I got serious. I've written multiple posts in my blog about my freelancing journey about how I started much of this writing thing--going in many directions--as an experiment. After a year of data, I said I'd reassess and decide which avenues were best for me to focus on. Well, it took me longer than a year. About 14 months I guess, but by the end of June I'd made one decision, leaving the rest in the gray area.

Goal: I will finish the first draft of my novel by the beginning of next July.

There, I said it--though it took me over 6 weeks to commit publicly like this. I made the deadline generous, because I really hope I may be done sooner, and by July, be in the second draft.

I enjoy what I'm learning in freelancing, but I refined my goals. If I'm going to get anywhere as a novelist, i've got to start getting serious NOW. It takes years to get a book written, marketed, accepted and then published. I don't want to waste any more time not pursuing that. I'm a member of one writers group full of novelists, and going to those meetings helped me decide it was simply time to get down to business. I've been working on it for over a year, but just by squeezing it in between writing magazine articles, online content articles, and other essays. It's time I said the opposite--focus on the novel and write other things only when they're really compelling or I'm doing it to deal with writer's block with my novel.

Strange as it may sound to my own ears, I'm looking forward to the second draft. I think that part will be maybe the most fun. This first draft is a real mess of a thing. Hugely long (over 128,000 words already--past the top limit agents and publishers say they'll even consider for a first-time novelist), it's going to need not just pruning, but some outright amputation. I've finally been able to just leave beginning chapters alone (instead of editing all the time) and just press on to the end. When I'm done cranking out the story, then it's time to go back. Til then, wish me well on seeing my characters to the end. (And that end, I now finally see. While on vacation at the beach, I got a clearer glimpse than ever before of how the characters are getting to the end. That's a great thing for a writer who writes into her story--not exactly from an outlined, predetermined plot!)

My sparse online writing activities of recent months:
Zucchini for Breakfast, Dinner and Dessert: Five New Ways to Use Up Summer Squash and Zucchini

Omega-3 Fatty Acids Protect Against Obesity?

High Fructose Corn Syrup: Thirteen Reasons to Avoid It

100% Whole Wheat Bread with Honey or Molasses, for a Bread Machine

For fun, two from over a year ago:
Potty Training: Cloth Diapers vs. Disposables

Baby Food: Save money by Making Your Own

Writer's Block--how to write the holiday meal....

I love movies with great family holiday meal scenes. Some of my faves: ones from National Lampoon's Christmas and While you were Sleeping. It's long been a goal of mine to write a really great one of my own. A novel lends itself to the space and character development prior necessary to carry such a scene, and my novel-in-progress has had this empty chapter just sitting for months. It's titled, but I've yet to write the scene. In fact, it might have been 2 or even 3 years ago when I knew there would be one, and yet I haven't been able to touch it.

I'm stuck, asking myself, what am I trying to accomplish in it? i don't want to just launch into it rambling, hoping to find direction once I'm there. (though i do that often enough in this novel...I tell myself, my later drafts have got to be good, cuz my first drafts of chapters are sometimes, as writer Anne Lamotte says, really s----y.

Years ago, I assembled my characters for the scene--it's Ash and Ginny's house, and in attendance was her best friend Daniella (who is driving Ash nuts, though he cannot let on at great personal peril), Ginny's mom and stepdad (the latter of which normally drives Ash nuts, but is welcome in comparison to Daniella), the academic hermit next door neighbor, Ginny's  teen mother cousin who is ridiculously naive , and Ash's best weight lifting buddy. But I had little idea what I wanted to accomplish.

Well, in two years, I've written more of the novel, and i know a few things. 1) The scene must serve to really ramp up the stress on Ginny. A lot of that is accomplished because Ash invited most of those guests, last minute, without even asking Ginny, who has to prepare the dinner. I need the day to put Ash and Ginny at pique contention with each other. To further this goal, I think I'm going to have Ash invite the neighbors from the other side of the house--the family of seven. That'll really cook Ginny's goose!  2) I think the scene also will be about Ginny trying to come to terms with her family--her mom, the black sheep of the family, echoed in the teen mother cousin, and those who aren't there. 3) Ginny will also be processing her relationship with Thomas, and it too must be very uncomfortable, and she'll be mad at Ash for inviting him (though I have to write that prior chapter, and figure out why. 4) Some of the arguments are debates revealing the clash of world views at the table. Thomas in particular doesn't come off well, even though he's right, and Ginny tries to navigate the minefields.

So I guess I knowquite a bit. But I feel something is missing. I can't yet write it. I feel like nothing there is important enough to carry the scene. I didn't plan it to be a dramatic reveal--or should it be? Should there be some high drama, or just the rumblings of all these little conflicts? Hmmm...that's a question I've never entertained before. Does someone snap? And if so, who? Ash could--he's under stress, even though he's normally so mellow. That'd be a surprise. Ginny could, easily, but I'm not really sure what that would accomplish in my story.

Or maybe I have to just start writing, and write my way into something more profound. I've often stumbled onto a narrative gem by bumbling around in a scene, bumping into something that was gold. Maybe I should just get started, and see what else I can find as I go....

Stuff I publish online between bouts of writing fiction:

Zucchini for Breakfast, Dinner and Dessert: Five New Ways to Use Up Summer Squash and Zucchini

Chef Jamie Oliver Versus School Lunches: Where Do The Dietary Guidelines Come From Anyway?

His Eye on The Sparrow? Review of The Novel, The Prayers of Agnes Sparrow

How to Start a Novel You Will Never Finish: Part One

Your Body is Electric-- How Electromagnetic Fields From Cell Phones, Wireless Devices Interact with Your Body’s Nervous System

Putting a personal, tragic autobiographical experience in your novel?

Driving to church this morning, I had an out-of-the-blue epiphany to solve an apparent lag in the second half of my novel--and it was strange to me that the idea was to have one of my characters experience one of my life's most tragic events: pregnancy loss. I was thinking of the advice I've read for novelists: "Keep upping the stakes"--when you've got your character in conflict and struggling, what more can you do to test him/her? The truly unbidden idea (dare i say flash of inspiration) does offer a great many features that would strengthen my second half--it'd bring other existing relatioships and conflicts to great stress and would also really change the character herself. My experience is that you're never the same after losing a baby. And i can say from experience it's quite different too, the experience of an early miscarriage versus a later loss; the latter kind affects you much more. It changed me greatly, but the early miscarriage did not so much.

Having this idea made me realize: my characters in this novel-in-progress really have been echoing little of my life experiences. Whereas my first novels were very much about my life experiences, thinly guised by fictional characters, this novel is rich with characters who are in places i've never been. I've never been a 50-something year old woman who's lived with the guilt of killing her husband, failing her children. I've never been  a man who lost everything for following his heart, facing terminal illness. I've never been the only child of a single, never-married mom, whose husband had an affair, or had an affair myself.  And I've never been a child of a dysfunctional family, therefore searching for love in all the wrong places...  i think I'm giving myself a pat on the back for this--the idea of the pregnancy loss being the first real-life event to make it into this novel makes me feel god. I've been making characters who are truly themselves, and less of me, than ever before.

NOW my real question is to figure out the intricate dance of timing. With everything else in the book happening--another character having a baby, the outcome of the affair and broken marriage the ongoing drama of the terminal illness--where is the optimal place for this to occur? In some ways, it's pretty flexible--I mean, it could take only a few months from beginning to end. The only obvious restriction is that conception obviously has to  take place, and because I want the experience to be 3 months into the pregnancy, I guess my first real decision is the timing of the conception in the context of the other events. Hmmm. I just realized a snag: I was planing to do a Part 1 d Part 2 set-up, letting me fast-forward through a few months to speed the story along. But doing that would have me fast-forwarding right through when this pregnancy could naturally occur.... I'll have to think on that some more... Maybe skip only a month or 2?

I always knew I'd someday want to put into a novel the experience of pregnancy loss--because it's something not dealt with much, and i had more than a bit of anger about how it went down, how i never knew it was possible to occur the way it did for me. It's not just a powerful experience to create drama in a plot--it's a social issue I've long wanted to be able to address. I've had little luck getting nonfiction articles on the topic published; it's a hard sell--which is precisely why women who face it find themselves completely unprepared. Even if youre' searching for the information because you know you will lose the baby, you cannot find info about what it'll be like, to prepare yourself.

I never thought of putting the experience in this novel though--but thinking about it has opened a lot of doors. Advice for novelists talk about the value of putting your characters in really vulnerable positions--this will certainly do that--and leave her at the mercy of neighbors or anyone she can get to help her, as she'll be alone when it happens. I also like the possibilities in how it will affect her husband, and her best friend...

Hmmm... I've got  chew over the possibilities of the timing....

How to Organize Your Novel: An Excel Spreadsheet or Your Fridge?

For months, I've been overwhlemed by the immensity of my project. I'm no longer able to remember what I've written and what's in what chapter, etc. I knew I needed a way to keep track of my sequence of events, but I hadn't found anything to work for me. I'd tried keeping a word document list of each chapter with a summary. I've even more recently tried making this list in an Excel spreadsheet--and that makes sense--rows can be added more easily, etc. But still, I found it such a huge chore to have to go back and update that stupid list--sadly I wasn't disciplined to do it often enough, and having that file soon became a ridiculous totem to my inability to organize my novel; it was so outdated, it didn't help me at all...

I have a friend who made me jealous when he posted on facebook a photo of a 2-door closet in his room which he'd transformed into a white-board, for the purpsoe of plotting his novel. That was so brilliant! He shared it was easily made with a painted-on surface--but sadly, I have no such feature in my house that I could paint with that just to use for plotting.

But it stuck with me, and I guess, got me thinking about how the method to organize my novel could be visual, and not in a list on a computer file. Years ago (about 9 or 10 to be exact) I'd taped old computer paper to the wall of a spare bedroom I used as my office. Do you remember the computer paper where each sheet was joined to the next by perforation, for a dot matrix pritner? Yep, that's what I used. I put it at eye level across an entire wall, and there I began visually plotting a plot line for my second novel (which I've long ago ceased working on).

So I got to thinking--how could I make a workable, visual system? Well, one of my problems was that I do a lot of thinking in the ktichen. I make a decent amount of decisions about my novel while cooking, doing dishes, laundry, etc. I've often been there with an epiphany, or an idea to change the order of some chapters, but can't leave at the moment to get to my copmuter and make them. The idea is there to make a note, but it often got lost. So I figured, if I made a visual way to chart the sequence of my novel, having it in the ktichen might be the best place. I could even purposely try to work on my novel, thinking while filling the dishwasher, etc.

I'd tried one type of visual system with notecards before. I still have a stack of them in my desk drawer, a chapter synonsis on each. The idea was I could lay them out and then be able to visually see how the story would change if I changed the order. (Changing the order of the telling of my story is a big part of my craft--it has led me to a lot more depth and more possibilities.) But as good as this method sounded, I've never used it more than once. And those cards are now so outdated, half those chapters discarded, I'd have to start all over to resume.

But then I found my husband's box of old business cards I'd been saving to make flashcards for my kids. And I took some of those long twist-ties that always come around the brocoli I buy at the grocery store, and stapled them to paper like clotheslines. I pinned each sheet of paper to the fridge side with magnets. On the back of the business cards, I began writing a one-sentence description of a scene, with an initial for the character whose point of view tells it. Then I began clipping them with mini closethespins (yes, I really have them--a craft store find from 10 years ago I bought simply because they were neat and figured I'd find a use for "someday.")

Now the side of my fridge is graced with 3 of these mini clothelines hanging scenes of my novel from them. I love that they are small enough that I can see the arragnement in one contained place, and I can easily reshuffle them based on ephiphanies I have while mopping the floor or frying eggs. And perhps best, it's always there--I never have to put it away, which meant I sometimes neglected getting it out when it could be of use! And, it's not reachable by the little hands of toddlers!

When get new ideas for chapters and the forward motion of the story, I grab a bsuiness card from the junk drawer next to the sink, and jot it down, then clip it to the wire on the fridge. So far it's the best system I've used.

The other day, it solved my latest stalling point. I was glaring at a set of chapters I knew were slow. I'd been doing a lot lately to carve up some story lines by inserting other story lines between those chapters. But I was so frustrated because I was staring at a group of chapters I couldn't rearrange to any better sequence. I'd been alternating between Ash and his wife Ginny, every other chapter from each voice. But staring at a set of Ginny chapters had me sutck because I did not want to move forward in Ash's storyline just yet. Suddnely, because I could see this all laid out visually, with tangible cards in my hands representing scenes, I realized what I hand't been able to grasp when all this was in a list on a word file: there was no way to rearrange those chapters because they were, of themselves a single storyline. My only way out was to bring in another voice entirely. I had to write some chapters form another characte'rs point of view to intersperse between Ginny's. It is the only way to break up what to me seems might be a dragging, bu necessary, journey for her in the plot. Perhaps dragging is the wrong word--it's just so focused on her emotional state that it's hard to wade through if you don't get a break, a little distraction.

So anyway, that's the story of how my fridge is now a writing tool....

Other things I write (but not so much lately):
High Fructose Corn Syrup: Thirteen Reasons to Avoid It

How to Determine If Your Child is Ready to Begin Kindergarten

100% Wheat Bread with Honey or Molasses, for a Bread Machine

Lyme Disease and Autism Patients Prescribed Diets Free of Genetically Modified Foods

So who says you should get a first draft down before you revise?

I'm here to question if it's really necessary, or best, to nail down that first draft. As one who's gone against the advice and has instead worked on revising the first half multiple times, I can see some benefits to do it this way.

I'm still riding a high from my recent writer's group critique of my prologue and a couple opening chapters from the point of view of Asher, the central character. It's the first time I've felt my writing in this novel has finally arrived. It was amazing to hear the fellow writers/readers talk about the characters, getting exactly what I wanted them to get, seeing the characters exactly the way I'd hoped they'd be seen. Also, I've been through enough drafts (7? 13?) of that prologue that I've finally arrived at a narrative voice that I'm starting to like. (Click here to read the prologue.) To be told I had a strong narrative style was amazing to hear. I fall in love with novels because of their voice--and knowing how important it is, I have long felt the real lack of that in my novel-in-progress. I guess I'm learning a first-time novelist's lesson: maybe that voice and style doesn't, or at least not always, pour out, whole and gripping in the first draft. It took me many to get there. It took me years to get comfortable in my characters' shoes enough to speak for them, to let the poetry begin to seep out as I tell their story. I've long been frustrated by how bare my prose has been in recent years. Because I've been working at freelancing for magazines I thought to perhaps blame that. Other moments, I tell myself I'm really just primarily trying to figure out plot and my characters--how can I expect my prose to sing like poetry? But as I read aloud my pieces last week to my writer's group, I saw that it was there, finally. The writing was good.

It's not done. But it's much closer to the kind of rich writing I used to do in poems and short narrative essays. Man, is a novel ever a different kind of beast to deal with!

And that is why I can see the merits of writing, rewriting, revising and editing the beginning before getting to the end. Because I have done so, I think my yet-unwritten second half has got to be better. I've revised my way into knowing my novel enough to have a glimpse of its ending.

I've been feeling really bad that my novel still hasn't seen the end of a single draft. I've been working on it 4 years, or 6 if you count the 2 years I created the 2 short stories which eventually became the impetus for the novel. I've got maybe 60,000 words and no end in sight. I've heard again and again that i just need to get that first draft nailed down--a sketch even, so I can then later go back and fill in the details and subplots, etc. I even bought the book on how to write novel in 30 days, outlining how you do this bare bones type of draft. (I never intended to use the 30 day perimeter, but I saw the merit in doing the method)

I've had little forward momentum on the plot because I've spent a lot of time going back over my first half. (Largely exacerbated by having joined an online critique group that needs to read from the beginning, making me want to spruce up every chapter before I sent it.) Part of the reason I couldn't nail down the second half is because I simply don't have a really good handle on it. I sort of know some events and outcomes, but the few times I've tried to write ahead, I got stalled, or simply trashed it, because i didn't have great insight into my characters' emotional landscapes.  I just now am realizing a lot of that is due to the fact that i didn't know my characters well enough, because I didn't write them deep enough in the beginning. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'd been avoiding one of my main characters and writing from his point of view. And I have to say, finally facing him, writing a few opening chapters form his perspective, has really grounded me in the time and place of my novel in a way I hand't yet been. With him in place, all my other characters' psyches are deepening. This work has transformed my beginning, and I'm sure, as I go about editing the middle, it'll transform that, maybe even change it significantly.

So here's to questioning well-tested advice for writers. But I do know I do eventually need to heed it--I still DO have nail down that first draft,  all the way through! I'm just now maybe not going to beat myself up over the fact that I didn't do it first.

Some examples of journalism that I blamed for my bare-bones prose:
Acidity in Your Diet Linked with Weight Loss Struggle, Depression and Degenerative Disease

Antidepressants: If They Work Due to the Placebo Effect, What is The Harm in That?

Chef Jamie Oliver Versus School Lunches: Where Do The Dietary Guidelines Come From Anyway?

How to Determine If Your Child is Ready to Begin Kindergarten

The prologue to the Asher novel

This whole blog is talking ABOUT this novel. Well, for anyone who wants to read a part of it, here's the prologue that has been through maybe 10-20 revisions in 6 years... From 30+ page short story to this very small opening...

Working title: Still House

PROLOGUE—November 13, 1978

            Maizy knew her baby would die, long before she went into labor. But one look at Curt’s face as he held his firstborn, a scrawny, wriggling four-pound form, told her that he was still in denial. The look of hope and wonder on his face broke her heart, even as sympathy for him comingled with a trace of contempt for his optimism. 

            “Created to glorify God,” Curt said as he peered into the baby’s opaque eyes set in puffy lids. He didn’t even try to stem the emotion overpowering his face. She turned her head away.

When a nurse asked if they’d chosen a name, Curt responded, “Asher.” Maizy opened her mouth to protest this name they’d argued over, but no sound came. By default, she let Curt have this one small privilege. Though to her it was ridiculous—naming the infant “glad,” under the circumstances.

She watched a proud daddy study his son through eyelashes webbed with tears, but the miracle of life was lost on her. She remembered feeling that way about her firstborn, her daughter Camille. But this time was different.

The baby threw his head back in a wail. “That’s the most hopeful sound in the world,” Curt whispered, throwing Maizy a glance.

Her heart sank. He just didn’t get that this baby wasn’t going to make it. His birth weight was low, his lungs weren’t strong. And he was born on the thirteenth. Not that she put much stock in unlucky numbers, but she thought all these facts might give him pause to consider that her premonitions and nightmares had been right. It still surprised her that he didn’t believe her, because it was in his Bible where she’d found that story about David and Bathsheba and their baby who died.

            That story that had kept her up nights and haunted her dreams through the whole of her pregnancy didn’t relent when the baby survived the fourth day, surprising the doctors. Each day he lived made her more anxious about when he would die.

She obsessed about her guilt and contemplated the sequence of events that led her here. She wondered when the point of no return had occurred—was it when Curt showed up at the house she had shared with her husband Stephen, joking about the two front porch doors of the centuries’ old home? Was it the day later that summer when he fell against her knees, confessing his love? Or had it been years before, when she’d met him, a hungry eyed college freshman?

In a week, the baby improved enough to go home. Maizy had never prepared for that. She treated it as temporary. She realized the story never said how old Bathsheba’s baby had been when he died; it could take months. Then when Asher reached three months, she had never yet organized his clothes in drawers or bought anything in the next size. She was finding the passage of time cruel; the waiting was just too hard. Especially while everyone else around her was rejoicing at the baby’s progress. So she tried to survive by numbing herself to that life and simply completing each day as a series of chores, each only freeing her to the obligation of the next.

One dark February morning, Curt cradled his miracle child in the crook of his arm as he ate his oatmeal, as he did every morning. He soaked in the minutes, delaying his departure for work until the last possible moment, then rose from the kitchen chair to hand the baby off to Maizy, as usual. She turned her head so his lips hit her cheek.

“Bye, my little tiger,” he said as he held Asher in the air, legs kicking spastically in blue pajamas. “Grow bigger and stronger for Daddy! I wish I could be the one to enjoy the day with you,” Curt added, lingering, before rushing out the door.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Maizy laid the baby in the playpen as if his body stung her hands. She shivered in the icy air that swirled around her ankles in Curt’s wake and that set the radiator to popping and hissing. She turned from the playpen, not expecting to look in it again until absolutely necessary. He was the tell-tale heart of their transgressions. At times she swore she saw his eyes turning amber, like Curt’s. And his black hair, like her own, was lightening to Curt’s brown. She remembered she’d once been desperate in her desire for Curt—for years—but now she despised him for what that desire had propelled her to.

Maizy turned to her next duty: spoon-feeding eighteen month old Camille. She did it mindlessly, staring at the metal cupboards the girl’s father had repainted for her. All the words of  Lady MacBeth’s “Out, damned spot” soliloquy, which she’d memorized in college, rushed back to her mind again. She watched her hands mime washing off the blood of Lady MacBeth’s muder victim. To everyone else, her hands looked clean, but the blood she saw on them was so thick and heavy it weighed her down to immobility much of every day.

The knowledge of how Stephen died—was killed—and how her son was born, made her want to run screaming into oncoming traffic or drown herself in the Susquehanna River visible from her porch. Going through the motions and not thinking was the only way she could quell the surges that threatened to bury her.

There had been moments, even days, of hope. Curt whisking her off to the courthouse a couple weeks after his divorce came through was one of those moments. She’d thought the legal stamp of marriage would make things right, but it had done nothing but make the nightmares of their baby’s death more vivid.

            Camille grabbed the spoon from Maizy’s limp grasp, and Maizy barely noticed. She ignored the cries rising from the playpen. Camille, tongue darting from one corner of her mouth to the other, began fingerpainting with  applesauce. She squealed to see it fly. Then she flung her spoon straight at her mother, as bulls-eye to her mother’s forehead as a creek stone from David’s sling. But it was the hit that resurrected her.

 Maizy bolted upright. She wiped the applesauce dripping into her eye and saw her daughter with a new focus. She smiled through tears as she watched how her daughter’s giggle pushed her dimple deep into her cheek. Oh, how Camille resembled Stephen, her good, good dark-haired father. She resolved not to live this death anymore. She had been letting circumstances steal her life and her daughter from her. Maizy refused to lose one more day that the advent of Asher had stolen from them.

“Oh, Cami,” she sighed as she lifted the girl from her chair. Asher wailed upon hearing her voice, and Maizy made two more decisions. First, she knew they needed to move out of this house and its mustard gold linoleum that Stephen had installed for her right before Cami’s birth. The house itself was her Scarlet Letter, chaining her to all the memories and solitary confinement within its walls as long as she lived in this neighborhood.

Second, she needed to wean the baby, immediately. Though she knew the doctor would give her a hard time, she could no longer tolerate it. The contact of his skin made hers crawl. Her neck was raked red raw from her fingers clawing it every second the baby suckled. It was a sham anyway—doing the best to preserve his life which she knew was doomed. His fate was sealed, but at least she could try to preserve herself and be more than a wooden doll for her daughter. And so she chose her new occupation to consume her while waiting for her son to die: she invested everything she had into Camille.

 Do feel free to leave comments--tell me what it leaves you wondering, what piques your interest or sympathy....