I'm trying to decide when Ash's sister tells him what she found: that he was obviously the product of an affair. I already wrote that conversation as a flashback. in the story, he should actually have known it since his college year, because his sister, Cami, gets in a fight with their mom and and brings that up. But Ash doesn't remember that until he finds himself facing the same temptation.
I thought to delete that and have Cami, in the present of the novel, converse with Ash, reminding him of that fight and the knowledge of his mother having an affair. But then the question becomes--is it more effective to the narrative to have that occur before or after Ash is in his situation? It definitely changes the impact. One way, it's foreshadowing--but it also should make Ash think twice, be less likely to succumb. His remembering after, when he's dealing with regret, makes more sense--that the memory comes to his mind only because he repeats the mistake.
So maybe I shouldn't get rid of my original concept--I should keep it as a flashback that comes, bidden when he is regrets his choice.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Feedback from 2 published novelists on my novel-in-progress
At a writers' conference I attended Saturday, I had appointments with two published, established fiction writers.
My biggest struggle right now is how to structure the telling of my story. I know enough to know it isn't just about the story, but how well and how I tell it. Multiple readers have told me my beginning isn't working. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too stubborn to not give up and do what everyone else says--just start with Asher, the focal character, at a crisis point in his adult life. But no, I've been hung up on this idea of a prologue, or otherwise beginning with the backstory of the scandal of his birth. My entire inception of the novel came from the moment of creating concern for the newborn. I wanted to make people concerned that he'd survive--or possibly worse, wonder what kind of a person he'd be if he did survive.
My first appointment was with novelist Joyce Magnin, and I asked her to read my opening--the first 3-ish pages. She told me I wasn't as bad off on structure as I thought, and she showed me how she wrote her first novel as a frame story too and showed me how and where I could make it more apparent that that was what I was doing. Of course, she said I had some other fiction techniques to master, but over-all, it was a really encouraging meeting.
Second, I met with T L Higley. I didn't plan on that appointment, so I had nothing prepared (and my print out of my novel's opening was already red-pen marked from Joyce). My mind was completely overwhelmed by all the fabulous teaching I got in the sessions, plus conversation with other writers, that by the time I sat with her, my brain felt like mush. Now, she had spent some of the lunch break talking with some other writers seated around me, and in the course of that conversation, I had talked a bit about my novel. She remembered that and simply asked me to keep talking. And that's what we did. I shared with her my big-picture vision of the novel, and unlike Joyce, she heard the whole plot as I planned to lay it out. Her advice was markedly different. She was concerned my long prologue (3-5,000) words of back story of Asher's mother might not be the best start--simply because if I hooked readers through her POV, they might feel cheated because they thought they were investing in her and would be disappointed to find out she's a minor, not th main, character. I can see this. I've been told my prologue was simply too long. But now I can see why it's too long, for reasons other than word count. Higley said it wasn't impossible for this to work, but that it was risky for a first time novelist. When I was younger, I might have argued, citing all the examples to the contrary I'd read--for instance, I recently read Toni Morrison's A Mercy, in which every chapter is told from the point of view of a different character. But I know I'm not Morrison.... I'm very aware I chose a very ambitious project in the first place, and I really need to get it together and work before I can afford to mess with convention too much.
I'm now trying to distill my prologue to merely a few pages, maybe even just 2. I want to share enough of the mother's story to bring about the concern for the baby's welfare, and then leave the rest of the back story to be pieced out through the course of the novel. My other challenge for the day is introducing Asher, as an adult, in a very strong way. This past year, I'd been set on introducing him through the POV of his wife Ginny, and now that I'm introducing him alone, without her, and through his POV, I have a new task at hand. I've written a few chapters form his POV, but none of them is as strong and definitive as it needs to be. I know I need a chapter that shows his strengths--we need to like him (or readers won't sympathize enough with future events). But it also needs to show where he's vulnerable and hints of the mystery of what happened to his mom and how he grew up. THAT is turning out to be quite a challenge. Also, I don't want the events to be extremely mundane--a lot of conflict is coming, so I need to introduce him in a bit of a lull in his life and yet write about something that makes a reader want to know more about him.
Another novelist I heard speak this weekend talked about rewriting her novels 7-8 times. That floored me. And yet now I can see this reality. I just didn't think that was normal. I thought it was a sign of how inexperienced I am as a novelist. Well, I need to get to it--I need to show Ash doing something mildly heroic in his opening scene, while showing his weaknesses too.
My biggest struggle right now is how to structure the telling of my story. I know enough to know it isn't just about the story, but how well and how I tell it. Multiple readers have told me my beginning isn't working. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too stubborn to not give up and do what everyone else says--just start with Asher, the focal character, at a crisis point in his adult life. But no, I've been hung up on this idea of a prologue, or otherwise beginning with the backstory of the scandal of his birth. My entire inception of the novel came from the moment of creating concern for the newborn. I wanted to make people concerned that he'd survive--or possibly worse, wonder what kind of a person he'd be if he did survive.
My first appointment was with novelist Joyce Magnin, and I asked her to read my opening--the first 3-ish pages. She told me I wasn't as bad off on structure as I thought, and she showed me how she wrote her first novel as a frame story too and showed me how and where I could make it more apparent that that was what I was doing. Of course, she said I had some other fiction techniques to master, but over-all, it was a really encouraging meeting.
Second, I met with T L Higley. I didn't plan on that appointment, so I had nothing prepared (and my print out of my novel's opening was already red-pen marked from Joyce). My mind was completely overwhelmed by all the fabulous teaching I got in the sessions, plus conversation with other writers, that by the time I sat with her, my brain felt like mush. Now, she had spent some of the lunch break talking with some other writers seated around me, and in the course of that conversation, I had talked a bit about my novel. She remembered that and simply asked me to keep talking. And that's what we did. I shared with her my big-picture vision of the novel, and unlike Joyce, she heard the whole plot as I planned to lay it out. Her advice was markedly different. She was concerned my long prologue (3-5,000) words of back story of Asher's mother might not be the best start--simply because if I hooked readers through her POV, they might feel cheated because they thought they were investing in her and would be disappointed to find out she's a minor, not th main, character. I can see this. I've been told my prologue was simply too long. But now I can see why it's too long, for reasons other than word count. Higley said it wasn't impossible for this to work, but that it was risky for a first time novelist. When I was younger, I might have argued, citing all the examples to the contrary I'd read--for instance, I recently read Toni Morrison's A Mercy, in which every chapter is told from the point of view of a different character. But I know I'm not Morrison.... I'm very aware I chose a very ambitious project in the first place, and I really need to get it together and work before I can afford to mess with convention too much.
I'm now trying to distill my prologue to merely a few pages, maybe even just 2. I want to share enough of the mother's story to bring about the concern for the baby's welfare, and then leave the rest of the back story to be pieced out through the course of the novel. My other challenge for the day is introducing Asher, as an adult, in a very strong way. This past year, I'd been set on introducing him through the POV of his wife Ginny, and now that I'm introducing him alone, without her, and through his POV, I have a new task at hand. I've written a few chapters form his POV, but none of them is as strong and definitive as it needs to be. I know I need a chapter that shows his strengths--we need to like him (or readers won't sympathize enough with future events). But it also needs to show where he's vulnerable and hints of the mystery of what happened to his mom and how he grew up. THAT is turning out to be quite a challenge. Also, I don't want the events to be extremely mundane--a lot of conflict is coming, so I need to introduce him in a bit of a lull in his life and yet write about something that makes a reader want to know more about him.
Another novelist I heard speak this weekend talked about rewriting her novels 7-8 times. That floored me. And yet now I can see this reality. I just didn't think that was normal. I thought it was a sign of how inexperienced I am as a novelist. Well, I need to get to it--I need to show Ash doing something mildly heroic in his opening scene, while showing his weaknesses too.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Write for the Market or JUST WRITE?
It's long been a question of mine whether I'm writing my present novel for the Christian fiction market or the mainstream fiction market. I vacillate on whether I care. Some months I say I'm just writing my story--I'll figure out what market it best appeals to later! Then other months, I realize certain ways of telling the story block me from one market or the other. (In fact, my big problem is that I've often felt I'm going to have a hard time in either market, no matter how well I write or the quality of my story craft. I'm writing about marriage and infidelity, so the sex lives of characters are certainly at the center of the story, even if sex scenes per se are not. On the other hand, the more I write, the more I realize my Christian worldview colors everything I write, so that even if I try to write a novel that's not overtly "Christian," a Christian viewpoint oozes out nonetheless. And I'm not upset about that--I am who I am, and proudly so. But it's put an added dimension on possible trouble getting published. Then in my wisest moments, I remind myself none of this really matters, in a sense, because if I'm writing what I'm meant to write--if my writing is flowing out of the purpose God created me for and He wants me to tell this story, He's going to direct it getting where He wants it to get.)
A fellow member of my local writer's group, Craig Alan Loewen, is presenting a workshop at a conference I'm attending Saturday at the Lancaster Christian Writer's Group. I looked over his handout, and I see he says not to write for the market--just write the story and the right market will open up. Ironically, anther strong voice in my head, saying the contrary, is from a book he gave me--Penelope Stokes' book about how to write for the Christian market (she advises expressly writing to fit the market).
Last night I was working on the first number of chapters to cement who Ash, my novel's main character, is, and I already feel a question about editing some stuff out, or at least moving some details to further into the book. Stokes talks about how readers of Christian fiction are in the more conservative end of the continuum, (which I read as 'more conservative than me'). When I think women in my novel critique group might be offended or uncomfortable with my revelation of Ash's past and present, I realize it's at least a possible litmus test for the Christian market. There are a lot of unknowns, and certainly the Christian fiction market has been evolving. But enough to handle this story?
I write this blog as a warm up to working on the chapters of my novel, and I was hoping to write to an answer, so I'd know if I should spend my writing time today revising my opening chapters to make them less forthright about Ash's dating life, possibly saving some details for later in the novel where those details may be easier to read. Or if I should just keep writing, changing nothing just now.
Maybe I really shouldn't worry about it now--but later. Maybe I won't really know what my novel can handle until more is written. Some part of me thinks maybe it never can be reconciled to meet the more stringent guidelines governing Christina fiction; I may be stuck in limbo between being too controversial for Christian fiction but too Christian for mainstream. And maybe that's just where it's meant to be. I sometimes worry that the story cannot even be told if i try to do it in the confines of Christian fiction--and yet I have connections and guidance to get into that publishing world--but none to try the much larger market of mainstream fiction.
I guess for now I'll just makes notes of how I could alter what I've written, if I ever saw that's what I wanted to do. But i'll leave them as they are for now, and just write the story!
PS At the conference I'm attending Saturday, I'm hoping to get an appointment with a fiction novelist there, and maybe that's what I'll talk with her about and see what her experience has been like... If I bring my opening of the book, about Ash's parents, she'd get the picture pretty quickly whether or not the entire book premise is just too much on the edge of what is being published right now. I'd seen that a book on adultery has been published in the market, but if I remember correctly, the woman found out upon her husband's death. I should probably read it as research. I wonder how that affects the story too--with the husband dead... My story isn't so much about the act of infidelity as the effects of it and whether or not the characters can handle reconciliation.
A fellow member of my local writer's group, Craig Alan Loewen, is presenting a workshop at a conference I'm attending Saturday at the Lancaster Christian Writer's Group. I looked over his handout, and I see he says not to write for the market--just write the story and the right market will open up. Ironically, anther strong voice in my head, saying the contrary, is from a book he gave me--Penelope Stokes' book about how to write for the Christian market (she advises expressly writing to fit the market).
Last night I was working on the first number of chapters to cement who Ash, my novel's main character, is, and I already feel a question about editing some stuff out, or at least moving some details to further into the book. Stokes talks about how readers of Christian fiction are in the more conservative end of the continuum, (which I read as 'more conservative than me'). When I think women in my novel critique group might be offended or uncomfortable with my revelation of Ash's past and present, I realize it's at least a possible litmus test for the Christian market. There are a lot of unknowns, and certainly the Christian fiction market has been evolving. But enough to handle this story?
I write this blog as a warm up to working on the chapters of my novel, and I was hoping to write to an answer, so I'd know if I should spend my writing time today revising my opening chapters to make them less forthright about Ash's dating life, possibly saving some details for later in the novel where those details may be easier to read. Or if I should just keep writing, changing nothing just now.
Maybe I really shouldn't worry about it now--but later. Maybe I won't really know what my novel can handle until more is written. Some part of me thinks maybe it never can be reconciled to meet the more stringent guidelines governing Christina fiction; I may be stuck in limbo between being too controversial for Christian fiction but too Christian for mainstream. And maybe that's just where it's meant to be. I sometimes worry that the story cannot even be told if i try to do it in the confines of Christian fiction--and yet I have connections and guidance to get into that publishing world--but none to try the much larger market of mainstream fiction.
I guess for now I'll just makes notes of how I could alter what I've written, if I ever saw that's what I wanted to do. But i'll leave them as they are for now, and just write the story!
PS At the conference I'm attending Saturday, I'm hoping to get an appointment with a fiction novelist there, and maybe that's what I'll talk with her about and see what her experience has been like... If I bring my opening of the book, about Ash's parents, she'd get the picture pretty quickly whether or not the entire book premise is just too much on the edge of what is being published right now. I'd seen that a book on adultery has been published in the market, but if I remember correctly, the woman found out upon her husband's death. I should probably read it as research. I wonder how that affects the story too--with the husband dead... My story isn't so much about the act of infidelity as the effects of it and whether or not the characters can handle reconciliation.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Novel Structure: The 3-Act Format?
I got some heavy critique from a fellow writer in my online novel critique group about my chapters that introduce the second generation of my characters: Ginny and Ash, a married couple. Some criticism was due to the reader forgetting previous characters' names and therefore misunderstanding new information on new characters as "inconsistencies." But all that irrelevant crit aside, a couple things this reader mentioned have been chewing at me.
Tonight I read a few articles in the Writer's Digest Write Your Novel in 30 Days publication. An article on the 3 act novel and story arc has really got me thinking--and in a direction I've sort of known might be a flaw in my plot construction. The 3-act structure, as defined in what I just read, means that the first act sets the stage, and the second act is about all the conflict, then the third is the resolution. Really, quite boring and uninspiring to me, at first. But I read some things that have made me ponder. Such as the writer's suggestion that while movies feature the inciting incident roughly a quarter into it, books need to do it a bit sooner, perhaps, a fifth of the way into it. I have read conflicting theories about what the inciting incident really is, and this article talked about how act II really begins when the character can no longer walk away and return to his old life. He argues that if a conflict in the beginning of your novel still leaves him able to go back to life the way it was, it's not the inciting incident. Hmmm...THAT got me thinking.
What is my protagonist's inciting incident? A worse question came to mind: Who is my protagonist? I've not wanted merely one. I want 4: 2 couples in different generations. The chapters just critiqued introduced the younger gneration through the eyes of Ginny, who, based on the amount of her point of view I've written, is the main character. But she isn't. She has to be slightly secondary to Ash, who is really the main character. I may have 4 people as leads, but Ash is the central figure, and Ginny hinges on Ash. So maybe some of the critique I've gotten about my recent chapters is rooted in the fact that Ginny does't have a classic inciting incident--because the plot is not revealing her to be the main protagonist.
The article also charted out the Hero's Journey, using Star Wars' Luke Skywalker as example. I've heard of this before and recognize I'm not writnig this kind of novel. Ginny dones't fit that . But then, I realized Ash sort of does...he is the main character, after all. I just have been reluctant to write many of his chapters yet because he's harder.
I think what I need to do is introduce the second genration with Ash's POV, giving a glimpse into his life, not Ginny's, first. I realize too that it means i need to go back in time, start the story at a point i'd planned not to write, just summarize in background info. But I see now that Ash's inciting incident is in that past I'd not wanted to write. Wow. this will be a challenge. I know I have to introduce him in scenes that makes us sympathetic to him, that let us see his vulnerability and make us like him, and then let us see the inciting incident when he "enters the dark side." I think I was trying to start with Ginny so we could see him through her point of view. Much of it was flattering to Ash, as Ginny extols a couple of his virtues. Starting with Ginny allowed me to keep Ash's secret. But I do now think I need to start with him...
Other pieces I've written:
Autism Rates Rise; University of Toledo Poises Itself to be Primary Resource for Deluge of Adults with Autism
Fast Food, Junk Food and Obesity Subsidized by Federal Government
The American Diet--Are We All Made of Corn?
Postpartum Depression, Psychological Distress Predicted by Previous Traumatic Birth
Tonight I read a few articles in the Writer's Digest Write Your Novel in 30 Days publication. An article on the 3 act novel and story arc has really got me thinking--and in a direction I've sort of known might be a flaw in my plot construction. The 3-act structure, as defined in what I just read, means that the first act sets the stage, and the second act is about all the conflict, then the third is the resolution. Really, quite boring and uninspiring to me, at first. But I read some things that have made me ponder. Such as the writer's suggestion that while movies feature the inciting incident roughly a quarter into it, books need to do it a bit sooner, perhaps, a fifth of the way into it. I have read conflicting theories about what the inciting incident really is, and this article talked about how act II really begins when the character can no longer walk away and return to his old life. He argues that if a conflict in the beginning of your novel still leaves him able to go back to life the way it was, it's not the inciting incident. Hmmm...THAT got me thinking.
What is my protagonist's inciting incident? A worse question came to mind: Who is my protagonist? I've not wanted merely one. I want 4: 2 couples in different generations. The chapters just critiqued introduced the younger gneration through the eyes of Ginny, who, based on the amount of her point of view I've written, is the main character. But she isn't. She has to be slightly secondary to Ash, who is really the main character. I may have 4 people as leads, but Ash is the central figure, and Ginny hinges on Ash. So maybe some of the critique I've gotten about my recent chapters is rooted in the fact that Ginny does't have a classic inciting incident--because the plot is not revealing her to be the main protagonist.
The article also charted out the Hero's Journey, using Star Wars' Luke Skywalker as example. I've heard of this before and recognize I'm not writnig this kind of novel. Ginny dones't fit that . But then, I realized Ash sort of does...he is the main character, after all. I just have been reluctant to write many of his chapters yet because he's harder.
I think what I need to do is introduce the second genration with Ash's POV, giving a glimpse into his life, not Ginny's, first. I realize too that it means i need to go back in time, start the story at a point i'd planned not to write, just summarize in background info. But I see now that Ash's inciting incident is in that past I'd not wanted to write. Wow. this will be a challenge. I know I have to introduce him in scenes that makes us sympathetic to him, that let us see his vulnerability and make us like him, and then let us see the inciting incident when he "enters the dark side." I think I was trying to start with Ginny so we could see him through her point of view. Much of it was flattering to Ash, as Ginny extols a couple of his virtues. Starting with Ginny allowed me to keep Ash's secret. But I do now think I need to start with him...
Other pieces I've written:
Autism Rates Rise; University of Toledo Poises Itself to be Primary Resource for Deluge of Adults with Autism
Fast Food, Junk Food and Obesity Subsidized by Federal Government
The American Diet--Are We All Made of Corn?
Postpartum Depression, Psychological Distress Predicted by Previous Traumatic Birth
Thursday, March 3, 2011
On putting myself, and everything I know, in one novel...
Right now my biggest problem writing is just in focusing enough on any one project to just do it! I think i don't have enough mental space to juggle all I've got going, so when I come to a week like this, being able to write at night because my husband is working, I waste an hour of my kids' nap time wondering which article or chapter I feel most interested in! I've got 3 articles in process, but then there's also like 20 manuscripts or queries I should be resending out there. I'm not managing my writing well. I keep putting out new stuff before I've found a home for older things.
Working on my novel is hard this moment because I haven't divorced my mind from other things. Here is where I see the purpose of writing about the book as a daily warm-up to write the book, as Steinbeck did for East of Eden.
I've been thinking about how he says he's planning to put everything he knows in that novel, and I fight the temptation to do the same with mine. After-all, this novel is my first, not the seminal work of a long writing career. And I'm considerably young to be attempting to put everything I know in one novel. Plus, I really need to wrap up a story in less than 1000 pages. but it's always been a struggle to have my novel take on subjects and topics that loom large in my real life. I've been working, by some definition of that word, for seven years on this one novel--even if I don't write a word for a year, the characters remained alive in my head. What happened, obviously, is my concerns 7 years ago were very different than mine now. When I was younger, I outgrew novel attempts long before I could complete them, because of that very phenomenon. But this time, I think what's different is that the story my characters had to tell was finally important enough that it still ached to be told after I passed the stage of my own life that created it. There's a lot of surprise in me that 7 years has not only not led to my lost interest, but that my characters are so real that they are dynamic--and yet, they've also not gone ahead of me. A fact that both frustrates me as well as helps me is that I still don't know the end of their story. I don't know yet where they're going and how each character is going to react to certain future events that I do know will happen. Between the ages of 18 and 24, I evolved so quickly as a person and writer that I couldn't dream of any writing project sustaining my interest this long. And if I am to finish this novel, who knows how many more years in the future it will require of me.
I know enough to resist the temptation to, as Steinbeck say, put everything I know in this novel. But I'm still tempted. For instance, I've given birth twice since I started this story, but I've resisted the temptation to give my young married couple children, just because I had so much to say about the subject. And those who know me well know that organic and non-genetically-modified foods are a primary issue in my life, but I've determined my characters just aren't concerned with that, though I am. It'd be easy to bring it in because it's such a part of me life. But I'm finally letting characters be who they are instead of trying to make them reflect more of me. Though, as Steinbeck mentioned too, of course I'm in the book--you can't excise the writer, even though I can make myself more or less apparently present.
I wonder what friends would say if they read the completed book, about who they think I am in the book. When I started, I think Ginny, one main female character, was perhaps going to be like me. But no, she's really quite different--she's a type A personality, and she's revealed to me recently that cleaning is a stress reliever. That's the kind of girls she is--certainly not me! In some measure, I think every character is a reflection of the writer, to some degree. There is a character I think is really more like me, and i secretly wonder who will guess that, should they ever read the book.
NOW I've got about half an hour to write left. Can i even work on the writing today? I wrote the scene of the demolition in Ginny's house, and this morning I realized I'd written her husband Ash's reaction all wrong. I wrote him getting angry, but now I realize he wouldn't. I think he'd really just laugh and be sparked alive by the impulsiveness Ginny demonstrates. (Though there may be, underlying, some negative emotion evoked in Ash that might linger--to come out when he does something drastic without asking his wife's approval.)
I feel bogged down by the amount of stuff I have written, and trying to place it in proper sequence. I know i need to just keep chipping away, manage a little at a time, and there will be a day I see the plot clearly. But now I'm just confused by so much stuff i've written in different years, trying to figure out what to keep (cuz there's a lot to lose). I wrote the demolition chapter without solving any problems--I just needed to write instead of be paralyzed by questions.
What can i do today? I think i can rewrite Ash's reaction and then try to work in the next chapters, which are already written, adding in how she and Thomas have to fix the big mess they've made (ooh--quite a few layers to that, actually!)
Maybe, for people who read this, I should soon write a brief intro of characters and plot, if I'm to keep mentioning characters...
Working on my novel is hard this moment because I haven't divorced my mind from other things. Here is where I see the purpose of writing about the book as a daily warm-up to write the book, as Steinbeck did for East of Eden.
I've been thinking about how he says he's planning to put everything he knows in that novel, and I fight the temptation to do the same with mine. After-all, this novel is my first, not the seminal work of a long writing career. And I'm considerably young to be attempting to put everything I know in one novel. Plus, I really need to wrap up a story in less than 1000 pages. but it's always been a struggle to have my novel take on subjects and topics that loom large in my real life. I've been working, by some definition of that word, for seven years on this one novel--even if I don't write a word for a year, the characters remained alive in my head. What happened, obviously, is my concerns 7 years ago were very different than mine now. When I was younger, I outgrew novel attempts long before I could complete them, because of that very phenomenon. But this time, I think what's different is that the story my characters had to tell was finally important enough that it still ached to be told after I passed the stage of my own life that created it. There's a lot of surprise in me that 7 years has not only not led to my lost interest, but that my characters are so real that they are dynamic--and yet, they've also not gone ahead of me. A fact that both frustrates me as well as helps me is that I still don't know the end of their story. I don't know yet where they're going and how each character is going to react to certain future events that I do know will happen. Between the ages of 18 and 24, I evolved so quickly as a person and writer that I couldn't dream of any writing project sustaining my interest this long. And if I am to finish this novel, who knows how many more years in the future it will require of me.
I know enough to resist the temptation to, as Steinbeck say, put everything I know in this novel. But I'm still tempted. For instance, I've given birth twice since I started this story, but I've resisted the temptation to give my young married couple children, just because I had so much to say about the subject. And those who know me well know that organic and non-genetically-modified foods are a primary issue in my life, but I've determined my characters just aren't concerned with that, though I am. It'd be easy to bring it in because it's such a part of me life. But I'm finally letting characters be who they are instead of trying to make them reflect more of me. Though, as Steinbeck mentioned too, of course I'm in the book--you can't excise the writer, even though I can make myself more or less apparently present.
I wonder what friends would say if they read the completed book, about who they think I am in the book. When I started, I think Ginny, one main female character, was perhaps going to be like me. But no, she's really quite different--she's a type A personality, and she's revealed to me recently that cleaning is a stress reliever. That's the kind of girls she is--certainly not me! In some measure, I think every character is a reflection of the writer, to some degree. There is a character I think is really more like me, and i secretly wonder who will guess that, should they ever read the book.
NOW I've got about half an hour to write left. Can i even work on the writing today? I wrote the scene of the demolition in Ginny's house, and this morning I realized I'd written her husband Ash's reaction all wrong. I wrote him getting angry, but now I realize he wouldn't. I think he'd really just laugh and be sparked alive by the impulsiveness Ginny demonstrates. (Though there may be, underlying, some negative emotion evoked in Ash that might linger--to come out when he does something drastic without asking his wife's approval.)
I feel bogged down by the amount of stuff I have written, and trying to place it in proper sequence. I know i need to just keep chipping away, manage a little at a time, and there will be a day I see the plot clearly. But now I'm just confused by so much stuff i've written in different years, trying to figure out what to keep (cuz there's a lot to lose). I wrote the demolition chapter without solving any problems--I just needed to write instead of be paralyzed by questions.
What can i do today? I think i can rewrite Ash's reaction and then try to work in the next chapters, which are already written, adding in how she and Thomas have to fix the big mess they've made (ooh--quite a few layers to that, actually!)
Maybe, for people who read this, I should soon write a brief intro of characters and plot, if I'm to keep mentioning characters...
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Reading Steinbeck's East of Eden Letters
I've been reading Steinbeck's East of Eden letters; every day before working on that novel, he began with a letter to his editor. He called it his warm up--in the letters, he discussed his goals and worked out his problems in the book. This is my second read. My writer friend Heather gave me a gift certificate for a book years ago, and that is what I bought and have since been fascinated with it.
I have no editor friend to write to, but I see the usefulness of his technique. I've been intermittently working on a novel--when I bought Steinbeck's book, I was in the beginning stages, and I started a computer journal with the same purpose. But I let both the novel and that journal subside over time. Now I'd probably find most of what was in that journal--a list of things I wanted to put in the novel, things I wanted to change about what was already written, and ruminations about what my goal was and what characters should be like--quite irrelevant. In letting a book idea sit for months/years at a time, it evolves.
The novel started with Asher, an ill-fated baby born in a short story I began in 2005. I think it was my writer friends Polly, Brian and Sarah who suggested maybe the story was the beginning of a much bigger work. Now it's a multi-generational tale and most of the book focuses on Asher as an adult, and his marriage to Ginny. The working title of the book is "The Still House."
SO maybe this blog is simply my attempt to do what Steinbeck did, though I see it problematic. After-all, he wrote full time. He could afford time to write a letter to start the day if he was putting 7-8 hours a day into writing. I'm a "nap-time" writer. When I get maybe 90 minutes a day, how can I justify starting with something like this? But Steinbeck says it helped focused him, so that when he got to the writing, it was better, clearer, executed with purpose. And the way I've been lately, I could use that! I've spent the past 2 days mostly wasting my writing time because i need to do the reflection on where I'm heading.
It's comforting to read this experienced writer talk about how he makes changes, changes a character form one intention into something entirely other. I just did my first ever character assassination, realizing its' necessary. I heard somewhere recently that most novels have too many characters to being with, but I didn't want to get rid of any of mine--of course. But I just did. I had, as a minor character who served as mentor to Ginny, a main character, a middle aged Protestant nun who grew up as a missionary kid in Africa, who still wore full African garb in her life in the US. And anther minor character was the same main character's yoga teacher, an East Indian woman, who becomes a new friend to challenge Ginny's views on the world. Yesterday I determined to conflate them. Now I've got the role of mentor filled by an Indian woman who wears traditional garb and grew up in a mission, who asks Ginny to edit a book she's writing. What both women had in common was that they were a bit eccentric and exposed Ginny to another culture. But I didn't really have room for both. interestingly, while the African one was always single, the new conflated character seems to be single, but after being widowed at a young age--early 20s. Funny, as Steinbeck says, that sometimes characters tell you who they are.
While some in his letters is comforting, I'm not so sure it's good i keep reading from a man who wrote an epic of a book, hundreds of pages longer than most books on the market. He got away with it because he was established. My biggest problem is that I think I'm only a quarter through my plot and yet I've got 200 pages already. No first time writer in today's climate publishes an 800 page book. Sometimes I get really discouraged to think that what I'm laboring through will end up getting drastically cut if I ever get to the publishing stage...
So what do I have on tap today? I'm redefining Thomas, a supporting character for Ginny, a neighbor who fulfills what she's missing in her marriage--intellectual engagement, conversation, etc. I've had this theme of her remodel of her old house, and I decided a while ago that she's going to want to expose some of its old features (including some secrets its holding) and a new possibility is that Thomas, already a rough, works-with-his-hands type (to balance his cerebral life), is going to help her. I think he is going to be an ex-construction worker or mason, and they're going to do some demo on the walls and unearth 200-year-old fireplaces. It might be a great opportunity to get her husband angry as well as get the house to reveal a secret of its past inhabitants.
SO whether or not I ever make another entry here, there's one... And if I ever do write, it's obviously for me, and maybe a few writers who might resonate with process issues. Maybe it can strike up some helpful, constructive discussion with a few writer friends. Or it might be horribly unappealing reading...
Other stuff I write:
Waterbirth Lowers Group B Strep Risk Better Than Antibiotics?
Power Your Electronics with Your Body's Own Movement? The NPower PEG, The First Kinetic Energy Recharger
Hormone-free Milk: Dairy Companies Pledging Not to Use Artificial Bovine Growth Hormone
Natural Family Planning: Success and Reliability?
I have no editor friend to write to, but I see the usefulness of his technique. I've been intermittently working on a novel--when I bought Steinbeck's book, I was in the beginning stages, and I started a computer journal with the same purpose. But I let both the novel and that journal subside over time. Now I'd probably find most of what was in that journal--a list of things I wanted to put in the novel, things I wanted to change about what was already written, and ruminations about what my goal was and what characters should be like--quite irrelevant. In letting a book idea sit for months/years at a time, it evolves.
The novel started with Asher, an ill-fated baby born in a short story I began in 2005. I think it was my writer friends Polly, Brian and Sarah who suggested maybe the story was the beginning of a much bigger work. Now it's a multi-generational tale and most of the book focuses on Asher as an adult, and his marriage to Ginny. The working title of the book is "The Still House."
SO maybe this blog is simply my attempt to do what Steinbeck did, though I see it problematic. After-all, he wrote full time. He could afford time to write a letter to start the day if he was putting 7-8 hours a day into writing. I'm a "nap-time" writer. When I get maybe 90 minutes a day, how can I justify starting with something like this? But Steinbeck says it helped focused him, so that when he got to the writing, it was better, clearer, executed with purpose. And the way I've been lately, I could use that! I've spent the past 2 days mostly wasting my writing time because i need to do the reflection on where I'm heading.
It's comforting to read this experienced writer talk about how he makes changes, changes a character form one intention into something entirely other. I just did my first ever character assassination, realizing its' necessary. I heard somewhere recently that most novels have too many characters to being with, but I didn't want to get rid of any of mine--of course. But I just did. I had, as a minor character who served as mentor to Ginny, a main character, a middle aged Protestant nun who grew up as a missionary kid in Africa, who still wore full African garb in her life in the US. And anther minor character was the same main character's yoga teacher, an East Indian woman, who becomes a new friend to challenge Ginny's views on the world. Yesterday I determined to conflate them. Now I've got the role of mentor filled by an Indian woman who wears traditional garb and grew up in a mission, who asks Ginny to edit a book she's writing. What both women had in common was that they were a bit eccentric and exposed Ginny to another culture. But I didn't really have room for both. interestingly, while the African one was always single, the new conflated character seems to be single, but after being widowed at a young age--early 20s. Funny, as Steinbeck says, that sometimes characters tell you who they are.
While some in his letters is comforting, I'm not so sure it's good i keep reading from a man who wrote an epic of a book, hundreds of pages longer than most books on the market. He got away with it because he was established. My biggest problem is that I think I'm only a quarter through my plot and yet I've got 200 pages already. No first time writer in today's climate publishes an 800 page book. Sometimes I get really discouraged to think that what I'm laboring through will end up getting drastically cut if I ever get to the publishing stage...
So what do I have on tap today? I'm redefining Thomas, a supporting character for Ginny, a neighbor who fulfills what she's missing in her marriage--intellectual engagement, conversation, etc. I've had this theme of her remodel of her old house, and I decided a while ago that she's going to want to expose some of its old features (including some secrets its holding) and a new possibility is that Thomas, already a rough, works-with-his-hands type (to balance his cerebral life), is going to help her. I think he is going to be an ex-construction worker or mason, and they're going to do some demo on the walls and unearth 200-year-old fireplaces. It might be a great opportunity to get her husband angry as well as get the house to reveal a secret of its past inhabitants.
SO whether or not I ever make another entry here, there's one... And if I ever do write, it's obviously for me, and maybe a few writers who might resonate with process issues. Maybe it can strike up some helpful, constructive discussion with a few writer friends. Or it might be horribly unappealing reading...
Other stuff I write:
Waterbirth Lowers Group B Strep Risk Better Than Antibiotics?
Power Your Electronics with Your Body's Own Movement? The NPower PEG, The First Kinetic Energy Recharger
Hormone-free Milk: Dairy Companies Pledging Not to Use Artificial Bovine Growth Hormone
Natural Family Planning: Success and Reliability?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)