Sunday, September 2, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Saving a Dying scene
Inspirational writing advice: If you have a lagging scene, amp it up by imagining what could make the character's situation even worse--then do that!
For a year, maybe even more, I've struggled with writing this scene that I knew was very pivotal in my novel: a Christmas day family meal. Something was missing--it was really bugging me. I've rewritten it a few times, even shared it with others. I couldnt' identify what was wrong or how to fix it--until the other night.
The original purpose of the scene was to place all these people in close quarters at a dining table to ratchet up the stresses and strains between the people present--husband and wife strained to the breaking point with anger toward each other, a husband's burden to confess to his wife an affair, piqued painfully by the presence of her pregnant best friend who shares his indiscretion, and a mostly uninvited guest with possible romantic innuendo with one of the said wives. plus usual parent-adult child stuff. What I'd written didn't deal with any resolutions to any of those big conflicts--just small conversational arguments that can break out among people with very different beliefs and ideas. I liked the tension between the surface arguments--what was said out loud--and the under-the-surface conflicts and what people were thinking, but not saying.
In July I blogged about this problem in How to Write the Holiday Meal? and told myself, after exploring through writing the blog:
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.
I revised heavily before Christmas, but I'd never really advanced anything for Ash, Mr. mellow, to snap about.
For a year, maybe even more, I've struggled with writing this scene that I knew was very pivotal in my novel: a Christmas day family meal. Something was missing--it was really bugging me. I've rewritten it a few times, even shared it with others. I couldnt' identify what was wrong or how to fix it--until the other night.
The original purpose of the scene was to place all these people in close quarters at a dining table to ratchet up the stresses and strains between the people present--husband and wife strained to the breaking point with anger toward each other, a husband's burden to confess to his wife an affair, piqued painfully by the presence of her pregnant best friend who shares his indiscretion, and a mostly uninvited guest with possible romantic innuendo with one of the said wives. plus usual parent-adult child stuff. What I'd written didn't deal with any resolutions to any of those big conflicts--just small conversational arguments that can break out among people with very different beliefs and ideas. I liked the tension between the surface arguments--what was said out loud--and the under-the-surface conflicts and what people were thinking, but not saying.
In July I blogged about this problem in How to Write the Holiday Meal? and told myself, after exploring through writing the blog:
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.
I revised heavily before Christmas, but I'd never really advanced anything for Ash, Mr. mellow, to snap about.
Then, the other night, I was just thinking--not trying to solve this problem, just thinking. I was thinking about another chapter, one that happens later, about when Ash's mother comes to see his new house--it's a pivotal point in the plot--the revelation of a secret neither Ash or his mother know is a secret, but that Ash's dad has been keeping. Suddenly, curled in the darkness of my bed, I thought,"What if Ash's mother came to that holiday meal and all the conflict of that later scene is added to what's already going on in the holiday meal scene?" My eyes flew open and I didn'tfall asleep for a while, my mind whirring with the possibilities.
I've mostly written it now. I had to change the timing a bit to accommodate other practical plot points--the holiday meal now occurs on New Year's Day, and I cut a couple characters entirely to add in Ash's mother and her boyfriend. As I began writing it, I began to see I would be writing the scene from more than one point of view. My original was from only Ginny's point of view (Ginny is Ash's wife) My new version starts with GInny's view, then switched to Ash's, then to his mother's. I realized it had to be in that order, from the least aware, to the most aware, so the reader can see how each person sees the situation very differnetly. If I started with Maizy, Ash's mother's point of view, it'd ruin our experience of Ginny's and Ash's POV because the secret would be out.
As I unpacked all that each was thinking, I think I found narrative gold. There's so much dramatic tension now because while Maizy is silently living her turmoil of the secret her ex husband kept from her, Ash her son, completely oblivious to any of that, takes his mother's odd behavior as her disapproval directed at him--which then leads him to jump to the conclusion that his Dad told his mom what he shared in confidence--that he'd had an affair and had to tell is wife. I found my way to shake Mr. mellow. I get him to snap!
As I unpacked all that each was thinking, I think I found narrative gold. There's so much dramatic tension now because while Maizy is silently living her turmoil of the secret her ex husband kept from her, Ash her son, completely oblivious to any of that, takes his mother's odd behavior as her disapproval directed at him--which then leads him to jump to the conclusion that his Dad told his mom what he shared in confidence--that he'd had an affair and had to tell is wife. I found my way to shake Mr. mellow. I get him to snap!
I recall reading some advice somewhere that a great way to amp up a scene is to just add more to it--think what more bad could happen and then make it happen. I also recall a writer saying to me once that the climax of a novel could happen for all story lines in a simultaneous moment. I never really saw how that could be true, at least in my novel. Now this scene may not be the novel's climax, but it sure is a high stress point, and I somehow stumbled on how to overlap two story line's crisis points and have them be set off simultaneously. It's very energizing!
Other writing I do:
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
Other writing I do:
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
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Second thoughts: Restructuring my novel didn't pan out the way I'd hoped...
In my last entry, I asked people two questions. Everyone who responded, either to me in person, or on my facebook page, all said the same thing: based on my first page, they did want to read more. (Now, I can imagine others may have had the opposite opinion but didn't want to share that opinion.)
But if I can go by the yeses, then that's great news! (And thanks, those who responded. Your feedback gives me much-needed motivation to do this work that is years away from completion...)
I also asked:
But if I can go by the yeses, then that's great news! (And thanks, those who responded. Your feedback gives me much-needed motivation to do this work that is years away from completion...)
I also asked:
Which of these descriptions of the whole story sounds like a better read?
1) 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 1978-1979 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.
Fewer people responded to this question, but I got 2 against one saying they preferred option 2. And I was really leaning toward option 2. It's daunting, and requires considerable rewriting to what I have done already, but it was also an intoxicating idea--I was excited that it could improve my story and let me do what I'd really wanted to do from the beginning: get you inside the heads of young Maizy and Curt, so you, the reader, could feel what they felt, even if you didn't agree with or like their responses to their circumstances.
So I've spent the past 10 days or so working on that overhaul, but I didn't delete the version I'd already written; instead, I made a copy and started remaking the copy. In trying to write the 1977 storyline about young Maizy and Curt, I've run into some problems that have me rethinking already:
1) I don't want to write a romance novel. But if I follow this new idea of telling both couples' mid-late 20s (age) stories, then that's what my novel will start out like: a romance. All the steamy parts all grouped together in the beginning of the book, most of the points of view putting you in the head of a character who is falling in love, or in the torment of an attraction, etc. I am not really comfortable writing a romance novel. I see my story as a drama that inevitably has parts of it that feature romance and seduction.
I kinda like some features of telling Maizy and Cur'ts story through their nearly-60-year-old memories. They temper it, shed wisdom on their choices, and their story comes through quite differently. The parts of it that are very hard and uncomfortable for me to write are easier for me as the writer if I transmit them this way.
Now that might just be cowardly of me--I shouldn't not tell a story cuz it's hard or uncomfortable--or even because I think it would block me from trying to publish in the Christian market. So by far, a more worthy reason I prefer telling Maizy and Curt's romance from their older points of view is that I like how I can space it out however I like--the flashbacks can happen anywhere in the novel that I see fit--so my book wouldn't be overloaded with all romance in the opening.
I kinda like some features of telling Maizy and Cur'ts story through their nearly-60-year-old memories. They temper it, shed wisdom on their choices, and their story comes through quite differently. The parts of it that are very hard and uncomfortable for me to write are easier for me as the writer if I transmit them this way.
Now that might just be cowardly of me--I shouldn't not tell a story cuz it's hard or uncomfortable--or even because I think it would block me from trying to publish in the Christian market. So by far, a more worthy reason I prefer telling Maizy and Curt's romance from their older points of view is that I like how I can space it out however I like--the flashbacks can happen anywhere in the novel that I see fit--so my book wouldn't be overloaded with all romance in the opening.
2) The stories have completely different pacing. Ginny and Ash's story is going to cover about a year. But in writing Maizy and Curt's story chronologically, starting from their mid-20s, I see how it's such a fast pace comparatively. 3 months or 3 years pass between scenes. I'm not sure that's a good pairing. How weird would it be for the reader to alternate between the two stories, the first one at a comparatively snail's pace, the time between scenes sometimes just minutes or hours, then the other storyline runs through the years, not getting nearly as deep in the emotional developments of the day to day and week to week happenings.
My perception is that it makes the story of Maziy and Curt too shallow, because I don't delve as deeply into their thoughts and lives. Which leads me to 3.
3) Trying this new structure begs me to write more for the Maziy and Curt story. The stories are very unequal in length, but my novel is already full 2x the length of a first-time novel that sells. Writing Maizy and Cur'ts story chronologically seems to require me to invent and explain a lot more, to fill in the gaps--but I need to be thinking how to cut my book, not expand it.
So at this point, and based only on my own worries, I don't think I can change the structure of my book. I think it's best to stick with telling Asher and Ginny's story in the present, but letting Maizy and Curt, as characters in their late 50s, tell their story through memories.
But some good things did come of the attempt to change the structure. I had to write many more scenes for Maizy and Curt, and in doing so, I learned a lot more about them. Even if some of those scenes never get to stay in the novel, I know what happened, and their lives are more fully fleshed out. And that should inevitably lead to me writing them more completely as 50-sometihng-year-olds.
Other things I publish:
Postpartum Depression, Psychological Distress Predicted by Previous Traumatic Birth
Other things I publish:
Postpartum Depression, Psychological Distress Predicted by Previous Traumatic Birth
Thursday, December 15, 2011
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
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.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
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?
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?
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