April 2012 Archives

For a week I’ve been flailing around with the current chapter of Sorrow’s Knot.

I keep thinking I’m about to hit the point where I can stop completely ravelling the last draft and saving only a sentence here and there. I dream about the big downhill rush, and I’m always sure it’s just after this last little slog. And maybe this time I’ll be right, who knows.

Anyhow. This week’s chapter addresses one of the big problems from the first draft: no one understood why my hero had to do the terrifying and incredibly brave thing she did at the climax. I mean, I feel like I understood it. But no one else did. And by no one I mean my incredibly smart editor.

So, task: create a chapter where the whys and wherefores of the brave/terrifying/magically logical climax are spelled out. Where the character - visibly and on-screen - figures out what she’s going to have to do. Short-term payoff: suspense. Will she really do THAT? Long-term payoff: increased reader satisfaction and decreased reader confusion. Hopefully fewer editorial post-it notes expressing bafflement. Definitely worth doing.

But what does this look like on the page? This looks like a big old chunk of talky exposition, that’s what it looks like. The scream in the sunlight horror all-is-lost incident right before this? Let’s lose all momentum by TALKING about it. A lot.

You may now picture me banging my head into my treadmill desk. Repeatedly.

Today, finally, I think I found the path through it. It’s a well-worn path - so well worn that screenwriters use it as a truism: exposition is ammunition. Let’s make the characters FIGHT about what to do next. It’s a well-worn path but I missed it, and finding it seems like a little miracle. If I can just get through this next little push, it will be a fast clean rush to the ending.

(Or not.)

First, take joy in your work. It’s corporate, but it doesn’t have to be dull.

Nomadic girl and her camel from the blog Bayan Jargal

Second, do more than what is asked of you. Most of what you have to do is work-a-day. But the necessary can be beautiful.

wood stack by alastair heseltine

Third, don’t worry too much about being original. Don’t strive for “fresh,” or “edgy” or “on-message.” Just write. Write well. Use verbs. Cut excess. Don’t re-do something that’s working. And when you’ve nailed it, don’t worry if it’s short.

newspaper blackout by Austin Kleon

Fourth, look closely. It’s the details that make things come to life. Avoid the generic. Don’t say: “a great deal of public interest was generated by our grand opening.” Say: “11,000 people came.”

grains of sand, by Doctor Gary Greenberg

You can even pick one detail and set it alone in a frame. People will pay attention to the most ordinary things if you help them encounter the ordinary in a new way.

clouds in a room, by Berndnaut Smild, via io9

On the other hand, don’t lose track of the big picture. There’s no reason why an overview can’t be compelling. If you let the landscape of your facts guide the principle by which you organize them, the lines and shapes of your ideas can be muscular and beautiful.

terraced ricefields in China, via National Geographic wallpapers

Finally, if it’s not working, tinkering with it isn’t going to help. Don’t tinker, revise, and be bold in revision.

“First Draft” cartoon by Savage Chicken.

Well, I did it. I tore apart the chapter I was talking about yesterday and put it back together again. And then - then I wrote the new ending for it. The one which brings the characters to the edge of escape, but fails to let one of them out. I finished it about 12:00, and spent the remaining half hour in my office shaking and crying. You can either view that as a sign the book is working, or a sign that I should up my meds. Up to you.

It’s not even really that terrible a scene. It’s just that characters being crazy-brave always nail me. Every single time, they nail me. Sad I can handle. But beauty and bravery break my heart.

So where are we now? Well, if I didn’t seem to be allergic to structure, I’d say this was the “darkest moment” part of the draft. If it were a 100-page screenplay, so sayeth the Screenplay God Blake Snyder, this would be page 75. The break into act three.

I have some hope that act three will be faster to write. I’ve totally torn act one and two apart, saving only the main characters, the general premise, and a paragraph of description here and there. I have never had to strip a book so far back. It’s not a rewrite, it’s a just-plain write. But act three may be more or less salvageable. Wish me luck.

Also, an aside: someone commented yesterday on my berating myself for listening to thinky-plotter me and thereby getting stuck. She says: “But I suspect that the thinky self gets you across the chasm on some kind of Rube Goldberg bridge, and then the real writer self sees where to go and flies across.” That rang true. Maybe I can usefully view my thinky-plotter self as one of the poor souls working on the crazy bridge in Dr. Suess’s How Lucky You Are. After all, you have to cross the gap somehow. Maybe you need a little crazy bridge labour before you can leap.

Today saw me back my writing office after a four day weekend. I’ve not gotten much work done since the beginning of April, which is a long stretch when deadlines are near.

But the thing is … I tried to write this last chapter. I gave myself a nice pause and a couple of thinky days before tackling it, plotting how I was going to help the characters out of the dangerous place where they were trapped, and then later how I was going to get them to go back there on purpose. When I thought I had it all figured out I tried to write it.

And failed. I wrote an entirely wrong-footed chapter, mechanical and choppy and confusing. But I pushed it (after all, I’d already given myself the pause) and got the characters to the end of the chapter, and the edge of escape. And as they came to the edge, I thought, “wait, this is IT, this is where it happens, right here, right now.” And I thought: “this is why I couldn’t write this: I was trying to avoid this moment.”

Of course that wasn’t what I had thoughtfully planned, so I ignored the hunch and wrote past the moment, completing the escape. Then I froze up.

It took me a few days to decide to throw out my plans (not to mention most of a chapter) and trust my gut. Of course NOW it seems obvious — why would they want to escape then come back? — but I fought and fought and whined and stomped my feet. But today, finally, I scrapped the problem chapter, stripping it back and putting it back together with its new not-escape ending in mind. I’m ready, tomorrow, to bring my characters to the their worst moment, the all-is-lost point. GULP.

But when, oh when, am I going to figure out that my thinky-writer self doesn’t know what it’s doing? When am I going to stop pushing through before I’m ready? When am I going to quit fighting those deep flashes of insight? Listen to your self, Erin: “This is where it happens. Right here. Right now.”

I don’t often talk about the books I’m reading on my blog, but I’ve recently read two books that are about to make their North American debuts, and I would love to see both of them reach lots of readers, because they are both fabulous. I thought: it would not hurt to do my part.

The first is Zoe Marriott’s Shadows On The Moon, which a high-concept blurb writer would probably call “A Japanese Cinderella.” That does not begin to do it justice. For starters, take it from me, it’s not easy to make the jump from fairy tale to novel, and most writers fail. They forget to fill in what almost all fairy tales leave out: motivations for the characters, and rules for the world. So, you must imagine a story in which Cinderella was not a fairytale cipher, but had an agenda of her own. What, exactly, does it mean to dance so well a prince might fall for you? And why would you need him to?

But I love Shadows most and best for its first scene, its first sentences, which I just want to diagram and study. Here’s how you do it, folks:

On my fourteenth birthday, when the sakura was in full bloom, the men came to kill us. We saw them come, Aimi and me. We were excited, because we did not know how to be frightened. We had never seen soldiers before.

Go on, put the book down after that. I dare you.

(Also, let’s hear it for non-white people in Fantasy Land, hurrah!)

Shadows On The Moon comes out April 24th.

I also just finished Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity. Here’s a book to give to your friends who shy away from reading YA because they think it’s all broody vampires. It is straight up fabulous, shatteringly good.

The novel largely take the form of a rather rambling written confession of a female British special agent being held in Nazi-occupied France. From the title on in, you suspect the agent is up to something. Indeed, I’ve always loved unreliable narrators, and who is less reliable, for better reasons, than a confessing spy?

On the surface, the confession tells the story of her friendship with the (also female) RAF (or rather, Air Transport Auxiliary) pilot who brought her to France. And here’s something else I’ve never seen done this well. The agent and the pilot have one of those fearsome “first friendships” that many of us have in college — the girls are of just that age. That first adult friendship that is not sexual, but in other ways just that intense, and just that new, because you are so new. Of course I’ve seen this first friendship explored for young men, but much more rarely for young women - and I have never, ever seen it done this well.

Code Name: Verity comes out May 15th.

Below are actual excerpts from my notebook and facebook feed and twitter and etc on the process of getting used to a treadmill desk if you (like me) are a klutz. Feel free to read the whole thing aloud in your best Captain Kirk voice.

Treadmill desk log, day one: I got a treadmill desk! (Actually I scored my in-laws dis-used treadmill and stuck a board on it: fortunately I’m short, so that’s all it takes.) This is day two of typing and walking at once, and frankly I expect to end up plastered against the back wall of my writing office. Also I can hardly type and think this whole thing might be stupid. But everyone tells me I’ll get used to it.

Treadmill desk log, day three: I still haven’t injured myself. Typing is improving slowly. The “second nature” thing that was promised has not yet appeared. Basically this is annoying and if hadn’t been endorsed my klutzy friends, I’d quit it.

Treadmill desk log, day four. Treadmills make my hips and knees feel weird in a way that walking doesn’t. What’s up with that? Typing continues to improve. I do think a separate keyboard and a boost for the monitor may be necessary.

Treadmill desk log, day seven: I think I could grow to love this thing. My brain seemed to work so much better this aft, strolling, than it did this morning, sitting and flailing. (Of course, this morning was dayjob and I’ve got a fundraising project. Still.) It helps to turn up the speed to 1.4 or 1.5 km/hr. 1.0, the lowest speed, seems artificially slow. Would I rather have a dog? Yes. Does this beat sitting in a chair? Um… I think it might.

Treadmill desk log, day ten: The treadmill desk is becoming comfortable and easy. Case in point: Today I’m in my writing office but have forgotten my shoes, which makes treadmilling dicey. And yet I feel a genuine urge to get up there; a feeling that things would feel better if I were strolling along. Me having an urge to exercise is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Treadmill desk log, day 17: The treadmill is clearly smarter than me, and I still haven’t learned to program it. But I have learned to access the pre-set programs, and the one called rolling hills, that varies the incline, is making treadmill desk working much better. It does get a little steep in the middle, but my old sore hip feels better than it has in years. Making the same stride over and over again wasn’t helping, but this is.

Treadmill desk log, day 20: I’m on retreat, loving it. Walking hours through the woods. And yet I do miss my treadmill desk. Stock up on canned foods, everyone: I miss a piece of exercise equipment. The Mayans were right. THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT!

Treadmill desk log, day 25: Today I investigated who at the dayjob might approve me getting a treadmill desk there, too.

Treadmill desk log, day 30: Today I hit 50 miles, and officially became annoying and evangelical about treadmill desks.

I’ve been asked for a video, so here is a video. I wrote a script so I wouldn’t be all “Buh, my desk moves.” James filmed me rehearsing it, then refused to film it again. He says it’s fine. I guess it’s fine. (I hate videos.)

I was just talking to a writer friend about how we want our scenes, our chapters, our stories as a whole, to be a little more jagged and gangly, with bits sticking out that don’t quite fit. Neatness is often seductive — you feel it’s “right” if it all fits together — but it is a small thing, and a false one.

The friend I was talking to was another writing Mommy, and we were particularly discussing our tendency to let the external pulls of our life creep into our fiction. Why did her scene end there? Because it was time for her to go pick up her daughter from school. Why are my chapters suddenly turning out at about 3,000 words? Because that’s how many “keeper” words I can write in a week. Deep true reasons of art, obviously.

But it is hard to resist the temptation to wrap things up at the end of the day, and make them neat. Leaving bits hanging feels like leaving wounds open. Or, less dramatically, like stopping your knitting in the middle of a row, without casting off and tying a knot. If you leave loose threads - won’t it all unravel? But writing is not knitting. Writing is wild. It does not prosper when we clip it short and box it up so. Ursula LeGuin wrote that all art tries to say the unsayable—and writing, God help us, tries to say the unsayable in words. It ought to be rough. It ought to be shaggy.

(A related point, which I won’t develop here: outlines don’t work for me. I observe that they work for other people but I don’t understand how they possibly could.)

Endings are of course place where one is tempted to pull all the threads together and tie a bunch of knots. That’s legitmate. You don’t want a novel that feels like it’s going to come to pieces in your hands. Novels - this is a remarkably controversial statement, but - novels are big stories. When you come to the end of a story you don’t want to be startled by the storyteller’s sudden silence. You don’t want to look up going: “wait, what’s wrong, did you choke on something? Did the transmission cut out? Did they leave out the last few pages? WHAT? WHAT!?” At the end of the story you want the sigh and the silence, and then the impulse to stand up and cheer. You don’t get that if you don’t make a good ending.

But many, many books go too far in making endings. They tie everything up too neatly. They end with a great clanging final thump.

The thing is, book endings aren’t really endings. (Unless they end with the world blowing up.) They often have that sense of launching something new, of going through a new door. Even something as simple as “and they lived happily ever after” is about putting a big door at the end of the novel and then opening it up. I personally like readers to be able to imagine the future of my characters, and to be able to glimpse what it is. It’s not too different than the way I like them to be able to glimpse the back stories of the assorted secondary characters. That these untold stories are there adds richness, even if no one writes them.

Endings are like … weddings, I suppose, which is why books often end with the bells ringing. In life it’s bad when weddings are viewed as endings. Anyone who’s successfully married will tell you a wedding is a beginning, or perhaps a climax at the end of Act One. Still, weddings have that quality I look for in novel endings, of ceremony and transition, of possibilities changing.

And like weddings, the happiest of endings can sometimes make me cry. Those are the best tears. Give me a book like that.