Recently in Sorrow's Knot Category

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.)

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.”

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with an English word, similar to arroyo or wadi, for a stream that runs only after a rainfall. Eventually I asked one of the hive minds (an online writers group) who came up with “wash” or “dry wash.” Arroyo and wadi were the words I knew, but “wash” was the one I wanted.

Why does it matter? Well, it matters because it’s for Sorrow’s Knot, and sometimes these high fantasies need a bit of care with language.

I remember reading how Tolkien swapped “tobacco” (which appears in The Hobbit) for “leaf” or “pipeweed” in The Lord of the Rings. He was unwilling to give up the actual pipes, but he did try to keep the Spanish loan-words out of his beloved and profoundly North-European Middle Earth. There’s a similar dance around the word “potatoes.”

Tolkien was, of course, a linguist — and is, of course, a master. Few of us laboring in his shadow would go so far as to worry about “potato,” and even if we did, we would not do it so well. But we should worry a little. High fantasy generally takes place “once upon a time,” or “long ago and far away.” It is hard enough for the reader to believe that the tale I’m writing now, on my laptop, with my iPod playing, could possibly come from such a distance. If I don’t use some care with language at the level of “dry wash” (or “potato”) I have no hope at all of pulling off such an audacious scam.

In other words: It breaks the spell of “this is an old tale” when a high fantasy contains thoughtless loan words. I say “thoughtless” because English is about half loan words if you go back far enough — it has a habit of jumping other languages in alleys and rifling through their pockets for stray vocabulary. But still, one can stick to the well-worn-in ones.

In other other words: don’t get me started on Middle-Earth-Knock-Off-Wannabes who use words like “okay.” “Vote for OK” was the slogan of the Van Buren campaign. Elves were not eligible to vote for Van Buren, and therefore shouldn’t use the word “okay.” High fantasy writers: Don’t cross the streams!

Here’s something you won’t often see from me: a 3,000 word day. Yes, if you squint at the number in that counter (it’s the project target counter from Scrivener), you’ll see that the word count is 3,056. And what was more, I wasn’t done. I had had a nice nap, and so while the counter reset I stayed up far too late — till 3:00 — and wrote another 1000 words. I made myself cry. Ah, retreat. I miss you already.

If you’re also squinting at the text, squint no longer. Here it is. Otter, the protagonist of Sorrow’s Knot, is seeing one of the most feared things in her world, a White Hand, for the first time.

“She could hardly make it out in the purpling light. It did not hold its shape, but drifted and billowed, swarmed and bulged. Only its hands were clear: white as peeled roots, five-fingered human but twig-skinny, bone-skinny. You could have taken them for a birch branch, if you were just glancing — but then your hair would rise in warning and you would turn slowly back and look again.”

I got out to the Hermitage on Wednesday afternoon. I unpacked my food, put my grandmother’s quilt on the little bed, poked around the tiny space — it’s an old stone milk shed, smaller than the average dorm room, with walls two feet thick and a counter across one of the deep window ledges that serves a desk. Profoundly quiet. I thought: now what? So I went for a walk.

The centre has about 15 miles of woodlot trail. There was a messy thaw going on, snow turning into ice, turning into mud. Well, I thought, I can cope with that. My book needs a messy thaw. My goal for the retreat was to take apart the existing nine chapters of Sorrow’s Knot. I’m a feel-one’s-way writer, so often my new chapters, when sent out to beta readers, will be topped with a note such as: “I’m doing something different with Fawn and will take her out of chapters 1 -5. Pretend you haven’t met her.” There were four major shifts of that kind that needed retrofitting. After that I hoped to write the two or three remaining chapters that would finish the first half of the book.

Messy thaw. Muck about, get muddy. Watch for tiny bird tracks and beautiful moss. Can do. So I finished the first two chapters — the really hard part — on Wednesday and the remaining seven — not as hard, but much longer — on Thursday. Thursday was a good day: mild and sunny. I walked eight miles.

On Friday that grimmest of winter things: sleet, then freezing rain. Ice came ticking down: we got half an inch. And then snow — huge flakes, falling fast. And then more ice. It was lovely but I couldn’t go out. So I worked, in a broken stuck way, on chapter ten. Some decent stuff, not amazing. It felt — forced. Trapped. In a little milk shed in the middle of nowhere where it would probably be stuck until the spring thaw. Shit.

So I whimpered and whined. And I decided it would be okay to be nice to myself. Pity I didn’t the necessary nice-to-self stuff: a book. Plus there was no bathtub. Not bringing a book: that was dumb. I turned on my smartphone and started expressing broken stuckness via text message. You know, in the spirit of our desert fathers.

And that, of all things, helped. Mostly Seánan helped: listening to my stuckness and questions and helping me work through things. (If anyone needs a book midwifed, I recommend her.) My hubby helped too. How I missed him.

An idea came to me out of all those questions. The first act ends with main characters setting out on a journey. The why of that was clear to me in my last draft, but (based on my editorial letter) it was coming off as “idle curiosity” instead of (as I was hoping) “desperate quest.” As if Frodo wanted to see what Rivendell looked like. Rats. Okay: Why do they leave? How to make it explicit? A trigger, a reason a —

Oh, got it.

A sudden and miraculous breakthrough, one which opened up the whole middle of the story. I skipped head two chapters and started writing. On Saturday I wrote 4000 words. On Sunday 2000, but I was running out of strength.

Fortunately, at that point the kids showed up to take me home. We built a bonfire in the snow — their first campfire — and roasted marshmallows. They were extra sweet, glad to see me. Home again.

Well, blog, let’s see. It’s been awhile. Last week I finished an edit of the first half of my book in draft, Swan Riders. I discovered what the arc of the main character was somewhat late, and so there was a lot of moving stuff around. You’d think this would be mechanical, but in fact it was hugely satisfying. I even made myself cry.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about Big Weird Poem again. It seems to be approaching chapbook length, and approaching done. I’m wondering if any publishers anywhere are interested in publishing a 40 page book. I may be DOOMED.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Sorrow’s Knot, the book I’m rewriting (usually mentioned around here in the context of how much trouble it’s giving me) is finally moving along. This is good because it’s due — EEEP! — April 1st.

This week I’m planning my first ever writing retreat. I’ve rented a hermitage in the Crieff Hills. I’m going on Wednesday and coming back Sunday. I’m planning to work on Sorrow’s Knot, and my goal is to finish the first half. Here’s the thing. I was really planning that I would completely re-do the first act of this novel and then try to salvage the last two acts. (The first act is the longest act by far, and takes up a half of the book. Then there’s a major turning point, and that’s what I want to write up to this week.) I’m starting to wonder if that’s going to happen — if I’m really going to end the first third in such a way that I can pick the second two thirds more or less intact. As I rewrite, it’s turning into a different book — and a better one, by far. But that makes the April 1st deadline pretty scary. Still, one must follow the energy.

I am currently fussing about my writing retreat, and sublimating said fussing into wondering about what food to take.

I even cast a Tarot about “how to move with my writing on retreat.” (I do not actually believe that shuffled pasteboard influences my life. I do, though, believe it’s useful to borrow an external perspective. Tarot is a mirror mets a dream mets an inkblot: always interesting, sometimes startling.) A notably intense casting: I got major arcana for three of four cards, including the Devil reversed for a signifier. This reads to me like a “break out of the rut” card, so: let go of the old draft of the back half, perhaps? “Deeper emotional connection and more equal footing,” sayeth the book. It’s kind of a wild energy card, though, so it could be (and I hope it will be) a big wild out-of-control few writing days.

One of the upsides of reading other writers’ blogs: realizing you’re not crazy. Or at least, you’re not alone. On reflection I suppose “not crazy” does not follow.

A case in point: many, many writers seem to have playlists for their books. I was so glad to learn this: I didn’t know anyone else did it! I always have, for fiction. I’m fairly literal about it, too. For my abandoned World War Two book (which eventually became Ghost Maps, my first book of poetry), I listened to scratchy old Glen Miller recordings — the “lost records” they recorded in German and broadcast into Germany in a “Radio Free Europe” sort of way. Ever hear someone try to cover “Is You Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in German? The clash of civilizations has rarely been so audible.

For Plain Kate, I listened to a single album over and over again: Burkene Bruse’s Stone Chair. This, for instance, is Kate’s “main theme,” the song that instantly transports me to the foggy wood and the river, the rough-hewn granduer and the soft sadness of the Russian and Northern European tales from which KATE borrowed its flavour.

The books I’m drafting — Children of Peace, and its sequel The Swan Riders — take place in a far future, in a depopulated Saskatchewan. In the Children of Peace world, they’ve lost the car, the suburbs, the principle that collective punishment is wrong, and (apparently) the electric guitar. I want a to evoke a world where AIs ride horses: modern bluegrass is obviously the way to go. Or, actually, I started out listening to Basia Bulat, and Pandora took me to modern bluegrass from there. This, for instance, is the love theme (GUYS! I wrote a book that needed a love theme!) for book one, where the hero realizes that a) quietly preparing all one’s life to be ritually murdered in a good cause may not in fact be a good thing and b) she may be in big scary love.

But the book I’m editing, Sorrow’s Knot, is so far mostly music-less. I do have a playlist, but I’ve never found the music, the music that takes me right into the story. This may, in fact, have been part of the problem when it came to getting the book out of the box. (See this blog entry, in which my book is STUCK.) LIke Plain Kate, it’s a high fantasy, so the usual moody rock (Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies) and gospel soul that populates my iPod seem like obvious nos.

It might make sense to go geographically near, but that has proven problematic. The Sorrow’s Knot setting got its start from ancient North America. That is, the same way the people in Plain Kate are NOT Polish, the people in Sorrow’s Knot are NOT Mandan. They may build the same houses and live in the same landscape and grow the same food, but the whole bit about the disembodied zombies is not, to say the least, historically accurate. But the traditional music of the Great Plains is hard to come by, and most modern interpretations of it that I’ve found have a faint whiff of recreational ethnicity — you know, white people hanging dream catchers from their rearview mirrors and visiting sweat lodges on vacation. To idealize and romanticize (and steal parts of) a culture like that is nearly as problematic as demonizing it: both treat the culture as something less than human. That’s something I’m acutely aware of, as a white chick writing about not-white people, and maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to sink into that music.

I think drumming might be the way to go. One of the characters in the book is a drummer, and I love drum music. (I bought my first djembe this year; my bodhran sadly needs reskinning.) I could listen to this guy below forever, but he doesn’t seem to have an album. I don’t know that my blog readers constitute a crowd, but I’m tempted to crowd source here. Anyone want to recommend some music? Something world-beat — not necessarily North American. (Taiko, for instance, would be fine.) Something with some force and energy, though slow is okay. Not too crystal-healing-dolphin. No orchestral windchimes tinklers need apply.

I think Sorrow’s Knot may be slightly less stuck. This week, I had an 800-word day, a couple 700-word days, and yesterday at last a sticker day, a 1000-word day. There was a brief relapse on Tuesday when I went: “But what if this is all WRONG?” and was again paralyzed for a bit. But I am slowly shaking it. I again feel loose and even a bit excited when I walk into my writing office in the afternoons.

Embarrassingly, the breakthrough came from using one of those “oh, just try for ten minutes: you won’t get much done, but that’s okay, and then you can have chocolate” mental tricks. This particular iteration of the just-ten-minutes trick came in the form software called Vitamin R.

Vitamin R is another in the family of software that urges you to work for just a little bit. I’ve used lots of them, over the years, and particularly like Freedom for the Mac and Write or Die. But when you’re as fragile as I’ve been these last few months (and the “or die” part of Write or Die seems like a real possibility), a nice friendly version is perhaps called for, and Vitamin R seems tick that box for me.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I don’t know. Recently I did an interview at an online community for teenage writers, Write On. There I talked about the universal writers’ experience of My Writing Sucks, and how to keep going in the face of that. This was my advice to them, which I myself proceeded to turn around and forget:

*”lower the stakes for yourself. It doesn’t have to be the next New Yorker short story, it just has to — and here you should fill in the blank. Be a fairy tale told from the villain’s point of view. Be a soap opera that’s so over the top it will make people laugh. Use rhymed couplets. You can’t succeed at a whole novel/play/book of poems all at once, but you can probably do this, and it will hone your skills and sharpen your confidence.” *

For me, lowering the stakes turned out to be “write for ten minutes on the scene where Otter rescues Cricket from the ghost in the cornfield.” Compare this to the previous stake, which was: “rescue a book you used to love, but which your editor doesn’t seem to, by making it totally perfect right NOW.” I mean, which of those tasks would get you to lift your head weakly from your desk and peer around with a tiny bit of hope?

I feel silly, but hey. Silly is in fact one of my favourite words. Did you know that “silly” originally meant “blessed”? Sounds unlikely but it’s true. The drifting path of its usage went roughly like this: happy —> blessed -> pious -> innocent/childlike -> weak/pitiable -> foolish. The root is an Old English word, gesælig, meaning happy or goodhearted. It may be related (distantly) to the word “soul.” Fairy story readers will know its much closer cousin “seely” (also spelled “seelie”), which is just silly with an older spelling, and an older meaning hanging on.

What an important idea, an important insight: that to be silly and to be happy and to be holy are the same thing. I am at my most creative and productive (and happiest and holiest) when I remember this.

Even if it takes a rather silly bit of software.

Well, I’ve reached a new phase in my professional life. I shall call it the Great Stuck phase.

Backstory. Last Christmas, I finished up a solid draft of my second novel, Sorrow’s Knot. I’d already sold the book, as an unspecified “book two” in a two book contract, so I took a deep breath and sent it off to my editor. The draft I sent was not a first draft (I would sooner break my fingers than share my first drafts with my editor) but it was not a finished draft either — I still had ideas about things I wanted to try. But deadline pressed, so I dutifully sent the draft on.

I was excited about the book at first. It had problems, but I loved the main character, loved the world, and was giddy about the ending. The ending makes me cry and grin like an idiot at the same time. It’s probably my favourite of all the things I’ve ever written. I wanted to dive right back into it and try to make the rest of the book live up to that ending.

But, well, circumstances. I won’t get into them here, but Because Of Reasons, it was impossible for me to dive back into the book. That hurt. A lot. I began to see only the book’s weakest points. The frustration began to border on heartbreak. It was like sitting next to the phone, waiting for That Call, and every moment it doesn’t come is worse than the moment before. So, eventually, I put Sorrow’s Knot into the past tense. I thought: well, that book is done. It will come back some day, but for now, it’s done. Put it in a box with the other failed projects and move on.

And I did. I wrote a different book, Children of Peace. I have always been a slow, careful writer — Plain Kate took me six years, Sorrow’s Knot three so far — but Children of Peace came tumbling out in about six months. Lightning fast. Lightning exciting, too. I even started a sequel (a sequel!) and got about 20,000 words in.

And then, those circumstances? They changed. And it was suddenly time for me to write Sorrow’s Knot again. That was two months ago. And here’s the thing. I can’t get the book out of the bloody box.

I have a revision plan, good ideas for what I want to change, and how, and why. But the words themselves won’t come. I try and try, but they just WON’T. I feel like A.A. Milne’s Rabbit, “braining out” notices: “Notice a meeting of everybody will meet at the House at Pooh Corner to pass a Rissolution By Order Keep to the Left Signed Rabbit.” Just that artificial, knocked together of prefabbed parts. If it were up to me, I’d give up. I’d leave the book in the box forever. But it’s not up to me: it’s a sold book. A lot of people have put a lot of work into it already.

So, now what? I’ve always advised young writers — and always believed for myself — that you should follow your writing passions, and not be concerned about what you “should” be writing. “Should” is so often a trap. And there are few good reasons to write beyond passion. I usually throw in a caveat here about the difference between following your passion and chickening out halfway through — but really, that doesn’t feel like chickening out. This is different.

What do you do when you want to quit but can’t? I’ve thought a lot about this this week, and here is what I’ve come up with.

• First: forgive myself. I’ve had very little time to write, recently, because of publicity pressures and dayjob craziness. (Recently my “half-time” job has seen me leaving at closer to 3:00 than 1:00 — I decided that that was temporarily okay to deal with a temporary problem. I’m redrawing that boundary now.) With all the stuff going on in my life in September and October, it’s no wonder there’s been little time to write. Good Stuff is still Stuff.

• Realize, too, under the heading of “forgive myself,” that part of this is reacting to the “You Must” nature of having a book on contract. My muse says: Make Me. That is the nature of the muse (and possibly the reason sophomore books are … ahem … problematic). Realize this, shake my head at myself, and move on.

• Second: realize diving back in is about more than just plot. Oddly enough, each of of my light little fantasy novels turns out to deal, in fact, with one of my Big Scary Personal Issues. (The plus side of writing about talking cats is that no one asks you if they’re autobiographical.) To get back to Sorrow’s Knot, I probably need to get back to the thing about it that moves and scares me. (Swell, that should be fun.)

• Third: be less like Rabbit and more like Pooh. By this I mean, sit quietly with the stuckness and have faith. This is an act of creativity, and creativity is more about faith than will. (For me.) This week, I’ve decided to trust that there is a door back into the work — just one I have yet to find. It’s my book, after all. I liked it while I was writing it. I loved Otter. And I still love the ending, unabashedly. Nothing there has changed. It will happen.

So I record all this so that others can see that Real Writers Get Stuck (I have many students who read this blog) and so that someday when I’ve written a dazzling book that I love beyond all reason, I can remember that I once hated it and wanted to leave it in a box. At that time I will probably have another book I hate and want to leave in a box, so this note to myself may be useful.

I am stuck, but I am waiting with faith. Someone can come read me a Strengthening Book, such as might comfort a Bear in Wedged in Great Tightness, if they’d like.