If My Life Were a Movie…

On Life, On Writing

…this is the song I would want playing over the closing credits: “The Hard Way” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter.  Especially this part:

Have a little trust in us when fear obscures the path
You know we got this far, darling, not by luck, but by never turning back
Some will call on destiny, but I just call on faith
That the world won’t stop, and actions speak louder
Listen to your heart, to what your heart might say
Everything we got, we got the hard way.
 

and this part:

We’ve got two lives, one we’re given, and the other one we make…
 

Oh, just let Mary-Chapin Carpenter tell you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjI1OXZdyZM

What the Heck is a Line Edit?

On Writing

My good friend Megan Morrison published a wonderful article on her blog a few days ago entitled “The Editorial Process: A Guide for the Friends and Family Members of Writers“.  This is highly recommended reading for anyone who has ever wondered why your friend who had sold a book is still working on the same one months or even years after the sale.

The only thing I would add to Meg’s excellent article is Stage 3.5: Waiting for the Official Announcement.  This is the time after the book has been purchased and the author has signed a contract, but the publisher has not yet put out the official press release announcing the deal.  This can be a pins-and-needles time for author, since she just wants to shout to the world, “I HAVE A BOOK DEAL!”, but can’t do so yet, and even if she did, no one would really believe it because there is no proof anywhere just yet.

I mean, I imagine that it’s a frustrating time.  Just saying.

Pressure

On Writing, Recommended Reading, Works in progress

So I know that I am coming late to the party with this, but I finally got around to reading the much-recommended Bird by Bird: 12543Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (New York: Random House, 1995).  I started out reading a library copy, and after finding something on every other page that I wanted to highlight, I gave up and bought a copy.  After about two chapters, I already knew that this was going to be a book that I wanted to keep on my desk and go back to again and again.

The thing is, Lamott doesn’t really cover anything you don’t already know as a writer – but her humorous insights give you permission to own up to those things you already know.   They make you feel a little less alone.  And if you’re a Type-A personality like me, they help take some pressure off.  I love her idea of the “1-inch picture frame”, or focusing only on the tiny little bit of story that you are working on right now, without getting bogged down by bigger questions.  This description, this interaction.   Because you’ve just got to get on with it.   As Lamott says: 

“And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.”

Yes!  So, see?  All my writing around the point?  Not wasted. 

I recently read a perfectly reasonable article in Writer’s Digest that made me want to throw the magazine across the room: “7 Steps to Creating a Flexible Outline for Any Story” by K.M. Weiland.  In it, Weiland advocates doing a great deal of up-front work in setting up the plot, characters, and setting of your story in outline form, so that you don’t waste time going down pointless paths later while writing.  Now, this is an admirable approach, and I am glad it works for her.  But I am Type-A, get-it-done, even-my-to-do-lists-have-to-do-lists kind of person, and even I felt it was a bit much.  I can’t imagine how a true “pantser” (those writers who plot by the seat of their pants) would react to it. 

Here’s the thing: I would love to be able to be that organized when it comes to developing a story, but that’s just not how it works for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I do a lot of planning up front – for my current work-in-progress, for example, I had an entire notebook full of character information, family trees, plot notes, research notes, and so on, before I put word one on the page.  But to me, it feels forced to try to jam all that into an outline too soon.  So much of the story reveals itself to me as I write it.  Even though I think I know the characters well, they tell me new things about themselves as I let them interact with other characters.  So for me it’s important to let those characters unfold that way, and let the plot flow from that.

Weiland’s article definitely has a lot of good stuff in it.  But I know that, for me, following it to the letter would be too confining.

And isn’t that what this writing thing is all about, anyway?  You have to find the approach that works best for you and keep at it.  Anne Lamott has a great quote about that too:

“You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side.”

Amen, sister.

 

Writing Around the Point

On Writing, Works in progress

Whenever I sit down to work on my novel in progress, I try not to think too hard about the fact that I am eventually going to cut 70-90% of what I write on any given day.  It’s painful to think about, even if it’s necessary.

So it’s weird that I have totally embraced another writing technique: writing outtakes.  For my current work in progress, I have written nine different outtakes and extra scenes, ranging in length from 15,000 words to 22,000 words.  Every time I do it, I feel like I am wasting time, or at the very least, indulging in what I like to call “productive procrastination”.  (If you spend your time organizing your to-do list to avoid actually doing anything on it…that’s productive procrastination.)  Some of these stories are scenes from the novel in other points of view, some are completely separate, some are background information that I need for the main story.  At two key points in the story, where several characters converge, I actually found it helpful to write the scene in several other characters’ points of view BEFORE I tackled it from my main character’s viewpoint.

So now, whenever I am struggling with my manuscript, I set it aside and choose another character to write about, or pick a moment in the past to write about.  Then when I come back to the main manuscript, more often than not, I have a much better idea of how to proceed.  It makes sense; if you got stuck writing an article or nonfiction topic, it would probably be because you need to do more research.  These side stories are “research” on my characters.  I have pages and pages of notes…

notes

 

…but for some reason it doesn’t all become “real” to me until I write it in prose form.  My characters tell me things I hadn’t known before when they start interacting with others.

Right now I am finally working on the climactic scene of my work-in-progress, a scene where five characters and their messy hopes, desires, and insecurities collides.  I tried plotting it using color-coded index cards…

cards

…scribbling notes in notebooks, adding half-formed notes to Word documents.  And I have been working on this scene from the other characters’ points of view first, starting with the villain.  (Writing in her point of view may not be healthy, but it’s useful.)

So here’s my resolution: I am no longer going to let myself feel guilty about this.  It’s not a waste of time.  It’s necessary to make the final product better, because when it comes to writing a great story, there’s just no way to rush it.

Epiphanies

On Writing

As we were driving home from church yesterday, my son and I were talking about Epiphany – in the religious sense – and epiphanies –in the James Joyce sense of “sudden and momentary showing forth or disclosure of one’s authentic inner self”.  I told him my favorite epiphany story – the story of how I realized that I had to be a librarian. I was in the fall semester of my last undergraduate year at the Catholic University of America, and one evening – I remember very clearly that it was a Tuesday around 5 pm – I walked into the university library stacks, breathed in and thought, “I love the smell of books”.

Now, my memories of the next few minutes may be a little skewed, but I am pretty sure the ceiling opened up and a bright light shone and angelic voices sang. Or maybe that’s just how it felt. Because in that moment, I knew, without the slightest doubt, that I had to be a children’s librarian. I knew that, in my soul, I already was.

The reason I remember that this happened on a Tuesday night around 5 pm is that I had my children’s literature class that evening, and I remember arriving early and pelting the professor, Kristi Beavin (head of the children’s department at Arlington County Library), with questions about library school. I was so excited that I called just about everyone I knew that night, and stayed up all night researching library schools on my slow dial-up internet connection.

As much as that moment felt like a sudden revelation, it was really more about making a connection. All the clues had been there before. I loved children’s literature, and I had already started preparing graduate school applications for an MA in English, figuring that I would become a professor in that field.  I had adored libraries since I was a child. Books were my best friends. (My mom, in fact, had had a middle-of-the-night epiphany a few years before, at the time when I was an unhappy musical theater major, that I should switch to English, a major I had never even considered before despite the fact that I loved books and writing and I had been editor of the literary magazine in high school.)  I was already taking a children’s literature course in the education department and had been hearing about children’s services in libraries all semester. When I had presented the story “Mr. Fox” during class, the professor had written on my grading sheet: “You have a future as a storyteller, if you want one.”  (Note to teachers:  Don’t think your students don’t listen to you.  Look how I make a living now.)

So, all in all, when I look back at that moment, I think: what the hell was wrong with me? Why didn’t I see it until that moment? It was that moment of pure physical presence among the books (and, as my friend Marie Flanigan would say, perhaps being addled by the smell of book mold) that did it.

So after telling my son that story, I started thinking: what about becoming a writer? Was there an epiphany about that? And the answer is: nope. But I have always been writing, from the time that I wrote (bad) poems for extra credit using my spelling words in middle school.   (Maybe one day I will dig some up and post them here…if I am ever in the mood for complete humiliation.) Whether it was fanciful stories or fanfiction or articles or attempts at real stories, writing was how I always felt most comfortable expressing myself.

So I guess at some point I had a quieter epiphany, a gentler, less startling “disclosure of my authentic inner self” –  not that I wanted to be a writer, but that I already was.