Story Telling

You know when you're telling a friend about a movie you just saw and their eyes are glazing over, but you just can't stop yourself because you loved this movie so much and you want to tell them the story? You don't want to leave out any of the important details, but they look like they're about to pass out, so you hurry through it, giving a much longer version than a movie trailer, but condense it just enough to stay within the limit of average human civility?

I sometimes think I might be unique, as I do about this type of experience, but usually I am not, so I'm betting most people have done just what I've described above. This week's aha! about novel writing is that what you must do in order to understand the complete arc of the story you're writing is to summarize it in the same way you'd summarize that fantastic movie you've just seen. Only unlike retelling the plot of your favorite movie, this time it's exciting, it has your friend begging for the next twist in the plot, and salivating, waiting to hear how it ends.

It has to be that exciting, or it will never sell. And it can be. The reason it will be much more exciting is that it is your story, not someone else's. And you must be excited yourself, or the story will never make it in the big bad world of publishing. The story has to be really good. It has to be told in a unique voice, it has to start off strong, continue to grip the reader, and end with a twist. But it will be if it is the story that needs to be told that only you can tell. It will take off like wildfire if it is the right story. And whether or not it is the right story, is something only you, the storyteller can decide.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to use a well proven type of plot structure to make choices about my story. It just has not been working and I've been getting very frustrated. Every writer's process is different and what I realize this week is I have to create the arc of the story first, then test it against successful plot structuring. It is much easier to mold and knead an existing story than it is to mold and knead thin air as I've been attempting to do. Storytelling should be fun. It's time to have some fun, then check it out to see if it has all the elements needed to sell it.

More later.

Roiling

This week has been catch up on real life. Working extra hours to pay the bills and make up the time spent at the writers workshop. But no matter what I'm doing, the novel is always roiling around in the back of my mind. Wake up thinking about the plot and the characters, the epic nature of the story.

And other things too. Is that young, first time novelist, with the MFA in creative writing I've been reading, going to dampen my ardor for my own work, or can I learn something from her book? Is listening to 28 CDs of George Eliot's Middlemarch the right thing to be doing, just because it feels like the right thing to be doing?

Is it possible to work on solving the housing crisis in the San Juans by day, and work on the novel by night? Are the workers' cottages Dorothea designs in Middlemarch somehow connected to the lack of decent affordable workers' housing in San Juan County? Can I work that into the novel somehow? Or should that wait for the next novel? Oh yes, and then there's that thing about the economy, and boomers losing their life savings and no one talking about it...

And on it goes. Showering, dressing, cooking, eating, driving, working, paying bills, picking up the mail, and all the while, there's this invisible mechanism at work, working on the novel for me. I don't even ask it to. It's better than a lover in that it really does know what I need without me having to tell it.

The problem solving abilities of the subconscious. Time spent on worthy endeavors seemingly unrelated to the novel will, as has been the case so many times before, in time, prove fruitful, but how that happens is completely unpredictable. Which is the thing about it I love most. What is predictable is that it will happen.

More later.

The Rumored Death of Boomer Sex

This week I met Jane Smiley at a workshop. She told me to stop preparing to write the novel and sit down and write a sloppy first draft, start to finish, then begin polishing it. I traveled twelve hundred miles, and spent a considerable amount of money to get this advice. It was worth it.

What started out as The Winter of the Novel has actually turned into The Winter of Understanding How Incredibly Complex a Task it is to Craft a Novel of Which One Can be Proud. As recent publications prove, it is possible to write a bestseller, or even a series of bestsellers with very little talent for writing and not much to say. But that is not what I want to do.

The only question worth answering is, "What is the story that must be told, that only I can tell?" For the workshop, we were all asked to come up with break out titles for the books we have written or partially written, or the books we want to write. I picked Boomer Sex because I want to write from the perspective of the Baby Boomers and I know "sex sells". Hey, why not just put it right there in the title I thought, then write a novel to go with the title.

That wasn't necessarily a bad idea. The problem is, I got impatient. I wanted an outline for a great novel  that I could start writing right now. Because I got impatient, I crafted the outline of a novel I didn't like very much. I couldn't get into the story, it felt more like a cartoon of a novel than it felt like a novel. So it was very hard to pitch it at the workshop. I was discouraged to say the least. Having been discouraged before, I've learned that that uncomfortable feeling very often immediately precedes a breakthrough.

I also met Robert Olen Butler at the workshop. Bob said write about the things in Boomer Sex that are real. A woman approaching retirement age having lost most of her savings in the recession, that is something you can get passionate about writing. The same woman losing her husband to a divorce, is something you can get passionate about writing. The question to ask is, what is the yearning of your character. In the case of Boomer Sex, the yearning is not, "how do I get money again?" The yearning is "who am I now?"

The first day of the workshop, our leader, Michael Neff, told us you can't build a beautifully crafted home with a couple of boards, some nails and a hammer. And writing a novel of which you can be proud is more complex than building a beautifully crafted home. If anyone should understand that analogy, it should be me. Michael has been known to say "sex sells", nothing new there, and he's right, it does. He was telling the truth.

But the context of that comment is very important. Michael makes it very clear you need a tightly written and edited story that is unique, interesting, and keeps eyes on the page. Once you have that, there are many more, very specific, things you must do to improve the chances of selling it. But if you don't have that tightly written and edited, unique story, all the sex in the world won't sell it. Unless you're E. L. James. Of whom I'm sure there will soon be many imitators.

The truth is, it's much easier to talk about writing a novel, or blog about writing a novel, than it is to write a good novel. Going forward, having spent the past three months studying novel structure and all the essential elements of a good commercial novel will in the end save me many months if not years of flailing around. I'm very grateful for the homework leading up to the workshop, for the condensed help I've been given, for the chance to practice pitching my ideas to professionals, and to observe what the other dozen attendees are working on as well as their processes. All in all a rare and enriching experience.

More later.

iPanic

Did anybody else notice that when Barack Obama led Michelle onto the dance stage at the Inaugural Ball, except for the onlookers holding news cameras, pretty much everyone else in the room was holding up an iPhone or iDroid to take their picture? The picture of that from the back of the room was flabbergasting… and a little depressing.

You see, I don’t own an iPhone. I tried an iDroid when they first came out, but when the twenty-something goth girl at the iDroid store suggested I come to iDroid school, I put it back in the box, stuck the box up on the high shelf in my bedroom closet, and asked for a dumb phone. I still use my dumb phone. The only time it bothers me is everyday, all day, when I see everyone else on the planet using their iPhone or iDroid.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with novel writing, the sole purpose of this blog, the topic from which I have vowed not to stray until the novel is written? Good question, I’m sure there’s a way to tie it in. Sure, here’s a way. Research is essential when writing a novel, and what better way to do research than to google at will on any topic, at any time, from any place. Yeah, I’d kind of like to be able to do that, I’ll admit it.

Now back to bitching about iPhones. It’s getting to be so bad, when I close my eyes, all I see is a finger “sliding to unlock” and a voice saying, “just wait a second here…” I mean come on, why do you have to slide to unlock, isn’t that really the same thing as the phone always being unlocked? Except that there’s an extra step? I don’t get it, why the slide to unlock?

And why is an iPhone still a phone? I don’t get that either. It’s a flat rectangle for God’s sake, does anyone else think it just looks dumb to be holding a flat rectangle up to the side of your head? Or worse yet, holding it out in front of you like a tiny rectangular platter? I don’t know, call me strange, but at least the flip phone looked kind of like something meant to connect an ear to a mouth. And the phone function is such a tiny portion of what you can do on an iPhone, why even bother?

I just feel obligated to try and resist at least a little bit longer. I don’t even know why. It’s the principle of the thing. I don’t know what the principle is, but I’m sure there is one. I’m trying to hold out until everyone else on the planet is using an iPad or mini-pad. Didn’t that used to mean something else? It’s so hard to keep up. I don’t know, there was something about that Obama moment, I kind of iPanicked.

Balls

So I went to the writers’ conference on how to publish a best seller. It was great. Two agents were there to whom we were allowed to pitch our novels. Let me just say this: It was a great experience, but it did kind of remind me of one time when I talked my way into a passing grade in architecture school in spite of the fact I had no building and no drawings to show for an entire term’s work.

Yes, I really did that. And no, I am not ashamed of it… well not much anyway. I guess you could say I had drafter’s block. I knew how to draft; I learned that in technical school. I was capable of coming up with passing design ideas; this was not my first design class. So, what happened you might ask? Well...

This wasn’t just any architecture design class. I had been selected as one of the crème de la crème to study under a legend-in-his-own-mind professor. Even though we worked in a crappy old past-its-expiration-date temporary building on desks left over from World War I, and were crammed into our studio space like a box of number two pencils still in their box.

The stakes were high to say the least. I spent most of the term blank minded and terrified. I managed to do two things right, I kept trying to figure out what the professor was talking about, and I never stopped coming to class. A good thing, as that would come in very handy when I would later make my plea for mercy.

Everyday, I’d come to the studio, get out my tracing paper and pencils, and make wonderful looking little sketchy marks and diagrams along with everyone else. Every few days, we’d pin our sketchy little drawings up on a wall and wax eloquent to one another about them. That was relatively easy, given my gift for gab.

The fact I had no idea what I was doing and the professor might as well have been speaking Greek, did not deter me on my mission to look like I knew what I was doing. (Actually he might have been, according to their own reports, the other students were of such high caliber, I might have missed that as a requirement on the syllabus).

Anyway, the more time went on, the more terrified I became. I was in a near constant state of panic, which did not help my ability to assimilate or produce. Just telling this story is starting to give me palpitations and hives. I better get on with it and cut to the chase. So here’s what happened. The term ended as all architecture school terms end, with a Final Review.

What I later learned about the Final Review is I really could have put up my sketchy meaningless diagrams and talked about them. Most architecture students have the opposite of imposter syndrome and probably half the class had done that anyway. But I hadn’t read that part of the architecture school student manual yet.

What happened next is a blank. I don’t know if I appeared at the Final Review with nothing, or failed to appear at all. It’s kind of like a car wreck where you end up in the hospital saying, “I can remember only just up to right before the accident”. My next memory is sitting in the office of my professor about to make the ballsiest move of my as yet, barely budding, architecture career. It was divine intervention. To this day I don’t know what made me do this.

First, I told the truth. I had not, all term, produced anything of substance. I was repentant. I recapped for the professor what I had learned in spite of complete drafter’s block. I promised it would never happen again. And I may have smiled and batted my eyelashes, I was a lot younger and cuter back then. And…drum roll please… he let me off. He, the scariest guy on the faculty, actually gave me a passing grade. Badunk!

I learned a valuable lesson that day. I didn’t learn that I was an idiot who had no right to be in architecture school. I didn’t learn there had been a mistake and he felt bad I’d been let into the class by accident. This is what I learned; you never know what you might receive, no matter how unlikely the odds, unless you ask.

To say that was a valuable lesson would be like your architect saying, “we’ve gone a tiny bit over budget.” You can find that under “U” for understatement in the How to Be an Architect Manual. What a gift. That lesson has served me well ever since. I’ll ask for just about anything. You just never know.

Which brings me to the workshop. This is how the two stories are alike. One, when it came time to pitch our books, I’d changed my premise so many times, there was no book, just a title and a few highly implausible plot points. Two, it was a completely architecture student in the swing-arm-lamp moment. I was frozen with terror. And three, I have almost no memory of what happened.

All I know is, I am now the proud owner of a personalized, signed copy of Jane Smiley’s novel writing guide, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and a picture of me with Jane Smiley was in my camera when I woke up this morning. Oh, and I know I have balls. Something I tend to forget on a fairly regular basis.

Speaking of balls. I have a vague memory of telling two agents I’d send them a copy of my manuscript as soon as it’s done, and they didn’t laugh, they didn’t even snicker. I have one of the agent’s business cards stuck in my copy of Jane Smiley’s book as a bookmark as proof. It just goes to show you, you really never know what you might receive, unless you are willing to ask.

Now, onward to write the novel.

More later.