The Re-re-read is now on The Brothers Karamazov!

Listen here or on Apple Podcasts.

The Re-re-read Podcast is still going! Now with Henry James.

We're well into The Turn of The Screw on the Re-re-read. Catch up on all our craft lessons from classic literature (including Dracula and Moby-Dick) here. 

New(ish) podcast: The Re-re-read: Short Craft Talks on Classic Literature

In case you missed it, I'm updating and recording the old Borrowed Fire series from this blog. It's now a podcast. So far I've done a series of 5-10 minute talks on Dracula, and am now in the middle of Moby-Dick. Listen here!

New story up at Entropy Magazine

It's called "Better Than Ever," and it's about a woman who flies (for a while).

I first started workshopping this story with my writing group in 2014. I sent it to 23 places before it found its home.

So this is also a story about not giving up.

From 20 minutes a day to 68k (almost) words

Today I finished the first draft of my new novel. It's on the short side, but my first drafts are always short. Next draft will likely be too long, and then we'll do the accordion thing for awhile and then some people will read it and I'll fall apart and then pull myself and then the novel back together. 

Then we'll see.

The point I would like to make today is that I started this novel back in late January (I think) by writing 20 minutes a day. At the time, 20 minutes seemed like an eternity. Like it would never be over. I didn't even make myself put words on the screen, though usually I did--I just had to sit there and think about the novel.

At some point late this summer, I realized I could finish a draft by the holidays if I wrote 500 words a day. That seemed doable, so I did it, and sometimes did 1,000 with two writing sessions per day. 

As many, many people have observed, writing in 2017 was goddamn hard. And I'm as inclined to beat myself up for low productivity as anyone. I'm here to say that even little bits and pieces, created and assembled on a regular basis, can come together quicker than you might think.

Yet more proof that there is no single process for writing a novel

While I was writing my first novel, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for books on "how to write a novel." Most of them concentrated on the early stages, like getting inspiration, while offering tips on how to find time and/or make a habit of writing, so you could produce the seemingly vast quantities of material required to constitute the finished product.

This was well and fine, but I already had inspiration. And, at that time anyway, I had enough time and self-discipline to create enough material. What I wanted to know was something like--how do you build a plot? Do you outline or not? What if the outline changes every day? How do you know if some thread is worth pursuing or not?

The short answer to all these questions, I discovered later, is "Don't worry about it." Not only does everyone have a different process, I suspect that everyone has a different process for each book. There are many maps; all can get you home.

For example, in the past, I've thought it a bad idea to show my writing group (or anyone) chapters as I wrote them. I thought it best to wait till at least one full draft and probably one revision was done, so that I knew what I was doing before receiving critiques. I didn't want to spend all my time second-guessing and revising; I needed to keep moving forward.

But now, here's why I think the opposite can be true. When you are still planning and plotting and inching forward, chapter by chapter, showing people chapters as you go can give you a good idea of what's coming across, what's interesting, what's likely (though not necessarily) going to cause trouble, which characters they "get" and which they don't.

The risk with this approach is that you may want to immediately start revising the previous chapters based on this feedback. And then you'll never write more than fifty pages--rather, you'll write the same 50 pages 20 times and then (if you're me) collapse in frustration. 

But if you can just *take note of* the feedback, say in something called a "notebook," and keep going, that feedback can provide guidance for moving forward. Not absolute direction--you are not handing control of your manuscript over to anyone else--but guidance. What do you need to keep an eye out for as you move forward? What *might* this interesting but still-unformed character turn into and contribute? What plot twist might readers absolutely never accept unless you do it extremely, extremely well? In the early going of my latest venture, this has proven extremely useful. Maybe it wouldn't have been for another novel, but for this one, I think it's only helping. And the encouragement to keep going is damn essential.

This is all to say, as many have said before me, there is no one way or right way to write a novel. Whatever keeps you moving forward is what you need to do.

Writing during the apocalypse, part six

I have just started reading Dan Chaon's Ill Will. I am existentially obligated to read this, because it is a darkly humorous horror story set in CLEVELAND. (Yes, all stories set in Cleveland are darkly humorous horror stories.)

Then I read this very interesting interview with Chaon, which suggested a writing method I've used in the past and think I will try again. Chaon mentioned writing the book as a series of chapters, and trying to complete one every night. In the completed book, many of the chapters are quite short, and the narrative is somewhat fragmentary, jumping from one point of view to another, and from one time period to another. 

This was more or less how I wrote my first novel, although I didn't have that much intention about it. I simply wrote short pieces I was interested in, with the hope or faith that because I was interested in them, eventually they would all fit together. Writing the connective tissue (i.e., the plot) can come later, but it may not be completely necessary in all cases. Sometimes the theme is strong enough to connect otherwise disparate sections.

In the past I've made the case for working from a pre-existing plot and allowing it to evolve as you go. Now I'm arguing that the opposite can also be effective. Just writing scenes or chapters that seem somehow related to you--or don't seem related as yet, but still intrigue you--can help you build up a deeply resonant narrative over time.

This can also work well with the 20-minute plan, which helps prevent excessive rumination and lends itself to the compact but still potentially fertile fragment.

Writing during the apocalypse -- part five-ish

Obviously it's not easy. That my previous post was in late January speaks volumes. The last few months have felt like years, and doing any work voluntarily, as opposed to under strict instructions or deadlines, has seemed close to impossible.

Nevertheless, here I am.

In the last few weeks I've tweeted rather proudly that I've started writing for 20 minutes a day. Rather than focusing on word- or even page-counts, the only thing that matters here is the time spent. You can just open your file and stare at it for 20 minutes and close it again. But if you're like me, you'll at least start seeing sentences you'll want to change, and from there get a few ideas on how to proceed.

So far, my new--yes, dystopian--novel is eight pages long and has the meandering format of a mostly un-outlined freewriting exercise. But so what? At this point the process is as much about note-taking and idea-generating as actually writing a story. And I find I have ideas in the hours I'm not at the computer, which means there's a there there, and that's reassuring.

The closest thing I can relate the T___p era to is watching a close family member slowly, inexorably, painfully die. It's hard not to feel helpless and sad and frustrated and angry, and to suspect that one's little acts--political, artistic, social, professional--make no difference whatsoever. But my greater fear is of allowing myself to give up, and of looking back on myself in a few years--if we're all still alive--and realizing I rolled over. And wasted the time that still belonged to me.

Persist.

On writing during the apocalypse--part three or four of many more

A few weeks or months ago (time in the T__p era is already a blur, events and hours run together as if in a dream), I lamented one of the many problems of writing in the beginning of the end times for America. The particular problem concerning me was the need--I felt--to give all stories and novels an explicit totalitarian context. Anything written before November 8, 2016--especially written *right* before--seemed newly non-credible. How could anyone write about, say, a family coming apart at the seams or vampires falling in love without acknowledging that it all takes place under a completely fascist regime? But then again, how to stay out in front of all that this regime can and will do, so that even your worst predictions don't end up seeming quaint by publication time?

This, as you might imagine, has proven a mostly paralyzing mindset. Trying to plan a new novel and a new story, I found myself adding layer upon layer of complexity, trying to inject government perfidy into every aspect of my character's lives. Too many threads competed with each other and the gears of narrative ground to a halt.

So now I'm thinking of starting very small. As Jonathan Franzen said in a Powells.com interview years ago, "The real pleasure in writing [The Corrections], for me, was discovering how little you need." I'll begin with one character, one story line and work outward, rather than first attempting to create a whole world system that will never be as strange or sinister as the one we now inhabit.

I have a feeling the larger totalitarian context will arise of its own accord.

More thoughts on writing and living during the apocalypse, which is not going away

This article on Flavorwire, "How Do We Comfort Ourselves When Staying Vigilant (and Anxious) Feels Like The Only Responsible Option?," really spoke to me. Three-plus weeks into the Upside Down, I'm still mostly unable to concentrate on anything but scouring Twitter for any sign of hopeful news (occasional!), confirmation of my worst fears (frequent!), and concrete actions I can take (quite a few, though I never feel sure they are "helping").

I've also read several articles by members of marginalized groups saying something to the effect of: "Feeling anxious and voiceless, white liberal? Welcome to my world." This is very true. It's now clear that one effect of privilege is the ability to relax on a regular basis, to assume that everything will be more or less OK in the end--because it usually is, more or less, for most of us. So now we know. And it isn't fair or reasonable to expect sympathy for the shock and sadness and weariness we suddenly feel--though solidarity is a different matter. We can bond over these feelings, and channel them into collective action.

But what does it mean if I still want to relax sometimes? Is that a slippery slope to relaxing all the time, to assuming other people are taking care of it, to deciding that my daily phone calls to Congress or my petition-signings or my donations are too-small drops in the bucket anyway, so why continue? And what about when I'm called upon to do something larger--as I now doubt will be?

Is accepting the same as "normalizing"? No, this and other articles tell me. Accepting on some level is even necessary for action. We must know something is real before we can take real steps against it. But accepting also feels scary, because it means we really can't go back; the world and life we had are truly gone. Yet, can we recover anything of that old life? And what does it mean to try to do so?

This leads me to a problem I'm having with resuming my writing. My basic assumptions about the world I'm depicting--even if it's a not-quite-real world to begin with--have overturned. Everything now seems to require a dystopian frame, an overarching totalitarian menace above and beyond, say, the standard dysfunctional family or workplace. Something like the Eye of Sauron, perhaps, or Nazi Germany. Raise your hand if The Man in the High Castle now looks completely different than when you first watched it.

So in addition to not really feeling like writing (though I am getting there), I don't yet know how to write in this new (to me) world. But part of accepting--and not normalizing--means learning to do that.

On (fiction) writing during the apocalypse

I've seen a lot of discussion online about whether fiction writing still matters, post-November 8. I have wondered the same thing. Who cares about our carefully crafted worlds, our beautiful sentences, our quirky yet lovable characters, when the American experiment may be at an end? Shouldn't we be doing something with a more immediate effect, that reaches out to more people than those who already agree with us?

Here's the provisional conclusion I've come to. We need to keep writing, no matter what it is that we write. We're going to need good stories to get through this, including stories that aren't overtly political. (And by "good," I mean by the same definition as we used before November 8--nuanced, not overly didactic, respectful of the reader's intelligence, etc.) Let's not censor ourselves. Someone else may try to do that soon enough.

However. Let's also not kid ourselves that fiction writing represents a sufficient form of defiance in this new era. We're all going to have to be braver than we ever were before. We're going to have to feel scared and sick a good part of the time, as we push ourselves beyond our previous limits. I had to fight with myself just to call my liberal Democratic Congresswoman's office yesterday--I'm that phone shy. And I'm going to have to do a lot more than that. I'll have to be ready to protect people who are being harassed or threatened or even physically attacked (even as I may be a target myself, though that's less likely). I'm going to have to march, and do many other things I haven't even thought of yet, but which will scare the hell out of me, and which I may try to find excuses not to do, because I'm so scared, and still partly unwilling to believe that any of this is really happening.

So I must not use my "liberating" or "subversive" writing to excuse inaction in other areas. But I also must keep writing and reading--for respite as well as inspiration. We will all need both, in abundance.

"The Truth about Psych Camp" is now on Audible!

Just in time for summer vacation, and perfect for your approximately 40-minute commute. My short story, "The Truth about Psych Camp," is now on Audible. With fabulous narrator Luci Christian.

On paying yourself first (in your writing)

Years ago I read an article on how to make sure you have enough money to retire before you die, or some such. Not likely at this rate. But anyway, one piece of advice was: "Pay yourself first," which meant that with every paycheck, you should make sure you were putting all you could into your retirement account before you did other stuff with your money, like buy things.

Talking about finances makes me anxious. Talking about writing also, lately, makes me anxious. But we're going to talk about writing here. 

For a long time I was writing in the late afternoon, after finishing up my paying work for the day. And that went OK. There was a certain upside to already feeling mentally and physically drained, so that I would just bang out my page (my goal at the time) and get on with napping or making dinner.

But sometimes, it was just too easy to blow off my writing, having spent most of the day writing for someone else. So now, at this point in my writing life, I think it's better to pay myself first--to get my own writing done and out of the way before I tackle anything else.

Of course this works best if:

• you are a morning person
• your morning schedule is somewhat flexible
• you work at home, or at least can work at home
• you can write relatively quickly, so that you don't have to set the alarm for some ungodly hour and get up when it's dark and cold and sit miserably in front of a glowing screen while the person who would normally make you coffee is still asleep

The advantages of this approach include:

• making your own writing top priority, so that you acknowledge its importance in your own mind and to others
• not having your unfinished page eating away at the edges of your consciousness for the whole day
• having an actual functioning brain when you're writing
• possible opportunity (which can be blown off *without guilt*) to write more in the afternoon

Currently I'm doing 500 words every morning. So far, so good.

Everyone in your novel should be working more.

Today in harnessing horrible Republican ideas for artistic purposes only:

I recently tweeted a discovery I'd made about revision:

The revision process seems largely to be about steadily transforming the protagonist from passive observer to active agent.

— Ann Gelder (@AnnBGelder) September 1, 2015

I would now add that this process also involves winnowing down the number of characters, so that fewer people take on more responsibilities. I find that after a first draft (or even several drafts), I often have two characters essentially performing the same function, and one of them is performing it less well--and doing nothing else constructive. Therefore I have to give one's duties over to the other, which a) gets rid of a boring character and b) creates a more interesting character out of the one remaining.

As you go through this process, think of yourself as the Bain Capital of fiction: swooping down on a perfectly nice, quiet but inefficient little novel, and ruthlessly getting rid of dead weight--who fortunately are not really people in your case. Presto: your novel is now leaner and more productive. Or, as Jeb Bush would have said, had he been an author instead of a really bad politician, everyone in your novel should be working more.

A voice that needs to speak

I've just started reading Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, and have had a little epiphany:

In fiction, voice is everything.

OK, time for the walkback. It's not everything. You need complex characters, a compelling and plausible plot...or, to start out with, maybe you just need a distinctive, interesting voice to tell the story. Maybe the voice can supply a lot of that other stuff, because that's all central to the voice's existence in the first place.

In first person, drawing plot and character from voice is relatively easy, because a character is telling a story about something that happened to--or, perhaps better, because of--her or him. However, in a lot of novels, especially those told in third person omniscient, we often don't sense that an actual character is telling the story. Still, there's a presence behind the words, which is somehow a version of the author herself: the author filtered through language, or constituted in language, perhaps. And, when you're writing this way, it's well worth thinking about what's driving this persona's choices--along with "What does she want to say?," ask yourself: "Why and how does she want to say it?"

The voice doesn't have to be just one person's, either. As in James's novel, different storytellers can pass the baton from chapter to chapter. This can be difficult to pull off, as every voice has to be distinctive (I think we've all read novels in which supposedly different narrators oddly seem to share the same quirky sensibilities). On the plus side, this technique allows you to look at events from several perspectives--not a new concept, but often an effective one, especially if you, the writer, are feeling stuck partway through your novel. You also can give your reader access to information that a single first-person or close-third narrator wouldn't have.

My point is, maybe it's worth thinking of your work not so much as a story that needs to be told, but as a voice that needs to speak.


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Research for introverts: in praise of the email interview

There comes a time in the life of every novelist when she has to conduct research. There also comes a time when Google and Wikipedia and even the local public library don't provide exactly what you need. And then the novelist realizes that there is no workaround: she has to talk to an actual person. Specifically, she must ask a person questions about, say, aeronautical engineering--not only to fill in gaps in the subject matter, which are too vast to fill in the end, but to find out what it's like to be an aeronautical engineer. And yet she does not really want to ask a person, because she feels guilty about taking up someone's time, and also perhaps embarrassed about her total ignorance of what, for that person, is ordinary life. Where does one begin? Where does one end?

This is where I've found email to be remarkably helpful. Of course you may not get the kind of spontaneous expression you get by phone or in person. You may need visual or auditory information that email can't provide. But with email, you do often get considered, detailed answers to your questions, which you can refer back to later without having to take notes yourself. You also--and this is key--have the opportunity to ask further questions in a relatively unobtrusive way, and the interviewee has the same chance to send more info when he thinks of it later, which he often will. You have specific examples in the interviewee's own words of professional or personal language--with no chance you misheard or mis-transcribed it. And you--or I--feel less guilty because you've allowed the interviewee more control over when and where he answers your questions.

In short, for my fellow introverts, asking questions by email is way better than not asking them at all ... and can bring you truly surprising and useful results.

This has been another edition of Stuff Other People Have Known for a Long Time But Is Exciting News to Me.

For when the phone is just too much.

Steal this plot: the case for the ready-made story line

I think of myself as a literary fiction writer. What does that mean? I'm becoming less and less sure over time, but it suggests my work is not so much interested in plot as in other elements--character, ideas, emotional dilemmas, history. On the other hand, I tend to gravitate toward stories in which a certain amount of external stuff happens. While I deeply admire, and in some cases love, novels like Marilynne Robinson's that create a kind of majestic stillness, a deeply rich experience of contemplation, I find I can't write them myself, and have little patience for less successful efforts in this vein.

As a reader, this simply represents a personal preference. My own life is pretty static and contemplative; when I read, I want to be taken out of myself, ergo I want a bit more action. And as a writer, even a literary one, I've found plot can be a great friend rather than a nemesis.

Fellow writers of literary fiction tell me plot grows out of character--meaning, I gather, that you start with a (ready-made?) person or group of people, and, like molecules in a chemistry experiment, they will begin to interact and create something new. I've always found this to be a rather dubious proposition. Without a more rigid context (a beaker? a test tube?) for the people to interact in, I often seem to come out with a bunch of random collisions that don't really add up to much. Or I end up forcing something to happen--so the molecules aren't just milling around pointlessly--and that makes things even worse.

Which is why I've found that starting with a plot borrowed from elsewhere--a real unsolved murder case, say, or the plot of a two-hundred-year-old novel--surprisingly freeing. Placing characters I've created within this framework allows both the people and the framework to grow and evolve together. The borrowed plot soon becomes quite different from the original--because I'm using my own characters, not borrowing them, so they naturally change the way things shake out. At the same time, I don't have to wrack my brain endlessly, wondering what the hell can and should happen next--I have at least a basic map to consider following.

"Castlewood" in Mill Valley Literary Review

My story, "Castlewood," a corporate fairy tale, is up at the Mill Valley Literary Review.
Note: pancakes are involved.

Another good grad school memory: Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin

For several months I've been too scattered to do much other than tweet, write the occasional blog post, and--oh yeah--do my day job. But now I'm thinking about resuming work on my third novel, while Novel the Second seeks a home. I was about 40 pages in, last time I touched it, and it's at least partly inspired by what scholars have called the first American novel: Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown.

The cool thing to realize about this novel, first published in 1798, is that it's about a ventriloquist who drives a man to murder his family by making him think God is speaking to him. Yep, the first American novel is a (sort of) paranormal/religious/serial-killer thriller, which reflects fears of democracy and the "voice of the people." It's great stuff, and the prospect of revisiting Wieland is exciting enough to get me back in the writing chair. Religious nuttiness + ventriloquism. What can go wrong?

I see my book-in-progress as a combination of this and Gogol's "The Overcoat," set in a comparative literature department--just by coincidence.



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What did I see today?

A few months back, I published a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Yuri Olesha's memoir in fragments, No Day without a Line. At the end, I suggested that I planned to try the same experiment: keeping a notebook--offline--in which I wrote every day. The purpose was not only to recover a purer experience of writing in the midst of constant distraction, although that was part of it. I wanted to write in a way that placed me in a larger context than just inside my own head. I wanted to record, for better or worse, "the times."

I'm sure you've all been on the edge of your seats, wondering: How's it been going? Did she do it? Has she written every day? What are those little handwritten gems really like? Answers: So-so. Yes. No. I was amazed how quickly I regressed to my previous journal-writing habits, which is why I gave up the practice in, oh, 1995. The thing became, far more than I had hoped,  Compendium of Complaints. A Litany of Laments. A Chronicle of Cranky. It's not that I ever intend these pieces to be published in this form (unlike Olesha, who was ultimately writing for publication). It's the ease with which I tumble into the black hole of solipsism as soon as I believe no one is looking.

On one hand, I obviously need some space for blowing off steam, and perhaps writing it is better than dumping it on, say, one's husband night after night. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that "venting" is really all that helpful in and of itself. And the writing it produces is altogether useless.

What to do? The solution I've come up with is, no matter what I've written previously, before I close out the daily blurb, I ask myself: What did I see today? This is a variation on one of Olesha's fragments. And it forces me to think of something, even something very small, that I've observed. Often I find myself writing about it at some length. For example, yesterday I recalled seeing, during my daily walk around the neighborhood, a film crew setting up on someone's lawn. Why? I don't know. But then I began recalling details, like a man entertaining a child (his daughter?) by placing her in the driver's seat of his car. I presume he was trying to keep her out of the film crew's way. But who knows?

Anyway, I would have entirely forgotten about that if all I'd allow myself to do was grouse. Just a suggestion for those of you seeking a way to get words on a page.



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