Message from the Universe...

Sometimes the universe sends the right words at the right time.

"This is what things can teach us:
 To fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
 Even a bird has to do that before he can fly."

                           ~Rainer Marie Rilke

Trimming

This week's challenge? An exercise from Louise Doughty's A Novel in a Year: Choose a scene, do a word count, and cut the words by a quarter. Repeat with next scene. After a few days, read the new and old versions to see which sounds better.

Cutting out whole paragraphs, Doughty says, is cheating. Instead, she says to consider each sentence, each word, and ruthlessly eliminate anything that is not absoutely necessary (case in point, there are a couple of adverbs that last sentence could do without).

At first, I thought this exercise was getting too specific too soon, but I tried it anyway with three scenes of different length (from 1 to 3 pages). Turned out that in the process of doing such mindful trimming, all kinds of other useful things popped up. Things like places or characters that need more description, parts that might be better off somewhere else in the story, questions about how a character feels/reacts in a particular moment, bits that need to be added for clarity, moments that beg for more/less tension. Things that will help me make more substantial revisions when I get around to serious rewriting.

What sounded like a task that was all about the word count turned out to be about something quite different. While my left brain was busy counting words, my right brain snuck in and put its creativity to work, re-seeing the scene. And, after spending ten weeks cranking out new material, it felt good to revisit some scenes that I hadn't looked at for a while.

Truth is, I think I like this part of the writing process better than coming up with new material. Or maybe it is just more in my comfort zone after years spent evaluating my students' creative writing.

Just one more reason to keep exercising the madman daily...

Now Entering Texas...

Thanks to Laraine Herring, author of Writing Begins with the Breath, I now have a name for where I am in the novel-writing process. She calls it "the Texas Period," thanks to the time she drove across Texas with her family and thought it might go on forever. It's just like reaching the middle part of writing a book, she says, "where the enthusiasm of the beginning has waned, but the end is not in sight, and you really, truth be told, have very little idea of what you've got to work with (though you're sure it's junk)."

All judgments about Texas aside, this metaphor captures the middle phase of writing a novel perfectly. Some days I am cruising down the wide open highway with the wind in my hair, while other days fellow travellers fly by at blistering speeds as I sweat and labor just trying to keep up with the tumbleweeds. Last week, I pulled into a scenic overlook (do they have those in Texas?) to look back at where I've been so far and to preview the road ahead. This week, I'm taking a little detour to revisit some older scenes and do a little trimming to tighten them up. But I'll be back on the road soon, foot firmly on the accelerator (didn't they just up the speed limit to 85 mph on one Texas highway?), generating more of these middle pages.

The first time I read Herring's book, almost two years ago, I jotted a note in the margin of this page: "Haven't crossed the border into Texas yet." So it's nice to know I am making progress. Maybe it's time to post a map of Texas on my writing room wall and pin one of those little cars from the game of Life to it. Then every time I write -- whether it's a few paragraphs or a whole chapter -- I get to move the car a few miles.

Whatever it takes to keep the motivation flowing...

Out of Doubt

No need to send a search party. I wrote my way out of the vortex this morning. (Still a little dizzy, but on my feet again.)  So what worked?

One: I opened the door to the main character's flaws by asking what has/what will she fail at? We all fall flat on our faces at times, much as we try to be perfect. The more we aim for perfection, the farther there is to fall. Good to remember that characters are better, and miles more believable, when they are not perfect.

Two: I chose to be grateful for the resistance I felt yesterday. Yes, grateful. Much as I hate to run up against it, resistance is almost always just the universe's way of reminding me to let go and get out of my own way. So I expressed my gratitude for being able to see that there are gaps, some of them quite large, in the plot and in the characters' lives that I couldn't see before. And then? Questions about missing pieces began to pop up. Questions like where Gabby's favorite place/place of refuge is and what she was obsessed with, or at least highly curious about, as a child.

Three: I went back to a scene I felt was powerful when I first wrote it and looked there for clues about what else might happen. Asked what implications that scene had for other parts of the story based on what it revealed about the characters. That opened the floodgates, encouraging me to search other key/favorite scenes for clues. By the time I put my pen down today, the gaps had transformed from uncrossable chasms into potential bridges.

Lesson to carry forward? When doubt creeps in, take a deep breath. Don't force answers. Invite questions.

Some Days...

This morning, the I-Can't-Do-This vortex opened up and tried to swallow me whole.

Some days at the writing desk are like that.

Evidence of Progress

On Friday, I printed out the latest set of scenes, chapters, and other fragments, and laid them all out -- sorted into groups based on which part of the plot they develop. They took up most of a queen-sized bed.

Then I did a little victory dance.
(It is important to celebrate along the way!)

Next, I attempted to put them in some sort of order that will make sense. That was a bit more of a challenge. It also got a little bit messier. (There are more pages on the floor on the far side of the bed.) Good thing we don't have guests coming this week...

Turns out I am not a linear writer, at least not for the purposes of this story. So when Stephen King likens writing a novel to an archaeological dig in his memoir On Writing, I totally get it. I feel like there are parts of a dinosaur skeleton scattered all over the guest bedroom, and like it is my task to reconstruct it as I uncover more and more bones of the story.

Wouldn't it be easier to just write the story in chronological order? (I ask myself that question all the time.) Perhaps. Perhaps not. Truth is, I don't always know what's coming. Sometimes, the characters surprise me when I let my imagination take the lead. So, at least for now, the outline (which I prefer to call the storyboard) is a work in progress too. A constantly shifting puzzle of colored sticky notes.

What next? Ask questions. Find gaps in the story. Draft more scenes to fill them. Rearrange the pieces again.

And so it goes...