Four calling birds

I always liked the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and the idea that the holiday season used to begin on December 25 and continue on for twelve days, culminating in the celebration of the Epiphany on January 6. It seems a more sane and balanced way to celebrate than our modern way of bookending the season with Christmas carols that start on some warm day in October and end about 5 pm on December 25th. The way we do it now, people are ready for Christmas to be over before it even starts.

So....if we were celebrating in the traditional way this would be the fourth day of Christmas. Four calling birds. I don't know why that popped in my head today but it seemed strangely aligned with the task in front of me now, which is writing four chapters in a row. Four chapters at the beginning of the Ballroom book told from the point of view of my main character, Abby. Why am I struggling with this so much? Fighting it so hard? Part of my resistance, I suspect, is that I don't really believe I can sell a novel on spec. I know I'm driving my agent crazy because, as we get closer to the pub date of the first book, I'm driving myself crazy. He's given me a task to keep me sane and he knows that even if we can't sell the ballroom book based on four chapters at least it won't be wasted effort - I'll be that much farther along on the complete draft that will probably really be required.

I know all this, and I know it's smart for me to get a good strong set up under my belt, a segment of 50 or so pages that really establish Abby's voice and lay out the key questions of the book. The trouble is I don't usually write in sequence...I usually bounce all around, writing in an instinctual fashion and then, when I have a bunch of scenes, I go back and think about structure. A lot of stuff gets moved and a lot of stuff gets cut so writing out of sequence isn't an especially logical or time efficent route to a novel but it's the only one I know. The only way I seem to be able to get at the heart of my story and find the voice of my narrator.

And this might be what's wrong with me now. Alison said my character felt distant. This scares me. It means that I haven't yet tapped into the real story or made Abby's voice nuanced enough to seem alive on the page and perhaps I've been working so hard on plot and sequence, i.e., telling the story, that I haven't slowed down long enough to let myself find the story.

I don't know what to do. Soldier on and finish these four chapters, dead as they are? Four four four seems to ring in my head like the four calling birds in the song but I don't know if there's really anything magical about stringing four chapters in a row, Should I maybe go back to my old method of hopping about, writing only the scenes that are speaking to me? Of course, there are drawbacks to that method too. Namely, it takes longer to finish the novel because you spend so much time overwriting and running down blind alleys... and while you're doing all this no one gives you money based on your proposal because you can't get your shit together enough to offer up a proposal and how the hell am I suppsed to live in the meantime?

It's almost 2010. My goal for the new year is to get out of debt. A noble goal and a smart one but a hard thing for a writer to do. I'm trying to write fast and put together a proposal that will bring me an advance...then I can slow down, take a deep breath, and I'll have funds to live on while I finish the novel. But that doesn't seem to be working. So do I make a 180 turn and go into some other line of work to earn money, knowing that this choice will slow the novel down? Perhaps slow it down and make it richer....but definitely slow it down. And the idea of slowing down my already glacial writing pace even further makes me feel a little sick.

I'm in a dither. And the new year approacheth.

The two parts of writing that are fun

Lately I've been thinking that there are two parts of the novel writing process that I really enjoy. The first is the absolute beginning - when it's all nebulous. It's not a novel, it's a project - it doesn't have a name or a plot or fully-formed characters. What it probably does have, at least for me, is a voice.

So I get these little snatches of ideas. A sentence or two, an image. Someone says something that triggers a scene. I begin to write these snippets down, helter-skelter, and throw them into a folder. I love this part, the very beginning, when it's all embriotic and unformed.

The other part that's fun is the ending. You basically have the book and the structure and now you're tweaking. Going in to expand a scene that has more possibility than you've truly realized, looking for places where you've repeated words, making sure your verb tenses agree, pruning out the extraneous line or word.

But between these two lies the actual writing, especially the dreaded First Draft.

Which is where I stand now with Ballroom. My agent David feels that the hopping around scenes don't give him a strong enough sense of who the main character is and that any future possible one-chance-in-a-hundred buyers, i.e., editors, will want to see that one solid viewpoint character. So I'm back to the drawing board, trying to get three or four chapters in a row at the beginning, from Abby's point of view. And that feels dangerously like writing a first draft.

Yikes. I have a goal. I'm going to NYC sometime in late Feb or early March and I'd like to have the four chapters to him by then. Selling off a partial is a long shot in this environment, especially with my first book not yet out, but I feel I have to try. Otherwise I'm going to end up behind the counter at McDonalds. Or in the loony bin.

How long do you hang in there?

Last week a woman in my writing group announced that she wouldn't be writing any more. She written seven books over a number of years and spent time revamping, revising, earnestly searching for feedback from fellow writers. And it's led to zilch. She doesn't have an agent or a publisher. She has seven manuscripts that she could work on forever but she's not sure it's worth.

And a couple of days later a close friend said much the same thing. She's more than a decade into the process without any significant publication credits. She doesn't have the heart to start something new.

And then....someone I met at MacDowell sent me an email. He's been following this blog and was commenting on my last post, in which I was basically describing the freak out period I'm in now as I await publication, the "four months out" syndrome. He basically said "enjoy this level of misery for as long as you can because once your book actually come sout, it will get worse."


Writing can be a very dark path. My children are 21 and 25 and if either one of them said they wanted to be a writer I would try to talk them out of it.

And yet....

With writing there is always a "yet." Some book not yet written, the agent you haven't let queried, some subject not yet explored. Because on the night the woman in my writing group said she was done, a man in the group sat there and gave her the standard speech. How you have to do it for love. How you have to do it because you can't not do it. The pleasure and meaning are in the process, not the results.

All those things people say about writing that are corny and trite and true.

But everyone has to find the right balance inside their own head. If it's making you miserable - if the inability to find publication is obliterating the joy you find in the proess it may indeed be time to step away from the desk. At least for a while.

Thoughts?

Doubt

I'm in such a funk. I did a summary and four chapter package on the ballroom book and sent it to David, my agent. My friend Alison, currently vacationing in Europe, too a look at it too. I'm very excited about the book, excited about the concept and the fact I'm writing in third person from multiple POVs for the first time in my little baby novelist career. Of course I wanted both of them to gush it was the best thing I'd ever written or maybe even the best thing anybody has ever written.

Heard from both of them on Sunday. Nice but somewhat lukewarm responses. They liked the basic premise of the book - but they both called into question my use of the multiple POV. Alison called it "distant." David said "It's not what they're buying." They made the same argument. First person's my forte, after all. Why go against your natural tendancy as a writer - especially in light of the fact the market prefers books that are told from a single character's perspective?

On one level I'm like "Why indeed?" I know I'm stronger, or at least more experienced in first person. As my ever-practical friend Dawn says "That's what editors want and you know how to do it, so why are you so upset?"

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Everyone is being very kind and logical.

So why am I so upset?

Possible reasons:

1. The first person pov can limit the types of stories you're able to tell, especially in a situation like ballroom where I am writing about the need for community and how the ballroom means something different to every person who steps inside of it. You can get a broad perspective with first person pov but it's harder. I don't want to fall into the classic traps like having the other characters talk to Abby way too much.

2. I'm tired of the limitations of first person. Dawn said "If I could write first person as well as you, that's all I'd do." But she's just saying that because she's coming off two third person novels and she's sick of the limitations of THAT pov. There's a plus and a minus to every choice you make in writing, including pov, and it isn't a matter of one being inherently better than another. It's a matter of how you do one for a couple of projects, get sick of it, and when you switch to the other it seems easier - at least for a while. Then you get sick of it and switch back to your original pov for the next project. No nothing is perfect....but if you have some variety in your writing style you can write longer without wearing yourself out.

3. I don't want to be a one-trick pony. Yeah, first person's my strength but I'm ambitious, so of course I want to move on and learn a new skill. In dance the people who jive want to waltz, the people who samba wish they could quickstep. Part of it is our natural human tendancy to downplay our natural strengths - if something comes easily to us we erroneously assume it comes easily to everyone - but an equally valid part of it is a kind of creative restlessness that artists have to have if we're ever going to grow. The jivers might say to the waltzers some variation of what Dawn said to me, i.e., "If I could waltz as well as you do, that's all I'd ever want to do" - but it wouldn't be true. If we're good at something, we automatically look to move on and master something else. It's what gives us heart attacks and also, I suppose, why our species dominates the planet.

4. This is probably the real reason: I'm just in such an anxious state that I'm going to freak out at anything anybody says to me right now. I know that in suggesting I stick with what I know David and Alison weren't implying that I'm incapable of learning anything else. That's what I heard but the 3% of my mind that's sane also knows that's not what they meant. It's just that as the date gets closer when the novel is going to debut I'm getting crazier. Everything feels like a criticism, even the most gentle and practical (and solicited) feedback.

So there you have it. I have a new task. Write the first four chapters in sequence from either Abby's first person pov or a tight, Abby-centric third person pov. And worry. And stew.

Paging Mrs. Dolenz...

Suddenly, I'm in one of those periods where things are happening....Aussie cover came. Heard I got nominated for an independent booksellers award. And picked up for an online book club. Am working on summary and sample chapter scenes to send to my agent, David, in hopes of selling the third novel, Ballroom, on spec. I rarely talk to either my agent or my editor but have had contact with both this week, as well as publicist and foreign rights team.

And, so, for a flash, it all seems real again.

I don't want to be a velveteen rabbit - i.e., real only when somebody loves me.

I know that I am most a writer when I'm actually writing. I know it's a trap to feel like you're a writer only when people are talking about your writing.

In fact, this aspect of publishing is kind of upsetting. I've blogged about this before, how strange it is that for long stretches of time nothing happens and your book and your characters live only in your head. If you step off a curb and get hit by a car, they die with you. And then comes a week or so when people are talking to you about what you've written and that's wonderful in a way because it all feels more real. Like this is your career and not some sort of extended fantasy. Sometimes it seems like wanting to be a writer is just a grown up version of when I was twelve and lying on my bed in my parents's home looking up at a picture of the Monkees and thinking that someday I'd marry Mickey Dolenz. It seems adolescent, unrealistic, the kind of story you tell yourself to distract yourself from the fact real life ain't exactly happening for you yet.

Then something sort of changes. You get a flurry of emails or phone calls, some of them from the other side of the world, and you've married a Monkee, at least for that week...and this is troubling in a whole new way. I mean, have you seen a picture of Mickey Dolenz lately? I didn't totally know what I was asking for all those years lying on my bed looking up at my Monkees poster and I don't totally know what I'm asking for when I pursue publication, either.

Talked to Alison yesterday. She's heading to Europe with her girlfriend. I was babbling on and she reminded me that a while back we had made a promise to each other to stop when the good moments come and really appreciate them without "Yes but"-ting them to death. I laughed and agreed but inside me the urge to "Yes, but" was very strong. Yes, I earned out my advance, but it was a small advance. Yes, the Australia cover copy is great, but I'm not as sure about the American. Yes, I got nominated for something, but a nomination isn't a win. I can do this until the cows come home....or at least until Mickey Dolenz loses his hair.

Okay, a couple of days back I declared December to be lovingkindness month and I have vowed to do my lovingkindness mediation every day. I love that particular CD with Jack Kornfield anyway. And part of lovingkindness is being appreciative of times when things are moving, even if the movement makes you a bit dizzy. Being appreciative of getting what you want without letting the "Yes, but" syndrome take over. So that's the focus for December.

And in January something else will happen.

The Aussie Cover

Woke up this morning to find two emails from my Australian editor. One contained a pdf file of the cover of their edition of Love in Mid Air, one contained the blurbs and cover copy.

Perhaps some backstory is in order. The Australian sale has always been a source of joy to me. All the foreign rights sales have juiced me, but I love the idea of going to Australia - never been there but I did a school report on it back in fourth grade and the continent has haunted my imagination ever since. So when the rights sold there it felt like a special benediction. And they're bringing it out the first day they can, i.e., the day after the US version is released and that seems significant too - like they're really excited about it.

Meanwhile, of course, the experience of bringing a first book out in the US has been a bit of a roller coaster ride. Just last weekend I was at a writing retreat and a poet innocently asked - no one can be quite as innocent as a poet - "So are you just thrilled about your novel coming out?" She was smiling and nodding as if I had answered before I had answered so I smiled and nodded too. But I'm thinking "Thrilled, yes, but not 'just thrilled.'" The truth is that I've written almost as many words about the publication of my novel as are in the novel itself. It's complicated.

So I hold on to the foreign rights sales and an uncomplicated bright spot and today I awaken to find that in the night, although of course it's morning there, my publisher has sent me a picture of the cover and the blurb text. I love what they said about it. I wish I'd had enough sense to describe it that well when I was trying to sell the damn thing. And I think I love the cover but the cover is really hot. Really sexy. Almost the exact opposite of the US cover. Red instead of blue, a woman's body instead of a floating house, big print letters instead of small cursive letters. While the US version implies seriousness, the Australian version screams sex.

So how do I feel about this?

My first reaction was "Yikes," and my second reaction was "Thank god." The book might actually sell somewhere. It might sell in Australia! And from there, of course, the mind runs mad with images of book tours to Sydney and clones of Russell Crowe asking me about the symbolism on page 117. So I'm happy and a little bit excited. And a little bit stunned. After all the months of waiting, this is starting to feel real.

"You're overreacting" and other unhelpful statements

Twice in the last week I've looked at a writing buddy and uttered that completely banal and useless observation that has been so often leveled at me: "You're overreacting."

In both cases the woman in question is an utterly rational person. Less prone to mood swings than I am, someone who has shown she can persevere in the face or rejections and setbacks and the other inevitable face slaps of the writing life. But in both cases the person in question was getting very upset - upset to the verge of tears - about some very mild suggestions for rewrites of a scene. Suggestions they requested. Feedback solicited from valued friends. Minor critiques suggested in the mildest of tones.

So why would a statement like "Maybe cut the last paragraph" or "I'd like more decriptions of the setting" send them to tears?

I think they're just tired. We all get so damn tired. Tired of endless rewriting, tweaking it here and there, going back through one more time.....we start to think "Is it getting better or is it just getting different?" And after people seek publication over a span of not just years but decades of course they break down. We're like kids on an eternal car trip. No, we're not there yet.

We don't even know where there is.

And both times, shaken by the fact my friend seemed ready to throw in the towel over such a seemingly minor point I compounded the problem by blurting out "You're overreacting."

Upon reflection, I don't know if it's possible to overreact. We feel what we feel and it's real at the time. A remark that would roll off of us on Tuesday drops us to our knees on Wednesday.

Note to self: Don't ever tell another writer he or she is overreacting. Someday she might say it back to you.

God hits the delete button

Big storm last night which did many strange things in an electrical sense including knocking out my desktop computer. Knocking totally out. I think I lost everything except for a handful of currently active files.

Now normally this would make me insane. I see my computer as an extension of my brain. A computer wipeout is the equivalent of a stroke. But then....on the other hand.

Did I lose anything I really need? I'm always talking about cleaning up my files.....converting to laptop.

Simplifying. Focusing.

So I got my little bitty laptop and no printer and four files.

This could be a breakthrough.

East is East, South is South, etc.

Just finished reading T.C. Boyle's East is East which includes a hilarious send up of a writing colony. Boyle's fictional colony is located near Savannah but otherwise quite like MacDowell, where he has been a resident....although I suspect it's also like Yadoo or any of the big colonies.

I heard about the book while I was at MacDowell but when I went to the Peterborough library to check it out I couldn't find it in the stacks. I approached the desk with some trepidation. MacDowell colonists are free to use the public facilities of the little town of Peterborough, including the library, but it's no secret we're mildly resented. Maybe because the colony pays no taxes, maybe because New Englanders are inherently suspicious of artsy-fartsy creative types. Maybe because the local rescue squad gets tired of running out to the colony for cases of alcohol poisoning, bear baiting, or half-hearted suicide attempts.

Anyway, the library looks over her half glasses at me and stonily informs me that someone from MacDowell took the book and never brought it back. She refrained from saying "What else would you expect?" but it hung in the air.

So now, a full year later, I have ordered the book off Amazon and I laughed out loud as I read parts, mostly about the over-the-top rivalry of two female novelists at the colony. In real life I never encountered that kind of cruelty at MacDowell. Our readings after dinner - while undoubtedly nerve wracking for whomever was presenting - were fun ways to get together and bounce around ideas and rarely sparked criticism or controversy. I may have been so far out of the loop of name artists there that I failed to see rivalry if there was any... but I don't think that's the case.

So why did I find Boyle's book so funny and true? Because I've certainly seen artistic envy in action before and I give him credit for having the balls to skewer it. (I give myself credit for using both "balls" and "skewer"in the same sentence.) Part of what made the book so biting is that these colonists are thrust by accident into the middle of a tragedy with international implications and they are so wound up with themselves and their pecking order at the colony that they completely fail to recognize what's happening. Until one of them decides it's her chance to move into the lucrative world of gossip journalism, that is.

God, you've got to love the colony world. It's so weird and self-absorbed and incestuous and out of touch with reality. I hope I get back into it soon.

Northward Ho

Today I sent off an application to Ledig House in upstate New York, a writing colony that seems to have a particularly international slant in that a large percentage of people attending come from outside the US. Starting the colony application process all over again has made me thoughtful...you have to answer those impossible Miss America-like questions such as "What is your book about?" or "How would you describe your creative process?" You're pulling together the recommendations and the SASEs and writing your little essays and then it begins to feel like you're the world's oldest and most hopeless high school senior applying to a "stretch school" like Harvard. Bottom line is: Everybody wants this. Why should they choose you?

But there was something different about it this time. Ledig House requested a sample of recently published work and I just took an advance reader copy of the book and plunked it in the envelope. That sure as hell was easier than torturing myself with some 25 page writing sample. And I was also thinking it was sort of a strategic thing to do - hard to say who will be reading the applications but it's another way to get my book out there, to have someone outside my small circle come in contact with it. For so long, being a writer has been about explaining what I want to be but at some point - maybe just holding the advance reader copy in my hands - it became more about what I already am.

So I sent off the book and said "I want to write a sequel to this."

There's also the matter of when to go. The book comes out March 29, 2010 and I feel like the Mayans, like my calendar suddenly ends with a set date. I honestly cannot imagine anythng beyond the publication of the book. For all I know on March 30, 2010 the sun will rise in the west. My experiences with my published friends has given me clear warning that problably nothing will change....the book will come out and my life will go on pretty much as it always has. To expect life changing events to follow publication is foolish. The cruel part is that your publisher wants you to be "available" for the first three months following the hardcover publication of a novel, presumably to deal with the flood of interview requests and reviews and demands for appearnaces on Oprah that are statistically unlikely to come. Hard to say what "available" means, but I think most writers interpret it as "at home, waiting for the phone to ring, and not working on anything else."

I know that I can't do this. I have to make plans for April of next year....and May and June and all the months beyond. So I hope that Ledig House says yes. Or MacDowell or Yaddo or Jentel or UCross or somebody.

And then we sink

Is there something in the air? For the last week I have heard from a wild and random variety of my writing friends and everybody is in some sort of funk, driving themselves nuts with unanswerable quiestions. What should I be working on? How do I get myself motivated to do it? Why isn't my agent calling me back? My publisher? My publicist? My mother?

It seems during the last few months, agents and editors - never a chatty crew, even under the best of circumstances - have become more silent than ever. Is it the economy? If an agent knows that nobody's buying he's not going to feel any time pressure to sign new people up.....an editor with zero dollars left in the till isn't going to read books she knows she can't buy....and a publicist who's been unable to scare up any publicity in this time of folding magazinses and collapsing newspapers isn't eager to tell her writers that um, no, nothing's happening.

So they don't call us or write us or even call us back and write us back. And we writers - always a neurotic crew, even under the best of circumstances - are, in the absence of any real information, left to do what we do best: tell stories. We tell ourselves and our writer friends horror stories, dreaming up the worst scenarios we can. Our agent isn't really an agent, he's a sociopath who actually works at a chainsaw factory and pretends to be an agent in order to lure unsuspecting would-be novelists to his cabin deep in the snowy woods. Our editor has read the new draft and hates it and is busy trying to get our advance stopped before it leaves the accounting department. Our publicist is in rehab - where she's meeting people who have WAY better stories than ours.

Is everybody else out there in a funk? Or is it just my own little circle?

Is a feedback, or merely an opinion?

Last week Dawn and I were talking about feedback - talking about it in the context of my visit to the independent booksellers trade show and the strange phenominom that once you have written a book people feel like they know you. They touch you, they talk to you in a sort of presumptious way ("You know what you should do? Here's what you should do...."), they analyze your book's title right in front of you as if you're either blind and deaf or not present at all.

It's a bit much and as I was trying to figure out how to process all this I said something about staying open to feedback and Dawn broke in and said "Well, you know, they're not giving you feedback. They're just giving you an opinion."

We began to mull over the difference between feedback and opinions and came up with these things.

1. Feedback is solicited. You pass out a chapter at your writing group or ask a friend to read through your manuscript. This is totally different from strangers who just come up and start jawing at you.

2. Feedback is specific. It speaks to certain flaws or strengths within the work - "The dialogue at the top of page 29 doesn't feel realistic" or "Maybe this chapter should end with the image of the melting ice cream." It doesn't reside in general statements like "I loved this book" or "I just didn't get it."

3. Feedback is directed toward a work in progress. You solicit feedback because the book/story/article is unfinished and the things you hear might help you make the work better. Once it's finished, published, and in the bookstores, it's too late for feedback. All anyone can give you at that point is opinion.

4. When you take all three of these points together, it's clear that indeed the sole purpose of feedback is to make a work better. The person giving feedback isn't trying to force the writer into changing their story or shifting POV or in any way writing the book that they secretly wish they could write. The person giving feedback wants to make this book more of what the writer envisioned, not change the writer's vision. Opinions, I suspect, are more about what the reader wishes was on the page.

So...you know the old rant about opinions. They're like assholes - everybody has one. And this is true, that you can't let opinions hurt you very much because they're not really about you, they're more about the person who is speaking. That's hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

Next time someone offers me their opinion, I'll smile and nod and say "Thank you for your opinion." But I'll also try to let that opinion run over me like water. Because unless their thoughts about my book are a) solicited b) specific c) timely and d) truly in service of the quality of my work, they have no relevance. There certainly are a lot of words in the world aren't there?

Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.

God, but there's a lot of people in this room

Just got back from California, a trip to Napa and Sonoma to celebrate my son Jordan turning 21. We had WAY too good of a time. Gorgeous weather, stunning scenery, fantastic food...and we sampled 102 wines in three days. Let me do the math for you. That's 34 wines a day. Granted, they were tastings, not full glasses, but once you multiply 34 times anything you get a friggin lot of wine.

Anyway, very fun trip. And the chance to see my son as not just my son but as also a friend/commrade/equal.

While out there, I read Bel Canto. I know, I know, I'm late getting to it but I wanted to read it for two reasons related to Ballroom. (Which is what I'm now calling the book which was previously cleverly titled Book Three.) First of all, Bel Canto involves a hostage situation, which is playing a part in the - and I use this term loosely - plot of Ballroom. Secondly, she uses a multiple third person point of view. I counted as many as eleven point of view characters until I got so overwhelmed that - somewhat like the wines - I simply stopped counting. She happily jumped from one POV character to another within the chapter and scene without space breaks or any structural clues. Someone in my writing group had warned me this would be hard to do but it seemed to work fine. As a reader I was never confused nor frustrated.

So I'm feeling that it's possible. Third person scares me a little. I'm more used to first person. But this book requires a lot of hopping around - a large part of the theme is that different things look different to different people. And there's no way to present this "fractured truth" theme without not only multiple POVs but also rapidly cycling POVs.

Wish me luck.

Tell Them a Story

I'm in therapy now for the pretty much sole purpose of trying to figure out how to navigate being an author (which feels weird) while at the same time being an author (which feels normal). And while talking to my therapist Kevin it occurred to me that when people ask you a question they don't want you to answer that question.

Of course they don't. I don't know why I've been so slow in figuring this out.

I talked to my friend Jason today. An architect who lives in New York, one of my MacDowell buddies. And he said "When they ask you something like, for example, 'How does it feel to publish your book?" what they're really asking is 'How will it feel for me when I publish my book?'" In other words all anybody really is ever asking about is themselves - and I think he's quite right. He suggested I respond to questions with a question, i.e., when someone says "How does it feel to publish?" I should immediately turn it back around and say "How do you expect it to feel when you publish?"

And once again I think he's quite right - as long as I'm talking ot that person one on one, such as in an interview or as part of my role as a teacher in an MFA program. I owe people something in that context.

But if the question comes in a group, such as a trade show or public reading, I'm not sure I can afford to engage every questioner on that level. Both Dawn and Alison have warned me not to "give too much" and I am beginning to know what they mean. If you engage too personally with every random questioner you'll not only wear yourself out, but you'll also fail to please your listener.

So, along with Keven's help, I've devised another plan. A way to go into a public author persona that both protects me and satisfies the questioner.

And that's just to tell them a story. When someone says "What is it like...." they don't really want an answer to this question. What they want is for you to tell them a story, a nice encapsulated egg-shaped answer. I don't think this will be hard. I have already come up with 20 or so "official" stories about the creative process. The stories are accurate and engaging and interesting - but they're just stories. It doesn't wear me out to tell them. It doesn't make me feel violated to tell them.

So here's the new plan. Don't answer questions. Tell stories. That's what I am - a storyteller. It's a fair thing for them to ask me to do. It's a fair thing for me to do back. I know I've written about this before - bear with me, constant readers - but the idea is evolving and I'm trying to get my mind more solidly around it. I can't be expoed and public all the time. I can't parcel myself out in bits and pieces. Alison tried to do that and it almost wore her out. What I can do is tell them a story.

Post Siba Thoughts

These thoughts will be few since your girl is pretty much brain dead. My publisher sent 150 Advance Reader Copies of the book down to Greenville, SC for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association trade show and yours truly went down to try and stir up some interest. I spent two hours moving from one table to another at an industry lunch, waving a copy of my book in the air and trying to give them a five-minute summary of why they should stock the book in their stores and hand sell it to their loyal customers.

It was fun and informative. At the author lunch before I met a gaggle of other writers - always a treat - including the woman who wrote Wind Done Gone, the Gone With the Wind parody that stirred up so much controversy a few years back. Very nice woman, actually kind of low key - just further truth that even politically hot writers, those which seem to be courting trouble, are actually introverts and recluses at heart. Then into the luncheon where I went through my spiel over and over until they called time.

Of the 150 books we gave out all but 5. Hard to say if it helped. I'd like to think it did. But like so many of these things, it was largely a blur of new people with no real way to tell which of them will turn out to be helpful to my little baby career. But as a first publicity outing, I feel it was successful....and it's just a relief to have the first one over and done with. What is it Macy Gray said about cherries on Dancing With the Stars?

SIBA

If you don't know what that means, you're not alone. It stands for Southern Independent Booksellers Association and I'm going to Greenville on Saturday for their big conference. Apparently I'm set to participate in a sort of speed dating situation where authors sit at tables and every two minutes a new bookstore owner sits down in front of you and you've got 120 seconds to describe your book. These are the people who aren't Borders or Barnes and Nobles...the smaller bookstores who, if they like you, might hand sell you book or recommend you to a book club or even invite you in for a signing.

So it matters and it's a little fraught.

I'm excited about it. Slightly nervous, true, but mostly excited. My publishers think I'm a raving extrovert and in comparison to most writers, this is probably true enough. But my extroversion comes at a cost...in other words, I'll be exhausted at the end of it, drained in that sort of soul-level way that only reading or talking about your work can cause.

This is sort of the equivalent of an early political primary for me....a chance to work a few of the kinks out of my pitch, a chance for me to see how well I hold up in this sort of sales environment, a chance to see how people respond to the concept of the book. Keep all fingers and toes crossed, please. I'll post Monday and let you know how it went!

Four things I can do

Writing makes people nuts. Well, actually, I think both writing and publishing make people nuts. So much of it is out of your control.

A friend just called me, almost in tears. She is about to sign with an agent - supposedly a happy moment - but she isn't sure if she's going with the right person. There are some big red flags. She said "This is the only person in fifteen years of trying to get an agent who's ever wanted to represent me so the only person has to be the right person, wouldn't you say?" I'm not sure how I feel about that, but we tried to talk it through and come up with a list of questions she might ask this agent before she signed with her but the conversation was disjointed and probably not helpful. She was too nervous to process options or to weight out the pluses and minues of different deals.

So....in this topsy-turvy industry where missteps are inevitable and disappointments are numerous what can we do to stay sane and reasonably focused? It's different for each writer, I suspect, but here's what I do.

1. I focus on what's working. In my case, right now, a lot of that has to do with the foreign sales for the novel and the people I'm in contact with at the various presses. Hell, it's exciting and rewarding to be able to even say "my German editor" and even more so if the person who holds that title seems helpful and nice. The foreign rights sales have been sort of a balm for the apsects of publishing in the US which are more brutal. This isn't anyone fault, it's just a result of New York being such a big, bad world with so many books coming out that it's hard for a first time writer to feel valued and acknowledged. So, I like focusing on the foreign publishing houses which are, frankly, more like I thought the whole thing was going to be.

2. I try to get into writing colonies, conferences, groups - anything where I don't feel so alone and stranded. I would have run off the rails a long time ago if so many of my friends weren't writers.

3. I begin new projects while existing ones are in the pipeline of sales and publications. Otherwise you get to intently involved in how the publishing process is going, what you're being paid, how much rejection there is out there, all those yucky things you can't control.... Having a new project underway makes the one currently being published less important to you and that's a good thing.

4. I read. It reminds me that I love books. Reminds me why I'm doing this.

I won't lie. It's still hard. But these four things do help.

Power Versus Precision

It's no secret that I love quotes about writing - and I love quotes about other things that seem to secretly apply to writing even more. Witness what Billie Jean King said about tennis (another quote from the new writing book I'm reading called "Bang the Keys"). She was talking about serving and how most novice players try too hard to get their serves in the box...how they stand there dinking one ball after another carefully over the net, nervously trying to hit the square and figuring they'll add power to their serves after they get their aim right.

She says it works the opposite - that you must serve with power from the start, even if your balls go horribly awry. (Actually I don't think BJK used the term "horribly awry" - that's my contribution.) Because you can add precision in later, as you go along, but if you don't develop power from the get-go, it's almost impossible to add it in later.

The same thing holds true for writing. First drafts - and probably second and third drafts as well - should be wild and free and a little imprecise. When my friends and I read each other's early drafts we always mark in a few "Maybe too much" or "A little over the top" or "Cut?" comments - they're a sign the writer has done her first draft job and let her mind go wild. You can always rein things in later and make scenes more sensible and neat and precise.

But it's almost impossible to do the opposite. If you start out small and careful you stay small and careful. Too protective of your beautifully polished prose to risk taking a chance - just as I suspect King's tennis students would find it hard when, after months of serving "successfully," i.e., in the box, their belated attempts to develop power mean they're suddenly knocking the ball out of bounds.

Ultimately - whether you're talking writing or tennis - you need both power and precision. But it's easier to move from power to precision than it is to move from precision to power. So serve the first draft as hard as you can. You can worry about where the boundaries are later.

Stealing from your own life

I like books about writing and recently I got a new one, "Bang the Keys" by Jill Dearman. She's more in the floaty school of writing instruction, more Julia Cameron than Gotham City Writers Group. In other words, more apt to write about meditating to get in touch with the unconscious of your characters than the architecture of plot.

Both matter. It's a good book.

But I was struck by a quote she gave from the filmmaker Pedro Almodovor, who wrote and directed Bad Medicine, a movie I watched with Phillip last year. Almodovor was talking about using his own life as material for his films and he said:

"Anything that is not autobiographical is plagiarism."

I laughed aloud at that. I assume he is kidding, but probably not by much. Almost all writers borrow heavily from their own lives and the lives of people around them....but mostly, I would guess, from their own. At least in terms of feelings. You might not have fought in the Vietnam war but if your soldier-character is feeling frustration, you'd better know how it feels to be frustrated. Better be able to tap into the last time you felt that particular emotion, the thoughts that led up to and away from the feeling, the way it manifested in your body.

Another thing I've heard - not sure where but I think it may have been Julia Cameron. Something about how writing is more about getting things down than it is about thinking things up. I'd phrase it a little differently, saying that there are essentially two schools of writers: those who get things down and those who think things up. I'm obviously more in the first school but my new writing group has brought me into contact with genre writers who are more clearly "creative" in the sense most people use the word - i.e., they sit there and make things up. They make up whole worlds with different laws and money and genders and physical constrants. I'm not sure if they base the people who populate these worlds on their own emotions or not.

Maybe something worth asking at the next meeting.

I'll be drummed out of this group soon, no doubt. I have no luck with writing groups. I think my questions irritate people.

Inevitable Envy

People are loathe to admit it, but envy is an inevitable (and unenviable) part of the writing life. I have been on both sides of the envy seesaw, and it's no fun either way. Envy has always seemed to me such a sticky-feeling emotion, the kind of thing where you need to shower just after you admit to yourself that you're feeling it. No wonder we call it by so many other words.

But Shakespeare felt professional envy, probably directed toward Kit Marlowe - in fact, he wrote sonnets about it. Fitzgerald and Hemingway had a famously rivalrous friendship - as did Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Melville got tired of playing second fiddle to Hawthorne...and I just read that Virginia Woolf, after reading glowing reviews of the "The Four Quartets" by TS Eliot, went out to walk in the fields and tell herself "I am I, and must follow that furrow, not copy another."

So here's the bottom line on professional envy. If you feel it...or rather when you feel it, first of all take comfort that you're in the very best of company.

Secondly, use it as an impetus to write. You can't let your friend get that far ahead of you, can you?

Thirdly, remember that this is a street which goes both ways and that at some point, if you keep writing, you will be on the receiving end of someone else's envy. It might just be a well-turned phrase in a writing workshop, it might be the Pulitzer. Either way when you notice it you're going to feel...a little sticky. Because here's the weird thing about envy. It feels no better to be envied than it does to envy other people.

When I sold my novel my friend Dawn said "The publishing process will be full of surprises. And one of them is that your friends are not going to be particularly happy for you." It's a harsh realization....for years you and your friends are lolling around in the same muddy pasture of despair. No one can get an agent, much less published. It doesn't seem possible. It seems as far away as if you were sitting there saying "Some day one of us is going to fly."

But then it happens. Someone sells her book. And the reaction is not just envy but surprise. Wait a minute. She sold her book? Actually sold it, and she has an agent and an editor and a title and a cover and all that sort of stuff? The land shifts beneath you all a little bit and it's hard not to have a jumble of emotions, with envy certainly among them.

Now here's the conundrum. If your group is full of good writers and you're committed to helping each other, the news that the first of your group has published is both an occasion for envy and, on the other hand, a boon for everyone. There's a little more of a crack in the gate....maybe your friend will ask their agent to look at your book. Maybe they'll help you when it's time to negotiate your own contract or publicize your own book.

But even if the stars align and you're able to help each other beautifully - and indeed it has happened among me and my writing friends - you still have to go through that gate one at a time. Some people have to hang back and watch their friends precede them into the land of the published and that hurts. So I guess the fourth point about envy is...

Accept it as a rite of passage. And in some ways, evidence of how far you've come. Melville envied Hawthorne because he knew him. Ditto for Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sexton and Plath, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Woolf and Eliot. We envy people who are nearby, who seem just a step or two ahead of us in the process. The language of envy begins with "It could have been me..."

We don't feel that about people who are far above us. You don't lie on your couch and re-read Pride and Prejudice of the 700th time and envy Austin. She's Austin, for God's sake, it would be like feeling envy for an angel. So when your friends begin to improve in their writing....to publish....to win awards or be admitted into colonies, your envy is a sign that you're not that far behind them. Painful as it is, you've moved a step closer to publication.

Because if it could have been you, someday it will be.

The Myth of Daily Progress

When I was in college the local paper was the Charlottesville Daily Progress - a hopelessly chipper name for a newspaper but one which I think reflects the way we all wish life worked. In the thirtysomething years since then, I haven't encountered a lot of daily progress in my life. I plod. I trudge. I put in the hours. And I endure long periods in which it seems as if nothing is happening - there's no progress at all, much less something measurable and daily.

This is true in all areas of my life.

But the flip side is that after weeks or months of this plodding, just at the point where I am most frustrated and most certain that none of this work is leading to any real payoff, I hit a period of rapid and almost effortless progress. A little blip of time - it never seems to last longer than a week, but is more often just a single day - in which it seems I am reaping the results of all the work I plowed in earlier.

Last Wednesday was one of those days. I was at the studio, dancing with Max and all of a sudden ("all of a sudden" as in "we've been working on these steps for weeks") everything clicked and I began dancing better. It's like in one day, in one lesson, I got drastically better. I know I wasn't just dreaming it - several other people commented on it too. And the next morning after a night of furious dreaming about dancing, in which I went through the tango routine over and over in my dreamstate, I woke up full of ideas for revision for the novel.

What is this? Why do we so rarely get real daily progress and instead get this bumpy learning curve?

I suspect it has something to do with the fact anything we're learning requires a kind of blind loyalty to the process. Periods of time in which it feels like you're wandering the dark and not getting any better. Perhaps this dark night of the soul is a necessary part of the creative process - that if creative work was more like bricklaying (i.e., full of evidence of daily progress) we would be more convinced that it is a result of our will and work and cleverness and not respectful enough of the fact that there is something more emotional and mystical about the process. We'd forget that creativity is the result of more than just putting in the hours.

You still have to put in the hours. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. You have to put in the daily hours but you have to put them in without any expectation of daily progress. It's a leap of faith. The time at the computer when it seems like nothing is happening is the primary sacrament of this strange religion we've all chosen...and the result is the periodic Wednesday when it all clicks, when one step seems to follow the other swiftly and effortlessly, when the ideas are coming faster than you can write them and when it seems, for just a matter of hours, laughably easy.

Knowing what to leave out

There's a scene in my second novel, The Gods of Arizona, in which the protagonist reflects back on the first time she trysted with the man who ultimately broke her heart. She recalls an expensive bottle of champagne he bought and how - unlike the cheap roses of her youth - it had no color. She says "I was already beginning to understand that what we were paying for is the absense of something." I've always liked that line, since the first moment I wrote it. What often elevates a moment is the absense of something - no noise, no crowds, no hassle, no smell.

I'm thinking of this because recently I was asked two questions about writing. One was "What's the difference between a mainstream novel and a literary novel?" The other one was "How do you develop a free-flowing conversational writing style?"

The first question came out of my new writing group, where everyone but me is doing genre and where I think they often look at me a little warily since my writing doesn't conform to the precepts of more plot-driven fiction. The second question came from a friend whose style has been critiqued as overly-formal. She says she envies my style, which is very much born out of the Southern tradition of oral storytelling.

Two different questions but it occurred to me that they have the same answer. To some degree, fiction is made literary by what the author leaves out. Suppose you have a scene where a secretary marches into the office of her boss and demands a raise. The boss, when he catches wind of her mission, gets up from behind his big desk and closes the door. The mainstream author will tell the reader why he the closes the door - he doesn't want the rest of the workers to overhear their conversation, he knows he's getting ready to get blackmailed, the secretary is his long-lost illegitimate daughter, whatever.....The mainstream writer will saying something along the lines of "Mr. Banks got up to close the door, conscious that the busybody Miss Crebs was lurking to eavesdrop." The literary writer will just say. "He closed the door," thus forcing the reader to work a little harder. Why did he close the door? The author is telling you quite clearly what is happening but she's stopping short of telling you why it is happening. There's a sliver of ambiguity in the scene that makes it inherently less literary.

And as for a smooth writing style....I think that's all about knowing what to leave out. Not constantly stopping the narrative to explain everything. Like being literary, the oral stream-of-consciousness style depends on the reader paying attention and making some connections without the narrative stopping to point them out. The person who asked me this question has a laborious style primarily because she comes out of the academic system. She can't say anything without explaining how she knows it - without practically offering footnotes. These constant small asides to dump in information - with little regard for how necessary that information is and even less regard for whether or not this tutorial style is insulting to the reader - slows her narrative pace to a crawl.

The bottom line? I think no matter how well a scene is written it's worth taking a minute in editing to think about what could be cut. Striking out what's implied, what's non-essential, what's simply in there to show off how much the author knows....and then further realizing that a little strategic ambiguity can be the author's friend. As I said before in the entry "The literary tango" it's a risk to invite the reader into the creative process and trust them to be able to make connections and pick up on implications without constantly beating them over the head with explanation. But it's a risk that often pays off.

The last happy day you'll ever have

Last night there was big news at my writing group. The leader of the group, who has been writing both fantasy and romance for years, signed with an agent from the large and well-regarded Writers House. It's a huge event, a watershed. I brought her flowers. She was excited and still a little in shock. The contract had just gone into the mail that day.

Later I was telling a (very seasoned) writing friend about the event. I said I'd brought Nancy flowers and my friend replied "Well you should have because...."

And then we said in unison "Because this is the last happy day she'll ever have."

We're actually not as cynical or as ungrateful as that statement would imply. But there is something poignant about that moment in which a dream starts to become reality. Part of it is the very obvious truth that reality never matches the fantasy....Whenever you anticipate an event such as going off to college, your first trip to Europe, getting married, having a baby you can't help but build up this whole dream around the event. Then when it happens it's good....it's just not good in the way you thought it would be good. You're home from the hospital but so sore you can't stand, sit, lie, or walk. Your dorm room is approximately 22 square feet. You new husband gets drunk and throws up the first night of your honeymoon. The cabdriver who picks you up at the Madrid airport looks nothing at all like Antonio Bandares. The fantasy has to make way for the more compromised and complex reality and that happens in publishing too. Getting an agent and a publisher aren't the end of the game, they're the beginning - the first flick of a domino that sets off a series of choices and you'll never know (never!) when you've made the right one.

And then there's the more interior issue as well....getting your dream in a way means losing your dream. You simply don't have a dream anymore. Something has to rush in and fill that space where are the anticipation and yearning lived for years but - at least in my case and probably in lots of people's cases - the new thing doesn't arrive all at once. So, in the meantime, getting what you want feels oddly hollow.

I didn't say all this to the woman in my writing group. I handed her the flowers and said "Congratulations."

Which, in the land of writers, translates to "good luck."

I get by with a little help...

Just had a long conversation with my friend Dawn. I sent her a copy of the much-maligned second book, The Gods of Arizona. She read it and called me while in the car with her two young sons. Even under these conditions - rambunctious boys in the back seat periodically announcing that they needed to pee, Boston to NYC traffic, the manuscript not in front of her - she provided a cogent and comprehensive analysis of what I'll need to do to take the book to the next level.

One important thing is that she liked the book. My confidence is shaken and I need to hear that right now. But just as important, she saw where it needed to be strengthened and had some ideas on how I might accomplish that.

I feel renewed. Like a have a definite and doable plan for revision. Now I just have to figure out how I can get away for a few weeks and really devote myself to the task. Too late for fall writing colonies. An escape to my friend Laura's house perhaps? She has always made it available to me and it's quiet and beautiful there.

What would I do without my writing buddies? Would I even be able to write?

Please forward all future mail to Sydney....

So much of what you learn in publishing (and I use the word "learn" loosely since this is a maddeningly slippery world with rules that seem to come and go at random) you learn the hard way... i.e., by experience.

But in the middle of the hard knocks I've had over the last couple of weeks has been a huge ray of sunlight. I got news that the Australian/NewZealand rights sold and that they were going to publish quickly - one day after the book comes out in the US, in fact. So I wrote them offering my author photo, bio, the info I've created for my American website, etc. They were so grateful and so sweet...they said "Our American authors never contact us with anything. If we want these sorts of things for publicity we really have to go looking for them."

So I thought "Hmmm....maybe my other foreign publishers would like this stuff. I could at least offer." I got their email addresses from the foreign rights department of my American publisher and contacted them. Same story. Delighted to hear from me. Grateful for anything I could send.

This has resulted in three things - tighter relationships with my foreign publishers, which I think is bound to help me somehow in the future, a little ego boost in the middle of a lot of ego knocks, and a further understanding that a writer who takes it upon herself to try and help market her book can indeed make an impact.

Feeling helpless sucks. And so much of this process makes you feel helpless. Creating little inroads - even if they lead to Rotterdam and Pisa and Perth - has made me feel (literally) worlds better.

Trying again

Last week was a setback. My editor didn't like the second book. So I went to the beach to hide out for the week in my mom's condo....to sit on the sand and read through the manuscript and think about what to do next.

And it worked. It was kind of funny in a way because the beach was so windy and here I come over the dunes with my SPF 912 sunscreen and my folding chair and Diet Coke and huge manuscript held together with a rubber band. The book was literally in danger of blowing away. And I just started reading. I came to some conclusions about how to handle the decisions facing me - what book to write next, who it show it to, etc. But the biggest thing is that in reading through the manuscript I was reminded how much I liked it. I was proud to have written it. Just realizing that was a kind of benediction.

So I'm back in Charlotte with some ideas for revision - revisions I want to make, recommended by no one else - and the sense that I want to go back into the book. For now I feel calm and focused. I say "for now" not to curse myself but to acknowledge that staying calm and focused is no easy feat in this line of work. But for now I feel good.

Out back. down under, and other places

This has been a week of extreme ups and downs. My editor doesn't like the second book. I'm headed to the beach this afternoon to decamp at my mom's condo for a few days during which I can re-read the whole manuscript (funny how quickly you can forget what you've written) and think about what to do next. Rewrite or move on to book three? Hard to say. Not only do I not know what the future will bring but I really don't even understand what's going on in the present. All this is a down but a down that I somehow feel could work to my long term best interests if I can just figure out a way to remain calm.

And in the middle of this, Australian rights to the book have sold and they're publishing it very quickly - one day after it comes out in the US, in fact. So I have been in contact with my Aussie publisher an adorable man who sounds like an even more whisky-voiced Crocodile Dundee. He is funny and nice and interested in my opnions on publicity and marketing....in short, the whole experience with the Sydney people has been a great balm for my battered ego.

My joke is that I tell my friends I'll have to become an ex-pat - move to Sydney or Rotterdam or Milan or somewhere else where the book is coming out because artists are never valued in their country of birth. No man is a prophet to his own people and all that sort of rot. And I laugh because it is a joke of course but at the same time the foreign rights sales have been a large part of what has kept me somewhat optomisitc throughout this process. There are so many setbacks or moments without movement at all....you have to find your comfort where you can. And right now my comfort is halfway around the world.

Ugh

I've just had a real setback. The editor of my first book has had the second for a couple of months and a couple of days ago I got an email from her. The bottom line is, she hates it. Doesn't relate to the character, think the two key scenes of the book are overdone, doesn't understand why some scenes are in there at all. Sorting through all this is a bit of a shock. Since the second book is based on the same characters as the first it never occurred to me she'd just flat out dislike it. Now it's time to talk to her and I don't know what to say. The things she's saying don't seem like fodder for a rewrite, they seem like a request for an utterly different book.

This is the distressing nature of this business. Everyone says "two steps forward, one step back" but it's actually not even that easy to progress. At times if feels like "two steps forward, two steps back" is more the rhythm of the dance.

How I Became a Famous Novelist

Just bought a hilarious book, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. Really smart ass, sarcastic, and frighteningly accurate view of the whole process - why we write, how you get published, what happens afterwards. To say this book casts a jaundiced eye doesn't do it justice. Even the cover is yellow....

Back from Arizona

I just got in from a trip to Arizona. Lots of hiking, spa-ing, etc, but Tucson is also the scene of my second novel. Walking around the desert got me thinking of all the ways that place influences a book. Not just in terms of describing the plants and animals and landscape, although even that is important. My recent Kripalu workshop with Natalie Goldberg made me re-appreciate the evocative power of place-specific nouns such as "roadrunner" versus "pelican" or "barrel cactus" versus "aspen."

But I was thinking more of how metaphor arises out of place. I've been trying to think of a way of saying the Kelly is frozen and stuck and numb in the beginning of the novel and as I walked I kept - of course - seeing these rocks. For some reason it jumped out at me that a lot of the stones in Arizona are approximately the size and shape of the human heart and the phrase came to mind "the stone-shaped heart" and I decided that I liked it.

It's small. It's a line, or not even a line. But it's also the sort of thing that pleases me as a writer. There's a little click that happens in your head when you find a word or phrase that seems right, a sense of completion, like a piece coming into a jigsaw and giving you a stronger sense of the overall picture.

Are we more likely to find these "really right" words or phrases if we immerse ourselves in place? I suspect it helps. Especially if you're the sort of writer, as I am, who is better at getting things down than at thinking things up.

Why is plotting so darn hard?

As I mentioned in the last blog, I have started compiling notes for the book on ballroom dancing. And it has brought me right up against my worst dread.....(drum roll)......plotting.

Just the word sends a shudder down your spine, doesn't it?

I know it does mine.

Why is this so tricky? And why have I taken on not just another novel but one that has way more characters than I'm used too and thus way more character arcs.....and why have I chosen to toss the word "commercial" around in a cavalier manner, knowing full well that it implies "tightly plotted"?

There is a part of me that relishes the challenge of trying to simultanously advance multiple story lines and bring them all to fruition at the same point....there is another part of me that is terrified of the challenge.

When I get back from Arizona next week I'm going to start research in the form of interviewing. Maybe that will get me going on story and while I realize that story isn't the same thing as plot, they are closely related and maybe that will unfreeze me a bit. Wish me luck.

Plowing

When I left New York ten days ago my editor told me she would read "The Gods of Arizona" pronto and let me know. My agent told me he was off to France for a week but that when he returned he would follow up with her pronto and let me know.

I still don't know. That's to be expected. Nothing happens fast in this business. There is no pronto in publishing and writers can become paralyzed with the waiting. Paralysis is my greatest fear. So I have spent the past week thinking a lot about the third book, the one about ballroom dancing, the one I'm tentatively calling "The Nature of the Dance." I am trying to produce a sample chapter and a 500-word pitch of the idea.

This is the exciting part of the process. The beginning, when the horizon is flat and broad and there is the sense that the story could go anywhere and that your heroine could become anything.

This is also the part of the process where you go into a bit of a fog. First drafts are physically exhausting to write. They really force you to go deep into the subconscious mind. My grandmother used to use the phrase "plowing the field" to describe complete exhaustion as in "I feel like I've been plowing the field all day." She was born in the rural south in 1905 and knew what plowing really felt like. I've never had my hand on a piece of farm equipment but first draft writing feels like a kind of plowing - taking this unbroken landscape and beginning to dig ruts in it, to create perameters and rows, to decide what goes where....to begin to enforce a type of order onto nature. You have to throw your back into it. You strike a lot of rocks.

So I walk around in a fog, obsessed with the story. The kind of headspace where you walk into the kitchen and wonder why you're there, where you pull off the road into a parking lot and begin to scribble notes onto a receipt you dig out of your purse. Oddly happy and oddly distracted.

When I first started writing, I never thought about publishing....or, if it did flit across my mind it was only in the context of "I need to sell enough to allow me to keep writing." That's pure and proper - publishing should always be in service of writing. But at some point things shift. The publishing part of it grows bigger in your mind and if you're not careful the tail begins to wag the dog (another one of my grandmother's pet phrases) and you find yourself spending a lot of time wondering what will make a book sell. Instead of "I need to publish so I can afford to keep writing" you begin to think "I need to write what I think they'll publish." In some ways that doesn't sound like much of a shift because both are important - you won't have any sort of career in the long run unless you give serious thought to both the creative and the financial side of your decisions. But even taking into account that both matter, the writing still has to come first.

When I told my editor I was thinking of a book about a ballroom dance studio her eyes lit up and I thought "I can sell that book." All I had was a concept. But in the ten days since that my mind has been furiously churning....who is this woman who has begun dancing? What does she want....and will I give it to her? I guess I'll give it to her slant, as in Emily Dickenson's line "tell the truth but tell it slant." That seems the way people always get what they want - they might get what they originally wanted but then find they don't want it anymore, what they think they want changes over time, they come to an understanding of themselves that renders the original desire moot. There are a thousand variations of this story and the parallels between Abby's pursuit of dance trophies and my pursuit of publication are not lost on me.

I may have started this book based on my editor's reaction, and the fact I thought I could sell it but the deeper question is: Can I fall in love with it to the degree that I would want to write this book even if I knew I could never sell it? In the meantime I just wander around dreaming the story, stopping sometimes dead in my tracks when a phrase or idea strike me as being real.

This is the exciting part of the process. But god do I need a nap.

Wild Mind Weekend

Last weekend I was in Kripalu doing a memoir workshop with Natalie Goldberg. I always approach workshops with "name" teachers a little warily but this was a good one. Not a lot of ego on either side of the podium. We wrote and wrote. Prompt after prompt.
Natalie kept saying "I want to make sure everyone gets their money's worth." So Friday we wrote until 9 pm and we were going to reconvene Saturday at 8:30 am and she gave us three prompts for homework. So we show up Saturday and we write until 11:30. Reconvene at 1:30 and guess what? Two prompts to do over lunch. By the end of the Saturday afternoon I was brain dead. I had definitely gotten my money's worth but the workshop, following directly on the heels (I first wrote "directly on the hells" - interesing slip, Dr. Freud!) of the time in New York was just too much. I didn't do my Saturday night homework (and felt strangely guilty about it...where are you, Sigmund, when we need you?) and took off Sunday without attending the final session. I wanted some time to explore the grounds, sit in the hot tub, hang out in the bookshop, just chill.
Yeah, I was burned out when I showed up, thanks to NYC, but more to the point I really wonder how much first draft writing I can do in a single weekend without it making me spacey, queasy, and borderline sick. I can revise and revamp and research for hours. All those words that start with "re" - they just don't take that much out of you.
But that word that starts with W, as in "write"....it'll just about kill you.
Like I said, good workshop. I liked my roomies, had a nice walk to the gorgeous Kripalu lake and during the writing sessions I generated a lot of material for what I'm calling the God-help-me-third-book (catchy title, don't you think?) So the time was well spent. But it proved to me once again that when it comes to first drafts I need to pace my energy. I drove home from Massachusetts in a complete mental fog.

Jiggity Jog

Home again from my never ending trip up north. I'm tired, but it was all so worthwhile. Here's a synopsis of what I learned:

I have to go to New York more often. I don't know why I treat it as some big deal. But it was almost immediately apparent upon my arrival that there's no substitute for actually meeting with editors and agents face to face - for being a real person to them and not just a voice on the phone or an email address. The standard thing everyone says about editors....ie, that they're distracted and overworked....is actually quite true. When you're there sitting across a dining table from them you move, even if just for that hour, to the top of the pile and have their true focus and attention. I got more feedback in four days than I've gotten in a year at home.

The first day I went to Grand Central, ostensibly to meet with the publicity director about my first book, Love in Mid Air, the one that's coming out in March. And meeting the publicity person is a big deal, but I also had the secret tiny hope that my editor, who received the second book, The Gods of Arizona two weeks ago, would like it enough to make me an offer. An offer on Gods would solve a bucketload of problems, some of the financial and some of them emotional. A lot of novelists are one-hit wonders who spend years writing the first book (God knows I did) and then either never produce another or wait so long to produce another that everyone forgets about them, including their own publishing house. So if she committed to a second book I'd feel like I was really developing a career with my publisher, that my first book wasn't just a matter of "let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

So I get off the elevator and almost the first thing she says is that she's sorry, but she hasn't finished the second book. In fact she had just started it and was only about 70 pages in. We soldier on, talking about publicity for the first book and what they will do (spend time) and won't do (spend money) to promote it. As we're all heading out to lunch, I'm swapping my heels for flats for the walk and make some comment about protecting my feet and we end up talking about my passion for ballroom dancing. I say, honest-to-God casually, that I want to eventually write a book about a ballroom dance studio and my editor just lights up. She loves the idea.

So now I'm thinking that maybe there's a third book in the works and that maybe even she'll buy the second book, for which I have a draft, and the third book, for which I have a one-line concept. It's unlikely on one level....everyone is saying that the market sucks, that it's an impossible time to come out with any sort of book at all, and that publishers have stopped giving big advances or multi-book deals. But on another level I saw that she was excited about the ballroom dancing idea and her interest in book three might nudge her to make a decision on book two. When I talked to my agent the next day, he thought so too.

After that I couldn't get this mythical third book off my mind. Started taking notes for it on the train back to Massachusetts, free-wrote on it during the writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg (more on that later), and was scribbling more notes while driving south on I-95 on Monday. And it seems crazy in a way to always be moving ahead developing new ideas before previous ideas are sold or even consolidated in your mind, but that seems to be how things have to work. Not every idea pans out....who are we kidding? Most ideas don't pan out. So you have to have a lot of them in order to survive this nervous marketplace. And then psychologically I need to feel like all my eggs aren't in one basket.

So....I'm tired, but it was a productive trip on all sorts of levels. I'll report more later.

If I can make it there.....

A little excitement this morning. The UPS driver dropped off a nice big box of my advance reader copies for "Love in Mid Air." It's a kick to hold it my hand, looking like a real book and all.

Leaving Thursday for the major northward trek. Going to see Laura in Virginia, then Dawn in Mass, then NYC for four days to visit with editors and my agent and friends there, then to the Natalie Goldberg memoir workshop at Kripalu. All in all I am gone about two weeks and it's like zones of experience I'll be driving in and out of, each requiring some pretty significant shifts of focus (as well as some pretty significant shifts of wardrobe...you should see my suitcase).

This is also when I'll find out:
What publicity is being planned for the first novel
If my editor for that novel is interested in acquiring the sequel

Scary stuff. I'll report in the minute I get back.

The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing

The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing


The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.
_____Gloria Steinem

I am going to write because I cannot help it.
______Charlotte Bronte


Publishing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is.
_____Anne Lamott

Pleasure is not always at the time.
______James Salter

The only advice I have to give a young novelist is to fuck a really good agent.
_______John Cheever.

Nothing is as important as a likeable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
_____Ethan Canin

The protagonist cannot be a perfect person. If he were, he could not improve and he must come out at the end of the play a more admirable human being than he went in.
____Maxwell Anderson

You must be aware that the reader is at least as bright as you are.
_____William Maxwell


The story is always about the person who is telling it.
_____Jack Heffron


The subconscious mind seeks truth. It wants truth so badly that it will cease to speak to anyone who wants something else more than he wants truth.
___Anne Sexton


The work will show you how to do it.
____T-shirt


Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

____Bill Barich

The Chapter Cometh

Okay, now this is freaky but true. I was down at the beach over the weekend and while I sat under my beach umbrella looking out at the gorgeous ocean I was also performing three writerly tasks:

1. Proofreading the galleys for Love in Mid Air, which were mostly fine.

2. Rereading the second draft of the second book, which I plan to send to my agent and my editor sometime this week. A little traumatic because while there are certain parts of the book I really like there are some definite chunks missing, especially this one part about 2/3 of the way through where I know I've always needed a scene. Not just a scene. A strong scene showing a strong internal shift.

3. Reading this absolutely infuritating book that I found in the back bedroom of my mom's condo. It's about writing so I can only assume that I bought it at one point during the 34 years she has owned this condo and left it there but I don't recall ever reading this book. Of course, come to think of it, I might not recall reading this book since this is the kind of book that gives you a stroke. It's all about how it's easy to get an agent and a publisher and just so long as you take care of your work and create the best manuscript you can that it will certain find itself a home. So Pollyanna-ish, so unreal and unhelpful, that I can't believe a published writer would say this to hopefuls. A pox upon her!

Anyway, I get home yesterday afternoon with a buttload of work to do because this is a very full week and I'm still missing this scene. So as I'm drifting off to sleep last night I summon the ghost of my dead father and any other random general benevolent spirits from the other side and say "Send me the scene."

And I woke up with it. Pretty much the whole bloody thing. The only thing I didn't have was a good last line, but hell, the rest of it was exactly what I needed and it might be the strongest scene in the book. I scrambled out of bed and came straight to the computer at 6 this morning and began furiously typing notes...just a brain dump and then I stood up and went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and then, for some reason, I said "Amen."

So I rushed back to the computer and wrote "For some reason I said 'Amen'" Which is the perfect last line for the scene.

I've got to start praying more often. And I am NOT kidding.

Oy

This has been a rough week. Not only did I get this bizarre attack (dutifully described in the "ouch" entry) on a scene from the second novel, but I have also been getting a lot of feedback on the first novel as well. The finished one. The whole thing is making me feel horribly exposed.

It started like this. My publisher sent me four sets of galleys to have when I visit workshops and conferences this summer, in case I meet someone artsy who might want to blurb the book. (Well...no one wants to blurb the book. Maybe I should say someone I can persuade to blurb it.) Since it was two weeks before the Queens session I decided this was a good chance to give some friends and family members a preview. They'll have to read it at some point and I suspected it would be upsetting for some of them. I figured this way we'd have ten months for them to read it, digest it, and get used to it before the book actually came out in print. So I start sending these four sets of galley copies around.

Some people were fine. A couple of friends/family members were very supportive and complimentary. A couple were lukewarm. A few struggled, clearly bogging down in attempts to figure out who the people in the book were based on, what was true and what was fiction, etc. A couple of people were hostile in a passive-aggressive way, either opting not to read it or claiming they couldn't finish it, based on the fact it was "chick lit." I found this last response the most insulting. ...I think when men use the term "chick lit" they almost always mean it in the most dismissive way possible. Some people offered suggestions for revisions as if they didn't realize that the book has been sold and this is the version that's actually coming out in print. In short it was pretty much what writing has taught me to expect, i.e., you can't predict how people are going to react to material. Some people who you consider to be experienced readers respond in a very simplistic way, people who you think might get upset are fine, people who you never thought about reacting in a thousand years get completely ripped out of the saddle.

But the aggregate of so much feedback over the course of ten days has laid me low and made me remember why I have a policy of not showing work in process to anyone who isn't a writer. Last night I went over and watching the Dancing With the Stars finale with my writing buddy Ed and his wife, my dancing buddy Schelley. He said that she is his first reader and Dawn says Steve is her first reader, but I can't imagine using a spouse as a first reader. I'm glad it works for them but I find this mystifying and wonder if I'm doing something wrong....if I show work to non-writers it seems that have trouble seeing it as a) a story and not either a confession or some secret message to them and b) my story and not theirs. I dread the moment people who know me read my work, dread the discussions which inevitably follow....so why do I have so much trouble doing what other writers seem to do easily?

Maybe it's just a matter of the material I work with, which tends to be about suburban life in Charlotte and thus easy for people to read me or themselves into. Maybe it's the fact I seem to know a lot of blocked creatives and they can't resist hijacking any story in progress and trying to turn it into the story they'd like to write. Maybe I present things in a defensive way, unconsciously looking for trouble and ergo I find it.

I honestly don't know. I just know this has been a tough week. Dawn and I have been talking a lot and it's got me thinking that feedback comes in three forms. There are the people you don't know at all - the anonymous readers who buy or don't buy the book, the critics, the reviewers, the people who rate your book on Amazon. There are the people you know slightly - the people in the community who take offense for reasons you never could have seen coming, the friends of friends who want to be writers and who thrust their manuscripts into your hands, the people you read for at workshops or conferences. And then there is that inner circle of friends and family, the twenty or so people whose reaction could have a huge impact on your life. That's the circle where you think you'd find your most support but it's where I seem to find a strange mixture of support and trouble.

At least it's almost past me. Three people have the galleys in hand right now. After I get it back from them, I'm not going to hand it out any more. I guess I'm glad I did it, and I'm definitely glad it's over.

Ouch

I am a little stunned right now. I sent a working scene to a friend, a scene from the second book...Granted, it's a violent scene and violent in a sexual way and this a double risk....but it's pivotal to the story I've imagined and I've just talked to him and he hates it. He hates it in a way that I couldn't even respond to. I just caught this torrent of words and now...I don't know what to think. This is the midpoint scene. Other scenes either lead up to it or devolve out of it. The thing is, I like the scene....or at least I think I do. I'm rattled right now. I haven't had anyone jump me like that in years. So now I have this scene that's pivotal in a book I'm going to show David and show Karen in a matter of weeks and someone whose judgement I trust has just eviserated it.

The scene is risky but I think I like it. Until about an hour ago I was sure I liked it and if you ask me an hour from now I might it again. But right now I am rattled to the core and wondering if he has really hit on something that's to be extremely upsetting to lots of people (he kept using the word "repugnant") in a way that makes the whole book unreadable or throws it into the category of pulp fiction....or is he just having a personal reaction to what is, on some levels, a rape scene?

What do you do with feedback like this? Or is it even feedback? I'm shaken.

I'm gonna call it "serendipity"

Yesterday I heard that the workshop I was suppose to teach at Tinker Mountain was cancelled due to low enrollment. It wasn't a total surprise - Fred, my friend and the director - had been making noises about how hard it was to get students this year for some time and in fact the most recent issue of Poets and Writers talked about conferences and workshops being cancelled across the country. And then the same day I hear from UCROSS - the colony in Wyoming and the last of the four I applied to this year - that I didn't get in.

Not that any of this is particularly great news but it didn't throw me. In some ways it's easier to plan the summer now, knowing more about what is and isn't going to happen. And it occurred to me that I had scooped out this nice full week for Tinker Mountain and this might be the perfect slot of time to visit New York. I've needed to go for months - touch base with my agent David and my editor Karen about the novel and talk to Laura, my editor at Fodor's for the Disney book, as well as see my buddies Alison and Jason and Jan.

And the funny thing is I started calling and emailing everybody and it all fell together. Everyone's in town. Everyone can meet me. So I have a great trip to NYC planned, and also now a built in time clock, a date by which I need to have finished the present version and have it mailed to David and Karen. It's a lot to do in the next few weeks, but the bottom line is, I feel great.

Change to Questions from Mike

Oops. The first question to the following post somehow got cut out. This is an interview with my friend and fellow writer, Mike.


His first question was:

Mike: "If you had an author superpower, what would it be?"

Questions from Mike

Kim: Cool question, but I actually already have one....invisibility. When I was a kid I wanted to be invisible. It was the Cold War era and I was always pretending I was a spy. Constantly hiding behind the couch to eavesdrop on the adults, that sort of thing. It turned out to be excellent training for growing up to be a writer and I still love to sit somewhere in public and pretend to be reading while actually I'm spying on people and/or recording their conversations. It gives me the chance to be, for at least a few minutes, invisible.
If I could choose a writing superpower I didn't already have, I'd become Sequencing Girl, able to know exactly where each scene belongs in a novel. Because now I spend so much time in cut and paste frenzies - moving stuff all over the place, trying to get every line, scene, and flashback into the right sequence.

Mike: Do you have any superstitious rituals? I met with this editor lady who says she always writes better in her lucky pajamas....

Kim: I'd love to have a pair of lucky pajamas. I don't have any particular rituals, although I do write better in the mornings so I structure my day to take advantage of that fact. And if I get stuck, I switch venues and write in public. Most of my first draft writing is done in coffeehouses and cafes or on planes. Planes, come to think of it, focus me especially well. Maybe because part of me feels like I'm getting ready to die.

Mike: Who do you model your writing after?

Kim: No one. When I was in school I did like Melville, Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad especially well, which may be where I got my penchant for first person POV. But I would say that my style is my own.
Last week I was talking to a writing buddy who said an editor once gave her a spectacular line edit, which is interesting because I can't stand to be line-edited. I think it breaks voice. I'd much rather an editor tell me to change the plot or a character...I'm like "Sure, I'll kill off Litttle Susie, just don't ask me to cut the word 'very' from that last sentence."

Mike: Is there a book out there that Love in Mid Air would remind people of?

Kim: I was very impressed with Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I think my book is thematically similar. My story is nowhere near as dark as his.

Mike: What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?

Kim: As followers of my blog know, I dance. American Smooth - the foxtrot, tango, and waltz. I'm obsessed with it. It scratches the same creative itch that writing does, but it also has a performance aspect to it, which I love.

Mike: What would you be doing if you weren't writing these books?

Kim: Talking about writing these books. I always knew I had to be a writer. There was no Plan B.

Mike: Will Love in Mid Air be part of a series?

Kim: Yes. It's like Elvis Costello says in "Everyday I Write the Book"....I own the film rights and am working on the sequel.

The literary tango

My favorite move in the tango is the corte. In it, the woman lunges forward in a single dramatic and glamorous step, arches her back, bends her knees, tosses her head….great stuff.

Of course it goes without saying (although I'll say it anyway) that if the woman is to step forward, the man has to step back. Dancers call this "creating negative space," and it's just what it sounds like - using your body to create a kind of container on the dance floor, a very certain and specific space for your partner to step into. Sometimes the lead dancer is a big clingy. Hesitant to step back enough and if the man doesn't create enough space for the woman to step into....well you can imagine the disasterous results.

I think it's equally important for a writer to learn how to create negative space. The writer can’t always be the one to advance, just as the man doesn’t always advance in the tango.

But it's hard for writers to step back just as it's hard for men to do it on the dance floor. I don't think it's a matter of ego. I think it's more about the fear that comes when we give up control....Stepping back feels like giving up control, which is ironic, because I'm actually starting to believe that your ability to create negative space is the ultimate demonstration of your finesse.

Bear with me. Here's what I'm trying to say. In a cortes, it's easy to assume since the woman is the one stepping forward the woman is the one leading the move. Not so. The man is using his body to tell her to go forward. It's not like he has let her go totally - not like he says “Hey, babe. You’re on your own. It’s free expression time. It’s fine with me if you want to go over by the bar and start to cha cha.” Quite the contrary. When the man steps backward he is still leading and he is leading her to go into a very specific place on a very specific beat. The cortes is a controlled, technique-driven move. Creating a space and inviting the other person to step into it - which in dancing circles is called “back leading” is a demanding and sophisticated way to dance.


Women love cortes. In my class the women always want to do them and they'll happily dance with any man who knows how to lead a corte. Easy to see why. It’s a fun and flashy move and also - at least from the woman’s perspective - not that hard to do. Men are always less enthused, because backleading is damn hard. The man has to do several tricky steps in order to create the space the woman is stepping into. So for the woman it’s a double blessing - an easy step that makes her the star. And for the man it’s a double curse - a difficult step he doesn’t even get credit for. Leading a woman into a corte is a generous gesture on the part of a man….and it’s equally generous when a writer invites a reader to step forward. A movement away from the idea that this story is somehow something that the writer is doing to the reader and a movement towards the idea that this story is something they’re in together, like a dance.

The poor guys at group dance class. They really struggle. Inexperienced dancers think their job is to grab their partners as tight as they can and march forward, forcing the woman to go backward with every step. There are two problems with this. Number one, a man dragging a woman from one side of the floor to the other is not much of a dance. People who dance like that are said to be "dancing tight" and that's not a good thing. Women don't like men who dance tight. You can drag a woman across the floor but you can't make her like it. Next time she's going to dance with somebody else, somebody who can come up with more varied and creative moves, somebody who lets her in on the action. Somebody who dances loose.

Number two, if marching forward is your only move pretty soon you’re going to find yourself in a corner. And once you're a corner, you’ve got to think of a way to get yourself and your partner/reader out. What writer on earth hasn’t at some point gotten into a plot corner? There's no graceful way to get out of them. After you've been stuck in a few, you eventually realize that you have to figure out a way to build the back and forth movement into the dance, so that you never get into that corner in the first place.

In my second novel I am trying to figure out how to write loose, how to create times when the reader knows more than the narrator, when the reader can predict the next move, when the reader can figure out things on her own, can enter in the story as a participant. It's hellishly hard. It gives me more understanding and greater sympathy for the guys I dance with. Creating negative space isn't the easiest move to pull off....but I know what a supreme pleasure it is, a borderline spiritual/sexual pleasure, to be led by someone who knows what he's doing and I'd like to create that sensation in anyone willing to plunk down $24.95 for my book. I want my readers to feel like they're dancing with a pro.

Zen and the art of publishing

The last week has been very full and productive and I'm on one of those elusive writer highs. Also been meditating faithfully every day (possibly a correlation....hmmmm.....) and just a few minutes ago, while listening to my beloved Jon Kabot-Zinn CD, I remembered something that happened a long time back. Ten years maybe.

I was in New Mexico, on my way to a Native American retreat. It was a typical western landscape, i.e., very blank. One narrow road through a rocky red landscape, one dusty gas station beside that road. I stopped and was shocked when a man actually came out to pump the gas. I was rummaging in my purse looking for cash because it also hit me that this gas station probably didn't take credit cards. As he was standing beside the car holding the pump he had time to take his measure of me, the rental car, the new-agey books in the back and he asked, sort of grumpily, if I was going to the meditation center. I said yeah - probably 99% of his clientele was either coming or going to the meditation center, there didn't seem to be anything else on this road - and he said"You don't have to go to a place like that. I can tell you the secret of life."

I had the feeling I was getting ready to get a great big jolt of Jesus but I nodded anyway and he said...

"Just don't take everything so damn personally."

Through the years I have thought about him several times. I don't know that anyone I've ever met, and I've known my share of philosophers and brainiacs, has ever improved upon his advice.

It's good council for the ups and downs of publishing. You send something out and you don't hear anything back and in those long weeks of waiting it's easy to tell yourself all sorts of stories. None of them kind. None of them fair. Or it's so easy to take the absense of a marketing campaign or a low advance or a bad review too much to heart. They don't like me. They don't like my book. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that publishing is a large, lumbering, and multi-headed beast and that very little that this beast does is a direct reflection on Kim Wright Wiley of Charlotte, NC. If I could just let things happen without rushing in to define and analyze the situation I know I'd be a happier person. Probably a better writer too.

I'm glad I thought about the gas station prophet during my meditation. And I will try to not take everything so damn personally. At least not today.