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.
Showing posts with label novel writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel writing. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
One more point about point of view
Talking to Laura yesterday got me thinking....
Much of my theories about first person point of view - which, God help us all, I am actually going to be lecturing on this summer at the Hollins College writing workshop - stem back to a single event from my childhood.
I was three or four. This is the first memory which I'm sure is an actual memory, neither a story I was told by my relentlessly story-telling family or a snapshot I saw in an album. The reason I know this is that I don't see myself as a character in the story - I see the story as I would have seen it if I were actually there.
Here goes. The entryway to my family home was a staircase of brick, leading up to a landing. There was a row of shrubs in front of the house. I would play out in the little protected area between the brick wall and the shrubs, pretending this was a fort or a castle or a boat or whatever the fantasy du jour required. Also, I realize now, when I went out into that little space I was hiding. I was always hiding as a child. Hiding and spying. It was a behavior that would serve me well in my later life as a journalist and novelist.
On this particular day my father was working in the lawn and my grandfather, who lived next door, approached him. They began to argue. I didn't know then and don't know now what they were fighting about but I instinctively knew that I was overhearing something I wasn't meant to overhear. Neither man had noticed me behind the shrubs or I'm fairly sure the argument would never have taken place - we were a dignified family, not inclined to open confrontation, and the adults certainly did not fight in front of the children. That's probably why I found this scene so fascinating. Up until that day I don't think I'd even known if was possible for adults to disagree.
Now here's where point of view comes in. On two sides I was surrounded by brick. On one side the shrubs were high and the only direction in which I could see out at all was partially obscured by lower shrubs. It was literally a limited point of view. I was so absorbed in trying to figure out what my father and grandfather were doing that I was shocked when suddenly (at least suddenly to me) my grandmother appeared. She had been standing on the lawn too, but on the part of the yard I couldn't see, the part obscured by the brick stairwell. She ran up to them and put her hand on my grandfather's arm and just then I was conscious of a noise above me and realized that my mother had also observed the fight. She had been standing in the doorway at the top of the stairwell.
When I think about point of view this simple little story always comes back to me. Partly because it's such a concrete way to consider what point of view means: Where is your character standing? What's her angle on the action? And fron that angle what would she logically observe or notice? But also I think this story has stuck with me because it shows that point of view is partly about what the character sees - in this case the argument between my fahter and grandfather - but that point of view is equally about what the character doesn't see. I couldn't see what was on the other side of the brick wall or above me on the stairwell so it was a shock when my grandmother and mother appeared.
Ergo my conclusion. First person point of view is just as much about what your character doesn't know as it is about what she does know.
Now I try to ask myself: What does my character fail to understand about the situation? What does she not know about herself? Where are the literal and metaphorical blind spots? What in the story is going to surprise her when it appears? Will there be things that the reader will see before she does?
And this also speaks to something I think is a misconception about first person, i.e., that the narrator knows the exact same amount that the writer knows. Someone once said to me that he was surprised I was so wedded to the first person pov because it had a single major drawback, i.e., you lose the omniscient voice. I agree that this can be a little problematic....your character can't know about conversations that took place when she wasn't in the room, or describe the troubled childhood of someone she just met. But there are ways around these limitations and most writers figure them out quickly enough. I think my friend who was critical was speaking of a deeper issue - the belief that the first person point of view forces the reader to accept reality just as the first person narrator is dishing it out to them. I disagree. I think there are plenty of ways for the author to alert the reader that the narrator is wrong about certain things.
Still with me? It's hard to talk about these things and that's why I'm nervous about the Hollins lecture. Maybe an example would help. My first novel is narrated by a character named Elyse who is essentially a reliable narrator, i.e., she isn't insane or mentally handicapped, she isn't on drugs or on trial for murder or a 2 year old child. The reader can basically accept Elyse's interpretation of events as sound. But yet Elyse is flawed, as she must be in order to work as not merely the narrator of the story but also the main character. Her primary flaw is that she is impulsive. One of the ways I showed this in the story was to write in present tense so that we see her doing things and regretting them or questioning them almost immediately. Another way is that I have her frequently interrupting other characters when they speak, cutting them off midsentence in her impulsive, impatient way.
Here's what I hope. That the reader will understand that while Elyse sees a lot and knows a lot - she's presented as a bright and thoughtful person - that she doesn't see everything and know everything. I hope that the reader will sense when Kim the writer is pointing out "Elyse shouldn't have interrupted Kelly there....Kelly's making sense" or "Phil has a point, Elyse just can't see it" or even "Elyse is totally wrong on this one."
So there's a point of view within a point of view. Kim the child standing behind the bushes can't see much. She's the first person narrator of the story. Kim the adult remembering the event can see more - she knows what happened later, she realizes that the mother and grandmother were also in the yard, she can come up with more elaborate interpretations of what caused the fight. She's the writer of the story. So if we accept that the writer and narrator are different people it seems logical that we can also accept that the writer knows things the narrator can't know and can thus use the poor narrator's blindness, or at least her limited point of view, as a means to advance the story.
Hard to talk about as this blog, I fear, painfully illustrates. But still I think, worth considering. Sometimes I just stop myself while writing, while sailing along on the wave of a first person narration and ask myself "But what's there that this person isn't seeing? What's on the other side of that brick wall?" This question almost always leads me to something interesting. Maybe even a plot point. And God knows we can never have too many of them.
But that's another subject.
Much of my theories about first person point of view - which, God help us all, I am actually going to be lecturing on this summer at the Hollins College writing workshop - stem back to a single event from my childhood.
I was three or four. This is the first memory which I'm sure is an actual memory, neither a story I was told by my relentlessly story-telling family or a snapshot I saw in an album. The reason I know this is that I don't see myself as a character in the story - I see the story as I would have seen it if I were actually there.
Here goes. The entryway to my family home was a staircase of brick, leading up to a landing. There was a row of shrubs in front of the house. I would play out in the little protected area between the brick wall and the shrubs, pretending this was a fort or a castle or a boat or whatever the fantasy du jour required. Also, I realize now, when I went out into that little space I was hiding. I was always hiding as a child. Hiding and spying. It was a behavior that would serve me well in my later life as a journalist and novelist.
On this particular day my father was working in the lawn and my grandfather, who lived next door, approached him. They began to argue. I didn't know then and don't know now what they were fighting about but I instinctively knew that I was overhearing something I wasn't meant to overhear. Neither man had noticed me behind the shrubs or I'm fairly sure the argument would never have taken place - we were a dignified family, not inclined to open confrontation, and the adults certainly did not fight in front of the children. That's probably why I found this scene so fascinating. Up until that day I don't think I'd even known if was possible for adults to disagree.
Now here's where point of view comes in. On two sides I was surrounded by brick. On one side the shrubs were high and the only direction in which I could see out at all was partially obscured by lower shrubs. It was literally a limited point of view. I was so absorbed in trying to figure out what my father and grandfather were doing that I was shocked when suddenly (at least suddenly to me) my grandmother appeared. She had been standing on the lawn too, but on the part of the yard I couldn't see, the part obscured by the brick stairwell. She ran up to them and put her hand on my grandfather's arm and just then I was conscious of a noise above me and realized that my mother had also observed the fight. She had been standing in the doorway at the top of the stairwell.
When I think about point of view this simple little story always comes back to me. Partly because it's such a concrete way to consider what point of view means: Where is your character standing? What's her angle on the action? And fron that angle what would she logically observe or notice? But also I think this story has stuck with me because it shows that point of view is partly about what the character sees - in this case the argument between my fahter and grandfather - but that point of view is equally about what the character doesn't see. I couldn't see what was on the other side of the brick wall or above me on the stairwell so it was a shock when my grandmother and mother appeared.
Ergo my conclusion. First person point of view is just as much about what your character doesn't know as it is about what she does know.
Now I try to ask myself: What does my character fail to understand about the situation? What does she not know about herself? Where are the literal and metaphorical blind spots? What in the story is going to surprise her when it appears? Will there be things that the reader will see before she does?
And this also speaks to something I think is a misconception about first person, i.e., that the narrator knows the exact same amount that the writer knows. Someone once said to me that he was surprised I was so wedded to the first person pov because it had a single major drawback, i.e., you lose the omniscient voice. I agree that this can be a little problematic....your character can't know about conversations that took place when she wasn't in the room, or describe the troubled childhood of someone she just met. But there are ways around these limitations and most writers figure them out quickly enough. I think my friend who was critical was speaking of a deeper issue - the belief that the first person point of view forces the reader to accept reality just as the first person narrator is dishing it out to them. I disagree. I think there are plenty of ways for the author to alert the reader that the narrator is wrong about certain things.
Still with me? It's hard to talk about these things and that's why I'm nervous about the Hollins lecture. Maybe an example would help. My first novel is narrated by a character named Elyse who is essentially a reliable narrator, i.e., she isn't insane or mentally handicapped, she isn't on drugs or on trial for murder or a 2 year old child. The reader can basically accept Elyse's interpretation of events as sound. But yet Elyse is flawed, as she must be in order to work as not merely the narrator of the story but also the main character. Her primary flaw is that she is impulsive. One of the ways I showed this in the story was to write in present tense so that we see her doing things and regretting them or questioning them almost immediately. Another way is that I have her frequently interrupting other characters when they speak, cutting them off midsentence in her impulsive, impatient way.
Here's what I hope. That the reader will understand that while Elyse sees a lot and knows a lot - she's presented as a bright and thoughtful person - that she doesn't see everything and know everything. I hope that the reader will sense when Kim the writer is pointing out "Elyse shouldn't have interrupted Kelly there....Kelly's making sense" or "Phil has a point, Elyse just can't see it" or even "Elyse is totally wrong on this one."
So there's a point of view within a point of view. Kim the child standing behind the bushes can't see much. She's the first person narrator of the story. Kim the adult remembering the event can see more - she knows what happened later, she realizes that the mother and grandmother were also in the yard, she can come up with more elaborate interpretations of what caused the fight. She's the writer of the story. So if we accept that the writer and narrator are different people it seems logical that we can also accept that the writer knows things the narrator can't know and can thus use the poor narrator's blindness, or at least her limited point of view, as a means to advance the story.
Hard to talk about as this blog, I fear, painfully illustrates. But still I think, worth considering. Sometimes I just stop myself while writing, while sailing along on the wave of a first person narration and ask myself "But what's there that this person isn't seeing? What's on the other side of that brick wall?" This question almost always leads me to something interesting. Maybe even a plot point. And God knows we can never have too many of them.
But that's another subject.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The Muse Comes at Three
Yesterday morning at 3 am I was awakened by a smell. My dog Otis had dropped a pile of poop of such malodorious magnitude on my bathroom floor that it actually woke me out of a dead sleep. I tried to ignore it but finally got up and started cleaning, scolding, dragging towels and bathmats to the washing machine, scrubbing my hands and arms with antibacterial soap, throwing my nightgown in the laundry too....in short I was throughly awakened. Awakened in the worst way. Four hours of sleep wouldn't be enough to see me through the day but it was just enough to make me pretty sure I either couldn't go back to sleep at all or, if I did, I would fall asleep about 5 and then doze away half the morning.
Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.
Damn Otis.
But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.
I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.
What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?
And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?
For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.
In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"
So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.
Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.
It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.
If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.
But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.
Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"
I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.
Otis is usually very regular.
Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.
Damn Otis.
But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.
I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.
What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?
And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?
For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.
In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"
So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.
Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.
It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.
If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.
But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.
Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"
I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.
Otis is usually very regular.
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