Posts Tagged ‘Novel’

Building a Book

July 2, 2012

I’m trying to build a book. I began about eighteen months ago, with a very clear concept of my protagonist. Like me, P has recently entered a new phase in her life, and is a little bit at a loss. She knows what she’s done and who she’s been. But what’s next?

I asked myself, what if just as P was beginning to figure stuff out, a stranger (S) walked into her life, making a claim that not only threatened P’s plan for the future, but also cast doubt on her assumptions about the past?

That’s the basic idea. I knew what P’s plan was, and what S claimed. I knew, in a broad sense, how P’s response to S would evolve, and how it would all end up.

I understood P’s motives, but wasn’t sure of S’s. I had a basic idea of the most important auxiliary characters – their roles in the story, if not their specific characteristics. I knew the story’s beginning, middle and end, but had only a vague sense of all the stuff in between.

But that was okay. Those details could work themselves out. Right? I just needed to start writing, go with the flow, get as many words down as quickly as I could, and sort it all out later. There’s a technical term for this approach. It’s called pantsing. As in writing by the seat of your pants. Which comes from flying by the seat of your pants. Which, according to this, comes from the early days of aviation, before today’s fancy instruments, when pilots “read” the plane’s reactions by how it felt under their butts. But I digress.

With only the broadest idea, I pantsed the hell out of my story for about nine months, producing many words very quickly, vowing not to stop or look back until I had reached the ending. Following some advice a then-soon-to-be-famous writer gave me in a writing class some time in the 20th century, I kept adding complications. It worked for a while. And then it didn’t. I added so many complications and side tracks that I lost track of my ending. In fact, I never even go to the middle. One day I looked up and realized I had made a huge mess. And I had no interest in cleaning it up.

So I wrote some columns. Played with some picture book ideas. Told myself I sucked. Told myself I didn’t suck. Got a new agent. Revised my other book manuscript. Wrote a short story. Started another short story, but lost interest before I finished. Searched through my files of unfinished projects, and rediscovered my germ of an idea about P trying to plot her future, and S showing up with her inconvenient claim. There, waiting for me beneath the mess of complications and the wild rumpus of unchecked verbiage, were my original beginning, middle and end. And they were still warm.

I decided to try again. Only this time, I would do the opposite of pantsing. I would plan.

I began with the broadest possible, most generic outline. Act I: Introduce character and establish problem. Act II: Complicate. Act III: Resolve and conclude. I divided each act into five chapters, flagging chapters 3, 8 and 12 as tipping points, the halfway-point peaks in the narrative arc of each act. Chapter 8, the dead center of the book, would tip the entire story.

Next, I turned my generic outline into a questionnaire. For each chapter, I asked myself the same set of questions. Where and when does it take place? What are the main events? Which characters are involved? What are the characters’ mental states – the assumptions, dispositions and desires that drive their behavior? What background information does the reader need to learn at this stage? How could the chapters’ beginnings and endings create suspense and help draw the reader through the story?

As I filled in the blanks, I kept a running list of characters and their basic information in a separate document (it’s amazing how easy it is to forget things like someone’s name). When I got frustrated that I wasn’t writing, but only writing about writing, I added first and last sentence(s) to my outline. How many of these sentences will end up in the draft? It doesn’t matter. Writing them helps me figure stuff out. And it helps me remember what this whole exercise is about.

I’ve gotten my form about two-thirds filled in. I think I know how to get from chapter 1 to chapter 8 (the book’s midpoint), and how to get from chapter 12 (the tipping point in Act III) – to the ending. But I’m still a little murky about what how to get from chapter 8 to chapter 12.

But that’s okay. Right? We’re about to go visit family for a few weeks, and I won’t be doing much writing. When I come back, maybe I’ll discover that my unconscious has filled in the rest of the blanks while I was thinking about other stuff. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s time to start writing. If at Chapter 8, I’m still confused, I can always pants.

Like my protagonist P, I’m on the brink of something new. But while P believes she has finally figured everything out, I know that any minute, some unexpected S could wreck havoc on my plans. If and when that happens, I hope I handle it better than my poor protagonist.

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Posted in Fiction for adults, How I Write | 4 Comments »

Telling Time

April 21, 2012

There’s a minor moment in my novel in which two kids squabble over a portable music player. The first time I wrote that scene, back in 2002 or so, the player was a Sony Discman. I later updated it into an iPod. Revising it now, I have just come across a note from my agent. Shouldn’t the iPod be an iPad?

The comment got me to thinking. In what year does this story take place, anyway? When I tell people what my book is about, I usually use the word “contemporary,” to distinguish the present tense plot from the parallel tale that weaves in and out of it, and takes place in the past. No one ever asks what “contemporary” really means. I guess people just assume I mean now. So when I used the word back in 2002, I meant 2002. And when I use it today, I must mean 10 years later. But can I really just keep pulling the story forward?

No. It’s not just that when iPads give way to wePads or iPutzes or whatever, I can’t keep going back and updating the technology. The bigger issue is that my main characters, who are the parents of school-age children when the book takes place, have back stories and memories involving the Kennedy assassination, acid trips, and other details that anchor their childhoods at the time when mine took place, in the 1960s and ‘70s.

And then there’s that parallel plot line, which involves, among other things, early 20th-century immigration, 78-rpm records, and the early adulthood of my “contemporary” characters’ grandmother. I can’t make her stand still in time while her descendants move forward. Not without eventually inserting an intervening generation.

The bottom line? I can’t just keep floating the “contemporary” time period forward. I have to anchor it in time. But when, exactly? Does it take place before or after the terrorist attacks of 2001? The New York City skyline appears in a few places. Does it include the World Trade Center? A high school student in the contemporary story listens to a lot of music. What is it? This same kid has a cell phone. What’s the earliest year when this would be plausible? Two lesbians living in New reconsider having a baby, but the idea of getting married never comes up. Do I bring up the possibility, or call “contemporary” pre-2005 or so?

Timing is everything.

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Posted in How I Write | Leave a Comment »

Back to the Garden

July 20, 2010

I used to be a timid gardener, willing to plant but reluctant to weed or prune or replant. Who was I to say which growing things deserved to live, once growing, how far they could extend their reach or where they were rooted? Live and let live was pretty much my motto. The result wasn’t pretty.

Well into my second full summer here in Rhode Island, I have found my horticultural heuvos. I pull weeds with a vengeance and prune branches with confidence. And I’m beginning to get into the idea of digging up specimens and tucking them back into the soil somewhere else.

Just this afternoon, I took up those three flowering tobacco plants whose leaves turned out to be way larger than I’d expected, and I put them behind the impatiens they’d upstaged. Then I took one of the impatiens plants and slipped it into the space where the tobacco had been. And then I gave the plants a nice soaking to help them settle into their new homes.

The whole operation took less than fifteen minutes. It was enormously satisfying. The corner of the bed no longer looks stupid, and I feel that much less like a helpless bystander in my little plot on earth. I’m feeling the same way about my writing.

For the last little while I’d been anticipating my agent’s editorial notes on Little Grandma’s Mirror. As I waited, too distracted to work on any other project, I started imaging worst-case scenarios. Sure he liked the book enough to take it on, I reasoned, but now that he’s gone over it more carefully he’s realized he made a mistake.

The edits arrived in my inbox on Sunday. They were very thorough. The cover letter stretched over six page – about three times as long as I’d expected. And the attached copy of the manuscript was covered with the electronic, track-changes equivalent of red ink.

Of course he said nice things. He told me how much he loved the book and assured me that I could pull off the revisions it needed to be really great. But those words barely registered. All those questions and comments had thrown me into defensive mode.

I worked as an newspaper editor for several years, so I’m familiar with red ink. But not from the receiving end. Never before has anyone had so much to say about anything I’ve written. Then again, never before have I written a novel of 300+ pages.

I spent a day “processing.” That is, I forced myself to read the comments carefully enough to summarize them in my own words, and I got used to the idea that my ambition to be a writer was ridiculous and unnecessary. Plenty of people live perfectly happy lives without ever trying to publish novels. Without all that pesky composing and revising I’d have more time for less stressful pursuits. Like gardening. All I had to do was work up the nerve to tell my agent when we talked on the phone this morning.

Of course, that’s not what happened. It’s not as if I wimped out. It’s that two minutes into the conversation, we were discussing my book’s structure and themes and characters more seriously and productively than I had ever discussed them with anyone. Having to explain my characters’ motivations made me understand them better. That made me see which of their actions didn’t make sense, and how incidental details could be better used to further my themes.

Yes, my agent was asking me to do a lot more work. But hearing the enthusiasm in his voice convinced me that the effort would pay off. And that made me eager to get started.

I’ll be creating new scenes, weeding out those that don’t belong, pruning those that do, and moving others around. Before I dig into the manuscript, though, I’m going to take a couple of weeks to get some perspective on what I need to do. I’ll do most of that away from the computer: jotting ideas down in a spiral notebook and mulling things over as I muck around in the garden.

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Posted in Fiction for adults, Personal history | 4 Comments »

The dreams that stuff is made of

April 17, 2010

There’s magic in objects. I don’t mean voodoo dolls and wizard’s wands. I’m talking about the aura that’s emitted by the T-shirt you wore to your first Grateful Dead concert – the sense of the sacred that makes that tattered rag impossible to throw out, even though you know you’ll never wear the damned thing again. I’m talking about the associations that make a relic of every item you save from your childhood home, from the prettiest platter to the lowliest note pad.

That’s how it worked for me, anyway. After my mother died, my siblings and I went through the old house, claiming keepsakes. I brought home a carload, and unpacked the boxes with a flourish, eager to reveal my treasures to my husband and the kids. They were interested enough. But not exactly excited. And why should they have been? The sort of magic of I’m talking about isn’t inherent in the things, themselves. It’s in the memories they prompt in us. The stories we bring to them. And unless we share the associations that make those cups and lamps so dear to us, their special status fades, and recede into the ranks of ordinary cups and lamps.

Clearly, if I wanted to preserve the magic of the objects I’d inherited, I would have to record all the stories and associations that made the stuff sacred. As a writer, I had no other choice.

My idea was to write a series of essays or short stories, one for each item. I began with the big round mirror that used to hang over my father’s mother’s sofa in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I started out with what I remembered about visiting that stuffy apartment when I was little, what I knew about Little Grandma.

But stories also have their own magic. What I did know soon gave way to what I didn’t know, and things that actually took place yielded to more interesting events that could have happened. Memory opened onto memory, facts led to fictions, and complications unfolded as characters created themselves. Ten years later, my story had evolved into the novel that is now in the hands of my agent. Few of the actual facts with which I started remain. What has survived is the emotion that impelled me begin, and to follow the project, through all its unexpected turns, to completion. I have also kept my original title: Little Grandma’s Mirror.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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