Category Archives: Writing

Dreaming a story

Early this morning I had a long dream in which I came as close to lucidity as I ever do. I didn’t realize that I was dreaming, but I did have an awareness that the dream was a story and that I should be taking notes on it. I also had a sense that it was connected in some way to my work in progress. The image that came to mind was that the dream-story was at right angles to the WIP.

The dream involved a sister and brother, a library, and, like my WIP, a much-sought-after secret way of passing from one world into another. But the characters were younger than those in the WIP, and the overall tone was much lighter. It had something of the flavor of one of my favorite children’s books, Dan Wickenden’s The Amazing Vacation.

Unfortunately, my dream recall was not operating at best efficiency this morning, so the story slipped away as I was waking up. (Not helped by Zachary poking me and saying, “Want to do a crossword?” The dear man.) But I like the fact that I had a dream that on some level I was comparing with, or relating to, my WIP.

27 index cards

Some months ago a protagonist and a premise presented themselves to me. I noodled around with them, on and off, and even wrote a handful of scenes. Then I stopped, because I had sworn a solemn vow not to write my way through a novel without plot, plan, or road map. I’ve done that before, and it hasn’t worked out well for me.

I had the beginning of my book, and the ending. I knew the two or three Biggest Things that happen in between. Almost all of the second and third acts, though, remained a mystery. I needed structure, causality, escalation.

“One of these days,” I told myself, “I will Grapple.” I resisted the siren call of scenes that seductively appealed to be written. Did they even belong in the book? “Must . . . finish  . . . plotting . . . .”

Yesterday afternoon  Bonnie shared with me the dining-room table in her family’s Portland house, several hours of her time, and, best of all, her insightful questions and excellent ideas. We did a Taos-style plot break on my book, complete with color-coded cards. And while we did not introduce a shadowy cabal of Norwegian secret agents, we did create a three-act structure that hangs together and will bear weight. Afterward, as she prepared for the red-eye flight home, I copied those index cards into Super Note Card, feeling grateful and excited.

NaNoWri Mo? NaNoWhyNot?

You want plot? I’ll give you plot!

I just came across this hilarious short article that appeared in slate.com in July. It’s about a guy who peddled plot-generators to aspiring screenwriters and novelists in Hollywood back in the DeMille era. The beauty of it is that he was living a fabulous plot line himself–a plot line complete with a serial killer and buried treasure, I add–and never saw it.

www.slate.com/id/2221392/

How to Write a Book

I’m crunched for time on a deadline right now, but it’s been a while since I posted, so I’ll take the lazy way out and post someone else’s clever stuff.

This piece on “How to Write a Book” was forwarded to me by my eagle-eyed and all-knowing pal Magda, from www.yankeepotroast.org, a site that bills itself as “The Journal of Literary Satire: Hastily Written and Slopilly [sic] Edited.”

  1. Do absolutely nothing until you can see the whites of your deadline’s eyes.
  2. If you’ve got cowriters, try to disagree as much as possible. If you’re of the same opinion regarding a section of text, bicker about dinner choices.
  3. Criticize what little progress you’ve achieved and doubt what little talent you possess.
  4. Do not write any new words when there are still old words that have only been rewritten twelve times. No sentence is complete until it’s lost all traces of your original thought.
  5. Complain about the pressure of a looming deadline to everyone you know. This will ameliorate the jealousy and bitterness felt by friends without book deals. It will also put an end to social invitations that may hamper your writing progress, as your former friends will now hate you.
  6. Stop sleeping. Complain about how tired you are too.
  7. Never have a mental breakdown before 11 p.m.
  8. Do not postpone other projects so that you can focus on the current one. It’s better to spread yourself so thin that you produce an evenly distributed amount of complete crap.
  9. If you’ve gotten this far without a single technical foul-up, now’s a good time to download something viral.
  10. Make a schedule for yourself, but do not even remotely follow it. Instead, continually do some mental math that divides your remaining pages by the rapidly dwindling number of hours.
  11. The best writing is that which is compiled from dozens of different documents, including things you’ve e-mailed or text-messaged to yourself. Try to create separate documents on as many different computers as are available. Some things will be irrevocably lost, and hours will be spent cursing. Learn a lesson about orderliness, but do not act upon such knowledge.
  12. Some terribly constructed sentences always make good low-hanging fruit for your cowriters to edit, thus protecting your awful idea from their meddling.
  13. Were you napping? Stop that. It’s 11 o’clock already. Start freaking out, hard.
  14. If you’ve worked hard three days in a row, take a hard-earned day off. And it looks like snow tomorrow, so you might as well take the whole weekend. But a day off from writing is not a day off from complaining!
  15. If you haven’t drastically gained or lost weight, you’re just not writing well.
  16. Assume your sources are reputable. When some accidental research reveals the source that serves as foundation for your work to be as reliable as grandma’s memory, briefly consider the amount of work it will take to correct things at this late hour, then fuck it and move on.
  17. Pick up any book on your bookshelf, skim a few pages, and admit that it’s a terrible book… but better than anything you’ll ever write. Cry.
  18. If one of your cowriters is something of an optimist, shit in his hat.
  19. If you’re not panicking, call your agent and request they he or she panics. You’ll have no problem panicking afterward.
  20. Call your mom.
  21. Your time is more valuable than your money. Spend as much cash as you’ve got in your pockets.

Yep. That’s about right.

A good day for ideas

Yesterday was, that is. (Today bids fair to be nothing but work, work, work to finish my book on Sea Mammals.)

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while. She’s a writer (plays and short fiction) and was curious about my experiences at the Taos workshop. During our conversation, I mentioned an idea for a new book–or at least a premise that might be nurtured into an idea–that I’ve been mulling for the past few weeks.

Now, I’m not by any means going to abandon my large and messy time-travel trilogy, but I’ve been thinking about writing a shorter, simpler, stand-alone novel to put some of the plotting insights from Taos into immediate practice. And I’d outline this one first, rather than writing a flabby, unstructured, overlong novel and retrostructuring it. Anyway, I mentioned this germ of an idea to my friend. Just now she called me about an article she’s reading that is directly connected with the premise; it could offer some good plot possibilities. So I have a starting point: Get article. Read article. See what happens.

In an embarrassment of riches, I had another idea, or set of interconnected ideas, completely unexpectedly, while I was washing my hands in the evening. These ideas were for BS, the first time-travel novel. They concerned some fairly sweeping changes that would make that book a lot stranger, but better. They would also go a long way to solving a couple of its biggest problems. I immediately scribbled them down on my whiteboard, happy to have experienced my first out-of-the-blue breakthrough in a while. (Thanks, subconscious mind!)

And then we watched Children of Men. But even that couldn’t buzzkill my day.