Breathing Through Broken

Thoughts for the Third Draft

2009-08-02T15:29:00.007+02:00

Book 1: As a result of reading Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted:

More Humor

Kaysen's book reminds me of the power, honesty, and necessity of humor in dark moments. I've realized in the last few months that I've rarely given that humor time of day in my "serious" writing despite the fact that it's part of who I am and who I was then.

For instance, the morning after Neenef killed Maggie, during which us resident assistants slept little if at all, I told Joan, "I need a fucking drink." "I know," she said, the irony being that as RAs, we'd agreed not to drink all year. You never know when you'll need one.

Choose Your Own Adventure

In February 2008, I decided to address the many "what-ifs" by creating a Choose Your Own Adventure mini-book of the events of October 17, 1999. It was called, "Break Up Survival: Will you make the cut?" To play off the series, I said it was Choose Your Own Adventure No. 40-70%, with a footnote stating: percentage of female murder victims killed by an intimate worldwide, according to the World Health Organization's 2003 World Report on Violence and Health. Now I'm thinking this could be interspersed throughout the book.

Excerpt: "Your ex sends you an instant message asking you to come over. You ask him to call on the phone. The phone rings. You pick up and he tells you he has something he wants you to read over.

You sigh and look at the time. You’ve always tried to help him and it seems like he’s always needed it. It’s late and you have your own things to do but you might have ten minutes to spare. And if it means resolving things for once and for all, maybe it’s worth it.

If you decide to go to your ex's room, go to page 16. If you decide to wait and help him some other night, go to page 14."

Book 2: After reading Alice Sebold's (VCFA alum) Lucky, a memoir of her brutal rape in college, the following came to mind:

Sexual Assault as Explanatory Device

So, there it is in all its vagueness--the words sexual assault. And for now, that's where it will stay. But after reading Lucky, I knew something I didn't want to know. In order to explain my 19-year-old narrator's dependency on men/boys, I need to disclose her history of sexual assault, or at least some of it.

Voice of Experience

I knew I needed this after the residency, but after characterizing it in Lucky, I now know what v.o.e. looks and sounds like, which means I can write it myself. Some clues:

references to time (after, now, looking back, years later, in that moment, etc.)
conditional and conditional perfect tenses (woulda-coulda-shoulda)
expressions that suggest doubt (guess, perhaps, might, maybe)
imagined scenes (i imagine, they must have been, he might have)
questions ("do you think i had free will? do you still believe in that?")
placement at the end of a paragraph, scene, section or chapter
superlatives (best, hardest, most, worst, easiest)
absolutes (always, never, no one, everyone, nothing, everything)
generalizations (but life is never that easy, etc.)

Book 3: Chris Noël's In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: A Geography of Grief

Use Murder-Suicide as T0

Just as he did with his fiancé's fatal car accident, I could count forward and backward at the beginning to every chapter, section, and scene in order to keep the reader rooted in time. I don't think I would even have to refer to "it". I could just say, "four months before" "two days after" "six weeks later" and so on.

Title Sections

Could be another way to ground reader. Every mini section could read like a titled chapter. Such as "How They Met, V.1," "How They Met, V.2," "How They Met, V.3,"and so on.

And We're Back . . . 1st MFA Residency Glorified

2009-07-22T15:31:00.008+02:00

Where have I been? Secretly writing my book but declining to post a word about it? No no no. Doing everything but writing my book, in fact. Well, sort of.

First there was the UN internship, when I had to renegotiate how one fits eating, sleeping, cooking, a job, a marriage and a myriad of friendships, both in situ and online, into one life, one day at a time. Then there was the workshop in London. And immediately afterward, the hop, skip and jump across the Atlantic, where I attended my first residency for a Masters in Fine Arts in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

"I knew it would be amazing, but I wasn't sure what amazing would look like . . . "

Variations on the above phrase fell out of my mouth from Day 3 of the residency until . . . no one wanted to hear it anymore, i.e. I came back to France.

Some of the lessons:

Movement vs. Action

That movement (ex. she turned the door knob, opened the door, then entered the hallway) is not the same as action (ex. she ran out of the room).
Movies are great teachers of this principle since not everything can be shown because there simply isn't time. For instance, sex might be implied if its not central to the plot.

Voice of Innocence vs. Voice of Experience

Sue William Silverman, Creative Nonfiction Goddess, uses these terms as a way to differentiate between the persona's then and now. In other words, to tell a story in the order that it happened is not enough. What makes it interesting for the reader is to hear what you know now, to have a sense of how you have reflected on it from a more mature place.

Read, Re-Read, and Re-Re-Read

So I thought I was a good reader. Wrong. I tend to read stories just once. Instead, one faculty member, Douglas Glover (who reads books 4-5 times), showed us how to critically analyze books as a writer--not as a literary figure looking for hidden symbolism, but as a brick layer scoping out the mortar and foundation.
What does this look like? Reading with a pen or pencil in hand, understanding the story's structure, checking point of view, keeping track of words, images, etc, that repeat, look at how the sequence of events relates to the chronology of events. List continues . . .

How to Zero in on Theme

Watch what is repeated--throughout a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a story--and eliminate anything that does not directly relate to the theme. Of course, this means you need to know what your theme is, which isn't likely until later drafts.

Happy, Authentic Stories Do Exist

In response to the question, "Why are your stories so sad?" visiting writer David Harris Ebenbach realized that he was not 100% committed to what he considers the writer's creed: unearthing the hidden truths. Why? Because some of the truths we hide from ourselves are about true joy, absolute beauty. Fakery abounds as well--Disney, Hallmark, etc--which is why it's important to share the real thing. Some examples of stories that do this:
Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn, I Will Redeem," in Ten Little Indians.
Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," in Cathedral.

"Show, Don't Tell" is Bullshit

"Good writers may 'tell' about almost anything in fiction except the character's feelings." --John Gardner
By avoiding precision, characters' motives lack clarity, which affects how the reader relates to them. Unbeknownst to us, the presenter, Laura-Rose Russell, a graduating student, read an excerpt of a story in which she had removed all words and phrases that directly or indirectly hinted at emotion. As as a result, we weren't sure about this character, though many felt disgusted by him. When she read the complete version, we got a fuller picture, and were able to feel compassion for the confused boy depicted in the story. (Clever teaching technique, by the way.)
Examples of Direct Disclosure: "She didn't approve of whiskey." "He wasn't a bad man." "I wept with joy." "I felt the loss."
Examples of Indirect Disclosure: "ruthless" individual, "bitter" winters, "embarrasing" praise.
Examples of Abstract Disclosure: "I prowled about like an animal." "It was as though something had been stolen."

Day 233

2009-03-31T13:39:00.003+02:00

Summary of Second Draft

* Parts are like mini-chapters and range in length from one page to ten.

Introduction

Pages: 1-2
Length: 2 pages

Section I: Before

Pages: 3-45
Length: 42 pages
Parts: A-K

Section II: Countdown

Pages: 46-75
Length: 29 pages
Parts: A-J

Section III: Unraveling

Pages: 76-120
Length: 44 pages
Parts: A-M

Section IV: Descent

Pages: 121-178
Length: 57 pages
Parts: A-U

Section V: Rebirth

Pages: 179-215
Length: 36 pages
Parts: A-T

Epilogue

Pages: 216-228
Length: 12 pages
Parts: A-F

Days 225-232

2009-03-27T12:08:00.004+01:00

The silence has been broken!

As has the 60,000 word barrier. I have officially just finished my current draft--let's call it the second--and have hit 65,147.

Hallelujah!

I feel like I just finished an all nighter, when in fact it's been an all year-er. As April 2009 approaches, I am reminded that I officially started the first word on April 23, 2008, though I started the writing itself in January/February.

As opposed to the first draft, which I never knew I would finish until I actually did, and by the end felt more like a combination of pages without any particular direction, and only a sprinkling of good within it, this feels so much more solid. I know better what I want to say, and instead of holding back, summarizing, or hiding in vagueness, I am saying it. Damn, it feels good. I suppose this is what it is all about.

This is not to say that this is done. No no no. Not done. And I still have used the word: SCENE, sometimes followed by a question mark, in many places. Scene is forthcoming, in other words.

But now I have cobbled together a new version, a more mature object that knows itself as perhaps an older adolescent does, one who knows how to drive. The first one I think was going through puberty and had no idea what was going on--a scary and exciting transformation at times.

My goal is to write those scenes, and fill in the few empty spots next week, then print the damn thing (all 227 pages), and start editing. I start my internship at the UN on April 6th, so I will have less time to devote to it, but since I supposedly don't start my day until 10 am, I hope to work on it for an hour or two every morning.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I will celebrate by eating lunch and falling asleep on the New Yorker (after reading some of it). And that's only the beginning . . .

Day 224

2009-03-05T13:04:00.004+01:00

We're getting there

(where?)

This is the question ticking in my head. I say I am 81% through. But through what? The 60,000 projected words, the absolute minimum to escape from novella and into novel. But my last draft was 63,000. And I've cut much of it. But I've added more.

As I looked back over some passages last night to add in some lines from rediscovered "poems" I'd written at the time, I realized that only my recent work has depth. For much of it, the straight, unwavering line of summary trudges forth. As soon as I've finished this, I will have to begin again, I think.

At a recent workshop with the Geneva Writer's Group, I listened to Mimi Schwartz break creative nonfiction into its three parts:

Scene
Summary
Reflection

Fiction has less reflection, she said, but creative nonfiction necessitates it. She asked us to ask ourselves, "What am I not doing?" And do that.

So with that question in mind, I see how heavily I depended on summary in these initial drafts. That's how you tell a story, I thought. And this really happened. And now I'm telling it. So it's a story. That's true. And it is one way one can tell a story. But it doesn't mean it's any good.

How does a storyteller enchant us? By bringing the story alive. Sharing the touch of the satin robe, the pinch of the antagonist's nose, the smell of the slaughtered pig burning on the spit. In other words, through scene.

In addition to the issue of summary, for the past several weeks--ever since I hit the material about winter quarter--I have been slogging through a swamp of melodramatic reflection. Such as:

"In the brokenness that follows, everything I’ve believed dissolves into crumbs."

or

"I’m floundering and I know it, but everyone who isn’t is just another reason to be angry."

What do I do with these? I delete them. I try to work them into scene.

Can I show myself dissolving? Yes. I can not get out of bed, I can not make it to class, I can stare at a knife, etc.

Can I show myself being angry with someone else who's not? Why yes. In fact, a scene comes to mind, one in which I'd gone to a friend's dorm room for help with chemistry, and went ballistic when his roommate, an ex boyfriend of mine, was jumping on his bed and laughing.

So there. That's why I write this blog, have this conversation with myself and whatever eyes are lurking--in order to process it, and through the process, find another jumping off point, though into what, I never know.

Days 221-223

2009-03-04T14:55:00.003+01:00

Both Monday and Tuesday were excellent writing days. Just as in my last examples, one tired description after another gave birth to a breathing, living scene.

This:
"As with every other break up, even the ones I’ve been responsible for, I hyperventilate through my tears, choke on the snot, and fall to the floor. After an hour of writhing on the cold linoleum, I’m calm enough to breathe normally again."

Becomes this:
"As with every other break up, I fell to the floor, this time my body half on a stiff rug whose palette looked like melted crayons, their shavings of wax having been woven into the fabric—magenta here, lizard green there, the sort of yellow we always use to depict sunshine in grade school though in fact our star’s light is far too scattered to match that potent concentration of color. My body curled into a question mark, my arms dangled outward as if branches fallen from a dead tree, my belly grew into a hard mound then collapsed over and over again underneath my grey sweatshirt, and my hair splayed out behind me as if I were flying. Maybe I was."

And all thanks to Margaret Atwood. Today was not a good writing day, as I spent most of it searching for a poem I wanted to include that I've only now found. Then I scrapped together part of a few scenes, but my heart was far from in it.

But today was a rapturous and devastating reading ay. In preparation to return to the Gex library, I finished The Blind Assassin. I had to. Here are some of the last lines my eyes lingered over, my lips read aloud to another's ear and my eyes watered:

p. 395
"I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light.

You want me to tell the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones."

p. 417
"I've looked back over what I've set down so far, and it seems inadequate. Perhaps there's too much frivolity . . . Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge."

p.494
"I could have stopped there. I could have chosen ignorance . . . I chose knowledge instead.

Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, well go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed."

p.508
"Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them."

Day 220: Are you there, God--I mean Margaret? (Atwood)

2009-02-27T14:51:00.006+01:00

As of the last few days, I've been able to write setting. (So what have you been doing for the rest of the 219? Ah hem. Avoiding it.) I don't know why, but this has been one of the hardest things to write, next to scenes. And yet scene and setting are intricately woven together, so if you get one you find the key to the other. ahhh. How nice.

During my noontime swim (and before plowing through half a fresh baguette while reading the New Yorker--its sometimes hard to believe my own luxuries even as I live them), I was wondering why and the answer came: Margaret.

Not just any Margaret. Margaret Atwood. As you'll see in my "reading" column I am reading her novel The Blind Assassin, a series of stories within stories. I've crept past page 200 and so far have been blown away by every moment and everyone line except one ("revenge is a dish best eaten cold," because haven't we all heard that enough? and what the hell does it mean anyway?).

I can turn to any page and find a description that makes me realize Atwood looks deeply and in a way I've usually never considered, thereby giving me a gift when I get to see through her eyes:

p. 42, "The orange tulips are coming out, crumpled and raggedy like the stragglers from some returning army."

I like to imagine Atwood has spent her life making these sorts of observations and putting them down in a notebook and now pulls from it as needed.

p. 110, "Her hat tumbles off, her arms are around his neck, her head and body arches backwards as if someone's pulling down on her hair. Her hair itself has come unpinned, uncoiled; he smoothes his hand down it, the pale tapering swath of it, and thinks of flame, the single shimmering flame of a white candle, turned upside down. But a flame can't burn downwards."

In the second one, Atwood shows off another one of her tricks: present something beautiful but perhaps doubtful, then recognize the doubt so that the reader still trusts her. Damn. She good.

Because of this, I've been able to make the following changes:

Passage A before Atwood:
"benches strewn with men in women’s winter coats whose bodies have been soaking in their juices for days and out the back door"

Passage A after Atwood: "that era had been replaced with the aroma of unwashed bodies, men in scalloped winter coats that cinched at the waist, whose sleeping forms were strewn over the benches"

Passage B before Atwood:
"I’ve set the alarm so we wake by 8:00 AM to make my appointment."

Passage B after Atwood:
"When we woke to my alarm’s electronic bleat at 8:00 AM, the temperature had risen and the snow had expanded into slush. My appointment, or in some ways, our appointment, was in an hour. Of less importance, my first class was in thirty minutes."

Passage C before Atwood:
"Today is the day we drive down Stadium, that grey, open expanse into nothing, where because of the slippery mush and Big Daddy’s unresponsive automatic transmission, we have a few moments of not knowing whether we’ll make it at all. I pull out in front of traffic thinking I can spin off into the distance at any moment. Instead we just sit there, motionless, wondering if the oncoming traffic will make contact or whether we’ll escape"

Passage C after Atwood:
"Today was the day I would pull onto Stadium, that six-lane, almost-highway that disappeared into our city streets, thinking I could spin out in front of oncoming traffic before remembering as we sat there, motionless, that the automatic’s acceleration had a several second delay, during which time I did not admire the forgettable scenery of light and telephone poles, black wires stretching in between them like warm Twizzlers, or the white caked tree limbs’ claws reaching toward something I couldn’t see."

Ta da! and thank you Margaret, Setting Goddess.

Days 218-219

2009-02-26T12:06:00.003+01:00

Success. That's what revisiting the scene, describing the inner and outer landscape, turning overheard comments into actual dialogue, summary into moment by moment action, feels like.

I rewrote the section about my Seattle visit, which grew from one three page section two two sections that total nine pages. A description of the boyfriend's ex girlfriend showing up unexpectedly turned into a full scene. At first this was hard because it wasn't a moment I wanted to revisit. Before beefing it up, I reduced in length because so much of it was me saying, "It's not fair," in one way or another, lines that weighed down the text and pulled the reader out of the story.

Note to self: the narrator, on her own, cannot absolve herself of guilt. That's the readers job, and as a writer, I need to remember that.

I also rewrote the next scene, which stayed the same length since I replaced more inner dialogue with setting, something glaringly absent from much of my text. I actually took the time to describe the Kalamazoo train station in full detail and it felt good. Instead of hating it, which is strangely my initial reaction, slowing down to describe everything down to the wrought iron bars felt right. I'm doing it, I thought. And why all the slowness? Because this scene reveals the major surprise of that relationship, though it might be less of a surprise to the reader than it was to the narrator at the time.

In some ways, this means slower going, but it's better going. And that's how I'd like it to stay.

Days 213-217

2009-02-24T11:57:00.003+01:00

Funnily enough I haven't had the urge to post (as you can see). In fact, I've been avoiding it. Why? Maybe I was afraid it would slow my momentum, as if it were better not to think about things, to skip over reflection and just push forward into action, squeezing it out until the last drop.

Apparently that method isn't effective. Which is why I'm here again, to reflect.

The last ten pages have felt harder and harder, bringing up questions like: Do I really want to describe the scene when I first worried I might be pregnant? And the answer feels like no. But it's in the book, I say. Its all summary, its unclear, its vague and it needs to make sense.

After I hit that particular roadblock yesterday I had another go today. It went much better. It was still mainly summary, but there was a reason: I remember very little of that moment, and what I do remember was that it felt like a blur even within the moment itself.

In that case, saying the following becomes accurate:

"Dice were rolled. Words were uttered. Laughs were had. Some voices were high pitched, some were low, some were barely audible. Mine was among them but I wasn’t sure which one it was."

Plus the moment I actually found out is a scene, as it should be. So hooray. Success.

In general though I find myself wanting to do anything but write this. The material feels very heavy and I squirm in my seat in one odd posture after another (why is it so hard to lean my back against the ergonomic foam?). Noon yet? No. Damn. Noon yet? Un un. I tried smudging the room to lighten things, which lasted for two to three sentences.

I think I zipped through the first 90 or so pages because I could tell myself it was someone other than myself I was writing about. And in many ways it is--I am very different from my 19 year old version. But I was also writing about happy, spunky me, not making bad decisions and suffering the consequences me.

Now I'm to page 135. Great right? Except for when I look at the word count and see I have about 20,000 more to go. Which is fine! It's not even March yet.

But inside I'm doubting and just wanting to "get this over with," as if that was why one wrote a book. You write a book to stay in it, to be fully in the moment, to climb the walls, to eat the flower petals, to smell the stench of a tortilla burning on an open flame and collect its ashes. So I'm praying for the willingness and the bravery to do that.

Days 210-212

2009-02-17T12:44:00.003+01:00

Annie Dillard calls a line of a words a "miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe," in The Writing Life, though lately it's felt more like a bulldozer, charging ahead without care or concern for anyone or anything in its way. That doesn't mean it's out to get you, but that it just wont be bothered if you end up underground. Perhaps not a pretty picture, but the end result is the only way forward and it's called momentum.

As I charge ahead in my something-st draft of this book, I see bits and pieces that don't fit here or there but I decide it doesn't matter. What matters is that I keep going. The better the material I have to work with, the clearer the editing will be. For instance, the imagined scene where Maggie and Neenef want to start over and the light in their eyes looks extinguished clearly goes after their murder, but right now it's before. That's easy to change but there's no reason to do it now. Better to wait until I can see the whole picture.

I've also realized that the story doesn't need to bounce back and forth incessantly between their story and mine. The form can be more organic, less rigid. Chunk o' my life, bit of theirs, and so on. This way we can get to the murder much sooner and continue their story long after they are gone.

And here is the most important realization I've made today: repeating the words of Max the great, "it is irrelevant whether or not someone likes your work," in a critique, it is also irrelevant whether or not I like my work.

Ahem? Yes, I mean it. If my going forward, my working on this draft, my commitment to this book is based on whether I like this sentence and the next and the one after that, well I might as well shut down the computer and walk out the door because that absolutely wont happen. In fact, I'll run into cliché after cliché (like that one there), weak verbs propped up by laughable adverbs, abstract statements about pain and grief that sound as if they've come out of a 15 year old's mouth, and so on. In other words, I will write and edit passages that I hate. Period.

And anyway, what a huge expectation to live up to. Not only do I have to trust the process, plop myself down at the computer and blindly romp forward for at least three hours a day, but everything I write has to be likable? Am I trying to win a beauty contest or am I trying to write my first novel?

So, right here, right now, I am committing to my new motto, which I will repeat: my writing has value irrespective of whether I like it or not.

Day 209

2009-02-11T16:22:00.004+01:00

Mme. Erika, Fragment Collator

Like my new title? (Made it myself.) It doesn't exactly compare to Dr. Bastard next door. Yes, Dr. Bastard, the one I direct would be patients to every other week. But my title fits for today.

After complaining that my book was really just a series of fragments, a true statement since I had started pulling out whole sections on one topic, collating them, and polishing them up in separate documents, I decided it was time to put Humpty back together again. And it feels good! I don't feel so lost. In fact, it seems I have a road map, and I think its better than MapQuest (do people even use that anymore?) except that it lacks a clear destination.

Today I finished the last "meeting" scene between Neenef and Maggie, the 7-11 scenario, and I am pleased with the result. At just three pages, it's short, but most of the introductory work to their characters has been done. And of course like everything else it is going to change, but I got it to where I could get it today. Plus, the lists I created with what we already knew about Neenef and Maggie and what we didn't yet know helped me not only create the scene--the fact that 7-11 attendants hit on Maggie--but also add to it once I had sketched it out. I also learned though google image searches that 7-11's are now owned by a Japanese company, and that Japan is now a huge market, and Tawain has the highest 7-11 density (Starbucks like, across the street from each other.)

Next up are other imagined scenes about Maggie and Neenef showing their relationship. I think there will be two of these, three tops. First I am going to scour the imagined scenes I've already created and see if there is anything to take from them.

Another possibility is to have them actually typing to each other on the computer (and using some of their ICQ dialogue to accompany it). Max, M. Content Editor, suggested to have two versions of the same scene and show the disparity between thoughts and actions. For instance, Neenef could write the same things in both scenes, but in the second one, think something totally different. And yet he is so trapped in the "playbook" that he doesn't go off script. Very clever.

I need to decide what book I'm going to read next. I guess it should be one of the ones I got from the French library--they have four shelves in English. Either Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assasin. But first, the New Yorker.

Day 208

2009-02-10T12:10:00.002+01:00

I recently emailed my writing coach and content editor, Max, that I would have a new draft ready by April. This morning, with almost half of February gone, I asked myself, "What the hell was I thinking?" A nice way to start the day . . .

And yet, despite that, I was successful. I finished the scene with Maggie's mom, for now anyway, and it feels right. I am sure it can become more skillful, more beautiful, paint more pictures, but for now it is doing what it needs to do, which is be a first draft.

Then I tried writing the 7-11 scene where Maggie and Neenef meet. It started off interesting enough, and I like the energy in it, the dishonesty and the sexual tension tug of war, but part of me is tired of writing these "when they met" stories. I wonder if two can be enough. But there's always power in threes. I wrote a page and let myself say, "I can't do this," before moving on to something I was willing to do.

Which was work on the K College and Kalamazoo setting pieces, which I know will not be pieces in their own right, but need to insert themselves in existing sections. They're pretty uninteresting right now, though. I'm trying to transform it from a history lesson to something that adds a shadow to a setting that is currently as deep as a the fake sunset lone ranger rode off into. I did what I could, and I imagine I'll keep coming back to it, polishing and polishing until I find each fragment a home inside the larger piece, which right now is also a series of fragments.

Then I moved onto two other sections, one on my room which was once 4-5 pages and now whittled down to one and a half because did we really need to know all that? I didn't think so. Now its more focused on the necessary details. Then I worked on the K section, about how I got the Heyl, what that meant, finding out about study abroad, taking the Spanish class at Western in order to have enough credits to go to Ecuador, and meeting Neenef. I was excited enough about it to keep going 10 minutes past when my writing usually comes to a close.

Day 207

2009-02-09T18:19:00.004+01:00

Mixed Monday: I started late. I told myself not to email and then I did. I spent some time working on getting applications out because I knew it would be my only chance today to do so. I tried to work on the imagined meeting scene between Maggie and Neenef and then decided I didn't like it at all. Time to press delete. And then restart. I decided that the basketball game scenario just wasn't interesting. Instead, using a line from Maggie's memorial website, which mentioned how all the 7-11 attendants would hit on her, I thought I could change to a 7-11 or something like that and put that act in motion.

The good things: I got some really helpful feedback from an insightful friend about the latest changes I've made to my writing sample. One of them was a suggestion that I write a scene describing my meeting with Maggie's mother last November when I was in the states. I agreed. So I started writing it and it flowed. I think its more telling and showing at this point, and yet what I learned from my first draft of my manuscript is that I can't show everything, and in fact, I shouldn't. We need some telling to get to the showing. Anyway, I'm still working on that balance.

I didn't finish that scene though because I was suddenly insanely hungry and tired and cold, so I made myself my second cup of tea and munched on this Swiss desert that is basically like a fried tortilla caked in powdered sugar while staring at our new wall map of Europe and letting the snowy crumbs fall to the newly mopped floor.

May tomorrow be more focused . . .

p.s. I just got news that I got into Vermont College, my preferred MFA program. This is why I need bottles of champagne handy. I mean, I'm in France for god's sake.

p.p.s. Thoughts on movies & books: Yesterday I read the Diving Bell and the Butterfly (see note in right column) and watched Milk, starring Sean Penn. Both are tragedies and I was intrigued by how the stories were told. In both, you know the protagonist will die. There is no mystery about that. But the way its divulged is what matters. SPOILER ALERTS.

In the first example, a memoir written by a star editor of Elle turned quadriplegic after a massive stroke, begins when the author returns to consciousness after the fog of a coma. He has some moments of hope that he'll be able to move again. Then he finds out he never will. He describes the process of being trapped in an useless body while his mind still functions perfectly. The very last chapter is dedicated to the day of the stroke. Six months later he dies.

In the second example, a biopic on the political career of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city councilman in the country, begins with footage from the day of his death. Ambulances crowd city hall. A woman announces to a camera, "It is my duty to inform you that both the mayor and supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed." Then it leaps back almost ten years to Milk's closeted life in New York, after which the audience watches his political life unfold in San Fran. All the while, his strained relationship with fellow councilman Dan White begins in the background. The second to last scene is that of his murder, followed by the 30,000 mourners who marched in his memory.

Both made me think about how that might be an effective way to start my book: a cursory scene of the murder, then at the end divulge the details.

Days 205-206

2009-02-06T14:25:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I began by cleaning up some sections I'd already been working on. The process goes like this:

collate all material on a particular subject
change all of the present tense verbs to past tense
delete and add sections as necesasary
clean up the language
repeat steps 3 and 4 until perfection or exhaustion is reached

I worked that process on a new section, all of my RA material. But here is the issue: the process, particularly the beginning of it, is incredibly boring. And yet it feels like a "safe" way to spend my time. Safe and totally uninteresting. Not that this whole writing a book thing is pure excitement. But still. Internally I was falling asleep. So I knew I had to do something different.

That's when I started working on a new imagined scene of how Maggie and Neenef met. I feel a little lost since I already have two that essentially do the job I had set out for them. But I have to start somewhere. So I chose a basketball game as a setting and life got interesting again.

Which brings us to today. Since I wasn't exactly sure where I wanted my "characters" to go, I thought I'd just see what happened with the writing. But sometimes the writing lies. For instance, I had Neenef reluctantly inviting Maggie to his dorm so he could show off his computer skills. Then I thought that doesn't sound like Neenef at all. So I put on the brakes and went back to the dialogue. What is he willing to do? Where do I want them to go? What's both realistic and purposeful for my manuscript? Difficult questions!

So what I realized is that I really wasn't sure what I wanted to get out of this scene. That's when I started making lists of what we already know and what we don't know. I revisited my notes about them, the ICQ messages, Maggie's memorial website and made two long lists for each of them. The thing is, not everything we don't know is necessary. Just some bits are. But what are they? And from that, what would be realistic to learn in their initial moments together?

Those are the questions I am sitting with. I'm hoping an answer will come to the surface by Monday.

p.s. Here's one line from my notes that I really liked: "Neenef was so quiet about his defeat that most mistook it for sweetness."

Days 203-204

2009-02-04T16:09:00.005+01:00

Recently I've been feeling as though this writing process has been an interesting journey in learning what to imitate and what to release into the great wide open.

First I wrote it as an essay. Then I read and tried to imitate. . .

Nick Flynn's memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Like him, I wanted to go in a million directions: plays, poems, greek tragedies. But Flynn's book is based on his entire lifelong relationship with his dad. Mine is about a year. Scratch that. Next up . . .
Alexander Fuller's memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. One of the most engaging memoirs I've read. Loved that it was all scenes in present tense. Copied that. Content editor pointed out that it's easier for the reader to hear, "I was hot shit," instead of "I am hot shit." Currently in process of transforming all of it to past tense. Then there was . . .
The movie Juno. I liked how it split up the year into seasons, since that's what school does to you, teaches you to fragment your life into mildly meaningless sections. I thought this would work perfectly for me. But nothing about the story has anything to do with seasons. So I dropped the season openers even though I loved them as I would my own children, eliminated the sections entirely and moved to chapters, which I know nothing about (how do you title them? how long should they be? what do they look like? how do they feel? ahh!). That's when I found . . .
Truman Capote's true crime novel In Cold Blood. As I've already said, he does a fantastic job with tension, transitions, and setting the scene. He also happens to divide his book into sections, not chapters. Except his sections, though based on a timeline, are thematic in nature. Aha! I can do this too. And so I get rid of the chapters and go back to sections, the first of which is called Before. In the back of my mind there's also . . .
Curtis Sittenfield's Prep. She organizes her book by year and by season, but that makes sense because it covers four years at a private school. I will go back over this more carefully and perhaps make more discoveries, but for now one thing stands out: her epilogue includes the whereabouts and goings on of all the characters. Ah yes, the readers want this. Thank you Curtis. Of course I couldn't forget . . .
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The way he plays with the truth inherent in fiction, and uses repitition both to give stories power and to show that they're not in fact memories but stories are two things I've decided to steal. Add to that having the narrator speak directly to the reader to explain the book's purpose. This is scary but useful. Last and possibly least is . . .
The movie Iron Man. Plus any horror movie I've ever watched. The burst into action and then the backstory afterward in the former, and the five minutes of happy quiet before the bloodshed begins in the latter, inspired me to start the book with an email I sent right after the murders. Then I realized the email was not quite so terryfying. It is, after all, an email. So that got deleted.

Write now I am focusing on Tim O'Brien's authorial interpretations, which feels really wrong for some reason, as if I'm breaking a cardinal rule no. 718: author does not exist. But the author does exist! It's all a mirage, dear readers, all a mirage . . .

Having said that, this might be exactly what this writing needs. A little "by the way" to set the stage. Which is what this is all about: finding out what the writing needs. Not my ego. Not my fantastical expectations. The writing. Period.

Day 202

2009-02-02T12:02:00.003+01:00

I'm very happy to share two things

I submitted my first MFA application on Saturday, to Vermont College (exciting, thrilling, terrifying)
I am back to working on my book and not a a years' worth of work crammed into a 25 page writing sample

I still have three more applications to go, all due on March 1st, but I've realized that in order to get that first 25 pages where it needs to be, I need to get the book where it needs to be. And having the space and time to do that is magnificent. I feel like I can breathe again.

What I've decided to do is to pull from the existing manuscipt everything pertaining to a certain subject, and then polish those bits and pieces. For instance, I took out all the ICQ messages and put them into one file, then whittled them down by a third. Then I went through them again and reduced them by half. I hope to keep reducing until I just have a page of the most important things they said. It's hard to let go of sharing their entire messages, but I know its what must be done. And I'm not sure what I'll do with them once I have boiled them down to their essence: create a scene using the dialogue, show them typing the words to each other are possibilities.

Then I pulled everything about the narrator's relationship that summer instead of having two pages here three pages there, which made it easier to repeat things or miss parts of the story. I am transforming it all from present tense to past tense, omitting unnecessary ramblings or back stories (I even have a reoccuring back story about the dining room table), altering the text to make it more honest, and trying to strengthen the language. I don't feel amazing about what I've written, but I know its getting better. And if I hadn't written it in the first place, I wouldn't have anything to work with now.

Now I'm on the section about how I chose K College, the scholarship and the study abroad program I hoped to go on. What occurs to me is that this could be a section where I say something about K, give a historical sense of it and an idea of the community one could find there. I've realized that I have a hard time remembering to describe the setting, and this is one place where I could focus on it, if only for a paragraph or two.

Something Capote did so well in In Cold Blood, was to start with a wide frame then zoom in for a portrait. My writing either hops around between the two or just jumps in for a frantic, nose-hair revealing protrait and then jumps away before the reader even has a chance to look around the room. I'd like to balance that more.

Day 201

2009-01-28T17:21:00.003+01:00

Back at it, in between feverish naps that pull me under covers until the next coughing episode wrenches me out of sleep. Which means not all of me is here. But the part that is wrote a new beginning to The Book today. New as in stolen from my very very (very) first draft of it, which adeptly sets the scene and tone.

I had thought starting with the email I sent to my dad and sister the night of the murder would do that, but emails just don't make that much impact. I was using it to mimic the firefight and abudction that sets the stage for Iron Man and have only realized in the last week or so the vast oceans of difference between a four line email and grenades flying at your face. Which is fine. Needed to do that, had to go there. And it no worky.

Instead, I now begin with the present voice, "When my second year of college comes to mind, and it often does, . . ." and set the stage rather ominously. This takes a lot of weight off the readers' shoulders, who were previously asking, "So what's this about? When does it take place? How old are you? Are you in school or working or what?" Now its spelled out.

I also took away the chapters and decided, yes my book will be broken into sections as I'd originally planned, but not by season, because season really played no part in this. So the first section is called Before. Section Three is currently titled Minutes to Midnight. I don't know if an entire section can withstain that or not, but I do like the title. (Section II and IV have not yet been born, in name anyway.)

I am hoping that by shifting some of these things, they can work like a jigsaw puzzle, shifting the rest, back and forth, up and down, until the solution becomes clear.

Truman Capote: Transitions Genius

2009-01-27T15:34:00.002+01:00

So I've just finished Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood. And I mean that genuinely. He was a damn fine writer. My writing coach had suggested that I read it and make a plot summary of it to see if that would help me figure out how to frame my story. And I think it will help but there is also the fact that the work is essentially flawless, a reality my first book is very far from at present. Meaning I'll need to remind myself that I don't have plenty of work behind me and am not at the top of my game. In fact, I'm at the beginning.

Aside: In Cold Blood is a true crime account of the murders of parents Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and children Kenyon and Nancy Clutter in Holcombe, Kansas, in 1959.

Framework Breakdown: Capote breaks his book down into four sections

The Last to See Them Alive
Persons Unknown
Answer
The Corner (inmate's term for the gallows)

Within those sections, he has mini sections which range from a paragraph to twenty pages, with an average of five pages, and these are separated by white space. In other words, there are no chapters. I call him a transitions genius because he jumps from through the white space to the next mini section seamlessly, as if the end of one were a conversation with the beginning of the one that follows. Examples:

End: “Marie scared?” “Hell yes, her and everybody else.”
Beginning: “Not everybody.”

End: Arthur Clutter says “I’ll wager whoever did it was someone within ten miles of where we now stand.”
Beginning: “Approximately 400 miles east of where Arthur Clutter then stood,” the murderers could be found.

End: "And while I was sitting there, right there in Warden Hand's office, he picked up the telephone--”
Beginning: “The person to whom Warden Hand telephoned was Logan Sanford”

End: "I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.”
Beginning: "But then he was."

Other great endings:
“He headed home for the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last.”
“Do you know what tomorrow is? Nancy’s Clutter’s birthday. She would have been seventeen.”
"Added up, how much money did you get from the Clutters?" “Between forty and fifty dollars.”
“Prior to the Clutter myster, the four cases cited were the sum of Dewey’s experience with murder, and measured against the case confronting him, were as squalls preceding a hurricane.”

Capote masterfully steps through time to give the details in an order that expertly holds narrative tension and yet doesn't feel cheap or manipulative. The book begins the day before the family died and ends after the murderers are hanged. But with each section and mini-section, Capote takes a solid longview before closing in the subject, whether its setting, or Kansas' history with capital punishment, or the number of people on death row at that time, it always begins with a wide angle lens before focusing in and capturing a portrait.

So what I keep asking myself is, how do I do the same?

When is a Day not a Day?

2009-01-19T10:20:00.003+01:00

When I don't write. It's rainy Monday, socked in grey, and I've been going over my application essays and fighting with the mouse. Last Wednesday I left this mess to its own devices and packed up for sunny Barcelona, where life was good and responsibilities were on the order of getting off at the right metro stop. Now I'm back to reality and wanting to escape. In fact, I don't want to write this blog. I am forcing to write it because I've decided it still counts as "writing." And writing is what I told myself I would do between the hours of 9 and noon. It's 10:23. And counting.

Perhaps this sense of being dragged back to this gigantic monitor silently kicking and screaming is because its back to applications and essays and really what could be duller. On top of that, I reread my literature essay and its just not very good. Which is fine. It's not due today or tomorrow. Or even next week. But still, its weak and I've sent it to many people to read (4!) who will soon know "the truth" about me. Zut alors, the French would supposedly say.

What I want to do (and let's be honest, might) is grammar exercises in my French books that have been sitting under the table for months, unused and unloved ever since this worrying about applications process began. (Anxiety takes up at least as much time as writing, if not more.) Why does this sound appealing? Because I feel I will have accomplished something. And there is a right and wrong, and since it has an answer key, I will know which. And because I've spent the weekend speaking Spanish and now I feel very confused.

Time to wrap this up, though, isn't it? What's the answer then? Now the grammar book sounds foolish. Oh silly me. Just reading? Is it okay to read when its crap out and I feel stuck and foggy and lost? Max said I should do a plot summary of books whose plot works. As in re-read Prep or read In Cold Blood. And I would like to. But I'm already finishing Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling from, avoiding Stephen King's On Writing and fascinated by the graphic novel Persepolis, which I'm reading in French (well aren't I special?). Wouldn't it be wrong to add a fourth book to that? I used to be one of those who said I was reading four books at a time, but it was never really true and so I distrust others who say the same and wonder about the "wisdom" of scattered reading as a whole. Really, what is all this coming to?

You be the judge. (Actually, it's me, but it was nice to pretend.)

Days 197-200

2009-01-13T17:35:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday in between sips from a bowl of miso soup an idea hit me: I'll put the email I sent to my dad and sister in the early morning hours after the murder on the first page. I have done and I'm still considering it a thing of genius. The reader is woken up with an undeniable truth before the back story makes him/her forget it. Obviously, everything is subject to change, but its working for me.

Influences? To be honest, Iron Man. I know. But it's true. Classic action move style, Robert Downey Jr. is caught in a firefight and captured by terrorists, then the reel jumps back 24 hours earlier to see who this guy was before being hidden in a cave. Similarly, I saw my manuscript turn into a screenplay, where the audeince sees this email popping up on the screen the night of the tragedy, then watches the story jump back three months earlier to witness me cruising down the highway at ninety thinking I'm on top of the world.

So that's a small and big victory in this process of sequencing.

On to the imagined scenes of Maggie and Neenef meeting. Several people have asked: but don't you want to find out how they really met? No, I don't.

Since starting to research this project, I've learned plenty of things I didn't know then. That Neenef was a resident alien from Iraq. That he was Christian. That his father sent his mother from Seattle to San Fran every time they fought. That he didn't want Maggie to go out with her friends, to smoke or drink, but that she'd disguise herself and do it anyway, thinking the whole thing was just one big game.

But I didn't know that then. And I was still tremendously affected by it. So to use those details now seems inauthentic in some way. They're still just details to me. They're not real.

What does feel real is what I've read in the police report, particularly in their instant messages. That's where I've gotten the strongest sense of who they were. What have I learned in there about when they first met? That it was in January. That she fell in love with him from the moment she saw him. And that's it. Two weeks later at the Monte Carlo dance he punched out a window and left a trail of blood back to his room. He asked security not to tell his parents and they agreed. Story ends. (For now.)

On the MFA side of things, after dinking around with a boring response to a series of questions for my personal essay, I went through it line by line with J and he had some amazing suggestions. From all that discussion, I was able to come up with the first line,

"I first became serious about writing when I was six."

And from there, the rest pretty much flowed. I know writing teachers say you can start anywhere, beginning, middle or end. But its damn helpful to have that first line/para/page.

Day 196

2009-01-07T12:02:00.003+01:00

Back to writing. Not editing. Writing. I can tell I haven't practiced that in a while. After an hour and a half I kept looking at the clock to see when it would save me from my head. When it reached 11:30 I wanted to do something sneaky, like watch previews on the Apple movie trailers website. But I told myself, no, this time is dedicated to creating. So if I can't write a new scene then at least I can edit the ICQ messages or something mindless like that. And that's what I did.

That's what the end looked like. But the first half was divine. I wrote my first scene imagining how Maggie and Neenef met. It felt dangerous and somehow that felt right. Whenever I step into the world of fiction I say things I wouldn't dream of saying otherwise. It's so freeing. Since I'm halfway through reading Where I'm Calling From, the collection of Raymond Carver stories, I'd like to imagine I'm writing like him, giving just the necessary details and nothing else. As if I could suddenly become Raymond Carver. At the same time, I do feel influenced by his brilliance, the way he makes note of all the small details and how they add up to something meaningful.

But now I feel drained. I told myself I would recharge with yoga but I'd rather get under the covers and go back to sleep. Except that then I would wake up in the afternoon and feel full of self-hatred. So I'll skip that, pop in the yoga dvd and see where I get to. See you tomorrow.

Post 2nd Book Chat with Max

2009-01-02T11:11:00.002+01:00

So here is the big news for 2009: Apparently I'm not writing a memoir.

Well I am. And also I am not. You know, that duality thing. Opposites attract and all that.

Max made the very astute point that unless Maggie and Neenef come alive in my narrative, their deaths don't have an impact on the reader. So in order to not only do them justice, but to provide a story for the reader that's worth reading, I have to fictionalize their relationship. Seems easy enough. But somehow I'm pretty disappointed. As if memoir is pure and fiction is full of lies. But everything's a manipulation to make the story not seem like a story, just an experience the reader wants to prolong. So maybe its all lies. And what's wrong with being a skilled liar?

Max said that, "The building blocks of memoir are memory and the foundation is imagation, whereas the building blocks of fiction are imagination and the foundation is memory." In other words, everything in a memoir comes from memory, but in order to recreate those memories, to rebuild those scenes, to create the dialogue, you have to use your imagination. But for fiction, the ideas, the plot lines, the characters come from your imagination yet are often based on people, places and things you have experienced yourself.

Max also stressed the importance of sequencing. How would the book change if I started it with the suicide note, for instance? He had a funny (to me) joke:

Writer 1: Have you read Moby Dick?

Writer 2: Well, I've read all those words, just not in that order.

Writer 1: Then we're not talking about the same book.

Sequencing is about keeping the narrative tension alive, that space between what the reader knows and what the reader is curious to know but doesn't yet know. It feels like a totally foreign thing to me.

So those are my thoughts for now. I've forgone skiing in the French Jura today to work on my MFA applications since apparently no one else is doing it for me after all. So off to it.

Days 190-195

2008-12-22T09:53:00.005+01:00

Time Line

For two days after my last post I worked on time lines. First I dinked around with a template in Excel, which proved to be a waste of time as I'd imagined it would. Then I did it the old fashioned way, with markers and a roll of paper (but no rulers--apparently my perfectionist tendencies are lessening). Having said that, I made and remade the timeline several times until I got it "just right." What I ended up with was one time line from 19998 to 2002 and another time line magnifying the period from July to December 1999. Not only are they incredibly useful as a memory and plot aide, but they were also fun to make. Afterward I used poster goo to stick them to the walls of this "creative space" so I can admire their organizational prowess.

Narrative Outline for Second Draft

This took the rest of the week. It also took some courage. Such is the nature of cutting. Secretly, I tend to think of myself as a poet. (Occasionally.) And so, as a secretive poet, I thought it would be appropriate to include little poems throughout the book here and there. But unfortunately that slows down the story, calls attention to itself and is relatively confusing to the reader ("why is this here?"). I even said goodbye to the very best poem, "Season of Loss." It just doesn't work, thereby adding to its list of losses. The introductions to the seasons had the same fate. They were gorgeous. Funny. Beautiful. And yet they really had no purpose. I thought I had completely taken care of setting within those few pages, but apparently one cannot describe setting once and then forget about it for the rest of the book. And they did absolutely nothing to advance plot. I found myself telling J, "Well, they really shouldn't be there but I'm not ready to get rid of them yet--maybe in the next draft." Later I realized how ridiculous that sounded. So goodbye to you, my little seasonings. I loved you just as you loved me. And who knows, maybe you'll turn up somewhere else.

The bit I haven't yet decided on are the imagined scenes. Since they repeat the information from the instant messages earlier in the manuscript, I'm not sure that they advance plot, yet I think they are useful in some way, perhaps just for adding flesh and blood to Maggie and Neenef's relationship. I think most of them stay, but I don't yet know in what form.

Because I really wanted Max to have a chance to look at the outline while I was gone, I finished typing it up around 1 am on Friday evening, despite having to rise at 5 am to catch our flight to Munich. Dedication, Europe style.

Reading list: Prep

At Max's advice, I spent my nights last week reading Prep by Curtis Sittenfield, which I couldn't put down despite wanting to smack the protagonist up the head pretty much incessantly. As opposed to "acting out," as I did in high school, breaking all the should's and shouldn'ts by sharing my every thought, the main character, who seems to be very similar, even in her looks, to the author, "acts in" refusing to say or do anything for fear of the repercussions. In other words, if I would have met in her high school, I would have hated her and then would have subsequently ended up as one of the bitches in her storyline. Having said that, what I got out of it is that good writing doesn't have to look like one amazing sentence after another, but the ability to get the reader to turn the page. It's also about connecting with the reader--in this case getting the reader to remember what her high school experience was like, how s/he both loved and hated attention, avoided and pursued her peers, and possibly fell in love or something like it. I did have a moment of surprise reading the book jacket cover and finding out that Sittenfield attended the Iowa Writers Workshop (what? how?) but here she is, making her living as a writer. I hope to do the same. Go Curtis.

Days 188-189

2008-12-04T11:32:00.003+01:00

Signal the trumpets! I have finished this grueling exercise and I will celebrate it before going onto the next one. What have I learned by doing these time and date stamps for each chapter as well as narrative summaries?

I jump around in time in a way that doesn't serve the telling of the story
I try to fit too much into a very small space (sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc.)
The chapters in which I focus on one moment are much easier on the brain
I think I'm talking about one time in particular when in fact I'm moving backwards and fowards
Lots of shaping ahead: what details serve the story and which don't?

As Max reminded me, memoirs are not a list of what happened in a given time period, but a story, and all stories must be shaped. For instance, I went to the bathroom at least 365 times that year (ok, 1000 is more likely) but I don't include any of that.

What Max said is that distilling these narrative summaries will give me plot, and once I have that, I can create a new plot to shape the second draft. I look forward to the days when I can start with an outline and then create my first draft instead of the other way around. So next step is distilling the summaries into a plot, though I wont spend more than a day on this, and then its time to start the summaries of what the book could look like.

By the way, though I've been saying I've finished my second draft, I've decided that that was just a modified first draft. So I'll be using "second draft" language for the next go-round.

All for now! I think I'll make myself a sweet treat in lieu of the trumpets, as they have yet to make their move.

Days 186-187

2008-12-02T12:21:00.004+01:00

This narrative summary thing feels hard. Very hard, despite poet Rolfe Humphries assertion that "very is the least very word in the language," which I agree happen to agree with. Still, though. This is a weak moment, and weak moments call for weak measures.

The good news is that I'll either finish tomorrow or the day after. That's the good news. The bad news is that I don't want to. The bad news is that trying to specify exactly what happened and when in each little chapter has me considering purchasing a straight jacket off of Amazon. And yet I must, if I'm ever to figure out what I wrote my book about.

I guess this is one of those lacking in patience and compassion moments, as in why did I try to cover this many places and times in a single page or two. Here's an example from of my date and time stamp from the introduction to winter section:

Location in General: An area of the world with four seasons, house, yard, road
Timber Ridge bunny hill 1988, Gobles, MI
Recess in Kazoo School 1986-87, 1401 Cherry Street, Kalamazoo, MI
Uncle’s cold apartment on Douglas in late 1980s early 1990s, Kalamazoo, MI
Sitting in dad’s lap on the couch in the living room in late 1980s, 1616 Jefferson, Kalamazoo, MI
Parking lots in late 1980s, Kalamazoo and Portage, MI
Almost hit a tree, Krista Maier’s driveway winter 1997, Kalamazoo, MI
Car accident on Alamo January/Feburary (?) 1997, Kalamazoo, MI
Time in General: Winter, specifically from November to March

Ahh! And I get how going from first person to second person in these introduction sections

("You walk out the door, pull it shut and step down to the pebbled walkway, serenaded by the now-useless screen door’s squeaky diminuendo echoing out over the street: click click creak. ")

is entirely confusing and unnecessary in the way it calls attention to itself. Who am I talking about exactly? Later on in the intro, all the examples are personal, but in the beginning it's this nebulous "you."

Ugh. Well, I'm putting it on record that right here right now, I'm resisting the urge for destruction. At least of the book. Maybe there's something else I could destroy, like a cardboard box. Watch out!

Day 185

2008-11-28T12:10:00.005+01:00

Here's an example of one of the narrative summaries I did today.

The material: Chapter 22: Maggie and Neenef ICQ Slice 10: Wedding Bells

Ninjoda: one day God willing i’m gonna marry you cause of how much i love you and we’re gonna be very happy together. i miss you hun. night.

Ninjoda: God babe i love you so much . . . . . and i miss you . . . . i talked to my dad today and he asked if i had a girlfriend . . . . and i say yes . . . . he asked if we were serious and i had to say no . . . . i think i’m playing my cards right . . . . . . so it’s possible he’ll send me over for the year . . . . . . we’re gonna talk again tomorrow and i gotta convince him . . .

Ninjoda: hope i didn’t scare you with my last message

First attempt at summary: Neenef promises to marry Maggie one day. He’s revealed to his father that he is dating a girl against his father’s wishes, though he lies and says it isn’t serious, which he hopes means he will still get to come back to school. Several hours after he’s sent the first message he says he hopes he didn’t scare her with it.

It's three sentences despite the "chapter" being so incredibly short. Ahh. Not good.

Second (or possibly third or fourth attempt): Neenef reveals to Maggie his plan to marry her and to his father the fact that he’s dating her despite his father’s no-dating rule, putting into question whether Neenef will be allowed to return to “K” in September.

Okay, I can live with that. Upwards and onwards! (or is it vice versa?)

Day 184

2008-11-27T12:10:00.003+01:00

Outlining somehow necessitates a large amount of caffeine. My head feels fuzzy. I think of lots of other things I could be doing. And yet, somehow I keep my ass right here in my chair and keep going. I've decided that each day I need to do at least 11 chapter summaries along with their date and time stamps, and so far, between yesterday and today, I'm 2 for 2. I'm hoping that next week, when Jon is in Hong Kong, I can up that number with evening or afternoon sessions since otherwise, with 95 chapters, it would take me all next week and into the following Monday. So I think that finishing by midweek next week is a good goal.

This exercise reminds me of writing for radio, getting the facts down and figuring out how to say them in an interesting yet easily understandable way. Apparently when I write creatively, its very easy for me to forget that the 5 W's and the H are still instrumental. For instance, putting the date time stamps down is challenging. Sometimes in a single chapter, which is never more than a few pages, I jump all around in time in space. Here's an example:

Chapter 14: How I Choose “K”

High School References (first paragraph, HS biology):
Kalamazoo Central High School 2432 N Drake Rd Kalamazoo, MI 49006 1994-98

Heyl Dinner:
May 11, 1998 5:30 PM in Hicks Center, Kalamazoo College, 1200 Academy, Kalamazoo, MI

Born on Hippie Commune:
In a trailer, May 5, 1980 Summertown, Tennessee

Childhood Home from 1984-1997:
1616 Jefferson, Kalamazoo, Michigan

The summaries have also helped me realize where the story repeats itself. For instance, in the ICQ messages between Neenef and Maggie, they are often arguing about the same thing over and over (will we break up or not). Including those same arguments may make it factual but it doesn't make it interesting for the reader. That doesn't mean that I make anything up but that I only need to include the lines that introduce new information.

Days 178-183

2008-11-26T12:55:00.004+01:00

Well well well, its been a while. Since my last post, I finished the second draft, edited the second draft, sent it to my editor, the glorious Max Regan, who discussed it with me yesterday and whose advice I'm now following (and I staffed a woman's weekend in French and visited family in the U.S. for ten days).

This is a lot. Was a lot. Continues to be a lot. Since the days devoted to writing were few due to my travels, I lengthened my writing sessions from 8am-2pm (instead of 9am to noon), and spent an entire day reading and editing the second draft until it was finally time to go to bed. Then I made the edits on the plane ride over to the US and during two early mornings at my in-laws kitchen table and one afternoon at the dining room table while everyone else played Mah-Johg. At first, the accomplishment felt wonderful. Look at me. Look at what I have done! That lasted for about three seconds, plus or minus one. Then the fear set in. People are going to read this. Max will read it. And then he will know what a crap writer I am and most likely everyone will hate me and I'll live the rest of my life alone in the woods, where I'll somehow figure out how to grow a beard and shrink in size by three feet.

Then I talked to Max and was so relieved. He reminded me that first attempts at writing a book are about finding out and attempting all possibilities, which he said I've bravely done. He also reminded me that a memoir is not a list of everything that happened in the order it happened but a story that must be shaped, manipulated if you will, for the reader's enjoyment. Even though I have plenty of source material (letters, journals, the police report), I don't have to include everything in them as if this were an autobiography, but I can instead pick and choose what is useful to the story. In order to know that, I must know what the story is about. Which brings us to the narrative chapter outlines.

At his suggestion, I am writing a one sentence summary of each chapter: who does what, what new information is introduced, etc. I'm finding this extremely difficult, actually, and have to write and rewrite each summary to get it down from a she says-he says paragraph to a succinct single line. I'm also including a time/date/place stamp at the beginning of each chapter so that its no longer floating in outer space. Then when I finish with this and get an idea of what I do have, I can decide on what I should have and make a new outline based on that.

Day 177

2008-10-31T13:55:00.002+01:00

I am plugging away, as my dad would say. I feel really solid about my writing and about what I'm doing. With each sentence I fix, each description I freshen, each paragraph a reassign an importance to I'm able to say, "Yes!" These are the messages that bubble up:

I am doing the right thing
This story is worth telling
I have the right to tell it
I am talented
I am a writer!

It's now the last day of October and I'm not done with my second draft, but I'm very close, and I've been doing a very thorough job. I noticed as I skimmed back that in the beginning, I just wrote down the comments from my edits but I didn't actually change very much. But since the middle of the fall section, I've been rereading the chapters aloud and altering them until I am happy with and proud of my work, which brings me a lot of joy.

I keep being clearer that there was no reason to shame my first draft, to think it was crap, to denigrate it in any way. I absolutely had to do it in order to have something to work with, and now that I have something to work with, I am doing just that. And its getting better all the time.

Day 116

2008-10-30T13:26:00.002+01:00

Another 10 pages down! I know I just wrote about not counting the progress, just sitting with it, experiencing the journey and so on, but it still feels good to move along. My goal was to finish the second draft before the end of October, but that looks like an impossibility at this point.

At 84%, I am close, but I still have at 34 more pages to go. Plus the epilogue, if I can get any farther on that. Plus the inserting of the chat and imagined scenes. Plus reworking the imagined scene that's on stage and in costume. Plus reworking the last imagined scene, which is just a series of texts.

I just decided to cut out a two sentence sex scene. Not much of a scene, obviously, it only being two short sentences. My edit asked, "Is this necessary?" and I decided, no. It was more like gratuitous nudity in a movie, and we all know what boobs look like. I'm doing such a raw, honest portrayal of myself and yet adding that to it, making it that much more intimate, is not something I'm ready for, I don't think. I didn't like the thought of anyone reading it, actually. Now that I'm saying that I worry that the way it happened was indicative of the sort of relationship I was in and that maybe I shouldn't have cut it out. But that's not something I can know now.

Playing with memory is interesting as well. Obviously, I have to go with the feeling of certain interactions and make my best guess to what was said. But at least I'm going with a feeling. In the scene where I'm told about an adoption, my edit was: "Rework. I can't see Erika or Sean. What are they wearing?" The truth is, I have no idea what we were wearing. Sweatpants, maybe? Jeans? Something fairly forgettable. And that was the last thing on my mind at the moment. So I keep looking at that edit and thinking, "You have no idea what you're asking for, lady!" Except that lady is me.

Days 114-115

2008-10-29T08:50:00.003+01:00

Getting there. Yesterday I went through the last pages of the fall section again as I didn't feel they were quite complete. In fact, I knew that I had rushed through them just to be done. And writing this book, no matter whether I'm on the first page or the fifth draft, isn't about "just getting it over with," no matter how many times I trick myself that it is. It takes as long as it takes, and what's important is that I sit with it, that I'm present to it, that I don't skip over the words in front of me just to make it to the words on the page that follows.

In that sense, I feel really good about the work I did yesterday and today. I'm cutting and rearranging material to help it flow better, and to space it correctly in time, which is very challenging. When I wrote the first draft, I wrote in terms of subjects rather than time and that's been plenty confusing. I still have a lot to piece together. J suggested I write a timeline for all the events and I think that's a good idea though I feel some funny unwillingness to do it. I want to say, "I know when it all happened!" and yet, if I know that, why is everything out of order?

I plowed into the first 10 pages of the winter section, the introduction to it taking the majority of my time, mainly because I hated it when I was in my edit mode. It seemed only a few words were not crossed out. Not that my editing was wrong. It was absolutely right. It was just a shock since I thought it was some sort of amazing jewel when I wrote it. But now I feel really good about it. Solid. I didn't just fix the bits and pieces, but the whole thing. That's something to be proud of. I did notice that I do have this fear that someone down the line, an editor or publisher, will tell me to take these seasonal introductions out since in some ways they are what I love most, helping to set the scene and the tone for the section that follows. And yet in that fear, I forget that it is my writing, and I do have a say, the strongest say of all, really.

I'm not giving this one away. Not this time.

Day 113

2008-10-20T13:03:00.003+02:00

On Saturday, I shared an imagined scene along with the ICQ messages it came from with the Geneva Writer's Group, which was a really good experience. Though it was difficult to say whether it worked in the context of the book, there was generally a warm reception to what I had done. Somehow I was oddly hoping there wouldn't be, but I guess I even have to swallow the good stuff. They helped me with the mechanics of the dialogue, which I was grateful for. Then words like "clever" and "original" were said a few times, which was nice. And interestingly, one woman said, "I see this as a film script," and ten heads nodded in agreement. Does this mean I need to go to some screenwriting program? I wondered. I had an enthusiastic really? in response followed by an oh shit really.

Today I cleaned up the scene I had shared with them using their suggestions. I had Neenef rubbing his eyes when he woke in the middle of the night, and someone scribbled next to it, "Do people really do this?" I thought about it, and my abrupt answer was no. At least I certainly don't. In fact I've often operated by the superstition that if I remove the eye crusties before daybreak, I wont ever fall back asleep. So far, no evidence goes to support that claim, but superstitions have never had much to do with the scientific method.

Then I finished the fall section, as I had hoped I would do before leaving for London tomorrow. I will most likely take a laptop there with me to continue to clean it up, since in the last few pages I mainly inserted comments without fixing anything substantially. In other words, as the end is far from final, its actually incredibly unsatisfying. In fact, I feel like I'm lying by changing my progress bar to 75%. But it will stay and I will go on, and the drafts will continue until its time for it to go out into the world and seek help from others' hands.

Days 111-112

2008-10-17T17:02:00.003+02:00

Despite it now being Friday and therefore three days having passed since my last post, I think only two days of writing have happened. Unfortunately, my off and on schedule has taken what's a pretty challenging piece of the story and made it that much more difficult to tell since one moment I'm in it and the next I'm out.

I feel frustrated, angry and sad about that. I want to come up with a list of people to blame andy yet it was my own choice, so scratch that. And occasionally (very occasionally) other things have priority. Actually, on that note, I've said that this would be my year dedicated to writing, and yet that's not the whole truth. Its also been dedicated to settling into living in France, learning the French language (very committed to that), rising the ranks of leadership in Woman Within, staffing their weekends and taking on a staff support role, revisiting Venice and falling in love all over again, anniversar-ing in Paris, staying with friends in London for a total of three to four weeks and getting crazy Vidal Sassoon haircuts there, discovering Stockholm, and, come November, going back to the US to clear up remaining business: the issue of our stuff in Houston, getting out of our scheit bank, and getting new licenses. Add to that, right before Christmas, we'll spend a week on a river cruise with J's family in Germany and Austria.

So I guess I'm sensing that I'm not as committed lately and this is bringing up ALL the ways I haven't been committed, as if I'm trying to make a "How I don't measure up" list. I'm fairly clear that that wont help. And its not totally in tune with reality either.

The rather large grain of truth, however, is that since the summer, when my six week intensive French course made it impossible to write, commitment has been spotty. Especially since August in fact. Clearly traveling during September and now October (going to London next week) is a part of that trend as well. And my first way of approaching this is thinking its an unchangeable system. But that's just not true.

So I've written less lately. Yes, its true. But who's to say I can't write in the afternoon as well? Just because my schedule has been one way doesn't mean its not time for change. In fact, that's exactly what its time for. I'm also looking at applying to long distance MFA programs in the US, which I was really excited about in August and now feel more stressed about than anything. I told J the other day I wouldn't want to start in June. But why? Why delay it? What do I gain by that? Escaping my dreams again?

Sneaky shadow stuff. Sneaky sneaky sneaky. But I've caught it. Right here, right now, on this page, in this blog. And I will be watching you.

Day 110

2008-10-14T14:05:00.003+02:00

Phew. The writing day has come to a close. Why phew? Because that's a silly thing to say, both being a word and not a word, and because its 2pm and I usually end at noon. Having said that, I usually write from 9 to noon and that didn't happen today. It didn't happen for a good reason, but I still find that frustrating. I don't like sitting until this late in the day, not doing yoga, not showering, not getting properly dressed. So a big fat blech on that.

Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I will start at 8. No ifs ands or buts. Not even a phew! This way the hour I will miss, from 9-10, again for a good reason despite being unhelpful to the writing process, will not have me looking for a bright red self destruct button. Not that I am looking for that button now. I'm too tired. But chances are . . .

On the good news bandwagon, I've jumped forward a whole seven percent of progress on my cute little bar. My goal is to finish the fall section by the end of the week. I just got through the final Neenef and Maggie material, and the last of it is the hardest. I felt a ball of steel coming to being in my gut as I tried to figure out exactly where the two of them were standing when he shot her the first time. Despite being so committed to this book, this is a day where I question exactly why I'm revisiting the worst day of my life. It's as if I'm trying to sit in that room with them, watch their final moments, and stay as still as a Buddhist monk.

Maybe I have some non-Buddhist monk-ing to do this afternoon to get the feeling of this tragedy out of my body, as I know it doesn't serve me nor anyone else.

Day 109

2008-10-13T22:26:00.004+02:00

Today was another important today, as I was working on what I consider to be one of the most, if not the most important scene: the moment we find out what has happened. There was the 19-year-old me who was concentrating on her Spanish homework, finishing up the exercises before 1:00 AM on a Sunday--early, in other words. And then there was the me afterward, screaming, crying, punching my punching bag, not able to put a single sentence together. And the space between the two is so large, so insurmountable that the two seem like different people. That's because they are.

Was was interesting to realize was that in this draft I had basically taken out both moments when our supervisors gave us the information about Neenef and Maggie. I just refer to it but the reader never got to experience it. What a cheat, I thought! I would be a very angry reader at that point, so mad I might stop reading the book altogether. Luckily I had written much of this in my first attempt at writing this, in a workshop--a 20 page version of what I have now, though in truth they are incredibly different--and was able to splice the two together.

Because of this, I spent almost the entire morning on this section, which means I eked forward from 51% to 54%. But I know this was an important one to get right now. I couldn't leave it until draft number three.

Day 108

2008-10-10T13:29:00.002+02:00

In Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and yoga, 108 is a sacred number.

number of beads on a rosary (to help the practitioner repeat a mantra 108 times)
number of names for Hindu deities
number of times the bell rings to bring in the new year in Japan
number of positions Shiva Nataraja takes when he dances
number of steps in front of a Buddhist temple, etc.

In a yoga class, I once attempted 108 sun salutations, though the truth is my body said no more around 80. Apparently it was not yet ready to be a spiritual vessel. For those who have not gone there, this is no easy feat.

So what does 108 mean for me today?

Due to all the research I did this morning to fill out my chapter 8, which is on homecoming day and the dance that followed, and despite the extra hour I added to my practice, I only inched forward one percent on my progress bar. Yet watching the bar isn't what this is about.

Thinking about Shiva, and his cosmic dance through the path of creation and destruction, I connect to the alignment of creation, and through this act, of writing, of truth telling, of allowing these unspeakable secrets to find a light, an ear, a page, their power dissolves.

Day 107

2008-10-09T12:36:00.002+02:00

Every day I commit to writing is a good day. So it was a good day. I broke up my morning a bit, which means I had less light bulb moments, but I was also reframing the ICQ chats, which feels a bit deadening and doesn't leave much room for creativity. I'm happy to report that I'm now 100% done with that because I've finished the last of the chats, which ended on October 17, 1999.

Tomorrow at Kalamazoo College they will have a 10 year anniversary memorial for Maggie at 11 AM EST called "Remembering October 18: The Legacy of the Murder-Suicide," presented by Gail Griffin at Stetson Chapel. This brings to mind a few things. One, Gail Griffin is also writing a book about the experience, though hers might be finished or even published by now. I try not to think about that much, though when I do, I remind myself that what she's written on the topic so far that I've seen is much more heady and focused on the occurrence of domestic assault than lyrical and personal, which I consider mine to be.

It also makes me wonder about how we decide on an anniversary date. For instance, I just told a friend that the date is October 17th, but apparently, from this day we are supposed to remember, others go by October 18th. Perhaps since it happened around midnight there is some confusion as to which date it fell on. My understanding from the police report is that it happened between approximately 11:40 and 11:50 PM on Sunday, October 17th. So for me the anniversary is the October 17th.

Day 106

2008-10-08T13:37:00.003+02:00

So, today was better. I even liked what I had written in the first draft and there was a general lack of shaming edits, which was a nice change. Some of my fears popped up, such as:

When the hell am I going to finish this thing
Will it ever be publishable
And if it is, will everyone send me hate mail

To which I'd like to respond

It doesn't actually matter. Just keep doing what I'm doing and I'll be fine. In general though, I imagine I will be a lot closer to a finished product by the end of the year. Also, please refrain from future references to this creative work as a "thing." It deserves a lot more respect than that.
That's absolutely out of my hands at this point and really not what I'm focused on. Let this fear go.
Again, we are so far from this moment. And its important to note that my honesty is most brutal to myself. I'm trying to share with the reader my state of my mind at the time, which was often cruel, but I make clear the difference between my thoughts and reality. Instead of a bully we really see the sad, insecure girl that is me at 19.

Breathe in. Breathe out. And keep writing.

Days 102-105

2008-10-07T12:16:00.002+02:00

During days 102-104, I finished the summer section, which felt like a big accomplishment (because it was). I also separated out the imagined scenes and added to them substantially. This was especially nice since it was right before going away for almost two weeks and the sense of finality was refreshing.

Of course, my first day back being today, Day 105, doesn't feel so refreshing. I'm onto the beginning of the fall section and am reading such loving edits as "retardo" and "what the hell does this have to do with anything?" Its easy enough to delete the offending sentences but I don't have any answers to the second comment, which means the chapter on my room stays despite having no idea why its there.

Yet in response to that I will repeat what I heard a wise woman say a few days ago, "What I know about confusion is that if you're not sure, it's not time to make a decision." In other words, since I'm not sure about these scenes, its not time to delete or destroy or recreate. I will just let them be.

Day 101

2008-09-22T22:07:00.003+02:00

Good Monday.

Why? Because a friend was helping me with it yesterday, which brought it to the forefront of my mind. Also because I started an hour earlier just for kicks. Kicks are a very good thing, it turns out. So the two things we decided, or rather, he said and I scribbled down in red pen on a free notebook I took from my husband's office,

The imagined scenes work
Until I figure out the overarching theme of the story, I don't actually know whether anything works, since theme/meaning is the guiding force behind those decisions.

So its hooray and "Shiiii" (Clay Davis style on The Wire) at the same time. For now I'm going to stick to being excited about number one, and just let the second one simmer a bit.

Imagined Scenes Live on in a New Venue

Though right now I will continue to add the edits from the first draft into the second, after I finish I'm going to take all the imagined scenes out of Summer and Fall, probably deal with them as a separate entity for a bit, then I will insert them into Winter and Spring. This keeps the Maggie and Neenef thread going all year and mirrors the processing of it that I was doing at the time and am doing now.

Thus, instead of imagined scenes during Summer and Fall, which would probably confuse the hell out of people (something I have a knack for), I will only include what really happened, i.e. insert the actual ICQ message, time dates and online names intact, etc.

This solves everything! (I'm sure that's not true, but I'll ride it for as long as I can.)

Days 99 to 100

2008-09-19T11:42:00.007+02:00

100th Day Celebration

Well this just took me by complete surprise. Somehow I wasn't aware that 100 came after 99, but in this dimension, that's exactly what happens. Considering how waffle-ly I've been about my writing in the past, this is worth celebrating, though since J just left on a trip that might mean me drinking alone, which would put me onto some sort of warning sign list. Hmm . . .

Hard Ass Work

So, I'm slugging away on the imagined scenes of Maggie and Neenef and everything I've said about memoir being harder than fiction is disappearing into thin air since apparently its hard to compare things when you know absolutely nothing about one of them. In this case, that would be fiction.

And it might be different I were creating scenes from scratch, but I'm not. If it were my scene, I would make the two characters utterly insane because I'm into that sort of thing, but instead I've got a depressed boy and a cheerful girl and I'm having trouble figuring out how to make it interesting. Then there's the fact that its all dialogue and I don't know how to do dialogue, so I guess I'll just keep guessing.

But, as I said to a friend when I emailed him an excerpt this morning, "Treat it like a deformed baby. Don't hate deformed babies. It's not nice." I'll try to remember that.

Charting the Flow of Connection/Disconnection of Each Scene in Excel

I've decided to make a connection/disconnection chart for each imagined scene, and this actually takes a while but I think I'm learning something from it. At the very least I'm giving myself permission to play around. One way of treating story structure, according to Janet Burroway, is like an inverted checkmark. It begins with a conflict, has a series of complications (line curves up to the right), then there's the crisis (top of the checkmark), the falling action (short part of checkmark), and the resolution (end of checkmark).

Another way to treat it is as a series of connections and disconnections. Janet Burroway explains, "In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the Montague and Capulet families are fiercely disconnected, but the young lovers manage to connect in spite of that. Throughout the play they meet and part, disconnect from their families in order to connect with each other, finally part from life in order to be with each other eternally. Their ultimate departure in death reconnects the feuding families," (Writing Fiction p.33)

This is the first chart. The Y axis shows the level of connection, using a qualititative scale of 0-10, 0 being none, 10 being complete connection. Then I determined what I considered each separate moment to be and what the level of connection was. All of this relates to dialogue, except for the first one, which is in reference to a fight they'd had, which I consider to be zero connection. Anyway, its interesting to play around with even if I'm not sure what its showing me. In my next scene, however, the line goes flat for a while, helping to show that its just not that interesting, which means I have some cutting ahead of me.

Days 97-98

2008-09-17T16:27:00.003+02:00

Tuesdays are always better than Mondays

I'm getting back into this. I took a (non sexy) shower scene and turned it into a three page investigation into my compulsive behavior, i.e. speeding home from work, showering for three minutes or less, and then sprinting to Spanish class on my bike, and get this: it was fun.

In fact, the lesson for today is that when I have fun writing, its more likely that my audience will have fun reading.

And Wednesdays better than Tuesdays

Today was short and sweet due to someone having smashed in one of our car windows last night (because of which I filed my first police report--en français), but generally I'm clear about a few important things:

I like what I'm doing
I believe in the work
I'm learning a hell of a lot

I reworked most of the first imagined scene of Neenef and Maggie, though tomorrow I'll rework it some more, and just like in yoga, taking the time to slow down and really see my surroundings made it so much more interesting. My complaints on Monday about the mundane things I've written about ring true when I haven't slowed down enough to show that its not mundane at all. The way Neenef watches Maggie at the beginning of the scene, for instance, half hidden from his bedroom window, is both creepy in that he's hiding, but also because it shows how much he worships her, which I think is useful information. Some combination of the less than/more than complex is present at all times for him, at least according to his ICQ messages with her.

Also, it was interesting to see that in the first draft I changed a lot of their dialogue from the original ICQ text to my own language, which was a whole lot less interesting. I wanted it to sound "right," but of course it sounded too right, which made it boring. It's far better to keep Maggie's dislike of contractions and Neenef's clearly non-native English, and his surprising nickname for her (yes, I'm just going to dangle that one), than to put in my own version.

Lessons:

Slowing down offers an opportunity to see past the mundane
Text lifed from the actual messages has so much more appeal

Days 95-96

2008-09-15T12:00:00.003+02:00

As I've been plugging away, inserting my edits sentence by sentence, page by page, which is surprisingly slow going, unfortunately one nasty question keeps appearing:

Who in their right mind would want to read this?
(A question that assumes insane people read a lot of boring books)

So in response to that, I want to remind myself of the following:

Nothing is final
I don't yet know where I'm going, I just know I must keep going
I can only see as far as my headlights will take me
Even if I don't use something, I gain from learning how to clean up the writing
It's not my place to say what goes and what stays (at this stage)
I'm just the typist

Days 93-94

2008-09-11T13:53:00.003+02:00

Reluctance to Listen to Self

Despite my self-admonishment on Tuesday concerning the small novella about my parent's kitchen that apparently was supposed to double as my second draft, I found that on Wednesday, I was still writing about my parent's kitchen.

It only jumped from 15 pages to 17, but the second version was vastly improved and included two poems about the moment before I open the lid on the cast iron pan to reveal whether or not it holds any hidden treasure, i.e. fried tofu.

The best part of the day, however, was that I reread the highlighted bits of Janet Burroway's chapter on setting, and found . . .

Questions To Ask About Setting

Burroway starts the paragraph by saying, "As with character, the first requisite of effective writing is to know it fully, to experience it mentally, and the second is to create it through significant detail.

What sort of place is this, and what are its peculiarities?
What is the weather like, the light, the season, the time of day?
What are the contours of the land and architecture?
What are the social assumptions of the inhabitants, and how familiar and comfortable are the characters with this place and its lifestyle?

She ends with "These things are not less important in fiction than in life, but more, since their selection inevitably takes on significance." I answered these questions about the kitchen, though the second one is scene specific, and finally felt sure that I'd covered all the bases.

Where Do I Go From Here AKA What the Hell Am I Doing?

That second question popped up a few times yesterday and today (in a moderately friendly tone), along with other questions, such as:

Should I actually write each setting separately then add it to the draft afterward?
Or should I add each setting to the draft as I write it and its fresh in my mind?

I went with the second idea, which was working well until

I realized there was only one scene in the kitchen,
I wondered what I would do with 220 printed pages of first draft covered in red ink. Which brings us to:

Adding the Edits

I inserted everything I'd circled in red, got excited about the "add comment" button, and retyped portions I rewrote while editing. This was both fun and extremely boring. I felt myself wanting to fall asleep until I started adding new edits on top of the old ones. But apparently by the end I was having such a good time that I went 15 minutes past noon without realizing it.

I'm finding my way by trial and error and luckily don't see any of these dead ends as "mistakes," though I do hope I don't see any 15 page essays on the bathroom.

Day 93

2008-09-09T17:54:00.002+02:00

I started a few minutes late today. It's true. I was going to lie. Keep it a secret. Nobody had to know. But do you know what's great about that? I didn't really matter. Whenever it was that I started, 9:18 or 9:27 or somewhere in between, I was absolutely focused.

So focused in fact that somewhere in the late 11's I noticed I had 15 pages about my parents' kitchen. Of course I'm cheating again because that's double spaced. But still. And that's when I began to think this is getting a little ridiculous.

What exactly am I going to do with 15 pages about a kitchen?

Apparently I'm doing that thing I do which some people call going overboard, others refer to "being intense", and still others use the i-n-s-a-n-e word. We don't say that word around here.

In the wake of this, some things it might be helpful for me to remember:

I'm not writing a book about my parents' kitchen
The plot of said book does not rest on the green rock with a spot of shiny copy on top of the light switch, despite its existence in said kitchen
[Choose any random nick knack and repeat previous bullet]

New plan will be to do some free writing about each setting then go back and choose the best bits to make one well described one inch by one inch picture frame. That was the old plan but apparently I turned them into monster sized murals, considering that the inside of the fridge got an entire page, and so the outside of the fridge got another. You know, to even it out.

Here goes to thinking small. Minuscule. Microscopic.

Day 92

2008-09-08T11:56:00.003+02:00

Thank god the real Day 92 is so much better than the fake one last Friday. The main difference is that I decided:

I was ready to work, and
That work could be fun

I started on my short assignment list of 57 settings. If I had finished the first of the 57 settings (which is really made up of 27 settings and 30 subsettings, as I mentioned in my last blog), then I would be 1.7% done with my setting descriptions. But since this is really the first draft concerning the nooks and crannies of my parent's kitchen, I decided I'm only 1% done. And thats . . . okay. Actually its nice to see that I am progressing, even if that is one percent at a time.

In fact, I found that I have a surprising amount to say about my kitchen. Six pages worth so far. I got so confused and turned around, describing and re-describing the same bit of kitchen in attempt to give the reader a better tour every other paragraph that I split up the kitchen into each of its separate parts, the longest section of which is about the door to the fridge. This feels silly but its still fun. And I've been noticing that fun writing sometimes translates into fun reading, and I since I like to cry, snicker, and laugh, though mainly snicker as a reader, I'd like my readers to have the same experience. Some gems I picked up today:

The way we carefully pick up the lid to the ever present cast iron pan on the stove, hoping against hope there's a cube or two of tofu fried to a golden, buttery crisp
The insane number of things attached to the fridge, turning it into the only scrapbook we own, causing me to declare one day, "I will never do that to my fridge."
The way we open the door to the fridge and stare into its depths for what feels like minutes on end, hoping it might answer our eternal question: what to eat? what to eat?

Don't remember if I already used this quote, but Anne Lamott said something in one of her final chapters of Bird by Bird with respect to doing the work no matter what and its been making me laugh all weekend:

When the Ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids.

Day 91

2008-09-05T11:41:00.002+02:00

This should actually read Days 91-92 but I've decided today doesn't count. I'll get to that later.

First, I finished typing up my pages of notes and was pretty excited to have them in hard copy by the end of the day. I've made a list of all the settings I need to flesh out, all the people I need to make clearer through dialogue and physical descriptions, all the scenes and information I'm missing, the many many questions I need to answer. Sounds good, yes?

Well, no. Doesn't sound good at all.

Why? Because I'm not just a list maker. I'm a counter. And I count the following:

22 new scenes
85 questions
27 settings with 30 sub-settings
49 people to characterize

And I wonder: how in the hell will I do that?

I know, I know. You don't even have to tell me.

And yet today I dabbled in "research" which meant throwing all sorts of folders around before I remembered that moving once a year, particularly internationally, has meant that I don't actually have anything prior to 2002, and very little at that. I wrote up a few poems I found that I'd written during the summer of '99, poems that would be embarrassing to include and yet help form an idea of who I was at that time (i.e. a shitty poet).

In other words, today was not research but sabotage. Those emails really needed some attention. What would happen if I didn't read them before noon? Too scary to imagine, especially considering all the disasters that happened as a result of all those days when I didn't read them. And then I kept being sure I had a gem of a memory inducer around here somewhere so I kept searching and searching until, what do you know, its almost noon! Writing time over. Ha ha--I beat the system.

Actually, I feel slightly ill over how much I avoided today and yet deep breath and . . . its okay. No, I haven't sabotaged like this in a while, but I also haven't written in a while since I've been editing. No failure here. Just a bit of fear and backpedaling. But we can absolutely pedal forward again.

So, team (rational brain and editor you are included in this), how are we going to do this? Like Anne Lamott suggests: in short assignments. We'll just work through one short assignment after another paying absolutely no attention to the others, fill out the one inch by one inch picture frame.

As I was reading my first draft and noticing the many places where I zipped through complicated material in a few sentences, I had the sense that if I want someone to read this, I need to respect them enough to slow down and show it to them.

Days 87-90

2008-09-01T12:13:00.007+02:00

Up, down and back up again

Up: Last Thursday I was bursting with new ideas, questions. I had invented a new style structural analysis, was the best writer in all of Ferney-Voltaire, maybe even France. I had plans, big plans, and all I needed to make them true was to clap my hands and watch as they put themselves into action. I was on fire. Unstoppable. The Queen of Sheba. These are also known as warning signs, but the highs sure do feel good.

Down: Then came Monday. The fire had gone out, the brakes were on and the land of Sheba had been destroyed twenty centuries ago. Anne Lamott agrees that Mondays are the worst, and she goes on to say that the whole month of December is a tricky one, therefore concluding that new projects should never be started on a Monday in December. Partly what made it difficult was that I really didn't like what I was reading. After having written two really good intros to the Summer and Fall seasons, and having thought the Winter one was just as amazing, I was disappointed to see that in fact it was nonsensical crap. But then that's no way to talk to a beginning writer. So I did a few more pages of ranting about the nonsensical crapness of it all and got back to it for as long as I could and when I could do no more, I sat down on the couch with Anne and highlighted away.

And: Tuesday was better because I came to the editing practice with compassion. I understood why the Winter section was so difficult to write and honored my courage in getting something down. Previous versions had a few pages that didn't make any sense and a page length poem. So to go from that to 37 pages, even if most of them should be binned, that's still pretty cool. Again I got insanely tired before noon and again I sat on the couch with Anne.

Back Up Again: I finished editing today and I'm really impressed by some of the things I saw in the Spring section, namely good writing. Since I need to write so much more, its great to see how many empty holes I have to fill in as well. Then I started typing up my notes and questions on the first draft so I can start the second draft hopefully on Friday. I'm only a third of the way through my notes so that might be an all day job tomorrow. I'm enjoying teasing this apart so I can put it back together again. Bit of a Humpty Dumpty job.

Days 85-86

2008-08-27T11:40:00.002+02:00

On Editing

When describing their practice, writers often say they can only produce new material for a few hours a day (3-5h), but they can edit till the cows come home. Let's hope they would probably edit out that cliché phrase in the first few minutes.

Yet what I'm finding is that editing is exhausting in a different way. Maybe that's because the first edit is the most consuming (obviously, I wouldn't know about the other edits yet). I'm pointing out scenes, reworking them, reinforcing characterization, setting, theme and dialogue, and even refiguring the blocking. So far, by the time two and a half hours go by, I'm exhausted and can go no further, despite that being pretty much the opposite of what I expected.

On Madame Editrice (Ma'am Editor)

Breakthrough: Yesterday, as I sat down to have a go at another thirty pages of text, I noticed myself feeling nauseated, my throat tightening up, and my eyes closing every thirty seconds. The throat bit in particular was my clue that something psycho-somatic was going on, some voice was not being heard. I took a page out of my notebook and let that voice go at it, writing down every nasty thing that came to my editor's small mind. Basically, this fear/shame based part of me thought my first draft was supposed to be perfect and show the world the coming of a new queen, and was horrified to see the disparity between that egotistical fantasy and the nasty reality of flat dialogue and misspelled words. "It can't be!" she cried.

Once I filled the page, I suddenly felt better. Then I reminded myself of the reality, which, luckily, is not bleak or dramatic:

I'm not looking for perfection
For now, shitty is OK
I am not my worst sentence
Why would I get it right on the first try?
I laid down the bones and the bones are holding steady
Be realistic
Calm down
It's okay
No rush

Now I'm better able to edit since I'm not constantly thinking, "Wow, this is shit. I'm going to tear it to pieces/burn it/throw it out the window." In fact, I even find some parts that are just plain good, where the red pen somehow doesn't even find a way in.

As usual, I'm learning about detachment. I treated this morning's session as if I were a teacher editing someone else's first draft, which helped me to be a little kinder, since I wouldn't write things like "absolute crap!" or "what the hell were you thinking?" in their margins. In fact, I even included a bit of cheerleading. After all, who else will do it if not me?

Day 84

2008-08-25T11:59:00.003+02:00

Well, now I've done it. I've started editing the big, lumpy, gooey mess that is my first draft. Sure, there are some good things there, and one has to build before tearing down, but its feeling generally yucky and incredibly tiresome. I could only go until 11:40 today. And that was after two mugs of tea and two shots of espresso. The last twenty minutes were just too much.

After reading each mini-chapter, I return to its first page and write the main things I need to improve. For instance, at the top of the introduction, I wrote, "Theme," which I actually found in the second sentence of the last paragraph (so there was a theme after all). When I rewrite this in the second draft, I want every part of the introduction to point back to the theme as much as possible, in order to strengthen it.

The two other main headings were setting and characterization, both of which I tend to skimp on, though setting most of all, as if all my scenes took place in empty space. Being able to focus on a few things for each chapter for me vindicates the weeks I spent working through the Writing Fiction book, since I'm better able to spot the main issues in my writing, a new found ability.

One thing I'm struggling with, besides the urge to either run away or fall asleep, is the urge to start rewriting it now instead of following my current plan which is to edit the entire thing and then start reworking it. In other words, I'm feeling impatient. Yet I know there are some big structural issues in addition to issues within the text, and I think doing a read through in a week's time instead of a month's will better help me to address that.

As I worked through my frustrations on this editing process, this is the piece of wisdom that came to me: what I'm doing now doesn't need to fill in the gaps, it just needs to find them.

Day 83

2008-08-22T13:54:00.002+02:00

On Revision

First, I took a "postcard" story, literally a story I wrote on a postcard from an earlier chapter and filled it out to include more character development. I felt stumped but was willing to play along. Compare the following sentences:

Original version: Mary looked at him, then leaned her head back, the barbiturates kicking in, giving her a sense of being weighed down.

Revised version: Mary looked at him, remembered how he used to tap her knee with his hammer and give her a sucker if she didn't cry. She closed her eyes as if that would wipe away the past or even the present and leaned her head back, her pale face drowning in a sea of black hair, the barbiturates starting to take over and weigh her down.

This works in that it helps to establish the relationship between Mary and "him," who in the first sentence of the original version is a man in a white coat, and in the second gets a name and an identity. Additionally, Mary moves from being an abstract idea of a person to a body with black hair who apparently regrets something she's done and is suffering emotionally and physically because of it.

Then, I did the opposite; I took a longer scene and improved it as I saw fit, cutting it by one fourth at the same time. I enjoyed this even more since I like cutting. Compare the following sentences:

Original: When I’m three quarters up the hill, I turn left, through the red square with the small fountain—saw a girl in a neon green swimsuit splashing around in there last June—passing by the basement entrance to Dewing on my right, and walk the ten stairs up to the winding sidewalk, where the trees hang heavy above me.

Revised: When I’m three quarters up the hill, I turn left through the red square, pass the frozen fountain and climb the stairs to the winding sidewalk, where the trees hang heavy above me.

What this brought home for me is how my tendency to add a series of random details can weaken the prose. Sure, if its about doing nothing, and its comical, I think that works, but it doesn't work for every character and situation. Characters must, after all, stay in character.

Seeing that this is from the point of view of a security guard about to find two dead bodies, we don't need to know about a neon green swimsuit. I think the revision is more effective because it's a little denser, helping to create a heavier, more appropriate tone.

On Monday, all these skills I've been working on are put into action, since that's when the real editing, i.e. beginning of second draft begins.

Day 82

2008-08-21T12:30:00.005+02:00

On Metaphor

Goal today? To rework cliché metaphors and bring them new life. Despite feeling generally nonplussed, I did my best to get down and dirty. Hehe.

It started by listing a few of the many metaphors Annie Dillard uses for writing in an excerpt of The Writing Life. Let's start by pointing out that she's a genius. This was my favorite of the ones I chose, more for the sentiment and intensity than the brick metaphor.

"You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)"

Then I had to make up my own. Here are the ones I'm willing to post:

The obstinacy to write well is the climber hanging by one hand to a cliff, refusing to believe that an ocean waits below.

Now I'm unclear whether the first one makes sense. But we'll go on.

The line of words is a scalpel pressed against your jugular. Courage will keep you going, honesty will keep you alive.

[Dramatic pause. Or just plain regular pause, if you like.]

So what did I find out from the "ridiculous" exercises once I let myself get into them? That they were actually fun. And interesting. And different than any I've tried before since I tend to be endlessly stuck in this "see where the page takes me," mode, which has its merits, but can lead to very confusing prose. Here's to writing with a purpose! Apparently it can be done, even by the likes of me.

Day 80-81

2008-08-20T15:43:00.003+02:00

On Failure

Earlier today, I attempted the following exercise (grace a Janet Burroway, the 'ushe'):

"Write a short story that you have wanted to write all term and have not written because you knew it was too big for you and you would fail. You may fail. Write it anyway."

So she's right. I failed. And I gave myself all of a page to do it. So you could say I set myself up for failure.

Obviously, there's no term to measure the time, but I've been interested in writing a story about disfigurement, particularly that of the face, since the days when I did in fact have terms, all the way back when in college. But as usual with anything ambitious, it seemed too big, like trying to birth this baby would end in tragedy, the umbilical chord wrapped around its neck by some evil force (I think that's me). Or, less dramatically, how the second side of my childlike pine trees point at the definition of asymmetry (how's that for mixing metaphors? there are not quite there? maybe a recall doesn't quite equal a metaphor).

Argh. So then I decided to give up on writing. Which meant rewriting my resume. That was fun.

So today I knew I wrote shit, but yesterday I was sure I wrote a masterpiece. Positive. Couldn't have been surer. True, it was only three paragraphs long, but they were beautiful. Then J read it and mentioned that it was a bit like my old writing in that it was a wonderful image but he had no idea what was going on. Oh. That again.

I looked at it with clearer eyes today and realized he was right. Why do I have to explain things again? To be understood. Oh, I kept thinking I wanted to be misunderstood, the point of that desire becoming less and less clear.

Day 79

2008-08-18T14:02:00.003+02:00

On Theme

I'm responding to the writing exercises on theme and its kicking my butt. It's hard. I usually have no idea what I'm writing about until after I've written it, which I hear is common, and is why revision separates writers from amateurs. I'm afraid I haven't quite made it over that boundary. Yet.

In response to those irritated by literary analysis, those who ask "But how do you really know that's what that means?" Janet Burroway says the following (p.310)

"The answer is that you don't. But what is on the page is on the page An author no less than a reader or critic can see an emerging pattern, and the author has both the possibility and the obligation of manipulating it. When you have put something on the page, you have two possibilities, and only two: You may cut it or you may keep it on the page."

Damn. She good.

In other words, no extra bullshit unless your piece is about extra bullshit, at which point, bring it. I've got some learning to do on this front.

The first exercise was to come up with an easily explicable moral or theme and use it to write short story. Well, I tried. But I felt tricked by my own hand. I thought it was about one thing and as usual, it was about something else. The victories? I started where the action was, the moment of change, and I kept it to a sparse 330 words.

On Melodrama

I've gotten this in critique's before, that my work is "Overwrought" and "Melodramatic," which I was knew was code for "I'm a jealous bitch," but times have changed, and I've changed with them. As in, I think they were right.

I am a feeler type and pro-feeling propaganda sometimes infiltrates what would otherwise be good writing. I was thinking about it: what makes Raymond Carver's The Bath and A Small Good Thing amazing? What brings depth to Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. What is it that really struck me about Janet Burroway's account of her son's suicide?

Not condemnations of hit and run drivers. Or people saying, "I'm so sad." Or anyone damning God. That's in the background, but what makes its volume deafening is that we don't hear a word of it. Instead, its the details. Its the courage to continue to be a writer, to observe the world around them and take note.

Its her hands in her coat pockets. Its the empty wrappers strewn over the table. Its the image, again and again, of her husband falling to the floor mid-sentence, because this time it might just make sense. Its admiring the cleanness of the shot through her son's head, that he didn't leave much to clean up.

And in this way, the writing is evocative, emotive, bringing the reader through the same experience, maybe even bringing tears to her eyes. Letting her know, "This is what grief feels like." And by passing it on, not attaching to this emotion, not gripping to this detail, just noting it and breathing and eating and going on with the day because that's what you do, they survive. And so do we.

Days 76-78: Writing Fiction Notes

2008-08-14T11:17:00.003+02:00

I have finished (and not finished) reading Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, which I have often quoted in these fair blogs, and rushing through the final chapters, I was only further convinced of her genius, part of which being that she says very little but instead shares the choiciest bits of modern fiction to illustrate her points. Here are the main points I've gained:

Chapter 9: Comparison, p.268-282

"What is properly called artistic pleasure derives from the tension of what is and is not . . . [it] comes precisely when the illusion rings true without, however, destroying the knowledge that it is an illusion"
Good metaphors "surprise us with the unlikeness of the two things compared while at the same time convincing us of the aptness or truth of the likeness. In the process it can illuminate the meaning not only of the thing at hand, but of the story and its theme. A bad metaphor fails to surprise or convince or both-and so fails to illuminate."
Things to watch for:

clichés (unless for purpose of dialogue and characterization)
topical references (give a sense of the connection)
dead metaphors (so familiar it ceases to be a metaphor)
mixed metaphors
far fetched metaphors ("opposite of clichés: They surprise but are not apt")
obscure and overdone metaphors (difficult of comparison has been misjudged)

Conceit: (either metahpor or simile) is a comparison of two things radically and startingly alike, and therefore take longer to explain or 'round out'
Allegory: "narrative form in which comparison is structural rather than stylistic . . . a continuous fictional comparison of events, in which the action of the story represents a different action or philosophical idea."
Objective Correlative: "A set of objects, a situation a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked." T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Contains and evokes an emotion
The objective insights must be co-relative to the emotion, each corresponding to the other

Symbols: "Before a thing can be a symbol it must be a thing. It must do its job as a thing in the world before and during and after you have projected all your meaning all over it." Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark
Brilliant things Janet wrote in this chapter

"People constantly function symbolically. We must do so because we rarely know exactly what we mean, and if we do we are not willing to express it, and if we are willing we are not able, and if we are able we are not heard, and if we are heard we are not understood. Words are unwieldy and unyielding, and we leap past them with intuition, body language, tone and symbol."
"All writing is "artificial," and when we charge it with bing so, we mean that it isn't artificial enough, that the artifice has not concealed itself so as to give the illusion of hte natural, and that the artificer must go back to work."

Chapter 10: Theme p.303-313

Existentialist questions about theme:

What is what is? What is the nature of that which exists?
What about what it's about?

What does the story have to say about the idea or abstraction that seems to be contained in it?

What attitudes or judgments does it imply?
Above all, how do the techniques particular to fiction contribute to our experience of those ideas and attitudes in the story?

Quotes on theme

John Ciardi: "Literature is never only about ideas, but about the experience of ideas."
T.S. Eliot: "We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express precise thought."
Anton Chekov: "What is "obligatory for the artist is not "solving a problem," but " stating a problem correctly."
John Gardner: "Theme, it should be noticed, is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it."
Rust Hills: ". . . coherence in the world [an author] creates is constituted of two concepts he holds, which may be in conflict; one is his world view, his sense of the way the world is; and the other is his sense of morality, the way the world ought to be."

Telling the truth vs. Telling a lie

"No one supposes that all conceivable falsehood can be wrapped up in a single statement called "the lie"; lies are manifold, varied, and specific. But truth is supposed to be absolute: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is, of course, impossible nonsense, and telling a lie is a truer phrase than telling the truth. Fiction does not have the writer tell the truth, but a truth."

A story speculates on a possible truth, but it offers no ultimate solution
"Fine writing expands our scope by continually presenting a new way of seeing, a further possibility of emotional identification; it flatly refuses to become a law."

Chapter 11: Revision, p.332-343

"Anyone can write . . . However, only the writers know how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into a pro." William C. Knott in The Craft of Fiction
"The resistance to rewriting is, if anything, greater than the resistance to beginning in the first place."
Revision questions:

What is my story about? What is the pattern of change?

Does it include all crucial moments of discovery and decision?
Is there crisis action?

Is there unnecessary summary?
Why should the reader turn from the first page to the second?

Does the first sentence, paragraph, page introduce real tension?

Is it original?
Is it clear?

We need to be oriented on the simplest level before we can share your imaginative world
Where are we? When are we? Who are they? How do things look? What time of day or night is it? What's the weather? What's happening?

Is it self-conscious?
Where is it too long?

We want sharpness, economy, vivid, telling detail

Where is it undeveloped in character, action, imagery and theme?

Where does the action occur too abruptly so that it loses its emotional force?

Where is it too general?

Day 75

2008-08-11T12:07:00.005+02:00

After celebrating with a bottle of lukewarm champagne, which is not surprisingly worse than its colder rival, and explaining four times to four different people, one of which I may never see again, how my first draft's 48,000 words are 12,000 short of the base, I am now stuck with the job I told everyone I was doing: revising.

And what does that look like? Time for another pair of eyes? No, not yet. No one gets to see my first draft. Why? For all sorts of good reasons, like pride, jealousy and fear. Fear most of all.

No, other eyes come in after the second draft. And I've decided in typical Stuart Smalley terms that that's okay. I know I can be crazy and I might be in the act of crazy with this self-made rule, but it doesn't seem so utterly crazy, at least to a mildly crazy person.

So what am I doing? Going through the first draft, a huge lump in the middle of our Thai elephant adorned table with a red pen? No. Not yet. Why? Because I am the Queen of Not Yet, of Almost, otherwise known as a God Awful Perfectionist Type i.e. I haven't read the chapter on revising because there are four chapters that come before it and I must read them in order otherwise Planet Earth's rotation might slow to a halt and leave half of us in eternal darkness. [Ahem, I don't really think that.]

Here's how its working for me:

Chapter on setting made me realize how underused this is in my first draft. Specifically, I could experiment with making a familiar setting--college campus--seem unfamiliar, thereby heightening the sense of shock
Chapter on point of view, despite initial protestations, brought up the fact that I broke what's apparently Rule Numero Uno: I changed point of view and jumped into someone else's head. I was sure I wasn't that kind of writer, but lo and behold, I done did it.

This has me wondering how I address this in the IM-invented scenes with Maggie and Neenef? For now, I'm thinking since those are third person limited, any thought anywhere in the text that is not mine must die under the stroke of the red pen.

(Rust) Hill's Law validates my choice to write in first person

"Either the character moved by the action will be the point-of-view character, or else the point of view character will become the character moved by the action."
(I would be the latter.)

Now I must decide whether I'm hard core enough to run in the pouring down rain after a two month break from anything that resembled "activity." Go go gadget activation energy!

Day 74

2008-08-08T11:34:00.006+02:00

How do you know when the first draft is done? Part of me wants to keep pushing along, saying not done, not done at all, until it looks "just so." Too issues with that:

Have no idea how "just so" looks
Could take forever due to issue no.1, plus isn't that what subsequent drafts are for?

I'm starting to think that the fact that I'd never before written anything that spanned more than 25 pages should be reason enough to do one of those "pats on the back" that we just talk about and never do.

Here's what it looks like right now, when we talk numbers:
Its about 12,000 words short of what I've been told is the minimum for a book. Winter is short. Spring comes somewhere between unimportant and afterthought. And Epilogue is composed of two annoyed paragraphs that I quickly typed a half hour ago just to get something down. Yuck. I hate "just getting something down," but then there is a purpose to it.

But I think I'm going to pat myself on the non-proverbial back (actually doing it as I type, okay, after I type, though it's not as satisfying as you would hope), take a breath, and print this baby out.

Days 72-73

2008-08-07T13:15:00.002+02:00

Let's call yesterday a relapse and leave it at that.

Okay, I can never "leave it at that." I wrote for maybe a half hour since clearly translating articles in Spanish from Bolivia in 2006 had priority over that, as did taking the early bus into Geneva just in case I was maybe late for my massage, the first in 10 months. Its was pretty much crappy crap writing, the kind I hope no one else ever gets to see.

But today I was back at it. Editing more than creating fresh material, but I felt I needed to get a handle on what it was I was writing all those months ago. I went back through the Winter section and spruced it up, which was going smashingly until the last paragraph, where I had apparently deposited all the missing pieces in a small pile of trash. As it happened, I was already a half hour over time by I reached said "trashy" paragraph, so that will have to wait until tomorrow.

But then what?

Then I might have to face the fact that my Spring section is only thirteen pages and I'm not quite sure what else to write. Is it wierd if the sections get shorter and shorter as I go? Or otherwise would I just be filling it with nonsense?

Aha! Idea just popped into my head. The letters I wrote to S. that are currently in the Winter section should definitely go in the Spring section because that's when I wrote them. Thank you, brain! That's at least . . . a page. But I'll take a page wherever I can get it.

Day 71

2008-08-05T12:08:00.002+02:00

Well shiiii . . . it's about time, too!

(Conclusion after first three hours back at it on a Tuesday morning--not to be confused with that treasure-in-the-junk-pile store)

Damn. Feels good. I no longer feel like a fraud when I say I'm a writer, because as of today, it's true again. In fact, I started to tell people I moved here to learn French, because for the last six weeks, I have, at the very least, been doing that. And it was easier. I'm still not totally sure how to describe my book in French, hampered partly by the fact that according to my professors, the phrase "school shooting" has yet to be inserted into their lingo, perhaps out of lack of necessity.

And opposed to whatever utterly irrational fears I had, I actually haven't forgotten how to write, I didn't start writing in French (though my spelling was off), and I didn't decide to throw the whole thing in the trash--in fact, I decided I actually like what I'm writing about and I think it has a place in the world. Well imagine that.

Couldn't really think of a better starting place, except for the lack of caffeine. Ta-da!

Rien/Nichts/Nada/Nothing

2008-06-30T20:42:00.002+02:00

Not even a word. I was sure, positive, incredibly, utterly confident that I would keep my three hours of daily writing alongside the intensive French course. I'd stay up late at night. Get up early in the morning. Re-energize in the afternoon.

Well, I am doing all of those things. And yet they're all for the French course. So, no writing for five more weeks (six in all counting last week's absence). At first I was angry. Then I was sad. I was sure there was someone to blame but somehow came up short.

They say acceptance is the beginning of the end (of suffering), so here I am, doing it publicly.

Au revoir, writing! (because I will see you again--at the beginning of August)

Day 70

2008-06-20T11:48:00.003+02:00

More yummy exercises. Except today my head is a bit foggy despite my many hours of sleep. Still, practicing with slow motion, flashback and scene and summary is something one could do their whole life, I suppose, and I'm grateful to get some time to focus on it since it will be incredibly valuable for my second draft. I wrote down some notes on scenes to focus on and how to turn an elongated "backstory" into a condensed flashback. I know sometimes I get in my own way by trying to tell ten different stories at once, though by the time I get to story no. 10 (or even no.3), story no. 1 is utterly cold and dead.

Therefore, in order to keep things moving, everything must have a common focus; anything seemingly extraneous needs to relate back in some way to the purpose of the story.

As Burroway says, "just as dialogue that only offers information is too inert of the purposes of fictions, so too is description that only describes."

This reminds me of class readings in my fiction classes, when every new character would get a five minute pause to describe their fashion or lack thereof. I decided to rebel in the opposite direction and say next to nothing, but now I understand that if the description is pertinent, it flows as part of the story. The trick is that it has to matter.

Back to Burroway, "One great advantage of being a writer is that you create the world . . . You may choose; the only thing you are not free to do is not to choose."

So just as in life, writing is full of choices, and it appears that every one of them needs a solid defense.

Day 69

2008-06-19T12:03:00.002+02:00

Well, this day had to happen somehow, so here it is and I've got nothing sexual to say about it.

It continues. I'm going through the exercises on setting and getting so much out of it, realizing that this will be a huge part of my second draft since this time around I was just struggling to get the dialogue down. Though I did some of it unconsciously, I forgot about using setting to augment a scene by being in conflict with it (or not), by making the ordinary seem unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar ordinary. So I am armed and ready with a few scenes in mind (ha ha! I will conquer you with my new skillz).

Actually, one of my responses to an exercise about making the familiar unfamiliar became a scene from the book, when the security guard opened to the door to Maggie and Neenef's room. I get the shivers when I get to the last paragraph, which has to mean something. I know there's more work to do, but if it can be this good on the first time around, it can only get better.

Thank you, Mrs. Burroway. The check's in the mail.

Days 67-68

2008-06-18T15:19:00.003+02:00

Yee haw! Yee m-f haw!

So every barrier really can be broken down, oui? After my disastrous Monday, I thought, "There must be a better way to do this." (You mean better than writing crap and hating myself for it? Or not writing at all. Yes, yes, this is what I mean.)

And it turns out there is. It goes like this:

Step 1: Chill

Step 2: Read Adam's blog post (hats off to number one reader/reader number one) http://ourmaninlosangeles.blogspot.com/2008/06/let-it-be-easy.html

Step 3: Say and repeat, "Let it be easy." It is your mantra.

So I thought, if this were easy, what would I be doing? I would rewrite my introduction to Spring without needing it to be brilliant. Just easy. Then I would go back to Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction because its like yummy/naughty candy. (Somehow, to a child's mind, I'm sure candy could be characterized as naughty.) And bing!

Yes, b-i-n-g bing.

It so happened that the chapter I read (and am now doing the exercises for) is on setting. So apropo. What did I learn? That I don't have to write my entire memoir in scenes, which is what I've been doing since all my writing workshops taught me that I'm a summary addict and readers don't like that too much. But apparently going in the opposite direction, though it may be the way of an addict, is not the way of a good writer. Why? Because scenes act like slow motion, signifying the intensity/significance of said scene.

Burroway points out that memory works the same way fiction should--less important bits are summarized, and formative moments are remembered as scenes with incredibly vivid details. She says that us scene-addicts' writing "tends to outlast the reader's patience." Well, its been outlasting my patience like mad. I kept wondering if my "who the hell would want to read this" thoughts were the shame-based editor trying to knock me down or if they were true. We'll go with true on this one.

On a different note, the end of the chapter has (usually) brilliant short stories to exemplify said techniques, and in this one I read my first Tobias Wolf story, "Bullet in the Brain." Wow. Double, triple, quadruple wow. Clearly I'm on my way to becoming a famed critic. Now I'm convinced that everyone, every being on this earth, needs to read this, along with "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (Flannery O'Connor--obvious) and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (Joyce Carol Oates) in my next class entitled Effective Creepy Ass Writing I.

Days 65-66

2008-06-16T11:06:00.002+02:00

Stuck. Totally absolutely completely stuck.

I can sort of write something about something, but I'm not willing to really get into it. And if I'm not into it, then I'm not really writing.

Each time I try to start on the Spring section, I feel nauseated, somehow pointing to some psychological work ahead, I fear. I don't even know what that would be. But its as if I'm sick of telling the story, somehow resentful about baring my soul and then having to wrap it up with a bow at the end. There is no bow. But then writing about the past includes all sorts of bows that were never really there. What isn't fiction at some level?

I grinned mischeviously over my Spring intro on Friday, but realized over the weekend that despite how amazing it was, its really the ending to a depressing short story I wrote in college, and doesn't actually fit here. Annoyed, I said "fine!" and deleted it. Then I replaced it with this crafty line before boring myself and moving on to something else:

“snow melts to mush mush to muck muck to rebirth we all come from the muck”

Oh goody. Don't you like how I only include the crappiest of my crap lines on this blog? Maybe its a good way of me not taking it too seriously. Or trying to convince you to convince me that I'm such a crap writer I should just give this up right now.

I'm also annoyed at the 19/20 year-old me. I've been with her the whole time I've been writing this, and honestly, she's not a great companion. Or at least not when she's depressed. Then in the spring she goes to ecstatically happy and I don't really believe it.

"You can't convince me, Anderson," I tell her.

I try to remind myself that I was doing the best at the time but I keep slipping into "what the fuck were you thinking?" tinged thoughts.

Blech.

But Blech is okay. Blech is part of the process. As long as I keep writing something I can figure out how to come back to this from a place of wanting to tell the story. Its either believe that or give up and I think I'll go with option 1.

Days 62-64

2008-06-12T11:32:00.003+02:00

I'm back at it. I was slightly anxious of what a two week break would do to my writing--would I give it up completely? Having said that, I'm glad it didn't happen any earlier. Instead, I think it had perfect timing, coming at my half way point in my first draft, when I was starting to get frustrated as I began the second half.

On Monday night, when I got back from London, I thought, "Tomorrow I get to write again!" in that way remembering that it is a gift or a privilege and not a duty.

I couldn't concentrate for the full three hours on the Tuesday morning, but decided that was okay. I rewrote the introduction to my winter section which had previously read something like "Grey skies. Snow. Shitty." and now really flows. Then I slept for three hours. Both were delicious.

On Wednesday I was doing a lot of editing and adding to reacquaint myself with what I had already written and to fill in the gaps. Then today I actually added new material. And I do have to keep reminding myself that its first draft material ("Yes, that line is supposed to sound overwrought/melodramatic/downright awful").

But, here is The Thing: my first two sections, Summer and Fall are both quite lengthy, around 70 pages each. And the Winter section feels done but its only 30 pages. I don't mention much about RA life or about Maggie and Neenef, though I can't remember anything happening related to them. Right now the first half feels like a steam engine rolling along and the second half feels like the plop! of a pebble in a pond. But is it a nice pond?

I keep thinking "There's more! There's more! I must . . . create something!" But maybe I just need to leave it there.

Cue repetitious thought: Erika, it is your first draft, after all

But here is The Other Thing: I fear it will be the same for the Spring section. Ugh. The Spring. I don't know what to write here. After all, its happy. And not much happens. And, and, and its the ending. And I hate endings! How many books/movies/etceteras have been ruined by a schiet ending?

Sigh

But all things must come to an end. And I will be brave! I will conquer! Arrrrr . . .

Wandering Writer Alert

2008-05-26T14:13:00.004+02:00

For those who come and have a looksy, I'm letting myself "off the blogging hook" and I could give you a really long list of why, since apparently I think I need to defend this as if it were a thesis, but mainly its because I'll be out of town until the evening of June 9th and I don't know if I'll have access to the 'innernet' as we Americans pronounce it.

Day 62

2008-05-23T11:14:00.005+02:00

Today's lesson: emotional baggage impedes writing process

Shocking, but true. I know I'm supposed to leave the rest of the world outside the room, but honestly, that doesn't work very well. And this week in particular, that world has been rushing in through the (albeit open) door like Niagra falls. Pretty amazing I've been able to tread water this whole time, actually. Honestly, have you ever tread water under the Niagra for an entire week? Highly doubtful. Okay, fine, no one has. But if you've been there in a metaphoric sense, this cheer is for you:

Hooray for keeping head above water! Hooray for doggie paddle technique! Thank you for all the dogs who taught it to me!

This morning, I wrote a long rant. I love writing rants. And I'm damn good at it. Brilliant, the Brits would say, if they said anything, which they don't, since they're not ones to compliment anyone ever. Sorry, Brits, but its true. At least for an American who comes from a compliment-at-least-one-person-a-day culture.

After naming names, blaming and shaming, all things that no one but me and the hard drive will ever see, I decided I was mad at this "god" entity I've been trying to get to know. Excerpt:

"In line with the Artist's Way, on my wall, to the right of the gigantic monitor, I have contract with the Creative Force. It says,

'You take care of the quality
I’ll take care of the quantity'

I signed it in November. I think I’m taking care of my side. But where the hell are you, CF?"

Maybe the Creative Force doesn't like to be sworn at. I suppose I don't. And if its anything like me . . . Then I laughed. "This is 100% hilarious "blog" material," I told myself. And apparently, I still agree.

Conclusions: Feud ended, willingness to write returned, and clean slate created. Onward, ho!

Day 61

2008-05-21T12:05:00.003+02:00

Perclunk.

That's the sound of the second half of my first draft coming to a close. It feels icky. Icky yucky. Unreal. And of course, the ever-present not good enough.

"That's why its a first draft, yo!" my positive half pipes up.

"Is that the best you got, kid?" [insert Clint Eastwood voice and hyped up drama]

So not only am I fighting against my own mind, clearly a powerful force, but also Clint Eastwood, and let's throw in John Wayne since I almost ridiculously confused the two. I know, its a sin I shouldn't admit to. But then I never watched their movies. Make a difference?

Now I see how the Summer section of my first draft was so much easier as it was not bogged down by brilliant previous drafts I absolutely had to include no matter how fragmented they really are (note: I'm writing the story in four sections, by season).

I warn you, Fall, second draft will be hell. Hell, I tell you!

Until then . . .

Days 59-60

2008-05-20T12:05:00.000+02:00

Excerpt from conversation between my friend and I:

"How's the writing going?"
"Well, I'm still doing it, so that's a success."

It wasn't until I overheard Jon telling his parents that I was having more good days and less bad days over the weekend that I realized it's true. And mainly it's about the war with my ego coming down to a simmer. Or as I told Jon, "I'm being less of an asshole to myself." Either way you put it, its good. Goodbye ego, hello love. It also means the stakes are much lower. If I don't hate myself for writing something I don't like, and just know that this is the first draft and that there are many more to come, as long as I keep writing, then its not such a big deal. But if I have to walk a very fine line of perfection day in and day out, its a tightrope with no net underneath. What I'm learning is that I don't need to do that with myself.

Right now I am working on the actual event, the murder-suicide and my writing is choppy and fragmented, which makes sense considering the weight of the story, and is totally acceptable for now. I'm also pulling from a bunch of different drafts, things I once thought were utterly brilliant that now look "eh . . ." but I've decided I'll just keep them there until I don't want them there any longer (i.e. second draft). Anyway, following in this vein, every day is a good day.

Day 58

2008-05-16T12:03:00.002+02:00

Today is a good day. I'm very joyful and energetic, which gets me through the rough bits. I'm going back and changing things in my Fall draft, since I find it so difficult to stay in the present tense that I often forget and revert to past. Plus I'm adding more to the story. I think that part of my "playing small" is thinking that no one really cares to read my story, which gives me that much more permission to skip ahead to the supposed interesting bits, giving my writing a jolting pace and creating confusing prose.

When I experience that from the other side, as a reader, I think if you're going to tell me about this, then tell me about it already. Don't give me one piece of the five. Give me the whole damn thing! I'm here, aren't I?

Thus today was about going back through what I've written and slowing down. Way down. Including the ironies, the ridiculous outfits, the inane conversations. Will I maybe cut them out later? Perhaps. But guess what? This is first draft material. And being present to that means not even thinking (not even for a second, Dear Editor) about the second draft. There is one draft and one draft only at this very moment. And that's the one I'm on.

Day 57

2008-05-15T11:57:00.003+02:00

I still can't tell if I'm awake. And that's after a short meditation, twenty minutes of sun salutations, a fresh croissant and scrambled eggs, a mug of tea and two shots of overly burnt espresso. Oh, and three hours of writing.

I'm still trying to figure out whether thats helping me to be in a non-ego place where I get to play and have fun

Evidence: I inserted addition and subtraction as a commentary on my 19 year-old competition-based mind

Or if I'm just writing sloppy crap. I'll refrain from submitting evidence on that part. I assume its some sort of mix of the two.

It is interesting to go back and look at the first first draft and see how I compressed months or even years into sentences and short, moderately crappy paragraphs. It jumps chronologically without meaning to and so many feelings burst out of each sentence its as if the reader is being pummeled in the boxing ring "Glad! Mad! Sad!" and ding!

Which is why were on first draft number three. The point being to see how far I've come as opposed to worrying about where I haven't yet reached.

Day 56

2008-05-14T11:58:00.003+02:00

I really want to say some negative about today. But doesn't negativity breed more of its kind? I will say that I had my typical childlike let down moment after being in "the flow" yesterday. Its so strong that I think I shouldn't write at all if I'm going to write "that kind of crap." But then I realized what I was doing, and laughed. Then kept writing.

Yes, I was a little lazy. Yes, I combined some material I'd written before and then added to it, but looky here:

I still wrote two chapters. Yes, the second chapter isn't finished, but its on its way.
I still wrote, period. This is an accomplishment
I added six pages in all to my text. Or five. Not sure.
I edited the entire Summer section. Okay, spell checked it. But its 80 pages long so it took a while.

Here's my funny obvious statement for today that is so hard to remember at times:

The only way to keep moving is to keep moving.

Day 55

2008-05-13T10:49:00.003+02:00

I've made it through to the other side. After paging through what I thought would be a whole library on dialog and instead turned out to be 12 pages where I essentially re-read the dialog essentials that have been taught to me time and time again, sort of like our awful succession of history classes from elementary to high school that teach just a few more dates and names than the previous class but essentially regurgitate the same material. I was ready to know the awful truth in first grade, thank you very much, and didn't actually need to wait until AP history to find out all the stories were lies anyway.

Right, that is called a tangent and I'm a Tangent Queen. So the dialog basics:

Use dialog tags as little as possible
BUT, if reader doesn't know who is speaking, reader will create hate mail group and send you a letter bomb
Only use "said" or "asked" and only when necessary. See above. Otherwise other writers will hate you and call you a hack, though you'll probably never get published anyway.
Remember to have some description of people's actions, etc, but not too much. This is neither a detail contest nor a play.
Listen to how people really talk, my beloved social outcast writer. Record a conversation and transcribe it. Sounds like illiterate crap, doesn't it? The truth can be harsh.
Only include what's necessary--no ums, ahhs, uh huhs.
Never, under any circumstances, should you alter spellings in oder to make a vuh-nack-u-lah, as you will likely receive not only hate mail but hack status.

That's the basic stuff. Janet Burroway has a lot more to say about it thats actually much smarter and more interesting, but its not exactly transcribe-able so you'll just have to go out there and find it.

Anyway, the major lessons I leaned were the following:

No one else will write the last scene of summer for me no matter how many times I flip through their books
Not writing at all will be a challenging method of "getting through this"
Maybe I don't have to have a perfect first draft with a perfect ending to summer
In fact, I could start on Fall and not feel guilty about it at all

Following that vein, I wrote the first portion of Fall and I'm in love with it. So much so that I will ask hubby to come and stand next to the computer as I read to him. Onward, ho!

Required Reading

2008-05-12T12:20:00.003+02:00

I found this attached to a NY times article on slow medicine. Its written by an elderly woman in the only residential senior center practicing the "quality of life"-centered slow medicine in the US. Speaks to the heart of any artist:

I Shall Make Poems

I shall make poems
long after I've forgotten
my middle name,
what cinnamon is for,
or why the unfamiliar place
I sleep is not the home
of my childhood.

The words will seem at first
enigmatic and oracular, then
untranslatable, unintelligible.
They will abandon agreed-upon usage,
assume an unruly logic--
but the rhythms will remain
to carry the burden of meaning.

Listen for the tumbling syllables
of my laughter, the slow spondees
of my satisfactions.
Listen for dactyls waltzing
my amazements in spiraling circles,
for the joyful anapests
galloping wildly like children
knee-deep in new snow.

The words will become
The music—pure music,
embedded deeper than
the deepest reservoirs
of memory gone dry.

Then speak blessed nonsense to me--
sing back to me, transposed,
the answers to my love letters.

c.a .. armstrong

Day 54

2008-05-12T11:51:00.002+02:00

The not writing that goes into writing. I blame late night dancing. I blame Skype. I blame the need to clean ferociously this morning, which I absolutely had to do. I of course blame anyone but myself. Seriously, though, I am absolving myself of shame/blame etc. in that I've decided having to write no matter what/at all costs doesn't produce great writing. Yes, discipline is necessary. Yes, a regular practice is necessary. And yes, I will write the rest of the week. Today I'm just stuck and decided cleaning the house might get me back into action . . . later.

I'm also lurking around the internet to find what I can on writing dialog. Part of me is saying,
"Skip it, just go onto the next section."
And the other part is saying,
"No way, this is a huge gaping hole that will only grow if you don't attend to it," especially considering that the dialog from the ICQ chats goes into the fall.

Well, so far I'm listening to the second voice. In my search, I first happened on an OK site that was really just not better than OK and then proceeded to get much worse when she refers to Flannery O'Connor a "he," over which a battle ensues in the commentary that follows, staring with Anonymous 1:

"Flannery O'Connor was a woman! Some of what you say loses credibility when you don't even know this particular point."

"Flannery O'Conner's gender did not influence my opinion of your article," Anonymous 2 bites back. "I enjoyed it and understood the points you made very clearly."

Well thank the lordy that Melanie Spiller's value and credibility were defended instead of Flannery's.

Okay, some sites I actually found helpful. Caveat: sort of helpful, but very basic.

http://www.sfwriter.com/ow08.htm
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2006/04/elements-of-dialog.html

Must were disgusting little things filled with flashing adds, which has me considering violent acts of revenge.

Anyway, I will look at my writing books today since I imagine they will not only be free of aforementioned atrocities, but also be extremely wise. Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Janet Burroway, here I come!

Day 53

2008-05-08T12:57:00.002+02:00

I don't want to get bogged down in my progress, achievement, productivity or lack thereof, so today I'm going to do something different. I'm going to let go of that.

In accordance with the agreement on my wall, signed November 2007, I'll take care of the quantity. I'll let my higher power take care of the quality.

What I have power over is my commitment and willingness to be present to the work. May I have the courage and the serenity to let the rest go. There is no impending disaster if today isn't a good day.

I am grateful for the opportunity to write every day. It has felt like a long journey to get here. I have thrown this gift away many times. But its been here, waiting for me. Thank you.

I commit to being patient. I am handing this process, this book, its completion and hopefully publication over to my higher power. I am releasing myself of fear and blame.

I commit to being tolerant with my struggles. And the struggles of others to understand me and what I'm doing. But I must start with myself.

I pray for the strength, the health, and the commitment to work this one day at a time.

Day 52

2008-05-07T14:13:00.003+02:00

I can usually count on Wednesday to be a flow day, but it didn't exactly work out that way. The positive is that I wrote two more scenes, though the second one in particularly felt thin and dry. I kept hanging onto it despite not being able to improve it much, until I realized I had been sitting in my chair for fifteen minutes trying to squeeze some brilliance out of my head. I don't think that's how brilliance comes about.

Part of the difficulty is struggling through lots of dialogue, something I haven't done that much of, and trying to:

1) Set the scene
2) Make it authentic to the situation
3) Make the characters believable; bring them alive in sight and sound
4) Let the dialogue flow
5) Have a clear ending, beginning, and a series of connections and disconnections in between

Right now, all those desires seem like a lot! I have been feeling like I really need some help in this area, and now I'm thinking its time to search for it. I welcome any advice and I know that finding "the answers" is just another part of my journey.

As I left after my morning session and headed towards the pool, I felt defeated. The last scene didn't go particularly well and I had no idea how to continue. What other portions of the ICQ messages do I use? They tend to rehash the same things again and again and I don't feel its necessary to include all of it. In fact, I know I shouldn't. Then during my swim, I realized that I could work off of the frenetic quality of their last two months' communication, and make something that reflects that. There is no one solid scene to imagine because it never happened. They didn't see each other and they hardly listened. So now I'm thinking I'll make a collage of some sort of the most important words. Can't wait until tomorrow!

Day 51

2008-05-06T20:47:00.001+02:00

Still feeling the flow, happy to say, and apparently I can be in "it" without locking myself in the room. In fact, I am now keeping the door open and allowing myself bathroom breaks whenever I please, if you can believe that. And snacks are not forbidden or guiltily devoured. Which makes everything just a tad less important, a really important exercise in the act of creating, when ego can take over, often leading to sabotage more than anything else.

I had a great day again today, mainly because of this "letting go" that I'm doing, where I have full permission to write "shitty first drafts," a la Anne Lamott. Because I don't get to write something amazing until I write the scheit version, or at least that's how it usually works for me. I used to think that if I didn't write something amazing from the get go then it was trash and not worth it. That's how a non-working writer thinks, or at least this one. It's also the mindset of a perfectionist, whose supposedly huge fear is of failure (therefore don't try anything if it wont be amazing on the first try), though I believe that fear is utterly intertwined with a fear of success (what if I'm not miserable for the first time in my life because I choose to do something I love, which of course will at times be difficult).

I finished the 1950's play scene involving M and N, which I loved, mainly for the potential I can see in it. It really upped the drama, yet since its using the dialogue from their ICQ messages, which are in fact incredibly dramatic (but tend to sound childish and hysterical in that particular setting), it gave the inherent drama a reason to exist. Plus I actually used a little unconscious (to myself) foreshadowing, for which I gave myself a pat on the back.

Then I wrote another scene back in the dorm room which logically followed from the 1950s on stage set. I'm writing much more than I imagined I would be for their portion of the "Summer" section, and for a moment I thought, "What am I doing?" Until I realized that in fact, the summer is all they have, since their story ends on October 18. Thus, I'm back to the reassuring belief that I'm exactly where I am supposed to be.

Day 50

2008-05-05T16:48:00.003+02:00

Fifty somehow seems momentous. And then it coincides with my birthday, which has lots of fives in it (fifth day of the fifth month), and . . . I like that for some reason. What's really the most interesting is that for the first time in my life, I'm doing something I want to do, something that I've chosen, and I'm struggling through it, sticking with it, not looking for a way out. Thats the most significant thing to celebrate.

The other celebration is that I've had my first good Monday in a while. After redoing the scene I worked on last Friday, adding in the pauses and descriptions between the dialogue, I got stuck again. And instead of getting angry, I decided that was okay. Using the "it's my birthday and I can do anything I want" excuse, I took a short break. When I resumed, I decided I wanted to put the next scene on the set of a stage, in the midst of a fictional play based on Maggie and Neenef's relationship if it had been during the 1950s. I loved it. And no, its not perfect, but if we only loved things that are perfect, we wouldn't love very much. Its taken me a long time to learn that, but I'm just starting to. I'm not finished with it but I'm so excited. Suddenly I looked up at the clock on the computer and it was 12:05. I love that too.

Today's lesson: accept being stuck, take a break, change something, and then sit back down and get to it.

Day 49

2008-05-02T11:59:00.003+02:00

Ouf! As the French apparently say. A tough day. Since yesterday was a holiday, and I took the day off, today was like another Monday. I'm starting to understand why some writers write every day. Maybe I will get to that point. The other difficulty is that I am struggling through both my egotistical and logistical issues of how to write the section on Maggie and Neenef.

I am grateful that I did write another scene, though I don't feel very good about it. And going back over the other scene I've written, some sentences jump out as cardboard thin. Yikes! This is not easy. Luckily, with my imagination, I can really see the scene. I hear him yelling at her. Covering his ears. I hear her crying, and then remembering how it used to be. But describing it and getting all of that information to the reader is hard. Requires serious skill that I am just learning in many ways. I'm feeling so negative that I think an affirmation is in order:

I commit to being gentle with myself about my writing

After the scene, I felt utterly spent, dead. I know have to go back to it, but i just didn't have it in me this morning. So I went through the rest of police report, which I've read now at least five times, to see if there was anything else to type up. Luckily there wasn't much. So now I don't have that hanging over my head as "yet another thing I'm not doing." Same goes for having all the ICQ messages on file. I had been typing them up until it was suggested that they be scanned. So now its just one big pdf, something that probably saved me days of typing.

Okay, time to return to the affirmation. Honestly, why would this be perfect? Why would I know exactly what I'm doing? I don't, and that's sort of the point. This is an exploration, not an end point. The process continues . . .

Day 48

2008-04-30T12:01:00.002+02:00

Another good day. This process is definitely helping me to have a "day-to-day" experience since every single go at this is entirely different. Or at least that's how it feels now. It started off slow. Slow, angry and sad, on account of I'm not exactly sure what. Some combination of realizing my birthday is suddenly coming up and that yet again I'm in a new country with little to no friends, and a mini argument over a minor coffee spill.

Then I was back to the "must get it right" mantra I had yesterday when it came to stitching the ICQ messages together it a scene. My mind starts going: I have to start from the beginning, from when they met, or can't I use something I've written before. Where were those scenes, anyway? [Insert frantic search through files]

Then after I find them, rename them, read all the dialogue and get totally creeped out again, especially by the fact that the messages go right up until the night before he kills her, and remember that I don't have to do it perfectly. That's when I'm able to start writing a scene that happens at no time in particular. Just focusing on details. On moments. And it feels good.

I still feel awkward with dialogue, and I know I have a lot to learn there. But I'm glad I know.

Day 47

2008-04-29T12:02:00.002+02:00

I was absolutely ready for today to be a good day. Not because I got up with my alarm--I didn't. Not because I actually wrote my morning pages--didn't again. But because I was awake and ready. And for an hour and a half, I was zipping along. It felt good enough, and in accordance with a fortune I got two months ago,

It could be better but its good enough

Sounds silly but actually good for me to remember. And then I finished the chapter or section or whatever it is--not sure how I will break it up--on the class where I met Neenef and pretty much screeched to a stop. Why? Because now my brain really has to start working. Because now what I'm writing really has to be good, clever, creative, amazing!

That line of thinking is a good way to hit the brakes. What if I went the other way and decided that right now, I need to write some shit pages about Maggie and Neenef. Really absolute crap. I can breathe a sigh of relief right now! How easy is that! I bet I could do that in about 15 different ways, or at least three.

I've typed up or scanned their ICQ messages from that summer, which are really intense, and my plan is to use dialogue straight from the ICQ in imagined scenes. And apparently I'm thinking that's impossible or I have to do it right or perhaps I don't have the "permission" to do it. That's what we call stinkin thinkin and it leads me right into writers block. So, right here, right now, I pledge that tomorrow I will set out to write some seriously crappy scenes using the absolute wrong lines from the ICQ and you know what? That will be perfect.

Day 46

2008-04-28T14:50:00.002+02:00

Slogging through. Another Monday. I don't know if I ever "flow" on Mondays, and misreading the 24 hour clock last night had me going to bed at midnight didn't help. Nor did the peristent cough, which annoying as it is, isn't all that bad. Need to remind myself that it was better than last Monday, when I had to hang out at the airport to force an hour of writing.

I wrote all three hours. Check. I wrote numerous pages without spending five minutes on each word. Check. I stopped myself from double checking facts online while I wrote. Umm. No check. I kept writing despite the loud volume of the "Who the hell wants to read this," voice. Check.

Speaking of that voice, I'd like to lodge a complaint, which is that its not very interesting; it always says the same thing!

Dear Nagging Voice,

If you are such a wonderful writer, come up with someone different to say next time.
You bore me.

With love, your faithful listener,
Me

Something I've noticed is that it feels incredibly awkward to slow down so much to catch the details of the moment, the dialog, the setting and so on. Partly because of the nagging voice and mostly because I haven't really done it before. So today I rewrote a section I wrote on Friday in order to create a series of scenes in present tense instead of the Devil I Know, narrative summary. But I'm doing it. And that is a huge success.

By the way, I'm not technically looking for a writers group because I haven't done anything to look for it. But I would like one. Need one. Want one. So if you want to form one or if you already have (online, since I'm assuming you don't live in France), and you'd like to invite me, I say, go on then!

Days 43-45

2008-04-25T15:47:00.003+02:00

As Beck might put it, "Hell yes!" On Wednesday, I had a major breakthrough. Not just a good writing day but the biggest and most important gift I've had yet: I found the beginning. Funnily enough, that is no small feat. For months I've been experimenting with different ways of writing the book, as I've noted here. I've tried a "Choose your own adventure," poems, songs, imagined scenes, and created plenty of fragments, which I've called, "takes." I was following the format of Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which is of course brilliant, using biblical parables and a play script in addition to beautiful prose. But what I realized is that what works for his memoir wont necessarily work for mine; instead, it made my story, which all happens in the span of a year, incredibly fragmented and hard to follow. I realized that Alexandra Fuller's spectacular Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, which is all in present tense, has plenty of dialogue, characterization and scenes, better captures the form I need to follow: as it happens, these were largely absent in my original, more narrative drafts.

I am not only grateful to have this beginning, but also that I don't have any regret for the months it took to find it. I know that every step of the way was a part of the process and I'm not just telling myself that in some psychobabble way. If I'd continued to ignore my life as a writer, i.e. not write, I couldn't ever figure out how to escape from the power of my first draft in order to see how to do it differently. I had a funny moment on Wednesday, when after I wrote my new beginning, I tried to tack on the old beginning. That night it hit me that this was my first real "darling" I needed to kill. Its just not the beginning to this particular piece. It doesn't fit. It stagnates it in fact.

Since then, I've been writing fast and furiously, trying to get out of my own way, i.e. not listen to the "Who the hell would want to read this," voice and keep going. I've been reading about writers who crawl out of bed and start writing before they've fully woken up so that they don't really know what they're reading. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott mentions writer Charlie Butts, who "so prizes momentum, and so fears self-consciousness, that he writes fiction in a rush of his own devising. He leaves his house on distracting errands, hurries in the door, and without taking off his coat, sits at a typewriter and retypes in a blur of speed all of the story he has written to date. Impetus propels him to add another sentence or two before he notices he is writing and seizes up. Then he leaves the house and repeats the process . . ."

The way I've been going about this is taping a piece of paper over the computer, and checking intermittently, at the end of a scene for instance, to go back and fix the zillion typing mistakes. Its working right now. And I'm also reminding myself that there is no way to be "certain" that I am doing the right thing, writing the right thing.

A friend emailed me this week a incredibly helpful reminder that I might just post in a banner throughout my "creative space," as I like to call it: "Writer's write. They don't outline, they don't plan, they don't talk about what they're going to write. They write. Every day. And that is all that makes them a writer." He attributes this quote to someone he can't quite remember, which I absolutely understand since I never remember who says what.

So that is exactly what I'm doing. From 9 am to noon, I am being a writer because I am writing. I'm not nail biting, I'm not wondering whether I'll be famous. I have no idea what lies ahead, with this book as much as with anything else. All I can do is to take a line and follow it. And that's exactly what I am doing, happily so.

Day 42

2008-04-22T12:14:00.002+02:00

Better. Slow but better. I am finished, for now, with the fiction exercises in the book I was using. I did the last exercise this morning, which was to write a story about a series of connections and disconnections between two pairs of people. I usually don't write about more than two people at a time, and then there's the challenge of dialogue, since I rely too heavily on narrative, so it was a little daunting. I seem to see things very imagistically, so the scene began almost as a camera angle, staring down onto four glasses pushed together and the four hands behind them. Then we learn who the hands belong to, why the four are there, and let the connection turn to disconnection when a fight erupts between the two men. And then that's it. I have a feeling that it has no ending though I am not sure if I care. Three quarters through the story I was bored with it, uninterested, yet I'm not sure if that's about the quality of the story or my saboteur that would prefer if I never finished anything. I have a feeling its the latter so at some point I probably will go back to this and my Cinderella story to give them both proper endings. Just not today.

My morning pages were mainly about Maggie and Neenef today, so I decided today was the day to go back to the subject of my book. On the train ride back from Venice, I spent several hours typing up the ICQ messages they sent to each other the summer before he killed her and then himself, and I found myself getting so angry. Its as if him killing himself isn't enough. I want to inflict pain also and yet there is nowhere for it to go. Its interesting because I started this project from a place of compassion for him, of wanting to show that he's not a monster, but a very wounded boy, and I still believe that, but the compassion is gone at the moment. I also see how Maggie's own insecurities and misunderstanding's about Neenef's clearly depressed state caused her to act in ways that obviously did not in any way create what happened in the end, but prolonged a painful relationship and caused herself a lot of pain.

Since the story feels so heavy and vast and complex, as it really begins with their tragedy and then leads into my own, I decided to use the Story on Post Card exercise to write out the whole story, from Fall to Spring, both in first person and then in third person, which helped me to gain some insights on the story and start to get an idea of how to end it. So, I call that a success.

Day 42

2008-04-21T12:06:00.000+02:00

After a weekend in the never-neverland that is Venice, coming down with a cold and arriving late on the train, I absolutely positively did not want to write today. In fact, I could have written a list of at least 100 other things I should have done instead. Yet I knew that wasn't my intuition talking so I decided to change things up a bit to make sure I followed through on my commitment. You could call it tricking myself, you could call it treating myself. Maybe it falls somewhere in between.

Instead of writing in my "creative space" here at home, I drove to the airport, just across the border and only a few miles away, finally found a parking spot and drank the best instant cocoa mix I've ever had while not so furtively staring at my companions at Bar Depart, the airport's major pre-departure food lounge. I wrote a character sketch about the guy across the room, starting with a description of his clothing until he and his family turned around and looked in my direction for a prolonged group stare and I decided it was better to finish the sketch from imagination and memory than to invite them over for a chat. Then I wrote about the person who was at my table before me, consuming a half pint of Heinekin before 10 in the morning. Then the idea occurred to me that perhaps another blocked writer frequented Bar Depart and was writing a character sketch on me, which prompted me to write up that scenario. I really enjoyed it and am glad I listened to my real intuition as opposed to the Discipline Queen who says "Work work work," and for some reason doesn't want me to leave the house. Of course, between the parking and the cocoa, the 10 CHF (same as USD) price tag means I'll probably make it a once a week thing.

Day 41

2008-04-17T17:08:00.002+02:00

Mmm. Good day. Commitment does reap benefits! I did have an interesting moment where right before I started my morning practice I emailed someone a story of mine and told her "I don't write Cinderella stories," only to find out an hour or two later, that the muse decided that in fact I do. I started writing a first person account from Cinderella's point of view set in the 1960s south. But of course! So just another way that the muse lets me know that I'm not really the one in control here. Good lesson. And following the muse as opposed to resisting and thinking, "too stupid, can't do it, wont do it, etc." keeps me in connection with her.

Days 36-40

2008-04-16T13:10:00.003+02:00

A tornado just came through and I'm picking up the pieces. I had trouble sticking to the practice with visitors for two weeks, one who unfortunately ended up in the hospital, and its felt slow since, with every single distraction popping into my head at any moment. I'm recreating the relationship with the page again, and wondering how many times I will have to do that. Maybe it never ends.

I've continued to work through the Writing Fiction book exercises with Janet Burroway, which I find absolutely brilliant. Though I'm not writing fiction, I have found her book incredibly helpful because my take on memoir at the moment is that it had to be good enough to read like fiction. Dialogue, plot twists, interesting characters and so on. Not a list of things that happened, or a string of sentences that begin, "I remember when . . . ," as if the reader weren't clear that the entire story were based on memory in the first place. This week I've focused on story form and structure, the difference between a story "a series of events recorded in chronological order" and plot "a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance" (Burroway p.38). It characterizes a plot as either a power struggle between two presumably equal forces or a series of connections and disconnections. I find this really fascinating.

One of today's exercises was writing a short story on a postcard, which meant starting in the middle of the conflict in order to get to a resolution by the last line. I loved this. I think I might try writing a short story version of my memoir, and start with an incredibly short version to get it down to the "meat" of it. Once I finish with similar exercises tomorrow I'll have worked through half of the book and I think that means its time for me to use the skills I've learned on my memoir itself.

Days 34-35

2008-03-20T20:08:00.002+01:00

Learning the hard way. Which is what writing is. Or following any dream. From far away, everything about it is beautiful. What could be difficult about following one's path, one's true love? Everything! Because its more than talent, its commitment. And through being utterly committed to truth, I learn that a lot of what I've written so far might be unusable. Which is fine in that its normal and I needed it to get me to where I am. Its not so much that I'm in a moment of self doubt or regret, its just that two months into this, I'm seeing things a little clearer, similar to when reaching a new plateau in learning a language--at each step I learn how much I didn't know before (but thought I did).

I haven't been able to respond to any of the daily exercises this week and I realized that's because I don't need help with commiting to writing anymore (yay!). I don't need ideas of things to write about, prompts, etc. I need help with the craft itself. So I pulled out one of my writing books from college and zeroed in on Showing, not Telling, concerning concrete details and characterization. Yes, this is rule numero uno in good writing and yet so easy not to follow, especially when writing memoir which feels like "telling a story" except if I tell it, you don't get a story. I have to show it. Recreating past dialogue and reconstructing scenes so that they feel alive today is my greatest challenge. And after reading Alexandra Fuller's Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight it became clear to me that gripping scenes are what makes a memoir. Yes, its a true story and that has its own pull, but its got to be a good story, well told, and riveting, otherwise there's no reason to read it. It has to be just as good as fiction without being fiction.

So this is my turning point. I have my magnifying glass in hand, and most importantly, the willingness to look.

Day 33

2008-03-18T17:13:00.002+01:00

Tough day. I felt fuzzy and absolutely unmotivated. I tried to respond to todays exercise but I just sat there with absolutely no answer to it whatsoever, a very strange feeling for me. So then I wrote about what was on my mind, which was fine--a rant about how I want to learn French so badly but I really haven't figured out the best way to do that. I've dabbled in many things that haven't seemed to work and I've found that frustrating. But I wanted to make sure my three hours were spent on the book so I gathered together everything I'd edited and made second drafts of most Maggie and Neenef related items. I feel really excited about that and yet at turns I had hugely self-critical thoughts like, "I wrote this! How the hell will I ever get published if I write things like this!" as if every word I wrote were destined to be publishable on the first try. So in other words I'm back to my old habits: criticism and impatience. Just noticing them for what they are and moving on, knowing that tomorrow is a new day.

Day 32

2008-03-18T00:01:00.003+01:00

After a week in London and then a week in bed due to a stomach virus, I am back writing again. And its slow. I am grateful for the one beautiful paragraph that came out of all my morning writing. I know its a relationship just like any other and we have to build trust again. One thing I've been experiencing over the last few days is the hugely excited reaction I get out of people when I tell them what I'm doing. Its a joyous "if only I could do that" sort of response, unlike any other I've received when I was a teacher, journalist and then "accounts manager," that last one not really getting any response since it was ill fitting anyway. Whats really sweet is that I feel like each one is cheering me on in his or her own way, saying, "Wow, that's a heavy topic. It must have really affected you," or, "How do you make contact with the muse?" or "Stop calling this your first attempt. It's not an attempt. You're doing it."

Makes me think of my favorite and only known quote from the Talmud, which I might have quoted here before, "Every blade of grass has an angel that stands over it and whispers, 'Grow, grow.'" Right now I have the gift of hearing the whispers. Thank you.

Day 31

2008-03-05T23:55:00.003+01:00

Even though I devoted less time to writing and more to packing for a long weekend away, I dropped right into grief from the class exercise. I wrote a poem to the family dog I grew up with who in a lot of ways was my very best friend. At the end of her life, we buried her in the backyard during the awful mess of a winter not entirely over, and come spring, a huge flowering stalk shot up five or more feet high, right over her body. I always considered it our red fern. It was really a gift to be able to reexperience how much I loved her and how I blocked myself from feeling much at the time since she was "just a dog."

Well, that's all for now. I'll be off line for a week, when I get back from London. Happy writing!

Days 28-30

2008-03-04T16:22:00.003+01:00

Its really nice to be keeping a record of this. I was feeling a bit defeated today and I look up at the number of days I've committed to writing and see its only been 30. Obviously that's 30 more than I've committed any other time, but it reminds me that it makes sense to feel like a novice. Why would I know exactly what I'm doing. Have I written books before? Ever committed an entire year to writing? No. Absolutely not. So I'm figuring it out as I go along, and that's exactly as it should be. I assume things will start to shape up in the next two months, at which point I'll start working with a writing coach, but until then, I'm answering my own questions. I've spent a lot of years not doing that, thinking I wasn't capable of it, so its important to learn how to rely on myself.

Having said all that, here's the daily report:

I wrote something like 6 pages in an hour on Sunday, which felt really amazing. Often that means a lot of it is rubbish, but its beautiful to be in the flow, words not coming with a trickle but a tidal wave and I just try to get them down as fast as I can. I love that rush. Sunday was a beautiful day all around, just reading and writing and keeping myself company on a ride through the French countryside.

Monday was still a good day. I connected to the exercise in my 50 days class and then wrote another poem that seemed I had been meaning to write. There's been a lot of those. I don't know that they mean much to anyone else (though I have an inkling they might), but what's important for now is that they mean something to me.

Today I was utterly blank. Not a word. I could write in my faux news blog and have a blast, delight in my morning pages, but nothing serious. That's a first. Maybe I need to remember how much I'm writing every day between the morning pages and my two blogs that a day "without" almost never happens. Instead, I focused my morning on editing the tomes I've apparently already written for the memoir. Some of it was frustrating, seeing that what in the moment I thought was pure magic is still just first draft material. Lots of got crossed out or relegated into notes. And then, here and there were lines or even series of lines that made me say, "Wow!" and know I'm on the right track.

That's the message I'm choosing to listen to.

Days 26-27

2008-02-29T14:19:00.002+01:00

Mmm . . . delicious. Two good days in a row. Yesterday I got back into the flow with one foot. The other foot was too focused on my blog to get going at 9 am, which meant one hour less of writing time, so I relearned that lesson of protecting my mornings and wrote solidly for three hours this AM and it felt great. No glancing out the window. No questioning looks at the screen. No sighs. No running to the kitchen for another piece of fudge. I wrote about 12 pages 1.5 spaced from the hours of 9 to 12 and feel full of gratitude and joy. All sorts of cliché phrases could help to describe this feeling of "being back on track," "finding my purpose," and perhaps most well-known, "riding the monkey train." Okay, I hope the last one is original but maybe the quest isn't to be original but to describe the ordinary in the truest sense, the one that causes the reader to nod her head and say, "I know!"

Not everything I'm writing is about the memoir, but I'm starting to learn that in order to 'profit' from the muse, I must listen to her, and if she tells me to write about the time I got lost in a sea of cactus in rural Mexico, well then that's what I do. Obviously the point here is to write said full-length memoir, and almost every day I'm doing something to add to it, a piece that will fit in between two others and become another link on the chain, though on the other hand, writing is writing, and the more I practice it, the better I become, the stronger I am, the swifter my spirit, and so on. In other words, every bite is a good bite.

Days 23-25

2008-02-27T21:53:00.001+01:00

I keep forgetting to blog about my writing, which is interesting. I'll need to think about why that is. So here's the update:

Saturday was a big to do in that I set the alarm and got up early to write. This was brilliant! I had a lot of fun doing it. Then everything was downhill from there as I fell into a slump. Didn't write a word on Sunday, and then Monday I felt like I was just slogging through again and was pretty disappointed since I thought I'd left that business behind somewhere in last week's struggle. After talking to a friend on Monday afternoon, I decided I needed to put the writing on hold to attend to the long list of things I'd been putting off to do, "when the time was right" except that they were all eating me up inside. So I made the biggest To Do list of my life and started attacking it from all sides. It felt great! I was reminded that the only way out of being stuck is through movement, and frankly, sitting my ass on a chair and staring at the gorgeous screen in front of me does not count as movement.

Because of that, today I was back at it, enjoying writing again and writing something I really felt good about, delving into another topic I felt like I had been waiting to write about for years, which feels amazingly refreshing. I haven't been writing a lot related to the memoir lately and haven't totally figured out how to incorporate a daily editing session, but I'll get there soon enough, I think.

As Erykah Badu once said to Busta Ryhmes, "Feelin good, feelin great, how are you?"

Days 20-22

2008-02-22T17:01:00.002+01:00

Slogging through again. Since I haven't felt the utter joy I had last week of really connecting to my writing, I've found it helpful to look at this reminder next to my computer, where thanks to the Artists Way I made the following pledge, "Creative force, you take care of the quality, I'll take care of the quantity." I want to just end there and have that be enough, think of Anne Lamott's Shitty First Drafts and accept it as it is. In the sense that I am still writing and adding a good number of pages to my memoir each day, I am doing that, though emotionally I'm finding it hard to trust in the process.

This has helped me make the realization that one of the reasons I haven't written much in my 27 years is because I wasn't willing to have shitty first drafts. Everything had to come out perfect. And therefore editing to me meant tweaking this word, adding that comma, and rethinking the title, but nothing more. It was very constricting. Since taking my first Inprint workshop, I learned I couldn't really create that way. One teacher suggested taping a piece of paper over the monitor so I don't even see what I'm writing while I do the first draft, though Max's suggestion to keep the editor out of the room and keep moving forward works just as well.

So really, considering how many years I have been unwilling to do so, I should count it a huge success that I have been able to sit tight and write shitty first drafts all week! Even in my lowest moments it was hard to get around the cold hard reality that I can't edit anything if I've got nothing down, and its gotta come out someway, whether its head first or breech or cesarean.

Days 17-19

2008-02-19T17:10:00.002+01:00

My wavering ability to focus seems to have affected my blog, so I'll use this moment to catch up. Last week, Friday, I had another amazing day spent in the flow. Again, I was writing a poem I had been longing to write and I really liked how it came out. It wasn't on the topic of my memoir though I decided not every day can dedicate itself to that entirely. I must attend to my many loves to retain the joy the creates forward momentum.

The weekend was entirely focused on buying furniture and putting it together. Somehow I couldn't "figure out" how to fit writing in, and then had various bouts of guilt to punish myself for it. By the end of Sunday night, when it was clear that I wouldn't be writing until the following day, I took some deep breathes and did my best to accept that fact. It occurs to me that I could write a lot on the topic, "How I Use Not-Writing to Punish Myself," as if Not-Doing were the biggest sin imaginable and therefore deserving of self-destructive thoughts. I know, I'm intense. Has its advantages and disadvantages.

When I get in those darker places, its good to curl up with some Julia Cameron, and then get writing, since that's the real cure. One of her "Basic Principles" in the The Artist's Way is, "The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature."

Yesterday felt spotty but I did the work, doing two of the exercises for my daily writing class to make up for the time I missed. I got into the exercises about my favorite works of art but I didn't write that much. Or it didn't seem related somehow, though on the other hand, having these daily writing assignments feels like a slow calibration of a compass. I don't know where I am going exactly, but piece by piece, I am being pointed in a direction. No more wandering aimlessly, lost among barren fields.

Today I felt like I was forcing the writing again, which feels awful and dishonest somehow. I tried a change of scenery, working in our sunny dining room at our new (to us) pine table to map out different pieces of the memoir and make a list of all the major scenes to be included, which was refreshing since I have a first or second draft of most of them. After going for a lunch time swim, I followed some of my own advice and wrote something from the perspective of the guy who sold Neenef the gun, curious to imagine how that might (and might not) have affected the guy behind the counter. Then I did some research about how bodies are shipped around the US (via plane, not surprisingly, and apparently funeral homes benefit from rewards programs) and school shootings, which contrary to popular belief, have been going on for a long time. By the end of this, I felt nauseated, weak, and hopeless as I often do when focus too much on death, especially the gory details. Once again, the breathing trick worked and I got to that ancient part of me that can hold dualities, an absolute necessity for this journey I am on.

Day 16

2008-02-14T15:07:00.002+01:00

Another great day in front of the computer. I absolutely love the exercise for today and dive straight into it, writing one poem after another until I look up at the clock and see that two and a half hours have gone by. This is the type of poem I've been waiting to write my whole life, I think. I want to write more but I'm feeling creatively drained.

I decide its time to start editing my previous work, and the best way to do that is with the paper in hand, so I go through all 13 exercises, spell check and format them, and do the same to my second draft of the memoir as well as the Choose Your Own Adventure format that I finished today. This takes many hours but it is necessary and worth it. I actually feel amazed by the number of pages I've written, more than any year previous, I think, in terms of creative work.

Before beginning this process, I harbored a small fear that I would find out that I actually hated writing or that I found it boring and torturous and I am ecstatic to say the least that that's not the case. Obviously its hugely difficult at times and nothing comes of it some mornings, but I haven't felt that particular set of feelings. I would like to be more active and split up my day with exercise, but I find it difficult to tear myself away from the computer. It will all balance out soon enough.

Day 15

2008-02-13T22:28:00.002+01:00

Writing process is slower today, but continues. I wake up tired and despite tea, an espresso, a nap and a swim, that doesn't change all day. Somehow it seems I need at least eight hours of sleep here, if not more. Maybe it's part of the ongoing transition process. I write for three hours in the morning and have a good go of it, which I need to consider "good enough" no matter what it produced or how it felt. I'm starting to get resentful of any "extra's" that take time out of my writing, like running errands or checking out a car during lunch, a sign that I need to define both my mornings and my afternoons as sacred time. That said, we are looking for a car and we still have several tasks ahead of us in order to get our long term visas, so there are unavoidable and necessary things to do during the day. It's just a matter of separating the necessary from the unnecessary and respecting my creative time and space.

Day 14

2008-02-12T21:50:00.001+01:00

Doing the dance, feeling the flow, I am happy to share. After months of stop-starts, one foot in one foot out, I feel like I am really in this. I guess its about creating and nurturing a relationship with my writing, and making this extensive daily commitment has its rewards. After my three hours in the morning, I'm desperate to write more and annoyed that I have to be pulled away to eat. I write for two more hours in the afternoon and still don't finish what I'm working on, but I feel great about it. I'm slowing down my often haphazard pace to focus on the details, 'draw' people, and create scenes, something I don't have much practice with. I used to take the "I'm not bothered," approach to detail but I'm just realizing how fun it can be (or painful at times) to relish each little thing. I think it is also a way of allowing each moment in time and object in space have its own dignity, which is a blessing. I am also grateful for the more objective eye I have for myself and the situations I entangled myself in as a teen and young adult. I'm definitely telling it like it was, but with a compassionate heart. For the first time in my life, I can say I am really satisfied with what I am doing. What a gift!