An impromptu strategy session in the children's library

How cool is this—I visited a local public library this morning and mentioned my YA novel-in-process to the children's librarian. She got so interested in the project that she pulled another children's specialist from the back room and we sat around talking about it for a good 15-20 minutes.

I am at the point in my book where my heroine is going to seriously start "booking"—a verb I've made up for visiting scenes in books via a magic bookmark—through four books, and I hadn't finalized my list of books as of this morning. As I told the librarians, if I had a year to research this, I could take the time to read all the books (again) that I want her to visit.

She is booking through books that Ellen, another, older girl is supposedly lost in. My heroine, Sarah, and Mrs. Reid, the librarian who gave her the magic bookmark (and Ellen's mom), are trying to find a commonality among the four books. That's where I was stuck. I didn't want them just to be books that I knew about, but time is of the essence since I am writing the book for NaNoWriMo, and only have seven days left to finish it.

We finally determined that my original choices weren't so bad; the obvious commonality they share is water (though I also know that's not the reason that Ellen chose them).

I also asked if either of them knew of a book with the same kind of themes, characters, plot, etc., as mine. I have been worried about this since I have been so writing quickly and wondered if some of my ideas might be coming from something I'd already read. Fortunately, they hadn't.

How wonderful to have a fictional work taken so seriously—and what serious fun.

NaNoWriMo Day 21

Today, on my 21st day into National Novel Writing Month, I am 28,499 words in—which might sound impressive until I hit the Stats bar on my NaNoWriMo Profile Page: I am 6,501 words behind. My suggested cumulative word count for the beginning of the day was 35,000 words.

It's not from lack of interest or idea on my part; life has gotten in the way. My kid's two full days and two half-days off from school this month, hubby out of town for consecutive weeks, and a half-day visit to the ER with E-girl for a broken arm, has meant that I haven't been able to sit alone and write at the computer for the two or three hours I need every day. Desperate, I have taken to writing paragraphs as multiple text messages on my cell phone or scribbling into a tiny notebook whenever I am sitting waiting anywhere or watching kids at play.

I have guiltily set E-girl in front of the TV on the schools days off, but I just can't put her there for more than an hour and a half. She needs fresh air and friends and interaction.

So I really want to write this book—all this time away from it has made me desperate to put it down, which is a wonderful thing, if you think about it. Without the pressure to finish it within a certain time frame, it might still just be another one of my good ideas I've never made time for. The less I am able to write it, the more urgent it has become for me.

"Oh hi!" and other awkward ways to get your characters into a room

A chance encounter with the cult classic, "The Room," reminded me how hard it is to get fiction characters smoothly transitioned into a scene.

"The Room" is celebrated in various compilations and snippets all over YouTube for its poor acting, editing, and writing. In the 30-second edit above, someone has taken some of the most awkward entrance dialog from the movie. [This will probably be taken down from YouTube soon, so if it's blank, that's why.] I'm not sure that I'm not guilty of some of this in my current project, a hastily written novel for NaNoWriMo.

Another scene from "The Room" that is also available on YouTube (inserted below) should be Exhibit A for writers wanting to know which scenes to cut from their fiction. The scene—which zips by in 19 seconds!—lacks meaningful dialog and description, doesn't seem to move the story along, and doesn't give each character a distinctive voice.

How can we read good prose when we're reading so much junk?

As my daughter and I stood in line at the grocery store yesterday, facing a display of magazines including Us, People, and The National Enquirer, she asked: "Why are people interested in reading about all these celebrities and made-up stuff?"

"Well," I said, unloading food from my cart onto the conveyer belt, "I think people like to read about celebrities for a couple of reasons. Making fun of how the celebrities look or what the celebrities wear makes people feel better about themselves."

"That's not very nice," E-girl said. "And it's dumb."

"Yeah, it's dumb," I replied, "but what's dumber is when people read about celebrities and think they really know something. That's what they know and share with people."

"I don't want to read about it," she said simply. I would have given her a big hug and kiss at that moment if the cashier wasn't ready and the grocery cart wasn't between us.

Would it be hypocritical at this point to confess that I read People magazine whenever I'm sitting in a doctor's waiting room? Reading it occasionally is like a trivia challenge, trying to guess why people are it in. I can recognize rock stars and most actors. But Snooki and all these "real" housewives? I don't know why they are important enough to merit my time, or a magazine cover. What have they done besides appear on TV?

Women's magazines used to publish short stories, but now they fill those pages with celebrity profiles. Sigh.

I looked at the rack of magazines and wondered at how much effort had gone into producing them—the writers, photographers, editors—and how, as far as I was concerned, it was all for naught, for no real value. Was there one paragraph with valuable information, one sentence of beautiful prose, in the entire rack of them?

Where are the writers who once might have written the short stories and essays for national publications? The lucky ones have retreated to literary magazines, the luckiest to The New Yorker and a few other journals that actually pay. The rest of us, to blogs.

Things I've learned from NaNoWriMo, five days in

As promised in a previous post, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month. Here are some things I realized in the last few days because of it:

• Writing under a timeline/deadline pushes words out of me. I am writing words I would never have put down on paper, in a genre (young adult fiction) I had never much contemplated before.

• When you're writing this fast there is no time for poetic description or nuance. The storyline is the thing, the pursuit of reaching the next page.

• Writing for a purpose, for a pursuit with a recognizable name, has brought my writing more out in the open. I am a participant in NaNovWriMo—I said so here and on my Facebook page. I rarely mention my writing in process.

• Since I must write at least 1,664 words a day, I can sit at my desk guilt-free, not worrying about the dishes in the sink, the pile of laundry in the corner. Otherwise, given my limited free time, it just won't get written.

• In an effort to reach my 50,000 word count, I'm already contemplating the longest possible way to describe and name things.

• I prefer writing short stories. I'm 19 (single-space) pages in already—a short story, done. And 25 luxurious days to edit it.

What should I write about when there is so much to say?

As I said in my last post, I signed up for NaNoWriMo a few days ago, with the goal of sitting down on November 1st and writing a novel from scratch. It all sounded very spontaneous and exciting—I was going to start writing whatever popped in my head and see if I could carry on with it for 49,300 more words.

But then, after I signed up, I checked their web site more attentively. They suggest I have an outline in hand.

Outlines and plot notes are very much encouraged, and can be started months ahead of the actual novel-writing adventure. Previously written prose, though, is punishable by death.

Gulp. I am writing this post on Thursday, setting it to publish on Sunday, because I imagine I'm going to be spending Sunday night scratching out potential plotlines.

J.K. Rowling said that Harry Potter came to her in a vision and she knew she had to write it down. I don't think such inspiration works well under pressure, or within a three-day deadline. I've been touching my forehead with my fingertips the last couple of days, trying to coax out ideas, but it is starting to feel like a clean slate in there.

It's overwhelming to realize that I could write about anything. So right now I am in panic mode, trying to think of new ways of doing something that is already tried and true (giving me a new empathy for film producers!).  Here's what I've come up with so far:


• As people are gathered in a fallout shelter in London, they each tell a tale from their lives to get through the night. 12 tales, based on Grimm's Fairy Tales, sort of a Canterbury Tales in the 20th Century. [After I imagined this, I realized it was inspired by the film "Atonement" and recently listening to a lecture in my car called "Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind." Why 12? I figure I'd write each chapter would be 15 pages, giving me the necessary total.]

• A female Holden Caulfield makes her way through a suburban Maryland high school year. But what does her voice sound like (too easy to fall into Valley Girl speak—not sure there is a recognizable Maryland teenager sound...)? What is her quest?

• 10 stories about Santa Cruz, each story a different character's story. Last story, they all come together.


The older I get, the more I realize how hard it is to be fresh and new and not derivative. There's an overwhelming amount of life experience to try to compact into 200 pages. At the same time, there's that need to drive the story along with challenges for the main characters, while scattering mysteries or unanswered questions every few pages that will keep the reader turning the page—to manage that is the difference between writing fiction and typing. I think I will be doing a lot of the latter, as I make my way through the necessary word count.

Another monkey typing at the keyboard

Like hundreds of aspiring novelists before me, I, too, have signed up for NaNoWriMo. What, you might ask, is NaNoWriMo? According to their web site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

If a thousand monkeys can produce a Shakespeare play by typing at keyboards for infinity, surely hundreds of humans typing 50,000 words in a month's time can produce one good novel. The problem is that each of us may only be able to come up with one of the pages (or sentences) from that great work. Much of the rest of it will surely be crap.

I type, on average, 700 words per page, so I figure that I'll need to write 3.5 pages a day to meet the 50,000-word goal. But judging from past experience, I'm probably going to be holed up in my room in a desperate writing frenzy on November 28th. The evidence? My 63-page undergraduate thesis on the Aeneid produced in a week (on a manual Remington typewriter, no less); likewise, my 50-page Master's thesis, typed over five days and nights in a computer lab. A month, then, seems like a luxury of time,  or at least it will the first three weeks.

Is it physically possible to type 45,000 words in a day?

The alternative is to be left behind on the 5,000-word slope, telling myself that it didn't really matter anyway, while others with more passion or persistence make their way to the 50,000-word summit.

56 drafts and three little kisses

After I wrote my post about Mary Amato's talk on revisions, in which she confessed that her last novel went through 56 drafts, I kept wondering—how did she keep track of it all?  Did she have 56 different computer files, 56 print-outs, or 56 of something else? So, I emailed her and asked.

Here is what she said:


When I'm writing, I don't print out until I'm "done" with a draft. After I'm "done" and I print out, then I read that draft and make notes in pencil about what I need to do when I revise. Then I go through the revising process and only print out when I'm "done" with that entire revision. So, when I say 56 revisions that means that I printed it out 56 times. Those revisions were not minor. Each one was major.

I haven't always used the most efficient titling system for my drafts. My suggestion for version management is to abbreviate the title and put the date that you're working on in the title.

Example: ILSept16.
If I'm working forward (writing new material and not revising old material), then I keep the same title and just keep saving the new material in the same file.

Let's say I work on that manuscript for a month. And after a month of writing, I realize I need to make a major change that involves revising from the beginning. Then, I will I save as a new filename: example: ILOct12 and use that file as the working file. If I decide to go backward and make revisions later on,  I'll rename it. That way I'll still have my old drafts saved (and not written over) in case I need to go back and look at an earlier draft.

How do you know where you left off? Do you make changes in (MS Word) tracking or do you write a sticky note to yourself about which page you stopped on?

I always leave myself three kisses... xxx. Then I go back and do a search for three xxx and find the place I left off.

The loneliness of the present moment

I have talked a lot recently about journal keeping, but I've never actually shared anything from my journal in this blog. What's the difference between a blog post and a journal entry? The journal entry isn't written for public consumption, but, at least during the moments it is written, for the pleasure of writing. Later, maybe, with editing, it becomes something else.

The paragraphs below are from my journal entry dated 4/12/2010. (These are unedited; I've only excised a few paragraphs in-between where I wrote more at length about having tendinitis in my thumb and the difficulty it creates for writing by hand).

I've explored the theme of writing out of loneliness before, in my October 1, 2009 blog post. Perhaps the other difference in writing for public consumption and writing in a journal is that you can indulge in a repetition of topics (like my perpetual prose on loneliness) without care that you are boring anyone; you are your own rapt audience (or not).

I realize now that when I was young, my writing came from unwanted solitude. Therefore, the reason I hardly write these days is from lack of solitude. It's ridiculous how many things take me away from writing when writing used to be my main identity/pursuit.

Even when I'm around lots of people, though, there's still that persistent loneliness, which only writing seems to appease. Saying something—putting an idea into words—feels like an accomplishment; it takes me away from the loneliness of the present moment. There's the possibility of touching the infinite, however momentary or fleeting.

I used to love the sensation of writing with a pen, but how it hurts and the pain detracts from what I want to say. How can an aching hand freely speak of joy?

It's nearly 11 p.m. I am sitting up in bed alone. I am not writing now because I am especially lonely but because I started to get that yearning that means it's time to say something, which I can only say with written words. I'd be tongue-tied if I tried to say any of this aloud. The paper is such an absorbent, steady listener—one couldn't ask for better.

Digging through journal pages, sometimes surprising artifacts are found

Looking through an old journal recently, I was elated to find a photo of my Aunt Stella's bedroom pasted into one of its pages. It was within a sort-of collage I'd made as a tribute to my then-boyfriend in California. ("Thinking of him in North Carolina," I wrote on the opposite page.)

Last spring, a writing teacher had asked me to describe Aunt Stella's house in greater detail in an essay I'd written about her, but I couldn't remember its layout, especially beyond the front rooms most often seen by visitors. I thought maybe the guest room was in an isolated back corner of her house.

And there was the evidence in the photo—next to the guest bed is a door that leads to the hall. It added another piece to the jigsaw puzzle her house has become in my mind, almost all the rooms filled in now except for the mysterious bathroom that I can't visualize at all, save for the white enamel, claw-footed tub.

This is the only copy I have of that photo, the negative lost as far as I know. I know it is probably of little importance to anyone else—who else would care if there was a door there? There are only a few of us who can still conjure up the memory of her house as it was this point in time.

The photo is a document of a place I can no longer visit, as the house was sold years ago to people I don't know. Looking at it makes me feel a little more whole, like a missing piece of myself has been found. In that moment I feel like I am back home.

The boyfriend? Long gone, his head folded down in the collage (as seen above) so I could get a better scan of the other photos. And yet he is what I thought was important the moment I glued them in; I thought he would be important to me forever.

A journal can provide accidental but valuable artifacts of your life, even when you don't realize you're placing them in there, the years like layers between the moment you write something and the moment you read it.

Perhaps it's best not to censor or edit yourself too much as you compile a journal. The future-you sometimes knows best what to look for, what has value that lasts.