How Not to Write a Novel

Look over there! SHINY.

2006-04-05T12:55:00.000-04:00

For my new low-pressure blog not involving a novel, see ratty blue stockings - reading, knitting and occasionally cats.

Stop Writing

2006-03-21T11:30:00.000-05:00

So I think I'm going to have to give the novel a break for awhile. You may think, as normal people would, that my previous hiatuses of weeks at a time constituted "breaks," but that would make too much sense. This is a break of the "I am not currently writing a novel" variety.

There are many factors at work here.

I'm just damn sick and tired of it. I dread having to work on it and when I'm done I forget about it with gratitude. It's a chore.
It's taking up too much of my time. If I didn't have to work for a living, I would love to write a novel, but I already have two jobs and I've never been able to get by on less than eight hours of sleep. If I want, and I thiiiiiiink I do, to freelance full time and give up my day job for good, I'm going to have to spend hours every day shilling for new work. The sustained psychic space necessary for me to write fiction has no part in such a lifestyle, at least until I do in fact give up the day job.
It's a source of anxiety. Whenever I'm not working on it, I feel like I should be, and since I don't want to and don't have time, it makes me feel like a failure. I had a brief acute depression about two weeks ago, followed by my first-ever migraine, that scared me enough to really pay attention to sources of anxiety. The world is full of things I have to do that I don't want to and don't have time, and I can't impose more on myself and not go nuts.

I hope this isn't the end of The Amateurs; I do think it's a good idea and I do think I'm good at it. If I pick it up again in six months and finish it six months after that, it's better than writing it for a year and a half in my life's blood and then dying young. Quitting is depressing, but not as depressing as keeping on with it would be.

I'll try to keep posting here though -- I've got to tell someone about my knitting.

Final Word Count: 19,593

Talk About Oneself

2006-03-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

Eek! I’ve been tagged by Wiz Knitter. For heck’s sake, Wiz Knitter, would I have started a blog if I wanted to talk about myself?

Four jobs in your life:
1. Freelance writer/researcher – someday I’ll do it full time.
2. Legal word processor/graphics operator (It’s the Best Day Job in the World! Please don’t fire me!)
3. Library assistant (College)
4. Retail clerk (High school. Isn’t everyone?)

Four movies you could watch over and over:
1. Fantasia, the ideal sedative. Have you ever noticed that at least one character falls asleep in almost every segment?
2. The Commitments.
3. Anything by Monty Python.
4. The Thin Man. Why am I not Myrna Loy?

Four TV shows you love to watch:
1. Mystery!
2. Rick Steves’ Europe.
3. The Daily Show
4. The Muppet Show, and if they would COME OUT WITH ANOTHER VOLUME ALREADY it would be higher up the list.

Four places you have lived:
1. New York, NY
2. Alexandria, VA
3. Lakewood, CA
4. Mechanicsburg, PA (OK, I was really too young to remember that one)

Four places you have been on vacation:
1. Disney World (Mike and I got married there, which is really all you need to know about us)
2. Paris, France (Why yes, we went to Euro Disney while we were there; why do you ask?)
3. Montreal, Canada
4. Ely, Minnesota

Four websites you visit daily:
1. Cute Overload
2. Go Fug Yourself
3. The Daily Kitten
4. Firedoglake

Four of your favorite foods:
1. Dark chocolate
2. Red wine
3. Brie cheese
4. Potatoes in any form (Irish on my father’s side and Polish on my mother’s – you can’t escape potatoes)

Four places you'd rather be right now:
1. Disney World (Anyone perceive a trend? Me neither.)
2. My extremely well-worn easy chair.
3. A cabin in the woods.
4. Bed.

Four favorite types of yarn:
1. South West Trading Company Phoenix Soy Silk
2. Crystal Palace Fizz
3. Debbie Bliss Cashmerino
4. Self-patterning sock yarn. How do they get it to do that?

Four bloggers I'm tagging:
1. Knancy at Sockaholic

...

I don’t actually know any other bloggers who knit and have not yet been tagged. So take it away, Knancy!

Skip Town, Part Deux

2006-02-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

Got to make this quick so I'll do it in bullet points:

Leaving tomorrow for a week with Mom in sunny California.
Finished the eyelash yarn corkscrew scarf and started a soy silk clapotis shawl.
Finished articles about Melvil Dewey and the Great Bone Wars for the History Channel Magazine, and I am so damn sick of them that I hope I never hear about decimal classification or dinosaur fossils again.
No novelizing.

So that's it! See you in a week. Unless you're Mom, in which case I'll see you tomorrow.

Wait Too Long To Take Up A Hobby

2006-02-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

So I've made a hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, so far, and I've just cast on a corkscrew scarf in glittery eyelash yarn (kind of a beast to work because you can't see the stitches, but quite forgiving because...well, you can't see the stitches). And I've discovered something interesting. My microcassette recorder has a voice-recognition feature that turns it on when it hears sound and off after a moment or two of silence. Which means I can dictate while I'm knitting (*BUMP bump BAAAAAA*).

This may sound like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but it's actually a discovery of some importance. The problem I have with first-draft composition, as I mentioned once before, is that concentrating solely on it causes me so much anxiety that I second-guess it as I go along, thereby adversely affecting the speed of the process, the quality of the work and any lingering enjoyment I might have of the whole affair.

I used to dictate while I walked in the park, which was ideal. Exercise, fresh air and perceived forward motion -- exactly what a neurotic needs most. But that's not always practical in the wintertime, especially on pitch-dark weeknights, which is when I have to write now that I work days. So any activity that will distract the internal censor while the lizard brain gets to work in peace is a great help. It's not quite a perfect solution because I'm not a particularly good knitter yet, so I have to send part of the lizard brain along to give the internal censor a hand with it occasionally, and the dictation slows down. But time and practice should address this.

Momentous discovery notwithstanding, I haven't done very much in the last two weeks, and whenever I don't work for a few days, I'm convinced that I'll never work again. But I transcribed my knitting dictation last night, as well as putting in an hour with the two articles I have due next week, so I feel that I can face you all again.

Word count: 19,593 (+2,111)

Take Up a Hobby

2006-02-01T12:09:00.000-05:00

A bunch of us at my job have gotten together for a "Biggest Loser" contest. Each person kicks in $100 and on May 5, the one who lost the highest percentage of body weight gets the pot, which is up to $2,000. To complicate things, the firm's charity committee is donating $5 per pound lost to Oxfam. Long story short, since health and vanity are obviously not strong enough incentives for me to lose that last thirty pounds, I now have greed and philanthropy to shore them up.

This is one of the reasons I've taken up knitting. I figured I needed something besides eating to do with my hands in my leisure hours. The other reason I took up knitting is because of my friend Wiz Knitter (N.B. Daaaaamn yooooou). I'm sure she didn't go out of her way to indoctrinate me or anything, but what she did do was introduce me to the concept of the online knitting community, and from then it was merely a matter of time.

Because knitters? Are crazy people. Intense, compulsive, possessed of a majestic illogic. Here is a knitter who lusted after a particular fiber for months, finally procured it from a foreign land and then put it in her yarn stash where it stayed for a year before she figured out what to do with it. This is the site for the Knitting Olympics, where contestants begin a project the moment the Torino flame is lit and have to finish it before the flame goes out. Finally, this. Clearly any activity undertaken by such sumptuously eccentric people is one it would behoove me to investigate.

So I'm going to be making this. It's my first attempt at knitting in the round, so I foresee drama. But one must move beyond scarves at some point, mustn't one? Of course one must.

Word count: 17,472 (+8,020, but mostly second draft so it's not quite as impressive as it sounds. Sorry!)

Plan an Escape

2006-01-18T12:15:00.000-05:00

So Mike and I are thinking about moving back to Southern California in a couple of years. The prospect freaks me out somewhat because I grew up there, and I never really thought I'd go back. Growing up, I had this beef that the California culture and architecture and setting were all some kind of cheap cardboard imitation of something -- that the proper state of the world involved snow in the wintertime, decent public transit, housing stock more than forty years old, neighborhoods instead of strip malls, and a downtown that people actually live in. You know -- New York.

But now that I've lived in New York for eleven years, I'm beginning to change my mind. In my grand total of two trips west since I left in 1993, I've been able to wrap my brain around the concept that California culture is its own thing, not a knockoff of something else -- the stucco and the strip malls and the sprawl and the occasional sun-addled dippiness are on purpose. Perhaps even in a good way.

In any case, I'm kind of over New York. It's cold, and dirty, and too many people live here, so it's rude. The places I've seen palmed off as livable homes would boggle the mind of a suburbanite. The rents charged for those places would drive the suburbanite to autolobotomy.

So it's time for a change. Mike, at the age of [REDACTED FOR SECURITY PURPOSES] has never lived anywhere else, so he's got to get out of the city for at least a few years or he'll start to grow moss. It will be great to be close enough to my mom to see her more often than once a year. And if we actually swing more than one bathroom, I can pretty much die happy.

Plus, Disneyland. Remember who you're dealing with here!

Word count: 9,452 (+3,059)

...I Got Nothing.

2006-01-11T10:51:00.000-05:00

In a good way, though. I know I'm supposed to be knicker-twisting about fiction writing and how awful it is and what a failure it makes me feel, and how I'm going to start speaking cynically and wearing black all the time and drinking a lot, but I've actually hit a pretty smooth stretch in the road. I'm writing just about every day; I'm pretty satisfied with the output; I've been able to keep my mind off how much better it would be if someone else were doing it. Having an outline keeps me from second-guessing every single thing right down to the spine of the story the way I used to (let that be engraved on my tombstone, Outlines Are The Greatest Gifts).

Most importantly, some synergy between my new workspace and my changing inclination in the matter of leisure activities is making it much easier for me to do work instead of reading mystery novels and snacking. Even when I rev up the easy chair and hunker down with a giant-sized bag of Cheetos and Gaudy Night, I get bored after about forty-five minutes and stuffed after twenty (I have yet to see dividends on my waistline, but we've barely passed the holidays, give me a break). I wish to heck I could figure out why, but I don't want to hex it.

Anyway, it's all good. For now. We'll see.

Word Count: 6,393 (+2,024)

Work in a Black Hole

2006-01-06T13:04:00.000-05:00

Well, dang. You know how I said back in November that I didn't like my work space? Last Saturday, the last day of 2005, we spent five and a half hours moving the study into the bedroom and the bedroom into the study, and damn it if it wasn't like turning on a faucet. That night I sat down and started outlining The Amateurs from scratch, and I finished the outline by Monday evening and have been going strong on first-sometimes-second draft composition ever since.

The only thing I can come up with is that the old study had some sort of sucking black hole of energy in the corner where I sat (which is fine in the bedroom because you want to be sleeping in there, and anyway the only thing in that corner now is a bookcase) because when we first made the move, we discovered that the only way to set up the furniture (we have a really weirdly shaped apartment) is almost exactly the way we had it in the previous spaces, which would seem to negate the purpose. Our faces when we realized that we had spent five and a half hours on that would have won a prize on America's Funniest Home Videos. But we were wrong. Hallelujah.

The only problem is that all the dust we kicked up seems to have given me blacklung or something. I don't even know what to do for a chest cold; all my home remedies are oriented on post-nasal phlegm. Fortunately it seems to be working itself out with no help from me.

Word Count: 4,369 (+1,633)

Nurture Discontent

2005-12-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

We recently bought a new map-of-the-world shower curtain to replace the moldy old kitty-cat one, and I was surprised to find it fostering discontent in me in an unexpected way.

I've always wondered if there isn't someplace in the world where we could live, comfortably and safely, on nothing but my income from freelance writing, which currently makes up about 15% of our total household income. We both have decent day jobs which are not too unbearable, but they take up way too much time that could be spent on writing a novel, learning French, baking our own bread, raising a puppy, reading the whole Bible including the boring parts, running a frame-by-frame comparison between the new Wizard of Oz DVD and the unremastered version, sleeping without an alarm clock every single day -- everything, in fact, besides sitting at a desk at some day job.

I don't know where that mythical place is where we can live on my writing money, but thanks to the shower curtain I now have a lot of possibilities lined up. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in the Aleutians," I'll say out of nowhere. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Archangel'sk." The southern horn of Africa is the part closest to the toilet. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Fianarantsoa. Maybe we can live on my writing money in Gaborone."

I don't really want to live in Africa; my notions of what weather and landscape should be are pretty firmly within a few degrees of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. I would rather live on my writing money in Dun Laoghaire or Gimmelwald or the Catskills, if I thought I could. But I've heard of all those places, which jacks up the cost of living, I figure.

Anyway, I can't spend too much time on that kind of thinking -- I have to get back to work.

Word Count: 2,736 (+1,069)

Edit Preemptively, Times 30,449

2005-12-27T11:43:00.000-05:00

You might think that I've refrained from posting for the last four weeks because the holidays, the transit strike and a string of freelance deadlines has occupied all my available attention. And you'd be right, but that's not the whole truth. No, the reason I haven't been posting is that I've done a lot of hard thinking about my novel and where it's going, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to start again from scratch.

Until now, I've been working on a kind of frothy, amusing novel with a good strong spine and a modicum of heart, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. But the surface is too slick, the spine is too straight, and it's altogether too conventional to be worth the trouble. There's nothing bent about it. It's like I'm watching When Harry Met Sally when I really want to see O Brother, Where Art Thou? There's nothing wrong with When Harry Met Sally; it's one of my favorite movies ever. But it's not bent.

I'm not going to toss out everything. I'm keeping the one scene that appeared in my original dream -- The Amateurs came to me in a dream, did I mention that? -- and the general plot, of course. I'm not going to start writing a different book or anything. But I'm going to sit down with the nutty little characters I've managed to extract from my unconscious, and try to get them to tell me what they want out of life, what they intend to do to get it and what kind of world they want to do it in. It's going to go slowly, but I think it has to be done.

It's actually pretty exciting, I think. The more you work on a piece of writing, the narrower your options become. I had written myself into a corner. Now it's wide open again.

Word Count: 1,667 (-30,449)

Work in the Wrong Place

2005-11-29T12:32:00.000-05:00

I learned something interesting about my work habits when I was visiting my dad and stepmom for Thanksgiving last week. We stayed in their big basement guest room, which is set up like a bed-sitter with a little living room area on one side and a nice bedroom area on the other, with a big table in between as a room divider. Lord, I love that table. I got more work done there in the half-hour before Thanksgiving dinner than I usually do in a whole weekend.

Which leads me to the interesting thing I learned: The workspace in my actual home is set up in the most perversely wrong way possible for the purpose of getting anything done. The desk is a computer workstation with no writing surface, and it's set so close to my easy chair that the difference between relaxing and working is standing up, aiming my butt in the other direction and sitting down again. The chair is a dining chair with no cushion. I have a lap desk to use in my easy chair, but my easy chair is so associated with not working in my mind that when I use it I proceed at about ten words an hour.

I used to think it was because I was lazy, but I work so much faster and more efficiently at my dad's house or the library or even my day job that I'm forced against my will to believe in the power of ergonomics. The thing is, I wasn't writing professionally when I set up my home office. The computer was for web surfing. The easy chair was for snacking. Finis. Five years into my freelance career, I'm still wondering why it's so excruciating for me to produce output when I ostensibly enjoy what I do.

So when I've met my two upcoming deadlines, I'll be cracking the old knuckles and shoving around some furniture in there until I've got a workspace that's conducive to, well, work. Something with a nice big surface for my books and notebook, with the computer over to the side, and the whole thing several feet away from my relaxing space.

Of course, this experiment was only performed on my freelance nonfiction. We'll see if it does anything for the novel. It certainly can't hurt.

Word Count: 32,116 (+0) -- yeah, you heard me.

Get out of Practice

2005-11-21T12:02:00.000-05:00

Well, we had a pretty good time at Disney World, and although a couple of fairly major things went wrong, they mostly turned out for the best. For instance, we thought we had tickets to Cirque du Soleil on Thursday night, but it turned out that their online ticketing system had eaten them. Fortunately, we were really in no mood to see whippet-thin contortionists doing nutty things with their midsections after the enormous dinner we had just had, so it worked out.

Also, I woke up the very first morning with my first head cold of the 2005-06 season, which was a huge drag. But I have head colds every few weeks in the wintertime (my theory is that a mutant immune system that turns all viruses into head colds is one of my superpowers, along with finding lost things and reading bad handwriting), so I know exactly how to handle them and I was feeling fine on the afternoon of the third day.

Of course, by the time we got back, I didn't want to work for a living anymore. I'm accustomed to not wanting to work at a day job, even the Best Day Job in the World. But this past weekend I didn't even want to write for a living. I had the hardest time even sitting down to work on the two fascinating articles I'm working on for the History Channel Magazine (this month features me on Audubon and Transcendentalist New England, pick one up at Barnes & Noble Booksellers today!). I practically had an anxiety attack; I kept getting up to wash the dishes, dig under the bed for the cat, stroll into the other room to see what Mike was up to...anything to keep from working. It's as though since I hadn't done any writing for two weeks, I'd forgotten how.

Word Count: 32,116 (+0)

Because if I can't write even when there's a paycheck on the other end, I sure as heck can't write for mere personal edification.

N.B. We're leaving again tomorrow night for Thanksgiving with my dad in Alexandria, Virginia. So there will definitely be no novelizing until at least the weekend. If then. I have two freelance things due on December 2nd and two more on the 5th, don't look at me like that.

Skip Town

2005-11-08T11:25:00.000-05:00

Mike and I will be at Disney World from the 10th to the 15th, and Jamie will be in the clink, so there will be no novelizing done.

I travel two or three times a year, about 25% of the time to Disney World, but I still can't get over feeling enormously stressed until the moment we get off the plane. I'm convinced that I'm going to forget something incredibly obvious, like taking Jamie to the vet, and he'll spend a week wandering pathetically around the house, slowly starving. Or that I'll leave my glasses at home, so I'll have to wear my contacts to sleep and my eyes will grow skin over them. Or that I'll forget the plane tickets and we'll have to spend another $X hundred dollars and sit there on standby, watching the hours tick away and the $150 I spent on Cirque de Soleil tickets for that night trickle slowly down the drain. I'm a very bad traveler.

Enjoy! I'll post pictures if we don't end up looking too fat in them.

Word Count: 32,116 (+759)

Cheat Again, Like the Saucy Redhead You Are

2005-10-30T13:36:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm just going to give up feeling badly about swiping stuff back from my kill file, and embrace it instead as a handy resource for increasing my word count without actually having to do any work. As I said before, "I did write the section, just not recently," and as my mom responded, "The writing counts no matter when the words were written. It was your creative decision to include them so they count!" Which just goes to show that one should always listen to one's mom. In any case, it's not like I stuck something in from a different book, or something -- the section goes there.

Oh, the redheaded part?

Last Saturday, the 22nd. Fetching, isn't it? I can't believe I never thought to do it before. I've been joking that I'll have to get a new redheaded personality to go with the hair, but I had to stop when my friend Pat said a touch dryly: "You've always had the personality, the hair just caught up."

Word Count: 31,357 (+1,157)

Work for a Living: THE REVENGE

2005-10-26T11:09:00.000-04:00

So I've stopped working full time at the Best Day Job in the World and have gone to an 11am-5pm schedule, five days a week. That gives me time in the morning to either go to the damn gym (many thanks and a big middle finger to the endomorphic ancestors who have made this necessary) or to walk in the park and dictate fiction. So, not to make too many extravagant promises, but that should mean that this blog should hear from me a little more often.

I've been reading the excellent February House by Sherrill Tippins, about W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and a supporting cast of dozens living in a house in Brooklyn Heights in the early forties, and it has been teaching me much. First of all, and I'm aware that I'm not the first to point this out, writers back then drank, my God. I'm fond of midprice Australian Shiraz myself, and Mike and I have spent some recent weekend evenings exploring the possibilities of the martini set I got him last Christmas, but holy cow, the Forties Writer Pro Drinking League is one I don't even aspire to. Add smoking to the mix and I'm surprised they lived to their thirtieth birthdays.

But where the book gets interesting is where it talks about their work habits, which is frankly what I look for in literary biographies. Carson McCullers found long walks to be "a therapeutic part of her writing process" and got lots of material from the things she saw, and Auden decided at fifteen that a great poet "arranges his life so that he can focus on his work." I haven't gotten to the Gypsy Rose Lee part, but I'd be interested to see if she wrote The G-String Murders naked, for the sake of verisimilitude.

Word Count: 30,200 (+620)

Sleep

2005-10-19T09:32:00.000-04:00

Gawd, I know. I think it's the days getting shorter. You know, in the summertime, I used to get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the gym? These days, it's all I can do to haul my butt out of bed at a pitch-dark 6:45 to get to work on time.

Because it's sleeping weather again, and I love sleep. I'll go to bed early just to sleep recreationally sometimes, I love it so much. All summer long it's been too hot to sleep, even with our shuddering old air conditioners: I stick to the sheets and I have to have a fan blowing on me, which always makes me feel like someone's poking me gently (pokepokepokepokepokepokepokepoke all night long).

Back when I worked the second shift, I could sleep as late as I wanted. My God, that was awesome. I didn't set an alarm for four years. I used to wake up at around ten, and then just lie there for forty-five minutes or so, dipping in and out of sleep. I called it "surfing the doze." I can't do that anymore. Even on weekends, Jamie needs his shot or I have to go to the bathroom or I might as well get some work done before Mike gets up. I miss it a lot.

I used to dream a lot about flying during the doze periods. When I fly in dreams, I start out by running, and the strides get longer and longer until I'm jumping about twenty feet at a time, and then I kick my legs out behind in the Superman pose and I'm off. It seems to take just enough effort that I feel like I've developed a new skill, like riding a bike. "Everyone will be so surprised when I show them," I always think. "Pretty soon we'll all be getting around like this."

The last time I had the flying dream was about six weeks ago. I ran, I jumped, I kicked and I flew, just like always, but when I got to the part about everyone being surprised, I thought "Gosh, every time this happens it turns out to be a dream." And I woke up.

Word Count: 29,580 (+574)

Write Other Things

2005-10-05T09:30:00.000-04:00

So I actually have another demand on my time besides The Amateurs, a marriage, a cat and the Best Day Job in the World: a freelance writing practice. I've written articles for a couple of magazines and copy for a couple of PR ventures, but my favorite client by an order of magnitude is The History Channel Magazine (available in Barnes & Noble stores nationwide!). I get to write stuff for them that I'd be interested in reading, which is a great boon to a freelancer; it has taught me an awful lot and on top of everything it's thrown me a decent amount of spare change. Not enough to quit the BDJitW, but enough to finance a couple of pretty awesome vacations. The current issue, for any who are interested, features me on heritage breed livestock, which was of course fascinating but for some reason a deadly hard topic to write about.

I have deadlines coming up for two HC articles in December and two again in February, and -- this is so typical there ought to be a pill for it -- the need to simultaneously research and write two articles while trying to maintain any level of involvement in The Amateurs has rendered me all but incapable of doing either. I have never been one of God's anointed multitaskers, but faced by the choice of (a) researching haunted hotels on the Internet or (b) going for a walk with my microcassette recorder and dictating a thousand words of fiction, I seem to default to (c) picking out slipcovers for the dining-room chairs or (d) surfing the Op-Eds for my daily dose of outrage.

Word Count: 29,006 (+695)

Get Dynamic

2005-09-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

What I find to be ironic about very active sequences is that the process of writing them is so much slower and more deliberate than just writing about two people having a conversation. The physical logistics alone take me days. "What does that guy do while this guy's running up the stairs? How about the girl over there? What's happening in the rest of the room? How soon would the people on the second floor get sick of all the racket and come down to holler at someone? Would Soandso just stand there while all this is going on?"

Because in an action sequence a lot of things happen at once, and while you can show that in a medium like film (in fact, the more things that happen at once in an action-movie sequence, the better, apparently), in written fiction you can't do that unless you keep going back in narrative time over and over and explain what everyone's up to. A lot of writers, of whom I will probably be one, employ the time-honored phrase "Everything seemed to happen at once" to indicate to the reader that these things are, in fact, all happening at once; other writers, generally known among the intelligentsia as "better," just tell you the important things and use style to create the required sense of urgency or chaos.

The heavy logistics also prevent me from dictating scenes like this, since I so often have to refer back to one or more of the other things that are happening at once, so all else aside, I work at half speed just from having to type it all. It's very discouraging.

And where the heck is fall, exactly? Surely by this time of year we should be getting at least a couple of days under 70 degrees? I've got to get hold of whoever's in charge.

Word Count: 28,311 (+843)

Share It

2005-09-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

I've been perking along pretty well on The Amateurs on the whole, although I've been fighting a lack of initiative for the last couple of weeks. It's easy -- or at least not hard -- to generate first-draft composition fairly regularly when I'm the only one who has to see it: I don't have to second-guess it, or polish it, or basically please anyone but myself. I can read it knowing exactly what I mean.

But now I've agreed to workshop some of it with my friend Danielle and ever since then I've been reading it as if someone else was reading it. And now I hate it. All of it. A lot. I've cut some things and put in some other things, and generally made it smoother and more readable. I still hate it. And I haven't even given it to Danielle yet.

I knew people were going to have to read it eventually, or what's the point, right? But until a couple of weeks ago, I had expected to be able to finish it, ignore it for a couple of months and then use my superpowers to turn it from a bundle of semiconnected scenes into a single, coherent piece of work.

I have to say, and I don't think I'm alone in this: when it comes to my own stuff I am the most blackhearted critic ever.

Word Count: 27,468 (+393)

Work for a Living

2005-09-16T09:50:00.000-04:00

Generally speaking, my day job is the best one ever: it pays well, offers generous benefits and has the deepest possible appreciation of the work/life balance that is still compatible with actual commercial activity. The time-off package is unbelievable, and the corporate culture actively nurtures courtesy and collegiality.

But we've been really busy at work this week, and while my brain understands and accepts that it is not the firm's responsibility to provide me with plenty of downtime in which to transcribe my dication and update this blog, I'm still mildly shocked and affronted when it doesn't. I've also been fighting a little bug of some sort since Sunday, so I've been sleeping a lot, and it seems to have affected my initiative, because when I'm not sleeping I don't really want to do anything but read mystery novels and snack.

Anyway, I did get a little bit of work done. I'm almost finished replacing the scene that I cut out over the weekend, and to my pleased surprise it actually went very quickly and easily, so I guess it was indeed a Good Thing that I edited preemptively, after all.

Word Count: 27,075 (+1,112)

Edit Preemptively

2005-09-11T16:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I reread my draft from the very beginning and came to the dismal conclusion that in order to move forward in the direction I want, I'm going to have to cut out and completely replace a scene near the beginning which had seemed to me merely expository, but which I've come to realize is a fairly major key to my protagonist's circumstances and character. It's certainly a good thing that I've recognized this now, instead of two weeks from now when I've written 5,000 more words that depend on this scene, but it's always depressing to see yourself going backwards.

However, in the process I've learned a lot about my protagonist and what has to happen to her. As a result of this scene, her trajectory will go from being largely driven by outside influences to being an internal conflict of personal morality, which is a lot less reactive. The rewriting of the scene, which will be accomplished over the next few days, will undoubtedly open up a lot of possibilities. So it is, overall, a Good Thing.

I suppose.

Damn it.

Word Count: 25,963 (-1,074)

Cheat

2005-09-09T11:20:00.000-04:00

Today's dirty little secret is that only about 600 of the new words in the word count are first draft composition. The rest is a section that I wrote months ago for an earlier conception of the novel and pasted in from the kill file. It's not technically cheating, I suppose -- I did write the section, just not recently -- but I still kind of feel like I'm getting away with something.

Anyone else ever noticed how dramatically different a scene looks on paper from the way you pictured it in your head?

Yeah, me neither.

Word Count: 27,037 (+892)

Read Someone Else's

2005-09-07T11:09:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and I'm considering instituting a moratorium on the reading of good fiction, at least until I finish a first draft. Crap, now -- that's different; all the Patricia Wentworth mysteries ever written won't impact my work on The Amateurs, except insofar as time spent reading crap is time not spent working. But good fiction inspires in me a deep insecurity, based on the following syllogism:

The New York Trilogy is good fiction.

The Amateurs is nothing like The New York Trilogy.

therefore

The Amateurs is not good fiction.

In general terms, that's OK -- I'm not trying to write good fiction in the sense of trying to make a literary statement or comment on the human condition or win a Pulitzer. All I aspire to for The Amateurs is a good well-paced story with strong and interesting characters in an amusing, slightly flip style. Beach reading for the moderately intelligent, I call it. But reading real literature while I'm trying to write decent fiction always makes me feel like a fraud, and even a strong but not necessarily literary narrative (see the Harry Potter books) makes me jealous to the point of weeping (which is why I didn't get past The Prisoner of Azkhaban). Is this the character flaw that will stand between me and a decent novel? Only time will tell.

In any case The New York Trilogy is totally depressing. All about hermetically isolated outsiders living in one of the developed world's most dehumanizing cities, nurturing ingrown obsessions with other people's lives. Don't read it right after a massive humanitarian disaster, is what I'm saying.

Word Count: 26,145 (+846)

Reach a Milestone

2005-09-06T11:02:00.000-04:00

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway mentions one of his sure-fire writing tricks: always to stop writing for the day before he'd emptied his brain, so that when he sat down again the next day he'd always have something in there to start with. It's the most practical piece of writing advice I've ever heard or read, and the proof of its utility is how it's made the rounds -- I think even Hemingway had gotten it from someone else.

Last week, I reached a small milestone in The Amateurs: roughly, the setting of the scene and the introduction of the most important players as well as the problems that will be addressed in the plot. Not that I've been writing nothing but exposition for 25,000 words; plenty of things have happened -- but the course of the story, which has been moving in a straight line, will now take a sharp bend and go over some rapids.

Naturally, I finished the Straight Line part last Thursday and then took a nice long Labor Day break to "brainstorm" about the Bendy Rapids part. I stupidly thought I could do this somehow subliminally, in the downtime between the championship CNN-watching and experimental martini-drinking I also had planned. Needless to say, I started today's writing task with almost no clue where I was going with it, thereby proving, if it needed proving, that Hemingway was a lot smarter than I am.

Word Count: 25,299 (+534)

Worry Your Pretty Little Head About the World

2005-09-01T10:16:00.000-04:00

Something that's been rightly taken to task by the liberal blogosphere is the idea that the people of the Mississippi Delta hardest hit by the hurricane (a) somehow had it coming, (b) certainly don't deserve help from the rest of us, and/or (c) are basically unworthy anyway.

Although I must say that people shooting at evacuation helicopters are not at all challenging the logic of (c), I'm always amazed at the thought process that would blame the victims of a situation like this, until I remember that victims of injustice are nearly always blamed, no matter what the situation. It's common for people to assign a moral component to a perceived failure -- it's a defense mechanism for their consciences, their worldviews, and their pocketbooks. At its basis is the totally understandable unwillingness to believe that bad things (often very, very bad things) can happen to absolutely anyone -- looters, thugs, hardworking families, office workers in high-rises. And if "failure" to put a plastic bubble around one's living space to protect it from Lake Pontchartrain is a moral "failure," then we don't need to feel badly about it, offer help to people who've experienced it, or imagine something like that happening to us.

Because if we imagine it happening to us, it might be too much for us to bear. And then we might become the kind of person who spends money, or vacation days, or house room to help people in need -- good people and bad.

It's might be cheaper the other way. But somehow I doubt that it makes us richer.

Word Count: 24,765 (+0). For some reason, I couldn't keep my mind on it.

Have a Pet

2005-08-31T10:59:00.000-04:00

The stereotype of writers having cats is a venerable one. This article talks about Dickens, Poe, Walpole, Sir Walter Scott and Harriet Beecher Stowe; here is the cat colony at the Hemingway Museum; Colette, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain and Robertson Davies were all Cat People, and so am I, but for some reason any work I get done is in spite of Jamie and not because of him. His persistent inability to understand that my lap, though capacious, will not hold both a ten-pound laptop and a fifteen-pound cat is one reason.

Today, I took him in for an abdominal ultrasound, in an attempt to pinpoint the cause of the puking hobby he started up this summer. He's diabetic, so they've been pretty much assuming pancreatitis, but a cat with pancreatitis who barfs between two and five times a week for three months would be in much worse shape than Jamie, who is fat and lustrous and actually managed to gain a quarter-pound since the last time we were at the vet a month ago.

My personal opinion is that Jamie has grown to understand conversations about money, and is using this secret skill to torture me. "My, my," he thinks. "A wide-screen TV? Graduate study abroad? A down payment on an apartment?! I'd better get to work on that extra money they seem to have lying around." So he throws a $500 veterinary emergency, and home electronics are forgotten for another fiscal quarter.

Through rigorous monitoring of his diet, we've come close to eradicating this summer's problem. I will have to have a serious talk with him though; the victims of Hurricane Katrina will need my extra money a lot more than he will for the foreseeable future. The Red Cross for the human animals, Noah's Wish for the rest -- get out your checkbooks if you haven't already.

I must say this blog has already proved its worth in the matter of keeping tabs on myself. It would have been really easy not to work on my novel last night -- who am I kidding; it's always really easy not to work on my novel -- but the thought that my mom and the other two people reading this will think I'm a complete loser if I don't get up that word count carried the day.

Word Count: 24,765 (+1,191)

Stare at a Blank Screen

2005-08-30T11:22:00.000-04:00

One of the biggest mistakes I consistently make is to try to sit down and type words directly from my head into the computer (you might recognize this activity as that which normal people call "writing"). Generally, for first-draft fiction, I dictate into a microcassette recorder; this allows me to get the words from my brain into a neutral holding facility without allowing me to second-guess them until later, when I'm transcribing. Otherwise, I'll no sooner type a subordinate phrase without wondering if it communicates anything, if it communicates too much, if it moves the story forward, if it reveals character, if there's any point to the whole exercise, and if I shouldn't just give the whole thing up and start watching Fear Factor in my newly spare time. Result: gridlock.

Last night, due to peevishness and sloth, I dictated 486 words instead of my usual thousand and change. I thought, in the naivete to which I so desperately cling, that when I got to the transcription stage I would become inspired and meet my thousand-word goal. It goes without saying that I was wrong about this. I extracted another thirty words as though I was paying cash for them, and called it quits.

Word Count: 23,560 (+516)

Start a Blog

2005-08-29T09:13:00.000-04:00

Because nothing says "I'm committed to my novel" like committing to something completely different.

My name is Kathy Monahan, and my novel is called The Amateurs. It's my seventh "first" novel, the other six being The Chaste Planet, The Secret of Pyewacket Island, The Odd Collective and Untitled #1, #2 and #3. The others were aborted somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 words, but this one, I'm going to finish. Really. Oh, come on! What are you shaking your head like that for?

Since I have such a distinguished history of slacking off on my fiction writing, I conceived of this blog as a way to keep tabs on myself, to document the evolution of my particular style and process, to bitch comprehensively about whatever is going wrong and, hopefully, to be of use to other writers who are experiencing the same thing.

Today, Monday, August 29, The Amateurs consists of 23,044 words of first-draft composition. Whenever that changes, which ought to be somewhere between two and five times a week, I'll post the new word count along with whatever thoughts I have on the process. And occasionally, when Daily Life or the World Out There intervene interestingly enough to make them worth writing about, I'll do that too.

So that's it -- on with the show!