How To Not Go Nuts While Writing

I'm often asked by other writers how I get my work done.

I ask them the same thing, looking for the same guidance.  For all of us, it's a constant challenge.  We need all the fairy dust we can find.

Because -- truth be told -- we each stare daily into a terrifying abyss.  Technique may supply the sticks for a rickety one-person suspension bridge swaying over a chasm two thousand feet down, but we writers know in the pits of our hungry stomachs that we must build every bridge all alone.  We also know that each span can start from only one side, from a single cliff face outward -- into mid-air.  Where that bridge will ultimately attach to the opposite wall -- if it ever does -- can't be known until our story's end, after we say in shock at least once, "Huh.  Not a romance after all.  A flipping tragedy.  I have to rip down this flowery wrought-iron I've spent six months on and rebuild this whole thing in Brutalist cement."

In my experience a novel is always a prerequisite for itself, forever circling back and beginning again, unable to support its full weight until it's all constructed and foot-tested.  At least for me, there are no incremental milestones of success, nothing before the final finish line because anything I do today I might decide to chuck wholesale tomorrow.  I live a life of deferred, delayed, and sometimes never-arriving gratification.  So what I'm really asking other writers is "How do you not go insane in the endless meantime?"  That's also the real, naked question I believe they are asking me.

FWIW, here's what I try to do:

• Choose an extra-curricular activity with a short-term payback.  For me it's art.  I'm a nature painter.  In a couple of weeks I can produce a canvas that's done done.  Hold it in my hands.  Pronounce it adequate and move on.

• Exercise.  Same point as above.  A workout is of finite duration and content.  Additionally, exercise flushes the over-thinking mind like water.  Which reminds me:

• Water.  Plus I find my exhausted, end-of-day sugar cravings evaporate as soon as I drink.

• Plot out loud.  To avoid mental cycling, I try to plot while walking.  (Aldous Huxley used to plot as he hiked Mulholland Highway beneath the Hollywood sign, where he lived in a house under the first "O.")  Also, starting a sentence out loud means I have to finish it, and hear it, and then say another.  Hellooo linearity, the blessed hobgoblin of cycling minds.

• Laugh.  It's something to pursue consciously, especially when it seems like forever will be spent on writing a dramatic novel.  I have learned from my elder daughter, who is a philosopher, purposefully to seek "the happy" every day.  To identify it and calendar it each morning.

• Daily reward.  Even if it's only a hot shower, choose your attagirl in the morning too so you can look forward to it during the day.  Setting a reward also obliges me to define the specific task that will earn it.  Et voila!  A quantifiable deliverable.  A thousand words, a morning of research -- which in turn solves the pesky revving-but-not-going-anywhere mental pretzeling.

• No internet surfing.  I love ya, CNN, but you can't get my work done.  Joyce Carol Oates observed that "constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination."  You said it, sister.

• The same daily work schedule, enforced.  My mind yearns to know for sure when it must be "on," plus a schedule that's already set is a relief, lowering stress by eliminating choice.  Enforcing that schedule, whatever schedule works for you, then becomes an exercise in delicious self-respect.

• A full daily schedule.  I find that when I plan my whole day in advance, I don't have time for flailing.  I don't sit wondering what to do next.  I may not finish every task I breathlessly assign myself in the morning, but I tackle most of them and more than I would have if I had not pre-gamed.  (Oops, I think "pre-game" means something different.)

• Hemingway was right.  He famously recommended that a writer stop for the day only after he knows what he will write tomorrow.  This advice has done great things for the continuity of my flow.

Now, of course, the issue is following all this advice.  Now that I've written it, I can't act like I don't know.If anyone has any other good tips, I would be delighted to receive them via email and to update this post. Happy New Year!

It's All Talent

I recently visited Stephen King.  Not the man himself but his black, wrought-iron, bat-studded fence outside his red home in Bangor, Maine.  That day his front driveway gate was open, yawning, daring, but I didn't trespass.  I stood and stared, then walked the wide sidewalk up and down the block in both directions, nonchalantly.  Exactly like all the other nonchalant walkers there every day, I'm sure.

To this lovely, manicured home I had the same reaction I had in Edinburgh at The Elephant House, the cozy cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote, which sells a postcard of her scribbling Harry Potter longhand at "her" table, her blonde hair aglow from the yellow light of the wall sconces.

My reaction there and in Bangor was the same.  That it's all talent.  The home and the cafe are great, but they aren't magical. It's only a wooden table; it's merely a Victorian house.  The magic resides in the fine minds of these writers -- minds muscled with imagination, driven by hard work, resilient in rejection, committed to getting it done.

I realized once again, in Bangor on a stunning day in June, that the best writers create their own magic.  And it's earned. Few things are more difficult than writing well.

I've had my moments of "if only."  If only I had somewhere to write that wasn't the dining room table.  Another writer I know assures me that he really needs a second house to which he can decamp without distraction.  He's looked for one but can't afford two.  He says the want of that nail is the reason he's not creating.

As I pulled out from the curb last month on my way back to the highway, I thought of that man and realized again that there are no excuses.  My dining room table is fine.  All a writer really needs is her mind.

Oh, and a bat-studded fence.  Gotta have that bat-studded fence.     

Writing A Sex Scene Isn’t Sexy

There is much to think about when considering a sex scene as a novelist.  How graphic?  Should I include clinical detail or cut to the waxing moon?  I’m from the generation that had sex but didn’t talk much about it, so the recent change in, huh, transparency has shifted the meter on what’s acceptable. Mainstream novels today include descriptions that thirty years ago would have been considered pornography.

When should a novelist include a sex scene, or three?   I had to grapple with that when writing Alternate Endings. A chacun son goût, but to me, it’s when the storytelling goal of the scene cannot be achieved another way. The sex advances the plot or illuminates a character with a light that only this sexual encounter can provide.

For me, sex in a novel isn’t about the sex, anyway, but everything else that’s happening: the characters’ relationship, how each person processes the moment internally, whether the sex changes them, precisely how the scene throws our protagonist into her next actions. Whether it’s done standing up or sitting down or on a camel is rarely revealing in itself, honestly, except when the method actually shows something else – love, loneliness, perhaps a fixation on sriracha.

In Alternate Endings, the sex scenes reveal character. They show us, and they show our protagonist, truths nakedly, which then propel her towards change. I think those scenes are compulsory in my story.

When the book comes out, as it will in a few weeks, I will be interested in whether you agree.

Inspiration

At Brasenose College at the University of Oxford there is a famous chapel with an unknown secret door. It’s in the high wooden wall that separates the entrance narthex from the chapel proper, to the right of the stairs that lead up to the massive organ that rises to the gorgeous fan-vault ceiling.

You can’t see the hidden door. It’s seamless within the rest of the panels, but if you look really closely there’s a tiny latch.

Inside, you see that it’s a small closet, also made of wood. Nothing special -- storage for cleaning supplies. You see a broom, a mop and spray bottles.

But look through to the back of it. The closet is surprisingly shallow.

See the light coming through? See the thin line that runs up, and across, and down? It’s another door. A second one, that leads to the outside. It accesses a narrow alley that runs alongside the south side of the chapel to a street called St. Mary’s Passage.

I was told that the closet was installed long ago for a certain principal of the college who was chronically late for Sunday chapel. The hidden passageway allowed him to slip in during services unseen.

And you know what else that closet is? Let me give you a clue. C.S. Lewis spent years at Oxford. He was a teaching fellow at Magdalen College, and I was told he knew all about this secret passageway.

So, on that day last summer, I found myself standing at THE closet. The one that inspired C.S. Lewis to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

And I was looking at exactly what he saw.

The tourists don’t know it, but this closet is located just steps away from that other famous door -- the heavy, carved one with the lion’s head on it, the one that’s on every tour of Oxford. There are pictures of it everywhere, the inspiration for the “lion” part of the story. But this hidden closet is only whispered about within Brasenose College, and I had been given the gift of it by someone there who had just learned that I am a novelist.

That summer day, as I stood with goosebumps scampering up my arms, the same goosebumps I had felt at Thomas Riddell’s double grave in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, I realized that inspiration comes from anywhere, and it can be some one, single, small thing. It can have the lightest footprint in our tactile world, but from such little things a great writer can conjure a universe whose blood pulses as if it really existed. That is, if the writer has an imagination that soars.

All the research for a story is great, but there comes a moment at last when it’s nothing but blank paper and pencils and the unreasonable hope that some small talisman will ignite an alternate world. It’s sometimes -- if you’re lucky -- just barely doable if there’s also enough windless mental space for take off.

Oh, and a good pencil sharpener. Maybe a couple of them.

Thank you, Brasenose College.

Building Structure in Farmer’s Son

I’ve been asked how I structure plot.  Not so much how I make characters cause the effects that advance the drama but how I choose the framework to tell the story.

In Farmer’s Son, I announce it.  Each section begins with a page that tells the reader the season, the year, and the point of view character.  Every scene then occurs within those narrow months of that given year, with each being driven by that particular POV character.  Bobby, our lead, appears in every scene of the first section, to establish his voice and stakes and motivation.  His father Garrett drives each scene of the third because by then we need to hear from a character so hated.  Not every reader notices this explicit structure, but that’s good (I tell myself), for that means the shifts aren’t clunky.

Why did I do it that way?  Because I wanted to dip into the subjectivity of each of the four leads, dwelling for a time within their unique personal lives distinct from each other.  And I didn’t want to spend a hundred pages doing it each time.  Rather, I wanted more of a drop-in, a capture of what mattered, and then a moving on, which I hoped would also mesh the individuals into a family.  I hoped with this structure that, when the climax came, the reader would intuitively understand where each of the four leads was coming from, why they each have to do what they do, and how their actions so tragically impact the others.  At the end, I wanted the reader to feel and see all the facets of a troubled, loving, fighting and eventually redeeming family.

I had no template for this, no model, no one to tell me that you just do not build a climax with four characters.  Actually five, if you count catalyst Cora.  That’s way, way too many people with conflicting stakes in the outcome.  But I’m told the climax works.

I built Alternate Endings differently because the story required an entirely different approach, which I’ll describe in my next post.

Thanks for reading!