Quick Whit

Huge Breakthrough!

No, I did not manage to finish writing my book yet, and yes, I am still not quite sure how to draft my way through the ending parts, but I made huge progress today, progress that I’ve been worried I might never make, but without which, my book would sink:  now, for the first time ever, it exists in a single document.

 

One of my early strategies to keep myself from getting hung up as I hack through the first draft was to keep multiple files upon which I could simultaneously write.  I wrote about Grandpa’s childhood in one file, about his introduction to and courtship of my Grandmother in another, and about how he came to enlist in the Air Force, his basic training experiences, and his various missions in still others.  I broke up his long walk out of Germany into many files, and from my very first day of writing, I’ve kept a file on what happened to him after his rescue.  In all, I wrote twenty separate files (and one more still to come), all the time hoping that I would one day have the bandwidth and patience to weave them all together.

 

See, I don’t like novels that tell a story from start to finish, chronologically, plodding their way through adventure and turmoil.  If you want to create a piece like that, why not film a documentary instead?  Good literature moves its readers around and weaves stories into a patchworked whole.  Great literature circles around a focal point in narrowing gyrations, ultimately pulling readers through the eye of the needle.

 

You can imagine the torments my mind has undergone with each new file opened and saved.  How will I ever piece all these bits together?  Will I even remember what I’ve written?  Should I just scrap it and start one big file all over again?  What if it makes no sense?  How does an author go about weaving such stories together, anyhow?  My doubts were large enough to start me cruising job postings again, certain of my impending failure as a first-draft writer.

 

Then, this morning, as I wracked my brain over how to get out of yesterday’s rut, not knowing how this story ends, it came to me:  it was time to piece it all together.  By so doing, I could get a full picture of what needed to be resolved, what would be best left open, and whether I had any coherent story at all.  I forced myself to sit through nearly four hours of copying and pasting, highlighting and resaving, shuffling and double-checking, and even though I wanted to stop, I wanted to rest, I wanted to give up, I made myself push through it.  Had I left the room any longer than to visit the bathroom, I would have lost momentum, forgotten what material I’d already covered and how it related to what was left, and thereby lost my book.

 

But I did it.  Much to my delight, some parts, written even at different points in time, fit together like a clever puzzle.  Other parts weren’t so kind – my pacing is all over the place, I need to rework vast portions of the sections to get them to flow together in a way that makes sense, and it goes without saying that much of the build-up still needs resolving.  But it came together, and while what I’ve written surely does not yet qualify as great literature, I must admit that what I pieced together does, in fact, gyrate.  Best of all, at least for now, it looks like I've accomplished my favorite technique in all of literature:  my story ends exactly where it begins.

Stuck, for real

I am 100% stuck.  I’m lost.  I have no idea how to end my book.

 

One bad writing day in three months is nothing to complain about, and even on such a bad day, I’ve written more than a thousand words.  But the words are wandering words, searching words, words leading somewhere but not quite arriving, directionless at best, hopeless at worst.  I’ve written about my Grandfather’s childhood, about his decisions to enlist in the Air Force, about his basic training, about his combat missions, about his plane exploding, about his trek out of German-occupied territory, and about his rescue.  But I’m stuck now, even as I try to get him home.

 

How do other artists end their work?  When I paint (which isn’t very often), there comes a point when I just know I’m done.  Anything more on the canvas and it would be an awful mess.  The key is to quit then.  A book, though, is much different, not least of the reason why being that I can’t see it all in one glance.  So I ask myself:  is my book done?  No – there are plot lines to resolve and lives to be summed up.  But how do I do it?

 

Maybe emulating a musical composer would be a better strategy, except that classical music is fraught with composers who had no idea how to end their works.  Beethoven is a prime example.  He resolves the development, returns to the original theme, both as he should, then goes to work with one or two newish ideas, resolves them, then decides to hit his audience with wave after wave of ending tones.  Basically, Beethoven is no model for ending a masterpiece.  Mozart’s endings, in general, make sense with the whole and send audiences out the door whistling his melodies but otherwise lack magic.  No one spends much time thinking about Mozart’s finales because, for the most part, there are none worth noting.

 

How about turning to, gasp, other authors for insights?  This might be more of a problem than a solution.  The endings in literature which I appreciate most are the ones I likely am not brilliant enough to craft on my own.  I should review simpler novels than To Kill a Mockingbird or The God of Small Things.  But I fear too much that I’ll end up like Donna Tartt with her book The Goldfinch which wraps up in a mere forty pages what she spent nearly eight-hundred developing.  It would have been better for her to have killed off her character in a suicide than to wrap everything up so quick.  I needed therapy after I closed the back cover.  And yet, it’s a best-seller, a page-turner, a money-maker.

 

I suppose this should prove to me that I might be over-thinking it.  As much as I detest mediocre endings, they don’t seem to have killed many artists yet, or at least not the ones with good enough stories in the first place.  Perhaps, like the rest of my novel, I can just get a few things written down and wait for it to resolve itself in the rewrite, once I have a better overall picture of how it’ll all fit together.

 

Meantime, maybe I’ll get lucky and dream the ending in my sleep tonight.  Here’s hoping.

Surprises Along the Way

I suppose I should have been able to guess that the emotional work that goes into writing a book might carry me into some pretty raw places.

 

When I started off writing my first draft nearly ten weeks ago, I discovered that I could get to a place where I watched a scene unfold in my mind and then I just typed what I saw.  It takes a little work, opening up my mind like that, but that’s how I write.  The characters take on a life of their own, and my job is merely to describe it as well as I can.  But in the beginning, aside from a few elements like building suspense or describing the childhood joys and follies necessary to develop a character, I wasn’t yet trolling the heavy scenes that my mind’s eye now witnesses.

 

Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I plunged into writing about Grandpa’s bombing missions ahead of the one that brought down his plane.  Grandpa may have only gone out on seven missions total during the war, but the majority of those were terrifying missions!  Twice (not including the fateful mission), his plane sustained enough damage to threaten their safe return, and once, the crew had to make an emergency landing to overnight in France before it was safe to return.  I suppose this is just business as usual in wartime, but sitting at my desk, typing furiously as such scenes unfold, well, it sometimes leaves me in shock.  Then I stand up to go make more tea, to make dinner for my husband, to return to my real life, but I remain lodged in the gulf between my creation and my reality.

 

It’s rewarding, this creative process, but it is hard in ways I’m not yet sure how to manage.  The good news is that, with any luck, such experiences are evidence that what I’m writing is going to be worth reading.  It’ll get your heart rate up, for sure, and perhaps, if you experience what I did as I wrote tonight, you’ll find it hard to read through your tears.

 

Stay tuned – the first draft is just about done.

The Crazy Thing About Time

The crazy thing about time is that I never have enough of it.  Even having left my full-time job, leaving me with nothing more to do than sit around at home and do all the things I’ve been meaning to do for the last few years (sort through old boxes and files, learn to cook, figure out how to use my fancy camera, back up all my digital photos), plus all the things I want to do on a regular basis (yoga, practice flute, exercise), while simultaneously writing a book, keeping the house clean, and spending time with my dear husband… Okay, well you can see how I’m consistently ending up without enough time in a day to do it all.  What’s killing me, though, is that I’m not finding enough time in even a week to work my way through everything.

 

I pride myself on being a rather efficient person.  I refuse to just “make a quick trip to the store” – no, every trip outside of the house, unless for recreation (and even then, sometimes), has to have a clear purpose, preferably knocking out three or four errands per trip, and has to be accomplished in a reasonably quick timeframe.  If I forget something on such a trip, I either have to learn to live without it or hold out until I corral up the next round of errands to include it with.  I live by lists – to do lists, goal lists, accomplishment lists, task lists.  I plan or think through just about everything by writing and ranking such lists.  And yet, the lists keep growing while hours, it seems, continue to shrink.

 

And so, even as the days are getting intolerably short here in Seattle, I resolve to start my days ever so slightly earlier (gasp) so that I may, hopefully, recover a few of my seemingly lost hours every day.  Rather than rising between 7:00 and 7:30 (which honestly has slipped by thirty minutes as of late), I resolve to rise between 6:30 and 7:00.  And I resolve to audit my activities, taking note of my day in fifteen-minute increments in order to identify gaps.

 

Wish me luck, folks, or else give me a twenty-five hour day if you happen to have one lying around.

Thanksgiving Reflections, version 2014

The opportunity to quit my job and spend several months writing a book is a true gift, and one for which I am especially thankful this Thanksgiving.  The gift comes from many sources – from a supportive husband who makes a good living, from years of accumulated savings of salaries I’ve poured myself into earning in years past, from a collection of small inheritances passed down, and from encouragement by friends, acquaintances, and even professional experts that this is precisely what I need to be doing with my time right now.  The weight of responsibility that comes with such gifts can be a strange burden to bear, but it is made lighter by a grateful heart.

 

I find myself in an uncommonly fortunate place.  Am I deserving?  Can I rise to the occasion and make the most of this time?  I will show my gratitude by giving it my very best efforts.

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

My First Book Review in Decades

Last Friday afternoon, I finished reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian author Richard Flanagan.  This novel won the Man Booker Prize last month, and as a fan of such Booker Prize winners as Life of Pi, Midnight’s Children, and The God of Small Things, I wanted to eat this book for lunch.  Moreover, its story takes place in large part during World War II and is told from the perspective of an Australian POW.  Given my current writing project, I have been gobbling up as many WWII reads as possible.

 

As I set the book down, having run out of words left to read, my chest ached.  Flanagan has a beautiful way with words.  I often told my husband that reading the book made me dizzy.  It demanded that I reach so far into my right brain to grasp meaning between otherwise mundane words that it quite literally threw off my equilibrium.  And I guess that’s why the book was able to reach so far into my core and move to me to sobbing, ragged tears in parts where nothing more is happening than a restaurant storefront being smashed or a bottle of wine split with an old man, a stranger.  Beauty can take strange and unusual forms at times.

 

Don’t get me wrong though, the book is awful too.  Afterall, it seeks to describe the hardships of the POWs who were tasked to build the railway through Thailand (Siam, then) to Burma, by hand no less, and rightfully dubbed the Death Railway.  As a consequence, the book contains disturbing, graphic imagery, some of which I fought through while trying to eat lunch.  I think I lost weight last week.  Some of what these characters (and by extension, the POWs they were modeled after) endured is beyond description, and yet, as an honest author should, Flanagan describes them.  But physical suffering isn’t the point of this novel, in direct contrast to Unbroken, which I found to be far too focused on violence than it needed to be.  Instead, Flanagan manages to transcend the grime and make you fall utterly in love with a small, unlikely character named Darky.  And through Darky, Flanagan touches the face of God.

 

Books that move me so thoroughly are rare and treasured gems.  While I would not recommend such a read for just anyone because there is only so much upsetting material a person can take, I full-heartedly agree with the Man Booker Prize panel in naming this book worthy of the highest honors.  For Australia, it will certainly go down as one of the greatest ever written.

 

I’m already reading it for a second time, but more slowly this time, to taste every word.

WEEKLY INSPIRATION

I really need to retitle these posts “Bi-weekly Inspiration” since I only manage to write one every other week.  Here’s to worthy goals.

 

This week’s inspiration is dedicated to my husband, a perpetual optimist in all the ways I am not, which is to say, in every way.  Two Sundays ago, he woke up early, bustling with energy, and decided to throw a load of laundry in the washer.  While he was at it, he decided to swap out the lightbulb in the half bath next door to the laundry room in the basement.  I’d been complaining all week that it burnt out.  The lightbulb was a strange size – none of our existing spare bulbs could replace it, so he traipsed through the house to find a suitable swap, if one existed.  As he returned to the basement, the washing machine had gone into “rinse” mode, or whatever mode suddenly dumps a flood of water down the drain, and by unhappy coincidence, great surges of water heaved out of our basement toilet, dumping all manner of sewer surprises, well, everywhere.

 

My husband sprung into action, freezing the washing machine mid-cycle and dropping towels in the bathroom doorway to halt the flow.  It worked; the gushing stopped.  Then he flew upstairs to where I had just woken up and said, “Katie!  Don’t flush!”  Except, I already had.

 

Thirty minutes later, Beacon Plumbing (“Stop Freakin Call Beacon”) arrived on the scene.  While they surveyed the damage, I took off for Lowe’s to pick up lightbulbs (they badly needed the room illuminated now), and upon returning, set out again for brunch takeout at none other than Jules Maes’ Saloon (think French Toast you hafta eat with a steak knife).  Finally, sitting down to eat while the plumbers worked their magic, I heard the full story of what had happened.

 

As it turned out, our sewer line crumbled.  It was, after all, 62 years old and made of concrete.  No worries, Beacon said, we can fix you up by the end of the week for around $20,000.

 

Twenty grand???  End of the week???  How could this be happening, right at the point in time that I had decided to strike out on my own and write a book, at great financial risk to our family, right as the weather turned wintery-cold for the first time, and right as my husband was getting his feet under him at his new job?  We were DOOMED!  The Universe must really hate us.

 

Except that’s not how my husband saw it, not at all.  His internal dialogue went more like this: 

“Holy shit, how did we get so lucky?  There could have been no better time for the sewer to break, and given how old it was, it would have gone sooner rather than later.  Instead of bursting on a weekend we had my daughter, it blew on a weekend where we had nothing else going on!  Instead of bursting on a weekday with only Katie here to see it, it happened on a Sunday, and a Sunday on which I happened to be monitoring the basement rather than running a load of wash and heading out for the day.  Oh this could have been so much worse!  It could have burst on a week with torrential rain in the forecast and the repairmen would have to trudge through it, instead of during the only dry week in a month!  Or worse:  it could have burst over Thanksgiving, when our house was full and bustling with family and friends!  Can you imagine???”

 

Best of all:  having recently switched jobs, his accrued vacation payout almost exactly matched the expense of repairs, even adding in an extra fix to modernize our line all the way to the street, with the neighboring landlord’s help and consent, and all made possible by my husband’s extraordinary knack for driving a hard bargain.  He talked them down from that $20K figure quite nicely.

 

A lot of bleach mopping, a few inconvenienced days of “light showers only” and “just close the lid and don’t flush” turned out to be just a small price to pay for repairs that, with a little luck, might outlive us both.  And in the end, I think my husband was right:  there couldn’t have been a better time for such an awful thing to happen.

 

His optimism wins.  Damn it feels good to marry an optimist.

TECHNIQUES FOR STAYING UNSTUCK, PART V

To my fellow aspiring authors out there, and to anyone else who might need some ideas to get out of a slump, I offer a few of the techniques I’ve discovered to be helpful in keeping up my momentum while writing my book.

 

To read or not to read, that is the question.

 

Some authors avoid reading books while they’re working on their manuscript.  To do so, they say, might taint their writing style and worse, might waste their time.  I am not one of these authors.  In fact, I find voracious reading to be the heartbeat that keeps me going day after day after day.  And I don’t stop at reading just one book at a time either.  In my first eight weeks of writing, I have simultaneously had up to four books going at once, in addition to my internet research.

 

I am explicitly not a morning person.  I hate them.  I especially hate mornings this time of year, the month and a half before and after the winter solstice.  Mornings dawn cold and dark and usually very, very dreary.  I hate overhead lighting in the mornings almost as much as I hate the mornings themselves, preferring to slide into the day as dimly as possible.  And so I’ve discovered the key to climbing out of my groggy state is to first, heat up some tea, then to sit by a lamp and read.  For an hour.  A book.  Not a tablet.  And it can be as heavy as war history or as light as David Sedaris.  It’s slow going, that first hour of every morning.  I can read far faster at noon and faster still at 3pm.  But without a book to transition me into the day, I am lost.

 

An hour into it, I grab breakfast and switch to fiction or narrative if I’ve been reading non-fiction.  Then, the creative juices start churning for good, and by the time I retire to my office for my first writing session of the day, I am almost bursting with words and imagery.  It seems to leap from my fingers and onto my screen, pent up and inspired by the other authors’ words in which I’d practically bathed myself all morning.

 

Does it influence my writing, this reading?  Sure it does.  At the most basic level, I learn a thing or two about how various authors put books together, about what’s selling and what’s winning writing awards, or, if the subject matter is relevant, about the stuff I’m writing about myself.  At a deeper level, it challenges me to be more courageous in how I tell my story, in how I grow my characters, and in how I depict my scenes.  And every so often, magic happens and I think, “well heck, I could write better than this.”  It may not be true, but such a thought can carry me beyond just about any slump.  And so, I read.  A lot.

 

Stephen King reads seventy or eighty books a year, he says.

 

So, less than two months into writing my first draft, what books have I read?

 

• Marlantes, Karl:  What it is Like to Go to War
• King, Stephen:  On Writing (of course)
• Brown, Daniel James:  The Boys in the Boat
• Hillenbrand, Laura:  Unbroken
• Corrigan, Gordon:  The Second World War
• Angelou, Maya:  Poems (in progress)
• Glaeser, Edward L:  Triumph of the City (in progress)
• Flanagan, Richard:  The Narrow Road to the Deep North (in progress)
• Zaloga, Steven J:  The Siegfried Line 1944-45 (in progress)

TECHNIQUES FOR STAYING UNSTUCK, PART IV

To my fellow aspiring authors out there, and to anyone else who might need some ideas to get out of a slump, I offer a few of the techniques I’ve discovered to be helpful in keeping up my momentum while writing my book.

 

What I’m about to tell you is going to sound painfully obvious, but what can I say?  Authors get stuck this way.  So here goes:  one of the best ways to stay unstuck is to avoid the things that get you stuck in the first place.  Those pesky things that bog you down?  Minimize them.  Avoid them. Banish them.  And move on.

 

In my case, those pesky, bogged down things are details and research.  It’s my first draft, folks, so when I sit down to write, I seldom know what I’ll end up discovering in the process.  There’s always something I don’t know, something that demands more explanation, and frequently, I have no explanation.  More often than not, I’ve never even wondered about this or that particular thing before, but now, it is clearly important and I owe my readers more than I have to offer.  What do I do?

 

Some authors might tell you, “DO NOT STOP TO GOOGLE WHILE YOU WRITE.”  They’re probably right and you should take their advice, but being the impatient individual that I am, I can’t abide by such advice 100% of the time.  Instead, I have to make a judgment call:  (a) am I looking for a quick answer or (b) do I need to do more in-depth research?  If the answer is (a), Google wins and I do a quick search to find an answer, like looking up the location of one place in proximity to another, or like double-checking some military terminology to make sure I understand.  Yes, it disrupts my writing flow a bit, but not too much.  These types of searches should take no more than 45 seconds, otherwise you might be in (b) territory. 

 

If the answer is instead (b), I type in a dozen or so periods and thereby flag the segment to finish later, after proper research, and I move on.  Some recent examples of spots I’ve marked in my draft for further research include:  What might the Maginot Line have looked like by late August 1944?  What targets were bombed in Hamburg on August 4^th of that year?  What might my readers want to know about the Hells Angels – the Bomb Group my characters flew with?  Sometimes, quick Google searches might be all I need, but if I’m not sure, I don’t want to risk getting distracted by link after link only to find myself thirty minutes later with too much information and with no additional paragraphs in my story.  Zero momentum.  Close the laptop.  Give up.  So instead, I leave ellipses, promise myself I’ll come back later, and continue writing the story as if I’d already written those pesky details.  I might not return to fill in the blanks for weeks, months, or even until the next rewrite, and that’s not a problem:  the problem would lie in letting the snag mire me down, waste my time, and threaten to derail my entire project.

 

My rewrite is going to be a heavy lift, but that’s not my main worry yet.  My main worry is my first draft:  without it, there can be no real rewrite.

TECHNIQUES FOR STAYING UNSTUCK, PART III

To my fellow aspiring authors out there, and to anyone else who might need some ideas to get out of a slump, I offer a few of the techniques I’ve discovered to be helpful in keeping up my momentum while writing my book.

 

Two exceptionally small behavioral shifts have contributed disproportionately to my success as I write my first draft, and I can come up with a good explanation for neither of them:  switching from page-counts to word-counts, and shutting the door.

 

The vast majority of authors are, by nature, avid readers themselves.  As readers, they likely track their progress in a book by how many pages they read.  This, at least for me, was also how literature assignments were doled out in high school and college:  read fifty pages and come ready for a quiz in the morning, repeat the next day and the next until the book is done.  Page counting can be a more reliable way to pace yourself than, say, chapter count.  Chapters can vary greatly in length, making them, in general, a less consistent tool for setting goals.  That’s why teachers and readers often default to page counts to track progress through a book.

 

It follows naturally then that a new writer would set goals in terms of page counts, and that’s precisely how I operated until last month.  In my mind, I wanted to write upwards of ten pages a day.  What progress I could make at such a pace!  But ten page a day is a lot of work, especially for a new writer.  More attainable goals would look like two to three pages a day, but it feels much too discouraging to announce, “hey guys, I wrote two pages on my book today!  Woot!”  Because discouragement and slumps go hand-in-hand, you can imagine where page count goals left me.

 

Then, again thanks to a recommendation by Stephen King in his book On Writing, I switched to word count.  He said to start out by writing one- to two-thousand words daily, and he mentioned that he tries to write about two-thousand words everyday (taking a maximum of one day off each week) to keep up his writing pace, staying up all night to write only on special occasions.  So, I gave it a try.  One-thousand words daily came easily, and two-thousand felt like just a tiny stretch beyond that.  More and more, I’m falling into three-thousand-word days without even meaning to, and I feel like a million bucks bragging to friends about my daily progress.  But get this:  two-thousand words a day translates roughly into a mere four pages, type written.  Four pages.  But, two-thousand words at a time, my book is taking shape (76,000 words now!).

 

Now, about shutting the door:  this is pure magic.  I have no rational explanation for it.  I write at home while my husband is at work.  I have no children or pets.  And yet, if I walk to my desk but leave the office door open, writers’ block zaps me immediately.  Realizing that the door is open, I stop writing and go close the door.  Then, when I resume my writing, the words just flow.  What’s the difference?  Hell if I know!  It’s just magic, pure and simple.

 

Just be sure to leave your cell phone on the other side of that closed door.