The Rush of Rushing

Hey, did you know I'm writing a novel??

You didn't? Well, I can't blame you. You wouldn't know it from my recent blog posts. What can I say? I've been caught up in the alluring world of creative non-fiction, where almost no research is required. What a beautiful place...

I know, it's been a while since I posted anything about my WIP. In my defense, I'm still working my way through this monster, which doesn't so much involve reading as it does navigating the research rabbit holes. You know, those places you stumble into when you're researching something, and quickly get lost in. The places that take you from the world of South American archaeology into the strange, sealed world of cliff tombs. For example.

I'm not disparaging these rabbit holes - they can provide surprising plot twists, fascinating tidbits of information, and lovely hours of procrastination - but I can't help but feel like a horse delicately picking its way through a field riddled with little rodent burrows. One wrong step...

I won't go into excruciating detail, because, well, it's excruciatingly dull, but I will explain the basics: I am attempting to place my South American lifetime in a specific set of locations and a specific time period, so that I can then attempt to figure out how the people of those locations and periods lived and interacted, so that I can then figure out who the hell my characters are and what the hell they're doing.

This process is of course not linear. I start with a vague set of parameters: one character probably lived in the dry Andean highlands, and the other in the semi-temperate edges of the Amazon basin. So I look in my giant archaeology book for articles about peoples who lived in the altiplano, or the high Andean plateau. That leads me to a variety of dense, academic treatises on the Early, Middle, and Late Periods of Pre-Incan civilization, so then I have to go look up when each of these periods occurred and what occurred in them.

The problem, though, is that it's very hard to find general information on early South American peoples, which is fair, because there were many of them living all over the continent in vastly different climates.

So then I start researching actual tribes who lived in the altiplano, which leads me to that BBC show on the Chachapoya people and their cliff tombs, which, although fascinating, is not what I need to know, because the Chachapoya lived in the Peruvian cloud forest, which is not at all arid and therefore not at all what I'm looking for.

I dig myself out of that particular rabbit hole, and dive into another.

I know it sounds a lot like I'm complaining. I'm not. The research is difficult, sometimes boring, but generally fascinating and rich with gorgeous ideas and images, and I need to know all of this. I just...well, to be honest, I just want to be getting this done faster. I'm constantly fighting that urge to rush, to finish my book as fast as possible and get it out there in the world. It's a totally self-manufactured rush - I have no deadline - and it's making me feel like I'm never getting enough done. Which means, really, that it's not helping me at all.

I know I'm not alone in this - Anne Allen had a great post about it a couple of weeks ago - but that doesn't make it easier to handle. It's so hard to fight that inner voice that screams for more, faster, now - and to not feel defeated when you know that less, slower, later, is better.

Send along some good vibes, and let me know how you fight the voices that tell you to rush.

Insecure Writers: Writing the Unknown

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember, it's an online group created by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers. You, too, can join us anytime!

Before I get started, I just wanted to say that I'll be doing my first-ever guest post this week, on Friday. So, stop by on Friday for the link and info!

First I just have to say, thank goodness for Shell Flower. I logged on today to write my blog post, and would have totally missed the fact that it was IWSG day if I hadn't seen her post, first. So, thank you, Shell, for dragging my brain out of Ancient Tibet, and into March 2014!

For any newcomers (and hello and welcome to my neurotic ramblings), my current WIP is a journey through Ancient Greece, Tibet, South America, India, London, and Australia. Which means I need to heavily research all of these places (yes, I am insane. As I said, welcome to my neurotic ramblings.)

So, I've had my nose buried in Tibet all week. I'm reading a book called, appropriately enough, Tibet: Its History, Religion, and People, by Thubten Jigme Norbu, a Tibetan monk who also happens to be the older brother of the current Dalai Lama. It's a lovely, if rather dry, read, full of actually useful information (something new for me) about the daily life and religion and outlook of normal Tibetans - not just kings and gurus, but peasants and nomads, too - and I'm very grateful to my local librarian for pulling it off of the shelf and pressing it into my desperate little hands.

It's also a lot. I mean, it's a lot to take in. I'm attempting to understand the world view of a character that's vastly different from my own, and whose culture I am mostly ignorant of - and let me tell you, Tibetan culture, history, and religion are not simple. The country is thousands of years old, with a complex animist religion at the time my character was living (500-600 CE); I've never met a single Tibetan person or been to Tibet; and unlike Ancient Greece, whose culture and mythology form the foundation for much of our own, Ancient Tibet is something I've only barely touched on in my life's learnings so far.

Now, I would never say that writers should only write about their own culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Because really, if I did that, I'd be writing novels full of me, talking to me, interacting with more me. How BORING (not to mention alarmingly self-involved.) I think it's important to go outside of what is familiar; to reach into the unknown, and hope to bring back something to share; something that illuminates, even in the smallest way, what it means to be human. To find not only what makes us different, but also what unites us.

I do believe that. But I'm also nervous. What if I really mess this up? What if I offend an entire nation, for God's sake?

This insecurity, I know, is understandable, but I have to find a way past it. Because right now, it's stifling. Part of what I'm trying to do is find my characters and plot through this research, and the fear is totally stopping me. I have no ideas. I am blank, blank, blank. Every time I try to come up with an idea, my brain starts going, oh my god no I can't make the character a jerk because then people will think I'm RACIST, and all creativity comes to a screeching halt.

So that's my insecurity for the month (year; decade; all known time; whatever.) Next week, I hope I can report back on my plot progress... but at this rate, I may just end up sharing some interesting facts on Tibet. Le sigh. 

It's OK to Experiment

I'm experimenting with voice these days, mainly because I'm fully inside my Ancient Greek story-line, and it just feels weird to write about Greek gods and myths with a modern tone. I mean, I know I don't need to go all Ovid on everyone, and start declaiming in verse, but I also know that having Apollo greet his sister, Artemis, with a "Hey girl, what's up?" feels just a wee bit awkward or, y'know, anachronistic (a word which, ironically, has Greek origins).

I say "experimenting" for a few reasons. I'm in that stage of development where I end up freewriting a lot of scenes that may never see the light of day; this helps me see how characters react to each other and to various situations. I often end up writing out scenes that happen before the action in the story, to sort of see how they unfold. This is pure experimentation; some of it works beautifully, and some of it should never, ever be read. By anyone. Ever.

I'm also experimenting, quite literally, with the tone - the voice - of these scenes. I'm finding myself writing some elevated, formal, and stylized language that I never normally use, and as a result it's a bit of a struggle to make it sound natural. See, I spend a lot of time thinking about the rhythm of the writing; how it flows, how it sounds out loud, whether it feels smooth or awkward. Yes, I read it out loud sometimes. Whatever - Jeanette Winterson said I should.

And yes, of course, I'm totally freaking out about this. Does this sound super pompous? Are people going to think I'm crazy? Is this the most unreadable, ridiculous pile of junk EVER written or what?

But the freaking out - that's normal. It's this new voice that isn't.

In all honesty, neurotic fears aside, it's kind of fun to try out a new style of writing. Ideally, I'd write each section of this book - each time period - in a different voice. The story in Ancient Greece should sound different than the story in modern London, or on a farm in Australia in the 1960s. If it doesn't, I'm not doing my job (this is another reason why I think I must be crazy to write a novel about souls moving through six different lifetimes. Seriously.)

So, I experiment. And because it's really fun to do something incredibly dumb, and expose myself to ridicule, I thought I'd post some of it here! It's totally brand new, unfinished and unedited, and absolutely NOT READY for public consumption, so naturally, I'm making it public. This is from a scene that may never appear in the book. It's an  explanation of what drove Apollo to swear off all love affairs; I used the myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus as the straw that broke the god's back:

It was Hyacinthus, in the end, who broke apart the last whole pieces of Apollo’s heart. Dark of skin and hair, wide-eyed and glowing with adoration, the young prince drove Apollo to distraction from the day the god first spotted him, running the edge of Sparta’s rivers with the swift wind at his back. Apollo descended from Olympus so quickly that he stumbled more than once as he ran, leaping and tumbling over the mountain’s forbidding cliffs with eyes fixed always on his goal. When he reached his target, and the youth stuttered his name, blushing and already weak with love, Apollo swept Hyacinthus into his arms and swore to never let go. From that day on, forgotten were the god’s lyre and his music; his bow lay neglected in dust and shadow; all his time was spent laughing over the hills with Hyacinthus. Together they hunted birds and netted fish, “like two silly mortals,” as Artemis scoffed; or played at sport, be it racing or discus or wrestling, their skin oiled and gleaming; or else wrote their passion, bodies entwined, across the sweet caressing grasses. 

As the days passed, and Apollo’s duties fell further and further from his mind, Artemis’s disdain swelled into open fury. “No good ever comes of these ridiculous affairs,” she spat, her face dark and her tone grim. “Something terrible will happen again, and it will be your fault when it does.” But Apollo, love-soaked, just laughed away the hard edge in her eyes, soothing her contempt with promises to spend many months hunting with her again, soon; tomorrow; or next week; or perhaps in a few moons… 

You can see from this small snippet that dialogue is an issue. It's one thing to make the prose stylized; it's another to make the characters talk that way, too. I'm still figuring that out. Along with everything else, of course.

Thanks for indulging my experiment. What about you? Do you experiment with writing, or something else in your work?

When Research Changes Plot, Or What To Do With A Vengeful God

I've been digging into Edith Hamilton's Mythology this week. No, I'm not indulging some bizarre nostalgia for my early teenage school years (I am not one of those insane quirky people who wishes she could go back to the halcyon days of high school, probably because I would never even think to call them 'halcyon' days, not that I hated them, because I didn't, I just found them full of growing pains and awkwardness and I'm going to stop this run-on sentence now); I'm doing research.

Granted, I'm supposed to be looking into (to quote myself, here) "Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo", so technically I suppose I'm also procrastinating. See, I do have a book on the "Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks", but 1) it's duuuulllll, 2) it's written for teens, and is therefore a bit oversimplified, and 3) while it's absolutely chock-freaking-full of information about the daily life of Athenians, it's got all of about two wee paragraphs on the daily life of goatherds and/or shepherds and also priests of Apollo, which is what I really need. What I'm saying is that the book has a misleading title and it's irritating. Not to worry, I do have a list of other books to look into (thanks to a certain brilliant and generous librarian friend of mine); I just don't have them in my possession. Yet.

So I'm taking a break from said irritation, and reading Hamilton instead. And happily, like other research, it's a useful and fascinating procrastination. I've got this little story planned out for a brief, possibly violent, and certainly tumultuous love affair between Apollo and a mortal youth, so this particular reading is actually part of my character development for Apollo. And like most research, it's changing my story.

The thing is, since Apollo does exist as a well-known mythological figure, I need to walk a fine line between meeting certain expectations for his behavior, and also crafting my own version of him. I did start some development for him, which mostly entailed combining what I remembered about Greek mythology with what I needed for the story I'm creating. I then used that combination to help me come up with a basic plot structure for this particular lifetime.

Well, it turns out I missed a few important things.

As I've said before, research is character is plot. In this case, I forgot a few things: namely, that the Greek gods can often be cruel bastards with a marked indifference to human suffering. Not all of the time, of course, and actually Hamilton points out that Apollo is one of the more beautiful and less crude of the pantheon, but he stills does stuff like have his sister kill his unfaithful lover, and rabidly pursue an unwilling maiden until she begs for mercy and gets turned into a tree (one that's sacred to Apollo, just to add insult to injury).

I also learned - and this I don't think I ever knew - that Apollo is the God of Truth and Light. Hamilton puts this quite beautifully, actually, saying that "he is the god of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips." Apollo really cannot tell a lie, nor can anyone lie to him.

Both of these things are important facets of his character, and they change what I'd been planning. I was thinking about having Apollo's mortal lover be unfaithful to him, and get away with it. Well, now I need to reconsider. I can disregard parts of his mythology that don't suit my purpose (thank you, artistic license), but these pieces are so interesting and so full of potential for great conflict that I don't really want to discard them. Now, if his lover is unfaithful, I need to think about how Apollo finds out (because he always finds out), how he reacts, and whether or not he tries to have this lover killed - or even whether he kills him himself.

I'm not sure yet what exactly is going to happen, but I won't be giving much away if I say that both Apollo and his lover will die somehow. After all, I'm writing a book about the various lifetimes of two souls, so in order to move on to another lifetime, the current one has to end.

This is one of the great things about research: when you find something that really does shift the story. What could be better than figuring out what a vengeful, all-powerful god might do to punish his faithless lover? I'm rubbing my hands together gleefully even as I write this...

Research is Character is Plot

Ok, first: THANK YOU INTERNET!! (And by "internet", I mean all of you beautiful people who came, read my plea, and left a comment last week with fantastic research tips.) I got a heretofore unimagined wealth of great, helpful information, which I am now using. Like, right now. Right this very second. Oh yeah, I'm a multitasker-extraordinaire.

Ok, fine. Not really. BUT I've been using your ideas already, and I'm spending a day at my local library this week, so that sort of counts.

I want to take a step back, though, and answer a question no one has asked. Why? Because I need a lead-in to the body of this post, obviously. Duh.

Last week, I wrote out a veritable laundry list of research needs for my new book, and explained that I needed these items for, well, really important writing stuff. Which begs the question, Ancient Greece and Tibet and the British Raj and Australian sheep and my good God what the heck is wrong with you?? Are you trying to give yourself a brain aneurysm???

Oh no, wait. That's not the question I was going to answer. Sorry. It was this one: Why exactly do you need this research to create a plot? You say character is plot; why can't you just use the characters instead of doing this utterly psychotic amount of research?

Ahhh, sneaky me, using my own words against myself! Well, smarty-pants, let me give you an example.

So, I had this idea to have one of the lifetimes for my souls take place in a remote village in Tibet, around 500-600 CE. When I came up with the idea, I thought of writing it from the POV of an old man on the day his next door neighbor, an old woman, lies dying. Without giving away too much, this little story revolved around the idea that he was supposed to marry this woman - as in an arranged marriage - but instead, he married someone else.

Cool. Workable idea. Then I did some very preliminary research into Tibetan culture...and found out that Tibet is one of the very few areas in the world where polyandry was widely practiced. For those of you who don't want to click on that Wikipedia link (and really, you should; the article is freaking fascinating), polyandry is "a form of polygamy whereby a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time."

Yes, you read that right. One lady, many husbands.

No, this isn't some form of ancient feminism. I had to read quite a bit more to wrap my head around this concept, but the basic idea is this: in a place like Himalayan Tibet, where there is very little arable land, it becomes critical to keep a family's land intact and not divide it up among all of the children (or, ok, sons) into small, unsustainable plots. To that end, the eldest son is considered the head of the family, and the heir. So this lucky guy finds a gal who is absolutely NOT from his clan, and marries her, and then, by proxy, all of his brothers are automatically married to this lady, too. Whatever children she bears, no matter which brother is the actual father, are considered the children of the eldest brother. And all of these people - wife, multiple brother/husbands, children, and any remaining members of the previous generation - live together, usually in one large house. (And thus you can see why people aren't allowed to marry within their clans; they really are all related to each other.)

It's a creative solution to some difficult problems, when you think about it. In addition to dealing with issues of inheritance, polyandry was also thought to help control population - again, important in a place with limited resources - as well as increase the likelihood of children surviving to adulthood. Really cool, from an anthropological standpoint, but a major problem for me and my cute little idea.

As you can guess, this information threw my seed of an idea on its tiny, undeveloped head. Maybe I do have an old guy with a wife, but are there other husbands, too? Or did he go off on his own and break all acceptable tradition, and marry one lady for himself, thereby losing all right to his family's land?

And anyway, what is the concept of a village in ancient Tibet? Is there even such a thing as a next-door neighbor, or are there just these clans living together in isolated pockets? If so, can our old man even have a neighbor who is dying? And are these marriages arranged, or not?

So, you see, in this case, the research informs everything. This is often the case with a society and culture that I'm unfamiliar with. I can come up with some nice ideas, but until I learn something about the time period and place, those ideas are fairly useless.

Which means... that I really do have to do all of that research. I know, I'm crazy. But if I can pull it off, it might just make a really effing cool book.

Confessions and Pleas (and PLEASE)

It might seem like a weird intrusion of the real world into imaginary life, but non-fiction research really is an essential part of the process of writing a novel. Unless I'm going to make up my own entire world, I need to be able to create believable descriptions of fictitious characters living in non-fictitious places - and time periods. Otherwise, people who read my books will spend a ton of time saying, "Hey, there weren't any Ferrari's in 10th century Egypt! What the hell kind of book is this?!" rather than getting involved in the conflict and the characters, and generally doing things that mean they're going to keep reading.

I've mentioned briefly that this new book I'm working on is shaping up to need a whole lot of that research....which isn't going so well.

Ok, I admit it: the internet age has ruined me. I no longer remember how to do traditional research.

I really don't know what I used to do before some dudes invented Wikipedia. I mean, I have these vague ideas that I read encyclopedias and books and stuff, but I don't even know if physical encyclopedias still exist. These days, when I need to do research, I spend my time wading through mountains of Google results for things like "British colonial era in India British family life", or "Tibet mountain villages ancient culture gender roles".

Yes, I know; my Google searches look like stream-of-consciousness exercises. This is what happens when you try to get quick answers to complex cultural and historical questions on the internet.

Clearly, this reliance on these new-fangled interwebs isn't working too well for me. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia when you need to quickly find out how many people live in Botswana, or what the state animal of Montana is (for the record, it's a Grizzly bear.) But if you need to understand why a British family might have moved to India in the 1890s, and to get a clear picture of their lives there, as well as understand how an Indian woman would have viewed and interacted with said British family, then Wikipedia isn't going to be super helpful.

This wasn't really an issue when I was doing research for Cloudland. That's one of the benefits of making up a land in the sky: no research required. The rest of what I needed to look into was fairly simple, and pretty easy to find. Want to know what a school social worker does? Great. Interview one. Want to know how kids process death? Perfect. There are giant piles of child psychology books on that one.

My new project, however, is going to be heavily reliant on good research. Right now, I have ideas for six lifetimes for my two souls... none of which take place in present-day New England, which is the only time and place I'm qualified to talk about without doing some research first.

This is, as I said, a bit of an embarrassing problem. As my Google search terms grow ever longer, my actual tangible results wear thin.

So, internet friends, I'm going to do something silly and embarrassing and rather odd, and ask for your help. I need some reminders of where to look, and how to research, any or all of the following:

• Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo;
• Day-to-day life, religion, culture, and gender roles in villages in ancient mountainous Tibet, 500-600 CE; 
• Information on the indigenous peoples of South America in pre-Columbus times (around 1200-1300 CE), specifically in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and the details of their culture, religion, and daily lives;
• The lives and work of the British colonialists and their families in India around 1890, as well as the lives of the Indian people, with specific information on Hindu religion at the time, and any rebellions being mounted against the British. I'm also specifically wondering how these two cultures viewed each other;
• Life as a sheep farmer in southern Australia in the 1960s or 70s, including day-to-day running of the farm, climate and weather patterns, as well as motorcycle culture during that same period;
• And finally (for now), the day-to-day life of a preeminent bio-geneticist doing cutting edge research, in the present day. 

I'm not expecting anyone to give me information on the topics above, of course. I'm ready and willing to roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work; I just need a little, eensy, minor bit of help remembering how. I'll take any advice you've got. Please?

This Novel Is Just Another Play

This is going to be a shortie but sweetie in honor of the holiday (i.e. in honor of the fact that I'm hosting Thanksgiving tomorrow and must give long, careful thought to important things like how long I should cook my sweet potatoes. Obviously.).

I've posted before about the value of having good friends, not just for life, but for writing. For me, these are the two people in my life who will listen to me fumble my way through a new idea, offer thoughts and encouragement, help me climb out of a self-induced plot hole, and read the towering pile of over-writing that I like to call a first draft.

The particular tidbit I want to talk about today involves one of these amazing women: my good friend who we'll call the Don (which can be interpreted in many different ways. Take your pick.) The other woman, the New Messiah, has made her debut on this blog already.

I've known the Don for a long, long time. We met our freshman year of college, which (just to age myself here) puts our friendship at the ripe old age of 15 years. Funny enough, we didn't like each other at all when we first met, but that's another story for another time. At this point, the Don is more like my sister than my friend. She was there when I wrote my first play, encouraging and helping and calling me out on my copious amounts of writing-related (and, ok, life-related) crap. She starred in that play, actually. She's read so much of my writing over the years that she could probably pick it out of a line-up while blindfolded. She's also one of those people who needs books like she needs air; she never, ever goes anywhere without one. It's a common sight to meet her at a restaurant and find her engrossed in a book while she waits, glasses perched on her nose, trendy scarf tossed artfully around her shoulders as she pores over the pages. She's also funny, honest, and too damn smart for her own good.

All of this makes her an invaluable critic.

Last week, I met the Don at one of our favorite haunts. Sure enough, she was reading while waiting for me, knee-deep in a book, sipping on a cocktail. We did what we usually do when we meet: we ordered a large amount of smoked and/or salted pork, drank a little too much, caught up on our lives, and probably cried. And, we talked about the idea I'm working on. The Don is familiar with this idea, of course. I've been telling her about it, bit by bit, for months now, and already her input and ideas have been priceless.

That night, I confessed my fears and struggles with writing in the first person, much like I did on this blog not too long ago. She let me go on for a while about my new strain of insanity, patiently listening as I laid out my concerns, and then when I was finished she looked me straight in the eye and said, "Why are you worrying about this? You're a playwright."

I stopped, and blinked, and said, "What does that have to do with anything?"

She gave me her patented eyebrow lift, and answered, "You write monologues." The "dumbass" at the end was, of course, inferred.

Well. DUH, right? I felt both very relieved and very, very stupid. The Don had an excellent point: a monologue is nothing if not a long piece of text written in the first person. How had I not realized this?

It's amazing how much this has eased my mind. Instead of being worried about my ability to pull off a first person POV, I've been imagining that this piece of the book is really just one really really long monologue. And that's not even unheard of, for a play: Tony Kushner has done it brilliantly (readers of this blog will already know that he's one of my writing heroes, but seriously, if you've never read or seen Homebody/Kabul, go grab a copy and read the first act. It's a phenomenal, inspiring, daring piece of writing.)

So that's what I'm doing: I'm writing a monologue. This, I know how to do. This is fun. This can even be easy. With one simple sentence, the Don was able to ease my fears, make me feel dumb, and change my perspective. Not bad for one night's work. I'll take it - and her - with a great deal of gratitude.

(As a postscript/side note... did I say this was going to be short??? Why do I even bother pretending??)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Wait, I Changed My Mind

NOTE: I was going to write about NaNoWriMo, but I got distracted. Again. I'll get back to it next week...I think. 

Last week, I wrote at length (of course) about my new idea. You should probably read that post, because otherwise this isn't going to make a whole lot of sense. I titled that post "Let Me Inside Your Head", but I think I might want to take that back.

See, I'm still working on the gender-free first person narrative section of the book (I wasn't joking; go read it). I took the good advice you all gave me to heart, and just went for it. Dove head-first into my character and didn't look back.

Ok, that's not entirely true. Actually, I first tried writing a snippet of a scene (you know, brainstorming), proceeded to have a minor panic attack about my inability to write in the first person, and retreated to the relative safety of my character analysis instead.

Here's the thing, though: I usually write these analyses in the third person, like a psychoanalyst writing up a patient. And I did that for about two paragraphs before I got really fed up with not using any gender pronouns (no 'he', no 'she' - hello, stupid diction gymnastics!), and switched to the first person, anyway.

And then the most amazing thing happened: the words just started pouring out. It felt for all the world like my hands couldn't keep up with the words in my head; the story wanted to be told. Or maybe this character wanted to be heard. Either way, I couldn't stop the story. It was all back-story, all of the details that might never appear in the finished novel but that are essential in crafting a three-dimensional person: how this person grew up, why this person acts the way they do (Oh for God's sake, let's just use the character name - Sam - and dispense with the ridiculous maneuvering), what Sam is afraid of, and all of Elizabeth George's other character attributes.

This was amazing. This was inspiring. It keeps happening, too - every time I sit down to work on Sam, it's a flood of words.

And believe it or not, this is becoming a problem.

Now, this is going to sound crazy. I mean, I know I say that sort of thing a lot on this blog, and maybe it might have the 'boy who cried wolf' effect, but honestly, this is really going to sound crazy.

I can't get out of Sam's head.

I know, I know, you're thinking "Ok Liz, that's cute and dramatic and all, but come on now. Stop snorting the special blue fairy dust and tell us the truth."

This is the truth, though, melodrama and mind-altering substances notwithstanding. I start writing, and when it's time to stop, I can't. It takes me a long time to move out of Sam's headspace. I quite honestly feel dazed, and - call the loony bin, because this is even crazier - I feel submerged in whatever emotion Sam was feeling. Sadness, loss, fear, joy; whatever I was writing about, I'm still feeling it when I get up from the computer. And God forbid I should be interrupted while I'm writing, because then I'm pretty sure there's a non-gender-specified Australian sheep farmer (yes, Sam is an Australian sheep farmer; don't ask) walking around in my body, talking to my wife, giving massages, texting my friends, and sleeping in my bed.

Which is weird.

This has never happened to me before. Sure, I get engrossed in my stories; sure, it's hard for me to be interrupted; and yes, of course I'm often still thinking about what I was writing when I get up and move about the rest of my day. But I don't usually feel like I'm stuck in another person's brain. A FICTIONAL person's brain, which I myself MADE UP.

I'm telling myself this is a good thing. I'm telling myself that I'm really getting to know my character, that I'm really digging down into my, like, writer's soul, man, and that's, like, deep and stuff.

Needless to say, I'm not sure I believe myself. Maybe this is one of the perils of writing in the first person, or maybe I am snorting special blue fairy dust. The thing is, I don't even know if I really have Sam's voice down yet. I don't think I do. I think I don't have a tone yet, or a set style, or Sam's real, true voice, and I think I'm still having Sam say and think things that aren't accurate. And yet, I can't get out of Sam's head. It's confusing and unnerving and for the first time in my life, I'm having to come up with ways to transition out of writing and into the rest of my day, and put Sam away.

So yes, I think I might change my mind. It's not "Let Me Inside Your Head", it's "Let Me OUT". At least, let me out when it's time to get out. Please?

Insecure Writers: Outlines Are My Binky

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember from last month, it's an online group for writers. Most of whom are insecure. So we support each other from the safety and comfort of our desks. It's perfect.

Happy Wednesday and IWSG, everyone! In honor of the two-year anniversary of IWSG, I'm taking a brave, massive step outside of my comfort zone, and writing about feeling neurotic and insecure as a writer today. Because, you know, I never do that here. Ever.

I'm taking a numbered, outline-ish approach to today's post, because yes, I'm a plodder plotter through-and-through, and numbered lists make me feel safe and warm and happy and reassure me that all is right with the world. Just like a binky. Also, I just can't help myself. So, without further ado, here's my List of Current Worries While Attempting to Write (Note: this list will probably change by tomorrow. Or later today. I make no promises that I will not have an entirely different list of worries in about ten minutes):

1. New Ideas: Yes, I'm still wading through piles of slain paragraphs as I edit Cloudland, but I'm also working on a new idea (more on that later). Every time I come up with a new seed for a book, I wrestle with the same thought process. It goes something like this: Oh... oh WOW. This is fantastic. This is genius. I'M a genius! Wait til this gets out into the world!! Oh god, wait. People - real, live people - will see this? WILL people see this? Will anyone WANT to read this??? Is this actually a good idea, or is it instead a truly STUPID INSANE ASININE IDEA THAT EVERYONE WILL HATE? Ok. Deep breaths, deep breaths. Yes, this IS smart. I'm smart! Wait. Am I too smart?? Am I even CAPABLE of writing this? Oh god... And so on and so forth. 
2. Actual WRITING: I spend a lot of time talking about process, but not a whole lot about the actual act of writing. Which is really - note to self - an entire other blog post or ten. But for the purposes of this list, let's just say that on the good days, generating text is FUN. I feel like a superhero streaming words from my awesome Spidey wrist web-shooters. On the bad days, every single word is up for intense, microscopic examination. You know: Is this really the word I want to use? Why isn't this sentence FLOWING correctly? NOTHING SOUNDS RIGHT KEEP GOING DON'T BE A SISSY. Fun stuff like that.
3. Time: Oh yes, this is a huge one. I'm always juggling life demands with writing, and always worrying that I'll never actually manage to finish anything. Now, I do have a finished third draft (HALLELUJAH!!!) of Cloudland, so this concern might be slightly overblown and unrealistic, but really, since when does insecurity rely on reality? However, I do have a day job. Blessedly, I am busy at my day job, and therefore am making money and eating and paying my mortgage and buying too many books. But that damn job keeps interfering with writing. Strangely, people don't want to pay for a massage unless I actually show up and give them one. Weird, right?
4. Agents and the Long-Feared Query Letter: I am fast approaching the point where I'll be sending query letters to agents and trying to convince them to a) open the email, b) actually read it, c) ask me to read some pages of my novel, and d) represent me. This is making me very, very nervous. People often ask me why I don't just try to get a publisher, and the quick answer is that even if I'm lucky enough to find one who wants to publish my book, I'm going to need an agent to help me negotiate a contract. So, that means I have to try to sell myself. Which I am so, so, SO very good it. Or not.

I know, only four items today! Not so bad, right?

Well, truthfully, #3 is giving me a headache and lighting a fire under my butt, which hurts, so my brain decided to stop coming up with worries and start telling me to get the hell to work. Which is my plan. As long as I can get over #s 1 and 2.

You know what, though? I feel a little better now that I've gotten all of that out. Huh.

So, IWSG folks, as well as non-writers, what are your worries today? Writing related or not - all are welcome. Leave 'em here on this blog, and walk away a little lighter and less insecure for the day. See? IWSG For All.

Deep and Plotty Thoughts

Ok, plot: step two! At least, that's what I was planning to write about this week. I kind of ended up with something different. Or not. Never mind, just keep reading - you'll see what I mean.

So, it's ironic: I chose to talk about plot last week using Chuck Wendig's excellent definition, which says (in essence) that plot comes directly from the characters. And I meant that. I really did. It's just that when it was time for me to figure out what the hell was actually going to happen in Cloudland, I got a little bit lost.

Ok, fine. I got a lot lost. Like, wandering aimlessly around the woods on a cloudy, moonless night with no compass or map, lost (and I should point out here that I am really terrible at directions, even when I DO have a map. I'm the person who has to turn maps around so that they face the way I'm heading, because otherwise I can't read them.)

Yeah, I knew who my characters were, and I knew what they wanted, but I didn't know how to turn that into real, actual events. So, my plot didn't so much come from my characters...at least not directly. As I said last week, I asked for help from a dead guy. And it was the best thing I could have done.

No, I didn't learn how to commune with ghosts (although that would have been a lot cooler); I started re-reading Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Joseph Campbell was "an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion" (thanks, Wikipedia). He developed the theory that myths from all around the world share the same basic structure, which he called the monomyth, or the Hero's Journey. In his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell lays out the structure of this monomyth, and illustrates how a vast majority of ancient and modern stories fit this structure. It's way too much to lay out in this post, but suffice it to say that if you were to look at Campbell's structure, and compare it to a hell of a lot of books, movies, and myths, you'd be able to see that they pretty much follow it, with a few changes here and there. The most commonly cited example of this is Star Wars, but there are a ton more.

Before I continue, I should note that there are some people out there who don't like Joseph Campbell or his theories very much. Since I'm not writing a blog about comparative mythology or Mr. Campbell, I'm not going to delve too much into the criticism; if you're interested, you can check out a summary of it here. Essentially, the critiques say that making myths 'universal' destroys the uniqueness and the intended lessons of each myth; that defining and following a specified structure leads to way too many predictable, cookie-cutter books and movies (see: all blockbuster Hollywood movies and the three-act structure); and so on.

I don't disagree with any of this. I just think it all misses the central message and value of Campbell's work, which is why I ignored the criticism and used the Hero's Journey as a jumping-off point when I was trying to come up with a structure for Cloudland.

Yep, I used it, because I love it. I'll just admit that outright. I love Joseph Campbell, and I'm inspired by him, because he lays bare this essential commonality in the human unconscious: for reasons we don't know, and can't explain, there are motifs, symbols, and metaphors that appear over and over again in myths from all over the world. The people creating these myths didn't collaborate with each other, or read up on each other's Creation Myths, before making their own. They stumbled, seemingly by chance, on themes that are universal, that access something buried deeply within all of us. And that's freaking amazing. I love that. So I wanted to think about and find and access those common unconscious associations - I was writing a book about death, after all, and what is more universally human than the struggle to comprehend death?

Notice that I said I used his theories "as a jumping-off point". I was lost in the woods without a map (see? Human metaphors from the collective unconscious. Oh yeah, that's how I roll), and I needed a refresher on basic story structures, so I re-read some of Campbell's work and took off from there. Am I indebted to and inspired by his work? Absolutely. Did I follow the structure of the Hero's Journey to the letter, and use it as the exact skeleton for my book? Nope, not at all.

I studied the structure - which you can see all laid out and summed up here - and I thought about what it was accomplishing, and why it was used, and then I took the bits I liked and got rid of the ones I didn't, or that I didn't think would serve my story, and made up my own version of it. And then bam, just like that, I had the skeleton for my book.

The problem with skeletons, of course, is that they're made of bones. No muscle, no nerve, no skin; nothing meaty to sink your teeth into, and enjoy (unless you like bones without anything on them, in which case, have at it. I'll be over by the deli and salad bars, trying to find some real food).

What I'm saying is that plot isn't just structure; it's also the all of the details of that structure. Adding flesh to the skeleton, if you will.

Which I'll talk about.... next week.

Also next week - a few brief notes on what it means to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer, and why those writers probably think I'm completely out of my mind (which I might be).

Plot, And Other Four-Letter Words

I have a new favorite blog. Now, before you click the link, just be warned that it is NSFW. At all. And if you're offended by curse words, you should skip it. And if you don't like fantasy or sci-fi (and if you don't, why not??), you should perhaps avoid it. It's called Terrible Minds, and it's by rather prolific author Chuck Wendig, who does not at all need my help to market him because his blog is hopping with comments, but I don't care, because it's a great resource for writers, and it's hilarious, and thought-provoking, and well-written.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I'm supposed to be writing a blog that gives you an inside look into the process of writing a novel (I am, really; it says so in big bold letters at the top of the page!!!), and I have yet to even bring up that huge, nasty, complicated four-letter word. Oh yes, that's right: PLOT. Before I can talk about the complex process of creating it, I need to talk about what it is. In a blog post yesterday about stakes, Chuck has this to say about plot:

"Plot is people. Or, more specifically, plot is the result of characters making choices and acting on those choices. Or, even more specifically, plot is the expression of characters aware of the stakes and who form goals in response to those stakes (correctly or incorrectly) and who attempt to overcome conflicts in service to those goals." 

This is a fantastic way to define that nasty four-letter word. I like it because it puts characters front and center, instead of somewhere off to the side, which is something I've been harping on about for a while. The action in the story should directly come from who the characters are: what makes them tick, what drives them batty, and what they really, really want. In fact, one of the well-known ways to come up with a story idea in the first place is to think of a character, figure out what he wants most in life, and then prevent him from having it. Voila - conflict, tension, high stakes. There's the beginning of your story.

It's also, however, an extremely writer-ly way to define it, so for the sake of clarity I'll just quote Wikipedia, here, and say that plot "is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story". In other words, it's what happens in your story.

It's also way, way, way harder to create than it sounds like it should be.

Let's go back in time, shall we? I'm working on Cloudland. I have a seed, and I've tortured myself into developing it and fleshing it out. I have some non-robotic, seriously psychoanalyzed, lengthily discussed characters. So, ummm... now what?

Now, of course, they DO STUFF! Really interesting, compelling, conflict-filled STUFF! And all that stuff happens in a well-conceived order, with carefully crafted building of tension, until we hit a thrilling, nail-biting climax that leads us right into a satisfying, moving, perhaps even thought-provoking resolution. And it all gets created in one lovely blue-y purple-y poof of MAGIC!

Right?

Riiiiiiight.

Even though characters, seed, and theme are essential, they don't create your plot for you, alas. I think I spent more time working on the plot than on anything else in the whole long brainstorming process, and that was a loooooong time. I had a few things to start with (after a great deal of brainstorming): 1) Jake and Sara were the main characters, and they were both going to lose a parent; 2) They were going to end up looking for their lost parents in a magical land in the clouds; and 3) They were going to have to confront, and deal with, the reality of their losses before the story could be resolved.

Awesome. So once again, now what? Besides extreme procrastination, of course. That's a given.

First: answer some questions.

1) Which parents, and how do they die?
- Jake's mom, and she dies in a car accident on a bridge over the Charles River, so that her body ends up in the water and is never recovered. This was important, because Jake is six, and therefore extremely literal. If there's no body, how can she be dead? And if she isn't dead, where is she, and how does he go about finding her? That's the entire impetus for the book - the inciting incident, if you want to use the technical term.
- Sara's dad, who dies after a battle with brain cancer that Sara's parents hid from her until about two weeks before his death. I came up with this specific death because I wanted a few things: a death very different from Jake's mom's (so no more accidents or sudden violence); a death that was sudden and unexpected enough that Sara would still have to deal with shock and denial; and finally, a death that involved some inherent tension and conflict with Sara's parents, because, well, honestly, because that would set her off and make a more interesting story.

2) and 3) What is the land in the clouds, what happens there, and how do Jake and Sara end up confronting the reality of their losses?
- If you think these three questions are enormous ones, you'd be right. The first question was a lot easier to answer. I spent quite a bit of time spinning my wheels and pulling at my hair as I tried to answer them, and in the end I wound up having to ask for help, from a very smart, fascinating, wise dead guy.

And you know what? He really helped me. I wouldn't have a plot if he hadn't.

More on that....next week.

(see: cliffhangers and other manipulative plot devices)

Real-Life Fake People! FREE!

I was just sitting down to start working on this post when my sister-in-law texted me about the Supreme Court's decision on DOMA and Prop 8. I got completely derailed - listening to NPR, watching Twitter and Facebook explode, crying and laughing, and wishing profoundly that my wife didn't work in a concrete cave so that I could call her and hear her voice and celebrate with her. I know this is a blog about writing novels, but I can't help it; this is so far beyond just politics for me.

However, I'm going to try to re-focus, here, and talk about characters. You know, about Real-Life Fake People! FREE!

Seriously, who can resist FREE STUFF??? I can't. I'm a sucker for all the swag they give out at conferences (and really, how many flimsy plastic keychain lobs does one person need?), not to mention free food. And for someone who normally tries to eat very healthy, this is a very strange thing to love, because free food is almost uniformly horrendous. And yet, I love it, anyway, because I didn't pay for it.

BUT, lucky for you, this post includes NO cheap-o keychains or crappy packaged food. Nope. Here, you get FREE IMAGINARY PEOPLE! YAY!

Last week, I went on a heavily psychological tear about crafting real, three-dimensional characters instead of lifeless robots (incidentally, if you're writing a sci-fi novel about robots with no personalities, you should ignore these posts). This is the approach I used when I was working on Cloudland; if you haven't read the last post, go do it now. No really, I'll wait. I don't mind; it's important (can anyone else hear their Jewish grandmothers talking when I say that?)

All done? Lovely. So, on Ms. George's advice, I created a nice character analysis document in Word, and then I went to town. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then I ignored all reasonable word limits, and kept writing. There are two main characters in the book (Jake and Sara, as I've mentioned), and then a second tier of four secondary characters (the Guide, Jake's father and mother, and Sara's mother), a third tier of one tertiary character (Sara's father), and then a fourth tier of some characters who are barely mentioned at all.

Everyone in the first three tiers got a detailed, in-depth, and otherwise exhaustive analysis. This included Jake's mother - who dies early on in the novel, but she's clearly so central to the story that I had to know who she was - and Sara's father, who dies before the novel starts, but since the whole book is about Sara's quest to find him, he needed to be developed.

Why? Well, a lot of reasons. For example, I had to know what, specifically, Jake and Sara missed about their parents, because that's how grief often works; it's so damned specific, it can seem crazy. You focus on the tiny, insignificant things about a person - an old shirt they loved, no matter how dingy; their favorite food; the way their hands moved when they talked - and then you spend a lot of time missing the hell out of those little things.

Plus, both of these people live in Sara and Jake's flashbacks, and in order for those memories to be compelling and real, I had to know how both parents would have acted, spoken, thought, and moved.

As for the other very minor characters, I didn't work on them, mainly because their appearances were so brief that it didn't seem necessary. However, my editor would probably argue (and she'd probably be right) that I should have created an analysis for at least one of those fourth tier characters - Sara's boyfriend, Brian - because he is currently giving both of us rather large, pounding headaches; he just doesn't quite seem to belong in the book. My editor keeps using writerly terms like, "you haven't earned that conversation" when he shows up. Meaning, in layman's terms, "what the &*$# is he doing here??" A fair question, and he may be one of my murdered darlings by the time we're done. I'm holding out for him for now, though.

At any rate, how do these analyses actually look, in real-world terms? Below, I'm posting an excerpt from the one I created for Jake. Why an excerpt, you ask? Well, for one, I tend to be rather, um, long-winded (I'm sure you haven't noticed that by now). Two, I really do dig in when I do these analyses, and I write for a long time, in free-form brainstorming-style, about who they are. And those two factors combined would make what is already a long blog post into a freaking monster.

So, excerpt-time:

Jake (Age 5-6):

Half Cape Verdean (mom's side), and half African-American (dad's side). He looks much more like his mother than his father, which will torture his father once his mother has died. He has his mother’s lighter brown skin tone, his mother’s delicate facial features and small frame, and, especially, his mother’s beautiful and soulful brown eyes. 

He is a quiet, introverted child by nature. Thoughtful, silent, and intense. He can communicate, he gets along with other kids relatively well, although he doesn’t have many friends: he prefers his own inner world to anything anyone else offers, except maybe his mom. I think he is an observer, a watcher. He’s probably quite bright. He is intensely curious, but unlike most children, he doesn’t ask questions out loud. Instead, he asks them in his own mind, and creates his own answers based on the facts he gathers from the world around him, and his own fertile imagination. Magic is very much alive for him, but he wouldn’t characterize it as ‘magic’ – it is every bit as real and solid to him as the so-called world of objects.

I think he had a special relationship with his mother, because they are so similar. He was much more communicative with her than with anyone else, especially his father; he can easily sense his father’s ambivalence and discomfort, and is a little afraid of him. His mother liked hearing his queer, strange ideas and stories; she never made fun of him, was never worried about what his brain created. 

It’s only when his mother dies that his quietness becomes deep, unassailable, and frightening (to the world). He withdraws into himself completely, into his own inner world where he can make sense of what is happening, where there is no accusatory father to disturb him. When his mother dies, and his father becomes so withdrawn and so angry, he is terrified. His world is full of danger, and there is no one to protect him. 

Core Need: To feel safe and loved, especially by his mother.

Pathological Maneuver: Introversion to the point of being totally non-responsive to the world around him. When he is afraid or upset, he retreats within; it is only within himself that he can be safe.

Sexuality: He was just starting to grow past the point where he was intensely attached to his mother, and starting to wonder if he could be more like his dad, when his mother died. This does two things in terms of child sexuality: 1) it made him intensely vulnerable to his father’s distance and coolness, and 2) it made him regress back to desperately wanting to be close to his mom.

Essential Past Event: His parents took him to the Museum of Natural History when he was very small, probably 3-4 years old or so. He got very interested in an exhibit, as he often does with things he observes, and didn’t realize that his parents had turned to the next exhibit. They were only a few feet away, but when he realized they were gone, he panicked. He sat down on the floor and concentrated very hard on his mother finding him, believing that if he thought about it hard enough she would. And she did. This led to a strong belief in the power of his own mind.

Core Desire: To find his mother.

Religion: Catholic. He goes to Church every week with his mom and dad, but he finds it a little boring, and hard to understand. He likes the beauty of the big churches, and the organ music, though. 

Spirituality: He is led, inspired, and informed by his mother’s true sense of spirituality. He believes very much that God and Jesus exist. To him, they literally live in a kingdom in the sky, close to or even the same as the place that his mother imagines escaping to. He has asked her before if her special place in the sky is close to where God lives; she doesn’t have a clear answer (“Maybe. Maybe they’re the same thing, maybe not. But I’d like to believe that wherever God is, there’s peace and lots of open sky.”) He sees God as a father figure; powerful, loving, a bit distant, a bit unfathomable. 

Hey, thanks for making it all the way to the bottom of this post! You are my new Favorite Person, and I will give a signed copy of Cloudland to you...once it's published :)

Next week: time to talk about PLOT. Probably. 

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

Do you all now have Pete Seeger singing that song in your head? Sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, I do, too. Stupid seed metaphors.

This all came about because I was thinking, if I'm going to write about writing, should I at least try to go in some sort of logical order? And then I thought, OK, then, where exactly does a novel start? The right answer is that there IS no right answer. It starts in dreams, or in a single word; it starts in a flash of an image, or one line of dialogue; it starts with life doing what life does, and periodically slamming you into the ground with stunning, breath-taking loss, or beauty, or joy. There's no telling what that one thing will be - the thing that catches flame, and flickers to life inside your head.

Which brought me to the seed metaphor. You know, little thing, flickering to life, etc? I'm saying there's always a seed of an idea. And it's always just that; just a seed. No one has an idea that springs instantly into a fully-formed bestselling novel from one's prolific head (unless one is a Greek god named Zeus, in which case, all bets are off). I get a flash of an idea, nothing more that a little seed, and then I have to plant that seed and water it and tend to it and weed it and then, inch by inch, I end up with a garden and with this dumb song stuck in my head. You get the idea.

There are, by the way, a ton of these seeds in my head at any given time, and only a few of them ever get developed. Some of them are waiting for a chance at my attention, and some of them are just really bad seeds (cue the opening sequence of that Macaulay Culkin movie, based on that older, much better movie).

In the case of my first novel, Cloudland, and Other Stories, the seed was loss. I knew I wanted to write a story about loss, or, more specifically, about the insane, heart-wrenching, terrible process of grieving. Then I got on a plane for various unimportant reasons, and looked out the window on that mind-boggling, reality-defying landscape of clouds - you know that one, when you're above the cloud-line and the entire horizon is filled with hills and valleys and plains and cities made entirely of clouds - and thought, I'm going to write a book about loss where the characters end up in this crazy, magical land of clouds. And there you go: the seed sprang to the front of my mind, and got my attention, and didn't let go.

That was, incidentally, eight and a half years ago. I didn't start actually WRITING said novel (or developing said garden, if I want to stick with the same tired metaphor, which I don't) until about four years ago. I don't know what the average amount of time for most people is - to write a novel, I mean - and I'd be glad to learn more if anyone knows, but I'm willing to bet that it's somewhere in that range.

So yeah, no Athena's leaping to life in nanoseconds, here.

So you have this seed. Then what?

More on that in another post.