Tag Archives: novel

It’s Outta My Hands

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Yesterday, I started sending out my novel for feedback from a few readers. They are all writers with a sensibility similar to myself. They are the first to be reading it. I was enjoying making this past round of revisions, but as soon as I let the manuscript go, I had all kinds of misgivings. The bowling ball is halfway down the alley, and I can’t bear to see where it will end up. No amount of body English is going to make it roll more true. It’s in the mail, and my back is turned.

So funny how other people’s opinions are so important to me, no matter how much I try to be strong. Feedback is just feedback, I tell myself. It has nothing to do with my self-worth as a writer or human being.

Tell it to the judge.

Yeah–he’s right here.

The Path Reveals Itself: The Fourth Draft

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I could have never predicted it. About two weeks ago, I mentioned that I was starting to edit the fourth draft of my novel, however, I was filled with great trepidation. I was expecting at least another two or three months more of work. But to my surprise, I finished this revision very quickly. Despite my initial misgivings when re-reading the previous draft, most of the really hard work must have already been done, though it was hidden. The path was there, marked in purple crayon; what I had to do was chop down the brush along the way so I could see the markings. Afterwards, I cleared out the rocks in the way, filled in the ruts, and paved over the dirt walkway. By hacking away at all the excess in the first few chapters, I had allowed the path to reveal itself.

The next few steps are this: leave it alone for two weeks, and then do a quick edit. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that some of the passages that I thought I had fixed were actually better in prior edits. But now that I know how this path curves, and where it will end up, I can go back to past versions and pick out the best passages without being afraid of getting lost.

After the quick edit, I’m planning to send the manuscript out to a few people whose judgment I trust. Not close friends or family; it’s too early for that now. I’ll send it to people whose writing expertise I trust, and who have a similar sensibility to my own. I’d like them to provide feedback in a variety of ways, from simple proofing to pointing out structural issues and advice on improving what’s there.

I’ve had such a wonderful time doing this. I’ve really learned so much about writing, and I see how much more there still is to learn. Like all of the arts, it’s a life-long pursuit –no one person can visit every town and city on the map. We get to visit the places we can while we are on this planet, and it’s always wonderful when you can visit someplace new. Paradoxically, knowing that the universe is infinite makes the pursuit of art less, not more, scary. When you accept that the universe is infinite; and that art is long and life is short; then you understand that you–and every other writer and artist on the planet–are only able to master a piece of all there is to know. But the freeing thing is that the piece that you master will be different from anyone else’s piece. In that knowledge there is freedom, and rest. Because of each artist’s inherent uniqueness, if you are honest and diligent, no one else will have explored exactly the same nooks and crannies as yourself. That’s what you bring to the table.  You can give yourself permission to go down the next road.

It’s going to be hard to let go of these characters that I’ve lived with this long. I don’t know how they grew. It was brush stroke by brush stroke, and now they have taken a life of their own. I am a proud parent. Maybe I have a child only a father could love. Perhaps. Should I leave this whole manuscript alone for a year and then go back to it? It probably would benefit. But then it’s like real life. It’s never a good time; you’re never prepared enough; the parents are never ready enough to have a child.

So, for all intents and purposes the book has been born. It has life in it. It may get a new set of clothes, or I may need to give it a haircut and a manicure, maybe some nail polish and a dye job, but basically, fundamentally, the book has arrived. I’m a daddy.

On Patience

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The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.–Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

Max Malini was a magician who came to America from Austria at the turn of the twentieth century. He made his fortune performing for the rich at their private soirees. While seated at their dinner tables, he would lift his bowler hat which had been lying on the table all evening, and reveal, underneath it,  a large solid block of ice. It was stunningly mystifying. Where could it have come from? It couldn’t have been sitting on his lap or hidden under his hat all evening without melting. There was no explanation. (If you’d like to see an encore of that performance, pick up the DVD of the excellent documentary tribute to magician Ricky Jay, Deceptive Practice).

“Max, how do you do the secret move without anyone seeing?” asked his fellow magicians.

“You vait,” he replied.

“How long?”

“You vait a veek if you must!”

Patience in art is a virtue if only because the audience cannot conceive that anyone would wait that week.

Or spend ten years to write that novel. But sometimes that is what it takes: the willingness to live with the anxiety of not knowing the outcome until a time far into the future. Really, when you think about it, the profession of a novelist is an absurd one. How can one possibly plan to spend a good chunk of one’s adult life working on a book only to find out later that no one likes it? It’s much easier to write a poem or short story, find out what people think, and move on to the next one.

Philip Roth in an interview once said that the first few hundred pages of writing a novel is agony because he knows that he’s going to throw away most of it in search of the one little seed from which the novel will eventually grow.

The readers never know of this wait. To them, the final product is given all at once like a Christmas present. They can devour the novel all at once. They don’t have to have the patience of the writer. That is part of the writer’s gift to them.

But the novelist has played a trick on the readers. The trade-off is this: the writer can take all the time in the world to achieve her or his effects. There’s no pressure because without a time limit on the creation, anything is theoretically possible to achieve. Write, edit, write, edit; rinse and repeat until it works.

My favorite Malini story concerns the time he accidentally picked up the wrong overcoat from his tailor. He realizes that it’s the coat of an acquaintance., so he returns it to the tailor that evening.

A few years later, Malini runs into the acquaintance. Malini asks the man to pick a card from a deck of cards. It is the four of hearts. Malini asks the man to take off his overcoat. With a pen knife, the magician slashes the lining of the coat. In the lining of the coat, behold, there is a matching card: the four of hearts.

Yes, Malini had sewn the card into the man’s overcoat the night he received the coat from the tailor all those years ago.

That’s artistic patience.

Fourth Draft Jitters Part 2

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Just when I thought I was out . . . It’s not finished by a long shot.

Last week, I wrote about the novel I was writing. I was nervous because after a month of letting it lie dormant, I was about to dive into the fourth revision. I didn’t know what I was going to find.

The plan was to find a quiet place and read through it in one sitting. I started to read and after thirty pages I had to stop. It was too disappointing. Everything that had seemed so sparkling and trenchant a month ago was flat on the page, a dead thing.

Grrr.

A few days later, I read some more. I came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong that couldn’t be improved by pitching the first 150 pages into a burning tar hellhole of a pit.

Double grrr.

So. Decision. I can see the problems plainly. I can identify them. I can name them. I can put the proper colored tag on each one.

What I don’t know is whether I can fix them. That is, I may be at the limit of my skill and talent. Alternatively, I could seek feedback and educate myself further and see where that takes me. I expect that I would then be capable of making some changes, but not have the ability or talent to make others.  I may have to accept that this is where I am.

Or I could just scrap the whole thing.

Today, however, I had a more positive experience. I decided to sit down again and start reading from page 151 until I reached the end, some 200 pages later. And I was able to do it. Sometimes I was smiling, and sometimes I was giving myself mental high fives. I liked what I read in that latter part. I was compelled to keep reading up to the end. The patient was definitely worth saving.

I think I see the path I have to take.

The first third doesn’t work because it takes too long for my actors to become active. I need to chisel away the rest of the marble to reveal the action of my story. My protagonist needs to be confronted with her problem within the first few pages. Settings need to be clarified, chronology and seasons sorted out, cliches ditched, language sharpened. I think these are all possible, all within my skill set.

So my time line is extended one more time. They’ve pulled me back in. We can’t let each other go yet. I’ll be back at my desk again tomorrow, as always, trying to write myself out.

A Room With a View: Wagering It All on One Scene

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I have been working on a novel, and it’s always wonderful to see how the masters solved the problems with which I as a neophyte am still wrestling. A novel sets up certain expectations as the plot unfolds and the novelist must fulfill them. If the plot expectations are not fulfilled, it doesn’t matter what else s/he does, the novel will disappoint. Sometimes the success of that expectation hinges on the turn of just one scene. If that one scene doesn’t work, no novel.

I recently re-read E.M. Forster’s comic masterpiece A Room With a View,  and it is a perfect example of a novel whose success depends entirely on the execution of one crucial scene. This short turn-of-the-century novel, a social romp through the new 20th-century world of a rapidly changing society, is full of wry commentary and third person omniscient observation. The comedy of social manners of young people caught between the ways of their conventional elders and the almost-liberated woman was a popular subject of the time. With Women’s Suffrage movements as background, George Bernard Shaw and others were making a career out of writing plays about women who, much to the consternation of their elders and the men around them, were asserting their independence.

In a short time afterwards the hopes for change embodied in these plays and novels would turn sour with the aftermath of the Great War.  But in those pre-war years at the turn of the century, it was still possible to write humorously about the ways conventions could be overturned with a strong dose of Idealism and Passion.

Forster’s story is about a group of British guardians and their almost-of-age children who meet at at an Italian pensione during a sightseeing vacation. Conventions are upset by the unconventional socialists, the Emersons. They have the uncultured habit of saying what they mean. When the elder Emerson offers his Room with a View to the young filly Lucy, her older prudish cousin Charlotte is shocked at the impertinence and forwardness of such an offer. The younger Emerson, George, and Lucy have other ideas of propriety, and the rest of the novel very quickly becomes a vehicle for delivering the otherwise-engaged Lucy to her real love George. Unfortunately, Lucy herself is still bound to conventional ideas and is too scared to break with them. On her return to England, Lucy denies her love of George and instead sets off to marry the upper-class twit Cecil, in accord with her family’s expectations. But George and his father both know that Lucy is lying to herself and really loves George.

As the novel moves its scene from Italy to Britain, Forster has fun skewering the mores of the drawing room set. But ultimately the success of the book depends on whether he can pull off the culminating scene. Because delightful as the book’s whimsy, characters, and pointed humor are, if it doesn’t deliver on its obligatory scene where Lucy is confronted with her real feelings, then the book fails.

But Forster at the ridiculous age of 26 executes the scene so beautifully that this one scene in my opinion makes the novel a classic all by itself. Forster in the penultimate chapter of the book has Lucy, on the verge of marrying Cecil, running into the plainspoken father of George once more. In a remarkable monologue, George’s father talks to Lucy passionately of Truth and Love and Lying and Lucy breaks down. She can no longer run from her true feelings. She knows she must have George.

It’s a breathtaking and daring turn. The whole novel depends on whether the reader can be as persuaded as Lucy about the holiness of Love. If we don’t feel it, the novel, despite its other fine qualities, is a throwaway. In the otherwise wonderful 1985 movie, the filmmakers don’t entirely trust the moment. They end the scene too soon and Denholm Elliot’s wonderful performance as the father is somewhat short-changed. But Forster’s father’s full speech is a breathtaking tour-de-force and as a reader I was affected by every word. When I reached the end of that chapter, I felt as if I had been taken by the hand of a master and whirled around in the air, landing giddily with an exhilaration at hearing a truth so plain, yet so inspiring, that I was left, like Lucy, with the feeling of a renewed strength to face life.

Did Forster write that novel with that scene in mind first? I don’t know. But what a dare, what a wager, what an achievement. Set up the expectation, then brilliantly fulfill it. Lesson learned. Simple.

Fourth Draft Jitters

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I’m as jittery as a three-wheeled caboose. I am about to face my novel again, the fourth draft to be exact. I don’t know what I’m going to find.

I’ve been working on a novel for the past few years.  In the last 10 months, I’ve given it more serious commitment. It’s become the most important part of my day. Three drafts done, the words finally sculpting a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

I worked through the drafts without much break in between. I didn’t want to lose the thread of whatever was there. I printed out the completed third draft, put it in a manila envelope, and buried it under a pile of bills by the window in the corner of my workspace. The morning street noises unconcernedly wafted over it.

One month. That’s the timeline I was giving myself. I was on forced vacation from the characters I liked and loved. The plan was to get some distance and come back for one final draft before letting a few others give their feedback.

I kept myself busy during the month (this blog, an outline for another novel) but now the time is up. Tomorrow I dig up the manila folder and start reading the pages again. It’s like meeting an old college friend. I hope we still like each other.

When my son was born I kept thinking how lucky I was to have such an absurdly beautiful baby.  Maybe Nature makes that happen for all parents. The parents look at their newborn and think no baby could possibly be more perfect. When I look back at the earliest pictures of my son, the truth is he looks pretty much like every other newborn baby. Even down to the identical funny little hats they are all issued at the hospital. It’s a wonderful protective mechanism we’re given (the parental pride, not the funny little hats).

But novels? I’m not so sure we get that kind of creator’s protection. We have to face the consequences of our lexical mistakes and bear the shock of whatever is really there. What if there’s nothing worth saving?

How bold will I be? Will I wimp out if it’s clear that the whole structure is rotten and needs re-modeling? Will I ruthlessly cut out characters who don’t add to the story line? Will I, as the advice famously goes, kill my darlings?

Not so fast. In previous drafts, my editorial self was tempted to take out whole characters and subplots. But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t kill my darlings. And that mercy, I think, for now at least, was the better choice. As I found out more about my characters and my story I found a way to more fully integrate them into the plot of the novel. I think the novel is stronger for that decision.

The one thing I am happy about is that with every draft so far,  I’ve surprised myself with new content. It’s not just been about changing words here or there, but still working with something alive and pliable. Each round I’ve written something that surprises me, surprises my characters. I am grateful for that.

She steps off the platform with suitcases, the blue suitcase I remember. The turn of her shoulder. What coat is that? What hair? We walk towards each other with half a smile on our lips. I stumble on a rock.

I’ll let you know how it all went in the coming week.