In our interview, author Kate Moses raised the topic of magical thinking about the ways your writing can impact the events of the world or your life. We’ve been talking about this in the Book Writing World, discovering that we all have our superstitions about the power of story, of words, to influence outcomes in life: if you kill off the parakeet in your book, what will become of your own little Popo? If your protagonist is older than you are, will the book be published only once you’ve passed her age? On and on . . .

This is the kind of worry that one often keeps to oneself, and it is a surprise to discover a lot of writers partake in this kind of magical thinking. On the other hand, words and stories have shaped our lives in very real ways as readers. Who hasn’t felt her sense of self shift, or even his mood alter because of the events in a book? Whose life isn’t made up of fragments of the stories we’ve imbibed as much as by those we’ve lived? It is because we are readers whose lives are shaped by books that we become writers. Little wonder, then, that we imagine that what we write might change our worlds, too.

The key, as Kate learned thanks to a friend’s generosity (see all in my upcoming interview), is not to let these superstitions stop you from getting the truth (fictional or not) down on the page. If writing is a form of playing with fire, we don’t want to douse the flames in order to avoid getting burned. Instead, we must learn to walk across red coals without fear. Or heck, with fear, sure: just keep on walking!

I just spent the morning with Kate Moses on the official publication day of her compelling new memoir, Cakewalk. We filmed our interview in the sunny kitchen, glass door open onto a backyard, three white cats circling and purring.

I read Cakewalk in the days before our meeting, laughing out loud and also sobbing. Yes, sobbing. It’s a wild and delicious ride, replete with recipes. Kate’s sentences are delicacies themselves–rich, abundant, generous and exquisite.

Rooted in a history of generations of Californians, White Russian treasure burning in a San Francisco dump, children tied to trees after the earthquake to keep them safe, Kate’s is the story of the making of a writer–for without waving any banners, this is a key part of the story and one that my writer self thrilled to read.

I don’t envy Kate her harrowing childhood, even with its flights of sugary beauty, and I suppose many writers have a cauldron of a past that boiled us, left us raw, tender and observant. But what a memory–what prose, what images–drives this narrative. What characters people it and what a journey creates the writer who can transform the whole thing into a delicacy.

I’ll be posting my video interview with her soon. Come join us in her kitchen!

dumpsters

I’m writing 1000 words/ weekday on this second first draft of my novel. I’m constantly reminding myself that part of the purpose of early drafting is to write too much, to learn, discover, invent, to tell myself the story so that I can transform it into scene and figure out how to dole it out to my reader.

Yesterday, on my class call, I went on a bit of a rant. But I was pleased with the truth of it and thought I’d share some of it with you.

We have a horn player in a professional and well-respected symphony who is writing his first novel in our group. And he is often participating in calls on his way to rehearsals.

And it occurred to me that writing is the only art where people want not to have to practice. We not only want this, we expect it, and are disappointed when much of what we write is not good enough for public consumption. We want everything we do to be performance—to be consumed (and paid for) with delight by our customers.

Well, maybe we’d be okay with about a 90/ 10 ratio of performance to practice. If we had to cut 10%, we could deal with that. But as in any art and any sport, the ratio is something more like the reverse of that: 10/90. A runner doesn’t go a block or two here or there, saving up the real push for the Big Event Marathon. A pianist doesn’t insist that her seven-year-old lessons be included in her Carnegie Hall debut.

Why then do we writers feel that we are being “inefficient” if we write scenes several times before we nail it, or if we throw out 2/3rds of a draft?

I almost never blog about what I am reading. The reasons could form their own blog. Suffice to say, I am not a critic. I read too passionately, get too consumed by a book to want to pull myself out and be insightful, any more than I want to write about other private aspects of . . . my personal passions.

However, I just read a book that enthralled me in a “shout it from the rooftops” way. I’d been laboring through a “thriller”—to learn something more about plot!—and just couldn’t get invested. I didn’t care about the protagonist. I actually liked her fine—it wasn’t about likeability. The stakes, even though they seemed to be life or death, didn’t matter to me because they didn’t really matter to her. A game had been thrust upon her, more as a matter of plot, of author convenience, than anything else, as far as I could tell.

I accidentally left that book at home when I went away for the weekend! Hmm . . .

Instead, I read a book by Yale Goldstein Love, the daughter of one of my brilliant mentors, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Warning: I am going to gush here.

This debut novel (called Overture in hardback and The Passion of Tasha Darsky in paperback) is astonishingly mature, authoritative, evocative and gripping. The writing is gorgeous.

I loved the character—not because she was likeable or not likeable, but because she was fascinating and because there was a dissonance between how she saw herself and how the world saw her that was apparent to me through the first person narration. That dissonance caused all kinds of plot problems. It also provoked theme. What are the consequences of underestimating yourself? Of women, in particular, being undervalued? What do we lose, as consumers of culture, when people fail to “say yes to it”?

Even in the laudatory reviews of Yael Goldstein Love’s first book, I sensed that people were holding back. This is genius, folks, in the form of a young woman’s first book. Encore! Encore!

It seems no coincidence that this is a book about mothers and daughters as well as about creativity and genius: Yael’s mother, the award-winning, MacArthur genius Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, has a new, highly-praised novel out now, too, which is next on my list: 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. These two women count for two of those arguments!

Gushing over. What books and authors do you LOVE?

WEDNESDAY: Five Ways to Keep on Writing Your Book

Three Plot Tips:
1) Ask, what do my characters (or I) expect to happen now? Make something utterly different happen.
2) Ask, what was true in the beginning of my book? What was the status quo? How is that changing? What would challenge that more? What would turn it on its head?
3) Ask, what else is going on, underneath what is going on? What else might be revealed? What do I assume? How might what I (or my characters) assume be absolutely not true?

A member of the Book Writing World has written a terrific mystery, but his protagonist is a little slow about pursuing the clues he’s stumbled upon that indicate a murder has happened.

I’ve had my own problems with protagonists who feel helpless, uncertain or just plain lazy. How do you get your characters to stop pondering, philosophizing or just buying donuts and start to make sh*t happen?

Get behind your characters’ motivation. What would *you* do if you thought you had discovered evidence of a murder?! Would it haunt you?

Writing can be like dreaming. I used to have dreams in which something bad was happening and I needed to run but couldn’t. Eventually I realized that this was because my sleeping body thought I actually wanted it to run and it refused to haul itself out of bed just because I was having a bad dream!

A similar lethargy can haunt the writing process. We writers are sitting safely at our desks or wherever, and it seems far-fetched to jump up and start solving murders or actively dealing with major life problems.

But if we were in the actual situation, you bet we’d be taking action–and that is what our characters must do.

A member of what will shortly blossom into the full-fledged Book Writing World–my online community, craft and coaching site for writers of books–had more than a dozen people read her manuscript, writing comments in the margins. Now what? she wondered, looking at this stack of xeroxed books.

First, I told her, open all the manuscripts to page one. Look at anything any one said on page one, and consolidate what is relevant and useful into one book. Go along, page by page, until you’ve reviewed and condensed the whole conversation onto one manuscript.

(On a practical level, this means that you go through each manuscript until you come to the first page that has a comment, and then you let it sit on your bed or floor or wherever you’ve spread everything out, until you get to that page in your review.)

She found it helpful to have this systematic approach, but then she’d finished going through all the pages of all the manuscripts. Now what?

So, what now that you have these comments transcribed?

1) Look through them and make a list of any structural or BIG issue comments that resonate with you but which will need to be addressed on a macro level.
2) These macro issues will take daydreaming, re-plotting, conversations with your character, ripping seams and pulling out nails. Re-visioning. Give them time. Ask yourself questions and let the answers percolate. Draw diagrams, read books, muse.
2) The rest of the comments will be easier: page by page, line by line you look at the comments. If you agree something needs to change, change it.
3) You have to go back to “first draft” writing mode in order to try something out. There’s no way to write something for the first time that isn’t, at some level, a first draft. Sounds obvious, but it’s hard to put first draft material in the middle of a manuscript you’ve been laboring over. There is, however, no other way. You have to experiment, see what works, be willing to get it wrong.
4) Once you think you have something that might work, go on page by page to the next site-specific comment or comments and address those.
5) Keep in constant communication with yourself. Do not fix what does not, to your way of seeing, need fixing. Do not assume that other people’s suggestions will be the right ones to fix a problem. Identify the problem underlying the suggestion and see what your own storyteller has to say about solutions.

I hope this helps others who are wondering how to move forward after a critique! How do you integrate feedback?

I’ve been listening to a podcast of Michael Krazny interviewing vintner and writer Randall Grahm on KQED’s Forum. Here and on his own website, Grahm talks about a French idea of two different kinds of wine making. Vin d’effort is a wine made by the effort of the winemaker—it bears his or her stamp, is made according to his or her will, but can only be as intelligent and interesting as the winemaker. Vin de terroir, on the other hand, depends on and expresses the place where it is grown— the weather and the nature, factors, in other words, that are out of the hands of its maker. This made me think about writing.

Is your book a van d’effort or a vin de terroir?

Grahm admires wines of place more than wines of effort. They embody originality as a collaboration between the grower and the place. (I’m elaborating here for my own purposes.) I love the idea that a writer in conversation with circumstance, place, with the sometimes random occurrences and objects that populate our lives will produce a more original book than one that is tightly controlled, carefully executed. The creation in the vin de terroir is one sparked against the unexpected, against chance and the external world.

How do you let the world around you join you in writing your book?

“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say  yes.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

A client writes:

“I’ve struggled all week trying to modify/open/deepen/clarify/intensify [these] chapters. I agree that they would benefit from it. Yet every time I try, I wind up being didactic, expository, redundant. Never organic. Never fresh. Never vital.

“This is not a new phenomenon…I’ve always had a tough time acting on critiques. In fact the only time I’ve been able to modify my work is when it’s being published or produced and I’m dealing directly with the editor or director and even then the changes are usually pretty minor.

“It seems my writing is like a jigsaw puzzle and if I pull out a piece I just keep looking for something the same shape to fill the space. And go slightly crazy while I’m looking for it.  So this is really my own process dilemma. I’m in a bit of a quandary…

“Any helpful hints about how  to  better utilize a critique would be greatly appreciated.”

One of the most important ways to support yourself as a writer is to understand yourself, your way of working, and to support that way of working. Critique is a complicated animal. If it comes too early, it is often just a way of teaching a writer basic technique: how to turn ideas into action, summary into scene, how to cut what’s not dramatic and raise the stakes on what is. If it comes in too vulnerable a moment, a writer, anxious to please, may make changes in reaction, in fear.

In order to be helpful, critique must be absorbed. What is unhelpful must be disregarded, and a writer does well to build up a strong instinct for what must be disregarded. What remains, then, is an arrow, pointing to a hidden door in the text that needs to be opened, or a hidden wall that needs to be removed.

This kind of critique must be put in conversation with the storytelling instinct, processed until something vital and fresh emerges. This goes beyond response.

If one of my basic writing rules is “whatever works,” another is, “doubt efficiency.” Anything that seems easier or appears to be a short cut will inevitably frustrate, impose, divert. Instead, you must meditate, absorb, integrate and finally return to the creative state and see what emerges.

One final note: we rarely know if what we are writing is good or significant while we are writing it or shortly after. The voice that judges the work is not that of our deep reader self but the anxious harping of some face concerned about the public eye. So you will not know right away if the changes you are making work. That, too, will take time, will take absorption, will lack efficiency.

Breathe into it. You are writing, and that’s the point.

I’ve been on a wonderful reading binge as I prepare to dramatically rewrite my current novel project. I’ve been reading in order to learn something new about plot and structure, to gather some ideas around me and inspire me. Here are three tips that will keep your reading productive for your writing-self and still pleasurable for your reader-self.

1) You have to find a way to divide yourself. One part of you will inevitably get caught up in the story. If this is a book you want to teach you something, it had better hook you, right? So you have to hold back a part of you that is watching the whole process. This can feel a bit like the famous scene in Annie Hall when she rises up out of her body during sex and wanders around commenting on the activity.

2) It helps to hold the big picture in mind. Keep track of where you are in the unfolding arc of the story. See the underlying structure–the bones or the architecture, whichever metaphor you prefer.

3) Notice what you are wondering. Your questions, as a reader, drive you forward, seeking answers. So look at how the author raises those questions.

You have to fill the well, as Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life, and reading–more even than living–provides the plenty you’ll need to keep that well full.