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?

“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 had a couple of recent queries about first person v. third person. Maybe I’ll tackle them in my blog. I’d bloody well do something in my blog if I’m to hold up my head as a content creator. And what, after all, was a writer if not the ur-content creator?

She’d had a couple of recent queries about first person v. third person. Maybe she would tackle them in her blog. She’d bloody well do something in her blog if she was to hold up her head as a content creator. And what, after all, was a writer if not the ur-content creator?

I am not too impressed with the finer points of first v. third person in terms of voice, interiority, exteriority, character development, the necessity of plot . . . Third person limited and first person are much the same creature. Sure, you can attribute language idiosyncrasies to your character in first person, but the truth is, you can do it in close third as well. See the second example above: the voice, the language, the thoughts are all, without attribution, clearly those of the third person character, yes?

In first person, you still cannot tell everything rather than showing it. There is little to trust about a first person confession: even with our best friends, we want the juicy details, the scene and interactions, not just the ideas and conclusions.

The key differences come about when you consider the powers of an omniscient third. Now you have the possibility of a storyteller and the option to dip into the thoughts and experiences of many characters.

Of course, you can alternate between two (or more) first person perspectives, but after a while, it can start to sound like a support group or literary experiment. Still, the bottom line rule for writing is, always and ever: whatever works.

Questions to ask yourself: Does this story belong to one main person? Is there someone whose perspective is engaging enough (sometimes because of its limits, as with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), to carry the whole? Do I want access to many points of view, to scenes outside of what my potential narrator has witnessed?

Then again, Madame Bovary was actually written in first person, the narrator a classmate’s of M. Bovary, and yet he has access to the intimacies of Madame’s boudoir. So I refer you, once again, to the bottom line for writing (above).

Finally, do not get hung up on the mechanics. You pick your strictures and your structures and they are the net that Frost insisted on for poets playing tennis: they make the game worthwhile. (Frost said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net.) You use what your choices have to offer, stick to the promises you set up in establishing those rules for your book, and then tell story, Baby!

In coaching a client last week, I articulated a trio of guidelines for what to keep in piecing together a revision. Now that I have to take my own advice (always a bitter pill no matter how cheerily helpful or accurate the advice), I thought I’d share this with any of you who might also benefit from some revision guidelines.

Keep it if:

1) It fits with your thematic statement. Be sure you come up with this thematic statement by reading through your actual material, not by forcing it or wishing it into being.

2) It presents an good and true obstacle between your protagonist and her desire.

3) It is required, on a “need to know” basis, for set up or because the question it answers has become so big, it’s time to answer it.

Pushing adverbs (quickly, slowly) into verbs (walked, drove) pumps up the sentences in a revision. “Walked slowly” becomes “lumbered” or “strolled” while “drove quickly” becomes “zoomed” or “skittered” and so on. Take those ordinary verbs and those excess adverbs and mix.

Now Deanna Carlyle has shared her list of 1,000 verbs, and I’m going to guess that this one will “go viral.” There’s something about verbs. What can I say? They keep things moving. So shake up your writing and check this out. Then come up with your own 1000 verbs, hey?

http://www.deannacarlyle.com/articles/verb.html

She’s got another great write-up about improving your descriptions. My students are deep into editing their books, and this week, we are working on sentences. I love this part of revision. Your cursor (or your pencil) becomes a scalpel, incising this word, then a needle, appending that. Relief: that first draft really can transform. The wrong words hold place for the right ones, the weak hang out until the strong can be found.

Anyway, I think she’s got some good tips and some great examples:

http://www.deannacarlyle.com/articles/descriptions.html

My monthly writing tip will be going out in the next week or so, and it’s going to be about sentences. If this sounds as enticing as chocolate or a foot massage or breakfast in bed, you are the person to whom I am writing. Sign up over to the right where it says, “Get Monthly News!”

I just finished reading two books, in which the authors, very different stylists, both avoided the repetitive usage of the verbs “to be” and “to have” as well as other overdone usages of sentence structure and sentence subjects. They dazzled.

One, Annie Dillard’s triumphant latest novel The Maytrees, lays down line after line, precise, poetic, thick as slabs of homemade, whole grain bread:

Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree’s cap’s shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present’s brine. In those prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man.

Notice, too, no excess articles: ” in cap and knickers.” But “blacked”! Now that’s a verb.

And for contrast, we go to Junot Diaz’s Drown. I’d read a couple of the stories. One I taught in a creative writing course and another a student had brought in to class. But it was not until I adored The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that I plucked my first edition hard-cover (bought back when that was the only edition available) of Drown from the shelf and devoured it. I think I’d convinced myself that the hype probably had it wrong; instead, I was wrong about the hype.

Check it out, looking again at the mastery of verbs:

He’s tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominoes when they play. Go, she says. Before your father comes out.
He knows what happens when his father comes out. He pulls on his mask and feels the fleas stirring in the cloth. When she turns her back, he hides, blending into the weeks. He watches his mother hold Pesao’s head gently under the faucet and when the water finally urges out from the pipe Pesao yells as if he’s been given a present or a wish come true.

“Urges” is not a typo; it’s Diaz’s twist.

None of these sentences eats its own tail, crushing meaning, curling in on itself. Neither do they plod, predicting each other. I’ve not picked the best passages or any in particular. I’ve merely leafed through, finding something to put down for you as representative of the whole.

I’ve just finished a pass through the novel I wrote at the end of 2007, starting in NaNoWriMo. The pleasure of editing is that it bolsters the writer, assured that these sentences can be revisited and strengthened. She can

replace “to be” and “to have” with better verbs,

flip the subject of the sentence,

cut excess articles,

move adverbs into verbs and adjectives into nouns by choosing stronger words.

Metaphors can be brought through a sentence, so that the verb alludes to the metaphor, too.

Cliché’s can be tweaked or excised.

Slogging through close editing reminds me that the first draft just needs to get on the page; it’s easier to fix it than to get it right in the first place, at least for me. I get, at the bone, that writing is rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting.

The good news about the ninety-nine percent perspiration–the secret news–is that the hard work pleasures the mind and the body, which want to pump, push and ache. The doubts and misery about the one percent inspiration melt in the face of the methodical effort that can turn out a perfectly juicy sentence.

This week, my revision course begins with Reading as a Stranger. I just posted the lecture and am reminded that anyone with a legitimate call to writing starts out (and continues on) as a reader first. Getting to be an ace reader of your own work rewards the inner reader that put you in the middle of this writing mess in the first place.

Oh–and I am going to get my monthly “writing tips” newsletter out this week, though there’s been both hell and high water, so if you want to get that in your email box (not more than once a month), sign up in the right side margin.

And if you have nothing to revise? Get something down. The worse it is, the easier it will be to make it better later . . .

I’ve been reading through the novel I wrote last year in November and December. When I finished it, I read the whole thing aloud to Angie, night after night for maybe a week. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread more than the first few pages of it since until this month when I’ve been up against a deadline with some writing cohorts. Now I know why: the first pages aren’t very good. They’re slightly terrible. Reading them I became tremendously discouraged, because I had really liked this book. But then an amazing thing happened: as I read, the book became better. Which is to say, as I wrote it, the writing became better. It’s not even throughout and it needs the revision I am visiting upon it, but it hits its stride about 15 pages in, and I was able to hit my editorial stride and read the whole thing, taking notes, making my comments in the margins, and in general being the kind of editor I always wish I had–someone like me!

The time I’d taken off also gave me the distance to be willing to jettison those first 15 pages, to realize that my character might be happy being madly in love with his fiance the whole book through but that it really didn’t make for an exciting plot, and to see that my character was wussing out on taking action not because that is more “realistic,” but because I’d been so tired while I was writing the book.

Now I have to rip out the seams and move pieces around and then resew it, without leaving gashes and tears or the bumpy hint of new scars.

I want to do everything I know needs doing before my cohorts read the manuscript because I want their critique to give me new information. I also want to keep close to my own personal vision of this book before I hand it over to readers; I fear I was mislead in my copious revisions of my last book because my goal became to please absolutely everybody and that is not only impossible and way too much work, it is actually opposite to the goals of art. These have to do with personal vision and the often uncomfortable edges where we do not all think alike or see eye to eye.

So here are ten things to keep in mind when you want to be your own best editor:

1) Read as if you were a stranger. Give yourself the time away from the material to be able to turn a fresh eye to it, to know what is exciting and what doesn’t really make sense, and also to be able to be moved by your own work, surprised, even.

2) Don’t get discouraged if the beginning isn’t strong. You were probably warming up there. Keep reading!

3) Mark what you like as well as what puzzles, frustrates or irritates you. We often can get into an editing frenzy when we go back to make changes and forget what worked about the book.

4) Keep a “to do” list as you are going, so that you will be able to go back through with ease and also so that you can review your notes and make decisions about what to do, but mostly so that you see that while the work ahead may be enormous, it is finite. (My list is seventy items long!)

5) Make a list of characters as you are going. You can make other lists, too: I started one, during that opening, of settings I might make use of later in the book. I don’t think I’ll really need them, but it helped to make me more willing to cut those pages when I thought that I might be able to use the parts I liked elsewhere. I also made a list of suspects, since my novel has an aspect of mystery to it, and in writing so quickly and without a plan, I had planted a lot of red herrings.

6) Make time to do this work. Enlist the help of your family, mate, coworkers or friends. Let them know that you have a project and a goal. As with writing, it can help to report on your progress to someone. Celebrate the milestones, too. Share the excitement of reading through your book manuscript.

7) Get involved with the story and trust your intuition. As we read a good book, we usually make guesses about what is going on: did that person just lie? Is that person hiding something? Should that person be going down that dark alley? Our guesswork as readers can be our best plotting as writers–you may find out who done it or why or what’s really going on when you read they way an involved reader does, rather than when you have your writer hat on and are trying to map a plot.

8 ) Harness the energy of the moment. If you have an idea of a scene, and you get all excited about it, by all means, go with that momentum and write as much as you can in the moment. We often imagine, when we are feeling inspired, that that feeling will always be there when we think of a particular idea. In fact, the next day, our few notes on something may be drained of energy–so if the horse starts to gallop, hold on and ride to the finish line. Or, you know, something like that . . .

9) Let other books be your teachers. Turn to the writers you love most for advice . . . all found in the books they’ve written. Look back to see how one built her plot, how another created a feeling of love for all of his characters, how a third used setting to create a strong atmosphere. When you wander in bookstores or the library, let yourself be bouyed by the brilliance that is out there.

10) Consider this your “learning how to write a book book.” When I wrote my first book, I called it my “learning how to write a novel novel.” This was tremendously freeing and challenging. What I’ve since learned is that each book teaches me how to write that book. Approaching your work as a student–not an amateur, but a professional sitting at the feet of your craft to learn–allows you to write better than yourself, to become better than your best, to innovate, which is to say, to create.

Revising a book? Join my online course Building Your Book. Early enrollment discounts in effect until Dec. 21, 2008. Visit my courses site for more information. Also, sign up for my newsletter to receive montly writing tips (in the right margin of my home page). See you on the screen!

“Okay,” a student writes, “here’s a question:

“Given that I am ending up with chunks of interesting information and scenes but not necessarily fitting the original incline, what are some tactics or techniques for figuring out how to fit the chunks together in a narrative?”

This is an exciting question that inadvertently (but not accidentally) taps into the heart of what storytelling is all about. I say “not accidentally” because when you write everyday, throwing yourself deep into a book as this person has done, you are bound to end up right in the lap of the creature, aren’t you? So there she is, with chunks.

Putting chunks together is exactly how to build a story. We contemporary readers-cum-screen-watchers can jump cut from one universe to another, from one point of view to another, from one era to another without pause. We do not need our chunks cemented with smooth transitions, with careful contextualizations, with complicated explanations. Show us the money, baby. Lay your chunks out like cards.

Cards is a great metaphor, in fact, because what matters when you are turning over one card and then the next–say in a game of War or Black Jack in not so much the card itself as its relationship to the card that comes before or after. But once you know the rules of the game, the cards can just be turned, and the story is all in the turning.

Check it: Twenty-One: First card is a five of diamonds. Second card is an Ace. What next? Tap tap: third card is a seven. You’ve either got thirteen or you’re over with twenty-two, yes? Tap, tap: an eight of spades. You’re golden. Lucky bastard. (Note: My Twentyone experience, such as it is, comes from when I was about eleven and attended a conference in Florida with my father. While he went to boring lectures, I hung out with the bartender and played Twenty-one.)

Five; Ace; Seven; Eight. Chunks. It’s the rules of the game that allow the juxtapositions to take on meaning. What are the rules of the narrative game? Things like this: Whatever someone is counting on will not come to pass; when things are looking very, very bad, something is going to turn around; when things are looking very, very good, something is going to turn around; people change, unless they are the kind of people who think they are going to change radically and profoundly, in which case, they will stay the same; actions build and stakes rise, so things can only get better, or worse–they can’t simply repeat, even in intensity; and it always comes down to a choice.

So you place your first card, and we’re looking to see what’s coming next. We know it won’t be the same. Things are going to go up or they are going to go down. We’re looking to be surprised. What expectation does your first card set up? Your next card is going to upend that expectation. Your third card is going to keep raising the stakes. Your fourth card is going to force a choice. Your fifth card is going to reveal that choice. Your sixth card will announce unexpected consequences to your choice.

So how does this related to real-life revision? Annie Dillard talks about the nine-mile hike you take, around and around a long table, when you are revising. You lay out your chunks–on the floor, on your dining room table, pinned to your walls–and you pace, moving them around. You are looking for electric connections, unexpected conversations between the pieces.

Story is about juxtaposition, as David Mamet talks about in his wonderful book On Direction Film, which is really on writing story. He’s using Eisenstein’s theories of collage–the story comes from the uninflected juxtaposition of two images.

A branch cracking. A deer looking up.

A little dog running toward a curb. A giant wheel of a truck rolling forward. Little dog. Wheel. Little dog. Wheel.

See? Uninflected images juxtaposed create a story. Create meaning. There is no narration. No voice over saying, “Poor little dog, if only I had known . . . “

This means: trust your chunks. Don’t smear loads of glue on the back that will seep around the sides and dry into white plastic paste on the construction paper.

When I first apprenticed myself to writing, I was twenty and had just moved to San Francisco. I had a very plain notebook, the kind you buy at a drugstore for a buck, and I filled it with short scenes. Then I read through it and looked for unexpected relationships between those scenes, and by laying them side-by-side, this character becoming that character, another character becoming roommates with the first, stories emerged from those pages.

I thought of this practice as setting up crosscurrents. A story was usually about at least two things, two unexpectedly juxtaposed things, out of which a third–call it meaning–emerged. The tension in story comes where the crosscurrents create suction, movement, a whirlpool.

Try laying out your cards. Shuffle the deck and try it another way. Card by card, lay out the story, until it’s one you’ve never heard before but which you know to be true.

[I am teaching a six-week-plus online / Skype course in Revision (for writers) and Editing (for editors). I am currently offering several holiday specials and discounts. To learn more, please visit my online learning center. I also send out a monthly newsletter with a writing tip. You can sign up to the right of my blog. Thanks! Elizabeth]

We live in a wooded area. Dominating the landscape are groves of the fast-growing and non-native eucalyptus tree. There are also redwoods, pine, maple, cedar, and other trees whose names I have not yet learned. Sometimes, a tree will die. I suppose this is due to some sort of infestation, because along with a giant pine that died in our backyard, a youngish (for a tree) tree recently died, too. It went from green to orange. This is how we knew. This youngish (for a tree) tree was just a sapling when I was a baby. My mother says that she used to sit beside it, holding baby me, on the stairs leading up to our house.

It is costly to cut down a big tree. It is also dangerous. We had a eucalyptus that was close to our house cut down a couple of years ago, and in the middle of that job, a guy on the crew died felling a tree at another site.

Meanwhile, to save money, we decided not to have the tree people haul away the rounds. It turns out that those rounds are nearly immobile. Even quartered, they are not easy for a very strong person to carry. Angie’s father, bless him, came down a few times with a log-splitter and cut all the wood (which covered our entire yard) down to firewood size. He took a bunch, got friends and relatives to come take a bunch, and left us with a generous firewood pile, which has been drying in our driveway ever since.

Some of our neighbors feel that the non-native eucalyptus hold up the hillside. Others (and we’re included here) simply cannot afford the thousands of dollars that it would take to remove any of the trees. But recently, our westerly neighbor hired a landscaper and eventually cut down a bunch of trees, including the dead one on our property and its friend. They also lopped off the top of some bushy trees between our houses. Suddenly, we emerged from the dark forest and into the light. There is a huge sky up there. (We had no idea.) There is a cyclone-shaped opening through which we can see University Avenue running all the way down Berkeley to the frontage road, and then the bay–darker when it is windy, nearly silver when it is calm–and across some islands to the hills of Marin. If you stand in one corner of the dining room and sort of squint, you can even see the Golden Gate Bridge.

I think this whole experience has something to teach us about editing.

But before I go there, I should mention one more element. Recently, our insurance company wrote to say that they were not going to renew our house insurance because our house was not defensible against fire. Some of you may remember back in 1991–October 21st, 1991, in fact, which was my big drinking birthday–the Oakland hills conflagrated. I drove to Santa Cruz that day to meet up with friends, and I remember seeing the billowing black smoke to my left as I cruised along the frontage road, which I now can see from my living room.

My oldest sister, who lives in the Kensington hills, packed up her most precious belongings in a U-Haul she’d rented and drove to Bolinas. My mother came over and watered my father’s roof and put some of the paintings from the house in her van. My father ignored the whole situation. I think he just couldn’t handle it. He did say that my sister would have been the person leaving Germany in the early 1930s while the rest of us were insisting that we were Germans more than we were Jews. He understood that, but still he stayed in his study and worked on a paper. He had a friend whose house did burn down in the fire (as did Maxine Hong Kingston’s house and all available versions of an original manuscript she’d been writing), and that friend came to stay with him (and me) here at the house for some time.

But anyway, I guess that the financial crisis and the tendency of our hills to burn made my insurance company nervous about risk-taking, and they sent some guy out to photograph our brush-covered yard and then told us they couldn’t cover us anymore.

Unless we made some changes.

Needless to say, we have found ourselves some great gardeners and are contracting with an arborist as I type, and the brush is getting cleared. The fire department has a whole downloadable pdf about fire prevention guidelines, and this is where we come back to editing.

The fire department wants space between your trees. Ten feet between trees and six feet from the ground to your first branches. They want the area between your plants cleared, and the debris removed.

Today I was lying on my couch (as part of an exercise in relaxing from a book on creating balance in your life. Seriously), and I noticed a blue jay fly way up and land in the tallest pine tree around. The leaves on the maple are now golden and pink. The bushy trees with the lopped off tops look cheery, green and round. I’ve been rejoicing in being able to see the sky and the bay and the incredible sunsets and the tiny cars way down on the freeway, but today, I really noticed the trees. Because I could see each individual tree. There were no dead branches to look through and no layers and layers of trees blending into a wall of darkness. It’s still a wooded area. It’s still a forest, but it’s been edited. The ragged parts and the dead parts and the overabundance pruned back. Some space cleared between the trees. The shape of the ground, usually hidden below the pine needles and fallen eucalyptus bark, is visible again.

The next class I am teaching is about revision. Editing. Adjusting the landscape so that you can see the trees. Raking away what is no longer alive, even if once it was the most vibrant green sprig waiting to bloom.

It can be harsh to see a big tree taken down. It’s a little like going to the circus. There’s a guy roped to the top of a nearby tree by a kind of pulley system that keeps you imagining just how he’d fall, the trajectory of his swing on the rope if he happened to slip. He loops another part of the rope around a section of trunk or branch and then takes the chainsaw that he holds while balancing on the tree, and with a roar, the chainsaw zips through the tree like a letter opener, and the chunk of tree falls, the rope around it lowering it to the ground. All of this is happening four or five stories up, in the arms of the aged pine, say, that is being taken down. I think of my father, who lived in this house and loved those trees, and the doctors who hung on the towering trunk of his life and slowing hacked it into managable pieces and let them crash down.

It can hurt to edit, too. Those “darlings,” those hard-earned limbs and rings of wood. The firy pitch of the chain saw is addictive, though. It’s exciting. It promises room for the healthy trees, for the plants that will flourish with an extra bit of sun, for the space between that will allow what is there to be seen to advantage. And most of all, for the view that opens up, which is what the book points to, something beyond the trees, outside the forest, framed by the labor that allows to eye to look through to the other side.

Pounding out a novel at 1667 words per day is hell.

Later, I will be ecstatic that I did it. I will tell you that it changed my life, that I felt like a real writer (and who ever feels like that?), that the writing was better than I thought, that having a first draft of whatever level of worthiness is so much better than having nothing. Do not listen to me. I am a fiction writer; my business is lying in the service of creating truths that are better than the truth we have to live with now.

Sitting down after a day that began at 5 a.m., proceeded through turkey watching, diaper changing, breakfast -making, -consuming, -floor decorating, cleaning enough so that the babysitter will not be appalled, creating curriculum, responding to email, dealing with contracts and bills and house business, negotiating my relationship and lunch (usually at the same time), getting the nap to take, crawling out of a bed I would rather stay sleeping in, in order that I may continue with the previously mentioned work, detailed on a long list that keeps getting longer, making snacks, changing more diapers, cleaning up more (with noticeably little consequence), getting to the park to wear out rambunctious children so that after dinner, bath, story time and songs, they will fall asleep, so I can once again crawl out of a bed in which I and my tired body would so much rather stay and sleep . . . sitting down then to reenter the world of my novel, to conjure plot and setting, to challenge my character and entertain my (imaginary) readers and, ideally, myself (the most curmudgeonly reader of all at this particular moment), is HELL.

I don’t like to say this to my students or my clients, but let’s face it: a lot of writers commit suicide. Would it be dark to suggest that while the tools of writing are generally similar across type and time, the tools of suicide are both varied and creative, at least among writers, and might be more fruitfully studied in master’s programs?

I am sensing that the humor I feel in writing this might not come across on the page.

The truth is (ah, be warned): usually, by about mid-way into my writing session, I have gathered my faith again, rallied my exhausted moral, gotten caught up in the miracle that there is this story emerging, like a small piece of twine I am pulling out of my belly-button.

And I sent emails to my aunt and uncle and mother, by way of doing research, asking them about Los Angeles in the 1950s, and am getting back the most wonderful, rich descriptions. I also live with a historian, it turns out, someone who can imagine a world we’ve never lived in, touched or seen in detail. I suppose I am a literalist. While my best characters are imaginary–inspired by a feeling or reflection perhaps about someone but not in any other way that actual person–my best stories are not, or not entirely. My characters tend, as do I, to think more than they act, to think about acting more than they act, and also to think about everything more than they act. They imagine acting, but then they chicken out at the last minute.

This may be why writing is so hard for me. Writing is, after all, an action. It’s physical and rigorous. It should make you sweat. Annie Dillard writes about this most wonderfully, in her gem of a book The Writing Life:

The materiality of the writer’s life cannot be exaggerated. If you like metaphysics, throw pots. How fondly I recall thinking, in the old days, that to write you needed paper, pen, and a lap. How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often “written” with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet. (46)

This is where we are headed, my brave little group of writer/ students and I. And they are one more factor I should mention. They are marvelous. They are marching along, writing, writing, writing . . . as am I, for that matter. We post our word counts to each other and shout out at each glorious milestone. I post jump starts and technique boosts, and we talk via Skype each week, but mostly we are connected as much by the courageous, hellish adventure we are on separately at our own desks, tables and couches, in our own beds as we are by the internet.

And in January, we will be revisiting this mass of material we are currently gathering, whether with zeal or resistance. We will hike our way around it, and we will shout out to each other after each long mile. Worlds are opening up beneath our typing hands; this much I know. I’ve heard fragments of what they are writing, and the reader in me wants to lie down (ah, that bed again) and sink into these worlds. But instead, for now, I must trudge to the very edge of my own known world and invent the ground beneath my feet.

It’s hell, I tell you. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.