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.

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.

We all want the perfect family and the perfect day, but the stories come from the problems and troubles. We want it to be easy; we want it to be simple; we want it to be pure joy. But life is more complicated than that, and your stories should be, too!

Here are some more tips for writers that holiday celebrations drive home:

1) Unwrapping half the fun? Worrying about being able to smile and thank Aunt Matilda for the horrible present keep you up at night? Anticipation is more involving than payoff. See my blog on withholding.

2) Shared childhood? Hardly! Each person remembers different moments, different aspects of what happened and who did what and what pieces of the world around mattered. Hence the interrelation of point of view, plot, character and setting. Who tells the story will determine what gets recounted, what gets noticed and remembered.

3) When everything is happening all at once, it’s exciting, but it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, let alone appreciate it. Sequences and causality support the creation of meaning.

No matter what kind of holiday (or childhood) you had, you can use it to strengthen yourself as a writer. The interior narrator, like the interior soundtrack, can get you through a lot until you’re back to the wide expanse of your own blank page.

I just read The Da Vinci code at the advice of someone great in my writing group, since I am about to (re)write an intellectual mystery/ quest, and that’s a big quest book, if not as intellectual as it might like to be. But hey, I’m not knocking it. I’m not imitating it, either, but I am studying it.

One of the things that struck me strongly over and over like a blunt object was the use of withholding in the book.

My class and I have been talking about withholding. We did a great exercise drawing from the techniques used in Michelle Richmond’s gripping novel No One You Know. She uses withholding a bit less bluntly than Mr. Brown but to great effect.

The main point is this: readers read, in part, to find out what is going to happen. E.M.Forster, sighing, agreed that this was the mechanism behind plot and that plot, though a lowly creature, was a necessary one. Questions pop into readers’ minds and stay, compelling the reader through the pages in search of the answer. Workshops tend to point out the causes of these questions as if they were a big problem: holes, as it were, in the story. In fact, answering those questions, filling in those holes, might well seal up everything breathing about your story and suffocate it. Hmmm . . . moving on . . .

Withholding can operate in many ways. Here are some examples:

1) Withholding from the reader. As when the chapter ends just as the characters (but not the readers) see what the murdered man wrote on the floor before he died.

2) Withholding from the character (and the reader). As when one character thinks, she was not yet ready for this information. Or she was not ready to think or talk about the terrible thing she’d seen ten years ago. And thus none of us get to know it yet.

3) Misleading the reader. As when a character is referenced as flashing his official badge, which would make you think he was the cop but he was the knight. Or when a character goes into the back of the car to take care of the person you believe is tied up in there, but in fact . . . well, in case I was only the second-to-last person in the world to read this book and you, my reader, are the very last, I won’t give it away . . .

My favorite kind of withholding is simply immersing the reader in the immediacy of the scene such that backward glancing explanations (why?) and forward glancing suppositions (what next?) are eliminated in the characters’ minds and left only to the readers. The character, for example, sees an old friend but does not think, “Ah, there is my college roommate. That time we stole the pig together and . . .” but instead sees this person crossing the street and throws open the door shouting, “What are you doing here!?” OR slinks down low in the seat and quickly turns a corner. In other words, the action reveals that there is much to know but the story is too caught up in the action to stop and explain. Not my strong point–I am a teacher, after all–but a great way to pull the reader through your tale.

All of these kinds of withholding–and many others–set up the story for revelation after revelation, and writers from Shakespeare to Dickens to, yes, Dan Brown, have kept audiences turning pages and not throwing tomatoes this way for centuries . . . Did you read The Da Vinci Code? Did you read it fast?

I’ve been part of an interesting conversation about plot in literature lately. By “part” I mean that through Tweeted and emailed links to blogs and articles, a conversation has made itself available me as witness, commenter and now commentator.

First, Lev Grossman wrote a piece, “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard” for the Wall Street Journal. His subtitle: “A novelist on the pleasure of reading stories that don’t bore; rising up from the supermarket racks.” He says point-blank that the desire for plot, for a good story, “is a dirty secret we all share. ” The modernists pushed plot out of the limelight, but things are changing.

Plot is coming out of the closet:  “If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like,” Grossman claims, “this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.” As proof of the renewed interest in plot, Grossman points out that “millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged.”

In an amazing and beautiful essay in The Atlantic, Tim O’Brien writes a defense of the imagination in fiction, countering the obsession with verisimilitude that has shaped writing workshops and the products that come out of them. Navel-gazing reality is not the stuff of stories, O’Brien claims convincingly. “Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events,” he writes, “which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.”

Alexander Chee, a remarkable up-and-coming novelist (read what Junot Diaz and Annie Dillard and others have to say about him; don’t take it from me), takes up Grossman’s article and the whole issue from a teaching perspective in his blog Koreanish. He makes a distinction between pain and plot and urges students of writing to stop segregating techniques for developing character and such from “telling the story:

So the advice is, don’t be afraid to have a plot, and to tell a story. Too many writing students are trying to become masters of style and not masters of story, and they do so to their detriment. They have all these beautiful beautiful sentences and we don’t really know what they’re doing with them. Be sure to tell a story.

I love this whole conversation. I’m a fan of plot. I’m not naturally a storyteller—I’m more of an ideas person—and consequently, I’ve studied plot extensively.  And you’ll find many entries on this blog about my opinions on and strategies for plot.

However, I’ve begun thinking about what it means that we’re all running around claiming that plot is about to revive. Of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality I have only an amateur’s view, a layperson’s, if you will (pun disavowed).  But I’ve dredged up this much from my long-ago undergraduate’s perspective: the constant discussion of the repression of sex is just another way to talk about . . . sex. The hide-and-seek of sexuality in society is a way to keep it in view, to keep us watching.

Likewise, is it possible that the plot against plot (our shared dirty little secret) is itself just another plot?

Aside from folks in English departments and MFA programs, who thinks that plot has weakened its hold or threatened to disappear? Might there be a social reason why defending plot emerges now as a popular pastime?

I’m looking here for a brilliant editorial analysis, something that encompasses the battle over healthcare, the failure of war and the glacial process of extracting ourselves, a national identity crisis over the loss of our superhero status in the world and the concurrent spawn of mock-superheroes, freakish superheroes and failed superheroes that has invaded literature and television?

Perhaps in a moment when successful international or national action seems unlikely, the assertion of the triumph of plot comforts us. Perhaps the failure of imagination and the tendency to navel gaze is as much a problem in our politics as in our literature, perhaps more so. Or is Modernism is to blame for the surreal, kaleidoscopic nature of policy, foreign and domestic, over the past many decades, the fracturing of the president as a coherent and reliable subject? Anyone? Anyone?

The following is the letter I wrote to the brave group of folks who started–and yes, finished–books with me last fall. I thought it might be useful to anyone gearing up to write a book. If you want to join my group, check it out HERE.

Dear Book Writers,

Why a Frame? Why are we starting with plot (and character)?

It has been my experience that the hardest thing to go back and put into a novel after it’s written is a strong plot based on a deep sense of character. In other words, actions must grow out of the motivations and psychology of your character.

Now, you can create a character who will, by nature, do the actions required of him or her in your plot, OR you can create a plot that grows, naturally, out of the will of your character. In either way, you want a character with some serious motivation and a backbone (even if it’s initially hidden from us or from him- or her-self).

Writers can work for years on books, so there are very many things one could do in preparation for writing a manuscript. In fact, I urge you to write at least a page every day where you are just thinking on paper (or on screen) about your novel. Writing about writing is actually a much more powerful planning tool than simply thinking about writing. It’s the power of the keyboard or the pen–the power, if you will, of writing.

In these pages, you can think about your characters’ histories, about the setting of your novel, about images that move you, fragments of the world that inspire you. Think about the underlying idea or theme that drives your story.
By the same measure, when you are writing 1670 plus words a day in November, you will be thinking and writing about these things all the time. That’s what’s so powerful about NaNoWriMo and the writing life itself. Right now you are tilling the fields.

Together, we are going to have three intertwined foci:
1) Building a strong, logical, exciting plot
2) Based on a motivated, backboned, interesting character
3) While revving the engines by inspiring each other and addressing any real questions or fears.

For some of you, this may be so effective that you will always use this approach in all future books that you write. For others, you may learn that you want to start with place or imagery, that your plot grows more naturally from an exploration of other material. For now, I ask you simply to respond to all the challenges: to try. Anything you do will move you further down the path of your writing life, which is to say, the project of creating worlds.

JOIN THE BOOK WRITING CYCLE HERE.

Warmly,

Elizabeth

The price must be paid for going public, and I am ready to pay it. I hit several instructional snags, which is not to say that learning got in my way but that my getting in my own way might have something to teach you. Or me. Whoever is paying attention.

I wrote 1000 words a day for each of the five weekdays last week, and then I hit snag one. I had not officially decided whether or not I was required to write on the weekends, and so I went on not knowing until the day had spent itself on chores and stuff and some fun and was gone. Since I had not written on Saturday, it was likely that I had in place a policy that I would not write on the weekends, but I considered that perhaps a six-day-a-week schedule might make sense. Thus did I spend Sunday watching the time go elsewhere until there was no more Sunday left and only a Monday to face.

By this time I’d not-written enough to send myself into a bit of a crisis. My brain wrested charge of the project from my storyteller, and my brain was not altogether pleased with what had been done in her absence. The brain never is pleased with extra-brain activities. Mine was no exception.

Hrumph, said my brain. This is terrible stuff here. (Actually, we–my committee–had all been most pleased on Friday when I’d finally given over to the flow of the story and shut down the brain’s commentary sufficiently and really let it rip, but by Monday all that was long in the past, and we had new concerns.) You need a plot. You need to know where you are going. And you can’t go to Tel Aviv if you haven’t been there since you were thirteen.

This was a problem. My storyteller is hopeful and adventurous. My storyteller believes that what she can’t remember of Tel Aviv, she can imagine, either accurately or better, as it should be rather than as it is. My storyteller believes in The Secret and in fairy tales and in the undercover lives of teddy bears. My brain knows that she is not to be trusted.

My brain put the kibosh on all this nonsense and got things going in another direction. My brain enlisted the brilliant Pilar Alessandra. She is a discovery of Angie’s. She teaches screenplay writing, and Ang is a real fan and finally bought her DVD. So last night we put it on and I did a bunch of brainstorming and got a lot of exciting ideas. My brain was happy. My storyteller was excited, too.

Today, I am halfway through my 1000 words, and have not yet incorporated all these new insights. But just by going back to the writing itself, I learned new things about my character, Edward, and about his story. I remembered the gifts of the storyteller to discover through invention rather than through thinking. To create through letting go rather than through controlling.

I know that I will continue to wrestle with these two parts of myself, and I know that the strengths of my writing depend upon both of them. I just wish they didn’t get in each other’s way so much. It feels as if I’d have more time for writing if I could stop arguing with myself!

“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]