Writing is hard. If you are honest with yourself and you really are a writer, you will admit that you like it that way.

I was listening to a quirky little interview with Ethan Canin yesterday, and he as much as confessed that he writes novels because they are harder for him than poetry or short stories. When I arrived at graduate school lo these many years ago, I was surrounded by people who had been considered the best writer in their class or school. Many found it frustrating to be part of the crowd now, to be told they weren’t ready to write a novel or that a story needed profound revisions.

But I suspect that the (many) people who went on to publish and continue writing welcomed–or learned to welcome–the challenge of writing well. There were a lot of people in that class who are doing remarkable work, and who have gotten some serious recognition, too, but all of them probably sit down to the blank page feeling at some level like a beginner. Afraid. Excited. Worried. Trepidatious, even.

Writing is hard. You have to ask yourself questions whose answers you don’t know (Barbara Kingsolver). You have to use your own flesh as bait (Annie Dillard). You have to follow the story, getting better at writing as you go, not waiting to know how to write before you begin. There is no bunny slope.

I just finished reading Mindset, a sort of pop-psych book by Carol Dweck, a non-pop-psychologist at Stanford. She proposed, and has done a lot of research to support, a theory that there are two mindsets that shape how people view learning, risk, challenges, intelligence, ability and self.

The fixed mindset sees intelligence, artistic ability and the like as, well, fixed. These are givens. Therefore, people with a fixed mindset are usually trying to prove that they are intelligent or able, rather than trying to get smarter or more able.

The growth mindset believes that intelligence and other abilities are gained through hard work, effort, learning, struggling and growing. These folks approach challenges and even failures as opportunities to become more intelligent, while the fixed-mindset folks are threatened by challenges which might de-throne them from a status such as “smart” or “good at writing.”

Dweck assures her readers that it is possible to change, that she herself changed from being a fixed mindset person to being a growth mindset person. At first, I found it hard to believe that one could change. This, I saw, put me in the fixed mindset group. At least in some respects . . .

I know that as a teacher, I have embraced a growth mindset, although even there I have been influenced by the reading of this book. But I see many ways in which I have a fixed mindset. And even with my students, I’ve sometimes had the desire to protect their egos instead of pushing them to do their very best. Dweck talks about the difference between praising someone’s qualities and praising his or her efforts. Some of these ideas go against the very grain of how I’ve been taught to interact, to encourage. Dweck shows that folks who are praised for their abilities tend to turn away risks and challenges that might prove that in fact they are not so great, while people praised for their efforts gladly take on new opportunities to grow and get better, smarter.

In the background, I hear Angie explaining this to our lovely babysitter: “If you can remember, and we can’t always ourselves, try to praise effort instead of ability. So instead of saying, ‘You are so strong,’ say, ‘I can tell you’ve been practicing.’ We’re really trying to emphasize the idea that learning and practice and effort are good things, over ‘being smart.’”

To her credit, our babysitter, despite having years of experience with kids, is very open to this new idea and not at all threatened by it. Growth mindset. See?

As writers, we have to encourage a growth-mindset. You simply cannot sail through with no challenge to your ego or your ability. This is a great good thing.

In New York, I taught at the Gothem Writers Workshop. One thing I loved about those classes was that because they were open to anyone but cost a fair amount, the people in them generally had some serious success in their careers but were willing to be beginners again–beginning writers. These are fun folks to teach. They have a growth mindset.

So what can you do to give yourself a growth mindset today?

Drawing from a wonderful chart Dweck publishes (on p. 245):

Accept challenges. Writing is hard. Don’t wait until it feels easy or you think you know what you are doing. Sit down and start. Expect it to be difficult. Welcome the challenge.

Persist in the face of setbacks. Writing seem terrible? Feel stuck about plot? Not sure you are even making sense? Keep going. The way to get better is to practice, to do the work, to keep at it.

See effort as a path to mastery. Someone told me when I was twenty-one that there was a ten year apprenticeship for being a writer. That really helped for for those first ten years. Then I forgot–after the first apprenticeship comes . . . another decade-long apprenticeship, and another. You are not proving your brilliance and talent when you write, you are learning that mastery. You are getting better.

Learn from criticism. No need to get defensive. Your draft is not a submission to a contest that deems your worth as a writer. Your draft is an opportunity to grow. This doesn’t mean you have to listen to all criticism or believe everything someone else has to say about your work. But do be sure you are wringing it for everything is has to offer you and the work.

Find lessons and inspiration in the success of others. This is a big one. There’s a wonderful interview with Jonathan Safran Foer by Micheal Krazny, on Forum, where Krazny quotes Flannery O’Connor’s famous dictum that writing workshops don’t discourage enough young writers. Krazny seems to be hoping JSF will agree with O’Connor, but instead he is so gracious and joyous about finding that his work encourages other people to write. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to it, but it is quite inspiring, and I recommend it.

So, as you head into the New Year, consider celebrating some of the failures and challenges of 2008–risks you took and opportunities you grabbed (often mistakenly, when you hoped you were grabbing the gold ring at the merry-go-round) that made you smarter, more talented, and better than you were before.

First, I want to apologize if I’ve been . . . grumpy. Grumbly. Cranky. Throwing small tantrums. Complaining about being uninspired. Writing blogs about futility and a passive-aggressive Zen approach to life’s matters, large and small. It’s been a tough month.

But it has also been a GLORIOUS month. Ah, perspective. Ah, the joys of looking back on the mountain over which you’ve come. The sweat dries. The thirst is quenched. The sun settles behind a peak and the sky reflects brilliant pinks and greens and oranges. You have not yet turned to see the mountain that is ahead. For once in your life, you are totally in the moment. Well, the moment and the exhilarating past, more exhilarating with every passing moment.

Seriously, though, right after my last whiny blog, I turned a corner. Maybe it was seeing how close I was to finishing. (Who said the light at the end of the tunnel is that of the oncoming train?) Maybe it was the longevity and intensity of my commitment finally paying off. I started to love my little book, and what’s more, I started to enjoy it. My characters surprised me in that way that writers sometimes say that characters can do–and what that really means is keeping at it long and hard enough that you can surprise yourself, dig below what you know you have to say and turn up something you’ve never told yourself before.

Maybe the cause of my change of attitude was reading Where the Wild Things Are aloud to my sons a couple of nights before I completed my 50k words. Reader, do you remember this book by Maurice Sendak? Max, the protagonist in a wolf suit, is getting into mischief “of one kind and another,” until he tells his mother he’ll “eat [her] up,” and is sent to bed without any supper. Well, as happens, trees begin to grow in Max’s room that night, and jungle, “until . . . the walls became the world all around.” Max gets in a boat and sails “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” They–the wild things–try to scare him by roar[ing] their terrible roars and gnash[ing] their terrible teeth and roll[ing] their terrible eyes and show[ing] their terrible claws,” but Max is able to tame them “with a magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once” so that “they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all.” This is how Max becomes their king.

As I read to Charlie and Leo, the parallels to what I had been spending my evenings at the computer doing became evident and exciting. Yes, I had set off on a long journey without my supper, and yes, my little manuscript had tried to frighten me in a myriad of effective ways, but I had persisted, staring into the yellow eyes of my book without blinking once (okay, well maybe I blinked a few times, but I kept returning to stare), and eventually, I tamed my story. Well . . . in the way that Max tamed his wild things, which is to say, he commanded the wild rumpus to begin.

The next few pages of this marvelous children’s book are devoted exclusively to pictures. Of the wild things rumpusing. During our story-reading ritual, we spend these pages chanting, “Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus. Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus.” There is one monster who has more or less a bull’s head, and the boys point to him and say “Moooo.” (Or really “Mmmmm,” which is actually a more authentically bovine lowing sound, which they know because Berkely has a little farm up in Tilden Park. Farms? In Berkeley? Mmmmmm. But I digress. Which is the great joy of blogging but not, perhaps, of consuming said blog.)

And so I rumpused with the monsters of my fears and the monsters of my dreaded imagination and the monsters of the stories I have to tell that I long to tell and the monsters of the stories I have to tell which I do not even know I know, and 50,000 words later . . .

I was having fun. Feeling inspired. Writing my monstrous menagerie. Which goes to show that you can’t wait to rumpus until you feel inspired. You have to rumpus to keep the monsters moving, rumpus like your life is leaning into that stomping frenzy and hanging from the tree.

I want to quote the next two pages (or six lines) in full, and hope that this does not violate any copyright law (which for those of you who grew up in the age of the internet was an old idea people had about protecting the uses of their texts). I think it’s okay because this book is one you need to buy and own, for the pictures, for the story and for the underlying lesson I’m about to careen home.

I also want to say that during a most rocky horonal time of my post-pregnancy year, I read these pages to myself and they made me cry, they carried so much resonance about the human condition.

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed

without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely

and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world

he smelled good things to eat

so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

I think this perfectly sums up the writer’s dilemma, the artist’s conundrum, the pull between the vital, scratchy world of rumpusing with monsters and being their king, and the declawed, yummy place where someone loves us best of all. Marge Piercy in her poem “For the Young Who Want To” says of writing, “You have to like it better than being loved.” I know exactly what she means: you can’t write to be loved, to gain love, you certainly can’t write for the love of your critics or your rivals or your mother. On the other hand, that’s a tall order, to like it better than being loved. Perhaps she had not snuggled with a one-and-a-half year old lately when she wrote that line . . .

But there’s one way to redeem ourselves, we who may not like writing better than being loved . . . who may not like anything better than being loved. If you write and write and write and write, if you write like you were married to writing and didn’t believe in divorce, if you write like writing is the way you get your oxygen and expell your carbon monoxide (remember that I dropped out of high school and forgive me if I have this equation slightly wrong . . .), if you write even when you are angry and lonely and even when you are tempted by a late-night bowl of cereal and an episode of Californication, something strange will happen. You will eventually and painstakingly and unconsciously learn to love yourself. To love the recesses of your imagination that can make you laugh or shock you (as if they themselves were one-and-a-half year olds). If you keep at the writing like it was your kid and you could not make another choice but to get up with it and sit up with it and feed it and rock it and sing to it and wipe its bottom and ask it if it wants to use the potty and mop up the urine off the floor and read it books and take it to the park and swing it as high as it can go in the swing and agree with it that, yes, that is an airplane . . . you will come to love it and it will love you and you won’t have to choose between writing and being loved.

And when you get back to your bedroom, your supper will be waiting for you. And it will still be hot.

Read the full story

” . . . or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.” –Gertrude Stein

I just had a wonderful conversation with someone who said yes to my goals. She is successful in her own right and she gave me some great advice. I know it is great advice because it is advice that Angie has been giving me for years, advice that makes sense and it practical and doesn’t require anything impossible. And yet because this person said it to me, I got all fired up and ready to go. She said, make a plan. Even if it is a bad plan, it will be something to go back to when things aren’t going well or when you don’t know what to do.

A long time ago, when I first wanted to write a novel and I had no idea how to begin, my wise and wonderful sister Nanou asked me to think about how I’d accomplished other things in my at-the-time realatively short life. Well, I’d accomplished other things by a contorted method of examining every option I could think of it excruciating detail until I finally plunged in one direction. It was torturous. She said, “It sounds as though you do a lot of mapping and planning, and that this leads you to take action.” This was more than kind, but in any case, it set me in a direction that worked quite well for me, indeed.

There’s a wonderful book by Kennith Atchity called A Writer’s Time, that became the perfect road map for a planner like me.

Now it is time for me to make a new road map for a new project. I won’t say too much about it right now, except that it builds on the great online community that has been growing out of the courses I am currently teaching in novel writing and (upcoming) revision.

Around the time that David Foster Wallace killed himself, Terri Gross replayed a part of an interview she did with him some years back. He seemed so scared to step outside of the generational cynicism that dogged him and yet so trapped and frustrated inside it. The conversation reminded me exactly of my graduate school days, the fear I’d had of being sentimental. It’s a terrible place to be, though, because life packs some serious wallops, and pretty soon you don’t know how to address all the feelings you are having that turn out to be common and human, because common + human = sentimental, and sentimental has somehow become the worst thing of all to be.

Of course, the sentimentality that is problematic is a more glib approach to feelings, a desire to tap into emotion without earning it, to push the reader somewhere instead of taking her there. And it’s a tough line to walk, no doubt about it.

But the people who are succeeding–on a variety of fronts–are optimistic, organized, and aware. I am thinking of this woman I talked to this morning who has made herself into a successful wealth manager, but also of Jamie and Laura who have shepherded their baby son Simon through a harrowing ordeal of months in a hospital.

In order to be optimistic, organized and aware, you have to risk sentimentality, you have to risk the muck of human feeling and the dangers of communicating it, to yourself and to others.

I know that out of the exhaustion and surprise of becoming a parent, I really had to earn those feelings that are most frequently described as “automatic” or “maternal instinct.” I had to develop a conscious relationship to those feelings through getting to know these two beings who’d been placed in my hands. Now that they are with me in abundance, I revel in the joy of them. I don’t worry if it is cliched to think my kids are as gorgous and brilliant as anybody on earth; I do notice the texture of it and the specificity of them: Charlie’s joy in saying, “No” in his rumbling baby voice. “No! No!”  Leo’s intent focus as he stacks blocks higher than his own height. Charlie’s witty repartee, as when it is time for good-night songs and he knows what is coming: “Rowrowrowrowrow.” Leo’s process of deciding which car seat he wants this time, heaving himself out of one and into the other, rolling back and forth between them.

See? These are small miracles for me and likely impress you very little. That’s okay. I am saying yes to my sons and yes to my own hard-earned maternal adoration and yes to my big plans. I am saying yes to the risk of sentimentality in the exploration of human connection. Our pediatricians have a handout that suggests that you give your kids ten yesses for every no, that when you say no, you automatically owe them ten yesses. I think I’ll try that with myself for a while . . .

Thanksgiving is approaching, and my title gives the misleading impression that this post will have to do with the gratitude you might offer up to whomever you believe deserves it. For many of you, November may be the month during which most of your consideration of turkeys takes place. For others, it also the time in which the majority of your writing happens (if you are participating successfully in NaNoWriMo).

At our house, however, we have a flock (pack? gaggle?) of wild turkeys living in our yard. These enormous, reptilian creatures gather in our driveway or behind our house to preen and prance. The males puff up their pretty feathers and fan out their tails. They gobble. Really. They say, “Gobblegobblegobblegobble.” But most wondrously of all, they fly. Yes, these are muscly, tough birds who would have no business on your table. At dusk, they stand together some yards from their favorite tall pine trees, and one at a time, they make a sort of running lift off and soar up to a high branch. Soar may be the wrong word. Ricochet is wrong in a different way (they don’t bounce off and come back), but better.

I turn to Angie. “What verb would you use to describe the turkeys flying to the trees?”

“What verb?”

“Mmm hmm.”

The sound of her mouse clicking and the hum of her computer fill a moment before she says, “Struggling.”

Let’s say that a haiku is a humming bird, fast, small, as much suggested as seen. A short story is a sparrow or perhaps a blue jay, depending on its attitude, but at any rate, a bird that can take off, fly and land with ease–compactly built for just this one activity.

A novel is a wild turkey.

It has wings; yes it does. And those wings can, in fact, carry the weight of its enormous body, its round cargo. By pressing itself as flat as it can and reaching with its neck toward the height of its goal, by believing in its power and by collecting its mates around it for encouragement, the turkey can attain a branch way up above the roof of our house.

In the morning, at dawn, the turkeys come back down. And because they are privileged to sleep a little bit later than we do, our early morning ritual is to stand at the living room window and watch them. There are maybe a dozen up in a couple of giant trees, and while they obviously know who is going to go when, we do not. We chat and make animal noises (Angie and I tending toward the first and the boys tending toward the second) until one suddenly pitches itself earthward. You hardly believe it will make it down without crashing. The bird itself seems no more certain. The excitement in all of us–observers and flier alike–is palpable. Again the bird tries to flatten itself into something sleek, something that might become airboren. Always, the awkward heft of the creature contradicts this effort. And yet, each time, it skids into the fallen eucalyptus bark and pine needles and restores itself to its round, reptilian dignity.

Yes, a turkey is a novel; a novel is a turkey. There is a wonder in seeing a tiny bird dart here and there, in seeing a hawk soar in the break in our trees through which we can see the bay and the hills of Marin. But none of these contain the humor, the humanity, if you will, the epic thrill–will she? won’t she?–of the turkey’s journey between earth and tree.

When I was in college, I participated in a study of dreams. Each night for perhaps a month, I would open up my  journal, write down “Dreams” and the next day’s date, and then go to sleep. In the morning, as soon as I woke up, I would record everything I could remember about my dreams from the night before. At first, this only took a few minutes. I noted fragments and then got up. But as I kept at it, I remembered more and more of my dreams, and the notebook began to fill with complex scenes, juxtaposed images, long, involved dreamscapes.

Writing a novel at a pace evolves much the same way. At first, if you have not been writing fiction every day, the stories inside you stay hidden. But if you keep the faith, if you boldly title the top of a blank page with your intention to fill it, the stories become willing to appear before your conscious mind. You begin to see–through the act of recording–the depth and the breadth of them, their relationships to each other, the wild, rich world of images that dances in your own mind.

The conscious mind does not always react well to this invasion. It has been taught–painstakingly and slowly–to fear and doubt the products of its sunken treasureship. Whatever you are doing, the conscious mind will not be pleased. At first. You are sneaking around the Berlin walls and barbed wire that want to KEEP OUT the connective, creative worlds inside you. And how are you doing this? By showing up every day. By facing the blank page and letting it be an invitation to your imagination. By being willing to be “wrong” or “bad;” indeed, by stepping outside of those definitions altogether.

Leo woke up early from his nap yesterday. I was there in bed with him, but he sat up and began to cry, and then pointed to the door. “Nursy?” I asked him. He shook his head, stuttering, “No, no, no, no” through his sobs. He didn’t want me to hug him or comfort him. He pointed to the door again, and so we left the room and went downstairs. In the living room he pointed to the empty bookshelf, and I swear I thought that maybe he was seeing my father’s ghost. We do live in his old house, in our raucous, messy way that my father would both have loved and hated. But mostly, I had just never seen Leo so inconsolably upset. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him turn down nursy, unless maybe there was a dog or a slide nearby.

Now I think that perhaps he had had his first bad dream. Well, actually both boys do their share of crying in their sleep, and one of the things we learned from parenting books is not to rush in and wake a sleeping baby just because he is crying. No one knows why we dream. It may be a way to process our day. To integrate our feelings . . . But even people who tell you that they do not dream, do. We all dream. Not all of us pay attention.

The act of paying attention is the radical part of being a writer. It’s also what’s exhausting (and rewarding) about being a parent.

The dream study returned my dreams with their analysis. They had counted up the number of times various objects had turned up in my dreams. They told me that I didn’t wear Burkenstocks. I remember that I had confused the words “president” and “pregnant”–which contained a world of stories they did not even try to guess or fathom. I was disappointed. At nineteen, I wanted someone to study my dreams and learn my hidden self, see my potential, marvel at the vivid worlds that turned up when I was willing to take notes on my nights. I was a dancing princess, and they were looking at my worn out shoes and seeing only poverty.

I am afraid this line of thinking could lead me into another diatribe against critics–and my gentlereader critic pled so well for his profession, its own “suspect class.” (This is the term for a protected minority, as it turns out.)

So I will jump to another square and ask, How do you create the possibility for creativity in your life? How do you made the blank space that will fill from beneath?

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I never intended this to be a political blog. Still less did I intend it to be a blog about marriage, of all things. But sometimes you get seized by a political moment. It’s made writing my novel hard, although I am about to land my narrator in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, so maybe I can fuel all of these feelings right into the story. Never thought of that!

First, let me say that I am OVERJOYED about Obama’s election. This is past-due and gives me a renewed faith in this country. I really didn’t think we’d be willing to elect an intelligent man president . . .

I am so angry that I even have to think about the probable passage of Prop. 8 and the lawsuits these reactionary people have already filed to annul my marriage. This is a time of celebration and hope, and I am sitting here wiping crap pie off of my face.

So I want to talk about the practice of writing. Writing every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you like how it’s going or not. Whether you have time, energy, inspiration or a clue. Much like parenting, this is the only way to develop a relationship with writing that will sustain it and you over the long haul. I have not done this always, and for that reason, I have accomplished more as an editor and a teacher than as a writer. But in the times when I do it–and this is one of them–I break through the romance of writing and take it up as a responsibility (to myself, because who else cares, really, at this point in the drafting?).

Imagining being a writer and actually writing are two such different experiences as to have almost no commonality. It’s like the first year of being a parent (at least when you have two): you have no time or capability for understanding or analyzing your experience. You are just living it, moment after moment, diaper after diaper, feeding after feeding, nap after nap, story after story, meal after meal, laundry load after laundry load, grocery shop after grocery shop . . . Wanting children is all about desire and imagination and feelings (sometimes hard feelings, when it isn’t going well). Having children, at least at first, has very little to do with any of that (except when the hormones through you over the emotional edge).

And yet, having children has connected me to myself and a sense of being human that has transformed me. It’s not a splashy transformation. Few people even know about it, I would guess, since I don’t have time or energy to telephone people anymore, and when you meet me at the park, I am running five different directions at once and conversations are choppy at best. Anyway, I think this is true of writing, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it: paragraph after paragraph, attempt after attempt, each sentence structure, the lousy voice of judgment harping on in the background while the fingers move and move, the mind hoping for some combination of complete, transcendent brilliance and extra time left at the end of the evening to watch Californication.

Maybe changing the world works the same way. Conversation after conversation, rally after rally, defeat after defeat, the highs, the lows, a kind of daily commitment to believing that things can be other than they are, that things should be other than they are. One day, you look up, and there is a stack of manuscript pages in the printer, a grown-up person who was once your little jumping bean, and a President of the United States of America, whose own parents, like my sons’ parents, could not have gotten married at the time of his birth in 1961 in sixteen states in the Union.

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

Day One. All day, I knew it: this was the day I would start. Angie took the boys downstairs when they woke up at about 6:15, and I got to sleep in until  a.m. As I was coming to consciousness, I was thinking my way through Aristotle’s incline vis-a-vis my new novel. I have been doing this over the past few days, never getting further than the first turning point, but this morning I got to the midpoint before I crawled out of bed.

Then we were packing and getting ready to come up to Sonoma, plus I had to post podcasts and technique boosts and jump starts to my class of folks who were also starting their novels today. My mother came over to play with the boys while Angie and I got things done, because it takes us about a million years to pack for one of these three day trips. We always bring too much of everything except the things we need. It takes us weeks to unpack. In fact, I had to unpack from our last Sonoma jaunt in order to empty a suitcase for this trip.

This is relevant to the craft issues that are the titled focus of this blog. Two journeys were planned to begin today, and my morning was preoccupied in packing for them, with precisely the same set of problems: planning a trip/ novel and actually making one are two very different projects, and from the standpoint of one, it is difficult to remember what one actually needs when immersed in the other.

It rained today. The boys barely know what rain is, we’ve had so little of it in their lifetimes. But today was a real California storm, and we drove through grey skies, over swaths of water, across the Richmond bridge. By the time we got to Sebastopol, I had to let Angie drive because I was so tired. Once she was at the wheel, I kept falling asleep–into deep, sudden, real sleep–only to be jolted awake by a sudden stop or the disturbances of the rain.

And then we were here, the house full of the smell of bread pudding, the boys elated to see Grandpa and Nana. (Grandpa reassuring Angie about Prop. 8: “Even if it doesn’t pass this time, it’s going to happen. It takes a while for us old codgers to catch up.”) Angie and I got to go back into town, to Cooperfield’s bookstore, on our own, and suddenly I was full of energy, and so many amazing books were being sold at double-discounts that my arms, normally weighted with babies, were weighted with books. That feeling kept stealing over me: today is the day. I am starting this book today.

I didn’t like the book anymore, abstractly in my head, but I knew well enough to know that it would feel differently coming out on the screen, on the electronic page, that it would surprise me and find room for anything that mattered to me. I felt in love with the millions of books in the world.

It was cold outside and so warm when we got back to the house, and now tangy orange flavors and salty tamari scents layered into the bread pudding smells from earlier, and the boys looked up, happy to see us but not unhappy that we’d been gone, and I knew: today is the day I will start.

I kept checking my email to see if any of my students had posted a call for help or anything else. We fed the boys. They are saying so many words now. Charlie says, “bear” as if it were two syllables but something like “be-er.” And then “more” rhymes with “be-er.” “Me-re,” he says, frequently. “Mere.”

“Writing is mere,” Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life. The full quote is something like, “Literature is merely literature; writing is mere.”

I wrestled the boys into clean diapers and fuzzy pajamas, and they said nighty-night to the dogs and to Grandpa and Nana, and we sang them their three songs, plus we sang them Tumble Bumble since we didn’t read to them like we usually do.

Leo had a hard time falling asleep. He kept pointing to the fire in the wood-burning stove, and when Grandpa came out looking for his glasses, Leo jumped up, filled with ecstacy at the reappearance of this man he adores, and all-in-all, he was not pleased with settling down for bed, but finally–and really, in not so long a time–he was asleep. It took a little cuddling with Mama on one side and Mommy on the other to do the trick. And while he was struggling and I was shushing him and nursing him and petting him, I was thinking about the opening scene of the novel I was about to begin, and about what I’d worked out when I’d finally typed out my whole Aristotle’s incline that afternoon before the bookstore trip.

Then Leo was asleep and I could get up again and finally have my chocolate chip bread pudding with bourbon sauce, and tell myself that when I reached 1,000 words, I could have seconds, and so I began. At 820 words, I was still thinking about the bread pudding, which in fact had made its way into the novel, but then I was at 1352 before I actually got up to carve myself a piece, and now I am done with my first 1946 words. I need to do 1667/ day to achieve the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 in November, but more like 2000 – 2500 to achieve my own goal . . . We’ll see.

Right now, I am pleased. I am sitting at the marble countertop on the island in the middle of the kitchen/ living room. The boys are asleep to my right. The fire behind me is dying out. Angie is typing a few feet to my left.

There are people who rail against amateurs writing novels and claiming to be writers and thinking they know something about the writing life–people who hate NaNoWriMo and everything it stands for. But I think we are all amateurs when we face the blank page at the start of a new project. None of us is certain that anyone else will care about what we’ve written, much less need it in any way. There is the root of love hidden in that word, and we all do well to remember the excitement of being a beginner–whether for this lifetime or this novel or this day.

Remember when I posted about Charlie’s first swear word? And remember how he was holding the dust pan while saying, “Shit, shit”? Well, it turns out that what he means to be saying was, “Swish, swish,” which–according to Grandma–is the sound a broom makes. (I knew it was Grandma’s fault!)

Meanwhile, outside my house there is some large-scale chipper turning great hunks of tree trunk into tiny flecks of wood. There are trees going down all around my house–old, far-leaning or dead pines and view-blocking non-native eucalyptus. We’re not responsible for any of it, but our view has been partially restored and it’s marvelous to stare out through the hurricane-shaped break in the trees to see University Avenue running down to the bay, and then the islands and inlets and finally the mountains across in Marin.

Last night, Angie said, “Go turn out the lights and look at the view.” It took a while before I remembered–I was emptying the tub and answering email and worrying and fussing about things–but then, as I was shutting down the house, I went into her office and turned out the lights. The fog filled the crevices of bay and city, lit up from below–a magical sweep of mystery. And, as an added bonus, with the lights out, I could not see the boxes of crap and unfolded laundry.

There are always cross-currents: the magical view and the piles of laundry. The swishing and the swearing. I think that cross-currents are at the heart of what makes a story. You take this piece over here and this seemingly unrelated piece over there, and put them together. It’s something like playing a chord on the piano. The individual notes create a new sound when you play them together. Harmonies and the like . . . As ever, my metaphor is slipping my grasp; I know more about writing than I do about playing the piano. The point is that a coincidence of sound–or of stories–produces a third thing, a something-else that I believe is at the core of fiction. Resonance is another good word here.

So I am getting ready to write a novel this month. Have an 18-month-old and a 14-month-old feels very different than having a 2-month-old and a 6-month-old. Those were quiet days, days given over to nursing and sleeping and songs. These days we spend in parks or running up and down the plywood board that is out in the yard or careening through the living room on the bulldozer. Right now it is nap time, and if I had nothing else to do, I might be able to write 2,000 words during nap time each day. You know, maybe just for the next 30 – 45 days, that’s what I’ll do. Though G*d forbid the nap gets cut short as it sometimes does.

Meanwhile, my students have mapped out their amazing books. They have taken up every challenge I’ve thrown at them–pitches and problem/ solution lists and character arcs and interviews and Aristotle’s incline. They know about their books just about everything I wish I knew about mine before jumping into the dark, warm waters of the writing itself. Me? I’m a little behind, I’m afraid. I have part of a pitch and part of a problem-solution list . . .

My focus for my students, though, and myself, for the next six weeks (since we are going to carry on past NaNoWriMo’s 30 days to get a real book-length manuscript), is now scene. Sensate detail. Keeping it real, so to speak: a physical world not dominated by the stutterings of internal monologue run amok. It’s the difference between swish and shit: the first an actual sound produced by an actual gesture, the second a commentary, an opinion, if you will, an internal monologue.

This is what I say to myself and to my student writers: stay with “swish”; let the reader get to “shit” through the action. It’s stronger to create the feeling in the reader via the concrete world than to tell the reader about the feeling.

Check out the following options:

A) I felt enormous pain.

B) The pain ground like glass across my eyeballs.

C) The knife slipped, and the serrated edge cut into the meat of my thumb, a sharp gash.  A blue vein severed, and blood leaked, red and bright, across my palm.

A) is just a statement. Nothing wrong with that. We know something in our heads from reading it: someone felt pain. B) is what certain people consider vivid writing. But do not be fooled. It is still abstraction, burdened with metaphor. It is a more complicated statement, but it is not an experience. C) is a description. If you are like me, C) makes you grab your hand and grimace.

None of this is great writing, but C) at least gives your reader somewhere to go.