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.

It’s a funny day. The fog gathered around my house this morning, turning everything gray and soft. Now the sun has broken through, but inside my head it still feels gray and soft. I’m in a different library, in the teen room, surrounded by the books that formed me. When I was a child, my father mostly read Scientific American and The New Yorker, and my mother read books about healthy diets and finances and thing. I didn’t know there were adult novels when I was little–though I was delighted to learn that there were.

What are the stories burning inside you? What are the books you desperately want to read that do not exist?

I put an ad on Craigslist for a babysitter and received, along with a passel of nice replies, the following:

“Who gave you the right to have kids? Under Gods law only a man and a women can have kids/raise kids, poor kids what example r u setting foe their future ? In school for instance, ohh yes I have 2 moms, right? They are going to ask, where is your father. Find God get them a real father, meaning! Get a man stop this sin, God made the woman for the man to rule this earth not the sick and depravation you are causing. Find God, you still have time to repent”

My own righteousness lies all in the practice of grammar, I suppose. Perhaps school is to grammar as church is to god. There are lots of people who go to school and learn nothing about grammar. There are lots of people who go to school everyday, but who do not care about grammar one little bit. On the other hand, there are people who forget that all human languages have grammar; school is not required for grammar to flourish. We humans develop systems for understanding each other whenever we gather together.

This is what I have to say to the man who is concerned about the depravation I am causing.

A long time ago, before I knew her, I took a class with Eileen Myles, and she had us watch an old movie with the sound turned off and to write as we watched. We were narrating the movie, essentially. Similarly, I could list off for you the titles of some of the books around me, and you could pick one and write your own book from it, or a short story at least. Angie listens to music when she writes–all kinds of music. I listen to interviews with writers while I clean the kitchen. My point, however, out of the soft gray fog of my brain (oh and I was leafing through Faulkner just now, which didn’t help), is that sometimes having two tracks running–the one you are imbibing and the one you are creating–can move you in different directions than just the silence of your own mind.

How does it feel to be hated?

Unfriendly, to be sure.

I was leafing through Light in August to see if I could map Aristotle’s incline across it. For example: There are 507 pages in the Vintage paperback edition I am holding, the one with the gold and burnt umber cover with a picture of a road on it. This one also has a sticker with a list of dates stamped and penned in (library book) and a Summer 2005 Selection sticker from Oprah’s Book Club (Faulkner being less able to object that the arrogant living writer who’d rejected her attentions). In any case, the midpoint of a 507 page novel should fall somewhere around page 254. Chapter 12 begins on 256 with the line, “In this way the second phase began.”

There is a mathematics to literature as there is to music.

I just finished reading A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I wrote in my newsletter tip about his excellent use of sensate detail. The whole books was visual; in fact, I would go so far as to say that it was nearly a film. Haddon has a background in writing film, so that may explain it. It was a funny and fast read–much like watching a romantic comedy with, say, Hugh Grant. (He could play the gay son, I think, or the sister’s fiance if he wanted to step out of type.) Omniscient narration with short chapters that spun among the main characters.

Haddon did a great job of pushing the story as far as it could go without becoming science-fiction or horror or something. Within its genre, I mean, he really let things happen and get bad and then worse and then . . . because it is a romantic comedy . . . better at long last.

Forgive this rambling little blog entry this morning. It is time to go retrieve the boys from the park and the babysitter and go have lunch. I leave you with five ideas for planning your novel, in case you, too, are going to start writing one in the next three or four days:

1) Write out everything you know about the book.

2) Write out everything you do not know about the book.

3) Make a list of twenty concrete images, scenes, people, moments that you want to include.

4) If you are stuck on a point, write out five different ways to solve it.

5) Ask yourself what you believe: what truths do you hold to be self-evident? Make a story up about that. Be sure you put that contrary character in there–the one who things that your best, most human self is a deprivation before god.

I attended a lovely wedding reception on Saturday, and ended up talking with some of the other guests about how useful it would be if they did start teaching marriage skills in kindergarten. Maybe the divorce rate would not be skyrocketing. It seemed to us, in our conversation, that the curriculum would not really have to separate the lesson into “gay” and “straight” marriage. For one thing, if there is any occasion (besides Halloween) where straight people have adopted costume and camp to better effect, I don’t know what it is.  But you decide:

Gay Marriage: A Kindergarten Lesson Plan

1) Marriage is a relationship between two adult, consenting partners. It is ideal if these people know themselves well and even like themselves. We also hope they really like each other, at least to start.

2) Marriage is a framework for sustaining love, family, and a lot of logistics, such as bills, housecleaning, and (sometimes) childcare. In this special Gay Marriage lesson, we are going to learn reflective listening, calendar management, and checkbook balancing.

3) A significant period of courtship is recommended before embarking on your marriage journey. If you expect your partner to change (even just to meet his or her amazing but unrealized potential), GIVE IT UP before you marry. Marriage is about loving a person just as he or she is. (This does not mean you cannot negotiate about the disposal of dirty laundry or whose turn it is to change diapers.)

4) When attending a gay wedding, see if you can find a card that does not have animals on it. With the dearth of appropriate cards, animal themes tend to dominate.

5) In our lesson on the history of Gay Marriage, we are going to have to talk about the Catholic church, which used to perform them some hundreds of years ago. Please have your parents sign the permission slip that will allow us to discuss this oppressive institution that many of them do not support, believe in or practice.

P.S. This week, Angie and I are going to elope . . . in case enough of you don’t VOTE NO ON PROP. 8 . . . and they take away our right to be married.

Tomorrow’s blog: Easy peasy GIVEAWAY for writers and people who want to write, plus more on books, writing and that sort of thing.

Last night we watched part of the new Chris Rock comedy special. Let me say, first of all, that the man is funny as heck. We were laughing hard. He had a lot to say about Obama that was not only funny but astute and telling. He’s also smart–he can read the audience and respond to that “uh-oh” feeling that comes from listening to edgy humor that takes no prisoners.

Angie and I were talking this morning about the part where Chris Rock said that if Obama were president, Black people could stop giving their kids the “you can be anything you want to be” speech every morning before they leave the house. He said, White people don’t give their kids that speech, because it’s obvious. This led Angie and me to discuss (not for the first time) the fact that we are raising two little white boys. They could be president, even in the old days (and let’s hope they are nearly over) when only little white boys could grow up to be president. Then we talked about whether having two lesbian moms would be enough of a handicap to prevent them from being president, and whether Clinton’s (Bill, that is) single mom and alcoholic step-dad were equivalent to having lesbian mothers. I said no; Angie said yes.

This is what we do with our free time while the boys are with their babysitter.

Then we go to the library, sit at the long wooden tables, and get to work. Around us, the economy is tanking, and taking us with it for the ride, I suppose, but we are all paid up on our library fines and have a clean slate when it comes to borrowing all the wealth in this bank of books. Wee-ha!

Just for the record, my mother did give me that speech, since I was a little white (half-Jewish) kid, but also a girl, and it wasn’t so obvious that I could be anything I wanted to be. Except as a reader.

Yeah–there’s the tie in to fiction: the gateway to success for those not wedded too closely to reality. Funnily enough, this is also exactly what most people–interviewers, say, or even readers–refuse to understand fully about writing fiction: characters can be invented out of the thick swirl of internal and external experience, out of the “what if” musings that run rampant in junior high kids like I was, for example, out of that feeling that who you actually are is a quirky twist of fate rather than a destiny, that you might as easily have arrived over there, in that body, in that life.

There but for fortune, we say, but is the fortune always good? I guess this is another confession: every time I hear a piece of someone else’s life, I zip into it and feel around for the fit. I overhear someone say that she’d finished her dissertation after twelve years. First thought: I should get a PhD. Someone writes to me from Kansas City with a look at living in a place that doesn’t value questioning over hierarchy as he feels the Bay Area does, but in an aside he mentions the lower cost of living. First thought: We could buy a house in Kansas City.

In life, I’m a bit of a push-over, then; indecisive and open to all manner of possibilities. My therapist seems to think (it’s hard to be sure between his nodding and questions and my own projections) that this has to do with my fear of committing to one life trajectory, since a single trajectory inevitably ends. Whereas Zeno’s paradox assures us that if we are jumping point to point, halfway to halfway to halfway again, we will never reach the end. In life, this is kind of weak, I suppose. But for the fiction writer, this same waffling, wafting search is like pumping iron for the imagination. I. Could. Be. Anything.

Sure, I can’t be everything. In life, I may only be able to be a handful of things (and some people might succeed in amending the constitution of the state just to prevent one of those things, so Vote No on Prop. 8). But there are lives ahead of me as a writer.

Borges said it better in “Everything and Nothing,” a piece out of Labyrinths which my father read aloud to me one day in what was then his living room and is now mine (speaking of changes . . .). My father had this sonorous voice, hushed in reverence to its own power, and when he read this I felt deeply understood. Which is not to compare myself to Shakespeare or Borges, but only to toss my headpiece in with the rest of the writers, to say, I live by my greatest weakness, which is that I cannot pick one life for good.

I taught my first Skype class last night, speaking with people as far away as Georgia and as nearby as Emeryville about how to plot a novel. There was a little technological brouhaha at the start, but that is probably the equivalent of my not knowing quite how the key works in the classroom door and then not being able to find the chalk while a few people wander in late or lost. And then we were off . . .

It was exciting. I started by having each person say something about his or her surrounds. It helped to imagine people at their kitchen tables or garage-offices, to know that this one had stacks of math books around and that one had the empty bowl from her pre-class snack. Are we gaining access to more people or losing access to the ones near-by? At any rate, I liked having the human context for the voices. I liked the voices, too. Regional accents and varying tonalities.

I used to love to talk on the phone, but these days I almost never do it. First of all, I am almost never alone. And we can’t make phone calls while driving any more in California. I mean, I can project a call into the car, but the sound-quality is so poor . . . and for some reason, raising my voice while holding the small device of my cell phone to my head seems so natural that I don’t even know I am doing it until I notice Angie wincing. But shouting in the direction of the dashboard in my car feels strange indeed.

I’m not sure any of the logistics are the entirety of why I don’t talk on the phone anymore. Another reason has to be the enormity of the shifts in my life in the past couple of years. I hardly know what to say in response to the simplest, “How are you?” that is both brief and true. I draw a blank.

I have so many experiences and feelings crammed inside me, like the whole wheat bunnies and sand and occasional sock you find in every crevice of the boys’ car seats. A phone call wouldn’t help. I need a vacuum cleaner.

But it was lovely to talk on the phone about plot. Made-up plots. We are all connoisseurs of plot, really. Someone starts to tell us a story and we have all the right questions at hand–not as critics or as writers, but as consumers of story. How do these events impact the protagonist? What happens next? What in this character drives her to take this action? And all the questions are about character and plot together, because we believe in what people do, not what they say.

Maybe this is another reason the phone isn’t doing it for me these days. Everything is in action, and I don’t want the voice-over narration. Come over and see my babies laugh. Talk to me while I wash the dishes.

Maybe I’m better in writing anyway. More eloquent. More honest. There’s a lot of getting in and getting out with a phone call, especially if you add in the need to explain that I am on call if a baby cries . . .

I think I’m complaining, which is a poor use of a blog. There is something else I want to say about plot:

Everything that people tend to hold up as against plot is right there in it: lyricism and place and theme and character and “real life” and whatever autobiographical fragments to writer brings to the book. The idea that plot is antithetical to these things is some bizarre misunderstanding of art. It is as if to say that a portrait that attends to perspective and framing, to shadow and light, to shading and line, cannot capture what matters about a person, about a life. People’s meanings and secret hopes and quiet desperations are yearning for expression, so much so that you can start anywhere–as many writers do–start with horror or parody or romance–and still you will stumble upon these things. And if the writer never makes it to the heart of the heart of the matter, don’t blame the lithe and limber plot. Don’t hate it because it is beautiful.

My two little guys got their hair cut today, Charlie for the first time. They hated it. No amount of toys or singing would keep them from batting at the lady with her scissors and her comb. Charlie confiscated the comb. The lady gave us an envelop with his little scraps of hair in it.

The Intersex Society of North America (which apparently has disbanded) recommends avoiding infant surgery and picking a gender in which to raise your child, later letting your more grown child make his or her own choices. This rough paraphrase is from memory based on information I’ve learned at the shows of my friend Thea Hillman, whose book Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word was released this month from Manic D Press.

When I first heard these ideas expressed, I fancied myself a gender-radical, formed by the brilliant work of Kate Bornstein and Judith Butler and others who challenged the very notion of a dual-gender system. I was disappointed in the idea of conforming to the dual-gender system, of raising your children in it, especially those whose bodies already seemed to lean away from it.

These days, I spot Judith Butler, her equally brilliant partner Wendy Brown, and their tall son at my local farmer’s market, where I am wheeling a double stroller while Angie feels up the pluots. But I guess what’s changed most is that while I’d still like the world to be a radically different place, I do not want to put my kids on the front line of the revolution. I actually think that imposing my own resistences to gender norms on them would offer no more secure a place from which they might begin to find their own way.

It’s true that as often as I imagine them growing up to be heterosexual men, I imagine them growing up to be gay men, or women of various persuasions. I’m guessing this is a little unusual, but when you’ve met the range of people I know, you’ve heard some nightmarish childhood stories about parents’ painful and limiting assumptions and the struggles to reconcile a budding sense of self with those external directives.

So I’m following ISNA’s advice. I’m picking a gender to raise them within (more or less, in a Berkeley sort of way). I’m aware that this is based on the fact that they have male genitalia. Unlike the experience many parents describe, I do not feel hit over the head with the inate gendering of my little guys. Our baby sitter has an eighteen-month-old daughter who is apparently a spit-fire, and compared with taking care of her, adding in our two boys is easy peasy. They are “mellow” and “follow instructions” and so forth. (Yeah, yeah, their donor must be a zen monk . . .) If the genders of these kids were switched, everyone would be attributing her energy and zeal to the fact that she was a boy, and my little fellows’ relative calm to the fact that they are girls. Instead, these get to be individual qualities, having nothing to do with gender.

Meanwhile, if you are getting tired of What to Expect: The Toddler Years (or if, like me, you can’t find your copy), check out a couple of books all parents should have on hand. Thea’s book Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word has at its core–I think–her relationship with her mother who, surprisingly, diagnosed Thea at a very young age. There is a lot to this little book, and Thea’s characteristic candor etches layers of pictures that might change the way you think about people and the world.

Kate Bornstein has an amazing little book (these are both just small–Kate’s in shape and Thea’s in width–powerful books) called Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.
Also, if you ever get the chance to see Kate’s theater–grab it up. What’s the adjective for “circus-like transcendent magnificence”?

I will say that when Leo got his first haircut, I cried. There is something shocking about your larval little primate (mixed metaphor, I know, but right in this instance) emerging from the chrysalis of your own body and encountering . . . this world. This unchanged world, which is suddenly both gorgeous and dangerous, fatally flawed and dazzlingly alive. Unrevolutionized, but evolving. Leo held onto a little red metal train car during that earlier haircut, clutching it in his baby hand, and he loved that little train. About a block after we left the store, I realized it was still clutched in his hand. I knew it wasn’t radical or even right, but I let him keep it.

In my post, “I Could Write a Great Novel If Only I Had a Story to Tell,” I neglected my own favorite kind of plot trigger: secrets. It’s funny, but writers do seem to revisit a certain theme. Michelle Richmond (at least in her last two gripping books) seems to write about the consequences of losing people for the people who feel responsible for their loss. In The Year of Fog, the young step-daughter-to-be is lost by the fiancée when she disappears from Ocean Beach while they are together. In No One You Know, the sister of a young woman who was murdered years before searches for answers about what happened that night, spurred on by a meeting with the man who was the sister’s lover, another character caught in the ramifications of loss.

My own work tends to gravitate toward secrets–what we don’t know that we don’t know. I am gripped by the idea that something there, but hidden, unknown, has a strong impact–even on the ignorant participants in the situation. In Shy Girl, Shy Mallon’s mother has hidden her identity as a Jew and her past as a holocaust survivor. Lots of people doubted the veracity of this story when I began to write it, because of course we hear from the people who are not hiding, those who believe that remembering is our only hope, our strongest activism. But in fact, there are many secret histories like Mrs. Mallon’s. Survivors who learned a different lesson: that safety lies in remaining below the radar, out of view.

My own father told me about coming to Berkeley (U.C.) at the behest of a friend and colleague. Ten years later, they each “confessed” to each other that they were Jewish. Each of my father’s first two wives (neither is my mother) claimed that my father didn’t tell them he was Jewish before they were married. This meant that he did not bring them to meet his parents. I asked him about this once and he said, “I didn’t want to give my father a heart attack.” When I was officially converted to Judaism, the Rabbi took my parents and my father’s Jewish fiancée (whom he never did marry) and me into a little office before the Mikvah and said, “Your mother is not Jewish. Today we are going to remedy that mistake.” I only nodded, but I knew it was no mistake.

Years later, when I read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, I finally understood my father in a new way. I wrote a piece called Portnoy’s Daughters, about my sisters and me. The point is, something that is hidden has an impact even if the situation looks the same as one in which that something isn’t there at all.

In any case, secrets are a good spur toward plot. What are the open secrets in your family? What about the ones you wonder about but for which you have no answers? What secrets have you been told or stumbled upon by accident? What secrets do you hold that no one else knows but you?

This week, we had a trial run with a babysitter for our boys. You see, other grandparents, a very busy but loving aunt and uncle, and a cousin who’s left the state for college, we have not really left the boys with anybody. For seventeen months. Now that Angie is my technical person and business advisor as well as my co-parent, it’s gotten completely crazy around here. So we are checking out having the boys go play, for three mornings a week, with a woman in the neighborhood and her eighteen-month-old little girl.

The woman is very nice and calm, an obviously loving mother. We visited with her in her house for a couple hours, met her husband, talked to a friend and neighbor of hers. All that. She’s in graduate school getting her doctoral degree in Psychology.

So then we made a plan to meet at a little Tot Lot near the Albany YMCA, and we all hung out for a while there before she took our boys and her daughter off to baby gym at the Y. As we stood watching her walk away, pushing the boys in their double stroller, her daughter strapped to her back, I thought . . .

What if the whole thing was a set-up? What if the friend she called and the man claiming to be her husband (who was obviously the father of her baby, but I didn’t think like that in this moment) and this nice-seeming woman were all part of some baby-trafficking ring, and the whole rigmarole was an elaborate set-up?

At the end of the morning, we met up again at the Tot Lot. The boys were happy and worn-out from playing. They were yards further down the potty-training line simply from watching her daughter use the potty regularly, and I had worked on my NaNoWriMo book pitch (for the class I am teaching).

But I realized that I am fully capable of concocting the most complicated plots, accounting for all the elements of reality that add up to something normal, ordinary, and making them align into something overblown, terrifying and, well, gripping . . .

One of my very talented clients told me about meeting a woman who had just come back from Africa. The woman began talking about her trip, and my client was not all that intrigued, but then it turned out that their luggage had been lost and they had to go into deepest Africa with only the barest, most inappropriate clothing, and then . . . I don’t remember the story now, but the point was that hearing a story without a plot is like watching someone’s slideshow about their vacation, replete with their commentary: “Oh, oh, that was the tour guide and right over there is the hut we stayed in, just behind that tree . . . ” Now, if the photographer is amazing . . . you might enjoy the show. Otherwise, you’re going to be hungry for story–happy when things start to go wrong for the erstwhile travelers. And if the photographer is amazing and there’s a story–you’re just where you want to be.

So tap into your own paranoia and build yourself a really great plot. Think about your “what if . . . ?” scenarios when the stakes are as high as they can be.

Here’s why:

Fiction is a training camp for those of us who are engaged in the risky business of life. It’s where we learn about relationships, meaning, and how to survive the worst and keep going. When my father was dying, I read Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. I’d heard about it before, but I’d been a little turned off by the grim opening situation: the main character’s boyfriend dives off a pier and breaks his neck, becoming paralyzed from the neck down (as I recall). But now, surrounded as I was by hospital routine and near-death calls, the book didn’t seem depressing to me. Like a hand reaching through the darkness, it showed me the way to stumble along. If Packer had decided that it was too traumatic to have someone get that seriously hurt (especially when his girlfriend was already unhappy and wanting to leave their long relationship, despite being engaged), the book might have been about a group of friends who enjoy a yearly picnic by a lake. But it wouldn’t have been published, and it wouldn’t have had anything to offer to me as I commuted to the place where my father lay trying not to die.

Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters, a moving book about a group of women who meet in the park in the 1960s who become writers together, posted a great link to a story on the Powell’s blog about a guy, Seldon Edwards, who worked for thirty years on his novel, The Little Book, which was finally published and became a best-seller. The lessons: Don’t give up! And: Hire an editor!

Meg’s blog is called 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started, and she hosts various guest writers who tell all sorts of interesting tales about their first tales.

As someone who spends half my time in the park (today I was there, sitting cross-legged by the merry-go-round, hunched over my computer), I love that this is the setting for Meg’s book. She weaves in key historic moments and movements along with the personal journeys of the women.

Meg also did something I’ve been waiting to see for a while: she made a video preview for her novel. Check it out; it’s great.

Just while I was loading the dishwasher earlier this evening and the boys were upstairs in the bath (under Angie’s supervision), I heard that the bailout went belly-up and the DOW plunged. “We don’t know yet if this is another Black Monday,” the guy on Marketplace said as I rinsed off the last dishes and stacked them in the rack. Then it was time to wrap up the babies and towel them off and go to bed. After I got up again, I received some tragically sad news, and I’ve been sitting here adjusting myself to the fact that it gets darker earlier now than it did yesterday.

But working for thirty years on a book lends some sense of perspective, doesn’t it? It reminds me of what I finally learned from various elders about how to have a life-long relationship:

Don’t leave.

I feel like I’ve said this before in the blog somewhere. It’s a choppy night, Friends. I hope you are warm where you want to be, cool where you need to be, and held in the comfort of friends.

Angie is behind me working away on my Online Learning Center. Shortly, my Nano Complete Course Series (which begins October 6) will be open for enrollment. This is the course I wish I had taken before I ran my first NaNoWriMo marathon. This will be the community that will get you from bald hope to a book in just a few months. Or you can do it over thirty years. Hey, whatever works!

At the start of last November, I had a two-month-old baby and a six-month-old baby. Years before I’d published a novel, and for the years since, I had been revising and revising my second novel, Strip. Sure, I had written some short stories, published some articles, made a couple of films, even. I’d gotten and given up a tenure-track teaching job, and taught elsewhere and privately, too. I’d moved across the country a couple of times since my first novel was published. In other words, I kept busy, which is sometimes the same thing as productive and sometimes not.

But I was not really a writer. “A real writer is someone who really writes,” Marge Piercy says in her rather profound poem “For the Young Who Want To.”

This is not to say that someone else had penned my novels–the published one or the endlessly revised one–or articles or any of that. It was just that, despite knowing better, I had a sort of passionate, on-again, off-again relationship with the kind of Writing that hangs out in clubs with people who call themselves “Inspiration” and “Great Idea” and “Excitement.” They have little gang rumbles with people who call themselves “Doubt” and “Brilliant Editor” and “You Could Do Better.”

Having babies got me really focused. I couldn’t hang out with that kind of writing anymore, had no time for skirmishes or romances or other capital-D Distractions. But did I have time to write?

That’s when NaNoWriMo came along. It sounds goofy, amaturish, like a crutch or a scam or some kind of edifice with nothing behind it, perhaps. But what, you may be asking, is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, Friends, is National Novel Writing Month. A web site; a sort of a program; a contest in which the number of winners is unlimited. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.com . . .

So there I was with the two babies, and after they would fall asleep, around 7 or 8 p.m., I would sit down, half-asleep myself, and type out about 2,000 words. (Officially, you must write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30 to “win.” This works out to 1667 words/ day, but I started a day or two late, so I aimed for 2000 words. Also, I knew that I would be cutting so much of what I wrote, that I felt I had to get over 80,000 before I stopped.)

I crossed the 50,000 word line at the end of November, and then I kept on going, at a slightly less hectic pace, but more or less the same, until about Xmas, when I got to about 85,000 words and the end of a draft.

Those are the logistics. Also included are writing buddies, all sort of cafe events and marathons across the country (none of which I participated in because of the aforementioned babies), pep talks sent out by NaNoWriMo from various authors, and forums where you can get advice, solicit plot suggestions, commiserate, or just waste time.

Oh, and there are a number of people who’ve published their NaNoWriMo books (after, one assumes, significant revision), including Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall, as well as Sara Gruen, whose Water for Elephants was a NaNoWriMo book, as was a previous book of hers. (There’s a list at the web site of other published authors; these were the ones I’d heard of . . .)

But more importantly than all of that, for me, is the personal experience I had of sitting down, night after night, exhausted and uninspired much of the time, leaking breast milk, to pound away at the keyboard. Sometimes I was nearly asleep, leaning close to the screen of my trusty laptop, letting my unconscious take over. My unconscious did all right.

Sure, the book is full of extra information, a lot of “ideas” and digressions, and even an excess of description. But I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to writing fiction. This comes from a certain fear, I think, something M.F.A.-driven that has to do with “purple prose” and a tendency toward embellishment and nostalgia. In other words, I have been developing a style that is in many ways opposite to my own “natural” style–a reaction to the “faults” that others have pointed out to me.

Fitzgerald said something about keeping all the quirks that the critics hated because that was his original style. I can’t find the quote right now, even at Google, but my larger point is that writing a first draft full of my inherent stylistic choices taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

Honestly, while I was doing this–churning out 2000 words every night–I felt confident that I would continue doing this every day for the rest of my life. I felt a kinship to Joyce Carol Oates that I’d never felt before. Because if only half of what I wrote was worthwhile, I could still write several decent novels a year at this rate, and raise up a passel of babies, too.

I forgot that babies stop sleeping so much and start running around and talking, at which point they need to be chased and answered, and it’s just harder to mull over the coming night’s writing while chasing and talking than it is while humming, rocking and nursing. I also forgot that good habits are hard-earned. Which is to say that I have not continued to write 2000 words every day, or even 1000 (though since I began blogging, I’ve written some number every other day or so).

However: November approaches.

Here’s what happens when I put my seat in the seat and type. Characters do things I hadn’t imagined; scenes develop; histories unfold; the people talk to each other and I listen, carefully, sleepily, and take notes. I know more and have more to say in front of a keyboard than I ever do anywhere else. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” My partner, Angie, talks about writing in that way–to find out what happens. When you write everyday, no matter what, you get as close as possible to being a reader of your own work, with the attendant pleasures, surprises and identifications readers get to experience.

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates once on the radio (with either Terri Gross or Michael Krazny, can’t remember), in which she talked about how she goes jogging every day, and while she jogs, she tells herself stories, so that when she goes to the keyboard, all she has to do is write from recall. Let us not forget that she lives in New Jersey, a place of winter, of snow. So this takes some dedication to the running, not to mention the writing.

In any case, for that month, I was more of a writer than I’d ever been, despite the above mentioned published novel, the unpublished novel, the M.F.A., and the teaching. Which is to say: I was writing. And when you are writing you don’t much care if you are a writer, just as when you are making love, you don’t much care if you are a lover. You’re just doing it, and it’s great.

So I invite you to join me over at the NaNoWriMo site. Become my “buddy,” so we can encourage each other along. I know you are busy and perhaps frightened and maybe you have a dissertation due or a job that drains you or babies to tend, but really, is that any excuse not to write a novel in November?

[Note: Fifteen percent of the 100,000 people who participated in NaNoWriMo last year completed their 50k words. Check out the course I am offering to see you through before, during and after: http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses. Thanks.]