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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gushing over. What books and authors do you LOVE?

WEDNESDAY: Five Ways to Keep on Writing Your Book

I listen to both the NY Times Book Review podcast and the Guardian Books podcast. I enjoy them both—they pop up in my listening list and I am pleased, filled with the anticipation of delight and inspiration. But they are quite different, and I think their differences might be instructive.

The Guardian Books podcast always makes me want to read the books they are discussing. The speakers are, at heart, readers, readers talking about books they love—or sometimes books about which they disagree. The show often covers the long and short lists and then winners of the major literary prizes, such as the Booker.

The NY Times Book Review podcast usually has one or two relatively serious interviews and then a look at the (dying?) publishing industry in the U.S. and a review of the bestseller lists, which change almost not at all. The speakers are disparaging about the bestsellers, and therefore the millions who make them, but still they include the material every week.

Don’t get me wrong; I like listening to the bestsellers conversation, much as I enjoy reading US Magazine at my dentist’s office. I suppose I have an attitude similar to the editors who are having the conversation on the podcast.

But it does make me long to live in a country where the celebrities and the literary writers are one and the same.

So . . . my therapist told me I was “dating around” on my books. Yes, I have four novels-in-process I’ve been juggling, and my writing group agrees: it is time to settle down. Make a commitment. Go deep.

My writing group members have been celebrating phenomenal successes in the world of writing, successes that suggest that the doomsayers are wrong. So finishing a book seems like a good idea right about now.

Of course, I took a look at my four books–my writing group around me in a circle–and I picked the biggest, unruliest, excitingest one of the quartet.

Should I be scared?

I guide other people through this process all the time. It’s easier to see clearly what someone else’s manuscript needs–and how wonderful it is. It’s easier to encourage someone else to be brave, to set and keep goals, to . . . well, to . . . commit. It’s kind of silly, but I’ve often wished that writer-me could have editor-me as a coach and confidant. Instead–and better–I am turning to you–all the wonderful writers and readers out there, electronically connected to me and to each other.

What works best for you? I’m looking for advice, encouragement and your own commitment to your own courageous goals. Help me to be brave, single-minded and stubborn this year, won’t you?

What are your own writing plans for 2010, and what’s your best take on how to get to where you are determined to go?

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Cameron’s popular idea (featured in her book The Artist’s Way) of writing three pages each morning–just dumping on the page–can teach a lot of things about writing.
1) The habit can teach you that the world will not end, your vacation companions will not abandon you, your children will not starve, if you write three pages before you get out of bed.
2) You will learn that you have an endless stream of words running through your head and that any “block” is about the arrangement and worth of those words (not to be belittled, those things, but good to shelve at certain times).
3) True for me at least: whatever you do first thing in the morning is the one thing that always gets done each day.
So, what if you want to write more than a fragment of last night’s dream, a harried “to do” list in narrative form, and grousing about your date last Friday? You need “Morning Pages with a Twist.” Give yourself a little loosening up room–a page, say, to moan, rant, angst, mumble . . . and then switch gears: Focus the rest of your morning pages on the project you are actually supposed to be writing. Start by writing about it. If you wrote two or three pages about your book every morning, you’d get farther than you can imagine. Then move on, as you feel moved, to sketching particular scenes, capturing images that arise, and so forth.
What to consider writing about your project:
1) Ideas you have for plot, character, setting, etc.
2) Concerns or stumbling blocks: what about . . .? what if . . . ? (Write: Maybe . . . and then list various ideas. Have a conversation/ brainstorm with yourself.
3) A specific breakdown of your goals–page counts, planning, daily chunks that will rise to weekly sections that will lead to monthly achievements that will contribute to successful completion.
In sum: start by writing about whatever’s on your mind. Then write about writing. Then write about the fictional world you are developing: about the people and what they do. Voila–you’re writing scenes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I am teaching (as I am all the time now), I tend to think more conversationally than when I am abiding inside my head, spinning tales. Lately, it seems there’s been a lot I’ve wanted to share that’s excited  and inspired me. Here are three of those items:

1) Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

At first, I was almost disappointed in the fit-of-my-shoes and tracking-of-miles-run-in-a-month mundanity of the book. But after I finished it, the full impact of his practice as a runner, his inevitable decline in the face of the body’s mortality, but his perseverance nonetheless, gave me the triumvirate of the writer’s being: the brain (lover of plot and planning, of revision, perfection and an impossible certainty), the storyteller (crazy, intuition-driven, passionate troubadour, who can do everything you hope and more if the brain will shut up), and now, the athlete. This is the writer who knows that how it feels to get the words down is irrelevant. The key is to put in the miles, to go the distance, to establish and maintain daily routines.

2) Robert A. Heinlein’s Five “Rules for Writing.”

1) You must write.

2) You must finish what you write.

3) You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4) You must put the work on the market.

5) You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

In a remarkable little essay, Robert J. Sawyer then takes us through each rule, showing us how fully half of all people who want to be writers fail to follow each rule. He adds a sixth, too.

(I’ll spend more time on this at another point, but let me say here that knowing what it means for a particular work to be finished—Rule #2—will make it possible, I think, to follow Rule #3 with success and a sense of integrity.)

3) A writer friend forwarded a “weekly reflection” from Mark Nepo about the long and material apprenticeship various cultures expect of their various artists and craftspeople. A perfect counterpoint to Heinlein’s light-a-fire-under-your-derriere Rules, Nepo’s gentle reminder pointed to a love of the process, of making progress rather than arriving. It’s not on his web site, but a bunch of his writing and information about him is there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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