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!

Sistine Chapel

I was sitting with a delightful group of published novelists recently and the conversation turned to complaints about the market: why must everything be novel-length? What if you’ve written a novella and don’t want to do more? Why must stories be linked to get any attention? Etc. etc. If you spend any time with writers, you’ve heard some version of the conversation. It boils down to a lament that the market wants a voice in shaping MY art.

Look folks, said I. The Sistine Chapel masterpiece had to fit on the ceiling. Shakespeare’s plays had to have five acts and keep standing crowds happy enough that they wouldn’t throw tomatoes. Art has never functioned independently of the market.

And most of the time, we are the market: we are those finicky readers who want to be pulled into a story as much as we want the language to thrill us, who go for the buoyant luxury of a full-length novel, rather than the crowded diversity of a gathering of stories.

We writers want to be read but then we act as if our readers should be devoted in the manner of parents—indulgent, blindly convinced that we are brilliant. And yet, most writers I know are highly accomplished people who’ve found ONLY IN WRITING a place where they have never quite mastered it once and for all, where they can always do better, always do more. And much as we all complain, I venture to guess that it is that challenge that keeps us all here, sweating and bleeding onto the blank page.

What inspiration do you get from the market? Do you thrive on challenge?

dumpsters

I’m writing 1000 words/ weekday on this second first draft of my novel. I’m constantly reminding myself that part of the purpose of early drafting is to write too much, to learn, discover, invent, to tell myself the story so that I can transform it into scene and figure out how to dole it out to my reader.

Yesterday, on my class call, I went on a bit of a rant. But I was pleased with the truth of it and thought I’d share some of it with you.

We have a horn player in a professional and well-respected symphony who is writing his first novel in our group. And he is often participating in calls on his way to rehearsals.

And it occurred to me that writing is the only art where people want not to have to practice. We not only want this, we expect it, and are disappointed when much of what we write is not good enough for public consumption. We want everything we do to be performance—to be consumed (and paid for) with delight by our customers.

Well, maybe we’d be okay with about a 90/ 10 ratio of performance to practice. If we had to cut 10%, we could deal with that. But as in any art and any sport, the ratio is something more like the reverse of that: 10/90. A runner doesn’t go a block or two here or there, saving up the real push for the Big Event Marathon. A pianist doesn’t insist that her seven-year-old lessons be included in her Carnegie Hall debut.

Why then do we writers feel that we are being “inefficient” if we write scenes several times before we nail it, or if we throw out 2/3rds of a draft?

1)   Don’t tread water. Keep moving, ideally in the same direction. This means that you are not hitting the same point over and over again. Hit it and go on. What’s next?

2)   Go back and re-read what you wrote over the past couple of days. This takes a certain kind of discipline, because you are likely to hear the angry, frustrated voice of the inner critic telling you just what he or she thinks of what you’ve written. So you must find a way to read just for what’s there, for what’s working, if you must—but better not to even ask yourself if it’s working. Just see what is there and from that, arrive at what comes next.

3)   Put your hands on the keyboard. Close your eyes. Know, powerfully, that what is coming next will come to you. Trust the inkling. Grab it. Go.

4)   Make a left turn, if you can’t keep going forward. If you start to get stuck, just make something happen. Do it as an experiment. You are going to write many books, and many drafts of this book. There is no way to avoid  writing it wrong some of the time, unless you skip out on writing it right, too. So loosen up, get it wrong, and see what you learn.

5)   Remember that water bouys you up if you keep breathing. So, too, will all the swirling matter of your book support your further progress. Lean into it. Breathe, relax, and float. To reverse the poem, you are “not drowning, but swimming “ . . .

What keeps you writing?

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?

Here are five sure-cure tiny miracles, when the colorful lights glimmering in the distance hail from the top of a police car:

1) Write a sentence. Just one. You can do it on a post-it if you want to. Or in your journal, if you can find it. Or on a napkin. Just. Write. One. Sentence. Ah . . .

2) Give someone a sentence as a gift. Say, “I wrote this sentence for you. Here.” Then read it to them.

3) When your hands are full–of groceries, plumbing tools, children, tissues, moving boxes–daydream about your book. Ask your storyteller for a little tale about your characters and let it wash over you. The world in your head is still growing even if your manuscript is not.

4) Ask for time as your holiday present. An hour in a cafe with your laptop. A bubble bath with your journal and favorite pen. Ask your partner, ask your children, ask yourself. Take the yes and run with it!

5) In any given moment when your story world seems miles away, take a moment to discover three things:

1) human passion, right there in the room with you, in the fight between your kids, in your partner’s insistence on checking email, in the way the dishes stack up because of our ceaseless and delighted appetites.

2) obstacles, the meaty stuff of plot, right there in the street with you, in the bus that doesn’t stop, the parking place that doesn’t emerge,

3) human dilemmas, the choices that seem insurmountable in the grocery store, in the few minutes and many responsibilities of your day, in the way that you are pulled in so many directions because you want to write and want to pull of your holiday celebrations and even want something to make for dinner tomorrow night . . .

You are learning and growing as a writer all the time. See? To master creating trouble you have to live through some and keep connected to your writing self  . . .

What miracles do you want? What miracles have you stumbled across?Please post a comment and let me know!

Brainstorming: when the storyteller rushes the brain for as many ideas as possible. Requires getting past the censors–the modest censor and the critical censor–and letting it rip.

1) Mindmap. Put each idea in a circle with related ideas connected by lines, and sub-ideas coming off of the main idea like petals off a flower . . .

2) Make lists. Don’t cross off while brainstorming. Just put everything down. Organize and cull later.

3) Draw. Use pastels or crayons and big paper and let your intuitive “child” brain figure it out through play.

4) Write the five worst ideas you can think of–what you DON’T want to write. Then look at the specific opposites of each of those ideas and see if they appeal to you.

5) Borrow/ steal. Use models–books and movies you love–for structure ideas, and insert your own original content. It worked for Shakespeare. Come up with several models, not just one.

Drafting will, you think, nail down your story. But revision forces a new vision, and again, all doors open, all worlds beckon.

You’d think that if the problem were an embarrassment of riches, the answer would be discipline, restriction. But no. The answer is to write more. Sigh. Isn’t that always the answer?

Seriously, though: if you are trying to figure something out about your book, instead of struggling and reaching for the right, the best, answer, come up with a list. Three possible endings. Seven ways to up the stakes. Five ways to turn the scene. Sometimes, you’ll find a way to use more than one, and sometimes you’ll find your way to the one that excites and moves you. But you won’t be stuck anymore. And chances are, you’ll loosen up and arrive at options you would not otherwise have considered.

This is how we move from trying to get it right to getting it written!

I ran a coaching call this morning made up of a group of writers most of whom had finished or were nearly finishing a first book—and by finish I mean putting on the final touches, NOT completing a rough draft. They asked questions and shared techniques, and each approach that had worked for someone sounded wise and wonderful. One said that he wrote slowly, that it took him a long time each day to reach his minimum word count.

“I’m very tolerant of stillness,” Jonathem Letham says in an interview in this month’s Poets & Writers. “I don’t mind sitting there for half an hour. I’d rather not move my hands just to move them; I’ll wait for the right thing.”

This makes so much sense to me, and yet another writer client on the call this morning talked about how effective “Write or Die” is for her, Dr. Wicked’s online program where you set a word count goal and a time goal, and the screen goads you not to stop typing, flashing bright colors and wailing unpleasant tunes at you if you stop, or—at a more extreme setting—eating backwards the words you’ve already typed if you don’t begin again to add more. This works for me, too. It breaks me past the brain’s ceaseless desire for the perfect plan to be in place before embarking on any actual writing. It allows me to discover what my storyteller has to say if I type fast enough that I can listen only to her and have to shut out the other voices, harsh and critical and terribly smart, that would rather I not write at all when you come down to it.

Another writer wanted to know if she should write chronologically or structurally through the story or merely pick a juicy place to work and labor there for the given day. One client responded that he’d gone straight through the story, following or changing the loose plan he’d made. This allows for the momentum of storytelling—and then what? And then what?—to keep your writing travelling forward. On the other hand, another client got on the call and reported that she’d chosen scenes nearly at random from all over the book and later strung them together, and now was filling in holes in a similar jumping around mode. This allows you to go where the energy is, to make discoveries both in the writing and in the linking, never to get stuck or bored.

As always, we come back to my number one rule for writing: Whatever works. Just make sure your athlete writer sweats and gets her heart rate up and pumping. Try this or that approach, hone your technique, and rewrite rewrite rewrite, but whatever else you do, write. And that’s what I love about NaNoWriMo.