Three Plot Tips:
1) Ask, what do my characters (or I) expect to happen now? Make something utterly different happen.
2) Ask, what was true in the beginning of my book? What was the status quo? How is that changing? What would challenge that more? What would turn it on its head?
3) Ask, what else is going on, underneath what is going on? What else might be revealed? What do I assume? How might what I (or my characters) assume be absolutely not true?

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.

I am part of a loose network of published women writers. Lately, we’ve been discussing whether to discuss politics, and if the answer is no, in general, is this election and this particular historical moment too important–should we make an exception?

In debating this point, the NEA has come up as one specific organization that will be handled very differently under McCain than under Obama. But so, too, has the nearly inevitable extinction of polar bears under global warming been raised as a consideration. Rightly so, if you ask me. I mean, we have to write about something, and if the whole world evaporates, that will dramatic for a while and then deadly boring, with an emphasis on deadly.

I myself have been thinking about politics, and what role they might play in the life of my blog. Can one extol the virtues of casting against type in one’s novels (making the plumber a thin, gay Dartmouth dropout, for example), without explaining that one ought not go out-of-bounds in one’s own life and cast the small-town mayor as Vice President or the anti-choice hunter as a feminist trophy? Can one be clear that in a novel, choices must be real–between two goods or two evils, between a clear A and a clear B, rather than A or not-A–and still find oneself tormented by the fact that what seems from here a choice between good and evil, the exact wrong kind of choice for a novel–is being played out nationally and internationally with great suspense? (More on choices in fiction in a future blog.)

Panic has driven much of the argument for getting together to support Obama, even if some of our fellow published women writers don’t agree with these politics. (For the record, no one has come forward to say that they do not agree, though some have remained quiet and some prefer to do their politicking somewhere different from where they do their writing conversations.)

But I woke up this morning thinking that for the first time since I was thirteen, I feel excited about this election–not just panicked. What happened when I was thirteen? Well, the Democrats nominated a woman to be vice-president. I grew up surrounded by rhetoric about change: self-help change (change yourself, your organizational system, your bad habits, your eating patterns, your karma, your own tires . . .), spare change, and the inevitability of change. For one thing, it was Berkeley. For another, it was the era of the Cold War (the first Cold War?), and we knew that the choice was change or die. (This is another choice that doesn’t quite fit with the equation about choices in novels, above, but which made for a lot of earnest marching and learning of Russian lullabies and the making of several terrifying movies.)

Hence, as a child, I thought change was inevitable, and that a number of specific changes having to do with justice and peace and equality were right there on the horizon of my young life. Twenty-five years later, I am not excited to find that another woman has been nominated for vice-president, but I am hopeful–if you will–that the next president might be someone brilliant and nuanced and concerned about some of the major things that concern me. That seems like a change. And I will be glad if this country breaks out of its bass-ackwardness and elects a man of color. Maybe in eight years, we can then elect his wife. And get over the idea that we have to choose between having a woman OR a person of color as a candidate.

Anyway, I guess this choice thing is actually the crux of the matter. We are all trying to convince each other that one choice is the good one and one is the evil. It’s like sports–how the game plays out and what it means depends on who you are rooting for. In novels, you try to get everyone rooting for the same team, and yet you still want to humanize everyone. (James Baldwin was brilliant at loving all his characters.) Maybe that’s one of the great pleasures of reading: the reader gets to be the sole consciousness. No one else is there saying, But I agree with Miss Havisham. I liked the old Scrooge. Jean Rhys did write from the point of view of the crazy wife in Jane Eyre’s Rochester’s attic, but that was a different novel (Wide Sargasso Sea).

When we read novels we are subtly, pleasurably manipulated; in politics, the manipulation can sometimes be as subtle, but it’s rarely as pleasurable. If politics is a “choose your own adventure” story, as it claims to be, what can we readers do? Campaign, make calls, donate money, call in to radio stations, drive to Nevada, throw fundraisers, forward ghastly little emails . . . I don’t think we can market another story where the “drill, baby, drill” folks win another round. We have to hope for something new.

Writing about writing can be as racy as the next blog-worthy topic. Hey, I weave in cute stories about my kids and moving tributes to my past and even some political panic. (Okay, political panic is only the subtext. See if you can pick it out.)

So: you meet a friend for coffee. You chat, have a brioche, catch up on who she’s dating and what she doesn’t like about her job and what your kids have learned how to do (oink in a grunty little way when you ask, “What does a pig say?”). You get a refill of chai latte to go, exchange hugs, and leave to go grocery shopping.

This is not a scene. Nothing happened.

I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t meet your friend for coffee or that she shouldn’t complain about the people she’s dating (new people, same complaints). It’s true that I did have a wonderful wise friend who advised me at one of my birthday parties to get new problems every ten years. However, one can live a perfectly decent life–maybe even a better life–with very little scene. (See my very first blog, which is about plot and how unavoidable it becomes over a lifetime.)

No one wants to read your everyone’s-happy-and-nothing-changes book. Even you.

Tell me if you’ve managed to sustain your everybody’s-happy-and-nothing-changes life for very long . . . Or do you go in and mess that up just for excitement? But sure, we WANT things to turn out well. That’s what keeps us reading as the characters get into deeper and deeper s***. We hope that the terrible thing that’s coming won’t come; as the good people that we are, we are rooting for these characters. But if it doesn’t come, if nothing comes, if everything gets better and everyone is out of danger, we’re going to put that book down and never look at it again. Harsh but true. If it’s the last page of your book, then you’ve done your job, and you can let us put it down and go on our way. But if it’s page fifty or page two, go back and stir things up, people.

Even Pema Chodron’s books are full of the struggles she faced and still faces, from her husband leaving her to her monastery disciples or whoever fully rebelling against her leadership style. How do you think she learned all those coping mechanisms for dealing with pain and suffering?

So open those plot-veins and keep that blood flowing.

I was a kid who, on the one hand, frequently put on original theatrical productions, rigging costumes out of the bizarre items the seventies left in my mother’s closet while, on the other hand, spending significant time sitting on my front step filling in workbook blanks. Loved those. I suppose (sorry to Felicia who wanted me to change problems every ten years) that I have been struggling with this creativity/ order dichotemy for a long-a** time.

But in writing, the two come together–or at least they take turns . . . So if you have that mechanical inclination, here’s what you can look for:

Go to the beginning of your scene. How’s everybody doing? Give them little emotional tags: happy, sad, scared, confident, proud. That sort of thing. Now go to the end of your scene. How’s everybody doing now? Are the happies still happy? Have the proud been humbled? Are the frightened still banging knee-caps? Are the confident all shook up? In other words, has anything happened?

If not, you’ve got some work to do.

If you are frightened of work, go dig outhouses in the desert. Don’t be a writer. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, talks about the physical labor that is writing, walking around a nine-foot table until you have to go home and soak your feet. She says (and I’m working from post-partum memory here), if you want to be metaphysical, throw pots.

So you go back and you make sure your scene turns. Let those suckers (your beloved characters) wander unsuspecting toward what is about to happen. Surprise them. Mess with them. Change them.

You cannot do this in real life. In real life, somebody else is in charge, and while I am praying all the time now, for one little boy in particular and the world in general, I feel like an editor who can’t convince my client that something different needs to happen in this book. Of course, the stuff I’m praying for doesn’t offer the best plot choices. I want “hope” not “change” and healing not drama and for the happy to stay happy and only the scenes that are going badly to turn.

So I am going to try to make a deal with this writer-client I’m talking to in my head about what’s going on around me: if I convince writers working on the page to inject some really terrible events into their fiction, to turn lives upsidedown and wring the fates like so many dirty rags, how about you lay off the drama-trauma out here in the world for a while, and I promise, I promise, we’ll enjoy the heck out of it in books.