I am on vacation. It’s a working vacation, in that I brought the kids and their attendant need to eat and have their diapers changed and go places to play, and I brought my computer and the online course I am teaching and my blog and everything else that can now e-follow me wherever I go. But still, this afternoon Angie and I left the kids with Grandpa and Nana and went into town to have a milkshake and hang out in the bookstore, Copperfields, which happens to be wonderful. And I have spent the past two mornings in a park on Valentine’s Street in Sebastopol, meeting conversational, open-minded, intelligent mothers (and a few fathers)  and their charges and the occasional friendly dog.

Maybe it’s because Sebastopol is a small town, but being in the park here is like being at a brunch. You really talk to people. Everyone who comes into the park smiles at you. There is a strong sense that we are all here together. Not just co-existing as we pass each other in our busy lives, but sharing an experience together.

Being at a park in Berkeley–especially Totland–is more like being at a dance club. There’s a lot going on–movement, frenzy, action–and you may smile at someone and then you may not smile at someone else and you might dance by someone and talk to another person and even buy a drink for a third, but most of the people there are involved with their own groups and it’s too loud to talk for long or to everybody.

Maybe it’s the way this Valentine park is designed. Maybe it’s the slightly lower cost of living here. Maybe it’s just my being on vacation, being relaxed. I loved it, whatever it was.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Launching an online course, working with editing clients, getting ready to write a novel next month, taking care of my little fellows, figuring out childcare options, watching my insufficient retirement resources (which, honestly, I am using now instead of when I am old, when I fully expect to be working until I die) plummet in quantity, dealing with trying to get married before the out-of-state Mormons yank my right to do so away, trying to get to picture-lock on my short film so it can be finished and sent out into the world, shoring up my old and falling apart house, not to mention cleaning it . . . I don’t know . . . I’m feeling tired.

Chai lattes help. Showers help. Vacations help. Grandparents help a lot. But I have again been reminded of the root of all my misery. I haven’t been reading novels.

I read The New Yorker, and I read some blogs, and I read Egri and this and that from my piles, but for some reason, I read novels in spats. I’ll read four in a couple of weeks and then go back to The New Yorker. Today, I picked up a couple of volumes at Copperfield’s, and just now, I cracked one, and suddenly . . . I relaxed.

It’s as if I trained, as a child, to lead these other lives, in secret gardens and dumb waiters, in attics and at Paddington Station and in Milwaukee and on the prairie and inside the walls of houses, with spools for tables and buttons for platters*. I learned to expect complications and growth and some resolution. The tangled threads of my own life, with its confusion of themes and uneven character arcs, bewilder the reader I am, first and foremost.

Entering the world of a book, the voice of the narrator capturing my attention, the story drawing itself across my imagination, makes everything feel right again. In a book, I know what to do, the right kind of attention to pay. An ardor rises up in me, a feeling of connecting to life itself, a life full (but not reeking) of meaning. Attending to it is pleasurable and worthwhile and productive.

I suppose that I am at my best as a writer when I feel that way about the actual world itself, when I can peruse the vegetables at the market with the same passion for sensate detail and follow the chaos at the playground with the same curiosity about humanity, believing that in time, it will all be ordered into a thing of beauty and character, into a story. And that surely I will be the one to do it.

*The first three people to name the greatest number of the books alluded to in this list,  will win free, transferable tuition to my Gathering Your Materials course. To enter, email me the list and your name and contact information by Oct. 20th Thanks.

So I used to worry about imposing the false scheme of plot onto the delicate creatures of my creation, a grid descending with sharp edges pressing down. My friends and I spent so much time talking, and characters in books spent so much time doing; the distinction troubled me, for I was after capturing some slice of reality, even as I increasingly disallowed myself that term. (In the blush of a kind of neo-primative post-modern undergraduate view of the world, such terms were of little use to me.)

These days, I still spend plenty of time talking. Processing. Planning. Imagining. Figuring and fixing. But that’s all sandwiched between actions, big and small. Birthing babies; wiping down surfaces in the kitchen. What I mean is, I believe in plot now because it’s hit me in the reality. Deaths, traumas, births, transitions. Nothing is theoretical anymore.

I planned this whole blog out while pinned down by a baby on either side during afternoon nap. All that remains is the title.

I’m rereading Charles Baxter’s helpful little book Subtext: beyond plot. He talks about having your characters make scenes; making scenes is how characters become visible to themselves. I’m also reading Egri on The Art of Dramat!c Wr!t!ng. (The title is printed that way, with the exclamation points.) The pivitol character is the one who makes change happen, who triggers the change.

I remember Stephanie Moore, my wonderful teacher who died so fast and relatively young, talking about how writers (or people who wrote in her classes) always want a character to go from being a little bit angry to more angry, or from a little bit happy to more happy. We shy away from reversals, from BIG transitions. I guess we learn to do this in life, too. Po Bronson says that most people have transition thrust upon them, even when that change turns out to be wonderful, a life-shift for the better. People want to change, but they are afraid. They don’t make things happen in their lives until they are forced to do so. And writers are afraid of change, too, and afraid of scenes.

Stefanie Moore, by the way, was a lithe blonde woman who could dance and swear and hear one page aloud once and know what it needed. She was still gorgeous when she died at age fifty-five and I don’t think she was afraid of anything except running out of time.

So this is a hodge-podge of other people’s wisdom by which I want to say, in the words of the proverbial t-shirt: shit happens. Let it rip. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.