A premise is a journey. It’s the itinerary of a journey, more precisely. It says, if you get on this plane in San Francisco, you will get off in London. It does not say that all planes go from San Francisco to London nor even that all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. It just talks about this plane, this journey. But what it says is true.

A premise is not the flight itself, not the play list you listen to or the memories each song evokes. Not the two seats that you try to lie upon, legs folded against one armrest, head propped on pillows, blankets, jacket at the too-close other armrest. A premise is not the orange juice you drink, the articles you read in the New Yorker, the way you laugh at Eddie Izzard and wonder if the people around you notice. It is not the freelance golf writer on her way from Maui via Los Angeles and San Francisco and London to Scotland who does not like to fly. It is not the view of the ocean cliffs and the Richmond Bridge that you point out to her, feeling that you have been drafted to distract her as the plane takes off. It is not the baby boys you have left behind, the nap they are supposed to be taking and the park they will go to afterwards. It is not your questions about what they make of your absence. It is not your grandmother’s funeral ahead, the dawning realization that she died of old age and is only twenty years older than your mother, her daughter.

The premise takes all of this and more and kneads it as your reader’s mind will knead it, until it joins together and rises, and the journey becomes clear, the specific journey–San Francisco to London, child to adult, a person who feels outside a family to a person who feels inside a family, perhaps. Your premise looks at where you started and what kicked you over to where you landed, and it makes a claim:

Commitment leads to connection.
Ritual triumphs over daily life.
Responsibility conquers division.

Not always. Not all commitment leads to connection. Not all ritual triumphs over daily life. Not all responsibility conquers division. Not all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. But this journey went that way, and showed us something about these qualities: commitment, ritual, San Francisco.

Once you have made the journey–written the book–you read back over it and you dig out your premise. What does this journey teach you? Name the qualities that characterize the book’s movement.

This becomes the lens through which you revise. It is the unity that pulls your book together, and anything that does not support your premise belongs in another book.

Now, just to be clear, this does not mean that scenes, actions, characters and events that directly oppose your premise should be excised. On the contrary, your premise requires a good fight, a fair fight, to prove itself. Let it do battle with ideas and forces that suggest it is wrong. Just don’t wander off on a little Los Angeles to Los Vegas loop when you are going SFO to Heathrow. See?

When someone dies there is, I’ve found, a kind of internal reckoning. Their premise becomes clearer, once the whole arc stretches–rainbow-like–before you. Not that I can see anything like the whole of my grandmother’s arc, but I see that she lived a single life, after all. My father used to talk about how life zigzagged while you were living it, but looking back, it turned into a straight line. What is remarkable about a human life is that its conflicts and contradictions and layers all unite, in the end, into a single strand of days, years, decades–nearly nine, in my grandmother’s case.

Near the end of her life, my uncle asked my grandmother what the purpose of life was, and she mouthed one word: “Love.” Now, this is not the most original idea, but if you’d read the whole book, you’d know that there was a distinct character arc, that that moment and that insight represented a journey and an arrival.

Love conquers even politics.
Bitter memories and eccentric independence lead to the embrace of love.
The revolution of the heart conquers even a family whose spine looks like the post-1988 Berlin wall.

What’s the premise of a book you love? Of your own book?

Plus, I imagined I would always know these people all my life. Even the kids in school who teased me or the housemate of a boyfriend who annoyed me–I just thought the world was a lot smaller than it is. Or was–before Facebook.

Still, getting the occasional or regular status updates is not the same as curling up on the couch for hours of talk, hot drinks in hand. It is not the same as taking over the highway together in our determination to stop the war. It is a lot shorter than a three-hour-long consensus meeting to decide what brand of toilet paper to use. Less detailed than surviving third grade side-by-side. More succinct than wandering the city in the middle of the night with feather boas askew.

I just thought I’d have enough time to live the thousands of lives each connection and context promised. And I don’t. “Life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans,” is the line that has been attributed to John Lennon, though it’s uncertain he said exactly that. In any case, while I love the life I turn out to have, it is just the one life and necessarily excludes the hundreds, nay thousands of others that lived as close to the surface of possibility at one time or another.

This is where fiction comes in. The art of imagining other lives is nurtured in us, the more so now that we have so many opportunities (the good and the bad) that we have to pass some by. I don’t know about you, but I am constantly carrying on little imagined conversations in my head–with the cop I fear will stop me and whom I am, before he exists, assuring misunderstood the situation because I would never merely slow at a stop sign or speed to make a light; with the jerk from high school whom, I’ve learned, lives very near where I buy my vegetables; with the person who assumed I had no artistic role to play in making our film because I was looking after the children. Those are the defensive or vengeful fantasies, but of course there are lovelier ones.

There are fan letters I write in my head but never send. I’ve been doing that since I was a child. Now there are blogs I imagine but don’t get down on the screen before life rushes in and demands my attention. There are futures I imagine, multiple, irreconcilable futures. There are worries and fears, the scenarios I concoct when someone is very late and can’t be reached by phone.

The reason there are meditation practices and self-help books to try to pin us to the moment, to reality, is that all of us, I venture, are close to spinning off into the fabricated possibilities we conjure at each juncture. What if? What might . . . ? It could have been . . .

That’s the business of fiction–to explore the truth of what doesn’t happen.

When I was in high school, I used sometimes to imagine that I was somebody else who had been transported into my life and my body and was getting to experience this entirely other, different life and perspective. In reality, I was ten years younger than my next sibling, and lived alone with my mother. I longed for a big family. In my fantasy, I would imagine that I was a kid with seven brothers and sisters who was getting to experience, for the first time, having my own room and no other kids around. It’s a little twisted, I know. But it’s a good training for a fiction writer. We are all tangled up with each other, are each other’s might have beens and could have happeneds.

Want to live a thousand lives? Wonder what it would be like to be him . . . or her . . . ? Write it and see.

As the New Year approaches, and we all begin to make resolutions and create–in our minds–a life in which we eat perfectly or exercise daily or read as much as Junot Diaz or write as much as Joyce Carol Oates, remember that you are using right in those moments a powerful muscle that may not create changes in your life, but which can create worlds on the page: your imagination. And even if you don’t make it to the gym on Jan. 1, you could probably make it to the laptop, which unlike the exercycle can be dragged into bed.

When someone catches you staring off into space, rehearsing a conversation, playing a small smile across your face, you can just tell them, “I was practicing writing fiction.”

Next step? Get those fantasies onto the page.

Happy New Year! Come join my online Building Your Book course, starting Jan. 15, or sign up for my monthly newsletter for writing tips and discounts on classes. http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses

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.

When you live in other places, places with dense humidity sometimes and deep snow other times, you long for the pure pleasure of living in Northern California. When you live among the ambitious, people who pursue and promote their art the way any fierce trader on Wall Street pursues wealth (I imagine), you long for the pure, child-like pleasure these people–my people, I suppose–take in creativity and sunshine and a good tune.

When you are here, you congratulate yourself for remembering to buy vegetables (and not just ice cream) at the Farmers’ Market; you feel vaguely contented and you don’t think too much about it.

But I did not always live here. One year, I lived in Geneva, New York, a very small town with about twelve bars and no shoe stores on the shores of the Finger Lakes. (When I got the job teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, my sister called me and said, “I can’t believe you are moving to Switzerland.” Other Geneva, I told her.) I lived in an inexpensive, two-bedroom apartment; the radiator leaked and mushrooms grew underneath it, large toadstools that appeared in one night and had to be plucked from the carpet. I lived there without a television or a partner, and as a result, I made friends with everyone on campus–the queer faculty, and the old emeritus professors who still came to the lunchroom on Fridays, the students from the city who couldn’t afford to go home on breaks, so we had poetry slams instead, and each and every visiting professor, writer and thinker who passed through our auditorium to give a talk and stayed for a super at the old Victorian mansion on the hill.

Reginal Shepherd came one day. I taught some of his poems in my freshman literature class. They were dense, deep poems that rewarded study, and I am glad I taught them because it made me give them their due. He was charming and just nice–teaching at another isolated upstate college–and we decided to be friends. We liked each other. But then the next year I went to Brooklyn, and then my father was going to do chemo and I went back to California (I’d been longing for the weather and the simple creativity and pleasure and all of that). I never saw him again.

And then last week on Facebook, someone posted that he was sad because Reginald Shepherd had died. I googled him and found his blog, with its last posting on Aug. 26, 2008, from the hospital.

I found this link:

http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2008/09/reginald-shepherd-died-yesterday.html

offering a copy of his last chapbook. At first I thought, well, that wouldn’t be for me, but then later I thought, why not? So I asked for one and it’s been sent to me. I’ll let you know when I’ve had the chance to read it. The way the man saw slices of the world is left behind for us, poems and writings . . .

I believe in the life-and-death system–I mean, I believe it is the way things are (the way some people believe in god and some people believe in santa claus), and I also believe, intellectually, that it’s probably a very good way to organize things, probably makes our days on earth precious in a way that they would not be were they infinite. But as more and more people I knew die, I have to say, on a personal level, I really do not like the system. It’s okay with me that we move around and lose touch, but I want everyone out there–on Facebook, say–close to my fingertips, if only in reach of the keyboard.

Allen Berube was a teacher of mine one quarter at USCS. He taught “Queer Life and Social Change,” and I think his class shaped the rest of the work I’ve done since then. Vito Russo had taught at UCSC the year before and then died, of AIDS, and so people were very emotional at the end of the quarter, when it was time for Allen to go back to San Francisco. And Allen brought up Vito Russo and his recent death, and he made us a promise: “I am not going to die of AIDS,” he said.

He was right. Allen Berube died this year–at 61, I believe–but not of AIDS.

Thanks for the company in that upstate winter, Reginald, and for the beauty of your vision; thanks for the lessons in ways of looking at the world, Allen, and seeing beyond the history we’d been taught before. Thanks for crossing paths with me on this brief journey we call life, and showing me what it means to do meaningful work. Rest in peace.