Atchity and Me

I am writing this off the top of my medicated head as I recover from wisdom-teeth extraction, so take it with a grain of ibuprofen and go get Kenneth Atchity’s great book A Writer’s Time for yourself. I began teaching my Book Writing Cycle (BWC) this week, and one of the techniques I am recommending is based on Atchity’s use of index cards. I’m going to explain something about this system, as I’ve applied it to my own projects. Recently, I’ve switched over to Scrivener, so that my index cards are computerized. We’ll see how that goes . . . (My To Do List is also computerized, has been for a year or so, and I’m still on the fence about it . . .)

The Math

The idea with the index cards is that you will gather up a bunch of them, doing exploratory and then focused research (which, for fiction, and even memoir, is already a lot more open than for non-fiction), and then organize them, and then use them as stepping stones when you write your first draft.

Since my BWC participants are all going to write a full manuscript in seven weeks, in November (as part of NaNoWriMo) and for three weeks in December, they have (coincidentally) seven weeks from today to collect their cards. So the first thing to do is the math. Let’s say you want to write a 300-page manuscript (at 300 words/ page, that’s 90,000 words). And let’s say you want 2 cards to carry you across each page. You’re going to need 600 cards to write the manuscript. But not all cards you create will survive to your final stack (more on that soon), so you aim for, say 700 cards. You can toss 100 and still have enough.

Including today, there are 50 days until Nov. 1—manuscript launch day. In all fairness, Atchity gives twice this much time to research and doubles the number of cards per page to four (though he’s more flexible for fiction), but we’re working in an accelerated timeframe. That’s part of the fun and challenge of NaNoWriMo and the BWC.

So: in order to gather 700 index cards before Nov. 1, starting today, you have to create 14 cards/ day.

The Cards

What the heck is on these cards?

For the “expansion” phase, Atchity has you wandering in the stacks of the library, making your way through various books and interviewing people, too. Interviewing for fiction is fun—more focus on quirks and sensate detail than just the facts. I also make my way through books on writing—currently John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, for example—and use the suggestions and exercises in there to spur ideas that go on cards.

When you sort the cards in preparation for the focused part of your research, Atchity suggests that you be sure you have enough dialog, action and setting cards. So those are three good categories to focus on. Character cards are important, too. I also have notes like, “Maybe Lucy and Magdalena went to high school together and the whole pink elephant scene happened between them.” A lot of my cards start, “What if . . .?” What if Lucy were writing a book about Magdalena’s ex-husband? What if Edward and Magdalena already had kids? What if Magdalena’s trouble about the truth of her book happened at the same time as Edward’s job sent him to Israel? Some of my cards contradict each other. At the gathering phase, I’m not worrying about that. More will be revealed. Always. As long as you keep wondering and writing down your notes.

In essence, if our job as writers is to ask questions whose answers we do not know and then to answer those questions, index cards, those neat, open, blank spaces, give us the tiles in which we begin to explore answers. Something from nothing, here on this 5 x 7 rectangle. It’s manageable and exciting at the same time. You have a blank stack of cards, 14 cards, and some bit of time in front of you. So you make notes. You turn to the world, you turn to your imagination, you spark ideas—and you write them down. That’s it. There’s a lot of intuition and trusting of your storyteller in this system.

Here’s another metaphor: the index cards are firewood you are gathering from the floors of the forests where you wander. When you write, you will burn your way through them to keep things hot.

About half, or two-thirds, of the way through your card gathering phase, you take stock of what you have and what you need. You need more information about Edward’s journey to Israel. You need more about Magdalena’s book and Lucy’s motivation. You need more dialog cards. Whatever. The last phase of your gathering, what Atchity calls “Contraction” is about filling in the gaps.

The System

And so, the day arrives when you have your 700 cards. (Atchity gives you days to sort and road-map with vacation days in between. Again, for BWC folks we are modifying this system so that we can jump in and write like crazy.)

Atchity’s rule is “NO THINKING” for the first part of the sorting. Here you are making two piles: Yes or No. You ask yourself, Is this card dramatic or not? Will it create a memorable scene or image or not? Yes or no? He suggests you go through the entire pile once and then quickly again, to be sure you got it right or to adjust.

The next stage of sorting is into piles. First card goes into its own pile. Does the second card join it or begin a new pile? Go through all the cards, creating piles. Then go through them again, correcting and confirming and looking for ways to combine piles. He suggests putting rubber bands around your piles, so you can then move them around, looking for a natural order—beginning, middle and end—to your novel. Somewhere in the book, he also suggests that you order the middle of your book into “beginning, middle and end,” and do this as many times as you need to keep the middle taut.

Basically, he’s applying non-fiction research and writing methods to fiction, allowing for a lot more open, loose application of the techniques. If you stop needing the cards, he urges you to let them go and keep writing. They will be there as a roadmap if you lose your way or your momentum.

Order and Creativity

I was a strange child. I make up plays and played dress-up and wrote stories, but I also loved filling in the blanks in notebooks. Atchity’s well-organized system reassures me. In the end, I will move back and forth between the plan and my own urges and intuitions. But note, the plan itself is based largely on intuition. Having a structure creates a pathway for your intuition. It gives you a way to begin that does not ask you to know where something belongs or how it will become a book. It gives you a way to proceed until you have a book.

Janet Thornburg is the author of a collection of short stories, Rhurbarb Pie (from Thunderegg Press). She teaches at City College of San Francisco and performs solo shows known for their hilarity. This is her experience of last year’s Book Writing Cycle:

One day last fall when I was checking my email at work, between a penis-enlargement ad and an update of my American Express balance, I found a message from Elizabeth Stark about her upcoming NaNoWriMo classes.  She offered preparation, support, and follow-up for writers bold enough to commit to writing 50,000 words in the month of November.  I’d been tinkering with dead-end revisions of a novella for a year, and the idea of writing 50,000 NEW words in one month made my mouth water. “Sign me up!” I emailed back to her.

I’m the kind of writer who polishes the beginning of a story for weeks and then has to discard it as soon as the real story gets rolling.  I routinely sit and fret over a word for twenty minutes and then scratch the whole sentence.  I spin my wheels and then whine because I don’t have time to finish anything.  Taking on a challenge like NaNoWriMo seemed like it would either break me of those habits or kill me.

If I’d tried it on my own, I would have written thirteen beginnings, scrapped them, quit, and said it was a ridiculous idea anyway.  However, because Elizabeth was coaching and encouraging me and because my fellow students were consoling and inspiring me in our group Skype gatherings, I learned at last the skill of pressing onward in spite of imperfection.  I learned how to write a first draft through to the end.  A HUGE first draft.  I found new kinds of writers in myself–dogged, sloppy, sleepy, wacky, wildly intuitive writers who all worked together for just one goal: to make that day’s quota of words.

I finished 50,000 in thirty days.  It was a glorious writing coup.  I highly recommend Elizabeth’s classes.  Amaze your friends and family.  Amaze yourself.  Write 50,000 words in November.  Whew!  Did I REALLY do that?

Want to do it, too? Sign up here.

David Woolbright is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.  A mathematician by training, he’s taken a couple of writing classes over the years at Davidson College and Oxford University. Last year, he wrote a novel. I’ve read the first couple of chapters, and it’s really good. Here’s what it was like to accomplish this:

I didn’t expect to write a novel.   And I only had a couple of vague ideas in the back of my head about possible novel topics when I signed up for Elizabeth’s first writing course at the suggestion of a friend.  I did have some free time, and I thought her course might help me learn how to build a plot for a short story, or perhaps a first novel that I might write sometime in the future.

I really had no idea that the first course was preparatory to writing a novel in the 2008 NaNoWriMo write-fest.  So when Elizabeth suggested we decide on a topic for the novel that we would write in November, I complied, but I never seriously believed there would be enough time to complete such an ambitious project.  I would enjoy the first, preparatory course and bow out.

Somewhere during that first course I changed my mind.  I found the writing exercises that Elizabeth prescribed were just what I needed to free a creative urge which I had long ignored and suppressed.  Amazingly, I learned to build a plot – and not simply the plot of a short story, but the plot of a full-length novel.

The online community of fellow writers who were enrolled in the course was especially encouraging.  We cheered each other on in our virtual classroom.  By the end of the month I decided to take the NaNoWriMo plunge and write a novel.  It was now or never.  Stopping at that point would have meant letting down my classmates and myself.

November was grueling.  Writing sixteen hundred words a day is not easy to do.  But I did it.   And in doing it, I learned that the most important thing is to keep writing and never look back.  Send your inner editor on vacation until the task is done.  Edit later.  I wrote so many words in November!  When I reread the novel it was like reading something that another person had written.  I didn’t remember much of it.  The interesting thing is that I liked what I was reading.  It was far from perfect, but I wasn’t embarrassed by it.  In fact, I was proud of it.

I can highly recommend Elizabeth’s courses as a way to get moving, no matter what  your level of expertise as a writer.  She has an amazing literary sensibility that you can leverage for your own work.  Her courses are crafted with just the right number of exercises, phone calls, and encouraging words.  The sequence of courses flow seamlessly to help lead you to a finished work.

I wrote a novel last November – looking back I find it hard to believe, but I did it.

Amy Truncale is a self-described “wife and mother in the Bay Area who loves to write and dream.” She dreamed up an amazing story last year, and here she tells us about the experience of writing a book in less time than it takes to make a baby:

Last year I wrote a novel in the month of November during the annual NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was seven months pregnant and had been stuck on a book I started writing six years before. I hadn’t even looked at it in a couple of years, so I decided to write it over from scratch without referencing the old material in any way. I wanted my original inspiration back.

NaNo sounded challenging, fun, scary, impossible and wonderful, and it inspired me. A door banged open in my soul with the fresh air of possibility. That may sound a bit dramatic, but the thought of doing NaNo made my eyes wide with anticipation. It was an opportunity I had to take. There was another very important reason I wanted to undertake this task at that time. Simply put, I wanted my daughter (still in utero at this point) to have a mother that would model having the courage to do what she loves. That was a powerful motivation for me. I’m wise enough to know that she’s much more likely to do what I do, rather than what I say. So with that arsenal up my sleeve, I set out on a journey of creativity.

As I mentioned previously, I had been stuck in my writing for a long time. I needed to do something different, something I had never tried before. I had employed different techniques to move my writing forward in the past but always seemed to end up in the same place – inertia. I was looking for a new internal paradigm. NaNo happens in the 30 days of every November. Coincidentally, it is said that it takes 30 days to break a bad habit and replace it with a healthier one. I wrote a never-ending river of words last November that created a new mental pathway. The flow of momentum broke through little dams of dry twigs (I’m stuck) and brambles (I don’t know how to do this), rats’ nests (I can’t) and garbage that was previously creating blocks and distractions, making it difficult to write anything. Plus, I gained confidence as I experienced success! The goal was to write 50,000 words, and I did that. It doesn’t say to write 50,000 perfect words that create perfect sentences that make a national bestseller (although that possibility is open to you), it just says 50,000 + new words, period (well, not just random words – but you know what I mean).

In retrospect it still amazes me how easy I was on myself during this process. I always thought taking on a commitment like this would be painful, that I would have to chain myself to the desk and force myself to do it at knife point, sweat beading on my brow. Maybe being pregnant had something to do with this new gentle feeling towards myself. It forced me to slow down and take it easier than I ever had.

All I did each day was read what I had written the day before and then keep going. I did not critique anything. Previously crippled by my perfectionist left brain, I embraced the idea that it could be as bad as it needed to be – and sometimes it really was – but occasionally it was even good. My main goal was to KEEP GOING, not to write well. I had never let myself off the hook this way before. It was more than a revelation. Once I had accomplished the goal of just getting words on the page, I could shift my focus to creating quality through revision.

There are many books on writing on the market. I know because I own quite a few of them. There is some great advice for how to go about writing a book, yet most concede there is no direct ‘how to’ guide. I suppose it’s because of the nature of novel writing; that is, it is a different path for everyone. What Elizabeth Stark has created in her Book Writing Cycle is nothing short of revolutionary, and I have never heard of anything else like it. I honestly could never have done it without the support of this class/group, specifically designed to coincide with NaNoWriMo. It’s a tremendous resource for writers, and I am grateful to be a part of it. Writing a novel is about following your dreams. Whether the path is symbolically straight as an arrow, meandering through meadows or jumping into the abyss with arms stretched like an eagle, all that matters is that you take a step, and then another…

Gretchen Atwood took part in the Book Writing Cycle last year. She blogs about “Sports Race Politics America” and has written a profound and important book (see below).

Last year I wrote the first draft of The Lost Championship Season, my nonfiction book about the racial integration of pro football in 1946, with the help of Elizabeth Stark’s classes and National Novel Writing Month. I can’t remember most of the details of that experience and for that I heartily credit both Elizabeth and the wonderful folks at NaNoWriMo.

Let me explain.

Early last fall I had been lurching this way and that trying to get traction with the draft of my book. I am a hard-headed midwesterner and thus prone to both “go it alone” on projects and beat my head against a wall with the fervent belief that if I just keep adding more effort to a goal I will get there.

Turns out I was wrong. For some people writing works as a completely solitary pursuit but I needed more. I needed structure, community, and inspiration. The Book Writing Cycle and NaNoWriMo provided that.

NaNoWriMo identifies one of the biggest blocks to actually finishing a draft–worrying that it isn’t good enough as you go and shouldn’t I really tweak that section more before moving on?–and bludgeons it with a sledgehammer. The only rule? Hit your word count. Doesn’t matter how good it is, how much you’ll rewrite it later, whether you’ll cut the entire scene or say, “Screw writing!” and join a convent afterward. Just get the words out and move on to the next day. Don’t look back, don’t hit the brakes, just write.

So 1667 words a day was my goal. And Elizabeth’s daily check-ins, weekly phone calls, and online message boards were the perfect complements to NaNoWriMo. I could have tried NaNoWriMo by myself and I would have failed. Why? No additional structure and accountability, no community of writers to struggle with and be inspired by. My goal of completing a draft had now been committed to other people. I loathed the idea of failing in front of my peers. And I got great suggestions from Elizabeth and the other writers when I got stuck. We even developed some friendly competition and gently egged each other on to greater accomplishments than we would have achieved otherwise.

And the exercises, though geared toward fiction, were a great help to my writing as well. The essentials of good storytelling apply whether doing narrative nonfiction or fiction…compelling characters, tension, movement (action or emotional), etc. The exercises helped me increase narrative tension (both within a scene or within a segment of the story), address weaknesses in the pacing of my book, craft compelling scenes and improve the dialogue. Sure, I couldn’t make up whatever I wanted to but I could choose to describe someone’s conflicted actions or draw attention to what he/she did *not* say in a similar way a fiction writer could.

I don’t remember the specifics of the day-to-day writing of that first draft because I achieved the mindset of “whatever happens, keep writing” and so I did. I hit snags and I wrote some strong passages and it all just kept flowing into the draft. To this day it is one of the writing accomplishments I am most inspired by. Sure, finishing a book is also challenging. But getting the first draft done, in a month no less, shows how incredibly *possible* writing a book really is.

Devi Laskar is an old friend of mine from graduate school. She took last year’s Book Writing Cycle course: planning, writing and revising an amazing novel. (I just got to read a good chunk of it, and I was blown away. You’re sure to get a chance to read it yourself in a few years when it’s a NYTimes bestseller. You heard it here first.) While Devi has not one but two master’s degrees, including an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University, she faced her own challenges while writing an entire book last year, as you shall see:

I think moms are some of the most creative, resourceful people on Earth. They are able to multi-task (it is practically a prerequisite of being a modern mother to be able to talk on the phone, make a sandwich, change a diaper and tie a shoe simultaneously!) and accomplish so much for their families during the day. Every day. But it is a thankless job and if you’re successful at it, you’re taken for granted. Unfortunately, it is the same in the vast world of creative writing – some of us are able to multi-task and get “things” done but we (the writers) often take ourselves for granted at the end of the day, and leave our most creative ideas swirling inside our heads and not on the page.
As a mom of three girls, I have found it to be challenging to get my brilliant future-Pulitzer-prize winning thoughts on to the page some years. Yep, I said it: years. When my oldest was merely an only child, I was writing so much – especially when she took naps and at night when she was asleep. I was organized, I was motivated, I was in charge. I was making time for myself, even if that time meant a half-hour here and a half-hour there. A few years later, I had three little girls and I was lost in the vacuum of diaper duty and late-night feedings, and chained to the vacuum cleaner, too.
My daughters are now a little bit older, they go to school and I’m back to writing again. It is a matter of consistency. Just like we make time to eat and sleep and take showers, we writers must make time to write. I was very proud of my family last year when I told them I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo – they knew I had to write 1,700 words a day and they left me alone for those few hours when I did it. If they caught me slacking off, they’d offer me alternatives: “Hey mom, can you fix A….” or ,“Hey mom, can you make B….” or, “Hey mom, why don’t you drive me to C…” and quickly I’d scurry back to my writing table and churn out more sentences. I finished NaNoWriMo, got my 50,000+ words and gained so much more confidence – I felt I could go back to older projects that had been languishing in my desk drawer and finally finish them.
I feel the Book Writing Cycle was a real asset. It was great to be on a schedule and to have a community to commiserate with – we checked in with each other frequently and our conference calls with Elizabeth helped immensely. I felt as though I started friendships, and the course helped me to focus on the book at hand.
And that leads to me to my most important point: it’s about quality, really, not quantity (although if you have both, it’s great to have both). There are plenty of writers out there who are lucky enough to be writing full-time and they are constantly stuck. If you are a busy mother, like me, eek out that 30 minutes or one hour during the day and make it YOUR TIME. Put it on the schedule of your busy day, sometime right after the early morning shower and before the dinner dishes are put away. Start slow. Buy a cheap spiral notebook and a pull out a ballpoint pen that comes in a package of ten. Tell yourself that all you have to do today is write 10 sentences in the notebook, and then you can go do something else. After a month, you’ll find your notebook is full and you have a wonderful go-to source of inspiration that’s all your own.

First, I want to apologize if I’ve been . . . grumpy. Grumbly. Cranky. Throwing small tantrums. Complaining about being uninspired. Writing blogs about futility and a passive-aggressive Zen approach to life’s matters, large and small. It’s been a tough month.

But it has also been a GLORIOUS month. Ah, perspective. Ah, the joys of looking back on the mountain over which you’ve come. The sweat dries. The thirst is quenched. The sun settles behind a peak and the sky reflects brilliant pinks and greens and oranges. You have not yet turned to see the mountain that is ahead. For once in your life, you are totally in the moment. Well, the moment and the exhilarating past, more exhilarating with every passing moment.

Seriously, though, right after my last whiny blog, I turned a corner. Maybe it was seeing how close I was to finishing. (Who said the light at the end of the tunnel is that of the oncoming train?) Maybe it was the longevity and intensity of my commitment finally paying off. I started to love my little book, and what’s more, I started to enjoy it. My characters surprised me in that way that writers sometimes say that characters can do–and what that really means is keeping at it long and hard enough that you can surprise yourself, dig below what you know you have to say and turn up something you’ve never told yourself before.

Maybe the cause of my change of attitude was reading Where the Wild Things Are aloud to my sons a couple of nights before I completed my 50k words. Reader, do you remember this book by Maurice Sendak? Max, the protagonist in a wolf suit, is getting into mischief “of one kind and another,” until he tells his mother he’ll “eat [her] up,” and is sent to bed without any supper. Well, as happens, trees begin to grow in Max’s room that night, and jungle, “until . . . the walls became the world all around.” Max gets in a boat and sails “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” They–the wild things–try to scare him by roar[ing] their terrible roars and gnash[ing] their terrible teeth and roll[ing] their terrible eyes and show[ing] their terrible claws,” but Max is able to tame them “with a magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once” so that “they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all.” This is how Max becomes their king.

As I read to Charlie and Leo, the parallels to what I had been spending my evenings at the computer doing became evident and exciting. Yes, I had set off on a long journey without my supper, and yes, my little manuscript had tried to frighten me in a myriad of effective ways, but I had persisted, staring into the yellow eyes of my book without blinking once (okay, well maybe I blinked a few times, but I kept returning to stare), and eventually, I tamed my story. Well . . . in the way that Max tamed his wild things, which is to say, he commanded the wild rumpus to begin.

The next few pages of this marvelous children’s book are devoted exclusively to pictures. Of the wild things rumpusing. During our story-reading ritual, we spend these pages chanting, “Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus. Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus.” There is one monster who has more or less a bull’s head, and the boys point to him and say “Moooo.” (Or really “Mmmmm,” which is actually a more authentically bovine lowing sound, which they know because Berkely has a little farm up in Tilden Park. Farms? In Berkeley? Mmmmmm. But I digress. Which is the great joy of blogging but not, perhaps, of consuming said blog.)

And so I rumpused with the monsters of my fears and the monsters of my dreaded imagination and the monsters of the stories I have to tell that I long to tell and the monsters of the stories I have to tell which I do not even know I know, and 50,000 words later . . .

I was having fun. Feeling inspired. Writing my monstrous menagerie. Which goes to show that you can’t wait to rumpus until you feel inspired. You have to rumpus to keep the monsters moving, rumpus like your life is leaning into that stomping frenzy and hanging from the tree.

I want to quote the next two pages (or six lines) in full, and hope that this does not violate any copyright law (which for those of you who grew up in the age of the internet was an old idea people had about protecting the uses of their texts). I think it’s okay because this book is one you need to buy and own, for the pictures, for the story and for the underlying lesson I’m about to careen home.

I also want to say that during a most rocky horonal time of my post-pregnancy year, I read these pages to myself and they made me cry, they carried so much resonance about the human condition.

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed

without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely

and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world

he smelled good things to eat

so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

I think this perfectly sums up the writer’s dilemma, the artist’s conundrum, the pull between the vital, scratchy world of rumpusing with monsters and being their king, and the declawed, yummy place where someone loves us best of all. Marge Piercy in her poem “For the Young Who Want To” says of writing, “You have to like it better than being loved.” I know exactly what she means: you can’t write to be loved, to gain love, you certainly can’t write for the love of your critics or your rivals or your mother. On the other hand, that’s a tall order, to like it better than being loved. Perhaps she had not snuggled with a one-and-a-half year old lately when she wrote that line . . .

But there’s one way to redeem ourselves, we who may not like writing better than being loved . . . who may not like anything better than being loved. If you write and write and write and write, if you write like you were married to writing and didn’t believe in divorce, if you write like writing is the way you get your oxygen and expell your carbon monoxide (remember that I dropped out of high school and forgive me if I have this equation slightly wrong . . .), if you write even when you are angry and lonely and even when you are tempted by a late-night bowl of cereal and an episode of Californication, something strange will happen. You will eventually and painstakingly and unconsciously learn to love yourself. To love the recesses of your imagination that can make you laugh or shock you (as if they themselves were one-and-a-half year olds). If you keep at the writing like it was your kid and you could not make another choice but to get up with it and sit up with it and feed it and rock it and sing to it and wipe its bottom and ask it if it wants to use the potty and mop up the urine off the floor and read it books and take it to the park and swing it as high as it can go in the swing and agree with it that, yes, that is an airplane . . . you will come to love it and it will love you and you won’t have to choose between writing and being loved.

And when you get back to your bedroom, your supper will be waiting for you. And it will still be hot.

Read the full story

To be honest, I had barely read a blog before I got ready to start blogging myself. I was perhaps a bit suspicious of the medium. It’s true that ever since I was a child, with my first Hello, Kitty journal, I could not keep a diary without imagining a future reader. In fairness to the vanity of my young self, the diaries I was most familiar with were those that had been published–Anne Frank, for example. In any case, the blog circumvents the necessity of pretending you are writing for reasons of personal growth, even as you become most aware of your desire to grow, personally.

I have admired writers who are willing to grow in public. Michelle Tea is a wonderful example. She is prolific and talented and has written with a work ethic I envy and then gotten her work out to a growing public (via spoken word tours–the infamous Sister Spit–and publication) since she (and I) was quite young. This means that she’s gotten better, and broader, in front of that public.

Yesterday in the car, Angie played a part of a podcast for me in which the speaker made an important distinction between the natural, healthy dissatisfaction a writer or creator feels towards the work he or she has done and contempt for that work. There is slippage between the two, and contempt does no good, since it casts doubt on the worthiness of everything you do or might do. Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, will push you to stretch, to grow. To try something different. (Although the boys were not interested in (their or my) listening to the entire podcast, Angie tells me that it was from Accidental Creative, which seems like a great group.)

I considered publishing my daily writing of this NaNoWriMo novel that I’ve been working on for the past twelve days (not including today, yet) and which I will be writing for at least the next eighteen days. My idea was to post a sort of blog-style rough draft of this fictional story in installments, much as Dickens published Great Expectations and other of his novels. Then I remembered that I am not Dickens. Actually, I just thought that the pressure of writing a novel in thirty days might not withstand the additional pressure that the novel be readable.

Another part of me, though, longed for the tension, excitement and sheer storytelling demand an audience would create. Shahrazad had no time to erase her efforts and throw up her pages in despair. Shakespeare purportedly scribbled lines on some Elizabethan index cards and handed them to his actors. The ur-storyteller caveman had to create some serious questions in his listeners or risk being tossed out of the cave. And not just Plato’s cave.

In general, I have been guilty of revising for too long, if there is such a thing. I have let dissatisfaction slip into contempt. The problem is, of course, that with each new book (or draft), one learns more, one grows as a writer, and so that book inevitably becomes the product of a younger, less experienced (if also less despairing) writer. I think I made the same mistakes with having children–I waited nearly until the deadline had passed, wanting to get it right instead of merely to get it done. But with writing and children, I have learned that there is much to be said for getting it done as a path to getting it right.

Then, too, watching little people grow in public, it becomes clear to me that nothing can eclipse the brilliance of embracing wherever you are in the moment. I think of Charlie clapping his little hands together in self-approval when he shoots a basket or puts away a toy. I think of Leo’s pleasure in learning to say the “O” in E I E I ____. We delight in them when they can hold their heads up and then when they can play peek-a-boo and then when they can feed themselves a bite and then when they can walk and then when they can say an animal sound and then when they can make a joke and then when they can read a book . . . and they learn to delight in themselves, too. At one-and-a-half (or -quarter), no one is looking back and saying, “Hmmm, I didn’t used to be able to walk. What a loser. I should have stayed in until I knew more.”

Whatever its flaws, reality writing has a lot going for it over its fellows in television. I used to worry that people would stop leaving the kinds of informal, intimate written records that our parents and grandparents left–letters and diaries. Blogs are not the same, of course. But this is what I started out to say: I have become a convert. I read blogs now. At the end of the night, for instance, I check in on the progress of the cutest, bravest little guy and his amazing moms at Simon Lev, and I always read Amy Wilensky’s amazing entry at Seven Hundred Fifty Words. I am learning about organization and Serenity for the Self-Employed from Heather Boerner, about How Not to Write from Jamie Grove, and on and on . . . Words have always been my medium, and it is a great pleasure to find this living stream of them at this time when I am most house-bound.

I would love to know: what blogs do you read?

Thanksgiving is approaching, and my title gives the misleading impression that this post will have to do with the gratitude you might offer up to whomever you believe deserves it. For many of you, November may be the month during which most of your consideration of turkeys takes place. For others, it also the time in which the majority of your writing happens (if you are participating successfully in NaNoWriMo).

At our house, however, we have a flock (pack? gaggle?) of wild turkeys living in our yard. These enormous, reptilian creatures gather in our driveway or behind our house to preen and prance. The males puff up their pretty feathers and fan out their tails. They gobble. Really. They say, “Gobblegobblegobblegobble.” But most wondrously of all, they fly. Yes, these are muscly, tough birds who would have no business on your table. At dusk, they stand together some yards from their favorite tall pine trees, and one at a time, they make a sort of running lift off and soar up to a high branch. Soar may be the wrong word. Ricochet is wrong in a different way (they don’t bounce off and come back), but better.

I turn to Angie. “What verb would you use to describe the turkeys flying to the trees?”

“What verb?”

“Mmm hmm.”

The sound of her mouse clicking and the hum of her computer fill a moment before she says, “Struggling.”

Let’s say that a haiku is a humming bird, fast, small, as much suggested as seen. A short story is a sparrow or perhaps a blue jay, depending on its attitude, but at any rate, a bird that can take off, fly and land with ease–compactly built for just this one activity.

A novel is a wild turkey.

It has wings; yes it does. And those wings can, in fact, carry the weight of its enormous body, its round cargo. By pressing itself as flat as it can and reaching with its neck toward the height of its goal, by believing in its power and by collecting its mates around it for encouragement, the turkey can attain a branch way up above the roof of our house.

In the morning, at dawn, the turkeys come back down. And because they are privileged to sleep a little bit later than we do, our early morning ritual is to stand at the living room window and watch them. There are maybe a dozen up in a couple of giant trees, and while they obviously know who is going to go when, we do not. We chat and make animal noises (Angie and I tending toward the first and the boys tending toward the second) until one suddenly pitches itself earthward. You hardly believe it will make it down without crashing. The bird itself seems no more certain. The excitement in all of us–observers and flier alike–is palpable. Again the bird tries to flatten itself into something sleek, something that might become airboren. Always, the awkward heft of the creature contradicts this effort. And yet, each time, it skids into the fallen eucalyptus bark and pine needles and restores itself to its round, reptilian dignity.

Yes, a turkey is a novel; a novel is a turkey. There is a wonder in seeing a tiny bird dart here and there, in seeing a hawk soar in the break in our trees through which we can see the bay and the hills of Marin. But none of these contain the humor, the humanity, if you will, the epic thrill–will she? won’t she?–of the turkey’s journey between earth and tree.