Remember when I posted about Charlie’s first swear word? And remember how he was holding the dust pan while saying, “Shit, shit”? Well, it turns out that what he means to be saying was, “Swish, swish,” which–according to Grandma–is the sound a broom makes. (I knew it was Grandma’s fault!)

Meanwhile, outside my house there is some large-scale chipper turning great hunks of tree trunk into tiny flecks of wood. There are trees going down all around my house–old, far-leaning or dead pines and view-blocking non-native eucalyptus. We’re not responsible for any of it, but our view has been partially restored and it’s marvelous to stare out through the hurricane-shaped break in the trees to see University Avenue running down to the bay, and then the islands and inlets and finally the mountains across in Marin.

Last night, Angie said, “Go turn out the lights and look at the view.” It took a while before I remembered–I was emptying the tub and answering email and worrying and fussing about things–but then, as I was shutting down the house, I went into her office and turned out the lights. The fog filled the crevices of bay and city, lit up from below–a magical sweep of mystery. And, as an added bonus, with the lights out, I could not see the boxes of crap and unfolded laundry.

There are always cross-currents: the magical view and the piles of laundry. The swishing and the swearing. I think that cross-currents are at the heart of what makes a story. You take this piece over here and this seemingly unrelated piece over there, and put them together. It’s something like playing a chord on the piano. The individual notes create a new sound when you play them together. Harmonies and the like . . . As ever, my metaphor is slipping my grasp; I know more about writing than I do about playing the piano. The point is that a coincidence of sound–or of stories–produces a third thing, a something-else that I believe is at the core of fiction. Resonance is another good word here.

So I am getting ready to write a novel this month. Have an 18-month-old and a 14-month-old feels very different than having a 2-month-old and a 6-month-old. Those were quiet days, days given over to nursing and sleeping and songs. These days we spend in parks or running up and down the plywood board that is out in the yard or careening through the living room on the bulldozer. Right now it is nap time, and if I had nothing else to do, I might be able to write 2,000 words during nap time each day. You know, maybe just for the next 30 – 45 days, that’s what I’ll do. Though G*d forbid the nap gets cut short as it sometimes does.

Meanwhile, my students have mapped out their amazing books. They have taken up every challenge I’ve thrown at them–pitches and problem/ solution lists and character arcs and interviews and Aristotle’s incline. They know about their books just about everything I wish I knew about mine before jumping into the dark, warm waters of the writing itself. Me? I’m a little behind, I’m afraid. I have part of a pitch and part of a problem-solution list . . .

My focus for my students, though, and myself, for the next six weeks (since we are going to carry on past NaNoWriMo’s 30 days to get a real book-length manuscript), is now scene. Sensate detail. Keeping it real, so to speak: a physical world not dominated by the stutterings of internal monologue run amok. It’s the difference between swish and shit: the first an actual sound produced by an actual gesture, the second a commentary, an opinion, if you will, an internal monologue.

This is what I say to myself and to my student writers: stay with “swish”; let the reader get to “shit” through the action. It’s stronger to create the feeling in the reader via the concrete world than to tell the reader about the feeling.

Check out the following options:

A) I felt enormous pain.

B) The pain ground like glass across my eyeballs.

C) The knife slipped, and the serrated edge cut into the meat of my thumb, a sharp gash.  A blue vein severed, and blood leaked, red and bright, across my palm.

A) is just a statement. Nothing wrong with that. We know something in our heads from reading it: someone felt pain. B) is what certain people consider vivid writing. But do not be fooled. It is still abstraction, burdened with metaphor. It is a more complicated statement, but it is not an experience. C) is a description. If you are like me, C) makes you grab your hand and grimace.

None of this is great writing, but C) at least gives your reader somewhere to go.

Okay, I stole this title from Barbara Sher (the Wishcraft lady), who has a book entitled I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. I am about to usher myself and a passel of writers and hopefuls through the process of planning and writing and revising a novel.

In October, we will plot and plan, write about writing, fumble and feel and think our way to the stories we think we will tell. In November and half of December, we will write our a**es off, at a minimal rate of 1667 words/ day. In mid-January, after a respite for perspective and recovery, we will gather again to see what these books are about and to begin to revise them.

But right now, we are about to start (on Oct. 6. To join us visit http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses). And I am asking people to come up with a pitch–character, motivation, obstacles. These are good times for stories. No one can say that nothing happens: corruption, greed, ambition, loss, fear, and a lot of the unknown, looming. And yet, what to write?

I won’t say that there are two types of people . . . but I will say that some people have tons of ideas (but don’t necessarily follow through) and some people seem not to have ideas. My theory is that people who don’t seem to have ideas are just shooting them down before they pop up. Scaring them away.

It is easier to come up with five ideas than only one. Five ideas is like dating; one idea is like getting married on your first date: what if I don’t want to stick with this idea?

The secret, I think, is to trust story. Not a particular story, but the fact that caught in the happenings and imagery and relationships of a story is everything you have to say about the world. Start with a composite of your grandmother and your dental hygienist. Start with a moment when someone loses everything on the stock market. Start with a little boy at the park hugging smaller little boy in a matching shirt until they both fall over in the wood chips and start to cry. (Character, dire situation, imagery.)

When I was seventeen and had just started college, I took a class with Gloria Anzaldua (another amazing writing teacher who died too young. Uh oh.). She has us write a Table of Contents of our lives. This is a great exercise for digging up story.

Shakespeare lifted his plots (stole them, you might say) and transformed them. I’ve heard that Jane Smiley always uses another book as a blueprint. (I know that A Thousand Acres uses King Lear.) Natalie Goldberg (not a great writer but a great writing teacher) would tell you, write down, “I want to write about . . . ” and then keep your pen moving, coming back to this phrase whenever you get stuck. Barbara Kingsolver asks herself a question whose answer she does not know, and she learns the answer in the process of writing her novel.

Start with a story from the newspaper. Or the story of how your parents met. Or the story you invented about that strange guy at the corner store. Think of someone you know and about what would cause this person to change completely. Then make that person a different gender or age or race, give them a different profession in another city; let them become a fictional character.

Take a stack of index cards and write down ten different characters, ten different impossible situations, ten different insurmountable obstacles. Then mix and match.

Write in crayon on big paper. Ride a bus and scribble in a little book. Go for a walk and let the rhythm of your feet turn into words, into a voice, and let the voice tell you its story. Look at someone across the cafe from you and imagine something in his life that changed him completely. Ever wondered, “Why do people do XY&Z?” Make-up a character who does that and let her tell you.

I remember a story–I think it was in a play? or in The Sun magazine?–about a woman who told her young daughter that she was going to teach a drawing class to adults. “You mean they forgot how?” the child asked.

Your mind is full of stories. What are you afraid of, what do you hope for, who did you think you might be? The great thing about the writing experiment we are about to embark upon is that you can start anywhere, explore, and move deeply into a story. Through that story you will discover other stories, discover a voice or voices, discover what you think about some piece of the world and–by extension–about the world itself.