I am in the process of ushering some folks through the planning stages of writing a novel, in preparation for my upcoming course, Gathering Your Materials, which will operate in conjunction with NaNoWriMo but go much further.

Somerset Maugham is sometimes credited with saying, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Someone else talked about writing a novel as being like driving across the country in the dark: you can only see the three feet in front of you in the headlights, but you can go all the way like that. (The original quote, needless to say, is a heck of a lot more elegant.)

The main thing I’ve learned from both writing and teaching is that it doesn’t matter how it is done, it matters only how *you* do it. When I taught in the creative writing program at Pratt Institute, I worked for a whole year with fifteen creative writing majors. One of my assignments for them was to create a contract with themselves and me for the work they would do over each semester and how that work and its quality would translate into a grade. Each student had to contract individually, and what I noticed was that everyone came in to our initial conference and said something like, “I tend to write abstract poetry, so I am going to focus on narrative.” Or, “I tend to write really long, epistolary novels, so I am going to try flash fiction.” If they found that they stayed up for long weekends, hardly sleeping, and produced copious quantities of prose, they decided to force themselves to write for an hour each day. If they wrote best in the park, they were going to try to work at a desk. If they preferred to journal, they would try the computer, and if they read for inspiration, they were going to put those books aside.

This tendency–for the creative to try to reinvent themselves–is not isolated to my Pratt students. There are times when it seems that becoming an entirely different person would be easier than facing that next revision or approaching today’s blank page.

So the question is not, HOW do you write a novel? It is, How do YOU write a novel? And the answer, always, is that you write a novel in the same flawed, frustrating way that you do anything else in your life. Are you a list maker? Are you a fumble-blind-refuse-to-look-at-a-map-nik?

I guess this was the epiphany of my life, because I feel like I’ve written about it in every blog entry, but when I was giving birth, when I was waiting to be able to push my baby out, at a moment when most people have moved beyond language and become the animal beings that we all are, I was repeatedly asking, “What’s the plan? What’s the plan?”

So I am going to propose that changing who you are is about 700 billion times harder than getting down to business with the tools you’ve adapted to your own crazy way in.

Still, I am teaching a class, which is to say, I am offering myself as a sort of a guide, and in order to do this the best way I can, I asked myself, what do you need to write a novel? My answer is: some sort of framework (plot) to keep the thing up off the ground; a novelist’s instinct, so that you create vivid scene, characters, dialog, and so on, so that, in short, you write a novel and not a tract; and then another framework with which to approach the thing once it’s piled before you (likely, on your screen). And this is what I am offering in my courses, more or less.

Last year, when I wrote a novel draft in six or seven weeks, I started only with an idea. It was an idea I’d been harboring (and confessing) for about fifteen years. But it was only an idea. Now, rampantly, each night, it became a specific story with a protagonist who was in trouble. Lots of trouble. I had no idea what he should do, honestly.  I was still learning a lot of basic things about being a parent of two, and other basic things about writing 2000 words a day, and I had little to offer by way of advice for this guy chasing down priceless documents that offered him personal and professional redemption and the chance to turn at least his particular world upside down.

But because I had to go into a room and stare down the screen and make things happen, I did. Night after night. I winged it. And I learned a lot from winging it.

Now in the title of this blog, I am trying to make prayer stand in for planning, for asking for advice, for thinking ahead and staving off the trouble you can get yourself into if you do not. This may stretch the definition of prayer–or it may come kind of close to matching it. But go with me, if you will.

I have given all of these assignments to my students so that they may plot their novels, and I am giving myself the same assignments. (I marketed this as the course I wished I’d taken last year, and so it is.) But I notice that I am a little bit reluctant to give up on winging it, to see what emerges out of my head or heart or fingers or whatever it is that steers the story when I have two hours to produce 2000 words, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived.

At the same time, I have the manuscript from last year, and even though I think it is the best thing I ever wrote, it still needs support in many places where it sags to the ground, and it needs cropping where I resorted to babbling (in character) because I was waiting for something to happen and I had no idea what that might be. And if I could save myself the trouble of some of that, I suspect there’s something I’d get in exchange, which is a different level of discovery.

It’s the difference between being told a story–say, how your parents met–and being transported to that time and place to be the proverbial fly-on-the-wall. What I mean is, without knowing anything much about my plot and character going in, I am essentially telling myself the story, listening for what is going on, what happens. But if I know what happens, then I am going in to learn what the textures and subtleties and meanings are in each moment, in each room, between people. I am creating the experience for myself.

There will be discoveries all the same, but instead of discovering the plot, I will be discovering the flesh of the flesh of the story.Or, to revert to my original metaphor, a little wind beneath the ol’ wing may loft me to a better view . . .

I taught my first Skype class last night, speaking with people as far away as Georgia and as nearby as Emeryville about how to plot a novel. There was a little technological brouhaha at the start, but that is probably the equivalent of my not knowing quite how the key works in the classroom door and then not being able to find the chalk while a few people wander in late or lost. And then we were off . . .

It was exciting. I started by having each person say something about his or her surrounds. It helped to imagine people at their kitchen tables or garage-offices, to know that this one had stacks of math books around and that one had the empty bowl from her pre-class snack. Are we gaining access to more people or losing access to the ones near-by? At any rate, I liked having the human context for the voices. I liked the voices, too. Regional accents and varying tonalities.

I used to love to talk on the phone, but these days I almost never do it. First of all, I am almost never alone. And we can’t make phone calls while driving any more in California. I mean, I can project a call into the car, but the sound-quality is so poor . . . and for some reason, raising my voice while holding the small device of my cell phone to my head seems so natural that I don’t even know I am doing it until I notice Angie wincing. But shouting in the direction of the dashboard in my car feels strange indeed.

I’m not sure any of the logistics are the entirety of why I don’t talk on the phone anymore. Another reason has to be the enormity of the shifts in my life in the past couple of years. I hardly know what to say in response to the simplest, “How are you?” that is both brief and true. I draw a blank.

I have so many experiences and feelings crammed inside me, like the whole wheat bunnies and sand and occasional sock you find in every crevice of the boys’ car seats. A phone call wouldn’t help. I need a vacuum cleaner.

But it was lovely to talk on the phone about plot. Made-up plots. We are all connoisseurs of plot, really. Someone starts to tell us a story and we have all the right questions at hand–not as critics or as writers, but as consumers of story. How do these events impact the protagonist? What happens next? What in this character drives her to take this action? And all the questions are about character and plot together, because we believe in what people do, not what they say.

Maybe this is another reason the phone isn’t doing it for me these days. Everything is in action, and I don’t want the voice-over narration. Come over and see my babies laugh. Talk to me while I wash the dishes.

Maybe I’m better in writing anyway. More eloquent. More honest. There’s a lot of getting in and getting out with a phone call, especially if you add in the need to explain that I am on call if a baby cries . . .

I think I’m complaining, which is a poor use of a blog. There is something else I want to say about plot:

Everything that people tend to hold up as against plot is right there in it: lyricism and place and theme and character and “real life” and whatever autobiographical fragments to writer brings to the book. The idea that plot is antithetical to these things is some bizarre misunderstanding of art. It is as if to say that a portrait that attends to perspective and framing, to shadow and light, to shading and line, cannot capture what matters about a person, about a life. People’s meanings and secret hopes and quiet desperations are yearning for expression, so much so that you can start anywhere–as many writers do–start with horror or parody or romance–and still you will stumble upon these things. And if the writer never makes it to the heart of the heart of the matter, don’t blame the lithe and limber plot. Don’t hate it because it is beautiful.

In my post, “I Could Write a Great Novel If Only I Had a Story to Tell,” I neglected my own favorite kind of plot trigger: secrets. It’s funny, but writers do seem to revisit a certain theme. Michelle Richmond (at least in her last two gripping books) seems to write about the consequences of losing people for the people who feel responsible for their loss. In The Year of Fog, the young step-daughter-to-be is lost by the fiancée when she disappears from Ocean Beach while they are together. In No One You Know, the sister of a young woman who was murdered years before searches for answers about what happened that night, spurred on by a meeting with the man who was the sister’s lover, another character caught in the ramifications of loss.

My own work tends to gravitate toward secrets–what we don’t know that we don’t know. I am gripped by the idea that something there, but hidden, unknown, has a strong impact–even on the ignorant participants in the situation. In Shy Girl, Shy Mallon’s mother has hidden her identity as a Jew and her past as a holocaust survivor. Lots of people doubted the veracity of this story when I began to write it, because of course we hear from the people who are not hiding, those who believe that remembering is our only hope, our strongest activism. But in fact, there are many secret histories like Mrs. Mallon’s. Survivors who learned a different lesson: that safety lies in remaining below the radar, out of view.

My own father told me about coming to Berkeley (U.C.) at the behest of a friend and colleague. Ten years later, they each “confessed” to each other that they were Jewish. Each of my father’s first two wives (neither is my mother) claimed that my father didn’t tell them he was Jewish before they were married. This meant that he did not bring them to meet his parents. I asked him about this once and he said, “I didn’t want to give my father a heart attack.” When I was officially converted to Judaism, the Rabbi took my parents and my father’s Jewish fiancée (whom he never did marry) and me into a little office before the Mikvah and said, “Your mother is not Jewish. Today we are going to remedy that mistake.” I only nodded, but I knew it was no mistake.

Years later, when I read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, I finally understood my father in a new way. I wrote a piece called Portnoy’s Daughters, about my sisters and me. The point is, something that is hidden has an impact even if the situation looks the same as one in which that something isn’t there at all.

In any case, secrets are a good spur toward plot. What are the open secrets in your family? What about the ones you wonder about but for which you have no answers? What secrets have you been told or stumbled upon by accident? What secrets do you hold that no one else knows but you?

This week, we had a trial run with a babysitter for our boys. You see, other grandparents, a very busy but loving aunt and uncle, and a cousin who’s left the state for college, we have not really left the boys with anybody. For seventeen months. Now that Angie is my technical person and business advisor as well as my co-parent, it’s gotten completely crazy around here. So we are checking out having the boys go play, for three mornings a week, with a woman in the neighborhood and her eighteen-month-old little girl.

The woman is very nice and calm, an obviously loving mother. We visited with her in her house for a couple hours, met her husband, talked to a friend and neighbor of hers. All that. She’s in graduate school getting her doctoral degree in Psychology.

So then we made a plan to meet at a little Tot Lot near the Albany YMCA, and we all hung out for a while there before she took our boys and her daughter off to baby gym at the Y. As we stood watching her walk away, pushing the boys in their double stroller, her daughter strapped to her back, I thought . . .

What if the whole thing was a set-up? What if the friend she called and the man claiming to be her husband (who was obviously the father of her baby, but I didn’t think like that in this moment) and this nice-seeming woman were all part of some baby-trafficking ring, and the whole rigmarole was an elaborate set-up?

At the end of the morning, we met up again at the Tot Lot. The boys were happy and worn-out from playing. They were yards further down the potty-training line simply from watching her daughter use the potty regularly, and I had worked on my NaNoWriMo book pitch (for the class I am teaching).

But I realized that I am fully capable of concocting the most complicated plots, accounting for all the elements of reality that add up to something normal, ordinary, and making them align into something overblown, terrifying and, well, gripping . . .

One of my very talented clients told me about meeting a woman who had just come back from Africa. The woman began talking about her trip, and my client was not all that intrigued, but then it turned out that their luggage had been lost and they had to go into deepest Africa with only the barest, most inappropriate clothing, and then . . . I don’t remember the story now, but the point was that hearing a story without a plot is like watching someone’s slideshow about their vacation, replete with their commentary: “Oh, oh, that was the tour guide and right over there is the hut we stayed in, just behind that tree . . . ” Now, if the photographer is amazing . . . you might enjoy the show. Otherwise, you’re going to be hungry for story–happy when things start to go wrong for the erstwhile travelers. And if the photographer is amazing and there’s a story–you’re just where you want to be.

So tap into your own paranoia and build yourself a really great plot. Think about your “what if . . . ?” scenarios when the stakes are as high as they can be.

Here’s why:

Fiction is a training camp for those of us who are engaged in the risky business of life. It’s where we learn about relationships, meaning, and how to survive the worst and keep going. When my father was dying, I read Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. I’d heard about it before, but I’d been a little turned off by the grim opening situation: the main character’s boyfriend dives off a pier and breaks his neck, becoming paralyzed from the neck down (as I recall). But now, surrounded as I was by hospital routine and near-death calls, the book didn’t seem depressing to me. Like a hand reaching through the darkness, it showed me the way to stumble along. If Packer had decided that it was too traumatic to have someone get that seriously hurt (especially when his girlfriend was already unhappy and wanting to leave their long relationship, despite being engaged), the book might have been about a group of friends who enjoy a yearly picnic by a lake. But it wouldn’t have been published, and it wouldn’t have had anything to offer to me as I commuted to the place where my father lay trying not to die.

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.

I edit a fair number of memoirs, and I’ve read some great stories in them. My own family’s story is crazy enough that people tell me I should write about it. But for a long time, I couldn’t imagine taking the layered, messy, contradictory matter of my life–the stuff I’ve blocked out and the stuff I wish I could, and even the sweet or triumphant but private moments of which I am proud–and squeezing it into the form of a story. The blessed thing about novels is that they give shape to the confusion of living. For example, characters change; they grow internally, in one direction.

Do people change? (Remind me to ask this question again, when I have built up more readers, because this is a real question, and if you have answers and examples, especially affirmative examples, I would love to hear them.) One of the strangest things that happened when my father died was that I realized that the story of our relationship was over–or so I thought–and the finale never happened. There was an end, all right, long, drawn-out and dramatic, even. But the change, the perfect reconciliation, and–most important–his flash of insight that would somehow repair all the hurt: none of that ever came. Instead, there were quiet moments. Literary fiction moments:

When I arrived at the hospital, my father was groaning. I could hear him through the gray curtain that sheathed his room from the busy hallway. He begged the attendants to leave him alone. Each jostle caused him pain, and he let them know it. I came in and tried to get him to eat. He wanted applause for fake bites, and wouldn’t ingest anything. In short, it was a bad day. He couldn’t get comfortable, and his thin arm and long fingers kept reaching back to shove his flat pillow under his head in a different way. Finally, I pulled out the old poetry textbook I’d brought, something I’d used in teaching literature in a different year, and I began to read him poems. I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and “One Art.” Every poem I came across seemed to be about death, and I think anyone reading this textbook at their father’s deathbed would have had a distinct advantage in parsing the poems’ meaning. At the same time, the dense purity of the language, the close-up focus on imagery seemed the only way to use language when time is ticking by so mercilessly. I read many poems to him that day, until he began to grow tired and closed his eyes. A smile settled on his face, and he sighed. “What a wonderful day!” he exclaimed before he slept.

There are two points I want to make in today’s blog. One is that I’ve just read a great little book called Ron Carlson Writes a Short Story, and Carlson’s respect for those quiet little moments, for the inventory of the world that makes up the evidence that builds a short story, is inspiring. His key piece of advice–stay in your seat and resist the temptation to go for coffee or a dictionary definition–is probably the best there is. It reminded me of what I’ve learned from watching others about the secret to a life-long relationship, which is this: don’t leave. There may be things that make the time spent more pleasant, but really nothing achieves the success of longevity like staying put.

The other point–and I think they are related–is that my perspective has shifted, and my own story seems more coherent to me. I credit, in no particular order, time, my therapist, and facebook. Just as some chunks have fallen away with time, others have pressed to the surface. And in therapy, I am coming, at long last, to begin to understand that this particular set of experiences I am having and have had are, in fact, my life. I think that as a voracious reader all my life, I’ve sort of shelved my own experiences side-by-side with those of the protagonists and heroes (male and female and other) of my favorite books. Then, as a writer, I have come to imagine that I can go back and fiddle around, change point of view, collapse a couple of characters into one, make different choices. It’s funny, because I resist revision (though I spend a lot of time on it, in fact), but in life, I seem to have counted on it. And as Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is no rehearsal

Shame, really, because what I learned from the sliver of my twenty-year high school reunion that I attended, and from the online materials that accompanied it, and from facebook, is that I could have a lot more fun in high school (the right kind of fun, sustaining fun) now than I ever did then. As they approach forty, all those people look so decent, kind and funny and interesting. Not scary at all

On round two, I’d keep in better touch with those people in college by whose sides I was prepared to fight and live, garden and foment revolution. Instead, I am finding them on facebook, scattered across the state and the country, teaching, doctoring, making art . . . And knowing that I can drop a line to the guy I dated when I was seventeen to say, How would you feel about revising your high school ambition and being the second black president of the United States? or that I can get a status update every few days from the first woman I ever kissed (or, you know, something . . .)–this makes my life seem a lot less scattered. It’s as if what looked like a mass of yarn got rehooked to a big ol’ loom, and now, taut, reveals a pattern, amazing colors, and a patch over in the corner where I can turn my attention and labor a while. Like Carlson’s writing advice, I’ve found a way to stay put in this life, not so much in one place, but just day after day in one life, and just like Carlson’s writers, the story is starting to come to me.

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.