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 . . .

Some years before I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I dropped out of high school. Before I dropped out of high school I wrote a paper on Billy Budd which my teacher, a notorious hard-a**, read aloud to the class. This is not the moment that made me become an English professor or a writer. Because, you see, I had not read the book.

I report this with shame now (though let me be clear: I did write the paper, based on class discussions and lectures), but it makes a good frame for my blog about the presidential debate, which is recorded and waiting for me, but which I did not watch live.

The problem with not watching the debate live is that its “liveness” is the only exciting thing about it. Sure, the first time around we (that is to say, every single person who posts their status on my facebook page and I) hoped Obama would wipe up the stage with McCain’s Maverick underthings, but the Vice-presidential debate taught us that there is NO WAY TO LOSE one of these things, because unlike an election, there is no Supreme Court to decide . . .

Once it’s taken place, ideally with shots aplenty and your rowdy, like-minded friends around you, the luster wears off instantly. The pumpkins are pumpkins and you know when you press “play” that they are not going to turn into coaches. The other glass slipper has not dropped. It’s like watching the World Series on TIVO when your team has lost and you know it. (I think.)

So I turn to my sources and try to do a little analysis.

Here is what I gather: McCain uses the term “friends” as loosely as Facebook does. People feel nauseous, and while some are driving to undecided states, others are doing pagan dances and crossing fingers, toes and eyes. Yes, more than anything else, this election has brought prayer back into the lives of the largely godless lefties who litter my Facebook page.

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.