I’ve been on a wonderful reading binge as I prepare to dramatically rewrite my current novel project. I’ve been reading in order to learn something new about plot and structure, to gather some ideas around me and inspire me. Here are three tips that will keep your reading productive for your writing-self and still pleasurable for your reader-self.

1) You have to find a way to divide yourself. One part of you will inevitably get caught up in the story. If this is a book you want to teach you something, it had better hook you, right? So you have to hold back a part of you that is watching the whole process. This can feel a bit like the famous scene in Annie Hall when she rises up out of her body during sex and wanders around commenting on the activity.

2) It helps to hold the big picture in mind. Keep track of where you are in the unfolding arc of the story. See the underlying structure–the bones or the architecture, whichever metaphor you prefer.

3) Notice what you are wondering. Your questions, as a reader, drive you forward, seeking answers. So look at how the author raises those questions.

You have to fill the well, as Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life, and reading–more even than living–provides the plenty you’ll need to keep that well full.

Yesterday, I hosted my first free coaching call: Answers and Encouragement for Writers. A handful of my faithful clients and students joined in–but it’s open to everyone, so come by on the third Thursday of next month and get some momentum for your writing life. (June 18, 5 – 6 p.m. PST)

We talked a lot on the call about literary agent and author Donald Maass’s wonderful book Writing the Breakout Novel. I read it a few weeks ago and found it smart, well-written and, most-importantly, craft-oriented.

Nobody knows what sells novels. When my first novel was published, my agent said this to me. She mentioned that being picked by Oprah sells novels, but nothing else guarantees a hot ticket to success.

Donald Maass’s contention is that word of mouth is the number one way to sell books. This makes sense. If you think about it, even Oprah is just a person with a lot of friends who listen to her opinion.

The great good news is that this means that craft–great storytelling, compelling characters, high stakes, meaningful and resonant times and places, profound themes and strong plots, which is to say escalating conflict–is the key to writing the breakout novel.

How many people follow you on Twitter, who you are Facebook friends with, and whether or not your cousin works for Oprah will do nothing for you if you do not have a great book.

But remember, that’s the good news.

The story, the characters, the tale’s vivid world: these make people talk about a book. And craft is the reason we all got into this crazy stew in the first place, right? Other people’s storytelling drew us to the wonder of books, and somewhere along the line we started wanting to brew some of our own magic.

Think about the books you promote. What was the last book you read that you had to recommend to other people, that you couldn’t stop talking about? Post it here if you would be so generous. We talked about our current book passions on the call yesterday, too, and that pulsing feeling of needing to get my hands on a particular new book inspired me, as a reader and as a writer. It reminded me of the sexy pull of great books. Nothing duty-bound about reading them, buying them, and spreading the word.

It’s a good way to think about our own manuscripts, about how to make them deeper, broader, more powerful. How to make them unforgettable, so that people tell their friends, “You have to read this book.”

What’s the last book you said that about?

The New York Times published an article about how sales of books are up in France and Europe in general.

Two favorite quotes:

“It’s a happy message,” said André Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales. “People have been reading and they will keep reading, no matter what happens.”

“Books are a very cheap treat,” said Helen Fraser, managing director of Penguin Books in London. “When you are reading all this dreadful news in the paper, a lovely 500-page novel by Marian Keyes or a classic by Charles Dickens takes you right away from all that.”

What are you reading?

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

I am on vacation. It’s a working vacation, in that I brought the kids and their attendant need to eat and have their diapers changed and go places to play, and I brought my computer and the online course I am teaching and my blog and everything else that can now e-follow me wherever I go. But still, this afternoon Angie and I left the kids with Grandpa and Nana and went into town to have a milkshake and hang out in the bookstore, Copperfields, which happens to be wonderful. And I have spent the past two mornings in a park on Valentine’s Street in Sebastopol, meeting conversational, open-minded, intelligent mothers (and a few fathers)  and their charges and the occasional friendly dog.

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.

Three First Lines:

1) “I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once.”

2) “People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade–a lady with a dog.”

3) “Before I met Tim–who, in spite of everything I’m about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years–my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother’s house that I had to be nice to him.”

These first lines don’t tell you everything. No journalistic “who, what, where, why and when.” Fiction doesn’t have to provide answers. Instead, it must stimulate questions, in the reader. We read fiction to raise our blood pressure . . . which in turn makes us more relaxed, much the way cardiovascular exercise raises our heart rate in order to make our hearts healthy. Okay, not sure the metaphoric equation works, but you get the idea. I hope.

It just strikes me as funny that there is a tension involved in reading–good reading–but there is nothing more relaxing than being caught in the grip of a great novel or story, unable to stop reading. It feels so active, this kind of reading, so involving, and yet there’s the ol’ body, lying in bed, the book propped on pillow or chest . . .

But that’s the middle. In the beginning, we’re more tentative. We pick up the book and know we might put it down again. We’re starting a relationship with this new story, and we don’t know if we like it, if we care what happens in it, if we’re going to go the distance.

We read, “I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once.” (Alice Munro, “Face,” The New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2008, p. 59.) What? Here’s a shocking claim. All we know about the person making the claim is that he (as will prove to be the case here) is “convinced.” Certain. And that his father, if he is right, only looked at him, in the sense of really seeing him, one time. That suggests conflict. Two characters not meeting each other’s needs, locked into a relationship of high need. It’s a brash statement that goes against basic expectations of the parent-child relationship.

Try writing a strong, shocking claim like this that turns a socially-given relationship on its head.

A lot can be suggested in one line: “People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade–a lady with a dog.” (Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (NASF), eds. Cassill and Bausch, p. 236.)

Gossip. “People were telling one another . . .” A whole social world is suggested here, and an importance is given to this newcomer’s arrival because rumors are circulating about her. She represents a change in the status quo. And, of course, this is the first line of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” so the title is echoed in the first line, and we know that this lady and her dog matter.

Try introducing a change in the status quo through gossip, and set it up with a title you can echo at the end of the first line.

3) “Before I met Tim–who, in spite of everything I’m about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years–my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother’s house that I had to be nice to him.”  (Donna Tartt, “Ambush,” from Tin House,in Best American Short Stories 2006, ed. Ann Patchett, series ed. Katrina Kenison.)

There are two levels of warning offered here. The mother’s overt warning to the narrator takes place in the action of the story. The second warning comes in the aside. It suggests that the events to come contradict the eventual friendship that does, we are told, develop. Both warnings alert us to conflict, and we love conflict (when we are reading).

So try working two warnings into an opening line–one in the action and one in the narration. One from a character and one from the narrator herself.

Each of these first lines introduces at least two characters in some sort of opposition. By creating your own examples, you will suggest whole stories to yourself.

You’ll notice I’ve suggested imitation. Artists go sit in museums and recreate the masters. Why shouldn’t we writers imitate technique? I’ve found it a great way to develop my writing muscles. Feel free to imitate not only the function but also the rhythms and structure of a sentence.

I remember a fight in graduate school. A bunch of people were up in arms about some avant-garde poets who simply rearranged the dictionary and called it art. I shrugged. In essence, we are all rearranging the dictionary–because words are what we have to work with. Plagiarism? NO! Respectful imitation? By all means . . .