Quick:

What do you remember about March 7, 2005?

What do you remember about September 11, 2001?

Now, for all I know, you were a teenager giving birth on March 7, 2005. Or, like someone I know, you lost your spouse of sixty years on 9/11/01, and that’s what you remember. But if you are like me, nothing special happened on March 7, 1995, and you don’t remember it at all. Whereas on a day, some years earlier, everything seemed to be changing, and you remember where you were, what you were doing, who you called, what you did next . . . unless you were so traumatized that you’ve blocked major portions of your day. Memory is a storyteller. Or perhaps it would make more sense to say that stories are patterned after the human mind and soul, which is to say, the human memory.

What can the storyteller learn from human memory?

1) Not all events are equal. Not everything is part of the story just because it happened, too, just as not all the marble in the block became part of Michaelangelo’s David.

2) Details become very important when life is in crisis. The memory zeros in on the physical world. (See #4)

3) Build up, backstory and filling in the in between stuff are NOT important: jump cuts are part of human memory and serve story well.

4) Actions reveal character. You are fascinated by what you and everyone else did. Interior monologue is largely left out of memory. What you wore, who you touched, where you went–these are what stick and carry all the meaning.

5) Change–or the enormous and powerful possibility of change–are at the heart of memory and story.

Story and memory are the heightened bits, repressed or vivid, that move us to peer closely or to turn away. Everything else is just another day.

Authenticity note: I was living at 12th Street and Avenue A in the LES on Sept. 11, 2001 and teaching at Pratt in Brooklyn that morning.

What will you always remember? What have you learned from memory?

Brainstorming: when the storyteller rushes the brain for as many ideas as possible. Requires getting past the censors–the modest censor and the critical censor–and letting it rip. Here are five ways to move past stuck.

1) Mindmap. Put each idea in a circle with related ideas connected by lines, and sub-ideas coming off of the main idea like petals off a flower . . .

2) Make lists. Don’t cross off while brainstorming. Just put everything down. Organize and cull later.

3) Draw. Use pastels or crayons and big paper and let your intuitive “child” brain figure it out through play.

4) Write the five worst ideas you can think of–what you DON’T want to write. Then look at the specific opposites of each of those ideas and see if they appeal to you.

5) Borrow/ steal. Use models–books and movies you love–for structure ideas, and insert your own original content. It worked for Shakespeare. Come up with several models, not just one.

I’ve been reading through the novel I wrote last year in November and December. When I finished it, I read the whole thing aloud to Angie, night after night for maybe a week. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread more than the first few pages of it since until this month when I’ve been up against a deadline with some writing cohorts. Now I know why: the first pages aren’t very good. They’re slightly terrible. Reading them I became tremendously discouraged, because I had really liked this book. But then an amazing thing happened: as I read, the book became better. Which is to say, as I wrote it, the writing became better. It’s not even throughout and it needs the revision I am visiting upon it, but it hits its stride about 15 pages in, and I was able to hit my editorial stride and read the whole thing, taking notes, making my comments in the margins, and in general being the kind of editor I always wish I had–someone like me!

The time I’d taken off also gave me the distance to be willing to jettison those first 15 pages, to realize that my character might be happy being madly in love with his fiance the whole book through but that it really didn’t make for an exciting plot, and to see that my character was wussing out on taking action not because that is more “realistic,” but because I’d been so tired while I was writing the book.

Now I have to rip out the seams and move pieces around and then resew it, without leaving gashes and tears or the bumpy hint of new scars.

I want to do everything I know needs doing before my cohorts read the manuscript because I want their critique to give me new information. I also want to keep close to my own personal vision of this book before I hand it over to readers; I fear I was mislead in my copious revisions of my last book because my goal became to please absolutely everybody and that is not only impossible and way too much work, it is actually opposite to the goals of art. These have to do with personal vision and the often uncomfortable edges where we do not all think alike or see eye to eye.

So here are ten things to keep in mind when you want to be your own best editor:

1) Read as if you were a stranger. Give yourself the time away from the material to be able to turn a fresh eye to it, to know what is exciting and what doesn’t really make sense, and also to be able to be moved by your own work, surprised, even.

2) Don’t get discouraged if the beginning isn’t strong. You were probably warming up there. Keep reading!

3) Mark what you like as well as what puzzles, frustrates or irritates you. We often can get into an editing frenzy when we go back to make changes and forget what worked about the book.

4) Keep a “to do” list as you are going, so that you will be able to go back through with ease and also so that you can review your notes and make decisions about what to do, but mostly so that you see that while the work ahead may be enormous, it is finite. (My list is seventy items long!)

5) Make a list of characters as you are going. You can make other lists, too: I started one, during that opening, of settings I might make use of later in the book. I don’t think I’ll really need them, but it helped to make me more willing to cut those pages when I thought that I might be able to use the parts I liked elsewhere. I also made a list of suspects, since my novel has an aspect of mystery to it, and in writing so quickly and without a plan, I had planted a lot of red herrings.

6) Make time to do this work. Enlist the help of your family, mate, coworkers or friends. Let them know that you have a project and a goal. As with writing, it can help to report on your progress to someone. Celebrate the milestones, too. Share the excitement of reading through your book manuscript.

7) Get involved with the story and trust your intuition. As we read a good book, we usually make guesses about what is going on: did that person just lie? Is that person hiding something? Should that person be going down that dark alley? Our guesswork as readers can be our best plotting as writers–you may find out who done it or why or what’s really going on when you read they way an involved reader does, rather than when you have your writer hat on and are trying to map a plot.

8 ) Harness the energy of the moment. If you have an idea of a scene, and you get all excited about it, by all means, go with that momentum and write as much as you can in the moment. We often imagine, when we are feeling inspired, that that feeling will always be there when we think of a particular idea. In fact, the next day, our few notes on something may be drained of energy–so if the horse starts to gallop, hold on and ride to the finish line. Or, you know, something like that . . .

9) Let other books be your teachers. Turn to the writers you love most for advice . . . all found in the books they’ve written. Look back to see how one built her plot, how another created a feeling of love for all of his characters, how a third used setting to create a strong atmosphere. When you wander in bookstores or the library, let yourself be bouyed by the brilliance that is out there.

10) Consider this your “learning how to write a book book.” When I wrote my first book, I called it my “learning how to write a novel novel.” This was tremendously freeing and challenging. What I’ve since learned is that each book teaches me how to write that book. Approaching your work as a student–not an amateur, but a professional sitting at the feet of your craft to learn–allows you to write better than yourself, to become better than your best, to innovate, which is to say, to create.

Revising a book? Join my online course Building Your Book. Early enrollment discounts in effect until Dec. 21, 2008. Visit my courses site for more information. Also, sign up for my newsletter to receive montly writing tips (in the right margin of my home page). See you on the screen!

“Okay,” a student writes, “here’s a question:

“Given that I am ending up with chunks of interesting information and scenes but not necessarily fitting the original incline, what are some tactics or techniques for figuring out how to fit the chunks together in a narrative?”

This is an exciting question that inadvertently (but not accidentally) taps into the heart of what storytelling is all about. I say “not accidentally” because when you write everyday, throwing yourself deep into a book as this person has done, you are bound to end up right in the lap of the creature, aren’t you? So there she is, with chunks.

Putting chunks together is exactly how to build a story. We contemporary readers-cum-screen-watchers can jump cut from one universe to another, from one point of view to another, from one era to another without pause. We do not need our chunks cemented with smooth transitions, with careful contextualizations, with complicated explanations. Show us the money, baby. Lay your chunks out like cards.

Cards is a great metaphor, in fact, because what matters when you are turning over one card and then the next–say in a game of War or Black Jack in not so much the card itself as its relationship to the card that comes before or after. But once you know the rules of the game, the cards can just be turned, and the story is all in the turning.

Check it: Twenty-One: First card is a five of diamonds. Second card is an Ace. What next? Tap tap: third card is a seven. You’ve either got thirteen or you’re over with twenty-two, yes? Tap, tap: an eight of spades. You’re golden. Lucky bastard. (Note: My Twentyone experience, such as it is, comes from when I was about eleven and attended a conference in Florida with my father. While he went to boring lectures, I hung out with the bartender and played Twenty-one.)

Five; Ace; Seven; Eight. Chunks. It’s the rules of the game that allow the juxtapositions to take on meaning. What are the rules of the narrative game? Things like this: Whatever someone is counting on will not come to pass; when things are looking very, very bad, something is going to turn around; when things are looking very, very good, something is going to turn around; people change, unless they are the kind of people who think they are going to change radically and profoundly, in which case, they will stay the same; actions build and stakes rise, so things can only get better, or worse–they can’t simply repeat, even in intensity; and it always comes down to a choice.

So you place your first card, and we’re looking to see what’s coming next. We know it won’t be the same. Things are going to go up or they are going to go down. We’re looking to be surprised. What expectation does your first card set up? Your next card is going to upend that expectation. Your third card is going to keep raising the stakes. Your fourth card is going to force a choice. Your fifth card is going to reveal that choice. Your sixth card will announce unexpected consequences to your choice.

So how does this related to real-life revision? Annie Dillard talks about the nine-mile hike you take, around and around a long table, when you are revising. You lay out your chunks–on the floor, on your dining room table, pinned to your walls–and you pace, moving them around. You are looking for electric connections, unexpected conversations between the pieces.

Story is about juxtaposition, as David Mamet talks about in his wonderful book On Direction Film, which is really on writing story. He’s using Eisenstein’s theories of collage–the story comes from the uninflected juxtaposition of two images.

A branch cracking. A deer looking up.

A little dog running toward a curb. A giant wheel of a truck rolling forward. Little dog. Wheel. Little dog. Wheel.

See? Uninflected images juxtaposed create a story. Create meaning. There is no narration. No voice over saying, “Poor little dog, if only I had known . . . “

This means: trust your chunks. Don’t smear loads of glue on the back that will seep around the sides and dry into white plastic paste on the construction paper.

When I first apprenticed myself to writing, I was twenty and had just moved to San Francisco. I had a very plain notebook, the kind you buy at a drugstore for a buck, and I filled it with short scenes. Then I read through it and looked for unexpected relationships between those scenes, and by laying them side-by-side, this character becoming that character, another character becoming roommates with the first, stories emerged from those pages.

I thought of this practice as setting up crosscurrents. A story was usually about at least two things, two unexpectedly juxtaposed things, out of which a third–call it meaning–emerged. The tension in story comes where the crosscurrents create suction, movement, a whirlpool.

Try laying out your cards. Shuffle the deck and try it another way. Card by card, lay out the story, until it’s one you’ve never heard before but which you know to be true.

[I am teaching a six-week-plus online / Skype course in Revision (for writers) and Editing (for editors). I am currently offering several holiday specials and discounts. To learn more, please visit my online learning center. I also send out a monthly newsletter with a writing tip. You can sign up to the right of my blog. Thanks! Elizabeth]

A student writes:

I would like you to talk about point of view – even something as simple as an enumeration of the possibilities. I told my story from the point of view of an omniscient third person who knew the thoughts of the main character but of no one else. This was inconvenient at one point because I envisioned a chapter where [his] love interest goes off with [his] mother [for a scene]. I couldn’t do that directly because the storyteller only knew what was going on through the main character’s eyes. Did I make a mistake? Can an omniscient storyteller know everything? That was about the only place I needed that extra knowledge for the storyteller.

Part One of my three-part reply:

Usually, when people talk about point of view, they concentrate on the technicalities. Let’s get the technicalities out of the way.

Generally, the point of view can either be

* first person (“I walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed me five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) First person can be singular, as shown in example, or collective, as when a town or a family or some other group entity narrates, using “we.” This tends toward a more omniscient role, as the storytellers are often part of the setting more than they are the main character. First person singular need not be a main character, either. Madame Bovary is written in first person from the point of view of a classmate of M. Bovary who shows up briefly in one early pronoun and not much more if at all . . .

* second person (“You walk down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owes you five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) Note verb tense change. Second person is a bit of a stylistic tic and tends to come in present tense, perhaps to give the impression of hypnotising the reader.

* third person (“She walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed her five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”)

Third person can be “close” or “omniscient”:

* A close third operates from inside the head of one character, or follows that one character and dips in and out of his or her head. It is similar to first person, except for the pronoun choices.

* An omniscient third is the God point-of-view. Your narrator can see all; however, this does not mean that your narrator tells all. An omniscient narrator hopping from head to head can be as dizzying and unappealing as a 1970s hippie doing the same from bed to bed. Omniscience is about control, about that bird’s eye perspective that can zoom in, sometimes here, sometimes there, but thoughtfully, craftfully. No zipping, no hopping.

The other technical point of view issue to keep in mind is distance in time between the moment of narration and the moment of the events of the story.

This is an issue in non-fiction, as well, especially in memoir. The writer is obviously going to write in first person–or perhaps I should say, likely going to unless serious experimentation is taking place, whether legitimate–The Autobiography of Miss Alice B. Toklas–or illegitimate–A Million Little Pieces. However, a narrator looking back across a span of fifty years has a different first person point-of-view than one writing as if just upon the heels of the events. Either narrator will zoom in on the events to give the reader a sense of immediacy–we don’t want every moment moderated by that fifty-year perspective–but the first narrator can draw back and reflect, while the second keeps us close to the bone of the story.

Naturally, in any point of view, the distance in time will impact the perspective such that one could argue that the narrator is a different person at one age than at another.

That’s about what you will get in a standard creative writing course. Maybe less.

But I am going to tell you what no one tells you about point of view.

Point of view is story. It is plot, voice and therefore language, character, dialog, setting, the whole caboodle. It could be said that all of these elements of narrative are doors into the same large, labyrinthine room, but that does not mean that the interconnections are not fruitfully searched.

These elements will be explored in parts 2 & 3 of this post.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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.