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.

Pounding out a novel at 1667 words per day is hell.

Later, I will be ecstatic that I did it. I will tell you that it changed my life, that I felt like a real writer (and who ever feels like that?), that the writing was better than I thought, that having a first draft of whatever level of worthiness is so much better than having nothing. Do not listen to me. I am a fiction writer; my business is lying in the service of creating truths that are better than the truth we have to live with now.

Sitting down after a day that began at 5 a.m., proceeded through turkey watching, diaper changing, breakfast -making, -consuming, -floor decorating, cleaning enough so that the babysitter will not be appalled, creating curriculum, responding to email, dealing with contracts and bills and house business, negotiating my relationship and lunch (usually at the same time), getting the nap to take, crawling out of a bed I would rather stay sleeping in, in order that I may continue with the previously mentioned work, detailed on a long list that keeps getting longer, making snacks, changing more diapers, cleaning up more (with noticeably little consequence), getting to the park to wear out rambunctious children so that after dinner, bath, story time and songs, they will fall asleep, so I can once again crawl out of a bed in which I and my tired body would so much rather stay and sleep . . . sitting down then to reenter the world of my novel, to conjure plot and setting, to challenge my character and entertain my (imaginary) readers and, ideally, myself (the most curmudgeonly reader of all at this particular moment), is HELL.

I don’t like to say this to my students or my clients, but let’s face it: a lot of writers commit suicide. Would it be dark to suggest that while the tools of writing are generally similar across type and time, the tools of suicide are both varied and creative, at least among writers, and might be more fruitfully studied in master’s programs?

I am sensing that the humor I feel in writing this might not come across on the page.

The truth is (ah, be warned): usually, by about mid-way into my writing session, I have gathered my faith again, rallied my exhausted moral, gotten caught up in the miracle that there is this story emerging, like a small piece of twine I am pulling out of my belly-button.

And I sent emails to my aunt and uncle and mother, by way of doing research, asking them about Los Angeles in the 1950s, and am getting back the most wonderful, rich descriptions. I also live with a historian, it turns out, someone who can imagine a world we’ve never lived in, touched or seen in detail. I suppose I am a literalist. While my best characters are imaginary–inspired by a feeling or reflection perhaps about someone but not in any other way that actual person–my best stories are not, or not entirely. My characters tend, as do I, to think more than they act, to think about acting more than they act, and also to think about everything more than they act. They imagine acting, but then they chicken out at the last minute.

This may be why writing is so hard for me. Writing is, after all, an action. It’s physical and rigorous. It should make you sweat. Annie Dillard writes about this most wonderfully, in her gem of a book The Writing Life:

The materiality of the writer’s life cannot be exaggerated. If you like metaphysics, throw pots. How fondly I recall thinking, in the old days, that to write you needed paper, pen, and a lap. How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often “written” with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet. (46)

This is where we are headed, my brave little group of writer/ students and I. And they are one more factor I should mention. They are marvelous. They are marching along, writing, writing, writing . . . as am I, for that matter. We post our word counts to each other and shout out at each glorious milestone. I post jump starts and technique boosts, and we talk via Skype each week, but mostly we are connected as much by the courageous, hellish adventure we are on separately at our own desks, tables and couches, in our own beds as we are by the internet.

And in January, we will be revisiting this mass of material we are currently gathering, whether with zeal or resistance. We will hike our way around it, and we will shout out to each other after each long mile. Worlds are opening up beneath our typing hands; this much I know. I’ve heard fragments of what they are writing, and the reader in me wants to lie down (ah, that bed again) and sink into these worlds. But instead, for now, I must trudge to the very edge of my own known world and invent the ground beneath my feet.

It’s hell, I tell you. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Day One. All day, I knew it: this was the day I would start. Angie took the boys downstairs when they woke up at about 6:15, and I got to sleep in until  a.m. As I was coming to consciousness, I was thinking my way through Aristotle’s incline vis-a-vis my new novel. I have been doing this over the past few days, never getting further than the first turning point, but this morning I got to the midpoint before I crawled out of bed.

Then we were packing and getting ready to come up to Sonoma, plus I had to post podcasts and technique boosts and jump starts to my class of folks who were also starting their novels today. My mother came over to play with the boys while Angie and I got things done, because it takes us about a million years to pack for one of these three day trips. We always bring too much of everything except the things we need. It takes us weeks to unpack. In fact, I had to unpack from our last Sonoma jaunt in order to empty a suitcase for this trip.

This is relevant to the craft issues that are the titled focus of this blog. Two journeys were planned to begin today, and my morning was preoccupied in packing for them, with precisely the same set of problems: planning a trip/ novel and actually making one are two very different projects, and from the standpoint of one, it is difficult to remember what one actually needs when immersed in the other.

It rained today. The boys barely know what rain is, we’ve had so little of it in their lifetimes. But today was a real California storm, and we drove through grey skies, over swaths of water, across the Richmond bridge. By the time we got to Sebastopol, I had to let Angie drive because I was so tired. Once she was at the wheel, I kept falling asleep–into deep, sudden, real sleep–only to be jolted awake by a sudden stop or the disturbances of the rain.

And then we were here, the house full of the smell of bread pudding, the boys elated to see Grandpa and Nana. (Grandpa reassuring Angie about Prop. 8: “Even if it doesn’t pass this time, it’s going to happen. It takes a while for us old codgers to catch up.”) Angie and I got to go back into town, to Cooperfield’s bookstore, on our own, and suddenly I was full of energy, and so many amazing books were being sold at double-discounts that my arms, normally weighted with babies, were weighted with books. That feeling kept stealing over me: today is the day. I am starting this book today.

I didn’t like the book anymore, abstractly in my head, but I knew well enough to know that it would feel differently coming out on the screen, on the electronic page, that it would surprise me and find room for anything that mattered to me. I felt in love with the millions of books in the world.

It was cold outside and so warm when we got back to the house, and now tangy orange flavors and salty tamari scents layered into the bread pudding smells from earlier, and the boys looked up, happy to see us but not unhappy that we’d been gone, and I knew: today is the day I will start.

I kept checking my email to see if any of my students had posted a call for help or anything else. We fed the boys. They are saying so many words now. Charlie says, “bear” as if it were two syllables but something like “be-er.” And then “more” rhymes with “be-er.” “Me-re,” he says, frequently. “Mere.”

“Writing is mere,” Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life. The full quote is something like, “Literature is merely literature; writing is mere.”

I wrestled the boys into clean diapers and fuzzy pajamas, and they said nighty-night to the dogs and to Grandpa and Nana, and we sang them their three songs, plus we sang them Tumble Bumble since we didn’t read to them like we usually do.

Leo had a hard time falling asleep. He kept pointing to the fire in the wood-burning stove, and when Grandpa came out looking for his glasses, Leo jumped up, filled with ecstacy at the reappearance of this man he adores, and all-in-all, he was not pleased with settling down for bed, but finally–and really, in not so long a time–he was asleep. It took a little cuddling with Mama on one side and Mommy on the other to do the trick. And while he was struggling and I was shushing him and nursing him and petting him, I was thinking about the opening scene of the novel I was about to begin, and about what I’d worked out when I’d finally typed out my whole Aristotle’s incline that afternoon before the bookstore trip.

Then Leo was asleep and I could get up again and finally have my chocolate chip bread pudding with bourbon sauce, and tell myself that when I reached 1,000 words, I could have seconds, and so I began. At 820 words, I was still thinking about the bread pudding, which in fact had made its way into the novel, but then I was at 1352 before I actually got up to carve myself a piece, and now I am done with my first 1946 words. I need to do 1667/ day to achieve the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 in November, but more like 2000 – 2500 to achieve my own goal . . . We’ll see.

Right now, I am pleased. I am sitting at the marble countertop on the island in the middle of the kitchen/ living room. The boys are asleep to my right. The fire behind me is dying out. Angie is typing a few feet to my left.

There are people who rail against amateurs writing novels and claiming to be writers and thinking they know something about the writing life–people who hate NaNoWriMo and everything it stands for. But I think we are all amateurs when we face the blank page at the start of a new project. None of us is certain that anyone else will care about what we’ve written, much less need it in any way. There is the root of love hidden in that word, and we all do well to remember the excitement of being a beginner–whether for this lifetime or this novel or this day.

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.