So . . . my therapist told me I was “dating around” on my books. Yes, I have four novels-in-process I’ve been juggling, and my writing group agrees: it is time to settle down. Make a commitment. Go deep.

My writing group members have been celebrating phenomenal successes in the world of writing, successes that suggest that the doomsayers are wrong. So finishing a book seems like a good idea right about now.

Of course, I took a look at my four books–my writing group around me in a circle–and I picked the biggest, unruliest, excitingest one of the quartet.

Should I be scared?

I guide other people through this process all the time. It’s easier to see clearly what someone else’s manuscript needs–and how wonderful it is. It’s easier to encourage someone else to be brave, to set and keep goals, to . . . well, to . . . commit. It’s kind of silly, but I’ve often wished that writer-me could have editor-me as a coach and confidant. Instead–and better–I am turning to you–all the wonderful writers and readers out there, electronically connected to me and to each other.

What works best for you? I’m looking for advice, encouragement and your own commitment to your own courageous goals. Help me to be brave, single-minded and stubborn this year, won’t you?

What are your own writing plans for 2010, and what’s your best take on how to get to where you are determined to go?

Atchity and Me

I am writing this off the top of my medicated head as I recover from wisdom-teeth extraction, so take it with a grain of ibuprofen and go get Kenneth Atchity’s great book A Writer’s Time for yourself. I began teaching my Book Writing Cycle (BWC) this week, and one of the techniques I am recommending is based on Atchity’s use of index cards. I’m going to explain something about this system, as I’ve applied it to my own projects. Recently, I’ve switched over to Scrivener, so that my index cards are computerized. We’ll see how that goes . . . (My To Do List is also computerized, has been for a year or so, and I’m still on the fence about it . . .)

The Math

The idea with the index cards is that you will gather up a bunch of them, doing exploratory and then focused research (which, for fiction, and even memoir, is already a lot more open than for non-fiction), and then organize them, and then use them as stepping stones when you write your first draft.

Since my BWC participants are all going to write a full manuscript in seven weeks, in November (as part of NaNoWriMo) and for three weeks in December, they have (coincidentally) seven weeks from today to collect their cards. So the first thing to do is the math. Let’s say you want to write a 300-page manuscript (at 300 words/ page, that’s 90,000 words). And let’s say you want 2 cards to carry you across each page. You’re going to need 600 cards to write the manuscript. But not all cards you create will survive to your final stack (more on that soon), so you aim for, say 700 cards. You can toss 100 and still have enough.

Including today, there are 50 days until Nov. 1—manuscript launch day. In all fairness, Atchity gives twice this much time to research and doubles the number of cards per page to four (though he’s more flexible for fiction), but we’re working in an accelerated timeframe. That’s part of the fun and challenge of NaNoWriMo and the BWC.

So: in order to gather 700 index cards before Nov. 1, starting today, you have to create 14 cards/ day.

The Cards

What the heck is on these cards?

For the “expansion” phase, Atchity has you wandering in the stacks of the library, making your way through various books and interviewing people, too. Interviewing for fiction is fun—more focus on quirks and sensate detail than just the facts. I also make my way through books on writing—currently John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, for example—and use the suggestions and exercises in there to spur ideas that go on cards.

When you sort the cards in preparation for the focused part of your research, Atchity suggests that you be sure you have enough dialog, action and setting cards. So those are three good categories to focus on. Character cards are important, too. I also have notes like, “Maybe Lucy and Magdalena went to high school together and the whole pink elephant scene happened between them.” A lot of my cards start, “What if . . .?” What if Lucy were writing a book about Magdalena’s ex-husband? What if Edward and Magdalena already had kids? What if Magdalena’s trouble about the truth of her book happened at the same time as Edward’s job sent him to Israel? Some of my cards contradict each other. At the gathering phase, I’m not worrying about that. More will be revealed. Always. As long as you keep wondering and writing down your notes.

In essence, if our job as writers is to ask questions whose answers we do not know and then to answer those questions, index cards, those neat, open, blank spaces, give us the tiles in which we begin to explore answers. Something from nothing, here on this 5 x 7 rectangle. It’s manageable and exciting at the same time. You have a blank stack of cards, 14 cards, and some bit of time in front of you. So you make notes. You turn to the world, you turn to your imagination, you spark ideas—and you write them down. That’s it. There’s a lot of intuition and trusting of your storyteller in this system.

Here’s another metaphor: the index cards are firewood you are gathering from the floors of the forests where you wander. When you write, you will burn your way through them to keep things hot.

About half, or two-thirds, of the way through your card gathering phase, you take stock of what you have and what you need. You need more information about Edward’s journey to Israel. You need more about Magdalena’s book and Lucy’s motivation. You need more dialog cards. Whatever. The last phase of your gathering, what Atchity calls “Contraction” is about filling in the gaps.

The System

And so, the day arrives when you have your 700 cards. (Atchity gives you days to sort and road-map with vacation days in between. Again, for BWC folks we are modifying this system so that we can jump in and write like crazy.)

Atchity’s rule is “NO THINKING” for the first part of the sorting. Here you are making two piles: Yes or No. You ask yourself, Is this card dramatic or not? Will it create a memorable scene or image or not? Yes or no? He suggests you go through the entire pile once and then quickly again, to be sure you got it right or to adjust.

The next stage of sorting is into piles. First card goes into its own pile. Does the second card join it or begin a new pile? Go through all the cards, creating piles. Then go through them again, correcting and confirming and looking for ways to combine piles. He suggests putting rubber bands around your piles, so you can then move them around, looking for a natural order—beginning, middle and end—to your novel. Somewhere in the book, he also suggests that you order the middle of your book into “beginning, middle and end,” and do this as many times as you need to keep the middle taut.

Basically, he’s applying non-fiction research and writing methods to fiction, allowing for a lot more open, loose application of the techniques. If you stop needing the cards, he urges you to let them go and keep writing. They will be there as a roadmap if you lose your way or your momentum.

Order and Creativity

I was a strange child. I make up plays and played dress-up and wrote stories, but I also loved filling in the blanks in notebooks. Atchity’s well-organized system reassures me. In the end, I will move back and forth between the plan and my own urges and intuitions. But note, the plan itself is based largely on intuition. Having a structure creates a pathway for your intuition. It gives you a way to begin that does not ask you to know where something belongs or how it will become a book. It gives you a way to proceed until you have a book.

David Woolbright is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.  A mathematician by training, he’s taken a couple of writing classes over the years at Davidson College and Oxford University. Last year, he wrote a novel. I’ve read the first couple of chapters, and it’s really good. Here’s what it was like to accomplish this:

I didn’t expect to write a novel.   And I only had a couple of vague ideas in the back of my head about possible novel topics when I signed up for Elizabeth’s first writing course at the suggestion of a friend.  I did have some free time, and I thought her course might help me learn how to build a plot for a short story, or perhaps a first novel that I might write sometime in the future.

I really had no idea that the first course was preparatory to writing a novel in the 2008 NaNoWriMo write-fest.  So when Elizabeth suggested we decide on a topic for the novel that we would write in November, I complied, but I never seriously believed there would be enough time to complete such an ambitious project.  I would enjoy the first, preparatory course and bow out.

Somewhere during that first course I changed my mind.  I found the writing exercises that Elizabeth prescribed were just what I needed to free a creative urge which I had long ignored and suppressed.  Amazingly, I learned to build a plot – and not simply the plot of a short story, but the plot of a full-length novel.

The online community of fellow writers who were enrolled in the course was especially encouraging.  We cheered each other on in our virtual classroom.  By the end of the month I decided to take the NaNoWriMo plunge and write a novel.  It was now or never.  Stopping at that point would have meant letting down my classmates and myself.

November was grueling.  Writing sixteen hundred words a day is not easy to do.  But I did it.   And in doing it, I learned that the most important thing is to keep writing and never look back.  Send your inner editor on vacation until the task is done.  Edit later.  I wrote so many words in November!  When I reread the novel it was like reading something that another person had written.  I didn’t remember much of it.  The interesting thing is that I liked what I was reading.  It was far from perfect, but I wasn’t embarrassed by it.  In fact, I was proud of it.

I can highly recommend Elizabeth’s courses as a way to get moving, no matter what  your level of expertise as a writer.  She has an amazing literary sensibility that you can leverage for your own work.  Her courses are crafted with just the right number of exercises, phone calls, and encouraging words.  The sequence of courses flow seamlessly to help lead you to a finished work.

I wrote a novel last November – looking back I find it hard to believe, but I did it.

When I was in college, I participated in a study of dreams. Each night for perhaps a month, I would open up my  journal, write down “Dreams” and the next day’s date, and then go to sleep. In the morning, as soon as I woke up, I would record everything I could remember about my dreams from the night before. At first, this only took a few minutes. I noted fragments and then got up. But as I kept at it, I remembered more and more of my dreams, and the notebook began to fill with complex scenes, juxtaposed images, long, involved dreamscapes.

Writing a novel at a pace evolves much the same way. At first, if you have not been writing fiction every day, the stories inside you stay hidden. But if you keep the faith, if you boldly title the top of a blank page with your intention to fill it, the stories become willing to appear before your conscious mind. You begin to see–through the act of recording–the depth and the breadth of them, their relationships to each other, the wild, rich world of images that dances in your own mind.

The conscious mind does not always react well to this invasion. It has been taught–painstakingly and slowly–to fear and doubt the products of its sunken treasureship. Whatever you are doing, the conscious mind will not be pleased. At first. You are sneaking around the Berlin walls and barbed wire that want to KEEP OUT the connective, creative worlds inside you. And how are you doing this? By showing up every day. By facing the blank page and letting it be an invitation to your imagination. By being willing to be “wrong” or “bad;” indeed, by stepping outside of those definitions altogether.

Leo woke up early from his nap yesterday. I was there in bed with him, but he sat up and began to cry, and then pointed to the door. “Nursy?” I asked him. He shook his head, stuttering, “No, no, no, no” through his sobs. He didn’t want me to hug him or comfort him. He pointed to the door again, and so we left the room and went downstairs. In the living room he pointed to the empty bookshelf, and I swear I thought that maybe he was seeing my father’s ghost. We do live in his old house, in our raucous, messy way that my father would both have loved and hated. But mostly, I had just never seen Leo so inconsolably upset. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him turn down nursy, unless maybe there was a dog or a slide nearby.

Now I think that perhaps he had had his first bad dream. Well, actually both boys do their share of crying in their sleep, and one of the things we learned from parenting books is not to rush in and wake a sleeping baby just because he is crying. No one knows why we dream. It may be a way to process our day. To integrate our feelings . . . But even people who tell you that they do not dream, do. We all dream. Not all of us pay attention.

The act of paying attention is the radical part of being a writer. It’s also what’s exhausting (and rewarding) about being a parent.

The dream study returned my dreams with their analysis. They had counted up the number of times various objects had turned up in my dreams. They told me that I didn’t wear Burkenstocks. I remember that I had confused the words “president” and “pregnant”–which contained a world of stories they did not even try to guess or fathom. I was disappointed. At nineteen, I wanted someone to study my dreams and learn my hidden self, see my potential, marvel at the vivid worlds that turned up when I was willing to take notes on my nights. I was a dancing princess, and they were looking at my worn out shoes and seeing only poverty.

I am afraid this line of thinking could lead me into another diatribe against critics–and my gentlereader critic pled so well for his profession, its own “suspect class.” (This is the term for a protected minority, as it turns out.)

So I will jump to another square and ask, How do you create the possibility for creativity in your life? How do you made the blank space that will fill from beneath?

It’s a funny day. The fog gathered around my house this morning, turning everything gray and soft. Now the sun has broken through, but inside my head it still feels gray and soft. I’m in a different library, in the teen room, surrounded by the books that formed me. When I was a child, my father mostly read Scientific American and The New Yorker, and my mother read books about healthy diets and finances and thing. I didn’t know there were adult novels when I was little–though I was delighted to learn that there were.

What are the stories burning inside you? What are the books you desperately want to read that do not exist?

I put an ad on Craigslist for a babysitter and received, along with a passel of nice replies, the following:

“Who gave you the right to have kids? Under Gods law only a man and a women can have kids/raise kids, poor kids what example r u setting foe their future ? In school for instance, ohh yes I have 2 moms, right? They are going to ask, where is your father. Find God get them a real father, meaning! Get a man stop this sin, God made the woman for the man to rule this earth not the sick and depravation you are causing. Find God, you still have time to repent”

My own righteousness lies all in the practice of grammar, I suppose. Perhaps school is to grammar as church is to god. There are lots of people who go to school and learn nothing about grammar. There are lots of people who go to school everyday, but who do not care about grammar one little bit. On the other hand, there are people who forget that all human languages have grammar; school is not required for grammar to flourish. We humans develop systems for understanding each other whenever we gather together.

This is what I have to say to the man who is concerned about the depravation I am causing.

A long time ago, before I knew her, I took a class with Eileen Myles, and she had us watch an old movie with the sound turned off and to write as we watched. We were narrating the movie, essentially. Similarly, I could list off for you the titles of some of the books around me, and you could pick one and write your own book from it, or a short story at least. Angie listens to music when she writes–all kinds of music. I listen to interviews with writers while I clean the kitchen. My point, however, out of the soft gray fog of my brain (oh and I was leafing through Faulkner just now, which didn’t help), is that sometimes having two tracks running–the one you are imbibing and the one you are creating–can move you in different directions than just the silence of your own mind.

How does it feel to be hated?

Unfriendly, to be sure.

I was leafing through Light in August to see if I could map Aristotle’s incline across it. For example: There are 507 pages in the Vintage paperback edition I am holding, the one with the gold and burnt umber cover with a picture of a road on it. This one also has a sticker with a list of dates stamped and penned in (library book) and a Summer 2005 Selection sticker from Oprah’s Book Club (Faulkner being less able to object that the arrogant living writer who’d rejected her attentions). In any case, the midpoint of a 507 page novel should fall somewhere around page 254. Chapter 12 begins on 256 with the line, “In this way the second phase began.”

There is a mathematics to literature as there is to music.

I just finished reading A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I wrote in my newsletter tip about his excellent use of sensate detail. The whole books was visual; in fact, I would go so far as to say that it was nearly a film. Haddon has a background in writing film, so that may explain it. It was a funny and fast read–much like watching a romantic comedy with, say, Hugh Grant. (He could play the gay son, I think, or the sister’s fiance if he wanted to step out of type.) Omniscient narration with short chapters that spun among the main characters.

Haddon did a great job of pushing the story as far as it could go without becoming science-fiction or horror or something. Within its genre, I mean, he really let things happen and get bad and then worse and then . . . because it is a romantic comedy . . . better at long last.

Forgive this rambling little blog entry this morning. It is time to go retrieve the boys from the park and the babysitter and go have lunch. I leave you with five ideas for planning your novel, in case you, too, are going to start writing one in the next three or four days:

1) Write out everything you know about the book.

2) Write out everything you do not know about the book.

3) Make a list of twenty concrete images, scenes, people, moments that you want to include.

4) If you are stuck on a point, write out five different ways to solve it.

5) Ask yourself what you believe: what truths do you hold to be self-evident? Make a story up about that. Be sure you put that contrary character in there–the one who things that your best, most human self is a deprivation before god.

My youngest son has apparently learned the word, “Shit.” Not sure where. Must be the babysitter. Or Grandma. Sh*t! Now he is holding the dustpan, which is about the same size as himself, and saying the offending word again and again.

In other news, today is my birthday and the day before my sudden marriage, and in honor of these occasions, I am giving away two spaces in my amazing course. It is not terribly immodest of me to say this because the course includes an amazing community which we’ve already started to build this month in the Framing Your Book stage. It also includes technique boosts, inspiration and encouragement, coaching and emergency aid.

For the first month, you can and should also sign up for NaNoWriMo, which will help you get through your first 50,000 words. Then Gathering Your Materials will keep on going until you have a full-length book manuscript. And whatever the condition of that manuscript–don’t worry: from mid-January through February, I will offer a revision course.

Here’s the thing: most people secretly want to write a book. Some of those people have never written a thing and others have published, but still it’s sort of a secret. Like calling your own course amazing, admitting you want to write a novel in a country that doesn’t greatly value art carries with it a bit of shame, I suppose.

When I was about thirty, I started taking hip hop dance classes. I am pretty bad at it, and I was taking the classes in New York, where other participants included chorus dancers for Broadway shows and serious club folk who tear up dance floors on a regular basis. As I danced with my mirror-image, I often found myself saying to myself, “I can write. I can write.” But by the time I was thirty, I knew that life was too short to do only those things I was good at. I had to dance, whether I could or not.

So should you write a novel whether you can or not. But everyone needs that guy or gal at the front of the classroom showing them the steps–again and again and one more time. For Gathering Your Materials, I am going to be that person–through podcasts, online forums and Skype phone calls. Yes–we have folks in Georgia, Los Angeles and Emeryville in our group. (Note bene: I will not wear any spandex, which even online would not be a pretty sight.)

So . . . throw your hat into this novel-writing circus ring. ALL you have to do is post a comment, and I will put your name in a hat, and draw out two lucky winners who will be inundated with inspiration and creative encouragement for six weeks. You know you have a book in you. I know you have a book in you. (Angie adds: This is a cheaper way to get it out than going to the doctor . . . )

Tell your mother. Tell your co-worker. Tell your favorite writer.

Sure, sometimes, like Charlie, you’ll find yourself saying, “Shit, shit, shit” for the sheer pleasure of the sound or the reaction on the faces of the people around you. Sometimes, you’ll be saying, “I can dance” or “I can run a seven-minute mile” or “I can tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Grey’s Anatomy.” Sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll think, “This is amazing.”

“Whatever works” is the motto of the six-week-novel.

You have until Oct. 24 to post your comment, and then the winners will be declared. Go on. I dare you. Get ready to write your book.