when in writing doubt: tip of the week number two

A few days ago, I wrote here of what is gained when we, mid-course into a new book, return to its beginning. How, when we dwell with what has already been written, when we don't rush toward the climax, the close, the I'm done!, we discover the true heart of the story. We find all that will propel us to a meaningful end.

Plus, it's really fun.

Today, again, I offer simple advice, on the theory that it's the simple stuff that we tend to overlook when we find ourselves in the heat of writerly angst.

That advice: Take out a pen. Take out a notebook. Write the story by hand.

There are a few reasons for this. One, obviously, away from the computer, you are, hopefully, away from the tempting distractions that electronically creep in. But even more importantly, as this Maria Konnikova story in the New York Times suggests, writing something down, using our own hands, pressing into the page beneath us, does something to our brains. It activates neural networks that are key to the making of stories:

The effect goes well beyond letter recognition. In a study that followed children in grades two through five, Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, demonstrated that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns — and each results in a distinct end product. When the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.

I always write by hand. The first draft of everything is a mess of ink on scattered journals. It is my head working, my hand trailing behind, nothing much, until it becomes something very much. I'll sneak back the computer when I have a few pages. I'll type a vague resemblance of the handwritten material there—clean it up, straighten it, do some logic tests. But then, again, I print those computer pages and I'm back on the couch, scratching out most everything, writing in the margins. Back and forth, this is the process.

The best stuff—the best details, dialogue chains, discoveries—is always the result of a pen in hand.

And only after I've done this many times, do I share the work with my editor, Tamra Tuller. Our conversation about how we work after that is here.

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Of iguanas and parrots

Between tropical downpours and gale-ing winds, we walked through the Botanic Gardens, encountering these blue-faced iguanas, who were out in search of sun.  It is a raw place, an island upon which the legacy of a once-ago hurricane is still read in the twist of palm trees and the discouraged fronds.  Cayman parrots, high in trees, depart in arresting twosomes of brilliant green and beak orange.

In my mind, all this time, I am reconfiguring a novel.  Finding my way back in.  There are editors who care.  There is an editor who has asked.

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Taking Advice

Sarah (my Zumba Sarah) said:  Walk away from it.  Work in the garden.  Do anything else.  It will come.

Bill said:  If it isn't working, throw it away.

I took both pieces of advice today.  Spent the morning in the garden and talking to clients.  Sat at my desk in the afternoon, opened the file marked "novel," and tossed the thwarting chapter to the other side of nowhere.  Threw it away.  Done.  Gone.  And guess what?  The book is better for it. I (liberated) now move on.

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Notes to a Writer's Self

The first flakes of the fabled thundersnow have started to fall. Home will be the globe now, so they tell us.

Today, while talking with clients, while reviewing proposals, while sending an email or two, I had this thought about the novel that I wrote for adults, a novel that needs another round of attention before I send it out newly into the publishing world.

If a single transition—in a poem, in a story, in a novel—is broken, then the whole is broken; it is untenable and marred.

Find the broken transition. Fix it. And when you do you will find the novel (the story, the poem) opening itself to you in ways you could not, before, imagine. You will find your novel capable of more. Yourself, too.

Be capable of more.

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Some of Each, in a Rain Storm

Throughout the long pour-down of yesterday's rain, I travel. First, in the dark of pre-dawn, I travel a dreamscape, write to page 246 of this new novel. It's a number bearing no actual significance, save that there, within page 245, are the seeds of the novel's ending, a turning toward, a knowing that, someday, I'll finish this—a fact I would not have bet on until yesterday's strum-beat of rain. Mid-morning Body Pump at the gym with friends is a journey away from me, my mind. Later, back at home, the windows streaking, the laundry room leaking, I slip inside the work of my Penn students, who have responded, with heartbreaking skill, to this call:

Choose an event from your own life about which you now have some distance, some accumulated wisdom. Tell the story of what happened. Enrich it with your understanding of what it meant then, of what it means now, of how time has shifted both the event and its meaning. Consider Ginzburg's dictate about poetic beauty, Dillard's consuming wish to notice everything, Hampl's suggestion that true memoir is written in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.

In the early afternoon, my husband and I eat under a canopy at a local dive, watch the canvas pucker beneath the force of rain. At the gym, beneath the pounding down of storm on rooftops, we practice our tango. Inside the ceaseless wash, we drive home, and again I read the work of my students, then read (for the fourth time) "Hotels Rwanda," authored by my friend Jay Kirk, a best travel essay originally appearing in GQ. Jay will join our class on Monday, talk about how narrative nonfiction gets done, about how one hunts for story, then finds its heart, then gives it shape and purpose. Jay will come, and because he knows and charms and bushwhacks and waits, we'll all be smarter for it.

Late afternoon, our son calls and we talk for a long time about the things he has learned, the conversations he has started, the words his teachers write across his papers. Night, the rain still falling, we watch the movie, "Seven Pounds." I cannot sleep afterward.

Today, this much-discussed ballroom dance showcase will take place. A tango. A Broadway quickstep jive. No matter what, then, that chapter will be written, complete. That is life, the sum total: the anticipation, the afterward.

I just wish I slept more.

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A Novel Response and a Question (to blog readers)

In a comment question yesterday, the wonderful Lilian Natel asked (among other things) whether I approach adult novels differently than, say, the novels I've written for young adults. The answer is no. I give as much, I ache as much, I confuse myself as much, I nearly walk away as much from any genre with which I choose to torment myself. I work the opening 50 pages countless times, for it is in those pages that many of the most important decisions are being made. Voice and mood, for example, which are established within the first lines. Conflict and backstory. Recurrencies and themes. Trajectory. The spaces I wish to leave blank, the spaces that will be flooded out with light.

The book I am writing at the moment is being carried by two very different characters, two moods, two tenses, and the suspense of inevitable intersection. The book entails enormous research, causing me to stop every line or two to find something else out. My frustration of late concerned a misfired motivation. To fix it, I had to fix just about everything else. One small novel particle, wavering at a novel's start, disallows progression, I find. Until I fix it, I won't move on.

Now for my question, to all of you. I blog every day, as you know, and sometimes twice a day. But would it be kinder to my readers (which are you), to pull back a bit from all of this? It's something I've been pondering. I know what BH thinks. I wonder about you.

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In Which the Son Rescues the Mother

Euphoria is short-lived in the life of a writer. You have an idea—oh, you have an idea—and you go all out in your attack of said idea—moving forward because you have to move forward because you don't have time (in the heat of the new) to slow things to a slog and hover over the fine points of perfection.

Then it has to happen: You slow down. You stop on a Saturday to read what you have written and you really wish you hadn't. You spend your next three days throwing out most of your work, swapping out paragraphs, cursing the day you opted out of law school (and why, in fact, did you opt out of law school when the law school library guys were so good looking?). Then you slow down, again, read what you've got, again, go off shopping for gifts for your many dear friends, again, and when you return to your desk and read once more, you hit a new low point of despair. You say to your son:

Can I, like, borrow you for an hour?

He says: Yeah, okay. Sure. What is it?

You say: Can you, like, sit on that Corbusier chaise over there while I read, um, nothing much just, well, you know, 38 pages of a stinking brand-new novel? Because we'll have steak tonight? Because it'll be just like you like it, which is to say, medium rare?

Um, he says. Sure, he says. Pulls half a can of Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and settles in for the haul.

And you read. And your son—he doesn't stop you. And you keep going, and what you've got, you realize, either isn't half bad or you're fooled by the sound of your own voice. And when you're done, and you look up, your son isn't even half asleep: He has a whole slew of questions that he's asking. Assumptions he tests. A few little pointers about that police work on page 10. He talks to you about motivation, does a few little turns around What if?

Oh my gosh, oh my goodness, now you answer me this: What would I do without this kid?

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