I wrote this post on Friday, but when I came out of my self-imposed Internet blockade, I was confronted with the tragedy in Connecticut and could not bring myself to post it. Most of Friday was spent in trying to channel my outrage and anger at the senseless killing of children into some meaningful action. I think if lay people like you and me cannot get rid of our apathy about the hijacking of the topic of gun control in this country, no change will happen.

Dec 14 2012

Gaurav Rastogi (published author himself!) points me to this great article about the writing habits of famous authors. One thing you learn from it is that every writer has their own recipe for getting it done, though I have to say Hemmingway had style when it came to his method, quite like his output.

“Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”

Maya Angelou’s confession that she often writes nine pages and cuts out six is consoling.

Yesterday I got a fair ways into Chapter 6, but today I think I’m going to be going back and redoing most of it today, mostly because my characters got from point A to point B (literally) too quickly. Metaphorically, this has been always a problem for me; I can recall my 9th grade English teacher saying, “Vidya, your précis is too short, it leaves out too much.” At a writing class at Stanford, I got the same feedback – I was hurrying my characters’ lives along, not explaining enough.

So today is all rewriting, again. It is not fun; I want to know what happens to these characters, and it is frustrating to have to wait. I have to say I have so much more respect for people who complete novels, even those of the trashy kind. Even a bad novel has to have all the moving parts work and all the logic worked out. It is bloody hard work, so at this point you can imagine how awed I feel by the likes of Rowling and Tolkein, who construct complete worlds that are populated by multiple characters with unique traits, worlds that operate by a different yet cohesive set of rules. No wonder it took Rowling seven years to write the first book.

More next week.

Please leave comments here instead of FB so I can keep a record. Thanks!

Dec 13 2012

The world seems have to survived the mini-apocalyptic trifecta of 12s and I seemed to have survived my writer’s block from yesterday. After I was unable to make progress on the novel, I lay on the bed next to the desk and the dog obligingly curled up next to me. Forced to focus on the book, I finally came up with a plan for today by the time my writing period ran out.

What I am beginning to realize is that I am not going to be able to proceed in the neat, chronological, logical order that I had planned in my notes. Today is going to be devoted to revising some of the earlier chapters so my story can move forward. This is disappointing, because I had my heart set on beginning Chapter 6, but the reason Chapter 6 was not flowing out yesterday was because of some inconsistencies in the previous chapters, and I have to fix that if I want the story to make sense.

Random aside: The angle of light on my keyboard reveals that there are some keys that haven’t been getting much use. Just for that, someday I am going to name a character in one of my books Qxzj (pronounced Coczee!).

More tomorrow.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 12 2012

Has it happened to anyone else that you start writing one kind of book and it turns out to be something else? The core idea of my book was very clear in my mind before I began. I even bought a couple of non-fiction books, based on the idea, that I thought would be very helpful to me as research material. But now that the story has got going, I see that I am barely using the core idea. Will some part of it emerge in future chapters? Perhaps. But it is also very likely that the story will end up being very different from the one I envisaged before beginning the project. And the reason for that is that the core idea was not logical in the environment I placed my characters in and I just could not reconcile the two.

I think there may be another book in there, for another time.

Meanwhile, I am not getting anywhere with the writing today. I think I might have the first attack of writer’s block, after chugging away productively for a week. The biggest problem is that I haven’t really thought through what happens in the next chapter, so don’t know what to put down. Is it going to be a chapter on background? Is the present story going to move along? Is it okay to spend my writing hours thinking instead? Throw in an interrupted morning because of the teenager’s block schedule at school, and you have the recipe for unproductivity.

Sigh!

Dec 11, 2012

My writer friend wondered if writing this blog was taking me away from working on the book. I’ve come to realize that each day’s post acts as a warm-up exercise for the book. I am writing, but I don’t need to worry about structure or content too much, and this prepares me for the harder work of creating the novel. And whether I have progressed in the novel or not, I have put down some words in my allotted work time. This, I have come to realize, is important to me.

Today was a particularly difficult day to get going. First there were words with the teenager because he wouldn’t get up in time for school, then there were a couple of necessary phone calls to make and receive. If it wasn’t for the ease of writing the blog, I would find it hard to get into the mindset of working on the novel, especially since the next few chapters are completely unknown.

Finished Chapter 4 yesterday and hit a milestone of 5000 words (that took a paragraph in Chapter 5 to get to). Regardless of the quality of the words, this feels like a real achievement to me. I still can’t get over the feeling that this will end up as a pretty sub-par first book, but having seen plenty of those in the Kindle free section, I am okay with that for now!

More tomorrow.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 10 2012

Back after a two-day break. Family members, who are now aware of the strict writing discipline I am trying to enforce weekday mornings, asked if I was going to continue the program through the weekend. I indignantly replied that I deserved a break, but then I came across this from a writer via Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish.

The No. 1 question I get at readings is: “How many hours a day do you write?” I used to stumble on this question. I don’t write every day, but when I first started going on book tours I was afraid I’d be revealed as a true fraud if I admitted that. Sometimes I write for 20 minutes. Other times I don’t stop writing for six hours, falling over at the end like an emotional, wrung-out mess, simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated. Sometimes I go months without putting a word on the page.

One night, however, I was asked that question and the right answer just popped out, unknown to me before it found solidity on the air: “I write every waking minute,” I said. I meant, of course, that I am always writing in my head.

This, of course, freaked the insecure writer in me out! I certainly don’t write like that, though there are moments during the day when I do get inspired by something I read or see. And, as I mentioned before, walks with the dog do wonders in recharging the imagination. But I approach writing as a job that I do for a few hours each day, not as a raison d’etre. Perhaps every writer approaches their task in a different way. What’s yours?

Back to the book.

The problem with having been an editor for a while is that I am always looking to construct perfect sentences and have the logic and chronology of the story all figured out before I put pen to paper(or cursor to computer). My sense is that this is probably not the way I should be doing it, because it really slows me down.

For instance, one of my characters needs to have been very ill with a modern disease that requires intensive treatment in a hospital. What is this disease going to be? Why can’t it be fixed in a private clinic? The Freedom software that I’ve installed prevents me from doing the research right away, so I will have to use a place holder illness and simply move the plot along. I’m finding that difficult to do, though common sense tells me that it is not a big deal to rewrite if the real illness I use later turns out to have different complications. Or I could even create a disease out of whole cloth. But the urge to get it right the first time is very strong!

Another issue that bugged me was that I realized each of the first three paragraphs of my fourth chapter began with the word “When.” This is an absolute no-no for the editor brain, though I know that this can be easily changed during a redraft. I tried to let it go, but it nagged me so much that I ended up fixing it before I moved on, though there were plot ideas that were fizzing in my brain, waiting to be released.

Today’s target: Finish Chapter 4. When I began writing this chapter, it was only supposed to be a little background to where the heroine came from, but a new character forced himself in and demanded to be fleshed out. I remember an interview given by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni where she said that when she begins writing she feels a god-like spirit channeling through her, putting words on the page. (I’m paraphrasing here, sorry Chitra). I am beginning to understand what she means, though my muse appears to be far less benign!

More tomorrow.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 7 2012

Quiet day yesterday as I worked on editing the chapters already done and completed chapter 3. In my new-found confidence about the state of the book, I gave in to my daughter’s desire to read what I’ve written so far. Luckily she was interrupted before she had finished the first chapter and I’ve quickly withdrawn the book so I can put some more thought into whether I want an opinion from her at this point in time. It is not the sort of book she naturally gravitates to, so her disinterest might be very demotivating.

Today’s plan is to get a start on the fourth chapter. I have some more ideas to beef up the first 3 chapters, but I’ve decided to put them on hold for now, because there is no end to the tweaking that can be done and I don’t want to be consumed by a fetish for improvement that prevents me from doing a first run of the book.

It’s also going to be a truncated work day because the house made a loud demand for attention yesterday by breaking the garage door and I need to get that repaired so skunks and raccoons don’t make a home inside during the cold weather. Plus, there’s a handyman around repairing the gutters and woodwork damaged by the recent rains.

Question for writers out there –
Do you name your chapters? Or are they just numbers?

More next week.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 6 2012

I discovered the marvelously talented Anne Patchett a bit late. State of Wonder, her book about a researcher who ventures into the Amazon to look for a lost colleague, landed on my desk at India Currents because the heroine is half-Indian; weird reason, since there are just a few pages dealing with Marina Singh’s visits to India, but a jackpot for me. SoW is un-put-down-able, even when Patchett pauses for long stretches in the narrative to muse on her characters’ motivations and inner lives. As soon as I finished it, I grabbed The Magician’s Assistant, her first (I think). TMA is much shorter, but even here the atmospherics are well crafted and ably support a rather sketchy plot.

Right now I am reading Bel Canto, her most famous book.  It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction(thank you Wikipedia) and it is both an aspiring writer’s dream and nightmare. No one can write detail like Patchett, and even in this story of a hostage situation in a South American country, Patchett takes the time to meticulously craft each character’s back story. This slows down the proceedings quite a bit, and in some ways I am glad I read SoW first, or I could have given up on this amazing writer, to my detriment.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is Ann Patchett is a terrific role model for writers who want to give their books depth. Reading her books is like taking a class in character and situation development, but it also makes you revisit your writing and shake your head at how fast your story has moved without enough explanation for the reader.

Yesterday I spent some of my time editing the first two chapters for clarity and got started on my third. Today I plan to add the explanatory passages that add heft to the narrative without (hopefully) slowing it down. And I can always pare later if the whole thing gets too long-winded.

More later.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 5 2012.

Finished my second chapter yesterday. As with the first, it is about 800 words. As with the first, I’m very unhappy with the result. This time, the problem is my voice. Is this really me, or is it a conglomeration of the many, many authors I have read over the years? It is hard to separate the two. I am plowing on because I believe that if I write enough that voice will emerge … God I hope that’s true.

The other big issue I had at the conclusion of the chapter was that I am now very unsure about what the age of the intended audience is. The theme (and the treatment) is not sufficiently mature enough to make this a book for adults, but my heavy-handed style is probably going to put off the kids. I wish I was writing a book about dragons. Sigh. I need to find a pen name to hide behind.

Also, I think I might need to find a writing group nearby to critique the book before it goes any further so I can course-correct if needed. Amazingly enough, there’s one right here in Fremont CA … guess there are a lot of us suburbanites with literary ambitions. Here’s some info on them –

Fremont Area Writers is the centennial branch of the California Writers Club. Visit our web site at: http://www.cwc-FremontAreaWriters.org. If you live in and around Fremont (Hayward, Union City, Newark, Niles, or Milpitas) come and meet other local writers and let creativity bloom! Come to a Writers Meetup to review work, trade literary tips, make friends and have fun, and learn more about Fremont Area Writers! All writers — and should-be writers — are welcome!

They meet every Tuesday evening to critique. The next one is on December 11 at Mission Coffee. Must muster up the courage to go and present my half-assed attempt.:)

More tomorrow.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.

Dec 4 2012

Did you know that words sound way better in your head than they do on paper? Finished my first chapter yesterday and hated, hated, hated it. If it wasn’t for this noose I’ve tied around my neck in the form of daily updates, I would just scrap the whole thing and give up.  But I’ve made a commitment and I intend to stick to it (as of now).

So how did the first chapter get written so fast? The truth is that, before I embarked on the actual process of writing my book, I had worked out a rough outline of each chapter. Then each day, as I walked my puppy Korra, I fleshed the first chapter out in my head till I was fairly clear of the pattern. Yesterday, when I began writing I had a beginning, middle, and end for this chapter. (Not so for the book itself, where I have not the foggiest idea of how the story will end. When I mentioned this to my daughter, she gave me a look and said, “Mom, you’re the one who is always telling me that the end will figure itself out.” What can I say, she is a smart cookie.)

Some roadblocks in writing that first chapter –

–    Character names. Some writers say their characters are alive in their head and just step onto the paper when they are ready. While this was somewhat true for the principal character, I still did not have a name for her. I finally decided on Lara as a title holder, since it is close to my daughter’s name. I figure that thanks to Word, I can just substitute the name en masse if I change it later.
–    Lesser characters. Obviously the heroine is not the only character in the book. But what to name the other characters? And descriptions? As I was writing a new character popped up, and turned out to be vital to the story? What should I name him? What does he look like? What is he wearing? It was surprising how much time and focus these insignificant decisions took. Again, I used a placeholder name (which is pretty yuck) and hopefully inspiration for a better one will strike sometime.
–    What if you need to do research? Using Freedom means no access to the internet for the entire 120 minutes, so this is a problem if you want to be somewhat accurate. Fortunately, my story is set in the future, so I can afford to take some liberties. But I anticipate some rewrites as I fix glaring scientific/biological anomalies.

The second chapter, unlike the first, is only a very rough outline, so I expect this one to take a long time and sweat.

More tomorrow.

If you have some tips to share or experiences of your own, please leave them here in the comments instead of FB so I can keep a record.