Beyond the Point of No Returns

There’s no two ways about it.  Writing is an insane activity.  Both when it’s working—and one walks along city streets in earnest, deep conversation with oneself, periodically stopping still to jot down notes—and when it’s not working (which involves more air-punching, sulking, frustration, etc, and yet one keeps getting up in the morning for it).

 The other day I was complaining to another writerly type, and giving vent to my less than decorous feelings about my key villain.  This villain still just isn’t working.  I’ve had this problem with the villain the entire time.  I’ve switched the villain’s goals, motivations, background—everything—precisely forty zillion and seventy three times.

 But for some reason, the precise rude bent of my rant suddenly opened my eyes to the true nature of my villain.  Oh—joys!  It would require…a HUGE revamping of the novel, but…this might be it.

Now, villains are the context of a hero’s actions—both protagonists and antagonists are affected by external as well as internal pressures—and so this change has pulled with non-genteel abandon at my frayed plot threads.  A new framework is rising, beam by beam, and it might even work.

This time I’m taking a different approach.  I’m taking notes.  I’m zoning into the plot and lingering in thought, pulling at the threads as they’re entwined with the beams, checking for weaknesses, checking for consistency.  I’m not writing.  I’m living with the options and recording them in my little notebook until I see it works.  Then—the writing.

In a sense, I’m not so much planning as I am letting the waters fill up and calm around me, taking stock as they clear, to make sure they’re right, healthy…and then I’ll sit down and pour them into the manuscript.

I think this might actually work…

Writing is full of so many false-starts.  You never know if you’re on a wild goose chase.  All you can do is ride and learn.  Patience, fortitude and stick-to-it-ivness.  Because in some cases you reach a point of no returns—when no matter your effort, nothing’s working and even making one part better is really just procrastinating from the problems with the whole—and you just have to keep on keeping on.  Beyond the point of no returns.

No second wind, no strain, no patience, no flexibility, no learning –> no improvement.

Writing novels, I conclude, is a hell only for the stubborn.

At any rate, I’m thinking of printing the manuscript so I can see all the spots I need to rewrite… But at the same time I can imagine that 400 pages is rather unwieldy…but I guess that’s the only option.  When have you started effectively printing your work for similar reworking?

On Gimmicks: just poorly disguised weaknesses or insulting cons and crutches?

I’ve been thinking about gimmicks recently.  Such an ugly word, “gimmick.”  It sounds sticky, gummy and like a cheap con.  Well, to me it does.

So what brings this on?  The book I read on Saturday.  I read it till past midnight because I wanted to know not so much what would happen next, but how it would end, period.  But although I read the entire book, and in one day, the reason I rushed through it was that I didn’t want to waste any more of my time reading it—it’s one thing to have done with it that same day, and another thing entirely to waste a second day on it.  I could have leisurely read it all weekend, but it didn’t provide that sort of pleasure.

So what makes a book gimmicky rather than simply “thusly structured or told?”  I guess it’s my sense that I can see the author’s crutches and on top of that weakness (of laziness), he’s also trying to con me or seduce me with cheap thrills.  How insulting.

Here’s examples from that particular book:

1. Sex that feels like a cheap ploy used because “sex sells.”  By contrast, the protagonist of Shadow of the Wind is a passionate teenager, and his sexual experiences are intrinsically bound to the story and it works.  In Fingersmith the sex is also a great part of the story.  It’s not simply writerly wanking, if you get my drift.  The protagonist of this story, by contrast, feels absolutely fake and a stand-in for the author, and the sex feels like stand-in sex for the author, too.  (Linked to gimmick #3, clearly.)
2. A protagonist’s unlikely brilliant ability to get out of any fight the winner.  Can we save that for TV?  (This is genre-related, but this book was not a ninja-tale.)
3. A sense I have, I can’t tell you why, that there’s some gratuitous self-revelation and self-love in a POV character who is meant in some way to reflect the author positively (example: as sexy, sharp, savvy, say-it-how-it-is and important)
4. Too many useful coincidences, not just stretching but making a joke of a reader’s suspension of belief.  In this book, every chief character is connected in some way to the NYPD, the mob and legal counsel.  (Including the film student working for minimum wage in a bookshop.)  Give me a break.

Maybe, though, if the writing was better (to me, as it’s a New York Times bestseller, something that’s utterly diminished my opinion of that particular accolade), I wouldn’t feel irritated and insulted by those crutches.  But was so obviously plastic.  It felt like a smarmy politician’s pick-up line.   

To feel clean again, I followed that book by reading another one entirely on Sunday.  This one I finished also after midnight, but because it was good and I wanted that closure of staying with the characters, in their mood, until the end.  This one’s also a bestseller, and once again I don’t understand how—but in this case that’s because I feel that it’s way too dense to be that popular.  Proof again that if a society VIP like the New York Times says “this is hot,” anything can sell, whether it’s trash or delicious but an acquired taste.

Anyway, this book did not have any obvious crutches to me.  It also was told through two POV characters, and two rather unusual ones, at that.  At first I felt the one character was too pat—a super intelligent 13 year old girl—but, hey, I accept it.  Because she’s also limited by her age’s didacticism, which is realistic to me, and surrounded by the concerns of her surroundings. 

The first book is The Book of Air and Shadows.  The second is The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

What about you guys—do you resent “gimmicks” or do you consider them simply poorly disguised story skeletons or something else?  And when you read gimmicky books, do you find yourself returning to your own work to eradicate anything smelling like gimmickiness in it, too?  Or do you want to convince me that I’m being petty?

I, for one, feel as if I’d hired someone to build me the Sistine Chapel, and they’d brought me to a plaster-and-chewing-gum-conjoined structure and expected praise.  Is that what I paid for?  Is that what he considers a Sistine Chapel?  No, it’s an insult and it’s an act of self-hoodwinking as well.  Or maybe just an indication of the author’s cheaper taste. 

  Ahem.  And now I’m going to get off my high horse and go to work.

Developing Characters, or: What Doesn’t Kill You…

The other morning I had a guest over for brunch.  In other words, I had to tidy the apartment.  The problem was that my apartment was already tidy. 

This is because I’m writing a book, and writing a book requires time to think.  Most often, taking “time to think” results in my getting caught up retightening the legs of my chairs, vacuuming the couch, cleaning the stove, polishing the floor, and even cutting and filing pieces of wood to hold up tapestries.  With steak knives.  In other words, procrastination leads to a tidy house. 

(Of course, too much predictability is boring, so when my original mission is to do housework, I artfully procrastinate by reading.)

Please, don’t try this at home.  I am a master and cannot promise you’ll have the same results.

So there I was, looking at my altogether far too tidy living room and thinking: I need time to think.  And then I thought, why, I really should clean the coffee table.  A lady never entertains guests on a laptop-and-paper-strewn coffee table.

Now, my coffee table is a Moroccan brass tray table.  In other words, it carries heat.  I always place a large and slim volume between my table and my laptop.  As a lady never overheats her books, I have a constant rotation of books.  Hard-covers being preferable for lap-top writing, I use paperbacks usually for table-top writing.

And so it was that Frog and Toad was on the couch, and Writing the Breakout Novel: Workbook was on the table.  I squinted at it, not out of suspicion, mind you, but because I’d just switched on the lights.  Then I sat down and flipped it open listlessly.  (I was, as you’ll recall, currently tasked with tidying up, and it fell to my lot to procrastinate by reading.) 

The book fell open to the section on antagonists.  I read a few lines of the worksheet Maass, the author, wanted me to fill out.

Meh, I thought. My antagonists are just fine.  I yawned.  And then an idea began to niggle.  I slammed down the book, yanked Frog and Toad back from the shelf and slipped it under the laptop.  And began answering the worksheet.  Egad.  It was amazing.

And bizarre.  I would read a question and think, but I already know… and then I’d type the question anyway and suddenly the groove would kick in.  I’d write sometimes totally what I knew, what I expected…  And then he’d ask me to subvert it, to fight my character.  And suddenly…great stuff.

I’d think I was rehashing, but suddenly—D’s future opened up for me.  I realized what was in store for him—in detail.

I was thrilled and horrified.  I’d just broken thoroughly into Act III.  I knew, finally, what he didn’t.  I had an emotional moment.  I decided to put all my characters through the process—protagonist and antagonist alike. 

And then, of course, as that meant writing, I cleaned the stove instead.

Okay, fine, so I did keep on writing.  Time-to-think rules don’t apply when writers have actually caught hold of a wriggly little fairy of a genius insight, and indeed one must often crush the desire to “think” too much over the stove or under the furniture.  Writing requires that key ingredient my dad used to tell me about:  Glue in the ass.

Anyway, this breakthrough’s been amazing.  I’ve been racing with Act III scenes and have plot points written up for others.  My antagonists are ready for their face-offs, and my heroes are heading to the denouement.  I’m exhilarated to feel it take shape.  It’s a great nexus—my vision, which I’d felt impaired for a long time, is back; and with it my sense of patience is restored.  Emotional truth and structure are both in sight, and the plot’s sense of inevitability is back—although I hope not its predictability.  We’ll see. 

I am utterly realizing anew what they mean when they say that the first draft is the writer telling the story to themselves, and that the subsequent drafts are writing it for others.  The first draft is when I find out what happens, really.  Only then can I craft it into something that will be enjoyable to read.  Then finally is the time to exert power over the text, because I’m not floundering in my own sea of questions.  My spidey-senses tell me that that’ll be a whopper of an experience–rewriting and editing.    But we’re not there yet.  We’re finishing Act III, mehopes.

Other stuff on my to-do list are:  two protagonists that need development and three secondary characters that need work—one of them I have decided is mostly invisible because she’s still the wrong person.  It took me several versions of M to find him fitting, and longer for him to start to move into himself, to develop his grays.  H isn’t there yet.  Maybe H has to go, and someone else take her place.  I wonder how M finally worked and how I can make my other protagonists stronger like him…

Welcome back, heady rush of story!  Welcome back euphoria!  Goodbye housekeeping!!! 

How’re you guys doing?

View from Central Park, New York City

The More Things Change… The More They SEEM the Same At First.

Two days ago a friend asked me if I enjoy writing.  I crossed the street before answering.  “I hate it passionately, and want to wring writing’s throat,” didn’t seem like the fully appropriate answer.

True, mind you, just not necessarily the whole story. 

The whole story…  *sigh* 

I feel like going Muse-hunting with a wicked elf blade.  I would of course only threaten it and then I would leap on the slimy bastard and shake it about.

I realize this sounds violent.  But it’s just comeuppance.  Oh heck, in reality it’s no Muse I seek to shake.  I don’t believe in muses.  I believe in myself, and it’s myself I want to shake.  And, I tell you, I have.  I have flung myself from one end of the couch to the other.  I have stormed from one end of the apartment to the other.  I have grumbled at myself and launched tirades at myself.  I have pulled my hair back and yanked it out.  I have gazed out my window at the Broadway pedestrians, at my neighbors and at the heavens, all the time trying to see into my story and into that skeleton that is craft.

But why this extra dash of frenetic anxiety?  Why the tense jaw?  (This last I can attest to, even if you can’t.)  I still write.  The story is moving forward.  I even noticed this week that my pace is more than acceptable.  From time to time the story even has the compelling feel of a pack of cards, dealt, loaded, and inevitably falling to play.

So why, why, why, is this the most anxious period for me?

I have concluded (temporarily, as all conclusions should footnote themselves) that it’s the place in the novel that seems to invest each moment with pressure to attain perfect allignment.

Before, I told the story.  I didn’t worry about deadlines.  Didn’t think “where in the arch am I?”  When I wrote 2 pages, when I wrote 10 pages…I felt good.  I felt I had done a good job.  I kept moving forward.  And when I jotted notes in my little notebook and then realized them in the manuscript, I felt a sense of fruition.  I kept moving forward, one step or ten at a time.

But in recent weeks, whether I write 2 pages or write 12, or delete 4 and write 10, I’m constantly feeling the tension of the future in each scene.  I’ll do the same thing–jot down notes and transfer them to the manuscript, but I’ll feel there’s more, more, more to write.  More than I’ve done, better than I’ve done, and it must work.   I’ll even have a flash of inspiration that I know betters the book, and even as I feel good making the change–my mind’s already on the whole, which I’m not yet grasping in my searching embrace.

So here I’ve been stressing that I’ve not found a balance of writing to research, or that I’m procrastinating or editing when I ought be writing, or that I’m researching when I ought be planning, doodling and thinking–but I’ve been doing all of that all along.  That is, every step of the way, I’ve been battling the same unknown, forging my technique on that exacting and unforgiving smithy that is experience.

What’s different now isn’t that I’m doing anything intrinsically worse..or less.  What’s different is that I’m feeling the ghost of the future pulling at me.  Like I see that figure through the mirror, darkly, but know I’m rushing to what I don’t know and I want to get there right. 

It’s not “the end in sight” as much as it is a murky sense of sight where before I was swimming in the dark and enjoying the sensation.  Now I see a shady image and am drawn to it, constantly finding it beyond my immediate grasp, and sensing the miles yet to go.  I’m exhausted not by what I’ve done, but by what is yet to be accomplished, yet to be tranversed.

So instead of inexplicably saying to my friend that I hate writing with the passion of a thousand misbegotten suns (and yet cut my sleep short by three hours each day to invest in it),  I held my silence till I crossed the street, and then I answered.  I said, “I love it.”

I walked into my dark apartment, and stood there in its shadows, hand on the light switch.  I imagined for a moment what if I stopped?  What if I stopped writing right now?  And my eyes stopped adjusting to the dark; they saw black and anathema gripped me.  Stop?  Stop and leave my characters forever fixed in their terrible predicaments?  No.  No way.  I owe it to A, and S, and M, and even D and D…  They have to get out, or at least rest in peace.  On the printed page.  Where every character born deserves to live, their struggles and goodness visible like the tombstone that is the book’s covers.

My.  As I write that I realize.  I’m afraid of burying my characters.  I’m afraid of the end, even as I feel the rush pull me there, and as I stress to craft it right… I’m heading where I can no longer rescue my characters.  Where, at least, I must put them away.

Plotting Along

This weekend was pure torture.

And by pure torture I mean intermittent irritation in a backdrop of a wonderful weekend.  So clearly I choose my words wisely.

I woke up to an unusual sound on Friday.  Puzzled, I looked about the room, wondering what was sputtering and hissing little death pangs.  Then a memory sparked, and joy filled me. 

It was too much to hope for, surely?

I approached the radiator slowly.  Knelt before it, and inclined my head.  Yes.

I had heat.

Heat.  I love heat in the winter.  And to think, I thought merely being insulated from the elements was gift enough.  What a treasure trove of comfort my new apartment is!

Insulation, hot water AND HEAT.  All was good with the world.  And as my new carpet had been delivered–my sole piece of furniture in my living room, bookshelves aside–I sat me down on a corner and enjoyed a delicious avocado sandwich and coffee.  Perfection.  Now my rug had served as a dining table and chair, too.  Why, it was as if I had said luxuries in my home.

I lay back and pondered my book.  And so it served as a sofa.  I enjoyed it muchly.

But even so, it wasn’t enough to keep the hounds at bay.

For as I’ve mentioned, I was having problems.  Character problems.  Worse–antagonist problems.  Me!

I thought about him.  I paced the floor.  I wrote his thoughts.  His justifications.  I cleaned the fridge.  I thought about him some more.  I cut my nails.  Realized I needed a hair cut.  Made soup.  I listened to his playlist.  I made cheese and spinach pastries.  I cleaned the dishes.  I washed the sink.  I cleaned the toilet.  I grumbled.

I read a book that had nothing to do with my own work.  I got an idea that didn’t fit.  I wrote it down anyway. 

I searched for a quote that had moved me, and realized it was online and not in my books.  I was not online. 

I bought wine.  I drank it.  I noted belatedly that I ought not drink before writing. 

I fixed my drapes.  Then they fell.  I moved them under the bed.  And then I moved them into the closet.

I looked under my bed to make sure it was clean.  It was.  How unfortunate.  My cursor blinked.  I looked away again.

And that’s when I realized.  I had a plot hole.  Which is very much like a pothole.  You can avoid it, but at the end of the day, the road isn’t good if it’s potholed.  It wasn’t my character who was failing, it was his options which weren’t clear to me–because of a tiny question mark I’d noticed and never fixed.

So I spent most of Sunday sitting on my couch carpet writing alternate diagrams to figure out that tiny bit of backstory without which the plot founders 365 pages later.

Gack!

Peering out of a Church

Six Pages This Morning, All is Good with the World

A question had been niggling me as questions are wont to–at least when they pertain to my story and therefore are really my job to solve, and solve quick.

How do characters M and B realize that two auspicious artifacts are connected, and why doesn’t M blow off S’s seeming deceit.  And for that matter, why did my character S make that odd, throw-away comment.  Why did the thought of what he suggested make me tingle with anticipation and a sense of rightness?  Was he right–did my protagonists really have to make that odd change of plan, or was he messing with them to buy time, or was there another nefarious plot afoot?  Or, as I reminded myself quietly, was that remark of his actually something I could delete. 

I do, after all, have the prerogative to have my characters unsay things.  But, at the same time, I need to give the story time to show me if the character’s unplanned action in fact has worth to the story, if it makes the plot stronger or just wider and disconnected and never ending.  In other words, is that string they tuck in going to unravel my entire fabric if I pull at it, or is it a crucial part to a pattern I myself simply never discerned before? 

Odd things, characters.  S has changed, too.  His role–no.  But his appearance and his mannerisms, and even his backstory.  Right now I’m trying to unite two visions of his backstory, but the crucial piece–how he’s connected with M–just fell into place over the past two mornings.  Today I slipped it in, and finally, VOILA, my question was resolved.

S fits much better into the story now, the awkward random coincidence thing is done and deleted, M’s instinctive understanding makes sense, and B’s impossible knowledge explained.  M’s emotions upon first hearing “the news” at the beginning of the second act of the novel no longer seems preternaturally restrained and aloof, and his growing anxiety and haste now make sense.

In other words:  All is well in the world.

It’s amazing how a good writing morning brightens up the day, no matter how filled with deadlines and impossibilities it may be. 

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much what life turns into:  ‘House burned down.  Car stolen.  Cat exploded.  Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

~ Neil Gaiman

Road to Kazbegi

Wrestling with First Draft Anxiety. Beating It to a Pulp :)

I’ve been at a crossroads the past week.  No–a busy roundabout.  Standing, without a vehicle.  Peering up and trying to make out the signs all around me, but the sun’s glare and the impossible rain is making it impossible to figure out which way is right for me.  Cars zip by, skimming so close to me I can feel mortality chase around me like slipstream.  Pamphlets litter the sky, thrown out by fast drivers.  I can’t make out their license plates.  I don’t know if I even ought to.  There’s the rub…

And standing there with my nerves knotting, I don’t know which way to go.  I’ve never been this way before.

I look down.  I’m grasping my notebooks.  I look back around me, at the malaise.

Which way to go?

I’ve decided now.  Can you guess?

I feel I’m at the hardest point of my first draft, but what do I know.  Writing for the first time is learning to write.  It doesn’t come naturally.  No matter how many books I’ve read, they’ve come to me fully formed.  I never asked myself how an author made me feel one way or another.  I just felt.  And if I didn’t, I didn’t ask myself what hadn’t happened right.  I threw the book aside (gently) and felt shortchanged.

God, how harsh I was on the poor author!  :)

I’m at 62.5K words now.  295 pages.

Recently, facing the last third of the manuscript–or is it the last quarter?–I’ve been telling myself I need to outline to help me draw everything to a close.  But I’ve hijacked my every free second to do something else, anything else.

And it’s time I face the truth.  Writing is frightening.

E.L. Doctorow had it right:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I know now which way I’m going.  And I know how I’m going there.

I’m going headlong, and headfirst.  I’m going to close my eyes and walk through the traffic.  And I’m going to go straight into the free-fall.  Let it take me where it will.  I’m going to run and jump into my draft, and I’m going to shadowbox the waves all the way through to the end.

And when it’s done, dammit, I’m going to emerge, spluttering, yes–and breathing.  And I’m going to grab my soggy draft close to me, and I’m going to wade to shore.  And I’m going to make it right, no matter how hard I have to work at it.

And until I get to the end of this draft, this first soggy bedraggled draft, I’m not going to stress about how I ought to do it right.  At the end, I’ll just start from the beginning again.  This time, learning how to write a second draft.  (Joys!)

That’s my plan.

My Death Trap, Before I Knew It

The Secret Lives of First Drafts

Before I tried, I never knew.  I used to think first drafts were just slightly poorer renditions of final drafts.  Now it physically hurts me inside when someone asks to see my first draft.  I shake in my sandals; I babble a squeaky and horrified refusal, wanting to wrench that idea from their minds and drown it in the Hudson.

After a rewrite, and only after a rewrite, will anyone see my “first” draft.  Every once in a while I give myself a mini-heart attack, imagining I die before the draft’s rewritten, and someone reads it in its current, seriously malformed condition.  I cross roads extra carefully now.  Now is no time to live recklessly.  I have a story that cannot be read until it’s written right.

Take Katz.  Actually, take him, literally.  Because although he features in my first 40 pages, he’s absent in the rest of the book. Know why?  Because he was all wrong.  Used to be, he was a gruff but well-meaning secondary character, whose primary role was to own the bowling alley where the protagonist skips school before starting his quest.  He was minor.  Now?  Now he’s not Katz, he’s M, and he has a painful past the whole neighborhood knows about, a past which it turns out is entwined with the quest.

In the first draft?  He’s there in both versions, Katz and M.  No explanation.  Because I am the only reader, and I know what I’m going to do with him when I rewrite him.  I can’t have you read that until it’s rewritten!  No way.  Perish the thought.  Perish it with an ice pick.  Perish it Rasputin-style.  Perish it further and more.

I interviewed a character, D, a while back.  For character development.  (Also to get his counsel on where the story was going. He was markedly unhelpful in the latter.  I believe his response was something along the lines of, “You’re the author, isn’t that your whole job?”  Thanks, D.  Thanks a lot.)

Character interviews are an odd thing indeed.

On the one hand, obviously the author creates the character.  But sit your character down for an interview and suddenly the conversation veers headlong into uncharted waters, clouding up what seemed clear and inshallah, also clarifying the murky.

Even silence in response to a question means something.  It can swing an entire plot around.  Before I asked D about it, in a sudden flash of suspicion, I hadn’t known that the house was hiding a secret captive.  Who knew?  That’s right, D knew, and somewhere in his interview with me, he sparked an epiphany for me.

Figuring out the identity of that mysterious captive was a struggle.  I was creating and snuffing out characters like the worst sort of person.  It finally gelled yesterday.  The dangerous C suddenly materialized, changing everything.

Brooklyn suddenly shifted from being the epicenter of the tale.  The timeframe shifted.  The entire plot went supersize.  Several new characters were born.  The story’s richer for it, and now I have only to put my all into it to make sure my words live up to the story.

Did I say my book would be 60K words?  I lied through my teeth, but inexperience made me do it.  The ripples C has made means the first draft is FAR from the final version now, both the past has to be rewritten entirely and the future has much forging ahead.  It’ll be more like 75K, and that only if I’m masterfully tight in imagery, dialogue and characterization.  Which means work.

First drafts are…expeditions for a writer.  And for a reader?  Ain’t no reader reading my first draft.  It would be cruel to the story to show it unmade.

The Two Realms of Novel Writing (for me)

Thomas Mann once quipped that:  ”A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”  Well, maybe it wasn’t a quip.  Maybe it was God’s honest truth.  ;-)

I’m finding that when I write, I work simultaneously within two separate realms.

Realm Gel

Realm Gel is my laptop.  This is where I type the story, for the most part in sequence.  That is, the order the story unfolds (or rather, is told).

Sometimes I’ll find I don’t know how to get from A to B on my plot line, although I know A must run to B for the story to unfold properly, and in those cases I write the scenes I can see or sense in my mind’s eye.  The connective tissue will come when it comes.

For example:  I have S in danger in one location, and A in danger in another location.  I know that they must reunite to face their peril together, but that both will have run-ins or find crucial information before that time.  But maybe I don’t know how they meet up again, although I know that when this happens, S and A have very different ideas of what their priorities should be, and that scene is hot in my mind.  So I simply write that scene that I see.  I mark the “gap” with yellow highlighter, so I know it’s there and to write it.  It lingers in my mind until the solution is found, or another scene evolves into the connection I need, and it’s seamlessly added.

(Ha! I hope it’s seamlessly added.  But right now I still see strings all about the place.  But that’s what a first draft is for.  Cutting the pattern and doing the first fitting.)

My only rule thus far is don’t go back.  So if you read the manuscript now, you’d see that character K’s pool hall is called something completely different in the beginning of the book, and that he’s minor and cheery at best.  And yet around page 142 or so, when he’s referenced again, it seems he has a much greater role in the book’s plot, and his character has been given depth that isn’t even hinted at in the beginning.  In other words, you can see the progression of the idea in the various parts of the manuscript, because I haven’t gone back to the beginning yet, to fix him up, set him up better, and rename the pool hall.  That’ll come later.

And his progression, absent in Realm Gel, is evident in my second realm, where he developed in the wings.  Realm Gel is the part that I think non-writers focus on as the main storytelling tool.  At least, that’s what I focused on.  But that leaves out the crucial realm of idea percolation and story development.

Realm Wings (beloved notebooks, blessed be they)

I value my notebooks more than my money in my purse at this point.  It’s in my notebooks that everything cooks and percolates. It’s my fridge of ideas, my farm of buzzers.  It’s there that I brainstorm plot, explore characters and write down random quotes, questions (for myself) and tips.  In a sense, the book springs from this well.

And although an outsider couldn’t glean what I was going on about, the notebooks remain sacredly, sacredly private.  Like a heart of hearts, except never to be shown.

My notebooks read like they’re written by a loon ordered by a judge to speak only in the form of questions, or to make contrary statements one after another.

I have scrawled questions of the “what if Y did Z?” variety, and of the “is P really R?” type.  Then there’s a whole bunch of “what does D really want?” or “what line would B never cross?”  And let’s not forget the “Does B need to think this way, because otherwise he couldn’t accept what F has done?”  Or “would D take it back if he could?“

Then there’s things like:  G is in control.  G is in control, but only at night.  D controls G.  D is afraid of G.  D created G but G’s out of control.  D is afraid of D. (Yeah, that won’t throw anyone for a loop.)  In the end, it’s about throwing all the options out there till one feels right to me.  Eventually Realm Gel will see the answer as it’ll be the story that’s chosen.

And most noticeably, I have entire characters and suggestions of overarching plot/framework in the notebooks which haven’t yet seen the light of laptop day, yet they together with the laptop form the evolving book in my mind.  The twain–references in the notebooks and writing in the laptop–can only meet when they’re ready.  When they can take their mantle on in the story.

Sometimes I can get caught up with where I am in the notebooks–ALWAYS ahead but ALWAYS facing questions I don’t have answers to–and forget that my laptop’s not caught up with them.  Then I feel I have hit a bump in the writing and must brainstorm before writing further…until I read over where I’ve left it, and realize I’ve LOADS yet to share with Realm Gel, thanks to Realm Wing’s ongoing trip.  :)

It’s like the laptop is the map with the pins for “where we’ve been” and the notebooks are future travel musings, but laden with more stress and tension.  Because, of course, usually when one travels, one is trying to AVOID the river with crocodiles, but if you’re in a book set in Africa, well, you’re trying to figure out how to make sure everyone MUST cross the river (or die), and with a baby in tow.  :)

And it’s Realm Wing that takes flight in the middle of the night, on subway rides, in the cafes, on the streets, and while watching TV or cooking, and for that reason my trusty notebooks are always with me.  From time to time, Realm Wing is so ready to take flight that I simply grab the laptop and let the idea flow straight into Realm Gel.  But there’s always, always, two realms to this writing my first draft….

Anyone reading this writing too?  If so, how’s it for you?

* The author has no crocodiles in either Realm, nor, as of yet, any babies.

Standing Before the Church: Ani in Turkey