Tag Archives: novels

Are You Prepared For That Big Rewrite?

Okay, so you’ve written a few drafts of your novel and you’ve gotten feedback from trusted sources, and slowly but surely it dawns on you that the story needs to go in a brand-new direction, whether through substantial changes to the characters or the plot or both.

Do. Not. Panic.

Friends, I too have been there, and over time have developed a list of key To-Do’s before embarking on any kind of large-scale revision. If you’re contemplating your own massive rewrite, this could be just the thing to boost your confidence and help you stay the course.

No. 1 Sever all ties with family and friends. The book is now your [spouse/significant other/BFF]. Hail Book!

No. 2. If you have a job, quit immediately. The tension that arises over how you’re going to pay your bills will feed directly into addressing your writers group notes about your narrative lacking conflict.

No. 3 Practice the art of insomnia. [Alternatively, replace your mattress with a bed of nails]

No. 4 Set the room temperature to touchy/reliably grouchy.

No. 5 Keep several chickens and/or goats at or near your writing space for weekly sacrifices to Book. Hail Book!

No. 6 Plastic surgery to replace your ears with noise-canceling headphones.

No. 7 Get comfortable with adult diapers. [See also: eliminating bran from your diet; See also: Google results for “eating antispasmodics like they’re Wild Berry Skittles”]

No. 8 Begin each morning burying your phone. Note: Also begin each morning drawing a map to location of said buried phone to avoid costly delay to revision due to nervous breakdown.

No. 9 Do not read a passage from your favorite book for inspiration. You don’t have a favorite book that isn’t Book. What’re you doing? Hail Book!

No. 10 Put together a writing playlist that’s basically one indefinite song with your own voice screaming over industrial EDM, “Are you done yet?!” “Are you done yet?!” “ARE YOU DONE YET?!”

Going Back To The Well

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Photo by Lienhard Schulz

Last week after finishing the first draft of a new young adult novel I decided to do something different. Usually in these circumstances, after taking a moment to celebrate–helium, trampolines, etc.–I return to another project that’s in a more advanced stage awaiting a rewrite. I do have one of those, but this time, perhaps masochistically (perhaps an oxymoron when it comes to writing), I wanted to face the blank page again.

That this endeavor happens to fall within NaNoWriMo (November is National Novel Writing Month) is a coincidence. I admire all who take on the challenge, but my intent here isn’t to rush to a finish but to dig in and develop something that stretches me creatively. It’s going take some time.

And because I’m not the type of writer who has an IDEAS file, a repository stuffed with the odd narrative strand or character bio or bits of dialogue, this means going back to the well in search of something fresh to set off my imagination.

Which also means convincing my curmudgeonly sidekick Psygor to help get me in and out of the well way out there in the middle of all those cold dark woods. He’s already predisposed to grumpiness so this is really not going to please him; not when he assumed he was done until 2016. It’s going to take a lot of Sanka and moon pies and “yes, stripes do do a fantastic job of concealing your hunchback” to get him out there.

But as formidable as Psygor’s griping and Sanka-breath are, going back to the well so soon is more daunting. It could be parched. It could be packed with mud. Even if it’s knee-deep in water those things squiggling around my ankles could just be half-formed, exposed-rib entities previously abandoned. But I have to try and hope something new is lurking down there, something alive that’s going to launch me out of my comfort zone.

And if that also includes launching me out of the well hopefully Psygor stops obsessing over his hunchback long enough to catch me.

I’ll wear my puffy clothes just in case.

LA Times Festival of Books! Day Two

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

Back again and better late than never with another field report from the LA Times Festival of Books. The magnanimity continued on the second and final day of LATFOB’s 20th anniversary. Well done, folks!

Here’s a few pearls of conversation from the author panels I attended:

“Families are like their own civilizations.”

“A lot of the times I’m writing I feel like an actor; I have to feel the emotions.”

“I had kids smoking, getting drunk, and my editor’s worried about the scene where they aren’t wearing their seatbelts.”

“A writer’s only responsibility is to tell the truth.”

“If I want to know how great I am I call my mother; if I want to know the truth, I call my brother.”

“I’m always taken aback when people [who know I’m a YA author] ask me when I’m going to write a ‘real’ book.”

“People have suggested that hackers and artists are exactly alike.”

“Quality relationships allow for the right amount of solitude and the right amount of connection.”

“The digital revolution has undercut our need for expertise and professionalism.”

“I’m on board with the digital revolution being frightening, but I’m not so nostalgic about what we’re leaving behind.”

“All these media outlets want to ‘pay’ for your writing by promising exposure; exposure is just a way people die out in the cold.”

“Technology is whatever has been invented since you were born.”

“Why can’t we have a platform that actually benefits the people who use it?”

“Every time I hear how I am as a writer I want to rebel against it.”

“Most of what happens to human beings is funny; humor in stories is integral, it’s not a condiment.”

WHO SAID THIS STUFF: Jandy Nelson, David Arnold, Carrie Arcos, Arnold, Robin Benway, Nelson, Vikram Chandra, Joshua Wolf Shenk, Scott Timberg, Chandra, Jacob Silverman, Chandra, Silverman, Amelia Gray, Jonathan Lethem

Trust Me, Said The Unreliable Narrator

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Photo by Erling Mandelman

Reading the novel & Sons by David Gilbert has me musing about one of my favorite literary techniques: the unreliable narrator.

The book follows the story of the famous but reclusive author A.N. Dyer, a seventy-nine year old self-described failure as a father who calls his estranged sons back home to New York City. The treat here, and what gives the novel its edge, is that the narrator is Philip Topping, son of A.N. Dyer’s oldest (and recently deceased) best friend. Philip literally and literally inserts himself into the lives of the Dyer family and tells us things that he has witnessed and that he may have heard secondhand, and then proceeds to relay with conviction what he cannot possibly know: the inner thoughts, feelings, and intimate histories of Dyer the author, his sons, and even his ex-wife. Topping is actually upfront about it, suggesting early on that he’s guilty of “narrative fraud.”

But what is his agenda? Halfway through he’s already dropped more than a few hints and clues, but I’m eagerly anticipating a fuller picture by book’s end.

So what about this idea of unreliable narrators? A story is already a lie in a way, and an unreliable narrator suggests another (I wager more profound) layer of deceit. I love the notion that as readers when we open a book we automatically go along with the fiction, the lie, that this story is “true” in the context of the world the author has created. The trust between reader and writer is inherent. But what happens when the narrator-character telling the story does something that makes us question the validity of the tale? That unsettling feeling we’re in shifty hands. Alert, the author says, we’re going to have to be sharp here.

Unlike & Sons an unreliable narrator often takes his time in giving himself away, revealing his ultimate aim. He’s usually betrayed by what he focuses on. Particular observations, attention to certain details, contradictions, a snowball’s effect of slip-ups that show us he is not who we first thought, that events have been tailored to show himself in a favorable (sympathetic) light. This is what I’m going after in my own novel.

It’s an approach that is definitely not for everybody. But it excites and engages another level of my reading brain. I like the challenge, the hunt, the tangle with a character who is troubled and possibly a danger to himself and others. Why else does a character craft his own reality but to disguise his pathologies?

So what about you, fellow reader? Do you prefer your literature more conventional, or do you go for something more elusive now and then?

Becoming A Literary Character

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SlaughterHouse5, Dresden, Photo by Keith Gard

The occasion: A good friend and fellow book-lover is turning 40 next weekend and he and his wife are hosting a birthday party wherein the guests are required to come dressed as their favorite literary characters. My first thought was, well, I’ll just come as myself because aren’t we all as we are just characters acting in our own private narratives? But this overcooked philosophy might be seen as a narcissistic cop out and I’ve already pledged to my doctors I’d keep those to a minimum this year.

So who should I turn into this weekend?

Maybe Tom Ripley, nattily dressed in stolen clothes, carrying a bloody broken oar and convincing everyone that Dickie Greenleaf is still alive, he just can’t bear to see anyone right now? Or what about Olympia Binewski, the albino hunchbacked dwarf from Geek Love, scheming to protect her daughter from the exploitative Miss Mary Lick?

No, it’s got to be Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. But how to convey the sense that I’ve come unstuck in time? Basically, the novel jumps around in Billy’s life as a prisoner of war in WWII, an optometrist in Ilium, New York, and a human creature on display in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. The trick is to find articles of clothing or other elements representative of these moments and then find a way (with either duct tape or Velcro) to stick them on and tear off at random times during the party.

Potential roadblock: Billy Pilgrim is naked while on Tralfamadore. Would my being true to the book break the hosts’ no gift rule?

Potential solution: Represent the planet Tralfamadore by recreating a Tralfamadorian, described in the book as: “…two feet high and green and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts…were usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm.”

I believe you can buy a Tralfamordian at any Walmart. KV would be so proud.

Okay, so while I put together my outfit let’s pretend you’re going to this party. Who among your favorite literary characters would you go as and how would you dress?

Ray Bradbury and Attitude

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Photo by Alan Light

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that we lost one of the great titans of literature a few days ago: Ray Bradbury, the grand fabulist, visionary, prolific concoctor of enthusiastic, exuberant, far-sighted prose. Admittedly, I’ve read only a small fraction of his vast output, focusing on his longer works like Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Death Is A Lonely Business, but even so I can feel his influence, his imprint, in the skin of my own dark-fantastic stories.

As impacted by his fiction as I’ve been, however, it’s Bradbury’s nonfiction, specifically his collection of essays on writing known as Zen in the Art of Writing, that’s raising the hair on the back of my neck these days.

Because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about attitude. As in, how the right attitude about his work can usher a writer through the occasionally tumultuous and volatile terrain of story-telling. And how that attitude can carry-over and color his view of his life. To say Bradbury’s attitude toward both was ecstatic is certainly true, but still the word seems too meager to encompass the size of his passionate curiosity as a man of this world and a creator of “other-worlds” to be seen by our collective mind’s eye.

This passion is immediate, right there in the preface: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!”

Throughout the essays in his book Bradbury implores writers to work with zeal and gusto. Joy. To first, be excited, to be a “thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” He poses these questions: “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightening bolt? What are the best and worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

There’s energy in these words, encouragement, and obviously some provocation, like a finger poking you in the chest a little too hard. But there’s also a deep sincerity here; I think it infuses every piece he’s ever written, and I find the mixture pretty intoxicating. Maybe that sounds a bit overheated, but this book affected me, and perhaps it’s because I broke it open at a moment in my writing when I needed to hear certain things said without equivocation.

Like this: “The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire too?”

Isn’t that what any writer wants to achieve?

And also this: To reach a point where “…you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is Love.”

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. It’s sad to say good bye, but thank you for the life you’ve led. No doubt you’ll lead one just as fantastic in the after…

LATFOB – What Stuck With Me Part 2

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

“Fiction is like a trust fall. Sometimes the story catches you and sometimes it doesn’t…and you wake up with a bump on your head.”

“Why is calling something realistic a compliment? Just because something’s realistic doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Everything that talks about the human situation is political.”

“The point of every story is that there are two sides of things, both good and bad, optimistic and pessimistic.”

“I tend to write when I’m upset about something.”

“I spent fifteen hours on a plane to Argentina with a fat German next to me who farted the entire time.”

“Freeze your jeans. Kills the germs from farting.”

“Eventually every Wikipedia article leads to squid.”

“The Internet is a terrible distraction for writers.”

“Starting is just about writing sentences, collecting voices. Need to be comfortable being in the dark.”

“People really want short stories. They buy novels, but really they don’t want them.”

“Reading a work in translation is like kissing someone through a handkerchief…which does have a kinky charm to it.”

“Robert Louis Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver on a friend with all of his finer qualities removed.”

“Fiction is the exploration of the self in the world.”

“All of us are many people and writing is a way to expose our other personalities.”

“You know who’s got great beer? The Czech Republic. You should go there.”

“I write with the feeling that the book could go anywhere, that the whole premise could change in the middle of a sentence.”

“Form is what makes fiction transcendent.”

“As Robert Frost wrote, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'”

“Does reading have to be a totally immersive experience? Can’t it be ‘I like this story/I like this sentence.’?”

“I like transparency in art, the idea of knowing that this was created by someone. Jackson Pollack included his own detritus in his paintings: tobacco, dirt, lint. It’s nice to feel like you’re interacting with the creation of the work.”

“There’s this whole idea of momentum in modern fiction, that the writer has to pick a reader up and carry him or her forward and then drop them off at a certain point, unchanged, probably, at the most a bit breathless and flushed.”

The preceding witticisms and wisdom were recorded on a miniature yellow notebook on Sunday April 22 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The purveyors of said perspicacity were an anonymous festival-goer and the following authors: Etgar Keret, Sara Levine, Ben Loory, Amelia Gray, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Ehrenreich, Mark Leyner, and Aimee Bender.

LATFOB – What Stuck With Me Part 1

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

“Starting a book trying to achieve the big picture will get you into trouble.”

“You can’t be an American novelist and not be haunted by The Great Gatsby.”

“Reinvention. Characters who try always fail…and that’s a novel.”

“Cormac McCarthy has three books where babies are being eaten. How does he get away with that?”

The answer to our nation’s problems is craft brewing. It’s the artisanal movement that’s going to save us.”

“75% of all literary fiction readers are female.”

“I refuse to have a cover with a beheaded woman on it.”

“Can’t think about who’s going to like your book while you’re writing it.”

“Fiction is an act of prolonged empathy.”

“Writing is about trying to be less afraid.”

“The reward of writing is the opportunity of having a genuine experience.”

“Worst thing to do as a writer is to be afraid of writing from the perspective of gender or race other than one’s own.”

“You can’t read a great novel and update your Facebook status at the same time.”

“I want to entertain myself at the same time I’m trying to entertain my audience.”

“You never stop coming of age.”

“When you go into a project nervous–that’s a good sign.”

“If you’re from the South and someone kills a person in front of you, the proper thing to say is ‘Well, that was a very interesting choice.'”

“While you’re writing, always ask yourself ‘Is it true?'”

“The hive mind is in ascendance.”

“YA writers have established a community; they even write together.”

“This is the golden age of storytelling in YA fiction.”

“To be a reader now is really to be in pig heaven.”

“There needs to be more diversity in YA literature. Overall, there’s not a lot of people of color [in executive positions] in the publishing industry.”

“Transvaginal wanding is not just my drag name.”

“Fairytales take away the burden of originality. They are like a river of stories we can dip into and swim around in.”

“Fairytales invite us to change the world as we know it. And because it is a world of change it’s possible to take the marginal characters and make them the center of the story.”

“Fairytales are constantly recast to fit the culture.”

“Ultimately what we take away from fairytales isn’t their morals but their sense of wonderment.”

“It is so pleasurable to read as a child.”

“Finding yourself as a writer is discovering what really moves you as a reader.”

“Writing is intuitive. Like a person stumbling around a dark room, a dark forest. Images become stepping stones to get across the river.”

“Post-modern novels seem to be contemptuous of the reader.”

“The first job of the writer isn’t to cater to the audience.”

“The challenge is clarity.”

“Amazing that out of nothing can come a novel.”

The wit and wisdom above was collected onto a miniature yellow notepad Saturday April 21 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Said perspicacity was uttered by anonymous festival-goers, as well as the novelists Chad Harbach, Lauren Groff, Jonathan Evison, Anthony Giardina, Libba Bray, Pete Hautman, Aimee Bender, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Trinie Dalton, Jack Gantos, Ransom Riggs, and Thane Rosenbaum.

Do You Write Without A Net?

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Man on Wire

There are many popular writers out there, John Irving among them, who never begin a project without knowing exactly where they’re going. I remember an interview with Irving where he said he starts a book by figuring out what its last sentence will be. There is something to be said for having a map, a guide book of sorts to keep you on track, to allow you to chart your progress.

Conversely, there are just as many well-known writers, Stephen King among them, who start with just a germ of an idea, a character or two, and then delight in discovering their story in the moment as they’re actually writing it. They feel that an outline only serves to stifle the creative process; in their view, to plot a story is to suffocate it.

Here’s where I stand on the issue: I spent many years authoring screenplays which began life as structured, organized outlines, and so when it came to writing my first novel I was determined to work without a net. I knew only the bare essentials before plunging in: the story would involve repressed memories, and my teenage main character would somehow become his parents’ therapist. The process was extremely liberating; in fact, maybe too liberating, in that it resulted in a huge first draft. But I don’t regret my choice and believe the story would not have as much of the energy and surprise that it does if I had plotted it out beforehand.

Things are a bit different with my new project, a YA horror novel. I’ve decided to go a bit further with plotting, to know more about the story and characters before I set off to write. I’m not sure if it’s because this is a “genre” project and I’m concerned about hitting on certain “genre” beats or expectations, but it just feels like the right move for this story. However, I haven’t completely abandoned my intrepid spirit, as my plot structure is pretty loose and I’ve purposely left open the answers to several questions that I’ll dig up when I start writing. There needs to be an element of mystery, a willingness to embrace the unexpected, or the writing will go stale. I can only write about my characters and the story for so long before I get the itch to finally bring them both to life.

So how about you? If you’re a writer reading this, where do you fall on the issue of story preparation? Outline or no outline? Net, or nothing but the unforgiving ground to catch you if you fall?

Where Do Ideas Come From?

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Photo by Ana Fuji

For me, the completion of a writing project always unleashes a mélange of emotions: euphoria, sadness, relief…and dread. Dread? Yes. Because inevitably, digging its claws into my back after “The End” is this nagging persistent question: What am I going to write next?

Okay, but what’s the big deal, I thought of one idea, certainly another is already in the making? At the very least being cooked up somewhere in the deep recesses of the mind? But what if it’s not? What if the tank’s empty? The well’s dry? Insert next cliché here. It’s not like I can just go down to the Idea Store and pick up a few items as easily if I were shopping for my next meal. Because Idea Stores went out of business years ago, remember? Too many shoplifters.

However. Hold on. There is good news. Really? Yes. Frowns upside down, on one…two…three.

The good news is this: ideas are all around us, we just have to be open to looking for them in the most unlikely of places. For instance, the idea for this blog post was found under a dead pigeon at the bus stop on the corner of Motor Avenue and Venice Boulevard. All I had to do was brush off the maggots and—wallah! Blog post.

What was I doing poking around a dead pigeon?

Moving on. Ideas for blog posts are one thing, a relatively small thing perhaps, a few hundred words, but what about the bigger ideas, the long term projects that necessitate thousands of words? A new short story, screenplay, novel, where are those babies lurking?

Where they are not, contrary to the literature I was handed at the aforementioned bus stop, is in the mouths of actual babes. Do not go looking there; the storks that bring those little bundles of joy into the world do not speak English and are particularly vicious.

So I must intensify my search, in which I mean I must prepare for battle. The days of simply sitting down at my desk with my thinking cap on are over. It’s a thinking helmet now, along with a hazmat jumpsuit, industrial gloves, iron-toed boots and a crowbar. Occasionally a blowtorch.

And with that, I’m off. I’ve heard rumors about ideas floating around free for the taking outside the Hyperion sewage treatment plant. If I find anything I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, where do you get your ideas?