Did family and house stuff all weekend. Today I wrote in-scene backstory about one of the characters in the swordfighting ms. I'm wondering what will happen if I keep going in this direction--will I get loads of backstory written about everybody, then have a bazillion pages I still don't know what to do with? How is doing this going to help me figure out how to structure the story?

It feels like I'm at a plateau--like when you're trying to lose weight, or trying to exercise at a certain level, and you hit a place where your results don't change anymore, and it feels like that's where you're going to stay. It feels like I'm at a place where my reach is permanently doomed to exceed my grasp. Now, you could say it's Murphy's Law--people rise to the level of their own incompetence--or you could say it's a plateau and you can break through it if you keep trying, keep switching things up, keep trying to think outside the box you've put yourself in. I'm going to go easy on myself and say it's a plateau that can be broken out of, and not my own particular level of incompetence.

And I'm going to keep on just doing what I'm doing, writing out pieces I like while waiting for lightning to strike. I'm going to the Vermont College residency in January, so I'm hoping to see and hear things that I can use to shake my brain up and maybe kick my abilities up a notch.*

I wonder how Megan Whalen Turner thinks. I'll bet she thinks like one of my writer friends, who writes in a straight line, and whose brain has a natural ability to combine character and plot at the same time. I can't do that. I don't know if it can be learned--but if it can't, there surely is some way for a confirmed non-plotter to achieve the same results while coming at it from a different--and perhaps more labor-intensive--direction.


*Not that the book that might come out of all this angst would be great literature or anything. It's not about writing a master work, it's about being able to do something I'm unable to do right now:

"I would rather have the two hundred fifty-six imperfect books that mark the vectors of my journey through my art form than to have one perfect book that marks nothing but its own perfect self."--Barry Moser

I thought I'd have a nice long uninterrupted writing session today, but things have cropped up and I'll have to squeeze patches of writing in here and there. I guess it doesn't matter that much because yesterday I worked on getting the first section smoothed out so I could read the whole thing--but it's taking longer than I thought, as usual. It'll take at least a couple of days to get that done.

But I'm happy and pleased with the world in general because I heard two pieces of very good news from other writers day before yesterday. The first is that a writer friend finished up a ms that said WF has been working on for several years. The wonderful thing about this is that I've seen a couple of incarnations of this ms, so I know that WF has consistently, patiently, doggedly worked toward feeling out what this ms wanted to be, consciously refusing to let market or business fears interfere with the heart and soul of the creative process. As a consequence, the ms has been a stylistic stretch from WF's previous work, and because WF didn't rush it or push it, but chose fruition as the ultimate goal, the story has visibly grown into its depth and potential.

I can't remember if I've posted this, because I say it so much, and everybody who knows me already knows my opinion, although they may not agree. For me, every book has an ideal form, and my job as a writer is to strive toward that ideal, to feel out the possibilities with an open mind, and to figure out what the book needs and wants to be. I will always necessarily fall short of that ideal, but it's the struggle and searching and goodhearted effort toward the ideal that are the true goal, not the printed and bound book that sits on the shelf. What happens to the book after it's published is a separate matter that has nothing to do with process. And although it would be nice if goodhearted effort was proportional to sales and acclaim, it usually is not. The only thing I have for sure is what happens when I'm alone in front of the computer, just me and the ms.*

So it pleases me down to my battered writerly bones to hear WF decide that the ms has indeed reached its current potential (we all know that another level of potential will be set when an editor gets invested in the ms) and is ready for the next step.

The other good news is from a WF whose ms I read several years ago, and which we discussed. We fell out of touch, but the ms has stayed at the back of my mind, because its strong points were extraordinarily strong, and because it was so very deserving of struggle and goodhearted effort. I hoped WF had not been ground down by this sucky business. To me, a ms becomes a living thing that requires its authors not to give up. If a living thing is going to die without you, you can't quit on it completely just because you're exhausted or feeling hopeless. Set it aside, yes; refill the well, yes--but not quit completely to let it die.

So anyway, this WF contacted me out of the blue to let me know that said WF had indeed been plugging away all these years, had been struggling and working to bring this ms to fulfillment--and that it had just sold in a multibook deal.

While I've been plugging away in various degrees of hope and hopelessness, other writers have been doing so too, with quiet dedication to craft and to their stories. Knowing this sooths my battered bones and warms my soul.



*It's an irony of this business that the more you focus on what a ms needs to be and the less you focus on whether it will be published, the more likely it becomes that the ms will be published. I will be so bold as to state that as a fact. Feel free to argue.

Was hoping to work alllll day, but unfortunately life interfered. As life is wont to do. However, I did get some good work done--shifted the formatting around and smoothed everything out from the beginning on, getting well past some of the parts I'd left undone because there were too many loose pieces to sort out. It was like ramming a car into a snowbank, because I hit it at high speed, got nice and deeply in, then the life interference killed my engine before I could get all the way through. So now I face tomorrow with a wall of snow before me, a cold dead engine and no momentum. I have no idea if I'll start from there tomorrow, or just skip it again.

The beginning has a flow to it now, and I think it begins to make sense as a story. Like, you pick it up and can get into it and understand what you're reading (at least, you can up till the wall of snow in your face). I don't think that has been the case thus far.

I feel pretty good. I'm nearly flat broke, jobless, and sinking into invisibility in the book world again, with no re-visibility in sight. Bad for the ego, but excellent for getting down to what's important about writing: finding the ideal this particular ms wants to strive for. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain, just me and the ms, alone and pure.

Fleshed out quite a bit of next-to-last chapter, to the point of dividing it into two chapters. But I'm happy with it at the moment because the first part ends on a nice hook, and that's one big thing I'm trying to do here.

The entire point in starting this book was trying to write something with an actual plot. But that's expanded into trying to write something that rips along like crazy, so that the reader will have a hard time putting it down. While also keeping my interest in writing it, which is another matter entirely. It's been one h*ll of a stretch for me to write story and plot rather than character. I think maybe I haven't quite succeeded. But I'm learning a lot from it; pretty much every day I learn something or encounter a new problem that requires another stretch.

"I would rather have the two hundred and fifty-six imperfect books that mark the vectors of my journey through my art form than to have one perfect book that marks nothing but its own perfect self."--Barry Moser