more negative attention

I received another rejection this week (so far). It was for my short story “Travel Light,” which is/was chapter two of my languishing novel project Larger than Life. It wasn’t a detailed rejection letter, but it was personalized, and when I wrote a quick email back thanking them for the consideration and feedback, they wrote back in turn thanking me for submitting. I appreciate that kind of respect and courtesy.

The story takes place during an office float trip, and I wrote about it in a bit more detail way back here. I suspect now that this stand-alone chapter may be as far as that novel ever really gets. Sure, I’d written perhaps 40,000 words for other chapters, but the effort stalled, and I’m losing touch with the protagonist and his motivations. I don’t see myself getting back to that place, and I’m honestly not too broken up about that. There is another character in that universe that I’d like to write a piece about. Oddly, he was a minor character who is more referenced than seen in that tale. But that may be all the farther I venture into that universe. Fathers and Sons has since taken over my creative life, and for now, that’s been a satisfying place to be.

The rejection email for “Travel Light” said that the editors really liked the characterization but they felt that the piece wasn’t structurally where it needed to be yet. (One other rejection had also mentioned the good characterization of the story.) I’m not sure what to make of the structure comment though. I’m not disagreeing with it; I just don’t know how I can use it to improve the story. While I do a little bit of flashback, it is mostly a straightforward account of a day on the water in a canoe. The whole trip is a metaphor for the character’s current state in life. Slow. Hung up on hidden sandbars. Every inch forward a struggle. That kind of thing. I can’t see my way around that part of the structure; it seems so apt for what I want to show. Well, I suppose the editors meant something else with their structural comment.

I wish I had other news to share with you, gentle reader. As I mentioned in a recent post, several submission deadlines have passed for various magazines, and I’m biting my nails in anticipation of responses for the pieces I’d sent in. (Also, how/why is it that people chew their fingernails when they’re nervous? Is that a learned behavior? Is it culturally specific? And why that?) I was hoping I could share with you the wonderful news of one of my Fathers and Sons stories being accepted, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I can share this with you, however. I get on an airplane later today and go to this place called New York. (It really exists; I’ve verified it personally.) I’m going to do a little bit of sight seeing, and then I’m running in a 10K with my daughter on Sunday. She runs marathons several times a year; I’m not sure how she’ll cope with my plodding pace. I’ll tell her to run on ahead without me, but she’ll be polite and stay with me. It seems exact in retrospect, but I never would have guessed how similar long-distance running is to writing. I’ve seen this very point come up in several other writing blogs I visit. Finding such dovetails in life and work is much like getting a respectful rejection letter. I feel good even though it hurts a bit.

not quite a rejection, certainly not an acceptance

Exactly 261 days ago, in the middle of last summer, I had submitted my story “Making Light” to an anthology of stories in the workplace. “Making Light” is a chapter from my novel-in-limbo, Larger than Life. It seemed self contained as a story, so I thought I had nothing to lose from submitting it.

The posted response time at the anthology was 60 days. After four months I wrote to the editor asking if there was any news. That was in October. At the time they said that progress on the anthology was coming along slowly, more slowly than they had expected, and they thanked me for my continuing patience.

Today I received an email from the editor with the bad news — his bad news, but also mine, I guess. He said that the anthology was not going to be published after all. So I didn’t really get a rejection.

It’s a quirky little story. I’ll continue to look around for likely markets, but I had submitted it before mostly on a whim. Nothing gained, but nothing really lost either.

Ten to one

In the times when I’m away from my laptop and can’t indulge in feverish composition, I often have flashes of insight about the stories I’m working on. (Do these flashes come because I’m away from my laptop? Does the inability to be writing cause me to have these moments of inspiration?) When this happens I generally make feverish notes so the thoughts don’t get away. I always keep a small notepad and (mechanical) pencil at hand, and generally regardless of whatever I am (or should be) doing, I will take up pencil and pad and scratch down a few lines until I have my brilliant thought safely corralled.

Although these notes sometimes deal with a short story I’m working on or even what I plan to do for the coming weekend, they mostly fall into two categories right now. Either they are about the Finnegans novel I’m currently working on or they are about the Larger than Life novel I’ve set aside for the present.

What I’ve found in recent months is that the ratio of Larger notes to Finnegans notes is about ten to one. I have about ten insights about my frustrating Larger than Life project to every one I have for my Finnegans novel. I suspect there is a message in that for me.

I don’t want to parse this too finely. The Finnegans novels — I have about a half dozen plots I’m actively developing as the muse visits me — have been knocking around in my head much longer than Larger than Life has. It may be that I’ve worked out most of the character and plot development for those stories and just don’t “need” the insights now. Also, Larger than Life is a more ambitious work; I intend for it to present a much more complex character with a more challenging storytelling approach. The Finnegans can more or less be taken at face value. My Larger than Life character — let’s call him Chris, though he would prefer a different name — merits a more careful and considered view.

Larger than Life continues to both tantalize and frustrate me. It’s probably going to be the hardest thing I’ll ever write. I began work on it, managed to get about six chapters written, and found that I still didn’t know the story well enough to do it justice. It’s certainly become a much deeper telling than what it had started out as. The character’s journey and destination, while the same as originally, are also different. I’m still trying to understand it and how to present it, which is why I think the insights that come to me continue to come to me. I’m still learning what the story is that I have to tell.

I don’t mind this. Larger than Life will be a much better story than what I had originally conceived. I just don’t know when it will be time to start writing it again. And my Finnegans story would appreciate more mental space for its development in the meantime.

Out of my mind

Not an hour goes by that I don’t have some idea or impression or solution for my novel-in-hibernation, Larger than Life. (As I noted before, I’ve even had this happen in my sleep.) If I’m not near my computer, I jot my note on a piece of paper (with a mechanical pencil, of course) to transcribe it and incorporate it later.

By the time I’m at the computer, I usually have a pile of these notes waiting for attention. And if it’s not for Larger than Life it’s for Finnegans Deciphered (the one I am working on right now) or for any of a half dozen novel and story ideas I’m gestating.

I have no complaint about this. It’s how I evolve my ideas, and eventually enough of it gels into a whole.

What’s curious to me, though, is that absolutely none of this is happening with my novel, The Sleep of Reason. I’ve finished that novel, and I’m (still) shopping it around, but unlike everything else I’m working on, no fresh ideas are coming to me for it. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

Is it because that novel truly is finished? Or is it that I have closed my mind to it, believing it is finished? Or am I simply not allowing myself to give any more creative effort to it. I don’t know, and I don’t suppose I care either. The ferment that I’m currently experiencing for my other efforts had happened to me at the same pace when I was toiling through The Sleep of Reason. I was in the thick of it back in those days (not so long ago either). Which is why I’m a little surprised that it’s not still happening.

Yet another post on my progress with Finnegans Deciphered

Yawn! Can I bore you with yet another post on my progress with Finnegans Deciphered? I am making progress. I certainly have the momentum and the critical mass necessary to convince myself that I have a whole story to tell and that I will be able to tell it. All is right with that world.

I continue to discover and correct all of the little inconsistencies that creep into my writing, especially on longer, larger works. If he has this realization now, then that couldn’t have been the case then? Didn’t I already bring up this point? Has this bit of character development been brought up yet? Don’t I want to introduce this or that feature sooner? Don’t I want to withhold this or that feature for later? All the mechanics of plotting and character development. It’s gratifying when I make the corrections even as it’s embarrassing when I discover the need for them.

Across six and a half chapters I’ve managed to compile 21,000+ words, and though I don’t write to prescribed word counts — I’ll tell the story I have to tell, dammit, and then be finished — I’m constantly checking this number. Those chapters will likely grow over time as I find I needed to lay the groundwork for later developments.

Ideas for necessary plot developments continue to reveal themselves to me. A couple of minor characters are playing larger roles than I had originally envisaged. I find I want to do more research — specifically to visit a certain Missouri River town and go bicycling. In all, it seems like a healthy progress.

It’s just boring as blog fodder.

In other news, Larger that Life continues to force itself into my brain. I am constantly making notes about how this new chapter needs to be developed and how that new chapter needs to now be created. My protagonist is evolving, and the story/character as I had originally seen them are long ago left behind. All I need are more hours in the day.

In your dreams (or mine anyway)

This has never happened to me before. As I slept the other night, I dreamed of an inconsistency in the manuscript I’ve written (so far) of Larger than Life. I didn’t dream up the inconsistency; it was an actual one in the story that hadn’t occurred to me, and the fact of it entered my dream.

Here’s what it is: At one point I have my protagonist reflect that he works hard, pays his bills, sets a little money aside, and helps his parents with their bills. Such a good son! But later in the story I have an observation that he could consider moving out of his apartment and buying a house because his parents would help him with the down payment. So in one case, his parents are poor and need his help and in the other they are well off enough to be able to stake him down payment money. Obviously that would need to be addressed lest the reader find it inconsistent.

But what amazes me is that this realization came to me in a dream! I’ve heard accounts of people who have solved problems in their dreams, or at least who have woken with a solution, presumably having solved it in their sleep. Until the other night, however, such a thing had never happened to me.

As for the inconsistency, I’m going to drop the bit about him helping his parents with their bills. It’s a nice quality to give to an overall likeable character, but there is more challenge to him, to get off fence where his life is currently stuck, in his having the ability to buy a house. Basically, he can’t avoid that kind of challenge/responsibility by claiming he can’t afford it.

I continue to surprise myself with the ideas I have for this novel that I’d decided to set aside for now. The story keeps pushing to the front of my brain. I think I’m going to have to write the whole thing somehow just to get some peace from it.

Speaking of which, in a couple of hours I intend to rest my head on my pillow, perchance to dream. Maybe some other plot revelation will come to me.

Update 2/7/11: It’s happened again. I woke from my sleep early this morning with a sudden realization about the name of one of my characters in my WIP. I had given the character the name I had because of its anagrammatic possibilities, but his name turned out to have an even deeper substance, one that ties even better with the plot. It was sitting there for me to realize for a long time. Granted, I might have reached this realization during my time conscious, but I didn’t. Sleep almost seems like another tool for the writerly toolbox.

Update 3/6/11: Happened again. This time just a “clever” name for a shop in town where my characters are staying, but it presented itself, and somehow in my dreaming I knew it would be good for the novel. And the name survived the perilous transition from sleeping to waking, so added it will be.

Confession; confusion

I had come to a decision. It was for my own good. It was clear and it was obvious. I was wasting my time, focusing on the wrong thing, or at least a thing that wasn’t paying off. I kept thinking it would get better or make sense or achieve critical mass or something, but it wasn’t, and I was deceiving myself thinking otherwise. I was putting a lot of effort into something that was just stalled.

So I made my decision. I was going to abandon work on Larger than Life and get on with my own life. The novel just wasn’t coming together. Too much of it wasn’t “revealing” itself to me. I wasn’t ready to write it. I didn’t understand the character well enough. Maybe I never would. And to keep plugging away at it was a big waste of time, especially since I have a whole bunch of Finnegan novels queued up, waiting for my attention. (Finnegan: my husband and wife cozy mystery novel series — though I’m not sure how well they fit into that category.) No, Larger than Life was at an end; a worthy effort, but a fruitless one in the end.

So to begin the new year I was going to put Larger than Life aside and embark on Finnegans Deciphered, my personal favorite among the many stories I’ve imagined for them. It was to be a fresh start at the new year on a new project that promised to be fruitful and lend itself to my creative energies (whatever they may be).

Finnegans Deciphered is a good story. I’ve written about it on this blog in some distant posts that are too distant for me to bother finding and linking to. It makes some nice literary references, it has some complex but credible characters, it has a nice and reasonable resolution of the tension, and I’ve been wanting to work on it for months and months.

I steered my thoughts to it, and I found all kinds of fresh ideas for its development and writing flowing through my fingers and onto the page or keyboard. It was coming along nicely, and I found that my notes file for the novel was just as thorough and comprehensive as I had remembered it to be. Finnegans Deciphered was one novel that was ready to be written. Green light: go!

Except that Larger than Life was not going to yield.

A friend once told me that you can recognize your good ideas by the fact that they won’t go away. Larger than Life won’t go away. It is as though by making the decision to “abandon” it, I have brought the novel to even more vitality in my pointed little head. Ideas for how to surmount plot problems are now bursting in my brain. The consequences of this or that character issue or plot point are revealing themselves to me apace. I’m seeing whole new chapters where I hadn’t before, chapters that needed to be there from the start, characters that I needed but didn’t know I needed. The whole theme of the novel has transformed in recent weeks. It seems that Larger than Life is not finished with me though I thought I was finished with it.

So I will not abandon it after all I guess.

It’s still going to be a long, difficult struggle to write this novel. That much is clear if nothing else is. My characters and their interactions are complicated, and in order to get them right, I’m going to have to toil and sweat and work and work and work. I don’t mind that, but it’s like learning that your child has some untoward talent that now must  be dealt with.

So how am I going to live my days? I’m not sure. I certainly will continue to struggle with Larger than Life, but I do want to put some effort to Finnegans Deciphered. I’m not sure how I’m going to do this or even if it is wise to try. But I am sure that it will make for an interesting new year.

*   *   *

I finished the Iris Murdoch novel The Book and the Brotherhood before the end of the year, which was a goal of mine. I loved the novel, and I suspect I will return to it again someday.

I’m now reading Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem on my Kindle and liking it a lot. I especially like the narrative voice. It reminds me a bit of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’m not sure about this whole eReader experience though. It works, but is it the same experience as holding an actual book in your hands?

*   *   *

Oh, happy 2011 to all of you fine folk!

More of the same

The story of my WIP, Larger than Life, is slowly revealing itself to me. It seems that each week I better understand my protagonist and can better envision him not only in plot-forwarding situations but in how he will behave in those situations. I make my copious notes when I’m away from my laptop, and I manage to transcribe them and even put some of them into fresh words when I’m before it. I managed to put down more than 2,000 fresh words in a recent writing session, which I consider highly productive (for me) but probably not sustainable on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve mentioned here a few times that I really have no use for NaNoWriMo as a tool. (I’m happy if it works for others, though.) I can see from my process that it would not work for me. The reason is that I am discovering my story as I write it. While The Sleep of Reason (still no news) is predominantly plot and tone based, Larger than Life is mostly character based. I am getting to know my characters at a measured and thoughtful pace that I don’t think would work under a month-long, artificially imposed word count system. If all I were doing was writing a plot-based story, maybe I could see some value in NaNoWriMo (again, for me). Or if all I wanted was to get the bare bones of a story’s plot in place in a hurry, that process might work for me. But I would have to have the plot mostly fully realized in my head before the month began in order to work productively under such high pressure (for me). This is how I happened to write my recent short story, “Diaspora.” But as I said, I had the plot nearly fully worked out for that one, and it is a short story, not a novel.

The point of all of this babbling is that Larger than Life continues to gain critical mass and momentum (if I may mix a metaphor), and I know I will finish writing it. (There had been some doubt. I have other projects I really want to get going, but I can’t do two such things at once.) It may be the novel I had to get “out of the way” or it may turn out to be a finished work. Either way, I’m getting there.

Percolating

I wonder how many stories I would have written by now if I weren’t waiting for them to be “ready.”

Somewhere along the way I came to the notion that I needed to have a story fully imagined in my head before I started writing it. And it’s true that I made an embarrassing number of false starts with stories — really just ideas, images, characterizations — that didn’t have legs, so to speak. My hard drive is littered with the corpses of these failed attempts.

Still . . . I’m not sure this is a fruitful stance. My hard drive is also filled with “notes” for stories that I may never write as I wait for them to be fully imagined in my head. Lately I’ve found that if I just push my way past this imagined barrier, I tend to produce the core of something worthwhile.

I come to this realization because I am reflecting a great deal on how different it has been working on my WIP, Larger than Life, compared to the completed-and-being-shopped-around The Sleep of Reason. The latter wrote itself. There were many times when I felt the story was being revealed to me and that I just had to keep up putting it in writing. Larger than Life, on the other hand, is only coming grudgingly from that murky creative part of my brain. Every writing session is a chore, a voyage of uncertainty, and yet each time I am pleased with what I have done.

The fullness of the story is percolating in my head. Hardly a day goes by now when I don’t have some realization or insight about it, some really substantive understanding of the characters’ relationships or the implications of an act (or the foreshadowing for the act). The writing isn’t getting any easier, but the connectedness of it all is growing more clear by the day.

And I think this is happening, in part, because I am forging ahead with the writing even though I know the story is not “fully imagined.” I think the act of forcing it forward is compelling me to achieve these insights and understandings. If so, then this has been a valuable lesson to learn.

It makes me think that I should take up some of those short story ideas I have floating around and pushing my way to getting the core of something about them written as well.  (In fact, my recent success with the story “Diaspora” resulted from something much like this.) Now it’s just a matter of stealing the time to do it from the myriad of other things that need doing.

Looking for momentum

As of today, I have more than 23,900 words drafted for Larger than Life. That is comprised of six and a half chapters of wildly divergent sizes. (Chapter one is only 1,732 words while chapter two is 5,471.) I am making progress; I am moving through this, but it still feels as though I am swimming in molasses. I know where I want the story to go, how it must march toward the required end. And I now have a clearer sense of the narrative voice to use (though I haven’t really applied it yet since I’m still assembling the skeleton of the tale). But the story is not yielding itself to me easily, not in the way The Sleep of Reason had when I was writing it.

Some of the time I think that this story is not worth the telling and that I would better spend my time getting started on a completely different novel. I realize that’s a commonplace reaction, apparently at about this point in the process, so I try to ignore those thoughts and forge ahead. I have two novels that I abandoned when this happened to me before. One truly was not worth the trouble and the other was more a political screed than a novel, so I don’t regret giving up on either of them. But I don’t want that kind of surrender to become an easy habit.

At other times I think that if I can pull this story together, it will be the best thing I’ve ever done, with perfectly realized characters and relationships. If The Sleep of Reason is more fantastic, Larger than Life is grounded in real life, in mundane, day-to-day actions and reactions. The former is more plot driven; the latter is more relationships drive. Perhaps that is why it is both challenging and full of potential.

I’m embarking on the pivotal chapter, the introduction of the second most important character and pretty much the halfway point of the story. True, if this really were the halfway point, then I would end up with a novel of fewer than 50,000 words, but that’s not going to be the case. On the one hand, a wholly new chapter presented itself to me in the last few days, one I had not imagined before in the rough outline in my head, so that will increase the word count and the texture of the story. On another hand, I have a new character to begin depicting. She will be both an antagonist and a friend for my central character, so that dynamic should fuel a lot of growth in the story. And finally, there’s that narrative voice I keep hinting at. Once I begin applying that I expect the telling to go off in some interesting directions.

I just wish all of these factors would come together for a while and flow through my fingers without a fight.