Making progress in Sleep

I am now nearly halfway through the final rewrite of my novel-in-progress, The Sleep of Reason. When I say “final rewrite” I mean of this narrative’s draft. The novel is currently in first person narration by the protagonist. After I get through this rewrite, chiefly to add seasonal and weather references and clean up whatever little problems I notice, I intend to recast the entire thing with a third-person, omniscient narrator. This will be a huge undertaking, but it is necessary in order for the story to have the more resonant ending I want to give it.

I’m going slowly, and I’ve given myself a good period of waiting between the fever of composition and the cold, dispassionate work of revising so that I can have the perspective I need to judge my own writing. This has been useful because it has pointed out a problem with my storytelling that I had completely overlooked in all of my earlier passes.

My protagonist asks himself a lot of questions. He’s in an altogether new and unforeseen role in his otherwise pathetic life, doing strange things for strange people, so he’s uncertain how he should proceed. Thus he asks himself a lot of question. The problem is that he asks too many questions. I have some paragraphs of five or six sentences that are all questions. And they’re rhetorical questions, so the poor reader doesn’t even get the relief of answers.

As much as he questions his role, my poor protagonist doesn’t ask enough of them in the end, but I don’t think I have to be so literal about that in the story telling. I’ve been reworking these question paragraphs to soften their force and frequency, and I expect I’ll erase their problem altogether in the third-person narrative.

Anyway, I attribute this late discovery to the fact that I’ve given myself some time away from the manuscript. I understand that one of the ancient Greek orators recommended allowing eight years to pass before attempting a rewrite. I don’t want to wait that long (though, in a way, I have since I began this story about a decade ago).

Thursday is the cruelest day

When you pause to think about it, Thursday is really a strange day in the work week. Consider this:

• Monday – You come to the office or wherever you work a bit shell shocked, confused and only motivated by caffeine and some vague sense of obligation, which you really need to reconsider when you have a moment to think straight. You stumble through the day on grit, uncertain that any of it makes sense.
• Tuesday – Okay, time to roll up the sleeves and get to work! You need to pay your bills, after all, and you’re actually pretty good at what you do, so why not do it and be done with it? Great things can be achieved on Tuesdays.
• Wednesday – Hump Day! The work week is halfway over already. You can begin to see the weekend from a Wednesday. Working for a living seems tolerable on a Wednesday.
• Friday – TGIF! Nobody works very hard on a Friday. Working on a Friday is just a way to heighten the gratification when the workday ends!

But Thursday? What is that? An extra day snuck into the week without character or satisfaction. Thursdays are nefarious days worked up by evil corporations to wring a bit more work out of people. Thursdays lack definition. You’re tired of the long week, but you’re delayed from getting to the weekend by one more damned day. Thursdays are a cruel trick.

When I am made king, Thursdays will be banned.

Characterless story

Can there be such a thing as a characterless story?

I read a piece in a “best stories” anthology once mentioning an old hermit who died — he was only mentioned casually, as I recall, and really no more than a MacGuffin — and the story was about his semi-rural property being reclaimed by nature because of his absence. The events were given in inevitable sequence, from the growing of weeds to the emergence of insects not seen for years. Wild animals returned. The house decayed. And so forth. There really was no character in the story. No conventional character anyway.

I suppose that one could stretch the definition to say that nature was the character. But it really seems to me that characters were not needed for the story. I think all sorts of stories take place all around us that don’t feature human involvement and may not even have animals that might be considered characters. Where I live, for millennia before Europeans arrived, there was a battle between the encroaching forests from the east and the trackless prairie grasslands from the west. It was an epic battle (only ended by the axe and steel plow). There’s a story, and I’ve read about it in fascinating detail.

Granted, most conventional readers would not be interested in a story that did not involve human characters. Fine. But does that mean that a worthy story must include human characters?

I’m trying to imagine a story in which human characters are almost superfluous to the tale. They would be no more than window dressing, no more than another prop; the story would stand strong and tall without the need of human support. I think it could be done. I think Borges probably did something along these lines.

I read a non-fiction book called The Biography of a Tree by James Jackson. It told of the complete life of a white oak tree from the acorn first falling on the ground to two hundred years later when the mighty oak that had grown from it finally fell to the ground too. While this was nonfiction, it told a complete, compelling story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was a story without human characters at all. (I think at some point he described a hunter leaning against the tree.) In fact, I’m sure Jackson combined observations he made about many white oak trees to come up with the story of one, so in this sense, his story was fiction as well.

Can you think of anything like this?

A puppy and a process, part two

What am I reading right now? Here are the top three books on my reading shelf:

• The Border Collie by Mary Burch
• Border Collies by Michael DeVine
• Living with a Border Collie edited by Dita Kilsby

If you’re seeing a pattern, that’s because I now have a black and white Border Collie puppy living in my kitchen. His name is Flike (named after what I consider to be the very finest dog in all of cinema) and he is just over seven weeks old.

You may recall me speaking of our Pomeranian, Queequeg, here a few times. He’s now nearly a year old, and he’s really my wife’s dog. I’d been searching for a Border Collie for a long time; they’re not a very common breed in Kansas City where I live. When I found one with the markings I wanted, we made a long drive into rural America to fetch him and bring him home. That was on Wednesday.

So far, Flike has been a quiet, undemonstrative dog. We haven’t heard him bark yet. He seems to be shy and prefers to sleep unless we take him outside. Then he romps around like a real pup. He’s sleeping on my foot as I write this, which is endearing at the moment, but I have work to do, and I hope my early morning writing sessions don’t get interrupted by yet another needy dog in the household.

Rebecca finds a home

I just learned this evening that another short story of mine, “Rebecca finds her way,” has been accepted for publication. It will appear in the Winter 2009 issue of Mirror Dance, which is the same publication that accepted my story “The Manuscript.”

“Rebecca finds her way” is a piece of flash fiction, coming in at 735 words (thereabouts). It is one of my Google Documents experiments. I wrote and revised the story completely in Google Documents, only copying it to Word in order to format it for submission. I make a brief mention of it at the end of this post.

Mirror Dance publishes all ranges of fantasy fiction, and my story falls into the feminist fantasy flash fiction category. It’s a recognizable character in our universe, having a dispute with a piece of technology that will lead her astray if she follows it.

So I’ll be sure to post a link to the story when it comes online. Thanks for being patient with me as I crow.

Writer’s block

I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced writer’s block (and I hope I never do), but I don’t know the exact definition of the term, so maybe I am plagued with it and just keep writing because I don’t know any better. This Wikipedia article seems to do a good job of defining and describing the condition.

I say that I haven’t experienced writer’s block, but maybe I have. I can think of a couple of times in my writing efforts when the words didn’t come, and being “blocked” sounds a lot better than being “lazy.”

As part of a college program more than two decades ago, when I was a callow youth (is that redundant?), I undertook to write a whole novel in one semester. It was a young adult novel, and I still have fond memories of it (even if I no longer have a physical copy of it). But I do remember coming to a point where I didn’t know what to do next in the story telling. As I look back with my more experienced eyes I think it was a problem of not having “imagined” my story sufficiently at the time. I think I may have set my characters loose in a rough framework of a plot and then run into some problems filling out that plot. (I realize that some writers work this way — often work with even less structure and planning — but it sure doesn’t work for me!) I think it may also have been that I wasn’t sufficiently disciplined yet as a writer to muscle through the hard parts of writing. Perhaps, then, I truly was suffering from writer’s block, but I’ll leave that for you to diagnose.

In any case, I came up with a technique that helped me get over my block. I took all of my characters (from my young adult novel in progress) and wrote them as characters in a short story set in the American Old West; I made them cowboys and cowgirls. I didn’t magically transport modern characters to an “exotic” setting through some time travel device to watch them cope with a strange setting. I simply tried to write them as though they were characters of that time and place. Born, raised, and living there, as much a part of it as every other character inhabiting it. I’m not sure where this idea came from; I’d like to think I thought of it myself. (Let’s say I did, okay?) What it did for me, though, was to give me a fresh perspective about each character. I saw how they would react and behave in a different setting, and it seemed to energize my approach to them in the novel where I wanted them to be. That got me through the writer’s block and on my way again.

The second “incident” I suffered lasted many years. This is the one I attribute to laziness rather than creative failure. As I noted in an earlier post, about fifteen years had passed between the publication of my first short story and my second. I continued writing, though it was almost exclusively nonfiction. During that time I had more than sixty feature articles published in various newspapers and magazines, as a free lance. It was a heady time in my writing life, filled with the pride of accomplishment, and I was actually paid for some of it (!). What I wasn’t doing much of, however, was fiction writing. I think I may have poked around with some short stories that went nowhere (like the story that eventually became my novel-in-progress, The Sleep of Reason), and I may have even submitted a few, but I can clearly remember thinking “when I write my novel” and “I should write a story about that” and such. I was thinking about writing a lot more than I was actually writing. Was I blocked or was I lazy? (Or was I also a husband and father with young children and a mortgage and other responsibilities? This may be a large part of it since I am writing fiction furiously fast and frequently now and the nest happens to be empty.)

As I said at the start of this rambling post, I don’t seem to suffer much from writer’s block. I have so many stories in my head and in my notes that I’ll never lack for subject matter. And I think I have developed sufficient discipline to keep myself before the keyboard to do the sometimes tedious work of actually writing. And I think further, in some undefinable sense, my creative self has matured sufficiently to allow me to see my way through my fiction to get it done.

This guy obviously never took a writing class!

In the course of only a few pages in the novel I am currently reading, I found the following “sins” that beginning writers are cautioned to avoid:

“All right,” I said sharply. - Use of adverb!

“Calm down,” he replied. - Use of a word other than “said” to tag dialogue!

“Sidney,” he said furiously. – That adverb business again!

“All right!” he said crisply. – And again!

But I hopped onto the bus, and then behind me the pneumatic door, with its hard rubber edge, swung shut with what I took to be an overly appropriate thump. . . – Telling, not showing!

I said, “I think maybe I’ll just get the bus.” – Tagging dialogue before rather than after!

Making me all the more belligerent. - Telling, not showing!

“You’re not,” he pleaded. – Use of a word other than “said” to tag dialogue!

Which was exactly what she thought about me, after reading my story. – Sentence fragment!

And so on. The pages are full of these kinds of amateur errors.

I’ve read this novel more than a dozen times, and I intend to read it another dozen times. It’s one of the five novels I would take if I were to be stranded on an island. The novel was nominated for the American Book Award, but it didn’t win. The author has been able to console himself with some other accomplishments. His thirty novels have garnered him the National Book Award (several times), the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award (several times), the Pulitzer Prize, and several dozen other awards. Many of his novels have been made into films. He was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by the President of the United States. He is a serious name when the Nobel Prize is discussed.

So how can a guy who writes like this, with countless mistakes like those listed above, win so many awards? Or could it be that those so-called mistakes are not mistakes at all?

Where matters stand

I continue to make slow but careful progress on the current pass through of the draft of my novel The Sleep of Reason. I’m going through it now to slip in seasonal and weather references and to clean up any lingering plot and structural problems I had identified earlier. (Most of these I set in red typeface so I wouldn’t overlook them later.) I also happen to be spotting a lot of embarrassing typos. I’m more than a quarter of the way through, and while I don’t feel I need to race, I do hope to pick up the pace some. Of course that will mean that I’ll then face the task of rewriting the whole damned thing with a third-person narrator, but I’m in no rush to get to that point yet.

I mentioned in a different post that I intended to work next on a new Finnegans novel, one of the murderless mysteries I think there is a market for, and I even sheepishly confessed to having written the first draft of the first chapter of it (when I should have been exclusively focused on The Sleep of Reason). I continue to make notes for it, happily finding that there is more themtic depth to the story than my original plotting ideas had suggested. I’ve also begun some tentative research on the works of late 19th Century women writers on the frontier. I’ll need to reproduce that voice in parts of the novel I intend to write.

The much bigger surprise, however, is that I find myself “compelled” to write the novel I had intended to set aside for later, with the working title of Larger than Life. Unlike the Finnegans novel that is fully plotted, with well sketched out characters and themes, Larger than Life only looms vaguely before me. I haven’t “imagined” all of it yet, and I only have the dimmest sense of where the plot will go. Yet I’ve written a rough draft of one chapter and plotted another, having completed about a third of that writing work as well. I have the opening chapter all plotted (though for creative reasons, it will have to be the last one I write) and several others stewing in my feverish brain. Most of all, I have a thorough understanding of the trials and tribulations of the protagonist. So here I am working on a novel I didn’t intend to write for a couple of years. I’m not complaining. I’ll take whatever creative frenzies come my way, and maybe it’s a sign that my inscrutable creative self really wants to work on Larger than Life rather than Finnegans Deciphered. In any case, all of this does not seem to be affecting the ongoing work with The Sleep of Reason, so I don’t consider it inappropriate or intrusive.

Aside from all of that, I’ve also been fooling with some short stories lately, including one bit of flash fiction that I wrote, polished, and submitted all in one week. I don’t pretend to be a master in the field of flash fiction; I may be writing utter tripe, but my story seems coherent and complete, and I always feel a brief moment of satisfaction when I send off a story. (Brief because it is quickly followed by an enduring feeling of anxiety about the submission’s status.)

So I’ve been busy, which is always better than the alternative.

Several writer resources

Regular readers of this humble blog (both of you) know that I am an advocate of the online writer’s resource Duotrope’s Digest. It is an aggregation of more than two thousand publications that accept submissions of poetry, short stories, novels, and other writing. The publications are organized in several ways: by genre, interest, length sought, payscale, whether they take electronic or paper submissions, and so on. Highly searchable, with sketch information about each (including reports of submission response times) and links to the actual publications. It’s really a wonderful resource, and the last couple of my works that have been accepted found their homes through here.

Duotrope’s Digest also provides a submission tracker linked to the sites it represents so that you can have a handy record of what you’ve submitted. You can record the submission date, the date you received a response, and whether or not your fine work was accepted. All of this is then added to the information already compiled about the publication. You have to register to use this function, but the publication search function is available to everyone.

I especially like the Deadline Calendar, which shows specific themes given publications are pursuing. This has helped me target my submissions.

Duotrope’s Digest is worth your time to explore. There’s a lot there. While it does not advertise, you are encouraged to make donations so they can keep the lights on. (I have.)

Litlist is a new outfit (since 2007) that does much the same work as Duotrope’s Digest. It doesn’t have nearly as many listings as Duotrope’s Digest — it’s clearly in its building phase — and they are, oddly, broken down by journals and online mags (plus publishers). I suppose the journals are print publications, but I don’t see much benefit in such a distinction. The lists aren’t searchable beyond being alphabetized. The search function is available to all visitors, but you must register to use the submission tracking function.

The site does run advertising, but it is not intrusive. The blog hasn’t been updated since February 2009. It’s been more than a year and a half since anyone has published a book review on the site. Assuming this site is still active, it seems to be more focused on attracting publications than writers, so its usefulness to those of us who scribble may improve in the months to come.

Litmags.org only recently came to my attention. It has a search function that is at least as sophisticated as the one Duotrope’s Digest uses, but it doesn’t have a lot of publication listings yet (488 according to the site), so the refined searching isn’t doesn’t do much for you. Otherwise, you can manually click through alphabetized listings that are color coded to show things like how traditional or nontraditional the publication is; whether the site takes poetry, fiction, both, or neither (whatever that may be); and even if it is a print or ezine publication. Each listing includes a link to the publication’s website so you can get more information.

*   *   *

The venerable Poets & Writers Magazine has an online presence that includes a searchable listing of publications that accept work from writers. This is open to non-registered users, and though the listings seem to be vast, the basic function is only searchable by poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, which doesn’t help very much. Beyond that, the listings are sorted alphabetically. There is an Advanced Search function, but you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the needlessly minute link to get there. Once there, you can search by publications that accept simultaneous submissions, electronic submissions, size of readership, percentage of unsolicited manuscripts published, and even the state and country where the publication is. When you get a listing you think you might like, it will give you the link to go to that publication’s actual website.

Their Classifieds listing might be more focused. These listings are purchased by publications seeking specific work, and if you read through them, you might find someone who is seeking a short story or novel exactly in the line of your fine work. The trouble is, you have to scroll through the whole list to find these nuggets.

Poets & Writers Magazine, even in its online presence, has a lot more to offer a serious writer, and it is worth your time to poke around a bit. I haven’t registered online with them, so there may be more resources there that I don’t know about. (I saw a link for podcasts, for example.) I know there is a discussion forum, and given the caliber of the articles I’ve seen, they seem to attract a more literary (rather than commercial or genre) crowd, so the discussions on the forum may be worthwhile.

Close reading

I’ve given names to my characters in The Sleep of Reason with careful consideration. Their names have reference to historical or mythical characters or themes or otherwise somehow help to illuminate their role in the story. (Okay not all of my characters. But the ones I could spot a reference for I gave such names to.) In a couple of cases I even changed the names I originally gave to characters so they were more “suitable.”

I’ve slipped other “bonus material” into the story. Various objects that make casual appearances in the descriptions of rooms hint toward greater meanings (though not all objects). I have one character who is often seen in doorways. Does she offer a way forward or does she block it? And so on.

These devices are all supplemental to the story; they contribute to the understanding and enjoyment of the story, but they don’t drive it. A reader does not need to catch even one of the references to appreciate the story on face value. (Some of these “bonus” items  are so obscure, in fact, that I suspect I will be the only one who knows they are there.)

The question, then, is, do they belong in the story at all? When you think about it, such “cues” and “bonus materials” do not occur in real life (though we often see meaning in randomness in retrospect). A story about “real” people with “real” motivations in “real” settings would never have such stuff in it. The boy who beat up the playground bully may just happen to have been named David, with no thought when his parents named him of the helpful role he would one day provide.  And while parts of my story are weird in the extreme, there is nothing supernatural or even superhuman in it. It is comprised of “real” people, motivations, and settings.

So if these bonus items are not needed for a reader to understand the story, and if they don’t correspond to the way things happen in reality, should they even be in there? What purpose do they serve other than to satisfy some playfulness on my part?

Of course if I thought that they didn’t belong, I’d probably have to omit things like metaphor. Mood setting imagery would have to go too. And so on. Anything not literally true would have to come out, but that ain’t creative writing.

I think in part I can’t help myself. I love doing this kind of thing. This is a hidebound tradition in most creative writing (and in a lot of nonfiction if you look for it). In a way it is a reward for a careful reader. Maybe it’s a lot like serifs in typefaces. These are thought to guide the eye across the line.* They don’t add meaning themselves, but they aid in the ultimate comprehension.

*There is another school of thought that says serifs clutter the page and add more material for the brain to process.