A week or so ago, a very kind reader – a long-time reader, and early Catholic blogger – and I think he told me he’s blogging again, but I deleted the email, and for the life of me, I can’t remember if this is true or if I just made it up –

Anyway, this person wrote to me, a bit concerned. He’d been watching my "Progress?" bar over there on the left stay steady and  unmoving for months and months. Was I perhaps blogging too much? Might I consider being not quite so solicitious of my blog audience and, er…get to work?

Well, I had good news to tell him, and my lazy self finally got around to adjusting the meter so that he needn’t worry any more. Easter People is still on file, but I got yet another idea, another one that dropped fully formed into my head.  I took that energy, sat down about 2 months ago and (this is a first for me, in my…what…5 or 6 novel starts) fully outlined the thing from beginning to end. 16 chapters in all, although that has morphed into 17 right now.

It’s a Young Adult novel called Nothing Else Occurs to Me. I won’t tell you what it’s about, but I will say that it comes out of passion on my part. I will be aiming for a secular publisher but I think a broad-minded Christian publisher could possibly find a place for it, if it’s indeed publishable at all. There’s a "problem" or two at the heart of it, but I am working very hard to ensure that it doesn’t become one of those hated "problem" novels I inveigh so frequently against ("prescriptive" literature is my term for it, because it’s like medicine. Here – read this, and it will fix your pain over your parents’ divorce, your sexual confusion, your feelings of being an outcast, your ethnic identity, etc). 

I freely admit to having no idea what I’m doing. I’m not very "meta" about my writing, and never have been, which is probably a problem. But I also know that the very best writing I’ve done – two or three pieces floating around out there – have been written totally in the zone, almost on autopilot, with a deep instinct of just knowing without knowing it that this what I wanted to say and this is how to say it.

But that said, I’ll just let you into some of the primary points in the process that I’m paying attention to – that I need to pay attention in order to avoid my particular weaknesses. There are other writers out there who might find it of interest, as well.

*Balancing the particular and the universal. Being very specific in setting, character, action and so on, but making sure that this particular can evoke something more universal in the reader, whether she has ever been in that setting or situation herself.

*Economy of narration. The first novel I ever tried to write was called (and stil is – it exists in a drawer) Eyes of Mercy, about a little girl who might or might not be having an apparition (such an original plot!). I wrote very painstakingly about the sequence of events…step by step by step. Assuming that if Joe and Lisa were both in the room and Joe was going to the store where he would encounter Walter, I had to take the reader with Joe, out the door, into his car, down the road, turn left, turn right, go straight, stop at a light, into the parking lot, out of his car and into the store. Amazingly ridiculous. I don’t know why I thought I had to do this. Well, I didn’t consciously think that I had to do it, but I did. It was such a leap for me to free myself from that and to figure out what the story really was and to just tell that. You’d think that an inveterate reader from the age of 3.5 would know a little bit more when she sat down to write, but aparently not.

*Dialogue. Years ago, I went to the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, which was one of the best things I ever did (thanks, Dad!), even though I do not, by any means, have an uncritical view of such experiences in general or Sewanee, specifically. But safe to say, I had a blast and it was just what I needed as I was transitioning out of teaching into full-time writing. My "mentor" was Diane Johnson, who, in our meeting about the chapters I was workshopping (no, not Eyes of Mercy, but Attempt #2, Serenity Malone, which I do someday hope to get back to.), had many useful things to say.

One was in response to my concern about not giving enough physical description of my characters. She waved away the problem and said, "Oh, I don’t care a bit about what my characters look like. It’s just not my concern. So, to please people, I stick in a "her hair was blonde" or something. If it’s not your focus, don’t worry about it." Whew!

As she went over my dialogue, she said, "Too much. This is screenwriting dialogue, and you’re not writing a screenplay. Condense. Summarize what people are saying." Another light bulb.

I was also a little wary of what she might think because she’s this sophisticated bi-continental woman who divides her time between San Francisco and Paris, and part of my chapters involved a figure-8 race at a dirt track in Florida. (Yes) "Oh," she said, "I found that very interesting.  Janet Guthrie is my cousin, so I had no trouble with that at all."

* "Pure Action" "Show, don’t tell" and variations. As little exposition as possible. That does not usually happen on the first go round. I find what happens is this: that in my first attempt, I am working out what happens, there’s more exposition than is necessary or good. In the revision, my brain shifts into a different mode – since I know what happened, I can relate it from a different perspective – from inside, as it were.

*Embrace the rewrite. I’m finally relaxing into the understanding that rewriting is an integral part of the process, not an indictment of my skills, and understanding what I specifically need to use the rewrite for: tightening action, transforming exposition into action, fleshing out characters, adding humor and deepening the narrative.

There’s a lot more, of course, every bit of it challenging, but those are the biggest hurdles that I face on every page. I share this, not because I fancy you are terribly interested, but because I need to lay it out myself. So I’m using you, essentially. In addition, David sent me the first fifteen pages of something he’s working on, and since I gave him pretty detailed criticism, I figured I could publicly expose my own writing weaknesses and give him a little satisfaction that way.

So there it is. That’s where my energy is, and as each day goes by, I feel more of it heading in that direction, really beginning to focus. We’re not talking great art here, but even though I’m making it up, I’m feeling as if I’m telling a true story, and it’s getting more interesting and urgent by the day.

(No, I’m not doing National Novel Writing Month, even though the push is coinciding with that august event.)