Where are you going, where have you been?

It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do, and then, you know, 10 months go by… In my defense, right after I wrote that last post (possibly the next day), I was offered a full-time job! As in canyoucomeinforaninterviewonfridaygreatwelikeyoucanyoustartonmonday?, and I feel like I’ve spent most of the rest of the year trying to catch up with myself…

So, this year has, in great part, been about learning to balance time: writing and working full-time. I still haven’t totally figured it out, but this is my ideal process:

• The night before, I think about what I’m going to work on in the morning: have a goal for a scene, or something. I don’t promise myself I’ll write x number of words because that just seems to be an invitation to myself to produce bollocks, but I’ll try and get a complete scene done (or at least end in a place from which I can continue said scene). I have to have an idea of what I’m going to be working on because on weekdays I have like 1.5 hours a day max at the moment (I have to be out the door by 8, so getting up at 5:45 is ideal (I don’t always manage this, mind you, but I try — see below)), and I have to make it count.
• Go to bed as early as I can get away with. Get up early. Use the strongest self-persuasion I have to. I tell myself that if Terry Fox could run across the country on one leg, I can get up and get my ass in a chair. One day away from the project is a slip in momentum, and it’s disaster thereafter.
• For the love of dog, do not open yer internet browser or email.
• Outlining? The verdict’s in: I need to do it, at least once I’m past the first draft. I need planning like mad — Excel spreadsheets! A giant drawing of the shape of my novel (it’s mountain-shaped — surprise!), with character trajectories and sub-plots and and and! Printouts of all my advisor’s words of wisdom, with bits highlighted! If I carry these around with me (except the giant drawing), their mojo seeps into me somehow.

What else is new this year so far? Hmm…

Well, I haven’t looked at the gargantuan novel since that last post. Never did enter the Amazon contest. Next year?

I did the “advanced” side of screenwriting with at UBC this summer. I tried my hand at outlining a full-length feature, without a whole lot of success, but it was a GREAT class; so much learned. Jesus, I’m going to miss these people. I’ll be the alumnus who drifts back year after year…

Mountain Novel has turned into my thesis novel, and I’ve been at that since September (had to hand in a full draft of the novel at the beginning of Sept). It’s going…well, I think! Surprisingly well! I’m enjoying the process! I’ve had excellent notes back from my amazing advisor and I’m really so damn lucky, basically. Of course she hasn’t read all the way to the end yet

And there you go. I do intend to be back in here before another 10 months is up!

All right, yes, I acknowledge it’s already been slightly over a week since I last posted and that does not bode well, but here is my motto for the year, grace a Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Things on the work front have been quiet-ish this week (not sure whether to be alarmed about that — is it the economy? — or relieved to get some time off after my hellishly busy Christmas and New Year. Mostly the latter, though), so I’ve been tackling the Amazon ABNA novel, previously called “Fire Eyed Boy” and now provisionally titled “Hold the Time” (do try and keep up). Last Sunday I went through a printed copy and marked it up with stuff to keep, stuff to lose (the funnest part about this process was buying different coloured Post-Its), and was feeling rather disheartened about how BAD the thing was (mawkish, amateur, melodramatic, with a kind of relentless cheeriness to the voice that made me want to strangle whoever had written the thing… oh, wait a second)… and as soon as I’d finished and was digging around on my computer for the files so I could start on-screen editing, I promptly discovered that the version I’d read actually wasn’t the latest, and I had some chunks and bits in other files that are actually NOT THAT BAD, and this discovery got me excited about the thing again.

So now I’m in the middle of building a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a novel, with bits patched together from various versions of the thing (which I fiddled with between 2005 and 2007. It’s amazing to see how my writing changed in that time), stitched together with new bits of writing. I’m aware that this is not the right way to go about things. I’d much rather start from the beginning and rewrite totally, but I don’t have time for that this year. So that’ll (have to) do, Pig. That’ll (have to) do. I’ll send it off to the contest, get summarily rejected, and keep thinking about how to make it better. I just do want to have something to enter.

On the topic of drastically reducing (which is what I’m doing, as the novel got pretty gargantuation — one version is 800 pages, fact fans, with 9,000 (OK not really) sublplots, and I’m just highlighting and deleting vast swathes of text… it’s vertiginous), I came across this yesterday, in a roundabout way because this author had posted the link to her blog on the Editors’ Association of Canada mailing list:

…In the end, it was a relief to cut 5000 words here and there and never look back.

But imagine cutting 500 PAGES of your work. I attended a summer writing workshop at Humber in 2002. I recall Nino Ricci talking about his first novel, and how it was originally 700 pages and if I remember correctly, it involved a lot of references to Jacques Derrida. When Ricci finally examined the manuscript, he found that the story was only about 200 pages and didn’t require Derrida’s approval. Ricci’s novel became Lives of the Saints and it won him a Governor General’s award.

All those words. That’s a lot of muck. It’s like diving in a Canadian Lake. You navigate with a compass because the silt is all stirred up.

You must trust the compass because it’s so easy to get turned around. I wasn’t following any compass when I wrote those extraneous, superfluous chapters. I ended up at the wrong end of the lake. And it’s hard to get out of the lake with all your heavy scuba gear.

I found this seriously heartening and intend to write to her forthwith to thank her!

I also had my critique on Monday and Tuesday for my mountain novel (my UBC novel; the one that used to be called Fraying). It went… really well. I was kind of stunned. I hadn’t expected much of it as I’m still floundering around with a new structure I took on late last year — essentially, the book now takes place over a month instead of in four years (!), and mostly on Aconcagua instead of four different cities, and a whole storyline involving a marriage and a child has been ditched, and I’m trying to get my head around the whole thing and what the thread of the novel is now. Alas, I had a wee freak-out in class about how one thing I was trying wasn’t working, and everyone was so great and positive and encouraging, and I’m excited to get back to that ASAP. If only I knew what my next scene was to be :-/ I’ll just have to write it and find out.

So there you go. That is all that goes on in the writing world of me.

Seriously — August?!

Wow. OK. This seems like a good time to trot out my New Year’s resolutions. Actually, they’re kind of more goals, these writing-related ones:

• Write in this blog at least once a week (as opposed to, like, every six months).
• Revise “Fire Eyed Boy” (it’s too bad I’m hating pretty much all of it… Now I remember why I abandoned the thing in the first place) for the Amazon contest — a contest you might be interested in, if you haven’t heard about it already: see here — but note you’ve only got until Feb 2.
• Finish first draft of “The Book That Used To Be Called Fraying When That Title Still Fitted” (a friend in my novel class calls hers “LEVON”) by June, thereby a) giving myself time to revise before the thesis draft is due in September, and b) giving myself time to get ready for part 2 of the script-writing course out at UBC in July — for which I’ll have to produce a feature-length screenplay… aargh!
• In June, come up with pitch/treatment for aforementioned screenplay. Perhaps a few scenes.
• Get short-story sub ready for the Writers’ Union Postcard Story contest — here — by Feb 14th.

So, hear ye, hear ye etc, let these goals be here in electronic concrete forevermore, for purposes of nagging and derision should they not be completed.

Strangely, as I was writing this, Kevin Alexander (or Kevin Alexander’s people) sent out a notification of his new column — on goals for the new year. Must be something in the air.

When last we left our heroine…

… she was freaking out about her screenwriting course at UBC. Well, I did it and not only did I survive it, but I loved it. The geek in me really responded to the “rules” of it — the structure, the formatting — and actually, when you have setting, dialogue, action and reaction (from the characters) to work with, it’s kinda amazing how much you can get across without that access to inner monologue I was angsting over. And dialogue! Do you know how little dialogue you really need?! (Of course you do; I’m just waking up to this. Ignore me.) I’d write something I thought was pretty minimal, and the rest of the class (we workshopped our scripts — it was a really collaborative process, which was also different and cool) would say, “you don’t need this much,” and I’d strip some more until all I had was the nugget — all I needed. Good lessons learned. Great class, great teacher, great times and fun in Vancouver. I’ll be doing it again next summer, for the last three credits I’ll need in that genre.

Upcoming this fall — more novel! Hurrah! The up-in-the-air novel class has come together and I have to have 80 pages ready by September (insert manic laughter here). But actually, Boyfriend has been away the last couple of weeks and I’ve made seriously good use of my time, and now I have 80 pages all in a row. I have to revise, shuck and winnow (I have no idea if that makes sense — a farming girl I am not), but it’s gonna be OK. I feel like I’ve got to know Remy, my main character, and Sophie, the other main character, a lot better — and most importantly, what they want.

I’ve been reading a book on writing called “From Where You Dream” by Robert Olen Butler (Pulitzer Prize winner, byotch, with a foreword by the amazing Janet Burroway), which is fantastic — I wish to evangelize about it to everyone. I like what he has to say about writing process, and yearning as a tool for character. Write from the heart, he says, and I’m paraphrasing and making it sound unbelievably hokey, but it isn’t when he talks about it; my favourite books and stories get me in the heart. I admire those clever, quirky short stories you seem to get all over the place, but they’re “head” stories, yeah? I don’t feel ‘em.

It’s been a good summer. Lots of writing, lots of relaxing, perhaps not *quite* enough work (although that’s picking up) — it’s always the one and not the other –  lots of getting in touch with old friends, too, via the wee miracle that is Facebook. Life=good, and now I’m hitting publish and hitting the novel file. Later.

Bright Shiny Morning

This is so snarky, as The Believer would say, but it made me guffaw in several places: John Crace’s Digested Read: Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey.

Learning Curves

It’s not that I want this blog to be all about lists, honest. But here’s another one, this time a list by Kurt Vonnegut (lifted from Novelr – thank you!):

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

In other news, I haven’t been writing a lot lately (my Other Half and I went on holiday and I’ve been working a lot and I’m trying to get back on my roll but but but…), but I did spend a month doing some very effective (I thought) revising (read: rewriting) and this week I sent off an entry to three (3!) novella contests. All mailed, mind you. I blanched, to put it mildly, at paying the entry fees and then the photocopying and then the postage to the US. All for a very very slim chance of winning, but I need to get work out there and circulating.

Next: I need to write a pitch and treatment for a short film for the Introduction to Screenwriting course I’m taking at the UBC residency this summer (it’s due June 13), and it’s completely freaking me out. I’ve somehow become a novelist. I’ve become a novelist who wallows around in her characters’ heads (very deeply). Do you know how hard it is to now try and write a three-page externally oriented (in point of view terms) story, where everything comes through in action and dialogue? Eek!

And after that — I need to get 50 pages of my at-some-point thesis novel done by the fall. I’m hoping that in the fall I’ll be in a novel class where people will read it, but it’s all rather up in the air… Fingers crossed!

Company

Last night I went to hear Andre Alexis, Anthony de Sa and Steven Galloway read as (a late) part of the Ottawa Writersfest. Three quite different works in voice and tone (all great, all purchase worthy, although I could only bring myself to drop the cash for one hardcover… Sorry, guys), but all, as organizer Sean Wilson said, with a common theme of “home”. Which anyone who knows me well might know is something that comes up again and again in the stuff I write.

In the post-reading discussion, Alexis said something I responded to deeply: he said he reads “for company,” and writes for the same reason. This resonated with me. I may be misinterpreting/mangling what he said, but I understood it as meaning he reads for companionship. I think this is the reason my most-loved books are those featuring “real people” characters – Jhumpa Lahiri’s work; Alexis’ character Walter in the piece he read last night. (Oh, yeah, and immigrants or lost/displaced people, evidently.) I don’t do so well with magical realism; I can’t connect.

The importance of being deeply observant and aware as a writer, of finding ways to portray the world, was also discussed, which rang familiar. A good night.

Agent things

Agent things

A couple of groovy places that talk about agents:

http://guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/

http://agentquery.com (look for me on AQ Connect as VictoriaBell (surprise!))

Of course, the brilliant and much-missed Miss Snark: http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

Last Day

It’s the last day of class today. I’m rather sad. I’ve enjoyed coming “eye to eye” (as our teacher, Peter Levitt, puts it) with my peers and partners, seeing them lay themselves open honestly, reading their writing, seeing them progress. I think I’ve progressed too. Below I’ll paste in parts of my “learning statement” I had to submit today as part of my final sub.

Learning Statement

For me one of the most interesting and educational things in this Translation course had to do with the differing degrees of modulation as we worked with the various texts (and various versions of the texts) and my reaction to these. At one end of the scale, there was the sticking closely to the bones. This felt pretty familiar and comfortable for me, coming from the perspective of a translator and editor, both of which are really about being a medium for the text from its originator to the source, trying to get a message across as clearly and faithfully as possible (I’m talking not so much about literary translation, but, say, technical).

And then, as I got braver and Peter gave us permission to get freer about playing with structure and form, we moved further down the scale, deviating from the bones more while trying to retain the essence of the work: that’s when I learned about writing and my own process. I think this was most successful for me when we worked on our own writing, or did the “backwards-forwards” poems [throughout the year, we had to post poems that resonated with us in some way. For this exercise, we had to choose one of those poems, break it down to its "bones" (see description here), and then recreate it], an exercise I loved. By really thinking about what I had wanted to say, and to play around with new ways to express it, I kept surprising myself. Towards the end of this semester, I felt like I had had a breakthrough. I know the writing I’ve come up with is not great or perfect or “there yet” by any means, but I have a start and I’m more confident in general. I feel more connected to my own pieces and my own “essence,” what I’m trying to say, to get across; this has felt like a stranger to me at times over the last couple of years, so it’s a relief to shake hands with it again.

I’ve also written some poetry, which is something I haven’t done for a good 15 years. I was surprised to realize how much I loved getting back to it, and I believe it’s helped my other writing: thinking on a microscopic scale about word choice, taking the time to sit down and slow down and be methodical. My biggest disappointment during the course—note I said during and not with!—has been lack of time to truly engage, sit, be still, during this unbelievably busy year. However, I’m coming away with a tool I’ll be able to use going forward.

Another tool learned has been the usefulness of breaking things down into the “bones” as a way of accessing the heart of the piece. This has been essential.

As an example of stuff we’ve done this year, below is a paragraph that came bubbling up out of some bones Peter gave us (I won’t paste them in wholesale, but basically there’s a boy at the end of a trail by a river that sounds like people chanting. He looks up and sees the geese flying; he realizes spring is coming).

He finds trees again at the bottom of the arid mountain, stunted survivor trees bent grudgingly over patches of shade. He sits beneath one of the trees and watches the water. Brown with mud, white with foam, the river tears the landscape apart. He’s trapped; he can’t get across until a ranger on horseback comes. He wonders how the Incas did it, how many they lost. They kept renaming this place: Conconcagua, Canconcagua, Concahua, Aconcagua. The foreign syllables bring a sudden gut-punch of homesickness, a sharp intake of breath. Eyes fixed on the other side of the river, he whispers the words to himself, a chant blending with the rushing roar of the water. He looks upward to find some familiarity in the sky. The sky looks the same wherever you are, even though it’s nearly autumn here, and at home, it’s nearly spring.

So, the end of another course, another phase, winter.

Forest for the Trees

Well, I’m just going to pretend I’ve been posting regularly…!

I’m currently reading Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, and I keep being smacked in the face (in a good way) by recognition of myself in the pages. I’m drinking it in; I can’t read it fast enough, but am trying to read it closely enough.

The latest is this, from pages 59-60 of the hardcover edition:

If when you were a child stories took you far away, if characters from books kept you company as you peered out a rainy window and tried to discern that great mystery of how other people live, then you know that books are the most important things in life. If you were drawn to books and in turn to writing, chances are you found the world wanting. You knew that a record had to be kept, or the world or you would disappear. People are motivated to write for a variety of reasons, but it’s the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Yes, yes, yes.

This hot on the heels of her statement on page 21 (I am NOT going to quote the entire book, I promise!):

I can assure you that you will never finish any piece of writing if you don’t understand what motivates you to write in the first place and if you don’t honor that impulse, whether it’s exile or assimilation, redemption or destruction, revenge or love.

I think I write to escape, to build new worlds I can take refuge in (not that I need to take refuge in anything now, but I’m building on a long-standing personal tradition). And by the same token, once I started thinking about that, all my characters are trying to escape something, too, to run away from something. (Sorry, this isn’t going to mean much to you, but I’ll note it here for myself: Remy — dealing with his past, himself; James — real life and his inability to form relationships; Madeleine — dealing with what happened to her. Alex is probably the exception; he’s the one who deals with things head on.)

The book came highly recommended and I’m passing on those high recommendations, especially if writing feels unbearably daunting sometimes, as it does to me at the moment…