Interrupted Interruptions

That is the Celtic symbol for chaos. It will all make sense to you in the end. Hopefully, that second sentence is true for most things.

In college, one of my professors told us how J R R Tolkien had several children, and he locked himself in a room and wrote for up to twenty hours at a time.

I was about nineteen at the time, and I remember imagining some kind of Mary Poppins in the background sailing paper boats with them on the banks of the Thames and feeding them porridge. I always imagined British kids sitting at the table eating grayish oatmealy things. It was probably from watching Oliver Twist one too many times. They were constantly eating gray, gloppy stuff out of bowls. I remember being absolutely fixated for a time on the word offal which I could not really believe anyone had or would ever consume.

I figured if I was going to have kids (and I was leaning toward the absolutely never side of that question back then), I would put them outside and go about my novel business. You can tell I didn't babysit much.

I am kind of interrupting myself here on purpose. Blogs are like little snapshots of what is going on with folks and I have been leading a life of non finishing. Here are some things I have learned in the past week or so:

1. When you sit down to work on your new middle grade, you can't believe you have an hour to work. It's a weekend morning. You actually lock the indignant cats out of the room so they can't walk across the keyboard. Five minutes into your manuscript, you hear an insistent "Moooommmmm" and you know, instantly, what is wrong.

2. Strep throat can transform itself into acute pharyngitis. This is when a kid's throat begins to close and fun activities like swallowing and breathing become difficult. You don't know this until you drive up to the ER and your kid is seen.

3. It's a very bad sign when the triage nurse in the ER says, "Aren't you Anne? I remember you..." You shouldn't know the employees of the local ER unless you work there.

4. A steroid shot in the butt can open the throat until the antibiotics take effect.

5. The next time you sit down, it is late on Thursday afternoon, after working most of the day on the non-writing job. The kids are, miraculously, quiet. You get almost a full paragraph written when the door opens, "Mom, I need a white dress shirt for the concert."

"Hmmm, when's the concert?"

"At six."

It is currently 5:10.

A white dress shirt is found in the back of a closet. Emma and I wash the cuffs and neck and use a blow dryer to dry it. You arrive one minute of six. You look up on stage and realize your dashing young man never put on the black dress shoes, but is up there in his dress clothes - and a very well worn pair of Nike sneakers. You decide this is fine because it's an arty, Andy Warhol kind of look.

6. Emma keeps introducing your Malaysian house guest to American music. Because she's 11, this spring's musical selection is Lady Gaga:

I wan you ugly/I wan you dizeese/I wan you ever ting/long as it free...

Eventually, I am going back to that middle grade. It's still waiting for me and it won't change unless I decide it will.

I wish the same were true for the kids.

CatWheels and Writing

I just finished writing notes on Emily Dickinson for one of my classes. She actually had it very easy: that room in Amherst, a rich daddy, no interruptions. I can't imagine that kind of leisure. Actually, maybe I can. It would be wonderful. She didn't have to work or chase the cats or do anything really. She could spend all day on a single line of poetry if she wanted. Doesn't that sound amazing?

I sat down to write this afternoon. Just a little. Each of the kids had something to do and I had just gotten back from teaching my Saturday morning class, and I thought, Great, I can finally have an hour to work on something. That's when this innocent looking creature:



got together with her equally innocent looking counterpart/sister and invaded Baby Cat's straw fortress while Baby Cat was on watch:



which resulted in flying fur, claws and a wheel of cat spinning across the living room. The other two cats, much older than the kittens, have a feline respect for Baby Cat's spot; the kittens are more like toddlers jacked up on sugar.


After I got Baby Cat back into her spot, and put the kittens into the bathroom to calm down, Emma figured out how to get the Karaoke machine to work. I thought that phase was gone, but then I remembered: it was only gone for the boys. She was still young enough to discover it.

Our Malaysian houseguest is back and he likes to sing. He really, really likes to sing. A World Lit teacher once told me that the Asian culture has an underlying framework of shame; Western culture has an underlying framework of guilt. I thought about that, about shame and all, as he sang the lyrics to Emma's current favorite song, Fun House, by Pink. It sounded like this:

Eet use be fur house
but now it fill with effel cloows

only really, really loud. Over and over. Apparently, his particular area of Malaysia does not function on that framework of shame. The kids could not stop laughing. He then picked up a guitar and added that to the karaoke party. He had to sing that much louder to compensate for the guitar. All this caused our dog, who howls at sirens and other dogs' howling, to howl.

I thought about moving to Amherst. The only problem with moving is I would probably have to take them all with me.

Revision

I can't write five words but that I change seven. - Dorothy Parker

The problem with revision is that it never seems hopeful to me; it just makes me feel like I failed the first time around. And I can't really complain successfully (meaning I get sympathy) to anyone unless that person writes. Then I can get lots of sympathy.

Actually, I almost never talk about writing, particularly my writing, to anyone I see on a day-to-day basis because where we live (a small seaport village that mostly supported McCain/Palin and doesn't miss a televised football game) no one:

a) believes that writers live anywhere near here

or

b) believes that I am one no matter what I say -

since the "real" ones don't live so close to the Chumbucket Bait Shop.

So I can only complain here. I tried complaining to my boys and they put their Ipods in and motioned that they couldn't hear me. My husband shrugged and said, "Just get it done." When I tried to complain to my daughter, she said, "Is it the middle grade story with the girl in it?" When I told her it wasn't, she walked out of the room. (Maybe flounced is a better word there).

What's so awful about revision? Well, look at the word a minute. It's a re vision which means you have to go back to a story you have mentally finished envisioning and face all the holes and gaps and weirdness that you ignored or didn't notice the first time around. I don't want to face them; I just want them to go away or fix themselves.

I have a friend who writes all the time, but she is still unpublished. She has such a better attitude than I do that she deserves to be published way more than I do. She's never surly about anything. In fact, she always tells me how she feels this wild sense of hope when she sits down to revise (see opening sentence) and I say encouraging things to her like, "What is wrong with you?" She sees revision as an opportunity to make her writing really shine, to learn from her mistakes, to pull everything together.

I know she's right, only I know it on an intellectual level, not on an emotional one. I feel extraordinarily put upon when I have to revise. I love to WRITE novels, not tinker. And what is this obsession editors have with logic and chronology issues anyway?

I get even crabbier when people (the ones I live with who are starting to get hungry and wonder when I am going to start dinner) say, "How's the editing going?" Editing is easy; revision should never be confused with editing. Editing is fixing grammar, spelling, tweaking a few sentences; revision is going into the structure and reorganizing the walls. It's work and writing is fun.

I can't imagine going through the revision process with other people. My friend (see above paragraph) belongs to a writers' group and she revises publicly - meaning, they sit around a Starbucks and tell her where her work needs to change. And she likes this, she drives there on cold nights to listen to their thoughts on revision.

That amazes me. I find it much better to hunker down, feel really sorry for myself, put a stack of chocolate next to my desk, and talk about how awful revision is because as long as I'm doing that, I can keep avoiding it.

The Reunion Voice in YA

I had time over the break (break for the teachers, I made enough pizza rolls and bagel bites to feed a sub-Saharan village)to look over some of the manuscripts I tell people I'll never get a chance to read. I explain that I teach writing and don't want to see any additional typed pages in my spare time. But writers are either gamblers or terrible listeners and they send them anyway. Usually, I glance at them and put them on the recycle pile. But with one kid sick the entire break, I got sort of bored and snooped through a few of them.

One of the reasons I dislike looking at manuscripts is because if I were an editor, I would send back acute observations such as: I don't like this and I don't know why. Something's just off...

Mostly, I can't articulate why I don't like someone's work, but I'm pretty good at saying why I do. You can guess which category most of the manuscripts I get fall into. But this time was different: this time I could put my finger on exactly what was "wrong" with the three manuscripts I leafed through. They were all YA, and the voices were, to borrow a highbrow editorial term, daffy.

Somewhere out there this snarky, sarcastic, wise cracking, semi cynical teen voice has emerged, and it's just awful. After a few pages, you recognize the the voice of an adult looking back on his/her teen years. I call it the "reunion" voice, that nostalgic remember-how-we-were-then voice, full of poignant memory and a kind of subtle admiration for your younger self. It's really fine for reunion weekends, but teens would tolerate it for about two pages before moving on.

The part that bugs me about about these stories (and you were thinking you already knew what bugged me) is that so much else about them had potential. The plot was well thought out, the characters were involved in intriguing situations, and there were truly funny scenes. It's just that the voices were not authentic, and that kills a story before it begins.

It's really hard to pin down what makes for good voice in a story. In the movie, Juno, when she says, "Silencio, old man," while buying a pregnancy test, I thought,
"Yik. Wrong." Most teens I know verge on hysterical if their hair straightener shorts out. But in Napoleon Dynamite, when he figures out his salary at the chicken farm and says, "That's like a dollar an hour..." it just sounds right. I can't explain why, but I can say that if the voice is right, probably a whole lot of other things about your manuscript are, too.

Writing for Kids

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my kids and not about writing. I remember a college psych teacher once said, "Ask people what they are in one word, and see what they say." It was one of those moments where you think, Right, I already sort of knew this. I would answer that question by saying, "Mom" -- though I have plenty of friends with kids who say they don't think that way. They would answer, "writer" even though they have never published anything. It's strange the way that works -- I think of myself as a mom, then probably a writer even though I've been pretty well published.

I think I should probably talk more about writing since I've been getting increasingly frequent emails from people asking me questions about writing. I try to answer everyone, but here's why I don't talk so much about writing: I don't really know anything. I don't fully understand how the process works or what helps writing or what hinders it or why one novel falls flat and another hums along. I think writing may be a process that works when we are not totally aware of it, if that makes sense. I do know I don't spend a tremendous amount of time planning what I write, okay, fine, I don't spend ANY time planning; I just sort of keep the story in the back of my mind, then when the house is quiet, I write it all down. I spend a lot of time revising. Easily as much time as writing, and sometimes more. I think revision and rewrites are the heart of publishable work.

And that's it. I don't have any tricks and I think that's why people are emailing me: they think there is some shortcut, some magical method that will guarantee publication.

There isn't. Trust me.

I like the quote on this blog from Maugham: it matches how I feel exactly.

Right now I have a really tough editor. I'm revising a middle grade, geared for the 8 - 10 year old set. It's harder than I thought it would be (mostly because I took advice from people who read a lot of middle grade literature and I didn't just sit down and write it out like usual)She is a huge consumer of fairy literature, has no patience for long description, and can't stand boys in any of the major roles. It makes me slightly nervous when she picks up the legal pad to see my ideas. This is the look I get when I don't reach her standards:



Should be an interesting weekend.

Some of the Writing Questions

I am away at the Land of Make Believe (I kid you not -- my daughter's tenth birthday is this Monday, and she gets to pick the weekend trip), so I am sharing my Amazon blog here so I can go down water slides and disregard the laws of physics.

In June, I agreed to answer the questions of a junior/senior creative writing class, and I decided to do it as a blog. Be back Monday.

Ok, because the Summer Reading Project is due on September 3, I have taken a group of submitted questions related to writing and I will answer them in two mock interviews. This is the first one.
If you have a question you don't see here, I will answer it before the end of August (at the latest). I still have about six more questions on this.
And thanks for these -- some of the questions actually made me think more deeply about the whole process of writing.


Where do you get your ideas?

The idea for a novel usually germinates from a small scrap of information: it could be a scent in a coffee shop that reminds me of when I first started college, or of a friend's house, and a weird kind of association begins. A few days later, I'll remember that scent, or the particular way a tree looked in the yard, or a few words someone said to me, and a character kind of "appears" - I don't know anything about the character. Yet. I don't force anything. Little by little I begin to see the character more fully. So, to answer another question, it's not from thinking of one specific problem or conflict. It's much more from a character.


Do you have a writing schedule?


God no. I have three kids, five animals, a part time job, and a big house that's not fully unpacked from last year. It's more like I grab a few minutes here and there to work on a scene. Most of my writing time is granted through insomnia.


Do you write from drafts and revise?

Sort of. When I have down time, like waiting at my daughter's dance class or when everyone is still asleep, I write notes about the story I'm working on. Remember when your English teacher freaked about sentence fragments? That's what I use. The notes will say -- "S. goes nuts b/c no friends call." Of course, sometimes I look at these notes a day or two later and say, "What on earth did I mean by this? And who's S?"


Do you consider yourself a serious writer?

Yup. Absolutely. I kid around a lot, but in spite of a really busy life, I always manage to write because it's really important.


Why did you pick YA as your genre?


Because I, like thousands of adults, am still secretly in recovery from all the damage middle school inflicts. I can revisit that time in life and change everything.


Are you working on a new book? Is it YA also?


Yes and yes.


Do you want to write a book that is not YA?


I am also working on a middle grade/tween novel.


Some writers say that dialog is the hardest thing to write. Do you agree?

For me, dialog is pretty easy. I live with and work with teenagers so I hear my characters' dialog all the time. What is hard for me is to keep track of the scenes because I sometimes write them out of order. I have to make sure everything goes together seamlessly so it's not snowing in the beginning of chapter six and they end up at the beach two days later. That would probably be noticed by readers.


What is the most memorable thing anyone ever said to you about The Shape of Water?


It seems that I am getting more and more email about this book each day, so this might change, but it had to be from a lady who called herself "A Mom" -- she wrote that she had purchased the book due to its "pretty name and lovely cover" and she did not realize the book was about an arsonist.
Now, Magda is attracted to fire, and yes, she does set a few, but an arsonist has a sinister implication that I think is too weighty for a fifteen year old girl. Anyway, this lady went on and on about how awful it was that I wrote about an arsonist and made her my main character. She went on to say what a terrible example I was setting for teenagers.
And here's the thing: my dad really was a New York City fireman, and I heard about teenage arsonists all the time. It's not like me writing about teen arson CREATES arson. It's been around forever, and it probably will be around forever. Books have to reflect what we do as human beings.
That was a pretty weird rant, but I must say, most people write lovely things.