I just began reading Mark Haddon’s The Red House. Haddon, you might remember, is the author of the highly acclaimed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and the even more brilliant (in my opinion) A Spot of Bother. Haddon is, I believe, one of the best fiction writer’s out there today. I only got three sentences in to The Red House before I had to stop to read and reread and gush over a particular sentence, which is so finely crafted it almost makes me want to just give up writing because I will never be able to write anything this good.

“Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields.”

Boo-yah!

Allow me, if you will, to unpack the beauty of this one sentence. There is, of course, the metaphor in here of a train, which, when combined with its tracks, looks like a zipper connecting the fields on either side. A stunningly apt metaphor, I think. Yes! That is exactly what trains look like.

But a metaphor is only as good as its connotations. What does the metaphor of a train as a zipper add to the text, you might ask. The image of a train as a zipper, unzipping (and not, it is important to note, rezipping) the world around it brings along subtle ideas of something burgeoning beneath the surface, something hidden that is about to be revealed. A pretty perfect opening to a novel, don’t you think?

But this sentence is brilliant for reasons beyond the fitting metaphor it couriers to the reader. This sentence is so elegant, so concise and economic in its language choices that the elegance of the metaphor can shine through. Many novice writers, or even decent but not brilliant ones, would have felt the need to expand the metaphor, to build on it or linger in it a bit longer to make sure the reader really gets it, notices how brilliant the metaphor’s creator is.

Another writer might have written, “The train looks like a zipper, its tracks the zipper’s treads. Quickly, it zooms across the tracks, unfurling the fields on either side,” or something along those lines. But what would that writer have added, for all those extra words? Fourteen extra words—more than twice the length of the original sentence—and no new meaning expressed. Yes, the reader is for sure going to notice the metaphor, but at what cost?

Beside the fact that it’s wordy, and unnecessary wordiness always feels self-indulgent to me, the new sentence is less subtle. Where the original sentence drops the metaphor on the reader and then lets the reader decode it and tease out the subtext, the new sentence tries to force the meaning on you: Look here! A metaphor about things becoming unfurled! That’s what’s going to happen in this novel! (That’s right, this other writer probably likes to use exclamation points.)

In spite of all these newly added words, the new sentence is also less exact. Where the original sentence just stated, explicitly and in four words, the exact speed the train is going, the new sentence rambles around the topic but never gets further than to tell us it’s going “quickly.” This other writer probably thinks the meandering sentences are more “poetic,” but really, they’re just verbose and imprecise.

And while we’re on the topic, should we point out that there are no adverbs in the original sentence? No. Of course there aren’t. Because expert writers rarely use adverbs. I know, I know. I used a lot of adverbs when I was first starting out too. I peppered my sentences with “quietly”s and “firmly”s and “sheepishly”s, and so on. There are a lot of reasons why novice writers overuse adverbs, and there are a lot of reasons why proficient writers don’t, but the main reason adverbs are rarely (I won’t say never, just rarely—and isn’t it funny that “rarely” is itself an adverb?) a good idea is exemplified in these new, sloppy sentences.

How quick is “quickly”? What does this adverb add that we wouldn’t have already assumed (aren’t trains usually driving quickly? And if you want to specify the speed, why not just offer the exact miles per hour?) The writer has included this adverb not because it adds anything to the text but because (most likely) he or she believes the sentence needs more words to read like the texts he or she studied in high school—you know, those canonical works, from back when writers got paid by the word. Those are the texts this writer believes he or she is meant to be emulating, not the ones that are actually, you know, GETTING PUBLISHED TODAY.

But enough ranting about bad writing. Let’s visit once more, shall we, the beauty of Haddon’s words? I’ll give you the sentences that come before and those that follow, and if you like them (and I know you will), I’ll remind you the book is called The Red House by Mark Haddon. Go read it for yourself. Following are the first six lines from the novel:

“Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-gray lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now.”

BAM!

I’m sorry it’s taken me two weeks to come back and post the prompts for the second chapters of our novellas. How are they coming, guys? I’m feeling good about where I’m at with mine. I’ve been working on the one that will be my “track 1” novella of the four I will eventually write. I’ve got the first chapter complete (15 and a half pages) and after writing out these prompts, I have a good idea of what will happen in chapter two.

So anyway, without further delay, here are the chapter two prompts for all four tracks. You’ll note some overlap between some of the prompts. I tried to keep them different enough that if you are, like me, going to write all four and weave them into a single overarching narrative, you should be able to follow the prompts and still have distinct, unique feeling chapters. But yes, I repeated a few components that I thought were essential and/or worth repeating. Feel free to modify, combine, or flat out ignore the prompts. They’re just meant to jog you into motion. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Track 1, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The inciting incident in this chapter should be something small and seemingly insignificant to everyone but the main character. Based on what has been established about the character in the previous chapter, however, it should be immediately obvious to the reader why this incident matters to the character.

3.      The incident should occur when the main character is in an environment in which his or her reaction must be guarded (for example, in a public place, at work, with a loved one who would not understand the reaction, etc.).

4.      The chapter must get across the character’s initial physical reaction to the change

a.       What is the first physical thing the character does when he or she learns of the change?

5.      The chapter should hint at the character’s initial emotional reaction to the change

a.       How does this change affect the character’s perceived need?

b.      How might this change affect the character’s actual need?

Track 2, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The inciting incident should not appear until the end of the chapter.

3.      The chapter should consist of a series of small, escalating incidents that pave the way for the larger incident that will set the rest of the story into motion.

4.      The chapter should detail the main character’s physical and emotional responses to each escalating incident, but should leave the character’s reaction to the final, inciting incident unstated (the rest of the novella will deal with this reaction, so essentially we’re ending this chapter on a sort of cliffhanger).

Track 3, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

6.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

7.      The inciting incident must adhere to the following requirements:

a.       It should be out of the main character’s control

b.      It should be a large-scale change that affects many people

c.       It should have a particularly significant effect on the main character

(For example, my inciting incident for this track is that a new law is passed that has a particularly significant effect on my main character.)

8.      The character should learn of the change when he or she is in an environment in which his or her reaction must be guarded (for example, in a public place, at work, with a loved one who would not understand the reaction, etc.).

9.      The chapter must get across the character’s initial physical reaction to the change

a.       What is the first physical thing the character does when he or she learns of the change?

10.  The chapter should hint at the character’s initial emotional reaction to the change

a.       How does this change affect the character’s perceived need?

b.      How might this change affect the character’s actual need?

Track 4, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      This chapter should follow the rule of threes: three similar incidents should occur throughout the chapter, but the first two should have a similar, fairly trivial result. The third incident should have a largely unexpected, weighty result and will set into motion the events of the rest of the story.

3.      Each of the three incidents should be set in motion by the main character. These should not be external incidents out of the main character’s control, but incidents that result from decisions that character has made.

4.      Because the first two incidents result in similar, inconsequential outcomes, the main character should not yet appreciate the full implications of the final, inciting incident at this point in the story. The reader, however, should be able to tell by the end of this chapter that the final, inciting incident in the series of three incidents will have enormous effects.

a.       This chapter, then, should make some use of foreshadowing (but with a very, very light touch, please). The chapter should end with a very subtle nod to the impending consequences of the inciting incident, but in a way that only the reader, not the main character, notices.

Let’s get started working on these novellas/novels, shall we? If you haven’t worked your way through Step One yet, I strongly urge you to go back to my July 22^nd post and create a character profile for your main character (and if necessary, any important side characters who will play a prominent role in the story). If you don’t want to fill out the worksheet, that’s fine, but I think it’s a good idea, for a longer project like this, to map out who your character is and what his or her driving needs are before you get going on the story. 

In my opinion, it’s more important to start with these details than a mapped out idea of your plot or even a premise because the nature and emotional need(s) of your character will help the story come together organically. If you try to begin with a plot instead, you’ll end up trying to force your character to do or say things that might not be appropriate, and you’ll most likely end up with a stilted, contrived story with a character who feels very artificial to the reader.

So, once you’ve profiled your character and, most importantly, figured out what his or her perceived and actual needs are, you’re ready for Step Two: Writing the First Chapter. My chapter prompts are going to be much sparser than the sentence-by-sentence prompts from Hannah Tinti’s class because it would be far more difficult to work your way through a complete novella or novel one sentence at a time. Plus, I found that by about halfway through the week in Hannah Tinti’s class, I was going well beyond the requirements of the prompts. They were a nice starting point, but if I had actually held myself back to stick to them religiously, I wouldn’t have ended up with a draft as far along as I did.

So instead of the one sentence at a time approach, I’m creating minimalistic prompts that will allow you to go at your own pace and let the story guide you. The prompts offer overall guidelines for the chapter, and my hope is that each chapter prompt will be enough to get you going on the chapter and push you to keep going from one chapter to the next. However, if anyone does get stuck at any point, please feel free to leave a comment on the respective prompt you need help with. I’m happy to offer more detailed, specific prompts and requirements if it will help.

Okay, enough blabber. Here’s Step Two:

All Tracks, Step 2:

Write a chapter introducing your character in his/her world. This chapter will function as the set-up of the overall story arc.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The chapter must introduce the setting.

a.      In the first three pages of the chapter, you must provide details from at least three of the five senses.

3.      The chapter must get across the following details:

a.       The character’s name.

b.      The character’s starting point (i.e. the character as he or she exists prior to the change or lack of change that will occur in the story).

c.       The character’s perceived need.

d.      The character’s actual need.

4.      The chapter must include a complete story arc:

a.       Set-up (2-3 pages)

b.      Inciting Incident (1-2 pages)

c.       Escalation (5-10 pages)

d.      Climax (1-2 pages)

e.       Resolution/Conclusive Lack of Resolution (1-2 pages)

5.      The story arc in this chapter should represent the typical ups and downs of this character’s life.

Okay, I know I still haven’t talked about my disappearance from the blogosphere and the reason for my sudden return. I will. I promise. Somebody emailed me months ago wanting to know why I had stopped blogging. I saved the email for weeks, trying to decide how to reply, what to say, how to explain it all, how to make sense of it myself, even—and then, finally, I deleted the email without responding. I’m sorry, whoever you are (if you’re even reading this). It wasn’t that I wanted to ignore you or that I felt it was none of your business. It was just that I wasn’t ready, yet, to talk about it all, I guess: the depression, and the depths it took me to this past couple of years.

And I guess I’m not ready still, beyond saying that I’m on a new antidepressant (a generic form of Lexapro) and am feeling a little better (though not back to 100%). The important thing, though, is that I’m writing again, and writing has always been my number one most reliable antidepressant.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I have a proposition for you. Anybody want to write a novella (or, hey, why not a whole novel) with me? So here’s my thinking: I had such a great (and productive) time taking Hannah Tinti’s One Story online class this summer, I wanted to keep the creative juices flowing with some more project-specific prompts. After working my way through Tinti’s daily prompts, I ended the class with an (almost) complete draft of a new story. I’d like, next, to get a complete draft of a novel.

Who’s with me?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m developing a series of novella-specific prompts intended to take us from character profile to finished draft over the course of—well, I don’t know yet how long it’s going to take. Six weeks? I do know the novella will be parceled up into six chapters: one chapter for the set-up, one for the inciting incident, two for the escalating events following the inciting incident, one for the climax, and one for the resolution (or conclusive lack thereof). I’m going to create a prompt for each chapter, and I’ll post the prompts on my blog, so anyone who wants to follow along with me can do so.

I’m going to actually create four separate tracks of prompt sets, because my goal is to write a full novel that will be comprised of four novellas interwoven together to create a larger story arc. Why do it that way? Because I want to write a novel, but right now, the idea of actually writing 300 pages or so of one story feels overwhelming. My novel involves four key characters, though, so I thought, hey, if I look at it as four stories, one following each character, four stories that, when woven together, will create something larger than the sum of its parts—well, that seems manageable. But I don’t want them all to feel like they’re following the same, I don’t know, template, so I’m going to create four separate sets of prompts for the novellas. I’ll post all four sets here, so you can do all four, or pick and choose as you see fit.

Still undecided? Here, why don’t you take a look at my step one? This is the pre-writing stage of all four tracks. Just give it a try, why don’t you? And if you do, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m open to tweaks or suggestions for this worksheet (and any of the prompts that will follow it), and of course, I’d love to hear how YOUR writing is going. Nothing motivates me more than swapping writing experiences with other writers and holding each other accountable.

 

All Tracks, Step 1:

Character Profile Worksheet:

Physical

Eye Color:

Hair Color/Length:

Body Shape/Size (i.e. skinny, muscular, chubby, etc.):

Defining Physical Characteristics (i.e. scars, freckles, etc.):

Physical Self-Image:

Personal

Interests/Hobbies:

 

Education Level:

 

             Major/Specialization:

Job:

 

Attitude (i.e. optimistic, cynical, etc.):

Emotional

Perceived Need(s):

 

Actual Need:

Even though I said recently that I would not, under any circumstances, be returning to the novel that was my graduate thesis, this past week I went into my trusty old “Failed Attempts” file on my computer and turned what was an 80,000 word novel into a 21,000 word novella. I’ve been thinking about doing this pretty much ever since I sentenced the document to my “Failed Attempts” prison. I guess making that very difficult but important decision freed me up to see the novel for what it really was: about 70 good pages of story and close to 200 pages of filler, of me trying to sustain the length of a novel without really knowing how.

Though this was not the first novel I’d written, as a novel it was more of good practice than a worthwhile piece of literature. It was me learning how to fill in that many pages, me learning how to revise something that lengthy. After multiple revisions, though, it’s still too flawed to be a workable book. I can see that now. There are huge components of the plot, entire characters, that feel flat, unbelievable, over-written.

But there’s some good stuff in there, too. At its core, there’s a nugget of an interesting story, which is what kept me working and trying and believing in this novel for so long. Once I accepted that the novel would never be good enough, I realized that maybe if I pared it down to that nugget of good stuff, maybe then I would have something worth reading.

The impetus to finally give it a try came from the Iron Horse Literary Review newsletter. Iron Horse is currently open for entries in their annual single-author competition, and this year they’re accepting novellas only. I almost never enter contests. With the exception of book contests, the few times I’ve decided to spend the money, I haven’t even gotten so much as an honorable mention. I’m just not good enough, I’ve told myself, so it would be like throwing my money away.

But it isn’t, really. The entry fees for contests help to support the journals you’re paying the fees to, and most entry fees entitle you to a subscription to the journal anyway. Your money is going to something worthwhile, even if your submission doesn’t place.

So I decided to use the Iron Horse contest as motivation to trim this novel to novella length. At a first pass, I got it down to about 95 pages—roughly 30,000 words. The contest guidelines stipulate that entries must be no more than 20,000 words—roughly 65 pages. I did some more tinkering and trimming and got it down to a lean 21,000 words, but I still need to cut another 1,000 if I want to enter the contest. I may not make it—the deadline is less than two weeks away—but I’m certainly going to give it a go.

Even if I can’t get it down to 20,000 words, I feel good about this experience. It was useful for me to see just how much I could cut from the manuscript, and it feels good, too, to see it take shape as something that might be publishable after all. Maybe this novella will eventually end up in the “Failed Attempts” file, too, but right now, I feel really good about how it’s turning out.

I’m trying something new as a writer, something that requires completely changing my familiar writing habits: dictation. The other day, my friend Jolynn told me about some dictation software her parents gave her for Christmas. I thought it sounded worth a shot, so I looked up dictation apps for my phone and found some free ones I could try.

I work an hour and a half drive away from home, see, so even though I only have to go to campus twice a week, I’m in the car for six hours a week commuting to and from my classes. If I could spend even a small portion of that time “writing,” I would bump my productivity up immensely.

So last week I downloaded Dragon Dictation. The first day, I had trouble trying to get my mind into writer mode. I’m so used to typing as part of my process that I think my mind almost has a Pavlovian response to sitting in front of the computer and opening a document to write. Speaking the story out loud just wasn’t doing it for me, and I ended up just deleting the barely coherent crap I came up with.

But I refused to give in so quickly. Six freakin’ hours a week, I kept telling myself. Six hours to myself, without my little girl climbing all over me. It would be the perfect time to write.

So I tried again the next day I had to go to campus. I waited until a sentence formed in my mind—that’s usually the way I begin any writing session—and I turned on the app and just started going for it. I “wrote” for the rest of the drive to campus and ended up with about 1000 words to add to my novel, words I feel pretty good about, too. Of course, I’m still in the very early stages of trying this out, but I’m going to keep at it, and I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this is going to help me write way, way, way more.

Last Wednesday I was tagged for "The Next Big Thing" by Jenni Moody. Here are my answers:

1) What is the working title of your next book?

I think of it as “The Little Dancing Girl,” but I’m positive the title will change as I continue writing and revising.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Two things sparked the idea:

When I was pregnant, someone asked me what was the most important thing I would want my child to understand about the world. I decided I wanted my daughter to know that there is no God, but that that isn’t a bad thing, that in fact, the real world—the world as we understand it based on science, not faith—is far more complex, interesting, and even magical than the over-simplified belief that someone created the world and we’re all beholden to that creator.

Also while I was pregnant, I was having trouble writing. I was incredibly distracted with thoughts of motherhood and planning for my daughter’s arrival. A few people suggested that I keep a sort of pregnancy log, possibly with the intention of showing it to my daughter down the road. I started writing her letters, which started to become a sort of memoir of the important things about me and the important incidents from my life that I wanted my daughter to know.

I wrote over a hundred pages of letters, and I started trying to shape the letters into a cohesive story about how I came to turn my back on religion (having grown up the daughter of a preacher), and how I found that my life seems to actually have more meaning this way. The problem was, as a fiction writer, I kept wanting to embellish the stories, or in some cases, make up entirely new, more interesting stories. Now that my daughter is one and the letters have been sitting, untouched on my computer, for some time, it recently hit me that this mish-mash of letters could be the impetus for a novel, in which I can explore those same basic themes, but do it in my own way, shaping the story how I want to shape it.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

I’m not really sure yet, but probably YA. The main character will be a young adult throughout the majority of the story.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm. If I could choose actors at any stage in their careers, I would cast Claire Danes from her My So-Called-Life days as the main character. I think I’d like to see Kevin Kline as the father and maybe Frances McDormand as the mother.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

This is a difficult question to answer at this stage of the writing process, but here’s a try:

A mother turns her life story into a fairy tale for her daughter: the tale of the little dancing girl, who grew up in a valley obscured by the shadow of a vast mountain on which everybody believed lived a fearsome king.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

If the book comes together in a way that I’m satisfied with, I’ll do an agent hunt. If I can’t secure an agent, I’ll look at small presses.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It’s still in progress. The plan is to have a complete draft finished by this summer.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I don’t really know. I think it’s too early to say because I don’t really know, yet, where the story will go.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired by my daughter and my desire to ease her way in life. I wanted to share with her the struggles I had growing up, never really feeling like I belonged and always searching for some meaning to my existence. On top of that, I’m a staunch atheist and feel very frustrated by the pervasiveness of Christianity in my culture. I wanted to give my daughter a clear idea of what atheism is and why her dad and I are atheists, as well as describe to her the sorts of struggles I remember dealing with from my own childhood in the hopes that the story might ease her struggles a bit.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

The story is told in the style of a fairy tale, but all the magic in the story is not real—it’s just things the townspeople believe but that the main character eventually discovers to be false. In style, it’s very similar to a story from my collection, “This Is Not a Fairy Tale,” in which a very mundane, non-magical story is told through the lens of a fairy tale. In my novel, it’s very clear that the narrator is fairy-tale-izing her own life to turn it into a bedtime story for her daughter, but you don’t know exactly what parts of the story are real and what is embellishment.

Next Wednesday, visit the following writer’s blog. I’ve passed the Next Big Thing buck to Jayme Russell.

I’ve said this before and I’ve always gone back on it, but you have to believe me, this time I really mean it: I’m done with my thesis novel. Finished. I’ve officially moved it to my “Failed Attempts” folder, from whence it shall never return. When I had said I was going to move it to my “Failed Attempts” folder in the past, I lied. Well, I didn’t lie, exactly. I was planning to do it. But when it came time to actually make the cut and paste, it just felt too, too, I don’t know, too something. Too painful. But this time, it’s already moved. It shall forever be considered just another one of my failed practice novels.

How do I know I’m really going to stick with it this time? Because this time, it felt really good, like a relief. It felt right. This time, I decided, I really am ready to move on.

And not only that, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the novel and thought, Eh, it’s not really that great. I got to this point because I was working on yet another revision of the novel, with the intention of entering it into Fence’s Modern Prose contest. This revision was sort of a combination of my most recent draft and some earlier drafts, and I do think the result was better than what I’d been sending around. When I had been cutting things in previous revisions, I actually cut some scenes that I now think are pretty integral to the reader’s understanding of certain characters, so with those scenes woven back into the story, everything felt a lot stronger.

But as I was working on it, I started really analyzing how well some of the components of the novel are working. There are some great things in this story, I think. Some of the writing is really strong, and some of the moments feel perfect. But there are some really serious problems with a couple of the characters, leaving those characters feeling very flat on the page. There are points that lag, too, and I almost feel like it’s a novella that’s been stretched in to an entire novel.

In short, I don’t think I want it to get published. I don’t think it reflects what I’m capable of. I can do better. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I began this novel. My first drafts, now, need less work than this nth draft of my thesis would still need, and I think it would be a better use of my time to work on a new first draft of a new novel.

Which is exactly what I’m doing right now. And the truth is, I’m having way more fun and am way more interested in this new novel than I am in reliving for the millionth time the same story from my thesis. I’m just so sick of Timothy Bannister and his dead father—there, I said it. I don’t want to work on this novel anymore. I don’t want to send it out. I don’t want it to get published.

But that doesn’t mean that those few years I spent working on it were a waste. I learned a lot about how to write a novel from this experience. I made a lot of mistakes and learned how to fix them, and I think my next novel will be much stronger from draft one as a result. Maybe the next one will be a practice novel too, who knows? But I do know that this last one definitely was, and finally—FINALLY—I’m okay with accepting it and moving on.

As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough to Do . . .

I talked last week about the new shared goal my friend and fellow writer Jenni Moody and I are doing to write our new novels. Our first milestone is 10,000 words by November 15^th. I have a little over 1,000 so far. Yes, I realize that’s not very much, but hey, I’m 1/10^th of the way there, and I’m feeling really excited about this project. I’m enjoying climbing into the voice of a new narrator, knowing that she and I are going to spend a lot of time together, that we’re going to really get to know each other in the next few months.

And maybe I’m getting overambitious, maybe the fumes from starting my engine to get going on this new novel have gone to my head, but I’ve decided—tentatively, and perhaps I’ll change my mind—to do one last revision of my thesis to submit it to Fence’s new Modern Prose contest. They’ve had a poetry contest for a while now, but this year they decided to create a prose contest as well. Their first prose prize will go to a novel. When I got the email announcing the prize, I felt like it was a sign. Okay, I don’t really believe in signs, but. You know what I mean. I felt like I should do this. I should try just one more time.

The thing is, I had recently been thinking about my thesis, anyway, thinking about how it’s been through who knows how many drafts and there are about 100 pages of cut scenes stagnating in a file on my computer. Most of those cut scenes were probably cut for good reason, but it occurred to me the other day that maybe the “right” form, the “true” form of this novel should lie not at one extreme or another, but at some halfway point between my early drafts and the current version. Maybe, in other words, I should look through those cut scenes and see if some of them should be put back in.

But my new novel is more important to me than trudging through an umpteenth revision of my thesis. I think there is more to be gained, right now, from working on something new, so if it comes down to it and I can’t possibly do both, I’ll focus on meeting the November 15 goal for the new novel.

Besides my two jobs working as a teacher and online tutor, and besides my other “job” as a mom, the reason why I might not be able to meet both these deadlines is that I’ve also taken a new volunteer position as an Associate Editor for Bound Off, the literary podcast in which my work has both appeared and is forthcoming. This new position, by the way, has nothing to do with my new story, Hair, which will be broadcast on Bound Off in a couple of weeks. My story had already been accepted when I started talking to the editors about joining their team.

Like the Fence prize, I learned about the opening through an email newsletter. I thought about it for a week or two, really weighing whether I thought I could handle the workload. Obviously, I decided I could. The job only requires me to read ten stories every two weeks, then offer my thoughts on the stories with a yay or nay vote. I think it will be fun and worthwhile—I’m just itching to get back into the editing game, to tell the truth.

But, of course, now that I’ve committed to this job, reading submissions and working on my new novel both take precedence over my thesis. So, right now, these are the things I have to do:

1.      Perform all the required duties for my two paying jobs

2.      Be a good mama—the best I know how to be

3.      Read and offer thoughts on submissions for Bound Off

4.      Write at least 9,000 more words in my new novel by November 15^th

Notice I put the new novel in the “have to” list. I consider this a true commitment. No excuses. I’m going to do this.

And, if time permits (and I hope it will!), I’m also going to work on these things:

1.      Revise my thesis to submit it to the Fence Modern Prose Prize

2.      Work on some stories

The following are things I don’t need to waste my time with, when time is in short supply:

1.      Watch old episodes of Mad Men on Netflix while Amalie naps instead of taking the chance to do something more productive

2.      Stuff my face with candy when I’m feeling overwhelmed (did I subconsciously buy too much candy for Amalie’s birthday piñata so that I could eat it myself after the party? Probably. Damn you, sweet-toothed subconscious!)

3.      Turn on my computer to work and, instead, spend the next hour reading and commenting on all of my friends’ Facebook status updates

First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.

Fellow UAF MFAer and good friend Shane Dayton recently made his MFA thesis, a novel called My Brother’s Keeper, available as an e-book on Amazon. I’m sure the decision to self-publish wasn’t made lightly, but after numerous personal, encouraging responses from editors and agents but still no book deal, I think Shane came to the conclusion that it was time to put the book out there and move on.
 
Personally, I was excited to finally get to read the book. Shane’s work was always among my favorite in workshop. His prose is somehow both gritty and lyrical at once, and his stories take on topics that a lot of other literary fiction writers don’t tackle. He doesn’t write about ailing marriages, about mundane situations causing great epiphanies. He’s not, like so many writers of our generation, trying to be Raymond Carver—I’m sorry, guys, Raymond Carver’s stuff is great, but you need to find your voice.

Shane’s work also never sacrifices plot to focus solely on the sentence. His sentences are good, but so are his actual stories, and My Brother’s Keeper is an excellent example. My Brother’s Keeper takes the reader into the mind of sixteen-year-old Gyle, a misfit with only three friends. Gyle is tired of being pushed around by the other kids at his high school, tired of being ignored by his father in favor of his athletic brother, and otherwise bored with his humdrum teenaged life. Gyle’s life is such that, as he puts it, “The days everyone ignored me were the easiest to get through.” It’s no surprise, then, that when Gyle meets Brent—a mysterious, Tyler Durdenesque boy who appears to be not much older than Gyle himself but who lives alone in a cabin in the woods—he is instantly drawn to the excitement and danger a friendship with Brent seems to offer.  

As Gyle begins to spend more time with Brent, it becomes clear that Brent views their relationship as that of a mentor to a protégé, yet Gyle, at first, is fine with this set-up. He admires Brent, even fears him, a little. Gyle wants to be strong and brave like Brent; he wants to be the sort of person who doesn’t get ignored. Slowly, Gyle finds himself changing in what he at first sees as positive ways, but as the story unfolds, Brent’s mental instability begins to rise to the surface, and Gyle begins to feel less comfortable with the new person Brent is pushing him to become.

When the story reaches its thrilling conclusion, all the loose ends are not neatly tied in a bow. The ends are frayed; they’re damaged and broken from the events of the story. The ending is complicated and messy and real. When asked, in the last scene, by one of his three friends if he is the person he was before this all began or the person she came to detest during the height of Gyle’s progression towards Brent-ness, Gyle doesn’t know what to say: “She wanted a quick answer, but I didn’t have one for her.” Finally, he tells her, “Neither,” but he can’t really elaborate further than that. I won’t give away the last line, but it’s beautiful and perfect and leaves you highly aware of just how changed Gyle is.

My Brother’s Keeper is a psychological thriller with the sensibilities of literary fiction. It’s darkly comic at points, intensely frightening at others, and it maintains the steady momentum of a plot driven novel, though not at the expense of character and sentence. It’s well worth the $2.99 Shane is charging for it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who really values story—plot—not just elegant writing.

A Tale of Two Movies

Yes, this week’s post has a title. I couldn’t resist. Even though it’s a bit dorksy.

Anyway, as you can probably tell from the (dorksy) title, I want to talk this week about a couple of movies I watched recently, both based on novels I had read previously. The Hunger Games, as everyone not living in a cave probably knows, is the first in an insanely popular (and startlingly good) trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The film adaptation hit the theaters a few weeks ago. The Ruins by Scott Smith is probably the best horror novel I’ve ever read. The movie version was released in 2008, but I only just got around to watching it (I picked it up used for $3 worth of trade at my local music/movie store, Haffa’s. The price should give you an idea of how popular the movie was.)

Both screenplays were at least partially written by the original book authors. Suzanne Collins is credited with three other screenwriters for The Hunger Games, and Scott Smith is listed as the sole screenwriter of The Ruins. It’s no surprise, then, that both movies remain pretty true to their respective books (although in both, the screenwriters had to change some small details to fit the film format).

Watching movie versions of books I love in such short succession of each other really got me thinking about the differences between novels and movies, and the problems that arise when the former is adapted in to the latter. It’s true of most movies based on novels that if you ask just about anyone who read the book and watched the movie both, they’ll tell you the book was better. This is not snooty or pretentious or a means of bragging about having read the book (though sometimes it comes across that way).

The truth is, this reaction is almost universal because when these novels were written, they were written for the literary format. The characters, plot points, etc. were all structured with the knowledge that the reader would likely spend a few days working his or her way through the story. The pace is much slower. In a movie, you have to somehow tell a complete story, develop your characters, establish tension, and so on, and you have to do it all in a couple of hours. The pace feels ridiculously fast in comparison, so the same sort of scope you can work with in a novel simply will not work for a movie, in my opinion. You have to zoom in, narrow your focus. It’s a lot more like a short story.

Case in point, look at The Hunger Games (SPOILER ALERT!): Because the movie stays so faithful to the book, a lot of ground is covered in a very short period of time. In some cases, a feeling of knowing and really caring about the characters is sacrificed. In the book, Katniss and Rue are together for several pages. We spend enough time with Rue to really feel that we know her, and her death is so, so painful as a result. In the movie, Katniss meets Rue, really meets her for the first time, then in the next scene they separate. When they reunite, Rue dies. They spend I would guess not much more than five minutes of screen time together because almost immediately after they meet, Rue dies. There’s no time there to build any kind of a connection with Rue. The movie relies on viewers either A) having read the book, so they already know and love Rue, or B) caring about Rue’s death solely because Rue is young and adorable.

In the book of The Ruins, the majority of the book is really about these kids going stir-crazy, trapped together atop the mound. That doesn’t mean the vine isn’t a genuine threat or that it isn’t scary, but what’s really scary is watching the mental states of these kids get slowly more and more unstable, until it becomes clear that the real danger is the one they’re posing to themselves. The movie stays close enough to the book to maintain some of that, but it’s impossible to really recreate the psychological twists and turns the book takes when we’re not able to climb inside the characters’ heads.

Both movies were good movies, don’t get me wrong. The Ruins in particular really caught me by surprise, I suppose because I went into it with fairly low expectations (although I should point out that the ending to the movie version of The Ruins is lame—I’m not sure why Smith changed it—and as freaky as the vine is in the book, you just can’t make a plant scary in a movie. At times, in fact, it looks sort of silly). But yes, if you asked me, I’d tell you the books were better. Waaaaaay better.

As much as I’m a movie lover and an advocate for the value of short fiction, I do love to get lost in a novel. I love the scope of novels; I love to spend days getting to know the characters, so I can really, really care about the things that happen to them. From a technical perspective, I still think short stories make better use of the craft elements taught in MFA programs. But from an emotional perspective, the longer form is better suited to make the reader really engage with the characters and their plights. There’s something that absolutely cannot be replaced about spending a few days slowly consuming—and in the best cases, being consumed by—a really good novel.

J. T.Dutton is the author of the novels Freaked and Stranded, both published through HarperTeen. I met Dutton a few years ago when she came as a visiting writer to my MFA alma-mater, the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dutton’s books are quirky and funny and daring—I highly recommend them. I was excited to get a chance to pick her brain about the process of publishing them through such a major publishing house.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and revising your first book, Freaked? You began working on it as an MFA student, right?

Yes, I submitted Freaked to my MFA workshop as a short story, then expanded it to a novella, then expanded it again to a draft of a novel for my thesis project. After I left Alaska, I dropped it into a drawer. Certain scenes continued to grow and become more mentally realized in my imagination and when I had time, I worked on them. Five years later, I finally stuffed the whole project into an envelope.

For those of us who have an unpublished novel languishing on our hard drives, landing an agent seems like the impossible dream sometimes. How did you hook up with your agent? How long did it take you to sign with your agent after you had begun shopping the book around?

I sent simultaneous blind queries to agents in A Writer’s Guide. (I did not think of Freaked as a Young Adult novel so I chose agents based on their interest in literary fiction.) Jodie Rhodes was maybe number 32 on the list. She asked to see the full manuscript, signed me a few days later, and sold the book in a matter of hours. I was still getting rejections from other agents even as news of the sale was going public in Publishers Weekly.

The seesaw effect of loving my manuscript one day and hating it the next is what kept me from submitting it sooner. Fear of rejection is what often stops me from taking important leaps of faith.

I’ve read that most agents don’t find many clients through the slush pile, preferring instead to meet clients through referrals. Do you have any advice for writers trying to brave the query letter process? What do you think makes a query letter stand out?

I was invited to teach at the Midwest Writers Workshop last summer alongside four agents who presented a panel on the best methods for pitching work. At the end of the conference, all of the agents had requested several full manuscripts and one stated that she’d had some of the best face to face meetings with authors ever. I walked away impressed by how much a one-on-one meeting with an agent can made a difference for aspiring writers. The road to publication requires a lot of collaboration between agent and writer, editor and writer, agent and editor and it makes sense that agents want a sense of who somebody is before they consider signing them.

The typical agent receives nearly 200 blind manuscript queries a week. In lieu of a face to face meeting, a blind query should probably deliver as much of the writer’s personality as possible. Some agents want writers who are market sensitive, others prefer an author who tells a good joke, others are more brass tacks and down to business. Finding the “one” should probably take a while in order for the match to be a success, and query letters should probably not be formula-written, but instead, come from some deep individual and original place.

I have yet to meet Jodie Rhodes face to face though we have exchanged hundreds of e-mails. She recently published a memoir entitled Confessions which describes why she has dedicated herself to the promotion of new authors. If every agent had a manual, figuring out a “personality match” would be a lot easier. Certainly “getting to know” Jodie has deepened my respect for her as a human being and for the work she does.

Tell us about the process of signing the contract with HarperTeen. They loved Freaked so much, they signed you to a two-book deal, right? How much freedom did you have on your second book, Stranded?

Publishers of YA novels frequently sign new authors for more than one book because the bigger contract allows them to plan releases so that the momentum and marketing of the first sells the second. It’s a good deal for writers because having an advance provides a little financial security while they are working. Having the second contract looming over me though managed to stress me out astronomically. I couldn’t dawdle or wait to feel inspired to write. I also had to show my editor a lot of garbage that I hadn’t yet recognized was garbage. I worried every day that she was going to boot me to the curb. I definitely felt like I was “faking it” a good percentage of the time.

Despite time constraints, I received quite a bit of creative freedom to take my second book in the directions I wanted. One of the things I like best about Freaked and Stranded now that they are out in the world is that they don’t fit into a clear YA mold and that they truly represent my take on the genre.

How hands-on has your agent been with your books? And your editor(s)?

I think we put equal parts love into each project.  Author love is different than agent and editor love. I did the writing, Jodie did the selling, and my editor did a truckload of patient reading and recommending.  One of the things I have learned since being published is writing professionally is very collaborative—a lot of thought goes into the finished product. 

Now that both books are out, what’s the next step? Will you continue publishing through HarperTeen?

I have no new projects with HarperTeen in the works though I would lay down my life to publish another book with them. I learned a mountain of useful information under my editor’s tutelage. I can’t even begin to express how much I grew as a writer. Whether my next book will be something she wants is really more her decision than mine. I get the sense that she would potentially read anything new I finished, but her business is an art too and she has to make very judicious decisions about what is the best use of her time.

What’s your relationship with your agent like now that you’ve published both books in your two-book deal? What role does your agent play as you take the next steps in your career?

I keep Jodie apprised of my projects and I get the sense she hopes to see work from me soon. Hopefully, I will oblige. I am in “creative mode” at the moment, where really it’s a time just to shut the door and write.

What are you working on now? Is a third book already in the works?

I have written two half-novels and a quarter of a third since I finished Stranded which have potential but not the full-on magic that I think is going to make them interesting to a perspective publisher yet. I’m not about to give up on them, though. If I’ve learned anything these last few years, it’s that big ideas pull together in mysterious ways. I just have to keep the words flowing, sit down every day and work, and more than likely, something interesting will come from it.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly warming my writing muscles back up again. I had tried to push myself with an insanely easy goal during winter break, and then I promptly gave up after repeatedly not meeting the goal during the very first week of break. For the month of January, then, which was also my first month teaching two classes since having the baby (though they’re both still online), I decided to just sit back and see what would happen. I obviously wasn’t ready yet to set goals. I did, however, have things I wanted to be working on, and not just in that “I really ought to be writing” sort of way; in that more magical, exciting way, where story ideas and sentences to accompany them dance through your head when you’re doing even the most mundane tasks: washing the dishes, taking a shower, rocking your baby to sleep.

So without even making any effort to push myself back into it, I opened the writing file on my computer and started sifting through my drafts. I was pleasantly surprised to remember that I did, in fact, write several drafts of new stories last year. I have the tendency to feel like I’ve hardly written at all since my book came out, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t revised many drafts to the point of being ready to send around, but I actually did write quite a lot of new stuff last year. 

So I got back to work revising a few of those drafts. I had Damien read a couple of them, and some other people read a third (which Damien had already read). I’m now hungrily revising—and maybe, just maybe almost ready to start sending out—the most promising of the new stories I wrote last year. There are still others that I’ll probably get around to tinkering with later, and a few that I moved to my “Failed Attempts” file (what a strangely good feeling it is sometimes to definitively say, “I will not waste any more time on this story.”).

Up next, I want to get working on a new idea I had recently that I think might develop into a novel. Maybe it’ll just be a novella. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. I do feel like I should be pushing myself to try working on longer pieces. I’m a bit hesitant about novel writing these days—my experience trying (and failing) to publish the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis left me both disappointed and feeling very shaky about my abilities as a novelist. I’ve read, then revised, then reread the damn thing who knows how many times. The fact that every time I read it, I think it’s publishable makes me wonder if the problem is, in fact, my own ability to recognize what a good novel should and should not be.  

I’ve had enough success publishing short stories that I sometimes wonder if I’m not just one of those writers—there are many, and many of them are very good—who just is and always will be a short story writer. Period. But sometimes I have these ideas, ideas that I don’t think could fit into the space of a short story. So even though I’m tentative and maybe a bit afraid, I’m going to start working on this new idea, and if it ends up developing into a full novel (gulp), well then. So be it.

I received this week what feels like the hundredth agent rejection for the novel that was my MFA thesis, this novel I’ve poured so much time and energy into over the past five years. This was another rejection from an agent who had, after reading my initial query, been interested in the manuscript and had requested a partial. Rejections from agents who actually requested to read some or all of the manuscript first are the hardest because they force you to accept that it’s not that you’re not getting a fair shake, it’s not that the agent just didn’t like your premise, it’s the writing, it’s the manuscript itself that brought on this rejection.

Naturally, this rejection was no exception. In fact, this rejection smarted even more than the other rejections for partial or full manuscripts I’ve received in the past because this one didn’t waste any time complimenting my writing abilities. The gist of it was that I have some “impressive” writing credits and an “interesting” premise, but this particular agent just wasn’t that into the material itself once he started reading it. I guess I’ve gotten used to the obligatory variation on, “You’re a very good writer, however . . .” and so this one pierced my rejection-toughened skin and actually stung a bit.

But let’s be honest here, the fact that this agent didn’t have time to waste stroking my ego isn’t the real reason this rejection hurt. It hurt because I’ve queried so many agents about this book, and I’ve had a fair number of partial or full manuscript requests—hell, I even had an agency solicit me after reading one of my stories in a literary journal—but I always end up getting nowhere. Many agents have been kind enough to take a look; none of them have been interested in representing me after they read the manuscript.

I’m at that point, of course, where I have no choice but to accept that this book just isn’t going to get published. Shelving a project you’ve poured so much of yourself into is maybe the most difficult thing a writer has to do. This time it’s particularly hard for me because I’ve done the set-it-aside-for-six-months thing—more than once—and still felt it was good when I came back to it. I’ve revised it so many times I’ve completely lost count, too. When I read through this novel, even now, I don’t understand why it isn’t publishable. Okay, it’s not the most brilliant novel ever written, but it seems good enough to me to get published. It seems just as good as a lot of the stuff that gets published every year. But I’m clearly missing something; there’s something wrong that I’m not picking up on.

I feel I would be deluding myself if, after all these rejections, I don’t admit defeat. I’ve talked in the past about the agent hunt being my first stop for this book, about how, if that didn’t work out for me, I would try my hand at small presses. In fact, I had already stopped querying agents (this rejection took several months to make its way to me and is from the last agent I had yet to hear from), and I had begun to submit to small presses and contests, but now I’m thinking maybe that, too, is a bad idea.

I know several people who have permanently set aside their MFA theses, accepting that the manuscripts just aren’t good enough and never will be. This may sound sort of pessimistic, until you realize that those same people are instead investing their writing time working on new projects, projects they do feel might have a chance of getting published. Giving up on their theses, for these writers, wasn’t, actually, like giving up at all; it was more like accepting that the thesis was a valuable experience, great practice, and now they’re ready to move on and apply what they learned to something better.

I really, really, really admire that mentality. I really, really, really want to know how to let go of this novel, at last. I’ve given up on projects in the past—this is not, after all, my first novel, just the first one I actually believed, after several years of close scrutiny and revision, was good enough—so why is this so difficult for me? One way or another, though, I have got to accept that it isn’t going to happen with this book. Researching publishers and crafting queries is taking up valuable time I should be spending on new projects, not to mention the fact that, as long as I continue to think of this book as publishable, it will be difficult for me to fully immerse myself in a new novel. Every time I try, I eventually hit a wall and get sidetracked by thinking about this book, whether I should revise it again, whether I should be bothering with a new one when this one has yet to be published.

So I need to move this novel to my “Failed Attempts” file, dust my hands off, and move on with my life. As difficult as this is for me, maybe it will be like a sort of release. Here’s hoping. On the positive side, anyway, I do feel very heartened by this final rejection’s admission that my writing credits are “impressive.” It gives me some hope that, while this novel, it seems, just isn’t going to cut it, maybe a future one will, and that I have built up enough of a publication history for agents to pause and take notice. Maybe the next novel will be the one. I’ll never know, though, if I allow myself to remain frozen in the world of this old, let’s face it, failed novel.