My Imaginary Boyfriends

Calvin O'Keefe.  Jeff Greene.  Joe Willard.  Stan Crandall.

Scholastic's Blog has me thinking about my first loves.

Joe Willard was the responsible,
mature man in Deep Valley.

Even without the bibliophilic inspiration, of course my first crushes were from books.  Looking back on it, I'm surprised I can't come up with a longer list.  Whatever was drawing me into all those hours of reading must have been the plots or the themes or the settings or something, 'cause it wasn't the characters.

Except for some of them.

When I read them as a kid, all of the guys in my favorite books were wise beyond their years, masters of any situation--and this was pretty much what I thought guys must be like in general.  So, in jr high or high school, if a guy I liked didn't ask me out (despite the rumor mill's assurance that he wanted to), I had no idea that he might be shy or scared of rejection or waiting for me to pick up on some of his more obvious hints and give him a smidgen of encouragement.  No, if a guy I liked wasn't asking me out, it must be because he wasn't interested.

Jeff Greene woo'd Dicey
--and me--with American
roots music.

That must have been hella wishful thinking on my part.  'Cause I've read all those books as many times as an adult as I did as a kid--which is a lot--and what I love about the books now is how none of the characters are perfect. The guys in the stories are excellent, yes, but excellent teenage boys, not paragons of maturity and wisdom.

Jeff, the boy in love with Dicey in one of my favorite books ever, is comfortable around Dicey's family and always says the right thing--except that he doesn't; he's awkward and unsure of himself and the only reason their friendship goes anywhere is because Dicey occasionally gets out of her own head enough to meet him halfway.  Joe Willard, who ends up married to my imaginary best friend Betsy Ray, is handsome and talented--but he's prickly and officious and gets offended at the drop of a hat, which is why it takes him and Betsy five books to actually get together and stay together.

Or take Stan Crandall, the love interest in the first romance novel I ever read.  The whole point of Stan Crandall is for Jane Purdy to figure out that despite his height and smarts and charm, he's not a Lord of Creation (to borrow Louisa May Alcott's turn of irony)--he's a kid, like her, and one of the big things they have in common is an overabundance of self-consciousness.

Which brings us back around to Calvin O'Keefe.  (And Josiah Davidson.  And Adam Eddington, be still my heart, Adam Eddington.  And, oh, Queron Renier.  And almost--almost--every other young man ever thought up by Madeleine L'Engle.)

Adam Eddington somehow managed
to be the boy next door and
unattainable all at once, while
Zachary Gray brings out the amateur
shrink in all of us.

Even on re-reading as an adult, Calvin is as close to perfect as a human can conceive.  He's popular but doesn't let it go to his head.  He's completely sure of himself, to the point of being able to tell Meg "what dreamboat eyes" she has, within hours of their first meeting.  He's come to grips with his dysfunctional family at a ridiculously young age.  And while the biographical details of each differ, L'Engle's heros are the only guys from my favorite books that match my youthful idealization.

Which is why, as an adult, my favorite L'Engle Guy is Zachary Gray, who never made my list of crushworthy characters.  Zachary is, at least in the books I've read the most, a cautionary tale about the tendency to get into relationships with people who need a lot more care than a teenager can hope to give.  His function is generally to be the bad-boy temptation and get rejected--for excellent reasons--by the protagonist, and the fact that he's smart, rich, sensitive, and handsome, yet bad for a girl, makes him among the most complex male characters in the L'Engle canon.

Paying it forward: who were your teenage literary crushes?  If you've re-read those books lately, how do they hold up to your memories?

Tree, Meet Chainsaw.

I've been meaning to write this post for weeks, ever since the Oxford Literary Festival way back at the beginning of April. I have a really good excuse for not doing it: I've been too busy working on putting it all into practice!

Marking up this manuscript was the most writing fun I've had in years.

Retyping the whole thing is running a very close second,
and may edge out the marking-up process any day now.

I really, really hate writing first drafts. So it's not at all surprising that writing this one took two years. I broke every conventional-wisdom writing rule in the process, too. I didn't write fast (obviously). I frequently stopped forward progress through the draft to go back and make major changes earlier in the novel. I didn't get critique at any point in the first-draft writing process. At one point I decided the WIP was really two books, not one, and having re-organized things to account for that, I spent a good three months doing absolutely anything I could think of (including massively long blog posts on Egypt and Glee) to keep from having to write the ending of Book 1. I am incredibly proud of the result, which if I do say so myself, is one of the most disjointed, self-indulgent 95,000-word monstrosities I've ever produced.

The process of turning it into a coherent, teen-friendly, 75,000-word (I hope) novel began with the Oxford Literary Festival, which for me opened at 10:00 on a Saturday in early April with a panel of "Creative Writing Fellows at Oxford Brookes University on Voice," featuring Patience Agbabi, Kate Clanchy, and Philip Pullman.

You had to feel sorry for Patience Agbabi and Kate Clanchy, simply for the fact that they had to be at the same book-signing table with Philip Pullman while not actually being Philip Pullman. (I ended up buying Kate Clancy's novel in part because I was standing right next to her while waiting to have Four Tales signed for my nephew. Only in part, though--I'd really liked what she had to say on the panel, and I'm looking forward to reading the book.) But on the panel, they all three gave evidence of being excellent teachers of the craft of writing--which is really, as they all made clear, the craft of re-writing. As Kate Clanchy put it, "You re-write to get back to what you meant."

In 10 years of hearing him speak and reading his essays, I've come to accept that Philip Pullman and I differ about as much as is possible in our writing processes. He is outspokenly anti-outline; I wouldn't write more than a first scene without one. He finds writing to music gets in the way of his own sense of the rhythm and music in his writing. I have trouble concentrating without background music, which I put on to distract the non-helpful, interfering voices in my head.

On this particular panel, however, Pullman came up with one of the best metaphors for writing and re-writing I've ever encountered: "the process of writing is like growing a tree. Re-writing is carpentry: cutting down the tree and building something out of it." He went on to compare the parts of a WIP that aren't working as "dead wood," and give the writer permission to read back in the manuscript to the last place where it felt alive, cut away the dead wood, and work from there.

Can I just take a minute here and talk about how freakin' liberating it is to go through your manuscript and draw huge black Xs over entire pages? Through entire chapters, even? No struggling to give the scene a purpose; no tearing my hair out trying to make something work that doesn't. Just cut it away and go from there.

(I highly recommend the Oxford Literary Festival as a day out, by the way. About half of the main tent was taken up by a pop-up Blackwell's Books store, but the rest of the retail space was given over to liquor companies. A nice young lady holding samples of scotch greeted the crowd exiting the panel for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, which sent us all into fits of even more hysterical laughter than we were already in, and a lovely person from Hendrick's Gin offered bite-sized gin & tonics to those of us waiting in line to have books signed by Louise Rennison and Michael Rosen. It did make it a little hard to stay awake for the Simon Winchester lecture, but it was totally worth it. Sadly, it did not lower my inhibitions enough to let me tell Michael Rosen that I kind of want to be him when I grow up and in the meantime could I please get a picture taken with him.)

Anyway. Back to the topic at hand. I've made one other huge discovery in the re-writing process for this book: instead of going back through an existing draft and making the changes in my notes, I'm re-typing the whole thing, start-to-finish. This is proving to have so many advantages over my earlier method that I can't believe I ever did it any other way. It seems to me, now, that making changes to an existing manuscript is rather like patching a hole in a piece of clothing; there's no way to make the new fabric match precisely, or hide the stitching. Re-typing, on the other hand, feels like using some existing fabric, and some new, to make something entirely different, and better. I'm so pleased with it I'm hoping against hope that this turns out to be a new Universal Writing Truth--universal for me, anyway--and not something that only works for this one draft of this one novel.

After a long, often-excruciating first-draft process, it's so nice to have this part be fun. I had this horrible worry, all the way through the first draft, that I was going to end up with something so unwieldy that I'd never be able to make it into anything. For two years I had to keep shouting down and drowning out the critical internal editor rolling her eyes and muttering, "oh, this is such crap, you are so bad at this." Now I can finally let the inner editor loose, and force her to help me build, instead of tearing everything down.

My own personal NoWriYe

It took going away for a month and then coming back and re-reading, but my last post made me notice something:

I spent beaucoup (that's pronounced "boo-coo," with both syllables stressed equally) bucks and two years on a master's degree, and in the last six months I've dropped most of the good habits that program helped me form.

Years ago, I wrote a lengthy Longstockings post full of advice to beginning writers: to write, if not every day, at least more days than not; to find a community of writers; to read extensively, both the kinds of books you want to write and books about the craft of writing. So why wasn't I following any of my own advice? Why was I disregarding so much of what I'd worked so hard and paid so much to learn?

Fortunately, I am old enough to know that the secret to life is not never getting blown off-course--it's getting back on course once you realize you're lost. And fortunately part ii, my personal revelation came at New Year's Resolution time, when the young (ok, middle-aged) writer's thoughts turn to renewed determination and better work habits.

I checked off my first completed resolution on 3 January, when I joined the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I'd been a member in New York, but let my membership lapse when I moved to London. Fortunately, it turns out they have a British Isles chapter. I'm now a member, and have joined the "11+ Realistic" online critique group (second resolution crossed off!). I'm also looking forward to attending masterclasses and events in their professional series, and meeting some fellow kidlit folks in person.

I have also, over the past few weeks, built a kid/teen TBR pile that is threatening to take over my living room.

All that remains is the part that is most firmly in my power: I have to get my butt in front of my manuscript, as often as possible.

So far, I've managed that in a paradoxical way. I used to tell myself, "you need to write 1,000/1,500/2,000 words the next time you sit down at your MS." A lot of weeks, this meant that I had maybe one good writing day a week, and six days of avoiding writing.

In 2011 I've managed to just tell myself, "you need to write something in your manuscript today." One day it was 30 words. At another time have such a poor showing would have made me wonder, "why did I even bother opening Scrivener?"

But you know what? My excitement level about my WIP has skyrocketed this week. I've found myself jotting down ideas at all sorts of odd times, like out on a date with my husband. I've solved--or at least ameliorated--a couple of significant problems with the manuscript. I'm living with my WIP these days, where for the past few months I've just been working on it.

This is the start of my Novel Writing Year. If my habits improve the way I hope they will, I'll write more than one novel before 2012. Probably not two, but at least one-and-a-bit.

Who else is rededicating yourselves to your art for the new year? What resolutions are you following to make that happen?

Why I ignored NaNoWriMo

I've never really felt the need to sign up for National Novel Writing Month. It first came to my attention in grad school, and back in my weekly workshop days it wasn't like I was hurting for motivation to get writing. When I graduated, I was part of a community of writers, and it was second nature to sit down and pound away at my WIP for a couple of hours per day. That's pretty much been the case every November since: I've never felt the need to sign up for NaNoWriMo because National Novel Writing Month has looked like... any other month in my life.

This year is different. Maybe it's that I've lived in London long enough to make the motivation of my literary New York social life seem very far away; maybe it's that my volunteer work is starting to seriously pick up. Maybe it's fear of rejection--or, as my therapist theorized for years, fear of success. (One of those two things has to happen to my WIP once I finish it, after all.) Maybe it's just the year I've had, which, without getting more personal than I'm willing to be on a public blog, has involved a lot of non-writing-related bad news.

In any case, with one thing and another, this past month I could have used the motivation of announcing myself as part of a community of people all typing away.

I just have one issue, though, and unfortunately, it's a doozy. I disagree with the entire premise of NaNoWriMo. I don't agree that the best way to write a novel is to keep your fingers moving across your keyboard until you've filled up about 175 pages--50,000 words--or that a first-time novelist needs to start by racking up as great a wordcount as possible. The website makes no claims that a quality work of art will result from this exercise; this is all about getting the "shitty first draft" (thank you, Anne Lamott) down on paper, in a very limited time period.

I know writers who work this way. I know published writers of great books who work this way. For that kind of writer, NaNoWriMo is a great boon.

I cannot work this way (and I know published writers of great books who can't, either).

Oh, I can do a shitty first draft of a scene, maybe even a chapter. That was the first skill I picked up in grad school. But a whole novel? I tried it with my last MS, and all that happened was an anxiety attack and several weeks of writer's block. I couldn't move forward with the manuscript when I had fifty pages I was seriously unhappy with. As fifty pages turned into sixty, writing that novel lost all the joy of creating something new, and felt more and more like walking through a huge airport carrying increasingly heavy luggage. When I finally gave up and went back and fixed what I knew was wrong, thereby giving myself permission to keep doing that as needed, the rest of the book was a lot more fun to write.

NaNoWriMo's website makes clear that they expect the people participating to be beginners: one of the FAQ's is, "If I'm just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?" And the answer has a lot I agree with: giving yourself permission to make mistakes; giving yourself a reason to just start already, without any "once the kids are in school"/"once my workload lightens up"/"once I'm retired" procrastination. I'm all for encouraging would-be novelists to get started, and for reassuring them that the first sentences out of their keyboards will not live up to their expectations, and that's okay.

But I wonder how many beginning writers end up discouraged with their efforts and feeling like they'll never write a novel, when really, the NaNoWriMo format just isn't for them. As far as I can tell, NaNoWriMo's website doesn't offer any advice for what to do after you've written your shitty first draft. It doesn't refer its participants to any books on the craft of writing. It does have a list of published NaNoWriMo authors, but no articles from any of them about the amazing amount of work that must have come between the month of writing 50,000 words and the publication date.

I want some kind of NaNoWriMo for the slow writer. Maybe NaNoWriYe. The website would say, "Some days it's about hitting your word count. Some days it's about fixing what's wrong, or outlining the next bit you're going to write, or re-vamping the whole project to make room for the brilliant idea you had as you were falling asleep that totally fixes that huge hole in your plot." Participants would still spend a couple hours a day at their work, and would still write together, for those for whom that's helpful. We'd take time out to review what we'd written and brainstorm solutions to any issues we were having, and tell each other when it was time to stop fiddling with that one scene and write the next bit, on an as-needed basis. We'd all focus on doing whatever it took to produce good work, not just to write 175 pages of whatever. We'd work under the impression that writing is an everyday activity, not a once-a-year blast.

Oh, crap. I just figured out what seems so familiar about that scenario: it was grad school.

Anyone know of a UK-based PhD in Writing for Children?

Budding

On the last day of my recent stay with my sister and her family, Liz brought out a huge plastic bin full of my parents' correspondence with my grandparents. The letters went from the late 1960s through the mid-nineties (when everyone got AOL). I had a great time learning about my parents' lives in college and grad school, and as very young parents, from their own hands.

(Honestly, it kind of made me worry about how much family history is being lost to e-mail and facebook. But then, all this family history would have been lost to the desire for less clutter, in a family with less tolerance for clutter than mine has.)

One envelope was postmarked from Salina, KS in 1981, and addressed from "Kathryne Alfred" to "Grandma Barten." Inside were a couple of brightly-colored pictures, and a sheet of ruled looseleaf in my mother's handwriting, but a writing style very different from my mother's. (An explanatory note at the bottom says, "pictures by Kathryne; Story written by Carol as Kathryne told it.")

I'm still giggling over this. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you--complete with illustration--my first ever YA story!!

Once a little girl met a little boy. One night when the little girl was 18 and the little boy was 19 the little girl said, "Let's kiss!" and the little boy said, "Tomorrow ask your mother and father if we can get married." Then the next morning they got married and lived in the apartment house and lived with their mother and father. And then they lived happily ever after. The end.

Of course I'm biased, but I see potential here.

Spending a sunny Saturday reading the papers

Things are looking up for 2010. The house has BOTH heat and hot water! The sun is out! Wonderful friends are having Gino and me over for dinner tonight! Spring is definitely on the way.

While Gino catches up on work e-mail, I've been browsing the Saturday papers. One of my favorites, the Guardian, frequently posts advice for writers--including, in September of 2008, a booklet on writing for children introduced by my hero, Michael Rosen.

Today, they've posted a two-part article titled Ten Rules for Writing Fiction ("Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing," which is apparently coming out in book form next month).

I sometimes hesitate to publicize lists like this, because I know how intimidating they can be for the new writer. There's a mountain of advice out there for people who want to write (to which I have contributed), and you have to have tried to follow a lot of it before you get to the point where you know that the only true, #1 Rule of Writing is "do whatever you have to do to get your work done."

The nice thing about the variety of contributors to the Guardian's article is that it gives the reader a chance to see for herself the variety of approaches, and how what works for one writer might not work for another. So while Richard Ford says, "Don't have children," Helen Dunmore says, "If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of J.G. Ballard." (I didn't know what she meant by that until I looked it up, but I often give myself the same advice using Ursula K. LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle, or Judy Blume.)

The article also offers a good amount of satisfaction, for this particular writer, anyway. I am at the point where I know to ignore advice that doesn't work for me, but I can still take a good bit of pleasure out of seeing that a Famous Writer has some of the same habits I do: so Hilary Mantel says, "If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem," and I think "woo-hoo! I'm on the same page as Hilary Mantel! Success is right around the corner!"

Best of all: sometimes, reading articles such as this one, you get a piece of advice you hadn't thought of before. My "aha" moment this time around came from Anne Enright:

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

Which reminds me of the other absolutely true, #1 Rule of Writing: You will never, ever get to a place where you know everything, so keep paying attention to what you can learn.

Winners

The American Library Association awards--The Newbery and Printz, among others--were announced almost two weeks ago. I'm proud of myself this year: not only had I heard of the Newbery winner, I had already bought and read it!

To my shame, however, I had never heard of the novel that won the Printz award. Didn't even know Libba Bray had written a new book, to be honest. It really drove home how much I miss by not being able to browse the tables at American bookstores on a regular basis.

I've had a lot of time to read over the past week, so I'm caught up now. Writing about Going Bovine presents quite a challenge: I don't want to tell you about the book so much as I want you to read it, so I can talk about it with you. I don't want to have to be careful about spoilers--though I will, just for you--and it's hard to relate the plot or discuss the philosophy of the book without talking about the ending.

Going Bovine relates the travels of Cameron Smith, a teenager dying of Mad Cow disease. It's one of the most beautifully constructed novels I've read in a while, setting out its influences--Don Quixote and Norse sagas and Road Runner cartoons and our awful cultural priorities, which too often place physical and emotional safety above all other considerations--and then letting them all play into Cameron's quest to find the man who might be able to cure him.

According to her bio, the author is--like me--a Preacher's Kid (though I prefer "Theological Offspring"). I'm dying to know what her father thinks of the novel. The book is definitely a philosophical novel, but the book's philsophy doesn't much bother with the idea of God (though it does feature a guardian angel). Through his travels, Cameron learns that no one is in charge of the universe. He also learns that the only way to deal with the danger and uncertainty of life is to embrace it: to take huge risks that might not pay off; to try hard new things at which you might suck; to love people you might lose.

I can't tell you how much I love this approach to life. I also can't tell you how hard I find it to live by. The past two years of my life have been full of transitions. While most of them have had tremendous upsides (helloooo, London! Hello meat pies and teatime and volunteering with teens and four-hour lunches and writing whenever I want!), most of them have also involved great losses. Dealing with the losses makes it really hard to embrace the gains: it's all too easy to imagine that I might lose those someday, too. Sometimes I need a novel-length reminder that it really is better to have loved and lost, that trying and failing is better than not trying and never knowing.

P.S.You should also really read the author's blog post about "the call," which includes a paragraph detailing all of my worst fears of a writing career, and confirmation that sometimes it all works out:

Still in disbelief, I stared at a picture of The Ramones. When I first moved to New York with dreams of being a writer, I used to see Joey Ramone walking around the East Village. I had concocted a whole fantasy in which he was sort of my secret saint, a good luck charm. Anytime I saw him, I’d assume it was going to be a good day. It was one of those beliefs I made up to keep myself going while I worked in publishing for $16,000 a year and had to cover the hole in the bottom of my shoe with duct tape because I couldn’t afford new shoes (no joke) and encountered rejection after rejection for my writing. Sometimes the rejections were form rejections, the we-won’t-even-consider-you kiss-offs. Sometimes they were brutal and snide and damaging, and then I would wish for the dismissive ones. On more than one occasion, I was told that my work was “weird” and “too much.” And now, many years later, I’d just gotten a phone call about possibly the weirdest, too much-iest thing I’d ever written, a book straight from my soul with detours through my heart and head, all my armor left on the floor, and a group of people I respect so much called and said, “Hey, you know your super weird book? Well, thank you for that.” The photo of the Ramones got fuzzier and fuzzier because the tears had come. Tears of joy. Gratitude. Validation.