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Cheap wooden blockade.
5 September 2001—I used to subscribe to Writer’s Digest. It’s a fine magazine, and though I feel it’s geared too much toward genre fiction and nonfiction, the realms of writing that are marketable, it has often included useful pieces of advice that cut across the spectrum of writing. Last year, for example, when I came up with my big index-card strategy for conceptualizing the novel, I realized at a certain point that I had once read an article about such a system in WD, and it had probably just lodged itself in my subconscious for just the right time. But the best thing I ever read in the magazine appeared in Nancy Kress’s fiction column. It was the single word that propels fiction and fiction writers forward: No. What kind of novel would it be, for example, if the protagonist got everything she wanted? Fuckin’ boring, that’s what. Give her a good No. Get in her way. Make her find another way around. Conflict, after all, is the lifeblood of fiction. So obvious and yet such a revelation – to me, anyway.
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And last week the lesson illustrated itself anew, in the form of a telephone call from the coordinator of a novel-writing workshop offered by the Extension program of the University of California at Berkeley, a workshop I had to apply to get into, using a ten-page section of the novel. Only sixteen applicants would be accepted. Two weeks after I dropped off my application, which included a carefully selected segment approved by two friends whose opinions I trust, I received a call from the coordinator, who had not been in charge of the selections. No, she said. Out of the twenty-eight people who applied, eighteen, it turned out, were accepted. Two people, it seemed, were deemed too promising to be rejected, so the instructor widened the circle just a little bit. Rejection. This is a word you can find in any writer’s vocabulary. Everyone knows at least one famous book that was just as famously rejected a dozen times before someone took a chance on it. Yeah – in the words of the great Steve Perry, who’s crying now? In the meantime, it’s still a No, but therein lies an opportunity. It helps if you can envision No as a cheap wooden blockade in the middle of the road. It looks convincing until you get close enough to see the cracks. Crack No. 1: Taste is subjective. Who knows what the instructor likes to read? Maybe he only likes Thomas Pynchon. Maybe he only likes Danielle Steel. Maybe he only likes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Crack No. 2: Who the hell is he, anyway? It says in the catalogue of classes that he graduated from the University of Iowa master’s program for writers, a selective program, to be sure. His bio also brags that his work has appeared in The New York Times magazine and a couple of other places. There’s no mention of any novel he’s ever written, let alone published. How do I know he has the first clue how to help me with mine? He should submit a ten-page section to me, and see if I don’t kick his ass out first. So that about wraps it up for the cheap wooden blockade, now nothing more than kindling for someone else to make better use of. Take it home and save it for next year’s Burning Man, if you like. And there I am, a little further down the road, still basically on my own, except for the dear souls who are waiting for me at a checkpoint still farther ahead, having kindly offered to read the chapters that are just about complete. In order to get to that checkpoint, however, and beyond that one to all the others down this particular road, I have to get back on a serious writing regimen. Writers work in all sorts of different ways, valid all. You just have to find the method that works for you. I have two different methods that seem to work for me, for different purposes. Method No. 1: Cliffhangers. When I was first beginning the novel, I was having trouble getting myself to write every day. Someone suggested to me that I should stop in the middle of a scene, in essence becoming my own Scheherezade, so that I would have to return the next day to see how the scene would end. Then I would begin another scene and stop midstream, and on it went. It didn’t last 1001 nights, but it gave the novel a needed kick in the pants, and it’s still one of the aces up my sleeve. Method No. 2: Self-imposed deadlines. I was surprised to find that this method actually works for me. It’s not like fooling oneself, say, like when I used to set my alarm clock ahead in order to make me think I was running late when actually I was on time. This was a poorly conceived trick; I’m too good at doing math in my head. But arbitrary deadlines can be effective, as long as they’re realistic. One of the most difficult things for any aspiring artist is to have the chutzpah to look upon your artistic aspirations as deserving of precedence over other things that seem more worthwhile. For some reason, deadlines impart just that amount of necessity that allows me to consider the novel something that takes priority over other activities. In June I worked out an elaborate set of deadlines leapfrogging each other: a week to type Chapter 5 (only minor editing allowed), then a month to handwrite Chapter 6, then two weeks to edit 5, then a week to type 6, a month to handwrite 7, and so on, down to the final typing and editing of 11. Two weeks seems awfully short for editing a whole chapter, but even on a tight timetable it was going to take me a year to get a complete draft together. This doesn’t even count the work I’d still like to do on Chapter 1, as well as tightening on 2 and 3 before I give out the first four chapters, approximately 160 pages, to the brave people who offered to read them. Anyway, here it is September, and I haven’t even finished typing 5 yet. I let a few things get in my way this summer, one of which I had no control over, but others were choices. So now I am challenging myself anew – here is a revised schedule. Feel free to question how well I’m doing with it:
Yes.
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