author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Still haven't finished Chapter 7. I really have to give Amy something more useful to do than twiddle her thumbs and wait for the end of the chapter. I'm one sentence away from getting her and Todd into that bit of necessary conversation--the one, in fact, that necessitates the switch in narrator, because it reveals things that Brian is not to know--during which Russ and then Brian will interrupt them, closing the chapter with a lovely piece of brutality we'll all enjoy (if guiltily) because the victim is Russ. I'll have to go back through the Novel So Far and make sure that Russ has been adequately presented as That Guy You Love To Hate, so as to best make way for the Schadenfreude. The effect I'm looking for is "Finally, that asshole is getting the beating he deserves! ...Wait. Ok, enough beating now. No, really. Stop! I don't want to see him die...."

Which all sounds very fiendish and manipulative. Probably because it is.

From time to time it occurs to me to worry that, as a writer, I'm setting myself up to be mistrusted by the community. Whatever community. Writers of fiction make their livings telling lies, after all--telling lies and pulling readers' strings. And yes, those lies stand in the service of Truth, and the string-pulling is exactly why the reader returns to a good book again and again, but still. The power to manipulate the heart and mind by use of words alone is a little alarming. Are those who have that power objects of suspicion? I don't claim to have that power in any significant degree as yet, but I'm reaching for it. I wonder if I'll regret achieving it.

Maybe the choice to use such a power to create works of unabashed fiction, as opposed to running for office or charming congregations into mass Koolaid imbibery, is enough to restore a writer's credibility. Unlike the corrupt politician or charismatic megalomaniac preacher, we're not trying to fob off our lies as fact.

Well, with the exception of folks like, I dunno, Carlos Casteneda or something.

I am not entirely sure that I believe in omens, good or otherwise, although I do tend to think that the coincidences and absurdities around us are susceptible to the same sort of interpretation as dreams. But I do think--believe--know this for sure: That we want very much to do a thing indicates that the universe wants very much for us to do that thing. A writer's ache to write is evidence of the Universe's need for the stories that only that writer can tell.

(Talk to Barbara Hubbard about it. I happend to use an interview with her from Magical Blend Magazine to fill up my half-hour of volunteer reading this week, and I was all like, "Yeah, yeah, self-rewarding work, the need to create, all that, totally, yeah!" only I was also like "OK, you and Mr. Langevin get to sit in the time-out box for insane overuse of the word 'co-create.'")

So while I make no claims about portents and signs in the sky, I do feel justified in taking that triple rainbow Boulder was treated to today as a sign of encouragement. (Triple? Yes! If you look closely, you can see green through purple repeated at the bottom, one rainbow on top of another, both of 'em below a faintly hovering third.) Kind of like the elements sort of conspired to give me a gentle nudge in the direction I was already going.

(Did I ever tell you about "Putting Down Roots," the 2002 World Horror Convention, and fried perch at the Greek restaurant across the street from the airport Radisson? ...Right. About that, more some other time.)

Of course, my camera decided to kaput at me. The collage you see here is entirely thanks to a super-sweet neighbor of mine who did not turn and run the other way when I asked him if I could have copies of his pics. (It was totally the batteries. Put new batteries in, and the camera worked fine. There's enough juice left in the batteries to power the TV remote, maybe even a stereo walkman, but not the camera.) To him, many thanks, and the hope that he's OK with me posting these beauties.

And the novel? A good 800 more words. Not the same as a pathetic 800 more words. These were good. This was a good blend of the dominant "Oh, whatever will we do?" theme plus a leavening of humor to keep us from tumbling too far, too irrevocably into the self-pitying abyss. There were tears, there was laughter, there were hugs, there was snot on Todd's sleeve. It's all good. Tomorrow, Brian'll show up and the angstometer will rise a whole bunch.

Chapter 7 is long. I'm not sure if its huge length relative to the first six chapters is OK, or if it's a hint that I need to pack more Stuff into 'em all. I reread Chapters 1-3 and realized that there's a lot of cool foreshadowing of lovely subplottiness that, sadly, totally fails to show up in Chapters 4-7. For now, I'm ignoring it. But just wait until the next pass-through, the one after this rewrite is complete. Those seeds will sprout if I have to yank them out of their fartin' seed-cases myself.

Sent out two copies of my picture book manuscript today. This means I have fulfilled my "one submission a month" requirement for January. Nyah.

I'm very pleased with the latest rewrite--the story's a lot tighter now, all extraneous elements removed, each remaining Thing tying setup and ending together in a neat little bow. OK, well, it's probably not that perfect. I can think of one Thing still in it that serves no purpose except 1) to establish the main character's physical setting in a "Damn That Television" sort of way, and 2) to establish a Saturday morning routine for the family. But I do think a certain amount of extraneous detail of this sort is necessary; otherwise, your characters might as well be floating in front of a blue screen.

What do I mean by "Damn That Television"? Well, it happens to be the first line of a Talking Heads song, and it got stuck in my brain after reading a forum post by James D. McDonald. Who's he? He's the "Uncle Jim" of "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" fame. The forum post I'm thinking of addresses the issue of Point of View, and quotes an instructive article by Rob Killheffer. (Notice that the link in the AbsoluteWrite.com forum post no longer works; the article had moved sometime since December 2003. My link does work. Please click on it.)

Here's the relevant excerpt:

Interlude: The Voyeur Camera

It’s television’s fault. Television and movies. Visual media. In so many of these indie publications the narrative point of view slides around like a hot rock on ice, and observations intrude without any clear viewpoint at all. Consider this, from Thoughtmaster: "a skeletal face…whose shifting features left the viewer confused." What viewer? Or this: "The voice was surprisingly strong from such a diaphanous figure." Surprising to whom? Surely not to the only other person in the scene, who knows the speaker well.

These writers’ imaginations have been shaped by visual storytelling, in which there’s always an implied viewpoint — that of the audience, the camera, the peeping lens. They conceive their scenes as if they’re presented on a screen, and when they commit their prose, the camera remains, lurking outside the frame.

There’s no other explanation for scene shifts like those in Exile. As Jeff Friedrick and his pal Carl leave the bar where they’ve met, we’re told: "At the bar, a man turned his head and watched them go. He was tall, and a brief flare of light revealed reddish hair. Before the spotlight moved on, odd points of light deep in green eyes gave the impression of motion.…" Gave the impression to whom? The viewing protocols of film and television help us make sense of it: The two men who have been the focus of the scene get up and head for the door, and the camera pans aside to settle on this watcher. His reddish hair is "revealed" to us, the audience. We’re the ones who receive the "impression of motion." It’s as if, in these moments, the authors are not crafting prose but working out a screenplay. I recall the oldest and most basic advice offered to the aspiring writer: Read! Read! And read some more! If you want to write a novel, don’t draw your skills from the big — or the small — screen.

Because then I'd really be doing the NaNoEdMo thing. I mean, I'm trying to do it right now, but as it's December I don't have the sense of participating in a huge marathon run with competitors from all around the globe. It's bad enough that I've told pretty much everyone I know that I'm trying to get through one revision cycle before Jan 1 - good darn thing I haven't told the whole world.

Because, of course, 43 hours to go divided by 13 days left is about 3 hours and 20 minutes per day. Starting today. And the thing about hours of revision is, you can't get them done any faster than at a rate of 1:1.

Holly Lisle recommends "Nerves of Steel" on her list of implements necessary to the One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique. She says she's kidding, but I think the only joke is saying that they're available for purchase at Wal*Mart. I mean, after just one hour of slogging through this manuscript, I can't sit still. I've got all sorts of contradictory stuff going on in my head...

"Ooh! Now I see what the overarching theme this scene serves is! I want to rewrite it now!" Except of course that would mean I might have to rewrite it five times by the time I got done with the red pen and the manuscript print-out. The last scene may, on reconsideration, also inform the revision of this scene.

"But there's no way I'll keep this all straight in my head for when I'm done slogging through!" That's why I'm taking notes. "Argh! But my notes are all mixed up!" Yeah. Good luck there.

"There's too much crap that needs to be done to make this thing publishable! It sucks! It sucks big granite boulders until all the quartz is gone! I can't redeem this dreck!" Which is why, I think, writing is a sort of religion; a certain amount of the process is built on faith.

Bleargh. Back to the grind, anyway. There was a time on Thursday when I was getting excited about really seeing clearly the main themes and character dynamics that drive the plot. Today, unfortunately, all I seem to be able to see is ick. It's obviously one of those days that separates the career novelist from the hobbyist writer - on a day like today, the one gets to work while the other goes back to bed.

"If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." -Brenda Ueland

On days like today it's good to know that successful and famous authors have days like today too. Not because I enjoy seeing others in pain, understand, but because I'm encouraged to see that when others share that pain they keep writing (and publishing) anyway. It's proof that perseverance is not only possible but prudent. (Ha-ha! Alliteration.) Besides, if even Neil Gaiman has days when the writing's so hard he'd rather do anything else, then having that kind of day isn't necessarily my cue to throw in the towel.

...which won't exactly top the charts as a big band swing pop tune, but it sounds like it ought to be one, at least. The long story is, they're replacing the floors in the laundry rooms of my building, so in the meantime I have to take my dirty clothes to the laundromat in Diagonal Plaza. Last night I took my novel draft over there along with two loads of St. John's Bay jeans and Hanes Her Way undies and the rest of the fauna.

So, whee for me. I ended up hacking out some 1500 words from the very beginning of the book. X. Cut. Gone. Well - those pages have been set aside to be mined for redeemable material at a later date, anyway. But still.

Admittedly, they did have to go - they were fine examples of my ability to waste oodles of text in getting characters from point A to point B. Great word-padding for NaNoWriMo, but not very good substance for a novel. Which leads me to the following conclusion. You ready for this? OK, here we go: NaNoWriMo is not necessarily good for your first draft.

No no no really. Let's try that again, and more accurately: NaNoWriMo only produces workable first drafts if the author begins with the goal of a workable first draft. There. That's somewhat less extreme.

See, if you bop around the forums, you will see all manner of unhealthy suggestions offered on the assumption that those reading care only about crossing a 50K-word finish line, and not about which 50K words cross that line with them. Suggestions such as, "write a scene involving ninjas! You can fit ninjas into any story!" And, "do a find and replace on all your contractions - 'do not' is two words!" And, "Expand all your acronyms! 'International Business Machines' is three times the wordage of 'IBM'!"

Suggestions like those remind me of coffee and cigarettes and all-night writing sprees when what your body really needs are a nutritious meal and a good night's sleep. Not that the occasional all-nighter isn't a useful way of challenging yourself, understand, but what I'm talking about here is the difference between a torturous one-month marathon that leaves you unwilling to run for a whole 'nother year, and a month of solid, healthy running practice. Some NaNoWriMo participants only want to run that marathon and then go back to the couch all year, so to speak, and that's OK for them. Me, I want my November production to be part of lifelong writing career. So NaNoWriMo has to be fun, not torture, and it has to produce a draft I can be proud of.

Thus, my goals for NaNoWriMo are a little more stringent than those of many other NaNoWriMoers:

• I have to tell a story that I'm willing to live with after November.

• I have to tell that story, and not tell around that story.

• Lastly, I have to write as though I'll want to read it later.

In short, a NaNoWriMo undertaking, for me, has to resemble in some ways the first draft of a short story. From the beginning, the hope is to produce a first draft - not just a 50K-word ramble. This of course means that I'll be heartbroken if November's output turns out to be unredeemable after all. I've got more at stake than I would otherwise. But it's having stakes in the matter that gets me to the finish line. And I've survived broken hearts before.

Hell, I've had to rip five hours of knitting back into a ball of yarn. I know all about surviving heartbreak.

OK, time to unravel another 15 rows of lace... *grooooan*

NaNoWriMo writers in search of something to get pissed off about should go here. (Nota bene: While this particular article is safe for the work environment, the rest of Ms. Case's blog is decidedly not.) Those who would like to refrain from bringing the gunpowder kegs of their tempers into close proximity with the sparks of Ms. Case's small-minded ignorance might wish to read this brief excerpt instead.

There is no market for 50,000 word novels. No real publisher will look at a novel that short, but it is too long to be published as a novella. It is pretty much the most useless length of story someone could train themselves to tell. Different word counts lend themselves to different sorts of stories, with different levels of complexity and character involvement. The 50,000 word length is what happens when a real writer gets stuck and has a story too complex for short fiction but not rich enough for an actual novel. A 50,000 word story is a tragedy which will never see the outside of the writer’s desk drawer. And NaNoWriMo is trying to teach people how to turn a passing interest in writing into a failure.

There is nothing wrong with writing only for yourself or for yourself and a few loved ones or for yourself and few drinking buddies. Writing to satisfy only your own passion in fine. Writing to only amuse a small group is fine. Writing a professional word count because the rent does not pay itself is fine. But forcing yourself to write crap for a month? That is just pathetic and the people encouraging this should be embarrassed.

A winning NaNoWriMo manuscript is a first draft. This is the main bit Ms. Case appears not to get. She is under the impression that a 50,000 word manuscript can't grow to a more acceptable novel length (or shrink to a lovely novella) on the rewrite. (She may also be unaware that 50K is actually right on the money for a YA novel.) She is under the impression, furthermore, that those 50,000 words are set in stone. That if they are crap on November 30 they will remain crap forever and thus be a waste of the NaNoWriMo competitor's time. Foolish woman, I say! Foolish, foolish woman! And you know what else?

The process of writing a 50K-word plot in 30 days is worthwhile regardless of whether a rewrite ever happens. Ms. Case is under yet another foolish impression: that our efforts are doomed to failure and our time is wasted thereby. I beg to differ. I have heard the anecdote repeated by various published writers (the source, according to Neil Gaiman, is Raymond Chandler) that every writer has a million words of crap in him, and the trick is to practice through those million words as fast as possible. 50,000 words is a fair bit of practice! And it's not just timed writing exercises a la Goldberg or morning pages a la Cameron. It's 50,000 words on a single story. So it's an exercise not only in writing, but in sticking with a single story for a whole month, and in getting that story told on a month's deadline. These are all worthwhile skills. No writer who takes on the NaNoWriMo challenge should be called a failure - and no writer who wins at that challenge should ever be considered to have wasted his or her time.

The people encouraging NaNoWriMo ought to be proud of themselves. By providing a well-publicized dare and an organized online community to share in that dare, Chris Baty and his Minions Of Love And Carpal Tunnel Syndrome have given us that psychological kick in the pants that many people need (and should not be ridiculed for needing) to go from "I'll write a book someday," to, "I've written a book!" The career writer ends up with a serviceable rough draft; the non-career writer ends up with an outlet for whatever thoughts have been prowling restlessly inside. And, hey, check this out, NaNoWriMo as an entity has raised enough money this year not only to pay its own operational costs but also to build three, going on four, libraries in Cambodia.

Ms. Case thinks that Chris Baty et al should be ashamed?

I think Ms. Case should be ashamed. I mean, libraries in Cambodia!

Now, the question of whether a NaNoWriMo winner should be encouraged to call him/herself a "novelist" is of course up for grabs. My friend Alma, for instance, says no. And her opinion, not unexpectedly, has made quite a few NaNoWriMo participants pretty angry. Rereading her article now and comparing it to the follow-up conversation I had with her last year, I think that's mostly because in her vehemence she appears to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I don't think baby-disposal was actually her intention - she clarifies her opinion in a calmer manner at the bottom of this page. If you find yourself getting upset with her article, do read this follow-up before saying anything rash.

Alma's opinion is simply this: if all you have done is pounded out a 50,000 word rough draft, claiming the title "novelist" makes light of the hard work that the career of a novelist implies: you write and revise book after book and you send them off to agents and publishers and you steel yourself for rejections and you hope against faltering hope that this time it's a buy because you've got a mortgage to pay and dinner to put on the table. Until you've been through that wringer, she says, you can brag that you've written a book, and it's a great brag, but you shouldn't call yourself a novelist, and Chris Baty oughtn't to encourage you to call yourself a novelist.

It's a valid opinion, and it differs from Ms. Case's in that it gets my respect. Alma's opinion is informed by somewhat more knowledge of what NaNoWriMo is about than is Ms. Case's - she understands the bit about it being a rough draft, you see, and Ms. Case does not. Alma's later clarification makes clear that her objection is simply to the use of an unearned word; Ms. Case's problem, as her encore elucidates, is with NaNoWriMo participants' use of their time, "using NaNoWriMo as their excuse to be inconsiderate lovers and friends.... making these excuses to people who have real keep-food-on-the-table deadlines to make and acting like theirs were more important." Perhaps Ms. Case only cuts slack for writers whose deadline is imposed by people who sign paychecks? All other writers - you know, us slackers who compose manuscripts on pure hope, not having yet enjoyed the level of success that brings a publisher's multibook contract - we're not following our dreams; we're just being "inconsiderate." (Gods only know how we're supposed to get to that level of success if we're not allowed to take the time to write now.)

And don't think she's backed off at all from her original epithets for NaNoWriMo participants:

...trophy wives trying to prove they have a few brain cells now that they are getting older and less pretty.... unemployed leech boyfriends who need to claim they are doing something besides shooting up and watching cartoons while their girl is at work.

Unlike Alma, who is simply arguing for one definition of the word "novelist" over another, Ms. Case has utter contempt for the entire NaNoWriMo she-bang and all its participants. She would be made happiest, I think, if one day she clicked on this link and got redirected to one of those "This Domain Could Be Yours!" sites. And she has advice for her NaNoWriMo participant friends:

There is also nothing wrong with loving books in general and novels in specific and not wanting to write one. Reading is a perfectly good pastime. Internet technology makes it really easy to keep a journal about whatever you actually do feel moved to write about. So maybe next November, fewer people will bring up the NaNoWriMo travesty. At least to me.

1. No sex, at least none onstage.

For some reason rape is an exception to the unwritten "no sex in YA novels" rule - I guess that's because rape is actually an act of violence, not of sex. Violence always seems to be more accepted for younger readers then sex is. (I say "accepted for," not "acceptable to," because younger readers will read anything you throw at them that doesn't make them feel too uncomfortable. It's when adults choose reading material for younger readers that these filters come into play.) I think it really comes down to our weirdly neurotic American puritanical heritage: you're never too young to suffer, say the Godly ones, but you must not under any circumstances be allowed to enjoy yourself until you're of statutory age of consent, married, and planning to stuff yourself with babies.

2. Adults mustn't see the supernatural thingie.

Oops.

3. The magic stuff has to go away by the end of the novel.

I always hated how the wing-juice ran out and the ponies all left forever and the Egypt game lost its appeal (Zylpha Keatley Snyder) and the girls stopped believing that they were witches (E. L. Konigsberg, Edmund Wallace Hildick). But I think in this story I've come up with a compromise between magic lasting forever without giving the girl superpowers forever, in a way that at least meets my standards for story necessity.

So are there any rules I missed?

What the hell happened?

Well, it was more complicated than I thought.

The logistics of the scene I want to write are still evading me. How does Mr. Right end up getting into the position of witnessing Mr. Wrong's abuses, let alone defending Diane from them? Did he somehow get invited along in a car ride that was intended to end in a sex scene? That seems unlikely. Did Mr. Wrong just happen to park the car somewhere along the Diagonal Highway on a night when Mr. Right was going for a late night bike ride from Niwot to Boulder? Even more dumb. If Mr. Wrong is in the middle of doing nasty things to the main character when Mr. Right shows up, does he still manage to whip out a gun while still, er, engaged, and then does he just ditch Diane on the side of the road and drive off?

And then the thought occurred to me that all three of my NaNo novels so far will have sexual assaults in them either onstage, offstage, or in flashback. I'm not sure I like the trend.

So, I'm just not sure exactly what's going to happen or how high the stakes will be. Does the story really need an attempted rape right before a gunshot murder? Isn't the shooting enough? Do we need another unicorn story in which a unicorn visits a rape victim, thus proving that it's not virginity but pureness of heart that unicorns actually care about? Does this story need to be one?

All of which is a) more than you want to know, and b) a lame excuse why after last night's enthusiasm I somehow haven't written another word.

But, hey. Last night, I typed until I bled. "Dude," said my husband, "that's hard core!" Yeah. People walk into your apartment and find you dabbing blood off the keyboard with a bit of moistened toilet paper. That should count for something... even if the bleeding wasn't really caused by the typing. Or maybe it was. I mean, I don't know exactly how that cut on my knuckle from the other week's bicycle wipe-out reopened. I just realized that my finger was wet, and looked down, and there seemed to be a lot of red. Maybe it was the typing. Serious, hard-core typing. Yeah.

Hey, look! That websnark guy is doing Nano too! Go look at his excerpts and leave me alone while I frantically make up 2,000 words of, oh, I don't know, background material or something.

Yeah. Phone call. Got it written - go, me!

In fact, I'm just about finished with The Prologue, or, more properly, Part I: Air. These are the ten single-spaced pages in which Our Hero finds out that He Has A Problem. I'm almost done writing him up to the realization of the exact extent of that Problem, and the scene will close with him driving back to Seattle knowing he will never be able to leave it.

Scene fades on westerly point of view, the Geo dwindles towards the Puget Sound, sun sets over the Pacific in a rather illogical way considering Our Hero had started out in the early morning and hadn't gone more than 15 miles but who cares it's symbolic.

And then what?

And then my sense of immediate structure dissolves. I know that my character needs a daily life and that supporting characters figure into it but really it's just marking time as interestingly as possible until The Problem Gets Worse.

Once upon a time, I wrote a lovely story of which I'm still very proud, about an angel who lost his wings. I wrote it for college, so naturally it came down to last-minute deadline panic during which I didn't know how I'd ever finish. What finally cut me loose and allowed me to tell that story from beginning to end was structure. I saw how the tale could happen over a week, with both the biblical allusions to Genesis (seven days) and to the Passion (death is explored on a Friday and rebirth on a Sunday). Each day would house one scene, essentially. And so the rough draft was no longer the aimless wanderings of an explorer with no sense of direction but instead an exercise in filling in blanks.

This year's novel does have a structure, but it's a pretty wide one, especially since I'm still reluctant to make any choices about the ultimate forms that the crises will take. That understood, it goes something like this:

Part I: Air In which Our Hero learns He Has A Problem, and we are tantalized with hints as to its Origin.
Part II: Earth In which Our Hero learns to live with his Problem, but is unprepared when the Problem takes a turn for the worse. A Crisis is reached.
Part III: Water In which a short-term Solution is found. Of necessity this solution causes a most inconvenient and unjust situation. The Truth is discovered, prompting Our Hero to make a difficult Choice (but not before enjoying Intimate Relations with a Mermaid; he's had a Rough Time Of It and deserves a little bit of Fun).
Part IV: Fire In which a final Resolution is reached, and our story Ends.

If that sounded a little vague, it's because I don't want to give anything away. If this ever gets published, you wouldn't want me to spoil the plot, would you? I myself have been avoiding finding out what's going to happen as much as possible!

So. Part II is going to consist of quite a lot of "day in the life" style word count padding. And Part III will contain much angst. Any more than that, I'll just have to read it to find out. And to read it, of course, I'll have to write it.

Quick! "Why does a writer write?"

Because it's not there.