Room With a View!

Posted on February 25, 2008 by lalber

How goes my impulsive and self-imposed writer’s retreat, you ask?

Just what my head doctor ordered! (Not that I have a head doctor.)

I’m up on the Puget Sound at an out-of-season resort area called Port Ludlow. There’s nothing to do here but watch for sea otters playing on the wharf. To the west, the snow-capped Olympics change color throughout the day, and the sun shines from behind a light coastal cloud layer.

As shown in the photo, I rearrange the furniture to suit my writing needs. I also don’t let the cleaning crew in to witness my writer-ly mess.

Am I writing more pages than usual? Today I will. Yesterday was “only” a five-page day because I needed a long nap. I usually go limp within my first 24-hours out of town: major decompression.

What I am doing is the much necessary thinking, pondering, daydreaming; sometimes I need to leave home to give myself room to imagine. New locales inspire me, and at the moment I’m transitioning my head from winding-up the first draft to winding-down the first draft. For me, these are unique mindsets, and I must take care now because I could lose myself in a middle-of-the-novel murky place.

I’m at about 250 pages, so I hope I’m angling toward resolutions by now!

The literary dinner I mentioned on Friday’s post was great fun — more to say on that later.

Back to writing!

Top Ten List: Early-Warning Signs of Spring

Posted on February 22, 2008 by lalber

This is a hopeful time of year. The days are noticeably longer and the breezes are gentler souls. It’s too early for crocus, but I still feel spring. Here’s my top ten early-warning signs of spring:

10. Buds on the rhododendrons.

9. Bye-bye to the extra blanket on my bed until next winter.

8. High-end Easter and gardening items (all those seeds!) displayed in my favorite grocery store. Too early for Easter stuff in my opinion, but I appreciate their cheerful colors anyhow.

7. Open-toed sandals on sale at Macy’s!

6. Strange but good-looking men wandering around my neighbor’s backyard, followed by the delicious scent of mown grass. (Said neighbors are an old couple who need professional help with mowing, tree-trimming, vegetable garden priming, and so on.)

5. Re-emergence of birds: hectoring scrub jays; male Anna’s hummingbird (bright pink helmet) checking out my feeder; red-breasted robins hopping around in search of worms; migrating songbirds twittering through the bushes; a northern flicker (think: giant woodpecker) tap-tap-tapping on my outside walls in the morning.

4. Honking Canada geese heading for their summer feeding grounds.

3. Those cutey Girl Scouts selling their almond rocas and peppermint patties. How could I not buy one (and only one) box?

2. As mentioned a few posts ago, my devil cat going stir crazy with spring fever. For his encore performance, he chewed through the exercise band I use for rotator cuff strengthening. It had been dangling from a little-used door for a year! Thank goodness he’s willing to go outdoors now is all I can say.

AND, my top sign of the coming spring…

1. My spring-fever stir craziness that has me longing to shake up my winter-weary routines and look out on a fresh view while I write. So, tomorrow I leave for an impromptu writers retreat weekend! I’d been thinking about it, but this photo on novelist Susan Wigg’s blog finally compelled me to overcome inertia. The literary dinner is a bonus.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Posted on February 18, 2008 by lalber

Cleaning out my email Inbox this past weekend, I had occasion to think about where I was one year ago versus where I am now. Specifically, I came upon various San Francisco Writers Conference (SFWC) newsletters, and I realized that one year ago I was back in my home territory as an attendee at this conference. I was:

1. Anxious because I was in the midst of a mysteriously debilitating shoulder and neck ailment. MRIs, X-rays, EMGs, orthopedic surgeons, a neurologist, eight months of physical therapy — all with no answer. You could have called me Lisa the Robot because I was ordered not to slouch or bend my head forward at all for six weeks. I wasn’t writing.

2. Anxious about my job because I’d received a writing grant but couldn’t quit until my mysterious ailment corrected itself (July!). I was underperforming because I was too ready to begin my grant time-off. I was secretive with my boss, which made me very uncomfortable.

3. Anxious because I was about to officially begin the onerous task called agent-hunting. Among my writer friends, I know exactly ZERO people who enjoy this necessary but fraught task. I was set to pitch my latest novelistic effort to three participating literary agents. I spent most of my time in a hotel room littered with scribbled-upon index cards trying to perfect my pitch. (Not to mention performing a strict regimen of physical therapy exercises).

Was I anxious at this time last year? Hah!

(I did manage to have some fun. I went dancing at the Starlight Room with writer-buddies Bonnie and Christopher. I caught up with another writer-buddy, Eldon, who had graduated from conference attendee to speaker. Rode the cable car up Nob Hill to the hotel; ate Chinese in Chinatown; browsed inestimable City Lights Books in North Beach. Sigh. I love San Francisco.)

A year later: what do I have to say for myself? I’m not so anxious these days, not even about what will happen to the novel that eventually found its best, talented agent. I’m just writing; this makes me a happy camper compared to last year.

Bum Glue and the Devil Cat

Posted on February 11, 2008 by lalber

This morning — resolute and annoyed — I stepped over drifts of shredded toilet paper and into my office. I would not let the mess distract me from my writing duties. I could clean the mess any old time; let it sit for awhile; let the devil cat from toilet paper hell have yet more fun with his kill if he desired.

I caught him in act last night. He woke me up. Yes, I laughed.

But this morning, giggles were beside the point. I mustn’t, I told myself, clean and vacuum; not yet. I could feel the procrastination mistress within, ever distractible she is, perking up at the thought of not turning on my laptop, not starting chapter 19, not settling into anything except the next chore or trip to the fridge.

I was reminded of a lesson from Write Away, One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, by Elizabeth George. She mentions “bum glue,” a little something we writers must possess to keep our bums stuck to our chairs and in front of our writing implements. Ms. George quotes from one of her own journals:

…I suit up and show up. I sit down at the computer and I do the work, moving it forward a sentence at a time, which is ultimately the only way there is to write a book.

As of this moment (4:00 p.m.) the toilet paper is still adrift in the hallway. Amazing how big it gets when off the roll and shredded to bits. It’s the popcorn effect. But that’s okay, because I wrote my pages.

(By the way, I grabbed this shot just before I turned on the computer this morning. Looks like mauling the toilet paper tuckered the poor dude out, doesn’t it? Rough life.)

Straight A’s in Life?

Posted on February 7, 2008 by lalber

You know how someone can say something and — kapow! — it’s like a verbal two-by-four upside the head? This just happened to me, and I’d like to thank J– at Home Comfort Zones for the good-natured head bashing.

Here’s the context: I’m sick (again) and self-medicating with leftover antibiotics, naval oranges, and “Sex and the City” marathon runs. All told, this week I’ve spent many more hours alone than usual. I have a large capacity for alone-time — what writer doesn’t? — but there’s a point of diminishing returns:

too much alone time = every possible neurotic thought

So, there’s that. Then there’s good old Home Comfort Zones (HCZ), a start-up company. I’m the freelance go-to girl for HCZ’s user manual and other documentation needs. This afternoon I met up with J– to talk about documentation updates. Business concluded, he then asked me as he always does: How’s the writing going? As we were talking I realized that he’s one of my top supporters. Simply put, he’s rooting for me.

Perspective adjustment #1: There are oodles of people out there rooting for me and rooting for my novels. I’m not nearly as alone on this path of mine as I sometimes feel I am.

Our conversation continued with my admission that as a result of too much alone-time, I felt myself succumbing to fear that went something like this: I still rent; I don’t have family money or husband money to back me up; I don’t have assets to speak of; who knows what may happen with book publishing in general and my place within it specifically; what the heck am I doing?

That’s when J– said, “Hey, you’re doing what you love and you’re paying the bills, so I’d say you’re doing great.”

Perspective adjustment #2: Okay, I don’t remember exactly what he said after the second comma in the previous statement, but it was that kind of sentiment. A wake-up call: No-duh, Lisa, you’re one of the lucky ones!

I’ve had various so-called careers, and I’d say I sucked at nearly all tasks that weren’t writing-related, which is hard for me to admit because I was always the girl going after straight A’s.

In reality, there are no straight A’s in life, are there? And by which random criteria do we rate our proximities to 4.0s? According to the typical external measures of success, I might be in the C- range. But when I compare myself to twenty-something me? Yee gads, I’ve come a long way from the black-clad party girl who had no clue what she wanted to do in life much less the moxie to go for it.

Sometimes personal success is more about the internals than the externals. Talking to J– reminded me of this. And, nice person that he is, he said he was sure I’d get published.

J– also reminded me that I owe him a personal phone call when my novel sells. Not a group email message, not a notification through this blog, but a phone call. And he’s right.

Okay, So I’m an Addict and Other Tidbits

Posted on January 31, 2008 by lalber

No deep thoughts today, so I’ll get my schizophrenic groove on with an interview…

Mini-me: How you doing?

Me: Wow, great interviewing skills.

Mini-me: Just answer the question.

Me: It took me all day to write four pages, one tortured paragraph at a time, and I’m sick again to boot. My throat’s at it; my lungs are congested; I haven’t been sleeping well; I’m headachy and parched—

Mini-me (whispering in an aside to imagined audience): Get out the violins. (Louder:) Right then, tell me about the scene you wrote today.

Me: It was a lighter scene centered around two clerics and a parishioner who lets his dog defecate on church grounds.

Mini-me: Sounds plain silly to me; I trust you wrote this scene for a reason.

Me: Of course, what do you take me for? The dialogue hides a bigger point. In fact, in my previous posts about dialogue I could have discussed this — that dialogue is best when it functions on more than one level.

Mini-me: Enough with the dialogue blah-blah-blah already, yeesh. If I read between the lines correctly on this blog, you suffered a rough writing patch during the holiday season. The writing is flowing better now, I take it?

Me: Slower than I’d like, as usual, but steady. In fact, this week I broke 200 pages on my first draft. Woohoo! (Momentary break to get coughing under control.) For me, that’s a significant milestone — the halfway mark, the light at the end of the tunnel — you get the picture. I’m already looking forward to revisions. Now, THAT’s fun stuff.

Mini-me (sighing): You don’t get out much, do you?

Me: I’ll walk out right now if you don’t quit with the attitude.

Mini-me: Will not.

Me: Yeah, you’re right. Next question?

Mini-me: In a post earlier this month you mentioned your moratorium on reading novels until your first draft is complete. How’s that going?

Me: Okay, so I’m an addict. I fell off the wagon for about a week because I’d forgotten about my book group, the Sassy Lassies. We convened last Saturday to discuss Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (don’t ask). Long story short, while in the library to fetch the book, I had to peruse the Latest Arrivals shelves…and, well, you know. But I’m back to nonfiction again. However, I’ve decided that I was a little extreme; I’ll now be a weekend fiction warrior until the first draft is complete.

Mini-me: Good luck on that. Next up, I heard through the grapevine that you spoke to a writer buddy this week—

Me: Wow, news travels fast. J– said something interesting about her current project. Namely, that she realized that she was writing her novel with her agent in mind. Basically, J–‘s creativity went haywire because of thoughts such as: Will her agent like this novel? Will she still want to represent J–? And so on. Luckily, J– found a way to disentangle herself from these external considerations. She’s since restarted the novel and likes this version much better. Our conversation stuck in my head — as you well know — because it was a vicarious learning lesson for me.

Mini-me: And, last but not least, do you have a favorite quote these days?

Me: Funny you should ask, because I do.

       “The secret of happiness is freedom;
           the secret of freedom, courage.”
                                         — Thucydides

Plugging Another Novelist: Patry Francis

Posted on January 30, 2008 by lalber

Thanks to BigD for pointing me toward Patry Francis’ popular blog. Her debut novel, The Liar’s Diary, just came out in trade paperback, but she is too sick to promote it. Her blog is worth reading, and her personal story, courageous. However, what moves me to write this quickie post is that yesterday was The Liar’s Diary Blog Day. Check out Backspace, The Writer’s Place for the scoop on an amazing example of how the Internet can band people together in a life-affirming and inspiring way.

Her novel, by the way, sounds most intriguing. I’m gonna have to read it (poor little old me).

Okay, back to my writing now!

I’m Still Thinking About Dialogue…

Posted on January 28, 2008 by lalber

In 2002 I participated in my first writers retreat. A fancy one on Maui. I was nervous about going public with myself — scary! — especially because I suspected I’d gotten in over my head with my chosen retreat course — called “Writing from an Idea” — which was all about the process of evolving an initial concept through many phases of story and character development to the point where you can start the first draft. Theoretically, I should have started with the beginner fiction retreat, but I wanted the instructor I wanted, period.

(Sidenote: This retreat also interested me because I’d previously written a novel willy-nilly and ended up with a 600-page first draft — talk about a learning lesson!)

End result: The instructor’s positive feedback — and as a New York Times bestseller she’s no slouch — started me on my slow path toward accepting that I might have talent and toward admitting aloud, “I’m a writer.”

But, lest you think I was riding high on a teacher’s pet wave (hardly), let me get to the point, which is the raw, painful, ego-busting lesson for all newcomers: dealing with critical feedback. As the culmination of our week, our instructor treated us each to an in-depth critical analysis of our imagined novels’ first scenes. After three paragraphs of positive feedback on mine, she hit me with my weakness. You got it: pesky, tricky dialogue!

And here’s the sad truth of it in her words:

Where you’re currently a little weak is in using dialogue well. Here, you run into several difficulties. I get the impression that you’re in a huge hurry to get to the end of the scene and, consequently, you tend to rush things a bit when the characters are speaking. You fall into the jumping conflict trap as a result of this tendency on page four, and the brief spurt of dialogue on page seven suffers from a lack of cohesion. I realize that, as Andrew is a dying man, his discourse might be wobbly and illogical. But art does not imitate life in all circumstances and in these circumstances, each line of dialogue could serve you much better if it’s causally related to the line that goes before it…Generally speaking, if you’re going to shift to another topic like that, you need to interrupt the flow of dialogue with some sort of related action.

(Another sidenote: She also mentioned that in places I went overboard with the figurative language. Oh, my injured ego!)

As you can imagine, I’ve given much thought to dialogue since then. Hopefully I’ve internalized many of her lessons: slow down, don’t jump to conflict without proper build-up, don’t write dialogue as people really talk (as described in last week’s post), strive for clarity and cohesive flow.

Funny thing about that first scene: It’s no longer in the novel! Over many revisions I ended up sprinkling its essence throughout as part of my protagonist’s backstory (Andrew being her father and not a nice guy).

Dialogue and Ye Old Authorial Intrusions

Posted on January 26, 2008 by lalber

A few days ago I met up with BigD at Urban Grind, a trendy coffee house with a warehouse feel and interesting art. I was glad, once again, for the excuse to leave my home office, where I had so far accomplished nothing but staring out the window and bugging my ever-patient cat.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about a comment from BigD. Gazing at me from across our laptops, he wondered aloud how to create snappy and realistic dialogue — which is to say, dialogue that achieves a state of verisimilitude; which is to say, dialogue that reads realistically without being realistic; which is to say that if we were to write dialogue as we heard it in everyday life: boring, snooze, zzzzzz. For example:

“I told that guy Todd that we’re, like, so over, and, like, you should have seen his face. I was like, whatever.”

I ask you, who wants to wade through a novel written the way people really talk?

But back to BigD: He provided a sample sentence in which character x says to character y, “You are always so stubborn.” The sentence is awkward, but why exactly? I realized today that if I’d written it, I’d have to accuse myself of an authorial intrusion.

The sentence tells us that character y is a stubborn person, which I might indeed want the reader to know. However, I could convey the same fact through implication, such as having character x state “you stubborn fool,” which implies the same thing and provides information about character x (his opinion about said stubborness). Also, my simplistic example is a bit more snappy and realistic.

My point is that dialogue that smacks of authorial intrusion often lacks verisimilitude. I don’t know how many novels I’ve read where dialogue was used to convey a fact that the author obviously wanted the reader to know. For example, good friends sit in a diner and one says to the other: “But you remember Todd; he’s the investment banker who married my sister Claire last year and then divorced her two months later because he fell in love with me.”

One: If they’re such good friends, why does the nonspeaking character need an in-depth reminder? Two: Even if a reminder is apt, who really talks to a good buddy like this? Three: There are more graceful ways to weave in backstory.

I’m differentiating between using dialogue to pass on data to the reader and using dialogue to show one character passing on data to another character. Hopefully, the latter scenario forwards plot, creates intrigue, develops characters, something.

Dialogue is great fun, but in the end BigD and I agreed that writing it can be tricky. I’m still learning how to tease out my own authorial missteps.

A Man’s Ruin and My Two Bartenders

Posted on January 21, 2008 by lalber

Over the weekend, writing in yet another cafe, a slice of my life slid into a slice of my novel-in-progress and led to a gleeful moment.

I have a character (the dog owner I mentioned in a previous post) who’s a bartender. His name is Alan. I also have a bartender in my real life: Ben. He’s not truly “my” bartender, but he’s the closest I have to a regular purveyor of alcoholic beverages.

Over the weekend, I began writing a scene featuring Alan. As soon as I started, I realized that I was calling on my observations of Ben the Bartender, especially regarding an interesting comment he’d made about hearing what he wanted to hear from behind the bar. In other words, he’s privy to many a private conversation as he’s going about his business. As customers, we assume that bartenders aren’t paying attention, don’t we?

This tidbit was the perfect perspective from which to have Alan overhear snippets of a conversation that he misinterprets until later events clarify their true significance. I didn’t know I was going to do this until a paragraph into the scene. And I wouldn’t have thought of this if not for Ben’s comment, which was good insight into the world of the bartender, little did I know it at the time.

That was cool, but the best connection occured a page later when I realized I needed Ben’s tattoo. It was the perfect device by which to hint at Alan’s backstory, which is troubled indeed. I’d been wondering how to further that aspect of his story arc.

Ben’s tattoo is called “a man’s ruin.” This tattoo is a beauty that encircles his forearm with images of men’s temptations: women, drugs, booze, gambling, and so on. Poor Ben, with me watching him in an unseemly manner. He’s a good-looking guy, but there was also something else at work — connections being made that only became apparent over the weekend.

Serendipity plays its part in my creative process. I don’t know how many times I’ve read, heard, or met someone that set my synapses firing. These connections between my real world and my imaginary world are found treasures — I get excited; I might even clap my hands in glee — that feel like magic.