Nursing My Diagnosis

“Are you writing this down?” my mother used to say, when I described something strange and irksome that had happened to me. My husband has since picked up the chorus. And when another writer tells me about some disagreeable experience, I have been known to say, “It’s all material.”

I have been using this line on myself a lot lately, since I received the surprise of my bizarre diagnosis. It’s been a lot to deal with, physically and emotionally. But it also offers a lot of material.

For example, phlebotomists and nurses. I have been spending a lot of time with both, the phlebotomists as they draw relatively small amounts of my blood for lab tests, and the nurses as they draw a pint each week—standard treatment for my condition. Because I want to distract myself from those unpleasant needles, I like to talk during these procedures. And because as a writer I’m always eager to poke my nose in other people’s business, I mine these moments for whatever slices of human drama or character-defining details I’m able to extract. Because who knows when I might be able to use them?

So far, I have filed away:

–The nurse who claims, as she’s sticking me for my very first blood drawing, that she’s afraid of needles.

–The nurse whose husband complains that she spends too much on the novelty cakes she bakes for her friends’ celebrations.

–The two nurses at the office where they put in my PICC Line. One at my head and one at my feet, they roll my gurney to the operating room, a route that takes us down narrow hallways, around tight corners and through just-wide-enough doors. Throughout the journey, they gossip as if I’m not there—only, because I am, they talk around all the actual content.

“I’m not surprised she didn’t come back,” says the nurse at my head.

“Yeah? How come?” asks the nurse at my feet.

“Because remember what happened?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Right?”

“Right.”

“Sounds like a great story,” I pipe up from my prone position. “Wish I could hear the details.”

I’m not trying to scold them; I really do want to hear more. But they shut up.

–The nurse who comes to my home to change the dressing on my PICC line, dropping by on Saturday afternoon, between one son’s karate class and another son’s violin lesson. She’s a slight, sweet-faced woman, who talks to me tenderly and handles my wounded arm as gently as anyone has ever handled any part of me.

When I tell her that my condition is interfering with my running, she says, “You should take up kickboxing. I love it.”

“What do you love about it?” I ask.

“It’s a perfect workout,” she says. “Cardio and strength-training combined. Plus you get to hit people and you don’t get in trouble.”

–The phlebotomist in Boston who plays Gospel music and never cracks a smile. When I ask her to spare my big veins for my next blood-letting, she says, “If you’re doing this for the long-term they’ll probably put in a port, anyway.”

–The phlebotomist in Providence who smiles constantly. When I ask her to spare my big veins for my next blood-letting, she nods sympathetically.

“I’ll just use a butterfly,” she says.

As the tube fills, she says she likes the way my purple cardigan looks with my yellow t-shirt. “I wouldn’t have thought of putting those colors together, but it works!” she says. “I’m always wearing purple with green. My husband says they don’t go, but I like them.”

“They’re Mardi Gras colors,” I tell her. “It’s your inner party girl coming out.”

–The highly competent nurse who has been drawing a pint of my blood each week for the last three weeks, and who I hope will draw all my pints forevermore. She is kind, careful, competent, and so relentlessly serious that I feel compelled to make wisecracks, and chalk up a personal victory each time she cracks a smile.

“That’s where my garden attacked me,” I tell her as we survey my inner arms on my third visit.

Her face lights up. “You garden?” she asks. “Flowers or vegetables?”

I tell her about my salad greens and radishes, and she talks about her raised beds, her kale that wintered over, the volunteer arugula that sprouts in her compost, her favorite heirloom tomatoes, and this year’s asparagus.

“The first time I saw asparagus growing I thought it was a joke,” I say. “It’s like a kid’s drawing of how vegetables grow.”

“I know,” she says, laughing. “Right?”

The Insomniac’s Approach To Productivity

Rule Number One when you’re trying to be productive: eliminate the distractions. Hence the gap between my last post and this one. I have actually been writing—yet another picture book, and a short story for grown-ups.

I’m hardly the first person to notice what a time-sucking addiction the miracle that is the internet can be. But noticing isn’t the same as acting. That’s why they call it addiction.

Here’s how it worked (or didn’t work) for me. Every morning, after breakfast and exercise and shower, and then maybe a little more of this and that, I would open my laptop, which was usually still in beside the living room couch, where I’d left it the night before.

First, I would check my email. Then I’d hop over to Facebook. And then, of course, I had to catch up with Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, because the Providence Journal doesn’t carry those comics. And then I would check the stats on my blog. And then I might follow Twitter for a while. And then I would try to do the Times crossword puzzle online. And then I might allow myself a round of mah jong solitaire. Just one. Unless, of course, it ended too soon. In which case I’d allow myself another. I should also mention keeping up with the various blogs I subscribe to. Oh, and how could I forget my endless rounds of multiple Words With Friends games?

Anyway, eventually I would carry the laptop upstairs to my desk, and sit down to write. But I would keep my email and Facebook and maybe even Twitter open, and the minute something new came in, or I got a tiny bit frustrated, I would hop online and get might happily get sucked in again.

Blame the witty, wonderful friends I get to hang out with online. Blame the election. Blame Sandy. Blame the excruciating slowness of the publishing submission process. Blame the blessing of having too much writing time, combined with the curse of having not enough deadlines. Blame the fact that writing is hard and goofing off is easy.

Whatever the reason, last week, on the Sunday before the election, I decided enough was enough. On the advice of my very sensible husband, I decided that I wouldn’t go online until lunchtime. I have cheated a tiny bit, but so far, the plan has been working very well. Here’s the idea.

You know how, if you have trouble sleeping, they tell you not to use your bedroom for anything but sleep and sex? And that rather than lying around sleeplessly in the middle of the night, you should get up, do something soothing, and then put yourself back to bed? That’s how I’m approaching my writing space.

Every morning, after breakfast and exercise and shower, I put my laptop on my desk and my butt in the desk chair. I turn off the ringer on my phone. I don’t open the internet. I just go to whatever document I have assigned myself to work on that morning.

Every twenty minutes or so, I walk away from the desk—shift the laundry, bring in the trash cans, get a glass of water, maybe just pace a little. Knowing I’ll stand up within twenty minutes makes it easier to keep my fingers on the keyboard.

I also stand up when I get stuck. Instead of hopping online, I hop away from my desk. But I don’t stay away for more than five minutes. Then I sit down and work for another twenty minutes.

I follow these rules until around noon. After that, I get to do whatever I want—work, play, work and play simultaneously, go out, whatever. But the really cool thing? Since I’ve gotten my writing muscles back in practice, I’ve been spending more and more of that free time at my desk, continuing whatever work I was doing in the morning.

Okay. There’s actually another piece to this story. For the first time in my life, I’ve joined a writing group. We’re getting together for the first time tonight, and I have to bring something to read. I could have chosen one of the manuscripts I have out on submission, or any of the dozens of pieces I have stashed away in my files. But I’ll be reading the new picture book I’ve been working on. Because for me, there’s only thing better than having a no-distractions writing policy, and that’s having a deadline.

If tonight works out, we’ll meet again next month. I hope my system keeps working this well—I mean, keeps me working this well—until then. If you don’t hear a lot from me here, it will probably mean that it is.

Feasting at the Fast

For the second time in three days, I dreamed about eating at Yom Kippur services. In both dreams, services were in full swing, the clergy resplendent in their special white robes, when I realized I wasn’t sitting in a pew, but at a table for eight, set for a banquet. While the cantor continued his fervent chanting, servers brought dinner, and everyone dug in. The cantor looked annoyed, but not surprised – certainly less surprised than I was.

In the first dream, I stuffed my face, like everyone else. (I don’t remember the menu, besides a crusty baguette.) On the dream’s second pass, I was the only one at the table who didn’t indulge.

What does it mean, doctor?

My former therapist, who wasn’t into archetypes or psychoanalysis, tended to see this sort of question as an opening for more free-form introspection. “How did the dream leave you feeling?” he might ask.

And I might answer, “In the first instance, guilty. And the second time, when I abstained? Annoyed. And a little bit self-righteous, maybe. And then guilty, for judging the people around me.”

“Good for you,” I can imagine my therapist saying at this point, smiling that warm, between-you-and-me smile of his. “Even though the second time you were the one doing the right thing, you still  figured out a way to feel guilty about it.”

And then we would probably dive back into our ongoing conversation about guilt – what triggers it, its uses and (more often) uselessness, and what other emotions it might mask.

But what if my therapist’s questions weren’t about feelings, but metaphors, plot points, imagery and motifs? What if  his question in response to my question were, “How might you use these scenes in an essay, a work of fiction, a poem?”

Then I would have to say, “It depends.”

In an essay, I could use the twin dreams to illustrate spiritual indifference in today’s society. Or the social irrelevance of today’s religious institutions. A more personal essay might delve into my own passionate ambivalence around religion.

In a short story or a novel, the scenes might emphasize my role as outsider – my failure to conform with the service in the first dream, and with my co-congregants in the second. I might build in a moment where I look into the face of one of the clergy and get a glimpse of understanding, and from that an unexpected connection.

In a poem, the feast and the fast could be symbols. The diners might be feasting on the substance of the service, tanking up on prayer or tradition or regret. Or the unstoppable service could be the background of wrongdoing or good intentions that’s always there, as we blithely go on passing the bread. Living our lives.

Or, how about this? In a blog post about writing, I could use the service to stand for form – the rules that govern different genres, the structures and basic story lines we expect. And I could use the meal to demonstrate what happens when a piece breaks the rules and confounds expectations. A dream that was only about sitting through Yom Kippur services wouldn’t be worth telling. And neither would a dream that was only about eating. Put the two together, though, and you’ve got something interesting – something that opens the way to new meaning.

Seed Season

Seeds are usually associated with spring, and fall with fruit. But autumn is seed season, too.

Yesterday I snipped the spent flowers from the tithonia, aka Mexican Sunflower, the brilliant orange annual we grow beside the garage. It grows to nearly six feet, and is apparently indestructible. Last year, when Hurricane Irene snapped its stems almost in two, our tithonia kept on stubbornly producing its fiery flower heads. We’ve been starting it from plants we buy at our local land trust’s yearly plant sale. But my mother-in-law wants to try it at her home in Colorado, and asked for some seeds.

Maybe I’ll keep some more myself and try it from scratch next year. We’ll see. The point is, I’m thinking about seeds.

Take my new novel, for example. The seed of the idea is still compelling, but the story refuses to grow. I have been vacillating between two desires: to submerge myself in a whole, long book, and to write a series of connected short stories, which would be easier to commit to than another big book.

When I admitted to my agent the other day that the big book wasn’t going, she gently suggested I might want try the short stories, instead. So yesterday, after collecting those tithonia flower heads, I started writing a new short story, taking the seed of my novel idea and trying it out in compressed form. We’ll see.

And then there’s that old picture book idea of mine. The one I’d set aside years ago, and recently retrieved and revised. My agent is now sending it out. And although it hasn’t found a home yet, one of the editors who read it liked my writing enough to invite me to try my hand at a picture book idea she has had in mind for a while.

I started working on it last week, and completed what I would call a serviceable first draft. I went to bed last night thinking I needed a stronger “hook,” an approach to the idea that would be fresh and compelling, something that would deepen the story, make it be about more than just itself. This morning I woke up with four ideas of how to do that. I’m hopeful and excited. But we’ll have to see how it goes.

You never know what’s going to work. At least, I don’t. At the risk of belaboring the metaphor I started with, some seeds never germinate, either because they land in the wrong soil, or they don’t get enough water, or they weren’t any good in the first place. And even when they do grow, you don’t know how they’ll end up. Some flowers are cut at their prime and brought inside to be admired, and some get left to mature and create the seeds of next year’s plants.

While I was outside collecting those tithonia seeds, I spent a while with our tomato plants. I harvested ripe fruit, removed withered leaves, propped up sagging stems, and took stock of what was left of the season. Dozens of tomatoes were still green or just beginning to redden, and a few cherry tomato branches had new flowers.

And then I noticed a fruit I had forgotten all about. It was one of our first black krims. I had waited too long to harvest it, and it had split and rotted on the vine. I had considered removing it, but it was too slimy to touch. So I left it where it was, and before long the growing vines and leaves and other tomatoes had obscured it. But now that the plant had died back, it revealed itself once again.

It was paper white, pleated and creased like crinoline, as wrinkled and puckered as a scrotum. Beautiful in a way I had never imagined a tomato could be.

Here’s to autumn, the season of new beginnings.

Picture (Book) Perfect?

So I’m sitting in shul yesterday, listening to the prayers and the chanting of the Torah and so on, and I’m thinking, “What’s a verb that either alliterates or rhymes with pancake flipper?” And I’m also thinking, “If I have to be distracted, how great is it that this is the most pressing question on my mind?”

Once upon a time, I was a writer of books for children. I wrote picture books for children who were too young to read (and the people who read to tem), and easy readers for children who were just learning to translate abstract squiggles into stories (and the people who helped them become literate).

Writing for children wasn’t a conscious decision. It came to me naturally, because my own children were little, and I was reading to them constantly. The cadences of books like Blueberries for Sal and Owl Moon and The Stinky Cheese Man got stuck in my head. And when I imagined an audience, the kids who regularly snuggled in my lap to listen automatically came to mind.

Once I started doing it, I fell in love. I loved that I could read the whole story through at once, hold the whole thing in my head, grasp the rhythm and arc. I find my way into a story primary by sound, so being able to hear the whole story at once, like a song, worked well for me.

Writing well in any format means not wasting words, but this is especially true for picture books. For me, this means millions of revisions. Since I love manipulating minutiae, and generally view writing as creating the opportunity to rewrite, picture books’ stingy word-allotment suited my temperament perfectly.

Plus, it was working. Once I’d sold my first picture book, writing and selling more was easier. Or not. In fact, for every story I started, I abandoned a dozen. And for every five I finished and submitted to publishers, I sold one.

Why? Some of my ideas just weren’t developed, and others just weren’t that good. Also, my writing was getting more and more “quiet” as industry tastes moved the other way. Editors became more cautious. Publishers merged or got swallowed up. The imprints that published my first two books disappeared. And I had no one to tell me what to do.

I had had an agent, briefly. I’d sold one of my books through her, and then decided I didn’t need an agent, because I had so many contacts in children’s publishing. Then most of those contacts either left or lost their jobs. And now that my own kids were nearly grown, I was no longer reading children’s books the way I had been.

I was doing other things, like writing newspaper stories, and then editing other people’s newspaper stories. And I started writing a novel. A big one, for grown-ups. After a while, the big novel consumed all my writing energy. When it was finished, all I could think of doing was starting another one. Children’s books were something I remembered fondly, from a former life.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was chatting with my agent, the one whom I signed with to help me sell my big novel for grown-ups. She doesn’t handle picture books. But I didn’t care, because she loves my big novel for grown-ups, and she believes in it, probably even more than I do. She also understands me. When we talk, it’s like we’re old friends who lost touch for a while, and are rediscovering all the things we have in common.

So one day my agent I are chatting, and I happen to mention one of my kids’ books. And she asks, “Why aren’t you writing kids’ books anymore?”

“I have drawers full of kids’ book manuscripts,” I tell her.

And she says something like, “Why don’t you show them to me?”

So I go through all my unpublished children’s books, and I send her the four I consider my best. She hates one of them. Another she’s not sure about. She loves another, but thinks it needs work. But one – my favorite, the one about bees — she thinks just needs a few tweaks, and then should go out on submission to publishers. She reminds me that picture books are not her area of expertise, but says a colleague at her agency who knows all about them is willing to help.

The colleague agrees with my agent’s assessment. He also says that I need to cut 200 words from the bee book.

First I balk, and then I rally. I let the information simmer overnight, and in the morning I get to work. For the next day or two, I cut back and rebuild the text. I shave unneeded helping verbs and prepositions. I delete adverbs and replace them with more descriptive verbs. I eliminate extraneous details and compress scenes to their essence. When I realize that I’ve lost some crucial phrases, I put them back, and remove others that matter less.

In a picture book, the illustrations tell at least as much of the story as the words do. After an artist comes on board (God willing), more of my words will be expendable. But for now, I need to leave in enough so an editor will envision pictures like the ones in my mind.

I keep clicking “recount,” watching my progress, and I keep printing the story out and reading it aloud to myself, pacing from one end of my office to other. When I can’t find anything else to fix, I send it back to my agent. The next day, sitting in shul, I realize I need to make one more change.

“That must be awfully humbling,” a friend commiserates.

Actually not, I tell her. Mostly, what I feel is grateful. The revised, shorter text is much stronger than the original, but I couldn’t see that for myself. I am thrilled to be working with such a supportive agent, and grateful that she has colleagues she can call on for help – and that she recognizes when she needs it. And I’m gratified beyond words to have my old love for children’s books rekindled.

As for the pancake flipper, I ended up rewriting the whole sentence to say slipper fuzz, instead. When I read the new phrasing to my husband, he came up with exactly the right verb. I’m grateful for that, too.

Fictitious Afflictions

The other day I sat down with a friend who’s a healthcare professional, and picked her brain about various medical conditions I might inflict on a character. I knew how the event needed to play out in my plot. Certain types of symptoms were preferable to others, and it needed to take a specific amount of time for them to develope. The ensuing crisis should require a specific level of intervention. There were certain types of medical procedures I wanted to come into play. And I needed to leave my character in limbo for a specific amount of time.

As my friend ticked through different possibilities, I thought about how well each scenario would meet my fictional needs.

“There could be abdominal pain,” she said.

“Good.” I wrote it down.

“Nausea or vomiting.”

“Perfect!”

“Spotty vision.”

“Nice.”

Anyone listening in from a nearby table would have found the whole thing pretty strange. I know I did.

“This is exactly what I was looking for!” I told my friend when we had gotten it figured out. All sorts of pieces were coming together. The story I had been hoping for seemed real and possible. I was so happy and grateful.

“I’m glad this is going to happen to a fictional character, and not one of my real patients,” my friend said with a smile.

I readily agreed. But her comment got me thinking.

At this point in the project, I have a pretty good grip on the logistics of my plot. I know how the medical scenario I’ve been imagining will affect my main character. And I’m beginning to understand how the imaginary crisis will play into my book’s broader themes. But beyond the basic facts my friend helped me figure out, I haven’t considered the situation from the point of view of my poor, afflicted character. I don’t even feel especially bad for her.

Why? For starters, she isn’t really real to me yet. More importantly – at this point, I don’t even especially like her.

This isn’t some random reaction. Most of the characters in this story aren’t really real to me yet. I have barely started writing it. But I like the other characters just fine. I even have a soft spot for the one I know has acted really badly. And I know that another character, whom my main character can’t stand, is actually a perfectly decent human being, even though I understand completely what my main character has against her. And I really, really love my main character, even though she has all sorts of bad qualities.

If I don’t love my characters, how can I write well about them? And if I don’t care about a character’s suffering, how can I expect readers to care? I’m pretty sure that once I really start writing about this one holdout character, the one I don’t like, she’ll start to flesh out for me. But first I need a point of entry. And I need to remove what’s standing in my way. So what is that? As I sat there with my friend, I figured it out.

The original kernel of this story occurred to me a while back, at a time when I was feeling hurt and angry. A certain someone needed to be punished, and I was going to do just that, through fiction. By now I have gotten (mostly) over being pissed off in real life. And the make-believe world of my story has grown and developed far beyond the real-life situation that spawned it. But my original associations with the character who set the whole thing off have persisted.

When I confessed this to my friend (who, besides working in healthcare, has also done some writing, herself), she very sensibly suggested that I pick someone I do like, and keep that person in mind as I write about the character in question.

So that’s my next task. I’ll be scouting around, holding a sort of secret casting call, considering real-world characters to graft onto the one I already have in mind. The result should be a richer, more complex character. One I can think — and write — about more sympathetically. One the reader can better identify with. Or at least better understand.

And who knows what might happen if I were to imagine the worst-case scenario I would inflict on my enemy afflicting my friend? Besides making better fiction, it might turn out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Looking Up

I had a not-so-great night last night. Woke up around 2, spent way too long trying to go back to sleep. Hormones? Humidity? A dear friend’s illness? The election? The fact that I got zero writing done yesterday? The fact that while I was getting zero writing done, a friend of a friend’s debut novel just sold at auction?

Whatever the cause, my lousy night left me feeling too washed out to go to the gym this morning. And the fact that at 10 am I would be talking to the friend whose friend sold her book probably figured into the equation. Despite what I would like to think about myself, the idea of this other person’s success was not sitting well with me.

So I made the bed. Took a shower. Folded the cold wash. Tried (and failed) to fix a leak in the soaker hose that snakes through the petunias. Then I tried something harder. I switched to a new dentist. And that turned out to be surprisingly easy. Two phone calls and it was done. When I told our old dentist’s receptionist where to send our records, she even said, “I’ve heard great things about him!”

I still had about 45 minutes before my phone call. I figured that conversation would be a more fun if I went into it from a position of writerly strength. So, buoyed by my dentist-switching success, I opened the draft of my new novel, and wrote. And that turned out to be surprisingly easy, too. I wrote about someone finding a squashed doll’s head in the garden, until the phone rang.

The conversation was great. My friend was so thrilled for her friend, and the story of how the book got sold was so interesting and exciting, that I couldn’t help but get happy and excited, too. “It means it can happen!” My friend said when I confessed about how I’d been feeling. “It’s good!” And of course she was right. And then something else happened.

You know how in the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast,” after Belle decides she loves the Beast for his inner beauty, he magically transforms into a Rod Stewart look-alike, so she doesn’t have to marry a beast, after all?  That ending has always pissed me off. What kind of lesson is it teaching when her reward for not being shallow is the very thing she would have wanted if she were shallow? I mean, come on, folks! Well, what happened to me next was sort of like that.

Just as I was feeling good about my friend’s friend’s success, and feeling even better about myself for feeling so good about my friend’s friend’s success, the Fed Ex truck pulled up in front of my house. I never get things from Fed Ex. But this time, I did. It was 10 contributor’s copies of Lilith magazine’s Summer 2012 issue, in which my short story, “Letdown,” appears as the third-place winner in the publication’s annual fiction contest.

As my friend continued recounting her happy story, I quietly sliced the box opened, removed the packing paper, pulled out a copy of the magazine, and found my story. It looked great.

And that wasn’t the end of it, either. After I got off the phone, I returned to my writing, buoyed now not just by my dentist-switching success, but also by my friend’s friend’s publishing success, and by seeing my story in Lilith.

I lingered deliciously over the details of the squashed doll’s head’s appearance. I described the hell out of my protagonist’s delight in her find, and I compellingly explored her ambivalence about sharing her discovery with the woman she would be meeting for lunch later in the day, someone she was just beginning to know. Would her new maybe-friend understand her fascination with disembodied doll parts? And if not, what would that mean about the future of their friendship? I was brilliant.

And then the last thing happened. There I was, writing like nobody’s business, when the UPS truck pulled up. WTF? Two deliveries in one day? Who could it be from? And what could it be?

It was from was from a guy I have been friends with since the fifth grade, when we went on an ice-skating “date” in the park. We were closest in high school, which was when I started collecting disembodied doll parts. He was there for my sixteenth birthday, when my cake was decorated with a doll’s arm holding a molar with its braces band still attached. He baked the cake for my seventeenth birthday, which was decorated with an icing portrait of Jerry Garcia. We haven’t seen each other in years, but we have renewed our friendship through Facebook. He is a sculptor now, living in Los Angeles. One of his recent pieces was an enormous hand – basically, a gigantic, disembodied doll part. He had sent me three baby dolls’ hands and two feet, the models for his latest project.

My hormones are still incorrigible. It’s still way too humid. My dear friend is still ill. The upcoming election still scares me. And my first novel is still out on submission. But publishing success is possible. Thousands of readers will find my short story in Lilith. And my good old friend knew exactly where to send his doll parts.

Building a Book

I’m trying to build a book. I began about eighteen months ago, with a very clear concept of my protagonist. Like me, P has recently entered a new phase in her life, and is a little bit at a loss. She knows what she’s done and who she’s been. But what’s next?

I asked myself, what if just as P was beginning to figure stuff out, a stranger (S) walked into her life, making a claim that not only threatened P’s plan for the future, but also cast doubt on her assumptions about the past?

That’s the basic idea. I knew what P’s plan was, and what S claimed. I knew, in a broad sense, how P’s response to S would evolve, and how it would all end up.

I understood P’s motives, but wasn’t sure of S’s. I had a basic idea of the most important auxiliary characters – their roles in the story, if not their specific characteristics. I knew the story’s beginning, middle and end, but had only a vague sense of all the stuff in between.

But that was okay. Those details could work themselves out. Right? I just needed to start writing, go with the flow, get as many words down as quickly as I could, and sort it all out later. There’s a technical term for this approach. It’s called pantsing. As in writing by the seat of your pants. Which comes from flying by the seat of your pants. Which, according to this, comes from the early days of aviation, before today’s fancy instruments, when pilots “read” the plane’s reactions by how it felt under their butts. But I digress.

With only the broadest idea, I pantsed the hell out of my story for about nine months, producing many words very quickly, vowing not to stop or look back until I had reached the ending. Following some advice a then-soon-to-be-famous writer gave me in a writing class some time in the 20th century, I kept adding complications. It worked for a while. And then it didn’t. I added so many complications and side tracks that I lost track of my ending. In fact, I never even go to the middle. One day I looked up and realized I had made a huge mess. And I had no interest in cleaning it up.

So I wrote some columns. Played with some picture book ideas. Told myself I sucked. Told myself I didn’t suck. Got a new agent. Revised my other book manuscript. Wrote a short story. Started another short story, but lost interest before I finished. Searched through my files of unfinished projects, and rediscovered my germ of an idea about P trying to plot her future, and S showing up with her inconvenient claim. There, waiting for me beneath the mess of complications and the wild rumpus of unchecked verbiage, were my original beginning, middle and end. And they were still warm.

I decided to try again. Only this time, I would do the opposite of pantsing. I would plan.

I began with the broadest possible, most generic outline. Act I: Introduce character and establish problem. Act II: Complicate. Act III: Resolve and conclude. I divided each act into five chapters, flagging chapters 3, 8 and 12 as tipping points, the halfway-point peaks in the narrative arc of each act. Chapter 8, the dead center of the book, would tip the entire story.

Next, I turned my generic outline into a questionnaire. For each chapter, I asked myself the same set of questions. Where and when does it take place? What are the main events? Which characters are involved? What are the characters’ mental states – the assumptions, dispositions and desires that drive their behavior? What background information does the reader need to learn at this stage? How could the chapters’ beginnings and endings create suspense and help draw the reader through the story?

As I filled in the blanks, I kept a running list of characters and their basic information in a separate document (it’s amazing how easy it is to forget things like someone’s name). When I got frustrated that I wasn’t writing, but only writing about writing, I added first and last sentence(s) to my outline. How many of these sentences will end up in the draft? It doesn’t matter. Writing them helps me figure stuff out. And it helps me remember what this whole exercise is about.

I’ve gotten my form about two-thirds filled in. I think I know how to get from chapter 1 to chapter 8 (the book’s midpoint), and how to get from chapter 12 (the tipping point in Act III) – to the ending. But I’m still a little murky about what how to get from chapter 8 to chapter 12.

But that’s okay. Right? We’re about to go visit family for a few weeks, and I won’t be doing much writing. When I come back, maybe I’ll discover that my unconscious has filled in the rest of the blanks while I was thinking about other stuff. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s time to start writing. If at Chapter 8, I’m still confused, I can always pants.

Like my protagonist P, I’m on the brink of something new. But while P believes she has finally figured everything out, I know that any minute, some unexpected S could wreck havoc on my plans. If and when that happens, I hope I handle it better than my poor protagonist.

Just Desserts

Matzah crunch with toasted almonds and coarse salt

A friend left a message on our phone the other day. She said she was in New York City, and wouldn’t have access to her email. So if I got any good news about my book in the next 24 hours, I should call her, rather than email. Why? She wants to celebrate my good fortune by eating lots of desserts, and New York City is a great place to indulge a sweet tooth.

Black Flower Chocolates, Vermont

The online magazine Tablet recently ran a piece about the Hebrew word firgun. Never heard of it? Neither had I. According to the article, firgun is ungrudging happiness at another person’s good fortune. The author describes the sentiment in purely positive terms, as an ideal most of us can only strive to achieve. (A reader commenting on the story takes a more jaundiced view, calling firgun the opposite of  schadenfreude. It’s the refusal to judge the good luck of those who don’t deserve it, the commentator suggests.)

Moroccan treats

Do I think my friend wants to hear about my success out of pure firgun? Of course not. Sure, she’ll be happy for me. But she also craves, for example, a certain seven-layered cake, some particular donuts, those big almond cookies the Jews call Chinese and the Chinese call Jewish, you know, the ones with a nice dab of chocolate in the middle? She wants an excuse to feed her passion. And that’s fine by me. I wish I could have given her that excuse while she was in the city. But it didn’t work out that way.

Valentine’s Day truffles

As I wait, do I have firgun for other writers’ success? Not really. But I do take comfort in the thought that if it happened for them, it can happen for me. When it does, I’ll be sure to let my friend know. And after I have my own celebration, I’ll enjoy hearing about all the decadent delights she consumed in my honor. We’ll both have our cake and eat it, too.

Mille feuille

Picture Books 101

While everyone else is starting their summer vacations, I’m heading back to school. On Monday I’ll be teaching a class of 5th and 6th graders about “being an author.” That’s how my friend phrased the request, anyway.

I said yes because I haven’t done one of these gigs in years, and I remembered they were fun. Also, when my friend asked, the date was an entire month away. The then-Present Me blithely agreed, figuring the chips would fall on some hapless Future Me. Trouble is, that former Present Me has by now morphed into a smug Past Me. She’s off somewhere sitting on her duff, no doubt eating bonbons. In other words, it’s time to get it together.

I have 90 minutes to fill. My plan is to spend the first half talking about my life as an author, focusing mostly on Crab Moon. To prepare, I pulled out my Crab Moon archives. That’s a foot-high stack of file folders – printed-out email messages from my Aunt Susan, drafts, correspondence with Gale Pryor, my wonderful editor at Candlewick, a packet of photographs of horseshoe crabs sent by my cousin David, notes from phone calls with Gale, more drafts, photocopies of fab illustrator Kate Kiesler’s sketches, dummies and paintings, yet more drafts, business correspondence, and finally page proofs, published reviews, and letters from readers.

I had remembered how long the process of bringing the book to publication was. But I had forgotten the particulars. Looking through the old drafts and letter now, searching for the essential artifacts that would tell my audience something interesting and useful, I was struck by

– how much the story changed between my first idea and the final book

– how much better (cleaner, sharper, more focused, better paced) the book is than my first idea

– how much of that cleaning and sharpening and focusing and pacing is the work of my editor (although the actual words on the page are mine)

– how lucky I am to have landed in some patient, capable and persistent editorial hands.

The second half of my class will be a group exercise in literary analysis. We’ll compare three picture-book treatments of The Little Red Hen, discussing the different choices the authors made, and talking about which elements are essential to keeping it the same story (could you write a version without the character of the little red hen, and still consider it The Little Red Hen?).

I could spend days (year, a life time) on this stuff. But I only have an hour and a half. And my audience of 10 and 11-year olds probably doesn’t share my passion. What do I want them to take away from the session?

– Real people write books.

– There is no one right way to tell a story.

– In picture books, the words and the images work together to tell the story.

– Writing in any genre involves lots of conscious or unconscious decisions.

– Writing well in any genre takes patience, persistence, and a willingness to listen to constructive criticism.

– A great editor can be a book’s greatest asset.