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.

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.

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.

Making Up Stories

One of my favorite games when I was a kid was making up stories. Using plastic figurines or dollhouse dolls or myself as the actors, either talking aloud or inside my head, I would narrate – what? Not exactly stories, now that I think about it. I can’t remember very many actual plots.

Making up stories about myself was more like adding an authorial voice-over that commented on whatever I was already doing. The joy of the game was that it turned the mundane act of walking down the street or taking a bath into something fascinating. Something you might read in a book by Sydney Taylor or Eleanor Estes, or maybe even Joan Aiken.

With the figurines and dollhouse dolls, it was about creating characters in relationships – families, neighborhoods, friendships. These characters rarely did much. But the personalities and jobs and back-stories I invented for them suggested all sorts of possible stories, if I ever got around to making them up. Only I never did. As soon as I had figured out who everyone was, the game was pretty much over. And the next time I took the toys out, the joy of turning them into a whole new set of characters was impossible to resist.

When I was around 10, someone  (my aunt? my sister?) gave me a box of cards designed by Charles Eames. They have notches that let you hook them together and build with them. But what’s really great about them is that each one has a photograph of some small object or set of objects – ordinary everyday objects like spools of thread, pills, vegetables, eyeglasses, and less familiar objects like a katchina doll or an abacus.

The set is meant to convey a multinational, we-are-all-one message, something like, all of humanity shares a single home. Which is great. But what interested me more were the different personalities the pictures suggested. The pills might be a sickly old woman, the eyeglasses a professor, the hard candy a happy child. Each time the cards were shuffled and sorted, a new set of family units emerged. The challenge was to assign the cards in each set personalities to construct a plausible household. Again there were no actual stories. But the process of creating a story-esque aura was an indescribable pleasure.

At some point, I started writing the stories down — first in spiral notebooks, and then at the typewriter, and finally on the computer. You might think that committing words to a page would force me to quit fooling around. And I have managed to  complete a bunch of kids’ books, some short stories, and one rather ambitious novel. But for each completed story, there are at least ten that I have abandoned in various stages of incompletion, because I got bored or frustrated or, most often, because I started writing in hopes that a plan would unfold, and it never did.

How do people manage to write stories? Even though I have done it myself, each time I start anew, I’m at a loss. Should I figure everything out in advance, or just start writing and see where it goes?

Right now I have what feels like a very promising idea for a new book. I know my protagonist and what her situation is when the story begins. I know what the event is that’s going to throw her life into turmoil and make her question everything she thought she knew. I know how she will respond, and how she will be changed, and I’m pretty sure I know how it will all turn out and where the ending will leave things.

I know where and when it takes place, and who the subsidiary characters are, and I have a pretty good idea of what motives them, and how they will be changed in the course of the book. I know how long the book should be, and how the narrative arc should flow from one chapter to the next.

But there’s so much I still don’t know. For example, what all these people’s jobs are. And where they grew up. What they look like. What sort of music they listen to. Whether they believe in God or read books or know how to cook. Do they wear glasses? Get along with their parents? Have speech impediments? Follow sports? Vote? There are so many questions, and so many possible answers. What if I get it wrong?

Maybe what I need to do is stop taking the process so seriously. Maybe I need to forget that I have a finished book and an agent who’s shopping it. Forget that being a writer is my only job now. Forget that I’m trying to start a new book. Maybe I need to remember the fun of making stuff up, and just let myself play.

Wish me luck.

(These aren’t my toys. They’re my kids’. But you get the idea)

Radishes and Revisions

Next time I plant radishes, I’ll sow the seeds more thinly. But I’m new at growing vegetables. So I just sort of dumped them. Ten rainy days later, they had become a gorgeous green mass, as luxuriant as ground cover. Unfortunately, they need room to grow as big as, well, radishes. The seed packet says to thin them to two inches apart. So today I went out in the rain and did just that, getting muddy and feeling like a bad-ass. I had to take out more than I could leave, but the sprouts I aborted will add a spicy bite to tonight’s salad.

What does any of this have to do with revisions? Not much, except that thinning my radishes was my reward for sending my latest set of revisions back to my agent. Also, after I’d finished tackling some biggish issues in the story (Where is the ghost now? Who’s talking? Is that sex consensual, or rape?), I went through the text at a micro level and tightened a lot of the language. That is, I thinned out a bunch of verbiage that was clogging up the story.

Here, for you list fans, are 5 (five!) types of excess verbiage I eliminated. The sentences are from my book, but if you’re a writer, you could probably find similar examples in your own work.

1.Adverbs

I am not a member of the We Hate Adverbs Club. I kinda like them, in fact. Parts of my book are lavishly embellished with them. But those parts are written in a voice that is deliberately baroque. In the parts of the book where the writing is more simple, adverbs can just clog up the works. So, for example,

 “Adam tried so hard to have everything today the way your mother wanted, ” Betsy goes on conversationally.

should probably become

“Adam tried so hard to have everything today the way your mother wanted, ” Betsy goes on.

2.Dialog tags

“What’s a dialogue tag?” you ask.

“It’s the little bit of verbiage that’s attached to a line of dialogue and tells you who’s speaking,” I say.

“And you want to eliminate them?” you ask.

“Not all of them. Just the unnecessary ones,” I say.

“But aren’t they always necessary?” you ask. “If you don’t have them, won’t you get confused about who’s speaking?”

“No.”

Come to think of it, in my first example, there are only two people in the conversation, and it’s obvious from context who would say what. The sentence above should probably read,

“Adam tried so hard to have everything today the way your mother wanted. ”

3.Telling and showing

You know the line, right? “Show, don’t tell.” It means that it’s better to demonstrate a character’s motives or feelings or whatever through dialogue or action than by explaining. I get that, and I’m pretty good at showing. I also have a tendency to tell as well as show. (My husband will confirm that I don’t just do this in my writing. I’ll say, “Monday is Memorial Day.” And then I’ll add, “So we shouldn’t put out the recycling Sunday night.” And then I’ll feel compelled to explain, “Because the town doesn’t pick up recycling on national holidays. And Memorial Day is a national holiday. So we should wait and put it out on Monday night.” It’s a wonder we’re still married.)

Here’s how it works in my writing:

Laurel hesitates, letting the bristles prick her fingers as she remembers all the times Mouse brushed her knotted hair.

Well, sure she hesitates. You can see that in what she does while she hesitates. That sentence might be stronger this way:

Laurel lets the bristles prick her fingers as she remembers all the times Mouse brushed her knotted hair.

4.Too many sub-actions

This is sort of like #3. It seems I’m not content to get the character out of the car. I have to document each step in the procedure – grabbing the door handle, pulling it forward, pushing the door out, putting one leg on the ground, etc. Okay. I’m exaggerating. But how about this?

 Neil steps forward with a grateful smile, his hand raised like a kid asking to be called on in class.

Unless the individual steps show something important (fingers fumbling, a fist swinging harder than intended, something spilling), why not just say what happens?

Neil raises his hand like a kid asking to be called on in class.

5.Too many examples

I managed to keep this list to just five items, but my natural tendency is to include every last thing that comes to mind. The house in my book is based on the house where I grew up. After my mother died in 1999, the house was sold. Setting my book there let me spend more time in a place I loved and missed. As I looked around the rooms in my mind, remembering more and more details, I had trouble not writing down every last paperclip and dust bunny. When I was revising, I spent a lot of time pondering sentences like this one:

Fringed cowboy vests and crushed plastic firefighter helmets and slippery skeleton suits spill from the costume box.

Could I have lost one of those details? Maybe. In this case, I kept them all.

How was it that after going over this book a billion times, I still found things to fix? Maybe it’s the advantage of having more distance. Maybe I’ve become a better writer. Or maybe the passages I fixed were newer material, which hadn’t gone through as many rewrites as the rest. In lots of cases, I was taking out things I’d put in as I figured out what was happening. Maybe those excess words are the extra seeds you sow, because until they sprout, you don’t know which ones you’ll keep, and which you’ll end up thinning out.

Are You Writing This Down?

I have been reading (and re-reading) Alison Bechdel’s just-released Are You My Mother?

If you don’t know about Alison Bechdel, you should. Her lefty lesbian soap-opera comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For ran in alternative newspapers for 25 years, and earned her legions of dedicated fans. In 2006 she published her first graphic memoir, the critically acclaimed Fun Home, which examines her closeted gay father’s probable suicide through the lens her own coming out as a lesbian. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? purports to be about her relationship with her (still very much alive) mother. But it’s also several interwoven essays — about mother-infant bonding, psychotherapy, the perils of mining your life for literary material, and the difficult and fraught process of writing Are You My Mother?

Turns out it’s trying to write about trying to write about the trying thing you’re trying to write while you’re trying to write it. Who knew?

Are You My Mother? is also about journal-keeping. That’s what I’m thinking about now.

Alison and her mother, Helen, both keep daily journals, but differently. Helen sticks to the externals, treating each entry like a completed to-do list.  Alison documents everything — dreams, flights of self-analysis, even the minutiae of her daily phone calls with her mother, which she secretly transcribes on her computer in real time as Helen chats. And while Helen never re-reads her entries, and sometimes even discards her completed journals, Alison saves everything in such meticulous order that if you asked what she discussed with her shrink the week she got her firewood delivered ten winters ago, she could probably pull out the relevant volume and tell you.

I have kept journals from time to time. I have been sort of irregular about it. For months, I will loyally fill notebook after notebook. Then I’ll stop for no apparent reason, and years will pass before I take the habit up again. Even when I’m out of the habit, I always keep my notebook and a jar of pens by my bed, just in case. When I’m in the habit, I record the major events of the day, what’s on my mind, stuff about my current writing project. In the habit or not, I always record the onsets of my periods, because doctors always ask, and I always feel stupid not remembering.

I started my first serious spell of journal keeping in ninth grade. A well-meaning English teacher who was worried about the crowd I was hanging out with gave me a copy of Go Ask Alice – the supposedly real (but as it turned out, fake) diary of a teenage girl who does drugs and gets in trouble. Mrs. Upton meant it as a warning, but I took it as inspiration. I started keeping my own diary, and when I decided I didn’t have enough interesting material, I started seeking out experiences in order to write them down. The process carried me through high school. And gave me plenty of material.

I had another good run of journal keeping in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a stay-at-home mom trying to squeeze in time to write picture books, short stories, and newspaper stories. Rather than seek out experiences to write about, I welcomed the chance to write about the experiences I was having. I wasn’t just documenting my life and clarifying my thoughts. I was also practicing the art of writing. As much as anything else, keeping a journal was a discipline, a daily exercise in free writing.

I started writing in my current notebook eighteen months ago. So far, I have only managed to fill a few pages. And those consist almost entirely of lists of dates followed by the word, period. To read it, you would think that since September, 2010 I did nothing but monitor my bodily functions. My daughter’s wedding, my son’s first solo art show, trips to Denmark and France, visits with family, hopes and frustrations around my writing career, taking up running, planting a garden, a blizzard and a hurricane all go unrecorded.

Why? Because rather than saving my thoughts for a journal, I can tweet, update my status statement on Facebook, or, if I really feel like I have something to say, write a blog post; and once I’ve mentioned whatever it is in one of those places, no matter how thoughtlessly, I’m ready to move on. So topics that might merit closer scrutiny get lost. And since I censor what I put out there for the world to see, I end up never writing about lots of topics I really care about. Damn.

After I started writing this post last night, I went upstairs to bed. On the table beside me were the book I’m currently reading (Alice Munro’s short story collection Friend of My Youth) and, under it, that nearly empty, 18-month-old notebook. I took out the notebook and plucked the best, smoothest-writing ballpoint pen from my jar, and I started free-writing.

I had thought that my fingers had become so accustomed to the keyboard that they couldn’t produce decent longhand anymore. I was wrong.

I had thought that I had nothing to say. Wrong again.

And I had thought that after spending the whole day revising my novel and then composing this post, I would have gotten the sheer joy of writing out of my system. Wrong, wrong, wrong.