Novels High School Teachers Teach: version #4 is in the books

Tags

John Updike, Rabbit Run

In The Books

I am writing novels. I wrote a novel just this November for NaNoWriMo. No, it is not a readable let alone publishable story. I think I know the differences. My November drafts are forays, experiments, and practice. I pick a rather random idea and write to it. I do some structural planning, but I do not put much thought into them. This might seem bad, but for me it is good. I have no limits when I write, no outline to guide my creative process. I follow enough scene-level form to keep me on the straight and narrow; I don’t need more.

I have five novels in the works, 2010 through 2014. I ran for a year with 2010 just because that was all I had in the hopper. It grew to 80,000 words and I am still fairly happy with its characters and ideas. But it takes place in Newfoundland, and it makes me uncomfortable. What right do I have to write about that province and their peoples’ events? If you have read February by Lisa Moore, you might catch my drift. By the way, she is coming here in February 2015 and we are so excited!

I also ran for a year with my 2011 novel. It is a long Canadian epic at 120,000 words, and it screams for twenty thousand more. My reading suggests publishers want short first novels, something less risky. And lets face it. Two years of fiction writing does not a writer make. I knew I needed to improve my knowledge and skills of this craft. Craft. Let’s all remember that writing is hard and it takes broad and in-depth knowledge and experience. I wasn’t there yet; I am not there now. There are also rumors of grant money for Canadian stories in 2017, the country’s 150th anniversary. I decided to let it sit.

My 2012 story excited me from its conception. I had nothing but an image in my head on October 15th. After two weeks of active brainstorming and diffuse thinking, the premise came to me. W5 plus how. I was excited that first day of writing, and the excitement stayed with me for the month. Yes, there have been ups and downs. I have asked myself a lot of hard questions. I have put my story and my skills up against firing squads. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendia, we have both survived. Unlike the good colonel, I hope to someday emerge from my solitude. I concluded edit pass number four this past week on December 15th, 2014.

So what to do next? Approach an agent? Pass it on to more beta readers? Let is soak? Stick my head into it again? I have two marked up version #3 manuscripts from beta readers I have not even looked at yet. I pouted for a few days, celebrated my daughter’s 25th birthday on Friday, and I printed out the first six scenes, 83 pages. I went to Starbucks, ordered a Venti coffee, and read the cut off MS. I marked it up as I read with a fountain pen I had lost for seven months (we moved) and an ink I haven’t used in a while.

I found myself marking up many words, phrases, and sentences. I clarified some things and unpacked others. Nothing particularly major but every page was becoming marked up with violet ink. Most changes were to make the sentences clearer. I changed “these” to “those” a few times. I removed much thinking, mostly “know” and “feel.” But I also added some literary flair:

He gave up on being a dad before he met Jill, and she had not changed his mind. “I don’t know how to be the father I never had; I can’t become him.”

I refuse to say if it is good writing, but some of my additions made my heart thump. The good part was I was happy with the story structure. My second and third scenes have always been bloated, and pass #4 was designed to remove bloating. Still, most of my changes this weekend were significant enough to warrant another serious pass. I concluded I need to continue with this edit before I let anybody else read it. I am focusing on the writing and not so much the structure; though I have already killed a significant paragraph. Today I updated 40 pages of changes and modified some of the mark-ups.

I am setting a short deadline of January 15th as my drop-dead date. It currently sits at close to 122,000 words, so this will be an intense few weeks. But it should be a fast edit. Hopefully most of the scene shuffling is over with. Hopefully I can focus on the writing and get it to where it needs to be, to where I want it.

Oh, I made a stunning discovery. I have been reading John Updike’s Rabbit Run and I learned it is one of the early, well regarded use of third person present tense which I use in my story. Like me, Updike drifts up and down in his perspectives. I probably drift more than he does, and I incorporate much reflective past tense as well. Unlike Updike who changes perspectives — sometimes it’s Rabbit and sometimes it’s Eccles — mine stays in one person’s head. In only a handful of places at most do I hint at drifting away. 

One of my beta readers made an interesting comment as we chatted briefly about it. “It reads like one of those novels your high school teacher asks you to read and you never forget.” My line of the year 🙂

The best writers give themselves the most permissions.

Tags

In Football Season, John Updike, The Music School

Sandford Lynne has written a very popular book on poetry titled “Writing Poetry From The Inside Out.” Thank you Robert Brewer and the fine participants over at Poetic Asides for the recommendation. I am not recommending this book though, at least not yet. It is a beginner’s book and I am a beginning, ignorant poet, yet the book bothers me. Me. I am looking for nuts and bolts and so far the author has only given his attempted inspiration. I am on page 67 and until now it has all been writing BS — “You can do it!” Pfft. I know that; I just don’t know how.” But on with my point I feel so self-secure about.

In the last paragraph of Chapter #4 the author leaves us with his legacy. When I read it I stopped, and not because it is the end of the chapter. I re-read it and re-read it. I have read it several times now, and I have Googled it. Many have written about his lines on this page number 31. I’ll present his full text since I always seem to skip the most important parts when I truncate.

When I think about it, the happiest, most successful, most fulfilled people I know are the ones who, over time, gave themselves the most permissions — in all areas of their lives. Guided by the compass of an inner truth, they did not wait for others to tell them what was okay to do, or wait for others to tell them which steps to take. Through trial and error, they learned how to experiment with their lives. And maybe this is worth underscoring: The best writers give themselves the most permissions. The happiest, most fulfilled people give themselves the most permissions. The two go hand in hand.

I am writing about this prescription to let it go because it has been a theme with me this past year. I run a prompt writing group, and this is really our one and only theme. Let it go! I have written poetry, essays, fiction, and pages full of landfill. I have turned a few of them into novel scenes and maybe one short story. Time flies. Every Wednesday night when it isn’t blizzarding I let myself go as much as I can.

I think I wrote not too long ago about my Douglas Glover workshop. On the way out he encouraged me with some direct advice. “Let it go!” I don’t know if those were his words; he probably said something more elegant. But that was the message. Let it go. Give yourself permission to go for it, and damn it all, go for it!

But an aphorism is useless without action. Words are just words, unless you are writing them. Or reading them. Yesterday I began my first John Updike read. I’ve been picking up his little novels for over a year now, but I have never managed to hold one open in front of me long enough to let anything sink in. I am notorious for that — reading a paragraph and brushing it off. I a a profligate first paragraph reader and a delinquent last paragraph finisher. I grabbed his short story collection “The Music School.” It was first published in 1962 and is almost as old as I am. Some of the stories, maybe all, are likely older. So let’s start from my beginning, I thought. How bad can this be?

The first sentence and the paragraph of the first story — “In Football Season” — hooked me.

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn?

Are you serious? Of course I do. I paused while my mind raced back to chasing my wife at university in the autumn of 1979 and remembering her fragrance. My mind continued back to junior high school in 1973 when my interest in girls had exploded open in that young teenage hormonal irruption. The fragrance of girls at the school dances and on the mile and a half walks to and from school each day.

As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seem to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Updike knew his opening sentence would create many of these sensations on its own, but now he directs them towards us. He tells our histories to come alive and be remembered. And then once he has us, at least us knuckle dragging men, he then directs us to the football field. And now we’re all hooked on John Updike.

But was this giving permission in action? What does giving permission mean and how do you know if you’ve given yourself permission? These are questions I ask of my own writings. Am I giving enough?

First, how many grown men would write about the fragrance of young teenagers? How many would write past glancing references and delve into flirtations and implicit inviting crescents? In today’s pedophilia-phobic society? In 1960? Any way you cut it, John Updike explored emerging sexuality without inhibition — at least by 1960’s standards — and went so far as to publish his words. I think it is pretty clear he gave himself permission to explore and write about all facets of the human condition. And the more I read John Updike, the more I fall in love with his free pen. The more I read John Updike, the freer I feel with my own writing hand.

Write on!