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Making the turn

So yeah, it’s taking longer than I thought, but this story is even better than I thought, so there. I’ll be running silent, running deep until vacation in a couple weeks. I really want to be done with this pass and take a complete break, but as the parents say, “we’ll see.”

On scene 50 of 98. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves, finished scene notecards below and cut-up pages of old manuscript under that. I am the queen of cut-and-tape this revision. Pages not yet started on are on the bottom, with the remaining scene cards above them (look, part of the shelf is empty!). “Blank” pages are in the center. I’ve gone through 257 of the 417 first-draft pages; the final scenes are shorter than the early scenes, but there’s also a lot of new writing coming up.

(p.s. comment if you want to see the whole, gory work area!)

Posted 14 July 2010 † nickyp § Learning § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Deja Vu, Peterloo

I am busy, but just stumbled on the first news stories on the Saville report, which exonerates the protesters during the Bloody Sunday “riot,” after decades of decrying them. I want to read more on it later, but this item just screamed out at me:

Reported in The Guardian, “Bloody Sunday: the Saville report live”:
“This was the Guardian’s leader column on the killings the day after Bloody Sunday. It begins:”

The disaster in Londonderry last night dwarfs all that has gone before in Northern Ireland. The march was illegal. Warning had been given of the danger implicit in continuing with it. Even so, the deaths stun the mind and must fill all reasonable people with horror. And yet it is too soon to be sure of what happened. The army has an intolerably difficult task in Ireland. At times it is bound to act firmly, even severely.

Posted 15 June 2010 † nickyp § History ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Off-line, on deadline

So, I’ll be running silent, running deep for a bit (like, 4-5 weeks) as I plow through the big second-draft revise. This pass includes the massive plot revise, character sharpening and combining, story rearranging, scene setting, and fluff cutting. I’m finding this nearly as hard as the scene-for-scene cards I did in April, and for a much, much longer stretch. A weekend and a bag of Tostitos won’t cut it this time.

Below is the current work-table. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves; pages not yet started on are on the bottom , scrap paper, notebook paper, and cards fill the rest. Today’s count: 21 finished, 390 not finished, scene 4 in progress.

In the foothills of the mountain, looking up, up, up. Wish me luck!

Posted 11 June 2010 † nickyp § Learning § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

What are your favorite books about the brain?

Over at the Dana Foundation, we are gathering a list of the best neuroscience books for general readers, to publish later this year in our Cerebrum e-magazine. Our current list was published in 1999, so it’s time for an update.

Please help us out by taking our quick survey.
You can name just one book, or as many at ten. Just name, author, and reason why — we won’t collect your name or e-mail; we just want your opinion.

Thanks!    Take the survey

Posted 10 June 2010 † nickyp § Books § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) °

Satire, 1819-style

From my research-pile, a snippet of one of the snarky songs of the late Regency period:

WHEN full sedition’s stalking through the land,
It then behoves each patriotic band
     Of Noble Minded Yeomen Cavaliers;
To sally forth and rush upon the mob,
And execute the Magisterial Job
     Of cutting off the Ragamuffin’s ears.

HOW valiantly we met that crew
Of infants, men and women too,
Upon the Plain of Peterloo,
And gloriously did hack and hew
     The d—–d reforming gang;
Our swords were sharp you may suppose,
Some lost their ears—some lost a nose,
Our horses trod upon their toes
E’re they could run t’ escape our blows,
     With shrieks the welkin rang.

— from “ ‘The Renowned Atchievements of Peter-Loo’ by Sir Hugo Burlo Furioso Di Mulo Spinissimo, BART. M.Y.C. and A.S.S.,” which I found at the Manchester Education Wide Area Network site. Here’s a direct link to the full lyrics.

Posted 25 May 2010 † nickyp § History § Learning § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Science-celebrity mocking two-fer

Great mock-science story in the Onion this week: Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity To Mock Celebrity Culture. I love the “research will continue” and citations of previous studies. And, especially, the kicker. Good job, Onion folks.

Posted 13 May 2010 † nickyp § Just fun ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Learning about learning

This week I attended back-to-back conferences on learning and the brain. The first was held at my favorite art-place, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. I got a few tips on how to space my study hours and what not to say about “learning styles.” You can see my giant story on it on the Dana site:

Busting Some of the Myths of Attention: Multitasking, ADHD, and optimal study times were among the topics as scientists and educators shared their expertise during the “Attention and Engagement in Learning” summit this week.

The second event was the 3-day Learning & the Brain conference, held at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in DC. The topic this year also was attention and motivation; I learned a lot more science this year than the one last year. Another writer is doing the story on that one, but I’ll have some short stuff for the blogs later on it.

Posted 09 May 2010 † nickyp § Brain science § Learning ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Housekeeping

Last month’s book-club pick was Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING, and it has taken me weeks to decide how I feel about it. Actually, I knew how I felt right away but discounted it because it doesn’t seem to match the tide of accolades the book has received. But I just didn’t enjoy it.

It seems to have nearly everything I like about books—marvelous language, flowing imagery, interesting out-of-step characters and unique setting. But, for me, it doesn’t hold together as a novel.
In some cases, while the description of the land and their living is so detailed, other major tent-pole markers go missing. For example, the grandfather worked on the trains, and died in a derailment when the train went into the water, as described in the first chapter. I didn’t realize till much later that the derailment was in the very town he lived in, which changed the weight of the water imagery for me. It still doesn’t make sense why I should have assumed that: (1) there are many waterways in America that trains run by, the chance it would be the home-water are slim, and (2) if they were that close to the station, the train would be slowing down, not barreling across a bridge.

Also, I had only the vaguest sense of time – they’re wearing jeans, and they jump trains, so sometime between 1930 and now. There doesn’t seem to be a social worker when the girls drop out of school, so sometime before 1980. Does it matter? It did to me. I actually went to Wikipedia later to discover that I was supposed to know that a novel one character was reading was published in 1954, so I would then know roughly when this story takes place.

And this narrator, who dropped out of school and doesn’t show evidence of mighty reading or checking a dictionary when she does, drops words like immiscible, fenestration, lucifactions, calyx, spillet, and parturition into her story. Hearing those words in her voice was jarring for me. Part of the story is about the reader’s discovering how Ruth’s interpretations of events (“finding” the rowboat, what flooding meant for the house’s foundation) doesn’t match our interpretation (stealing the rowboat, the foundation is unsafe). That her narration uses these words makes it also untrue, as if some smart person were trying to pass herself off as this dreamy, drifty woman. These sort of words are all through the book, and each time I passed each one and wrote them on the inside back cover to look up (me, with the master’s degree in English), my faith in the narrator weakened. By the end, I thought she was a big pretender and I’m not sure what she says happened in the end really happened.

I was also put off by the “promises” the story starts with that it doesn’t keep. For example, at the start of the story there is deep detail about the narrator’s grandfather, then his grandmother and all her daughters. They are so lovingly detailed I expected we would hear more about them, but we don’t—or not all of them. One became a missionary and disappears out of the story (not even a note, that I remember). I read this over a weekend, and remember waiting to hear something later about this missionary-daughter, who was so important she got a description at the start, but never did. Why is this daughter even in the story? To paraphrase Checkov on playwriting: Don’t have a gun on the wall in Act 1 if you’re not going to fire it in Act 2.

The one that led me to close the book for the night, though, comes later:

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again.
(HOUSEKEEPING, Picador 1980, p. 111)

Argh! I just spent time picturing this dog, making her history, guessing what part she would play in the story, and she’s not in the story ever again. This is the sound of a book hitting the wall.
This is why Crip is in the story:

She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods. (p. 111)

Again, beautiful, beautiful writing. And again, unbelievable. I’m more inclined to think that the experience of being caught outside overnight with no shelter and trapped by dark dreams would be a better explanation for the “somberness.” If it wasn’t for book club, I would not have read on; I’m glad I did. But I’m not running out to pick up another of these books.

One of the many things that worked for me was the consistent imagery of water as dangerous, deadly, dark, mysterious. I know that is true—every time I step into Lake Michigan I think of all the dead mariners somewhere below—but I quickly shake off that image with my preferred view that water is life-giving, healthy, and good, and dive in. The cumulative images and descriptions in the text did a great job of persuading me to the other point of view, to a better balance.

I also liked being reminded that a person outside looking through a window at a cozy family inside is not always envious, not always wanting the same thing or anything like it.

Also, there are so many great lines: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds true workings.” (p. 116) “They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.” (p. 131) “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” (p. 159)

Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver

Posted 30 April 2010 † nickyp § Books § Playing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

G. Helen, R.I.P.


My maternal grandmother died earlier this week, only days after her 103rd birthday. She was a long-distance grandma, but reliable, and she loved sending and receiving letters, which meant I practiced writing from an early age. This is my favorite childhood photo of Grandma Helen, sharing one of our favorite things to do–reading. I also like remembering that for a very brief time I was a blonde.

Posted 20 April 2010 † nickyp § Reading § Thinking ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Second draft hurtles into view

So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth.

This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the night in between (after I’d done two months of on-and-off analysis). I ran out of “meditation” candles in the middle of the night, so had to resort to our REI emergency candle-lantern, at back, to remind me to focus. To further distract my busy-mind, I listened to Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas,” acoustic version, on continuous repeat–more than 300 times. Usually I don’t need candles or tunes; at most I listen to recordings of rain in the forest or waves on a beach. But I wanted to tap those dormant, under-the-consciousness vibes, and it was really a reach this time.

This desk forms the new “fiction corner.” The old desk and closet have been transformed into my work office now that my office office has closed, and it’s easier for me to keep my day job and my night job separate if I am in a separate space while I’m doing them. This has made the room where I keep all this stuff rather cozy. The notes on the left, in the photo below, are taped to the back of a bookshelf.

Here I am going scene by scene through the first draft, comparing it with the new outline (propped up on the right) and reviewing all the plot, scene, setting, conflict, and character notes I’d taken, as well as the actual manuscript (in front). This part took the night shifts over three days (and counting).

The sharp new ideas I was getting during the weekend continued to flow, so I changed some stuff on the fly. I expect more will change in the next few weeks, as I go through the remaining steps to sharpen the characters and make sure every scene has conflict and is driving the story forward.

After I figured out how much would need to change in each scene, I wrote new, color-coded cards, one for each scene. Red is for massive change or a new scene altogether, orange shows one major part is changing but much remains the same, yellow a little less change, and green is for scenes that don’t need much structural change at all. Usually I keep them on a ring (unless I’m shuffling them around); here I spread them out to get a big-picture reading. Scene One is on the left; Scene 93 on the right.

First off, as usual, I began in the wrong place in the story, so it’s all red cards to start. First draft was in summer, with my heroine on her way to a house party; now it’s winter and she’s going to a very small social gathering. I was a little surprised to make this same mistake; I’d done a lot of plotting and character play, and roughed out a pretty-solid sentence-for-scene outline before I started. Que sera sera.

A lot of the red also is thanks to a new, kicking antagonist, who sort of amalgamated himself out of three mildly antagonistic characters in draft one. He is an excellent and formidable foe, but that meant that any scene with the old antagonist or with one of the two other characters in it became at least an orange card, and usually red.

BUT, good news, the middle looks pretty solid. In the past couple of manuscripts, the second and third acts have been textbook examples of “sagging middle syndrome,” where the plot meanders and the characters just talk, talk, talk until the events of the climactic ending finally get rolling. No such problem here, though you can see that my antagonist change has led to a clump of reds at the second turning point. So here the initial rough outline seems to have helped me as I barreled through the NaNoWriMo “just-get-it-down-on-the-page” first-draft marathon.

And then we get to the end, which involves the same time and mostly the same events, but still has massively changed. I realized my people were too passive, riding the waves of major changes and reacting to them but not making any waves themselves. Boring! So I rethought the kind of people they would be and what kind of choices they would make earlier in the story (like around that second turning point) that would roll down the hill and make big boulders crashing here in the fourth act. Now I’m thinking this story could be a real tear-jerker; I might make it a goal to make the reader cry. Twice. For different reasons.

This is a lot of work, and I felt a little bummed when I saw all that red. But this second draft is already so much better a story, I can’t wait to tell it (in the evenings, after I do my day job). The goal with all this analysis, pages, and cards, is to get the story where I want it in one step: a “one-pase revise.” I’m following the system devised by writer Holly Lisle, who is far more organized than me–and far, far more prolific.

I wasn’t as analytical or organized when I revised my other stories, and they went through draft after draft after draft. I think one of them lost all hint of energy from being reworked so many times, and when one of my beta readers reacted to a certain part in one draft, I couldn’t remember if that part was still in my current revision. And it was a sword fight!

Because this one has so many red cards, I’m pretty sure there will be a third draft, but if I can get this one structurally sound, then the third draft can be a quick edit and polish, and I’m still ahead of the game. My goal is to have this ready to submit by December.

How the reading is going: Not well. My head is full of multiple scene possibilities, and I haven’t kept up on my reading. I did get through HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson, which I have opinions about I may share soon, and I got swept into the “Song of Fire and Ice” saga, after reading A GAME OF THRONES for class. Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Barbara Kingsolver.

Posted 07 April 2010 † nickyp § Learning § Reading § Thinking § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,