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.

But I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they do not vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. It is this, and not senility, that is the real second childhood. … As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.
(THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY, 1970, Penguin 1990, p. 233)

And Davies gets off so many great lines:

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain—in short, a man. (p. 3)

But before Paul’s birth, he had loved her because she was the blood of his heart; now he seemed to love her on principle. (p. 38)

After the marathon reading, and a great discussion during book club, I find the lure of the next two books in the series, THE MANTICORE and WORLD OF WONDERS, nearly irresistable. Especially intriguing is the idea that the next book has a different narrator, so we readers will see old scenes (and the first narrator) in different lights. What luxury!

But my new year’s resolve has not yet slaked, and I know first I must finish the second half of NORTH AND SOUTH, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story is set very close to the time I set my latest work-in-progress, and she uses the same great reportorial eye and style she did in MARY BARTON, which is set earlier. I’d gleaned great ideas and details and modes of speech from the first half of N&S, but somehow had stalled out on reading it. I blamed holiday travel and a fierce dive into first revisions (for story) on my WIP, but opening it again, I remember the real reason. She is just too good.

“You think it strange. Why?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (NORTH AND SOUTH, 1855, Norton Critical Edition 2005, p. 109)

Gaskell also shows raw emotions expressed through action, as in the so-painful scene where Margaret turns down Mr. Thornton’s offer of marriage (pp. 174-8). And, the part that makes my head spin, she’s writing contemporary, not historical, fiction.

The darkness of January descends: I can’t match this historical accuracy, this raw emotion, I shouldn’t even try. I should write about my own time; after all, the themes I’m working are resonant now. But my attempts at contemporary have been clumsy, and I’m so slow that neither of the two contemporary manuscripts I’ve finished works for plot now: In one, the woman is a reporter in a style that was true when I was a reporter, all of five years ago, but isn’t true now; in the other, written four years ago, the protagonist invents a new app on the computer that somebody real invented two years ago. But if I want to say anything “real,” and be believed, I should do it in my own time.

I know the counter-arguments, and I have good reasons for writing historical (like I do want to write about Peterloo), but in the darkest days of the year, these arguments feel ephemeral. And there’s a snowstorm, so I have to shovel. And N&S sits unread.

And then my company announces it is closing its only office in town and laying off nearly all of us. So I flee.

I land in the last Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell I haven’t read, BEFORE THE FROST. This too, is an alternate-view story: Wallander as seen and felt from his daughter Linda’s point of view. She describes his hair-trigger anger, and we see it reflected in her own expressions of anger. I especially enjoyed how she resolves her childhood impressions of him with how she sees him working as a detective, and how she tries to resolve her choice to become a police officer with what has come before. Other father-daughter relationships in the book trace other trajectories. As always, I wonder how much I miss because this is translated.

Done with that, and still skirting N&S (which continues to travel back and forth to work in the messenger-bag), I glom onto AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. He’s been in the news, and in love, and I remember he does that hyper-real detail thing even in the stories that carry a lot of fantasy, as well as solid storytelling, and the book has been on my shelf forever and is recommended by the spouse (who says read ANANSI BOYS right away after). And, like Davies, this story wonders at why people want marvels, how they create their own marvels, and how people who feed them their marvels fare. Fun read, watching the stories told and re-told, and seeing how a longer form can carry a lot of short-story structure (like history passages that don’t slow the main narrative drive), you just have to remember to wrap it up better at the end.

So I’m cruising along and bam—on p. 99—he uses the word “manticore,” which is, you’ll remember, book 2 of the Deptford trilogy. It’s a Sign, so I seek out our copy of the trilogy, but spouse is deep into it and won’t give it up and aren’t I supposed to be reading N&S? Fine. I return to AG, and enjoy the “that’s my life!” references to the northern midwest (pasties, yoopers, those sports-team signs) as well as references to the potential that “It’s a Wonderful Life” could be a depressant and – hello – references to brain science:

She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought that when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
…
“I bet it’s like the space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow.
(AMERICAN GODS, Harper 2001, p. 133)

Soon enough, I’m through the book and dashed if it isn’t another snowpocalypse outside, saving me the trouble of immediately deciding which follow-up book to read (N&S is now under a pillow on the living room couch). This morning, no newspaper delivery so we’re reading books at breakfast, and the spouse shouts and chortles several times as he finishes WORLD OF WONDERS. “You must read this now,” he says, “so I can talk about it.”

But first, just one little chapter of N&S.

After I clear some more snow.

How the writing is going: Stuck in pre-revision molasses, but better to slowly look at everything now than rush like last time and discover my “fixes” messed up the plot. Ran through all the pages looking for plot points that don’t pay off, then noting characters that have too much or too little weight. This week I look at locations and setting.

Next book-club book: HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson

It gave me so much to chew on (the story of modern India, travel, what it means to be family, what superpower I would want, whether if I dropped to part-time to concentrate on fiction writing I could produce something even remotely like this about my country), that I haven’t read any fiction in more than a week. I keep picking up novels and reading the first few paragraphs at most, then setting them down, not quite ready to start. (OK, that’s published fiction. I did read my NaNo novel through twice already, as part of revising it, but that’s editing, not travel and adventure and escape.)

I didn’t like but did enjoy the narrator, telling his own story as if it were the center of the Indian universe, which, in perhaps less-extreme form, we all think of our own stories.

If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of that nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?
(from MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, (1981) 2006 Random House trade paperback edition, p. 319)

(I like how when I typed that in, Word said, “run-on sentence. Change?” Actually, no.)

My favorite story-parts included the grandfather’s courting his bride (and the various iterations of a sheet throughout the story), the sister’s childhood strength and her mutation to Jamila Singer, and the crazy-ghost Sundarbans jungle scenes. I didn’t enjoy the “present day” parts, where Saleem is writing and annoying his girlfriend Padma, but even that thread brings a fun part right at the end, as she giddily recognizes herself in the narrative.

Saleem’s final wrap-up metaphor sees his years, and India’s, as a series of flavors of pickles, “special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans . . . believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.” (p. 530) (Rushdie’s ellipses, my bolding–I’m adopting this as my new retort!)

As a victim of too many writing seminars, I also loved this line: “From ayah to Widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victime, persists in seeing himself as the protagonist.” (p. 272, italics Rushdie’s). Saleem could not be the hero of a series romance; they are required to act, and usually act heroically. He reacts, and often even his reaction is passive, yet he believes he and his fellow children, born in the first hour of India’s political rebirth, are “the gods you never had” (p. 504).

While the book doesn’t end on a happy note, and one of its themes is that optimism is a disease, still there is the promise of the new generation of gods, including the baby Sinai, who should be grown to young adults by now. Do you see them?

Next up for bookclub: FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been doing. I cannot answer as you want me to do, and yet I should feel so sorry if I vexed you.”
(From NORTH AND SOUTH (1855) Norton critical edition 2005, p. 58)

She is just as direct about what she as a southern stranger sees in the northern town of Manchester, as the city girds for a factory-workers’ strike:

“You think it [Manchester society] strange. Why?”

“I don’t know—I suppose becaue, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.”
(NORTH AND SOUTH, p. 109)

While “vexed” may date the first extract, there’s nothing in the wording that would make you think it was written more than 150 years ago. And it’s just as true now, feels just as impossible, and just as sad.
This story wasn’t deep history to Gaskell; hers is a “contemporary novel.” Reading it challenges me to see if I can write such a clear commentary on my own times. After my first couple of manuscripts came out so flat, I decided I couldn’t, and my next ones and this new NaNo one I’ve planned are set as historicals. They still treat common themes (meaning of family, definition of home, roles of women, one’s place and duty to one’s society) that are relevant in my times, but at a safe distance.

Maybe it’s time to try for currency as well as relevance again. Or maybe this is just cold-feet-just-as-the-writing-project-starts pondering; a familiar refrain. We’ll see how I feel on the backside of a month of novelwriting frenzy.

p.s. Our bookclub read this month was BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat. Lovely but slight, it read to me like a lyrical series of short stories with not much sinew between. A great voice, and another story of generations of women struggling and surviving, as in our previous reads, HOUSE OF SPIRITS and BRIEF, WONDEROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO.

Next month (Dec.): MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie.

The narrator catches up with Oscar in college:

He seemed like the same to me. Still massive–Biggie Smalls minus the smalls–and still lost. Still writing ten, fifteen, twenty pages a day. Still obsessed with his fanboy madness. Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In F***ing Elvish! (Please don’t ask me how I know this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De Leon, you gotta be kidding. Elvish?

Actually, he coughed, it’s Sindarin.

Actually, Melvin said, it’s gay-hay-hay.

(From THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Riverhead Books edition, pp172-3)

I can see how the writer might have wondered how to structure the story, with so much that is powerful in the past of the main story, but what he came up with works well. A long short story that ran in the New Yorker in 2000 shows how the structure changed over time.

Some in my group weren’t fond of the footnotes, but it was an efficient way to get backstory on Trujillo and sidetracks into the book and yet not mar the breakneak flow of the story. I liked the notes, the way I liked the geek references, because they brought me back to the time I encountered them first (in this case of fun footnotes, in David Foster Wallace essays in the Atlantic). I do wonder, though, if this sort of page layout will translate onto an iPhone or eReader–will books with these sort of footnotes be among the last that really do need to be published?

Another footnote-related thought came out of my other reading this month. I bought editions of both MARY BARTON by Elizabeth Gaskell and SHIRLEY by Charlotte Bronte that contained footnotes and endnotes, explaining history and literary references in the text, because I don’t know all that much about England in the mid-1800s. OSCAR WAO is so rich in detail and “insider moves”; will even today’s readers who aren’t in the exact demographic read it and miss the implications inherent in his observation that times had changed for Oscar because the stores were selling Magic: The Gathering rather than D&D paraphernalia? Will this book require a Norton critical edition before its 10th anniversary edition? Or can we make do with just the online “annotated Oscar Wao.”

I also enjoyed reading about writing and writers with persistence, especially the image “paginas en blanco” for missing history, whether a country’s or a family’s or my own. And this little gem:

What is it with Dictator and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar–Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X–Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.
(OSCAR WAO, footnote, p.97)

Next up: BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat

I don’t know why I’m still surprised, but of course writers using distant omniscient point of view could well describe the thoughts and motivations of their people, treat subjects and events with realism, and experiment with form. Bronte, as in the more-famous JANE EYRE, breaks the fictional wall by talking directly to the reader (“Reader, I married him” being the classic line from JE). A paragraph into SHIRLEY, we read:

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you, something unromantic as Monday morning…

(from SHIRLEY, Penguin Classics edition 2006 (1849))

Of course, part of the story is a romance, and melodrama. The characters must suffer mightily, in deed and in mind, before some find their happy ending. And Bronte even includes a sort of epilogue, showing a few characters further on in life, reaping what they sowed during the story.

Some parts rang so true they made me laugh out loud. In my day job, I read about a lot of cognitive science research, including the benefits of exercise on the brain and mind. Not that it’s anything new:

‘My dear! You are surely not superstitious?’

‘No, Mrs Pryor; but I think I grow what is called nervous. I see things under a darker aspect than I used to do. I have fears I never used to have — not of ghosts, but of omens and diastrous events; and I have an inexpressible weight on my mind which I would give the world to shake off, and I cannot do it.’

‘Strange!’ cried Shirley. ‘I never feel so.’ Mrs Pryor said nothing.

‘Fine weather, pleasant days, pleasant scenes are powerless to give me pleasure,’ continued Caroline. ‘Calm evenings are not calm to me; moonlight, which I used to think mild, now only looks mournful. Is this weakness of mind, Mrs Pryor, or what is it? I cannot help it: I often struggle against it: I reason; but reason and effort make no difference.’

‘You should take more exercise,’ said Mrs Pryor.

(SHIRLEY, p. 227)

A big theme is the place of women in the world, or as heroine Caroline Helstone, 18, puts it ‘Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it?’ As is still true in some societies, most women in the early 1800s weren’t taught much and many weren’t expected to do much–certainly not go to work, if they were ladies. For a person who thinks and strives (and already has a staff to do all the housework and child-rearing), that doesn’t leave much.

And their worst tyrants were often of their own gender (I’m reminded of those morality-police ladies at the Iran-Germany women’s soccer match in the documentary ‘Football under cover’). Any straying from the path is called-out and castigated, if silently, as in this scene of Shirley singing a ballad containing words of passionate love:

Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness; she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one.

On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat — semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her — none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunneley looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was is proper to sing with such expression, with such originality — so unlike a school-girl? Decidedly not: it was strange; it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.

(SHIRLEY, pp 509-510)

The tone is aggressive, ironic, off-putting, pessimistic and sometimes angry. In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Lucasta Miller describes the many ways it is so different from Bronte’s first, JANE EYRE, with its tighter narrative and first-person intimate voice. But the canvas of SHIRLEY is wider, and the external conflict far greater–between classes, between manufacturer and labor, between women who won’t fit a mold and their elders and youngers who would force them to.

For example, last month I read the short history Waterloo to Peterloo in between seeing films at the fabulous 5th annual Traverse City film festival, and it seemed so many of the films we saw included some scene of social-justice confrontation parallel to what I was reading about. Some were obvious: Burma VJ (monks lead the masses; army shoots), The Garden (L.A. cops surround community farmers as the farmers protest the unreasonable loss of their land; the farmers lose), Songs for a Revolution (civil rights protesters sit at tables and walk down streets; police and/or mobs attack them), and the heart-ripping Rachel (peace activist Rachel Corrie stands up to a bulldozer in Gaza; she is crushed to death).

Some of the parallels were subtle: The Cove (animal rights activists try to take photos; Japanese fishers and lackeys stand in front of the cameras), Football Under Cover (German women’s soccer team tries to arrange a game against the Iranian national women’s soccer team; bureaucracy and clothing laws threaten every step). Even the one drama we saw, Everlasting Moments (a dramatic memoir) includes a dockworkers’ strike in which people are killed (and Finns are dissed). (We did see the non-confrontational Everlasting Moments, too, a meditation about a Michigan undertaker who writes amazing essays and poetry, and Waterland, about the aches and pains of the Great Lakes.)

I shouldn’t be surprised. Storytelling thrives on conflict, and what better way to show it than people facing one another down? But somehow in my post-racial, post-new-age sunshine-glazed fog, I thought we didn’t do so much of this yelling and wilful misunderstanding anymore.

But then these health insurance reform meetings started, with so much shouting and so little listening, and it’s feels like post-war regency England around here. Except Peterloo protesters were more polite, marching and chanting, sure, but also singing “God Save the King” and listening to the speakers. None of them carried a weapon to the meeting, not a pike, not a blunderbuss, and certainly not an assault rifle.

What interests me about this moment in English history is that it is such a clear turning point. Sweeping changes permanently altered English society, from who owns the land and polices the streets to who chooses the government. The people in the middle of it couldn’t see all the facets of these changes, just their more-or-less narrow field of vision; and they reacted in well-meaning ways that sometimes helped and sometimes hurt themselves and others. It took more than 30 years to settle out; England in 1840 was radically different than in 1810.

I feel that we here, now, are in a similar fold in the fabric of society, where things are changing around us but we’re in the dip in the fabric and can’t see truly what is happening. I don’t know that our technology will make these painful social changes go any faster; people are slow processors. And we, in the crease, are reacting in our own varied, well-meaning ways that may help or harm, who knows? How many of us see the whole picture?

None?

Here’s about half of the floor. Sales totaled more than $60,000, all for charity.