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.

It’s the last of a three-part traveling forum that started in May at Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C., with “The Paradox of Neurotechnology,” which discussed how people are using new neurotechnologies for treatment and enhancement and whether that might alter what it means to be a human being. In July at Oxford University, “Brain, Mind, and the Nature of Being” explored how neuroscience theories might adapt to encompass the development of a “holistic concept of a human person.”

In New York, the topic will be human subjective experience, including what neuroscience and psychology can tell us about how experience affects our reasoning and morality. One of the presenters is Donald Pfaff, whose Dana Press book THE NEUROSCIENCE OF FAIR PLAY is recommended reading for the conference. Other speakers include Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania and Andrew Newberg, author of the new book HOW GOD CHANGES YOUR BRAIN: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist.

According to conference organizers, one goal of the events is use science to promote a sense of unity and cooperation, a member of the organizing committee says. I’m intrigued by the proposed discussion of morality and ethics as part of “core human ecology,” so you may see me there.

[a version of this post also appears on the Dana Press blog. See more good stuff there.]

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?

“Briefly stated, music is a prostitute,” Brown, director of the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, told his six dozen listeners at the Library of Congress. “Just about everything about music is extra-musical.” For example, music supports prayer and contemplation, dance and movement, story-telling, social bonding, remembering a culture’s memories, and reinforcing morality or ideas such as patriotism.

In Western societies, “we’re so accustomed to thinking about music for music’s sake,” Brown said, but that take on the art is “very rare in terms of musical history and musical culture. Most music has a connection with other things in society. It can reinforce other messages.”

But, one member of the audience asked, why does a passage in Beethoven move me to tears? And, said another, why do I hear a certain thunderous piece of music in my head when I’m angry? These are individual reactions, and true, Brown said. But they aren’t consistent or predictable across cultures or even among similar groups.

“People assume sad music will induce sadness, and it can—but it’s weak,” Brown said. The major induced effect is an aesthetic, thinking sort of response, along the lines of liking or disliking, not a deep emotion. He cited research where people listened to music then described what they thought about the music and what their mood was. Though people identified music as happy, sad, thunderous, and so on, their own moods did not change that much. “You say, ‘it sounds very sad,’ but you don’t feel sad,” he said.

“The best thing I can say about music is it works by representing the general sense of positivity/goodness or negativity/badness,” mostly by changes in contrast via scale sets, such as major and minor scale in Western music, ragas in classical Indian music and dastgahs in Persian music, said Brown, who has co-edited two books of essays, The Origins of Music and Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music.

For me, music in the concert hall or piped into my ears can direct my thinking; a certain soulful Bonnie Raitt song can take me back to the time I first heard it when I was really blue. But my reactions aren’t consistent: last week, hearing that song through my ear-buds “made” me feel bluer, but yesterday when I heard it in the coffee shop my mood didn’t change and instead I thought of the haunting harmonies. Still, I’m only halfway sold on the idea of music as merely a handmaiden; must be my Western-style “musico-centricity” showing.

The lecture was part of the “Music and the Brain” series, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event is March 13; podcasts and some Webcasts of earlier events are also available. [this post also appears on the Dana Press blog—see more good stuff there!]

Turns out there aren’t “rock solid” rules about writing sentences, and people (teachers) who tell you differently aren’t doing you any favors. At the least, they could say that there are many ways to write effectively and engagingly but here are some good rules to follow (though even that is debatable). There are worlds beyond chap-book grammar and the many acronym styles (CMS, AP, MLA). And beyond the five-paragraph essay is the universe.

Can you believe that a guy in Scotland in the 1860s made up the rules for paragraphing, and without thinking about it we parrot him to this day? Rules like, never be anything but clear and direct, keep to one idea in a paragraph, use a “topic” sentence, etc. As if every idea can be boiled down to one statement and built step-by-step in one perfect way. Turns out that if you actually ask people to paragraph, say, a Supreme Court decision, they all do it differently–and few do it the way the court writers did (and the same person divided it differently on different days). But who needs empirical evidence when you can more easily parrot the received wisdom?

Writing isn’t science (don’t get me started), but as a person whose sentences often do not fit the Correct Mold and whose work has on occasion been mangled on its way into print, sometimes I just want to scream, “It’s not wrong if it works! Read it as it lays!”

The teacher on the video, Brooks Landon (highly recommended, can’t dance, loves music), said he learned about generative grammars and such as a grad student in the ’70s, but “building great sentences” fell out of favor later. By the time I hit college, all I got was strict structure in writing class and fierce deconstruction in lit-crit classes. So I came out of school with only the skills I brought in — plus the idea that all writing can be broken down into tiny bits that, really, seriously, down deep, don’t mean anything. Wonder why I didn’t write for pleasure for the next decade?

Luckily, romance novels, graphic novels and the steady stream of classics I read (some in French!) snapped me back into joy. I love writing, sentences, paragraphs, stories and sagas, whatever. It’s sad I had to be 40 before I learned about them, but thank goodness I have. I’m thinking there won’t be any of my high-school or college teacher’s names on my first acknowledgements page.

This all dredges up days long ago. In elementary school, I was part of the horde that was taught “new math.” Handouts about sets and subsets were fresh and fun, sure, but when I got to middle school (in yet another new town), I discovered I didn’t understand much math at all. Like, none. A month or two of scary-red test papers later, I had taught myself the basic stuff and was catching up with the rest of my algebra class. It turns out I’m good in math (high-school math team, hello), but what if I hadn’t been? What about all my friends at the other school? Did they catch up? Thanks, teach, for wrecking us. Makes me grind my teeth.

Later in high school, I remember comforting a friend who was moaning about how she didn’t know grammar, obviously, because she hadn’t scored well on the PSAT. I said pah, SAT style is just a pattern of thinking (rigid structure, serial comma, use the word’s first definition). My teacher overheard me and stomped over to our desks, saying No, there is only one grammar. Luckily, I already knew she was wrong. Unluckily, she made my friend even more despondent.

Turns out even now, I had more writing “instruction” to unlearn. And maybe still more? Guess I’d better look out for more Teaching Company courses.

but we don’t need to hold ourselves up that high.

She aims for a level that would be fun to read two or three times, and then moves on to the next book. I know some of the series writers (such as those who write for Harlequin’s lines) feel pressure to produce 3-4 books a year, both to earn a decent living and to be “marketable.” Write it, edit through it once, and get it out the door.

Reinforcing that attitude, I read in Time magazine this week the article Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature by Lev Grossman, which describes how publishing is changing, and what that means for the type of “content” in a novel:

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

So am I writing for the few that will pay for a “bespoke” edition of novelish content, filtered through the editorial lens of a now-boutique publishing house? Do I want to be constantly updating every novelish piece of content I produce? Am I over-thinking?

On the other hand, I do enjoy romance-novel-style sentiment. And I like the idea of fewer gatekeepers and more chance for the odd-duck work to gain fans and fame. And I don’t like to edit more than three times. And I’m learning how to let go perfection (hello, blog). And I can’t stop progress. So be it.

I, too, am inspired and passionate and hopeful and glad, but I’m also staying at home, watching the news coverage online (cool whistle-stop tour) and the music and pomp on TV. For a month, I’ve been listening to Metro’s and DC’s dire warnings not to take transit or drive in the city, and I believe them. I also think—no, I believe—it is possible to celebrate and give thanks and do good in my own small way.

But as it doesn’t fit the mass-goodwill template, people this week have looked at me askance. “How can you express your joy without being in a shoulder-to-shoulder ocean of humanity?” “How do you show the world your solidarity if you don’t stand exactly like me and do exactly what I do?”

I do know the feeling of solidarity, of rising with the group, of being inspired to perform beyond my ability. I love how helping and giving ricochets back on the giver. I’ve felt it many times before, and I do today—that’s how powerful this weekend is. But most of all, in our days of celebration, I celebrate my freedom to celebrate as I wish. Good job, us!

 • write consistently more than 50 hours per month (12-15 hrs/wk)
• finish 2 submittable books
• build up ideas for 3 new books
• enter 3 RWA-linked writing contests
• volunteer to judge 3 or more writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW Web goddess
• attend 2 writing retreats or classes
• read 50 books
• keep a list of books I read this year (see right)

And you?