Novel Update: Day 1169

On March 16, 2010, I began writing my first novel as an adult.  I had just graduated college with my bachelors in English and an emphasis in Creative Writing, Fiction, and I wasn't going to waste any time.  Just as my professor Ron Carlson told me, I was going to set a precedent for my working life.  The first thing I did after finishing my last college class was start my novel. 

Five days later, I wrote my first blog post on this blog, sending it out into the void.  After 373 days, I finished my first draft.  Now, 3 years, 2 months and 12 days after that day in March, I'm still working on that same novel.

It's been a long and tedious process, mainly because of life.  In those 3 years, I've gotten engaged, then married.  I moved to my first new home since I was 8 years old.  And I've been working full-time 50 miles from my home.  So, really I should be a lot further along.

Writer's Block Doesn't Exist

Sometimes I think we writers like to use "writer's block" as an excuse to explain why they were less productive than they should have been.

I'm not quite sure that writer's block really exists.  True, there are times where the words fly naturally and fluidly off my fingers, and there are times (more often) that I stare at the computer screen and retype the same sentence over and over.

But isn't that how it is with everything?  There are on days and there are off days.

There isn't some mystical force that spreads writer's block germs around.  

The Transition from My to Our

My writing professor in college, Ron Carlson, told me not to go toward my MFA right away; he told me to get some life experience first.  Now, two years after graduation, I understand a little more about what he wanted me to learn.

I guess that is what my blog is about: my experiences, things I've learned, things I'm thinking about and digesting.  To me, portraying life is what writing is all about.

With that being said, recently I've been making the transition in my life from "my" to "our".  After you get married, you are expected for "two to become one flesh".  It's a concept that I hadn't truly began to understand until recently.  In no other time in my life have I really been asked to share truly everything that I have.

Any decision I make is now our decision.  Any purchase my husband makes is now our purchase.  Any choice that my husband makes is now my choice too.  Our house.  Our car.  Our clothes.  Our laundry.  Our dirty dishes.  Our family.  Our life.

I was writing thank you notes today for Christmas gifts.  I had to remind myself to say, "We are so excited about this gift," instead of "I loved your gift!".

Coming at life with this understanding that everything is shared changes everything.  Your life is not the only one on the line; both parties will suffer whatever consequences you make.

What can sound ominous and scary actually brings comfort too.  Our burdens.  Our problems.  They are no longer something that I need to handle on my own.  We're in this together.

My understanding of marriage as a symbol of God's relationship with Him deepens and grows every day.  This transition, though difficult at times, is yet another blessing God has given me, given us.



Soli Deo Gloria. 

Beginnings

I have been slowly picking away at the first edit of my novel. (Editing is such a daunting task.)  Today, I was working on the first chapter.  (No pressure!  First chapter!)  Setting the stage is so important for a story.  It's like the thesis of an essay.  What you say in the beginning dictates what the rest of the novel is going to be about.  Lots of times, it points to the path that your protagonist is going to have to conquer in the story.

You see, story is a lot like this diagram (very crudely drawn with Microsoft Paint) that my professor always drew in class or in crayon on the back of my manuscripts:

The black line is the trajectory of a character's life.  The yellow line is impact from an outside source.  The impact causes the trajectory of the character's life to change to some degree, however big or small.  In order to tell a story, you must first explain what the original trajectory of a character's life would have been.  Otherwise, the reader cannot understand the magnitude/importance/degree to which the character's life was shifted.  Story is explaining the "before", showing the outside source impacting the life, and showing the results/affects the consequently occur.

Thus my predicament with my first chapter.  It is so crucial to the rest of the story.  No pressure!

What's on your fridge?

I came up with this idea last night and thought it would be worth a try.  What could it hurt?  My professor in college, Ron Carlson, was lecturing on scene and talked about how the items in someone's room or car or home or purse demonstrate character.  You don't just want to put any sort of random detail in your description of a room.  You want the descriptions to reflect on the character or situation. 

One of his examples was what is on people's fridges at home.  Is your fridge clean or is it a home for a family of magnets? 

As a way to collaborate with each other, I thought it would be a fun experiment for everyone to post a list of what is on their fridge at home!  We could use the ideas for inspiration for characters in our own writing.  Free gleaning!  And it might just be interesting to see what comes out in that list.  So, either post your list as a comment on this post or post it onto your blog and post a link in the comment section!  A way to share...from one writer to another.

On My Fridge, I have...

1. a letter from an Italian restaurant with a coupon
2. a recipe for steak with garlic butter
3. a 2 year old photo of my 8-year-old cousin
4. an old Christmas card from 2010
5. a giant green Christmas stocking (the kind you get from the 99 cent store!)
6. a grocery shopping list
7. a turtle magnet that I got in Hawaii on my honeymoon
8. a whole bunch of empty clips
9. a free credit card magnet

I hope you participate, glean, and enjoy! 

Guest Blog Post

I had the honor of being able to be a guest blogger on Angela E.J. Koh's blog.  Check it out!

http://angelaejkoh.com/2011/06/27/guest-blogger-cheryl-chen-on-the-writers-stereotype/

Disclaimer

There is the phrase that goes, "Be careful what you do around an author.  You may just show up in their book someday."  or..."Don't ever date a writer. They'll turn you into literature."  Something like that.  I'm sure there are bumper stickers out there or something.

The phrases are true.  I'm sorry, but what else are we to glean from?  Our imagination can only go so far.  And even then, imagination is only creation based off of things that we've experienced.  For characters, any character we create contains bits and pieces of people we've observed or know.  It is not necessarily an insult or an honor to be portrayed in this way; I almost guarantee at least 80% of the time for the average writer the use of your character traits is entirely subconscious.

I wrote this for a writing exercise in college, and the paragraph still means a lot to me.  The exercise was to write a disclaimer for something, so I wrote a disclaimer for books or writing.

I have to warn you.  Most people think that when people write stories, they are fake, fiction, figments of zealous imagination.  But I’m telling you, and perhaps ruining the grand secret: our stories are most often based on truth.  Well, yes, we have to change that one thing, toss in new names, and flip that one pathway around, just to disguise the fact that we aren’t really all that creative but just intrigued by life and its intricacies.  But the hard part may be, for some of us, that our life really isn’t that interesting, so we take these nuggets of truth, little instances and moments, small handfuls of human existence, and try to contain it inside the confines of the written word.  So, what I guess truth in this story is that there is no such thing as pure fiction.  

I don't want to debunk fiction or to make it any less of a creative art.  Its just that I write because I love life.  Everything is so intricate and complex, yet increasingly simple at the same time.  The world is a paradox unto itself, and holds so many mysteries.  I like to create and to make up worlds that don't exist and people that don't exist but somehow are just as real to me as the chair that I am sitting on.  And yes, that was entirely cliché, but hey...I like well-timed clichés now and again.

Have fun gleaning information from people's lives (with respect and discretion, of course).  Ron Carlson used an entire lecture devoted to teaching us how to write examples from real life but disguise them so that the people involved won't be able to tell.  Asking permission is always great, but sometimes you just can't do that.  So change everything, every detail.  If it was set in the summer, put it into the winter.  If it involves a boy named Robby, rename him Edward.  If she has three kids, give her one.  Change all the details.

I think, if one has to define it, creativity is taking pieces of what God has created and fiddling around with them.

Some Personal Theory

So, you want to write a book (a story) that means something.  You want those deep, thought-provoking themes to reveal to the reader something about their own lives and hopefully encourage them to change for the better.

Then you get to writing class, and they tell you can't write toward theme because you will have a bad story.  They say you have to let the story to the leading and let the characters speak for themselves.

You are stubborn and try to write toward theme anyway.  You fail.  You realize that you have to listen to your teacher.

You try writing for yourself, but you are a theme person.  That is just how you are as a writer.  And you are trying as hard as you can to silence the part of your writerly self that wants to inject theme into every emotional conversation between two characters.  Symbolism!  Metaphor!  They are all dying to smear their faces on the page.  You do your best to hold them off, but bits of them creep in and get into the writing anyway.

Now, you're faced with your horribly written draft that is half a weak story that got shoved around by metaphors and themes and ideas and absolutes and ideals and half a poor soap box speech that has these weird characters with their own ideas (that probably and somehow conflict with the person that created them) getting in the way.

What do you do?

My first idea: Embed your ideals into the plot points.  Sure, let your characters do their own thing and hold the theme down.  But during the drafting part, you have to go through your draft and see what themes are popping out from the characters themselves.  If you don't like them, well, you're the author.  Get rid of them.  But the ones you do like, work with them.  They are there already.  But make sure that you make realizations or ideals presented or something like that a plot point.  They have to be integral to the plot.  If you could take them out and the plot would not have to change a bit, that won't work.  Your theme has to be so integral to the plot that it is a part of the characters lives.

Thats just an idea.  I don't have any experience really to back it up.  Ron Carlson, whom I studied story writing under for a year, would probably laugh at this blog post.  Either for my stupidity or for my simplification of something that he has been trying to teach me all along.

Storytelling

There is something beautiful about the craft of storytelling.  Using history, back-story, instances, moments to create a montage that says something to our hearts.  Whatever form it may take, be it in a book or a movie or a speech, storytelling speaks to all of us.

I was watching Randall Wallace's speech for the National Prayer Breakfast today and wondered, while he was amusing and his speech was humorous, what all of these little vignettes were for.  Then as he spoke, you start to see all of his pieces come together and what their purpose was.

In realizations like that, I always think of author and professor Ron Carlson, who I had the extreme privileged of studying under for over a year in college as an undergraduate.  He would always teach that when writing, you pull from the inventory you created.  In a room, describe what is on the fridge or the bulletin board or the desk or the love seat.  Put items in the room, and you will find them to be useful later.

It was the same thing here.  Randall Wallace told bits and pieces of his life, his past, his childhood and pulled them together by association to create depth and meaning to his story about the one prayer that helped to inspire Braveheart.

Watch this beautiful speech.  It holds positive qualities not only in the art of storytelling but also in the desires of mankind.  May God bless America.

Day 177

I have been writing my novel for almost 6 months.  Wow.  That feels both short and long at at the same time.  An accomplishment in time, but a failure in work produced.

Today, I want to write to support public libraries.  I'm not on a soap box, but never have I written so much in one week on this novel as I have a week ago.

After Labor Day, I was determined not to spend countless hours in my room goofing off.  My younger sisters had all returned to school at that point and the house is dead quiet.  A bad quiet.  My house is so often full of noise that it has become a normal auditory backdrop, and when absent, I cannot concentrate.

So, I go to the library. Where it is quieter than my house.

I woke up around 10:00am every day (a stark contrast to noon) and drove to the library and wrote until I was hungry for lunch.  I was usually there until 12:30pm.  I was able to concentrate.

It was such a blessing!  I sat in the quiet section at one of the tables, not even in one of the cubbies where you can block yourself out, but at a table, facing the thick tome-like reference books on American History and The History of Drama, and wrote.  I wrote about 5 pages a day, on average, for four days.  I normally write that much in three weeks.

Hooray!

The writing wasn't horrible either.  Even better.

The trick to this was that I practiced my professor's dutiful advice.  Ron Carlson would always say, "Stop writing at a place where you know you can start again."  I have the habit of stopping at the end of a scene or the chapter.  It makes me feel like I have accomplished something.  That week, I stopped writing in the middle of conversations.  I would reach the end of the scene, feel like it was a good place to stop, and tell myself to write one more page.  Then, I would be stuck in the middle of the next scene.  I would stop, come back the next morning, and feel like I was literally "picking up from where I left off."  Amazing.  Funny how simple the advice and how big the effects.

This past week, I was offered a temporary "full-time" position with temporary days off, and I had no time to write.  Such a stark contrast.  I was itching to write all this past week, but stupid 2 hour commutes per day and 8 1/2 hours at work and three scheduled dinner dates and an iTouch with addicting word games led to no productivity.

My fault.

I almost wish I didn't have a job again.  Then I could write.