Work-in-Progress

I haven’t blogged for some time.

The need to connect with the outside world has atrophied in me since I started working on my new novel.

I write every day, bright and early.

I never think past the scene I’m about to write that day.

I write that scene honestly well and that scene always breeds the next scene for the next day.

I don’t overwrite, for I know, as a reader, I like to participate in a scene.

I stop where I still have something to say so the next day I won’t face a dry well.

I read each day and in between my writing breaks to keep my mind off my own writing.

I don't believe in any other rules except mine.

There is another rule, though. I never talk about or show my work-in-progress. In my writer’s primitive mind, I understand that a novel is the whole assemblage of parts. A lyrically written passage might garner compliments from friends or blog readers, but it’s not the novel. I also understand that, again in a primitive way, I should never fall in love with my writing. Then I won’t have the urge to show my work piecemeal to anyone who would tell me that I can write. Well, I’m a writer. Why do I need to be told that I can write?

For those who are still unsure of themselves about their chosen trade, read this:

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them. [Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast]

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Old Age

I know I’m getting old. The other day I dropped a dirty tissue not into the toilet but the clothes hamper and my boxer not into the hamper but the toilet.

I could no longer retain ideas by just the power of my brain and had to jot them down as part of my to-do list for my writing. I forgot names of some of the authors I meant to read. Sometimes I went to a bookstore and just as I hit the shelves the names were just blanks.

I thought how awful it was to be in old age.  At this pace, I knew I could be any of these people you’re about to read  here.

You get old, first you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to zip your fly, then you forget to unzip your fly. –Branch Rickey

Three sisters, ages 92, 94 and 96, live in a house together. One night the 96-year-old draws a bath. She puts her foot in and pauses. She yells  to the other sisters, 'Was I getting in or out of the bath?'             

 

The 94-year-old yells back, 'I don't know I'll come up and see.' She starts up the stairs and pauses, 'Was I going up the stairs or down?'    

 The 92-year-old is sitting at the kitchen table having tea, listening to her sisters. She shakes her head and says, 'I sure hope I never get that forgetful, knock on wood.' She then yells, 'I'll come up and help both of you as soon as I see who's at the door.'

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The Scenes

What makes a novel interesting?

It’s the scenes. Each scene must have drama. Or it must set up drama. But more importantly, you have to be excited about the scenes you write. If you don’t feel excited about them, do you expect your readers to get excited when they read them?

Scenes that don’t have much drama are filled with trivialities, tepid dialogue, which neither show much about characterization nor advance the plot. Consequently, they don’t sustain the story line. What is the most frequently cited reason by agents and editors for their rejection of a manuscript? The pace or intensity flags in several places. In other words, the novel fails to hold interest.

Whenever you start struggling with a scene, it’s a good indicator of a potential problem. The next thing you do is try to get through such a scene. Then, unavoidably it will be there like a blank sheet in your manuscript. Many novelists tend to write certain scenes for the sake of keeping the novel alive rather than giving the novel the vitality that sparks it. They hope readers would read everything they wrote. Many novelists spend so much time and efforts in researching the materials for their novels, and consequently they fall victim to these materials. When too much of researched information appears in a novel, it’s non-fiction taking over fiction. The novel bogs down. The readers start skipping pages. A skilled novelist, on the other hand, uses his researched materials discriminatingly. He only uses tidbits of such information in places where they belong. He uses them where they can enhance his characterization, the pacing of his story line, the mood of his chosen scenes.

Next time when you don’t feel like getting up in the morning to face a lukewarm scene, ask yourself: does it really belong?

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Revision

You finished a chapter.

Now go back and fine-tune it — add, delete — what needs to go in, be taken out. Repair the characters. Do it when your mind is still fresh with the scenes and the characters of that chapter. However, you must be unbiased (which is hard toward what you’ve just written), detached (which is harder from what you’ve just built), so you can see your own creative flaws.

Or it will be hellish after the novel has been written to go back to fix the flaws either on your own courage, or at an editor’s request.

On characterization

Unlike an actor who plays just his role, an author plays all his characters’ roles, like a man who plays chess against himself.

You can imagine characters. Yet until you write them out, you haven’t known them. Put them in motion. Let them interact with one another. Let them live in some environment. It’s then that you begin to explore your characters’ depths. If you ask me what’s the hardest part in writing a novel, I’ll tell you: characterization. That’s what separates a literary novel from a potboiler. Characters shape a story line, not the other way around. You can’t think up a plot and shoehorn your characters into it. If you do, you are writing a potboiler. In fact, well-developed characters create a more convincing story line, even shaping it or altering it against your original vision. Think about that!

On Hard Scenes

Writing is just like any normal part of our daily life. It ebbs and flows. The worst thing to a writer isn't writer's block but illness, prolonged, unbearable illness that can really affect his writing. Other than that, as Hemingway once said, there will be days when you have to drill rock and then blast it out with charges. When that happens, just take a break, do something else and let your battery be recharged.

There are no hard scenes to write. Really. Those so-called difficult scenes are what writers make them out to be with their paranoia. So before they can write such scenes, their anxiety has already killed their creativity to write them.

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Write What You Know

You can write 50K words a month like the NaNoWriMo challenge. Even 100K words in two weeks. Then you’re qualified as a hack writer. Potboiler writers write faster than they breathe. John Grisham finishes each of his thriller in six months. However, literary fiction writers average 2-3 years a novel. Pace of a tortoise.

As an Asian, I can identify with a protagonist who’s brown-eyed, yellow-skinned. I read A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, one that won him the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for literary fiction. In this short-story collection, his protagonist in every story is a Vietnamese, and Robert is white. Well, despite lavish praises from his critics, I could never feel ‘the voice’ in each of his stories, presumably from a yellow-skinned human being.

It takes an extraordinary skill for a writer to write in a voice other than his own, considering his race, his ethnic background, his years spent in the said environment that serves as the locality of his novel.

Writers like Chang-rae Lee, Ha Jin write strictly from their upbringing background through their protagonists. So the Korean voice, the Chinese voice from their works ring true. I take my hat to Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha) who put himself (a white male) in the place of a Japanese female as a geisha and, kudos to him, succeeded where many others have failed. But it took him 12 years to write such a novel, having gone through three major rewrites to change the POV, third to first.

And don’t ask Arthur Golden to knock off 50K words in a month!

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