Norman Green

HURRICANE SEASON

11/29/08

 

Among a certain segment of society the time between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day in known as Hurricane Season, and not because of the weather, either.  This time of the year is difficult for us, and, I suspect, for the rest of you, too, and for some of the same reasons: relatives, parents, people for whom exhuming buried history is a recreational activity, finances, guilt, kids, fucking Santa Claus.  And the cherry on top of it all, Tiny Tim: ‘God bless us, every one!’  You’ve got TB, kid, the cure is a hundred years in the future, you’re dead.

 

Come on, it’s not like I don’t enjoy the holidays.  You hear about the WallMart greeter?  Poor bastard got stomped to death by early shoppers on Black Friday morning.  What in God’s name is there on WallMart’s shelves that could possibly be…

 

Humbug.

 

Well, of course, there’s football.  Bowl games!  (Will you guys quit whining about a national championship?  These kids are supposed to be students!  You love football so much, get up off your fat asses and go throw the ball around with your own kids.) 

 

Ahem. 

 

Sorry.

 

As a writer, holiday season can be problematic in another way.  (Hooray.)  I do my best when I have gotten into a groove.  I try not to be too neurotic about it, but I have certain times that I have blocked out for writing and I have learned through trial and error that I need to hang on to that routine if at all possible.  Mondays and Fridays are usually not good writing days, there’s generally too much going on.  If I happen to get a couple of hours when I can sit down and get something done, so be it, but it is not a normal occurrence.  Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, though, I can generally block out the same two hours of each day, I know that the legal pad is sitting on my desk waiting for me and it is my job to have a scene rattling around inside my skull, and since it is part of what I normally do on those days, it generally gets done.  Same thing applies to weekends: Saturday mornings The Kid has her own obligations and I will be on my own until one or two in the afternoon, and since it’s part of my routine I come to my desk prepared, my ideas are ready to hatch, I’m good to go.

 

The holidays throw a major monkey wrench into that.  Those two hours on weekdays get squeezed, Saturday mornings get blown out of the water (what are you doing, you’re supposed to be picking up Grandma!).  And the worst part of it is, I had it all going,  everything was flowing, I knew what was happening in the story…  The Kid does her best to understand, but she’s not a writer.  ‘Okay, I have to run out, I’ll leave you alone until eleven o’clock.  Get some work done.’ 

 

Right.

 

So I sit down, my unconscious was not expecting this so it is up in its room, sulking.  And what the hell was my character’s name again?  All of those half-formed ideas, those gestating scenes, those bits of dialog or action or whatever they were, they have faded back down into the detritus at the bottom of the trash bin that is my mind.  I might get some of them back and I might not.  If I had been able to hang onto my routine, they would be right here, waiting their turn.  It helps, to a degree, if I make notes, if I make lists of upcoming scenes, and I do that, but if I lose too many days then I lose the thread of my story and I have to sit down, go back to the beginning, read through everything I have written so far, re-prime the pump.  It’s very easy to lose weeks or even months that way.

 

Excess can be just as destructive, although I must admit, I love excess, it fits the kinked wiring of my personality a little too perfectly.  I remember once The Kid and I went down to the Jersey shore for a long weekend.  I am not a beach guy, so she laid out in the sun on her blanket and I did not leave the room for four solid days, I wrote, steady, the whole time.  It was great!  This has happened, over the years, maybe six or eight times.  Problem is, like a guy who stays on the exercise bike too long, I ran myself dry.  Each time I had to collapse on the floor for a while until I recovered, and then I had to get up and begin again, and for me, that is the most difficult part of this gig.

 

So.

 

If you are a writer, I wish for you a happy and productive hurricane season.  For myself, I am going to try to hang on to as much of my routine as I can.  I know I’m going to have to be flexible, and I can do that, but not too flexible, because my writing is too important to me to get kicked off the schedule without a fight.

THE NUMBERS GAME

11/21/08

 

I finally got back on the horse, two thousand words yesterday.  That’s a pretty good day for me.  Let’s see, two thousand words a day for the next two months, okay, figure ten days left in November, I’m gonna blow off ten days easy, so that leaves sixty working days between now and the end of January, one hundred twenty thousand words.  Right?  My books have averaged ninety, ninety-five thousand words, so it ought to be a pretty safe bet I can finish the book I’m working on by the first of February.  No?

 

Hell, no.

 

In my dreams, maybe.

 

When I was writing my first novel I worried obsessively about this kind of stuff.  First of all, how long is a novel?  I picked out what I thought was a book of acceptable length and I counted the words on twenty random pages, got an average number of words per page, multiplied that by the total number of pages, then hit ‘word count’ on my story…

 

Holy shit.

 

Man, I’m too short, this thing is too fat for a short story and too skinny for a novel, I’m screwed, I better go back and make this thing more complicated, I better give my protagonist more relatives, I better give him a girlfriend, no, wait, I’ve got it!  I’ll give him a girlfriend and a wife…

 

I wish I could tell you that I don’t do this sort of thing any more.  I read in James Reasoner’s blog that he wrote a million words last year.  Dude, get off your ass, Reasoner has written more words in the last five minutes than you have all year long, you better get going, you slug…

 

Variation on a theme:

 

On my current project, I just hit ten thousand words.  So, okay, what I’ve done so far, all I have to do is that much again eight or nine times, squish them all together and I’ve got a book, by God!  By that logic, if I have a job requiring two hundred man-hours, all I need to do is hire two hundred guys for an hour and I’m done.  Right?

 

Foist of all, okay, I am not James Reasoner, I am me, and if I try to write like him the best I can hope for is to become an inferior copy of him, which would do me no good whatever.  Second, my thing is totally out of sync with this kind of thinking anyway.  If, in first draft, I say something in a thousand words, in second draft I ought to be able to cut it to eight hundred.  And if I can say it effectively in five hundred I am ahead of the game, not behind.  Actually, it’s not about word count at all, not really.  It’s about being direct, it’s about the shortest distance between two points.  Strunk and White, Elements of Style: ‘eliminate unnecessary words.’

 

Yeah, but…

 

You can generally disregard anything following the word ‘but.’ 

 

This is really all just insecurity.  What if I run out of story?  What if I don’t have anything to say?  What if I wake up tomorrow and the well is dry?  Well, sure, and what if a meteorite falls out of the sky and hits me on the head?  It could happen, but it’s not worth worrying about.  The imagination is not a storeroom containing a finite amount of stuff, it’s a muscle, and the more you learn how to use it, the better you get at letting it off the leash, the stronger and more productive it becomes.

 

So basically what I’m saying, and more to myself than to anyone else, is this: the story will be as long as it is supposed to be.  I can generally forget about word counts, at least until I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

KICK ME, SOMEBODY

11/15/08

 

I am having a very difficult time getting started on this book.  I’ve got about thirty pages and I’m pretty happy with it so far, but it is substantially the same thirty pages I had about a month ago and if I am going to be honest here I have to admit that I have really made no progress at all in that time.

 

And I’m out of excuses.

 

In the past I have had to overcome a lot of obstacles to get any writing done.  When I was writing my first book I was working about sixty hours a week at my day job, which was a very stressful and physically draining sort of gig.  I was commuting from northern New Jersey to Brooklyn every day…  Route Four up to and across the George Washington Bridge, Cross-Bronx Expressway to the Whitestone Bridge, across the Whitestone to the Whitestone Expressway, Whitestone down to the Long Island Expressway, LIE to Grand Avenue, get off and go south on Flushing Avenue down into Bushwick…  On a good day and with the blessing of the gods of traffic it took about an hour each way.  Little bit of rain or, god forbid, snow, and that could balloon to three hours or more.  Plus I had to deal with all of the usual ‘unpublished novelist’ insecurities, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ ‘you’re wasting your time with this,’ ‘you really ought to be doing xyz,’ blah blah blah.  I admit it, I did get tripped up by the ‘You Suck’ virus and it cost me about a year, but still, I got the thing written.

 

Right now I’m down to a forty hour work week and I love my job, which bleeds most of the stress out of the deal.  My commute is a breeze.  This is my seventh novel, so it’s not like I haven’t done this before, and I don’t really get the guilts any more about the amount of time I spend writing.  To make it worse, this book is a sequel to my fifth one, so I already know who the major characters are, I know what they think and how they move and I enjoy their  company.  I even have a pretty good idea how the plot is going to work (he said, praying fervently that he wasn’t bullshitting himself), and yet here I sit.  I’m not at step one, not really, but it feels like I am.

 

A woman I know who is married to a writer once told me that the process of writing looked, to her, a lot like a guy lying on a couch, staring at the ceiling.

 

Hmmm.

 

I have to admit that daydreaming is a large part of the process, at least for me.  Like most human beings of the male persuasion, I am a very visually-oriented person and if I haven’t pictured a scene in my imagination I cannot sit down and write it, not yet, not effectively.

 

I have to see it first.

 

I was born and raised in New England, land of the Puritans.  ‘Hands to work, hearts to God,’ ‘the idle brain is the devil’s workshop,’ all of that shit.  And it’s funny how deeply that crap imbeds itself in your mind, you think you have rooted out all of those pernicious influences, that you have overcome or outgrown or otherwise climbed over the stuff that well-intentioned adults foisted upon you when you were a child and then you discover them still down in there, hard at work…

 

Sonuva…

 

Excuse me, there’s a couch calling my name and I’m gonna go crash on it, I don’t care how bad it looks.

 

Talk to you later.

YOU SUCK

11/7/08

 

Nothing personal…

 

Actually what I’m talking about is the editorial voice, the one in your head that tells you things like ‘this scene isn’t working,’ or ‘this character isn’t working,’ or ‘you call this a plot?’  And, on occasion, ‘you suck.’ 

 

More on that later.

 

Needless to say, the editorial voice is completely necessary, particularly in later drafts.  It can warn you when you’re boring the reader or over-writing or losing the thread of your story line.  However, and this is a big however, in first drafts the editorial voice is a destructive and relentlessly negative force which will impose artificial and unnecessary limits on what you will allow yourself to write.  It can cost you months and even years of writing time.  It can ruin you as a writer.  In first drafts you absolutely must not listen to it.  In first drafts you must feel free, you have to let your imagination run amok, you have to take your clothes off and run naked through the park.  Metaphorically, of course, although, you know, whatever works…

 

Here’s how to get the editorial voice to shut the hell up.

 

I suggest you do this the old-fashioned way, with a pen and a legal pad.  This exercise never works for me if I try doing it in Word, plus, the urge to hit that ‘save as’ command is too strong, and you might want to think twice about that.  At any rate, turn to the back page of the pad and write in some one or two word topics that arouse strong emotions in you.  I don’t think it matters whether they’re negative or positive.  For me, I find the personal ones work best.  My grandfather, for example, or one particular asshole boss I once had, or the time I got toasted and…  You get the idea.

 

Now, choose one, turn to the first page and let it rip.  DO NOT think about what you’re saying or how you’re saying it, do not pause or make corrections, and above all, don’t worry about anything except keeping your hand moving.  And especially, do not be afraid, what you are writing is strictly between you and your legal pad, and as long as you are careful with the hard copy, there will be no judgments or hurt feelings. 

 

The whole point of the exercise is to allow your writer’s sensibilities to vault past the normal constrictions of the mind, to get past the social filters, and (drum roll please) to bypass the editorial voice.

 

It’s all about access, baby.

 

Let the bastard out, turn him loose.

 

One cautionary note: if you are doing this correctly, if you are really granting parole to that grunting beast within, some of the stuff that comes out of your pen will surprise you.  It will not necessarily be truthful in any objective sense, or fair, or even honest, and if it finds its way into the wrong hands it can cause pain.  ‘Oh, but this bit right here is so good, it’s hard, it’s tight, I can’t throw it out…’

 

Dude.  Tiny pieces, you hear me?  ‘Above all, do no harm.’

 

The thing is, if you do this right, you will be using muscles you didn’t know you had, and every time you use them they get stronger.  You get stronger, you get more adept, you get better at tapping into those dark places, and you become a better writer.

 

However.

 

The editorial voice (at least mine) is very strong and does not enjoy being ignored.  If I lose my grip on the leash, it can grow and morph into something uglier.  For me, it’s a short walk from ‘this scene sucks’ to ‘you suck.’  At such times, the editorial voice sounds suspiciously like the voice of a particular person from my past, and once things have degenerated to this point, it isn’t just my writing that sucks, it’s my car, my job, my music, my house, my clothes, my life, me.

 

When I was midway through my first book I lost a year behind this shit, and I still fall into the same hole from time to time.  I used to use this writing exercise to get myself out of it, but here’s how I’m doing it these days: In my office, on the wall right next to my computer there is a bulletin board, it’s maybe 12”X18”.  It’s labeled ‘The Gallery,’ and on it are pictures of people like Mark Twain, Beethoven, John Starks, Georgia O’Keefe, Doug Coombs, T.C. Boyle, Charles Barkley.  And so on.  That particular person’s picture is up there too, I can’t pretend I don’t hear that voice any more, but at least these days it isn’t the only one.

 

All that being said, I still fall back into the trap from time to time.  I spent most of this past week down in the hole, digging.  I’m out now, though, or at least it feels like I am, and I’m back at work.  It’s going to take me a day or so to pick the threads of my story back up again, and then I should be okay.

 

I think.

THREE WORDS

10/31/08

 

“Call me Ishmael.”

 

In three words Melville’s got you.  In three words his protagonist tells you ‘Yeah, I’ve been around the block, and no, I’m not going to let you know who I am or where I come from.’  In the dance between Melville’s imagination and yours, Melville hands you the paint, the brushes and the first frame and right from there, right from that first sentence Ishmael is not simply his creation, but yours, too.  A mysterious figure, an alias, a backstory merely hinted at and the reader is already putting something of himself, of his own experience, into the story.

 

In three words.

 

Brilliant.

 

Think about it.

 

Some guy walks into a bookstore, and out of the thousands of available books in the joint he picks up yours.  Looks at the cover.  Checks out the blurbs on the back.  Opens to page one.

 

This is your only chance.

 

The guy just ducked through the ropes, he’s in the ring with you, you better go lay one on him, brother, and I mean right now.  How much time do you think you’ve got before he puts you down and moves on?  Thirty seconds?

 

The situation is even more pronounced when you’re dealing with agents, editors, et al.  The first time I walked into my agent’s office I noticed a shelf behind his desk, it was about fourteen inches deep and maybe eight feet long, and it was piled high with fat manila envelopes.  ‘That’s just this week,’ he told me.  You really think he’s gonna plow through all that stuff?  Not on your life.  In the precious few seconds he gives you, you better knock him on his ass.  Right from the first sentence you better have him rubbing his chin and saying ‘Wow!  What was that?’

 

Otherwise you have no shot.

 

Same thing applies to query letters.  You only get a very finite amount of time, don’t waste any of it on who you are or where you’re from or where you went to school or how much you love books or any of that.

 

No offense, but he doesn’t care.  If you waste his time, he’s gone.  The query letter is about one thing: ‘Wow!  This one can write!’  That’s your message, and you can’t tell the guy, either, you have to show him.  You have to knock him on his ass.

 

Or her, but then the boxing metaphor doesn’t work as well.  Sweep her off her feet?  Nyeah, I don’t like it.  Anyway, you get the idea.

 

In my mind this is one of the more important principles of fiction.  The most important page is the first one, the most important sentence is the opening.  It may be an obvious point, but I’ve got a few problems Melville didn’t have: I have to compete with MTV and the internet and twenty-four hour cable news and round-the-clock sports talk radio and I-pods and…

 

And if you are a writer, so do you.

 

I like to think I’m pretty good at openings.  This is my opening for my second book: ‘The Montague was an old whore of a hotel; she stood on the corner of Henry and Montague Streets in Brooklyn, New York.’  In real life, The Montague was actually called The Bossert, and sadly the old girl is no more, she got showered, shaved and perfumed, now she’s filled with yuppies reading e-mail on their blackberries, got no idea what sort of ghosts might still lurk in her shadows.

 

Anyway, I don’t care if you’ve ever been to Brooklyn or not, I bet you could draw a pretty good picture of the place.  I’m about twenty-five pages into the book I’m working on now and I like the way it’s going, but I don’t know if I’m all the way there with the first sentence yet.  Hell of a lot longer than three words, I can tell you that.