On How Do You Know When the Story is Done?

You know when the roast is ready when the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees; the quiche, when the knife comes out clean. The pasta and veggies are cooked when sampling indicates they are appropriately chewy or crisp, respectively.

But how do you know when your story is ready for submission?

Your critique group has given you multiple suggestions. One person tells you to “dwell” a little more when the protagonist meets the stranger for the first time; another doesn’t like the blonde you introduced on page 8. Someone else feels you should begin the story in a different place. You’ve been given ideas for extraneous words to delete. You revise and revise again, following some suggestions, ignoring others. As you are doing so, you get a couple of “aha” moments, which lead to some restructuring. All of a sudden, one of the ideas you had rejected now makes sense. You wonder what else you’ve missed.

You give it to a couple of other people to read. They like it, offer a few additional thoughts, maybe more minor this time. They find a few typos. You feel like you may be closing in. You search for those submission guidelines and find that your story is 500 words over the accepted limit. Time to tighten. You can’t believe how many long-winded phrases you manage to find, how you’ve inserted an unnecessary character who never appears again (but no one else mentioned), how the ending now seems too obvious. You manage to shave off 600 words. Is it enough? Of course, now you notice a mass of typos because of all the changes you’ve made. Although your husband is a great editor and proof reader, you are hesitant to give him your story in case he hates it. You like it, but you feel you’ve lost all objectivity.

So you save it in the folder on “works in progress,” and go back to the novel you were working on. No danger of that being finished to your satisfaction any time soon.

Then one day you casually mention to someone you have just met that you “write.” “Oh,” he says. “Have you published anything?” “Yes, one story,” you admit. Almost four years ago. One lousy story. Now you feel embarassed, ashamed that you even brought up the topic, even though you’ve been writing like a fiend during this time. You aren’t a dabbler. And it’s not because you’ve had rejection after rejection; it’s because you rarely sumbit work. On those few occasions when you scrambled to meet the deadline for a writing contest, your work did not receive any acknowledgement, and you allowed yourself to get discouraged. You rationalize that it takes time to find the right places, and for now you want to concentrate on perfecting your writing, on producing a substantial body of work.

You are reminded of your young English cousin who didn’t say a word until he was three, and then the first sentence he uttered upon seeing a freshly painted door was, “By jove, what a smashing green door.” A fully formed grammatical sentence. It caused a bit of a sensation. Perhaps you are hoping that when your horse leaves the gate (to change the metaphor), it will win its first race. A debut wonder. A best seller. But really, how many agents will consider you if you haven’t proven yourself in the marketplace? It doesn’t matter if you have a couple of dozen stories and three novels in the bottom drawer.

One published story is a good start. It was a decent journal. It means you’ve got some literary chops. At some point, you just have to trust yourself to say, “This is done enough,” and take the time to find the appropriate venues or get help in doing so. Submitting isn’t writing, but it is all part of the process, isn’t it? And let’s face it, you’re no spring chicken with a whole life ahead of you. After you’re gone, your bottom drawer, all your hard work, may be someone else’s recycling.Then you're really cooked.

On Revisiting Old Writing

For the last couple of months, I’ve been immersed in revising a young adult novel I started longer ago than I care to reveal. It’s been an interesting journey that has revealed something about my evolution as a writer and about the staying power of an idea. It’s been like visiting old friends that one hasn’t seen in ages—the core personalities are the same, but some of the rough edges are worn away. (Have I used this phrase before? It has a déjà vu quality to it…)

It wasn’t always a young adult novel. In fact, I had no idea what it was when I first began it. That summer I was working on my “qualifying paper” for my doctoral dissertation, and the urge to write something completely different came over me. It was sort of a “busman’s holiday” (nice English expression), but I found it very cathartic. Inspired by a dream I had when I was 16, the story is based on some experiences from high school. Maybe there was something about reaching the last stages of my doctoral degree (at a somewhat advanced age) that took me back to my school days. Maybe I needed to get past something. Maybe I wanted to rewrite some of my history.

I came late to writing fiction, unless you count the hours and hours I spent as a child concocting and illustrating tales. A novel was an ambitious place to start my fiction career, but I had no desire to write short stories. I never finished the novel that first time round. Life took over (in particular, the dissertation itself, and then a new career, post dissertation). But five years later I came back to it, tweaking it, fleshing it out a little more. Then I took another turn with my writing and began a screenplay with a friend on a whole other subject. Meanwhile, I began to study story structure while learning about screenplay writing. I also learned about revealing character through dialogue since interior monologue generally doesn’t work well in film.

But I still didn’t couldn’t let go of that original idea. A few years after starting the screenplay, I took my first fiction class. Through that I reshaped the first four chapters of the novel and received feedback. Then more life happened that interfered with my ability to be creative, and more years passed. Finally, I embarked on what has now been a steady period of writing for the past five years. It began by revisiting the YA novel, which I abandoned for the fourth time to pursue something that an editor told me was more “marketable.”

Two large writing projects (and a number of shorter stories) later, I’ve come full circle but with three significant differences. 1) I know a lot more about writing now. 2) Young adult fiction changed, and now what might have been risque when started it has become acceptable. 3) I have a writers’ group and other sources of support, so that I have company along the way.

What I wrote all those years ago isn’t appalling, but it needs a lot of tender loving care. I should probably have started over, as the revision is taking me far longer than writing something new would have. All the little voices in my head from all the classes I’ve taken and the critiques I have received speak to me as I write—urging me to show not tell, inviting me to provide a significant detail, asking me to slow down or speed up. Sometimes it’s hard to discard the original narrative.

Here’s one example of changes made between the original version and the most recent. This is the opening of the story, which is set in the early 1960s.

Original: Amelia Wade, or Amy as she insisted on being called, walked up the stairs to school, with a mixture of excitement and dread. Both had found their way to her stomach. The first day of school once again. It couldn't be worse than last year. Though she feared the condition might be permanent, a small shred of optimism told her she had reached her depths as a sophomore, and it was only up from here on in. Anyway, eleventh grade felt like the beginning of the end of school. Next year she would be applying to college. College would save her from all of this.

2010:
Amy Wade exited the Number 24 bus in front of the crimson and white sign that read in clean, bold letters, “Friends Day School, established in 1864,” the bus driver said, "Cheer up. It can't be that bad."

How did he know? Strangers did that to her all the time. "Smile", they would say as she was walking down the street. What if she had just broken up with her boyfriend? Not that she ever had one. Or failed an exam? Not that she ever did. But it really annoyed her. People should mind their own business.

Both versions reveal something about character and about Amy’s state of mind this first day of school. In the first one, we learn sooner about Amy’s age and her goal of just wanting this stage of her life to be over. The second is more rooted in place and has more detail. She is reacting to something specific (in this case, the bus driver).

The above represents some small struggles I’ve had. Some changes involved more major restructuring. I added a third voice in the last iteration (there were two originally). I’ve kept that configuration, but I know that two of the voices aren’t as clear as the other. In particular, I need to create a credible voice for my somewhat wounded male adolescent. I also removed some extraneous characters and had some significant events happen to the main and major secondary characters rather than to characters we don’t care about. I’ve ratcheted up the tension between the happenings of the external world (civil rights, in particular) and the internal world of the school and class. A big challenge is to make the story and characters seem both universal and timeless and of its time. I know how I want it to end, but there are gaping holes to be filled (the murky middle).

What I love about writing novels is trying to make all the pieces of the puzzle work together, and it is also what is demanding and sometimes frustrating. Every change creates a possible rupture somewhere else. Maybe I should have learned to master (if one can use that word with a straight face) shorter forms of fiction first. But I love living with my characters, helping to solve their dilemmas and mine as a writer at the same time. And one day, I hope that we will all be ready to move on. But sometimes I wonder if years from now when my memory is fading, I will be convinced that this story I spent so many years on will seem as real to me as any of my life experiences and the frienships as genuine. Will the truth even matter if that’s what makes me happy?

On Blog Block and the Perils of Revision

Dear Reader (and I know there were a few of you out there), I have been a terrible blogger these last few months, and I owe you an explanation, knowing I may have lost you to more faithful writers. Initially, I had an excuse. I even told you about it. I was working on the second draft on my novel, with a deadline of Labor Day imposed by my friend, who had agreed to read it through before the crush of her fall semester as a professor began. I'm good with deadlines. After I returned from our Jersey shore retreat, I buckled under, wrote for several hours each day after work and most weekends, and sent off the 450+ re-tuned pages that second week in September. I was also subsumed in an intense report writing phase of work--creative writing was my own "busman's holiday." (Does anyone use that phrase anymore, or is it remnant of my English upbringing?) I posted a few pictures of my garden (a symbol of my productivity?), scraps to assuage the hunger of the empty blog pages.

Following this two month burst, I gave myself a second reprieve from wordsmithing, trusting that the muse would return. But I had been in revision mode so long that my faucet of creativity had shut itself off. Not so much as a drip! I couldn't even write about the revision process itself, which for me was just a matter of considering the various pieces of feedback I'd received and plugging away. Nothing special to share. To maintain my illusion of being a writer, I faithfully went to my writers' group every two weeks, continuing to feed my colleagues previously written chapters and providing feedback to them in return. I attended readings, sat in on a session on writers' contracts, and even paid good money to participate in a full weekend workshop on "The Art of Language," where I froze in panic at having to complete an exercise involving substituting new words in a paragraph of an established writer's prose. On the second day of the workshop, I handed in the first two pages of my newly revised novel. It came back from the instructor filled with brackets indicating unnecessary words and a comment about the stakes feeling low. The stakes of my females middle-aged protagonist who was struggling with her novel! What a slap to the brain! I felt deflated but also armed with some new weapons in my revision arsenal. I would not let myself sink into a vat of self-pity (like my protagonist in one of my several attempts at rewriting the first two pages.)

In the meantime, I had heard from my friend--she loved the second two-thirds but included four single-spaced pages of suggestions about that first third. My husband, whom I nervously watched as he read the revision, had his own set of thoughts, also mostly about the beginning. (Blessedly, he stuck with the novel until he finished it, and I took this as a good sign that if it wasn't a page turner, it at least had a certain modicum of forward momentum.) So now I'm stuck. My homework is clear, except that it means more and more reworking of the same old material. Yet, what sense would it make to abandon something that is so close to completion? Or is it? It's reminds me of the waiting game. The longer you wait in line, the less likely you are to leave that line even though you may not be all that close to getting what you need. You have already committed so much time, to leave would be to admit that all the previous time was wasted.

I will finish that novel, but I need to give myself permission to do other writing for awhile, to not believe that I have abandoned the manuscript just because I don't want to deal with it just yet. I need to absolve myself of my guilt (or shame?), in order to move on.

So, dear reader, that is my story. It comes to you courtesy of a netbook with a nine-hour battery life and and an eight hour non-stop plane ride to Hawaii (but that is a story for another blog). I know there will be no tears shed for me upon that little confession. May my muse be waiting for me, mai tai in hand, on a lanai overlooking the deep blue Pacific. Until then...