The Friendship Quilts

This post is not about quilts. It is about writing. The Friendship Quilts is the name of the novel I finished yesterday. Finished the third draft which was largely a matter editing. Part of the reason I have lately been so concentrated on bad grammar and bad writing is that I've been fighting that battle with myself for two months now. I care about how sentences read; I know I sometimes write weak sentences. I have been weeding out "waffle" phrases that make statements less clear than they should be. I sometimes don't think clearly enough to make paragraphs coherent. Rewriting of this sort is much slower than the original writing. In the first draft the story is simply flowing; in this draft I stop, start, rewrite, reconsider, words, commas, phrases.

I fight the simple blind spots, the typos that are so easy to overlook when the fingers have typed in instead of on, than instead of then, when a comma has been left out or a quotation mark. These matter. Very lucky people have careful, erudite secretaries; most writers have to do it themselves. [I envy those the men who have dedicated wives who take on that role.] This kind of "writing" is drudgery but it is also an opportunity to buff the hardwood floor and make it shine.

Of course I do not know that the novel tells the story perfectly. [Is it linoleum instead of hardwood?] I know I have blind spots. Perhaps sometime I'll be told by an agent or editor "This doesn't work" -- about only certain sections, not the whole, I fervently hope.

The novel makes me happy because it came quickly and seems a gift I have given myself for so many years of working at and caring about the writer's craft. The story, the characters, spewed forth like a decorative fountain turned on after being turned off during the winter. An apt analogy because I had not worked on a novel for probably ten or twelve years. And now --? Well, actually, I must read through once more because of those sneaky hidden typos [and, as I find them, no doubt I'll find other missed opportunities to be clearer]. But beyond the novel now comes the part I hate: trying to write a good synopsis and a good query and then the waiting and then the rejection. Then an amended query and another rejection ... after a while, maybe a tentative "maybe" or even "yes" ... or not ...

If I make a quilt, when the binding is on and the label too, I can sleep under it and stay warm. I can share the novel with friends who will say nice things and I will appreciate their kindness but my goal has always been to communicate with strangers from whom I expect nothing but that they read what I write. I am always happy to give away my quilts, they are usually accepted with gratitude. The world is such that giving away a novel is almost impossible, and so the rejections ... sigh.

The Friendship Q uilts

"The Friendship Quilts" will be the name of the novel that I began during NaNoWriMo. I awoke before 5:00 this morning with a new bit of a twist to the final scene. I had discovered the big twist but this early a.m. revelation was the icing on the cake -- or so I thought. I got up and as soon sa I was properly fueled with coffee and toast and jam, I set to writing the last ten pages -- and discovered another small satisfying twist.

No, it is not a mystery or any other kind of genre novel; it is a literary novel about outsider art and a young woman writing her dissertation on that subject and the men in her life as well as the elderly quilter whose quilts give the novel it's name. I have been working along regularly, finding scene after scene, some complicating the further scenes. Discovering characters that needed to show up and complicate the story. The writing has not always been easy but it was been a pleasure. I am not a 'stare at a blank piece of paper" kind of writer. I write when the idea has been triggered, and then as I write people speak and act in ways I was not anticipating. To this point, with a full size novel, one can imagine, since the first of November until the middle of January, I have not been stumped for more than a day or two.

In Cohen's The Mature Mind, which I wrote about a few days ago, he says that the mature mind is better at conglomerating things, better at pulling together ideas than the younger mind. This seems to have something to do with the ego getting out of the way with the "what if I fail?" scenario and a new pleasure experience. Or maybe I'm interjecting my experience for however he said what he said. I made no outline, I made no character notes, I just wrote the story as it came to me. I have no guarantee that it's any good, of course. I know I have much work to do, going back and interlarding references to people or events that will come up later -- because I didn't know about them the first time through. I know there are awkward scenes and a great deal of flabby writing that needs to be fixed up, strengthened, vivified. But that's all cosmetics; the story satisfies me. I feel good about reaching the end. It is not a big bang and yet it reminds me of the end of a fireworks display with a whole series of little pops before the final burst of color overhead. That is profoundly happifying for a writer.

50572 words written in 25 days

Undertaking the NaNoWriMo challenge has been a very odd experience for me. In short it is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. I was not thinking of doing it until Rachel asked quite innocently [? -- I think] late in October if I were going to do it. I recollected a novel called "Geneva's Quilts" that I once started and put aside. Why not finally write it, I thought. There is now a sub-genre of books about quilters/quilts with a publisher or two who know how to market them at quilt events and in quilt stores, maybe the book could actually be published. So I signed up and I have been writing. This is not a reasonably way to write a book. It has been both seat-of-the-pants and without a strong drive to make a specific statement.

I had no doubt I could produce the words, although I had only a vague idea of a plot. In fact, I've just reread the synopsis I wrote when I signed up and I find almost nothing in it congruent with what I've been writing. I became interested in my main character, Liz, and the men who come into her life because of her interest. Suddenly I'm writing a romance as much as the original story about the quilt stash she has discovered and the aging quilter who plans to give them all away. I'm not a romance writer -- far from it. I'm so far away, in time and experience, from what is being written by and about twenty-something romances today that I'm a blind man describing and elephant. But, I tell myself, people are people and I find these people unusual enough to be interesting if far from typical twenty-somethings.

Today I hit the 50,000 word goal and am maybe half done with a first draft -- a very sketchy draft in need of enormous rewriting -- and rethinking. I feel as if I'm a dinosaur of very little brain standing at the edge of the La Brea tar pit and likely to begin sinking at any moment ... committing months to actually writing this novel. And then more months, maybe years in the search for publication. And then, if the miracle of publication happens in this changing era of the book business, of course, I cannot hope for anything like a reasonable return on the time invested.

My first impulse was to say, "No, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo." Many first impulses are the ones to go with. I gave in to a slightly stronger, secondary impulse, which is to say yes to the challenges that arise. The tar is warm and sticky. I won't starve while I sink, there are plenty of dead bodies around to gnaw on.

NaNoWriMo -

All of November I have been in the NaNoWriMo mode -- trying to write 50,000 words of a novel. I don't consider that a great challenge and find I'm averaging about 2500 a day, which puts me a bit ahead even though there was a three-day weekend when I didn't write at all. The organization cheerily sends out pep talks once a week -- the organizers handle it like a great game. I'm to old to play games. I just decided to tackle a once started and then dumped novel idea again and see how it goes. [Google NaNoWriMo if this is a new term to you.]

I've discovered what might be a bell shaped curve. It was steeply up and then a nice plateau of getting on with the story and watching it become more complex. Now, I have either started down the opposite side or hit a dip. I am truly questioning the worth of the story -- no, really the worth of my writing of the story. Now and then I really like a couple of pages, but mostly I think: this is not interesting enough to hold readers' attention this far. The plot is unfolding too slowly.

Yes, yes, I know there's rewriting to do but in NaNoWriMo mode one doesn't rewrite but plunges ahead accumulating words. But in that mode, it's hard to say, well, I'll probably jettison those 5 pages and I need to add X to spice up the story. It's reaching a point when it seems very, very messy. I've got a story mapped out in my head, things that will happen. The plot from that earlier idea that still fascinates me.

This morning I'm thinking of this process like making yeast bread. The first steps are very easy, add the milk or water, the butter, the yeast and eggs if it has them. Beat into a nice batter. That I thought I was doing with the novel. Then one adds flour cup by cup. It takes a bit to add enough flour to make a kneedable dough. At that early stage it is sticky, gooey, it's hard to mix in the flour but not at all pleasant to the hands. When it becomes kneedable it is a joy to work with. One needs to keep adding flour until she can dump it onto the floured surface and turn it into a smooth, elastic ball that feels alive in the hands. Then it can be put to rise and then shaped into loaves and baked until it becomes something delicious and even nutritious.

I'll call this the baker's view of novel writing. I love to bake bread and I love to write. Mostly I trust the methods of both, but I trust novels far less. Everyone needs and loves bread, especially warm from the oven. Novels stop being analogous at that point. Another novel is not needed or wanted [least of all by publishers] and it doesn't necessarily smell good, look good or otherwise appeal. At this point the metaphor is going south and I should drop this line of thinking or I won't get today's 2500 words written.