writing
Q. Do You Have Deadlines?
A. Yes. I have one today, actually, and I’m missing it.
My editor Kate Jacobs and I keep in touch regularly about my progress with my drafts, and we mutually agree about when I have one due, based on what stage the book is in and how much revising needs to happen.
For instance, I’m currently working on the 5th draft of Vault 3, and when I began it back in July, I thought I could turn it in by today. I started realizing last weekend, however, that I was… Continue reading
Summer Revising
Since it’s summer and I spent decades in school, the schedule in my bones tells me I ought to be on vacation. I’m not, of course. I have work like the other grownups, so my bones have to be quiet and let me concentrate.
Today, I’m working on draft 5 of Vault 3, and the current challenge has to do with taking my existing scenes deeper and finding a way to thread in one of my characters who has so far preferred to stay on the sidelines. It’s tricky… Continue reading
Dressing Up
Oscar de la Renta: The Retrospective, Exhibit at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, May 2016
Dressing up in real life is not something I find especially gratifying, but in my mind, I love it. I adore the idea of breezy blue dresses and guys in tuxedos. I can easily picture smooth, polished people swirling around a dance floor, confident and graceful, with a live band in the background and colored lights flitting over bare arms and white collars.
I can’t be alone. When I think of all the YA… Continue reading
A Quiet Milestone
When I work on a manuscript for months, and half the time it seems to be going backward, it can be tricky to tell if the work is adding up to anything, but yesterday I reached the end of another draft. It feels important, like real progress, even though I immediately turned around and went back in to keep working and changing things.
The draft has problems. It’s still too short, for instance, and I haven’t accounted for characters I’ve cut or figured out how to fill certain plot holes,… Continue reading
Q. How Do I Finish My Novel?
Q. I’ve started a novel, (more than one, actually), but I can’t seem to get to the end. How do I finish my novel?
Badwater Basin
A. I find myself in this situation more often than I’d like to admit. Starting a novel is hard. So is writing the middle. It makes sense that the ending would be equally difficult to write, if not more so. We know that an ending is supposed to wrap up everything, or almost everything, and that it’s supposed to leave the reader both satisfied… Continue reading
Reach for the Impossible
Landscape Arch, Arches National Park, May 2016.
Just a reminder: reach for the impossible.
The once impossible already surrounds us. So many conveniences that we take for granted in our lives today (highway systems, ibuprofen, cell phones) exist because people before us had vision.
For more inspiration, there’s nature. Think of what bees can do to pollen, or time can do to stone.
Claim the impossible in your art. Write your novel, bit by bit. Compose your opera. Take up knitting or a ukulele.
Make your impossible community. Invite a… Continue reading