Books Have Minds of Their Own

Authors often make statements about their books wanting to be written or characters dropping fully formed into their minds, and I have generally found these sorts of statements annoying. You may feel like the character came to you as an already assembled entity, but really you have been busily assembling him yourself, even if you have been doing so beneath your own radar. Yet, now that I am spending more time writing fiction and thinking hard about writing fiction, I find that, indeed, my story does seem to have a life of its own.

I know, of course, that I make up the characters, and I decide what happens to them, but once those people exist in the fictional space that I've created, and once I've set certain experiences in motion for them, there is a logic, a mandate, an organic something or other that emerges.

I will explain with an anecdote. For quite a while, I have known what would be the main plot arc of my second book, but I hadn't given a lot of thought to the particulars. I was waiting for time and also for a sense of momentum. Slowly, as I thought more and more about what would happen in this book, that momentum began to build. I think of it as key pieces falling into place. I visited a place a couple of months ago, and in that place, I spotted a detail that I recognized right away as something that belongs in this book. I held on to that detail, waiting to decide how I would use it. As time passed, other details fell into place. Now, enough pieces are there to give me and the story the momentum it needs for me to really start writing, but all those pieces also demand certain treatments. In other words, the pieces out of which I will stitch together the book, all come with their own stories, and it is those stories that seem somehow outside my control.

So now, like so many authors, I find myself saying things like, "Silvia does X," as if Silvia is a real person with agency. I know she's not. I made her. But, yet, somehow she is real. I made her and then released her and now she sort of does have a life of her own. I couldn't, say, turn her into a vampire or a drunk because she is nether of those things: she has an identity that I created but that now exists on its own.

And as I work on the details of the plot for the second book, outlining chapters, I discover that I do have a sense of the story existing in some abstract, unwritten form. I will write it and give it shape, but it does exist, even without my words. Of course, no one will every know that unless I give the story words.

So I will.

Gotta Keep Reading

My middle-school librarian friend Gretchen posted this on her Facebook page, and I have to share it here. It's a fabulous video that celebrates middle-schoolers reading.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6D9jiEYxzs

The joy on these kids faces, and the way they hold their books while they dance is simply wonderful.

Craft of Writing

In my classes, we always talk about how authors have made choices: when Dickens begins Bleak House with the one-word sentence, "London," that is a choice. When a megalosaurus waddles through London later in the paragraph, that is also a choice. A dinosaur didn't just fall into the novel; Dickens put it there. And he put a megalosaurus there, not a pterodactyl or a t-rex. He made a choice. Students of literature can have great fun wondering about these choices: why a megalosaurus? What does this choice tell us about Dickens' London, or about Dickens' aims in writing about London? This is a conversation I have often and always enjoy.

Now, however, I find myself puzzling over being the one making the choices. I have outlined the sequel to This Powerful Rhyme, and I have written some pages, but I'm not crazy about them. I have a very clear sense of what my characters are up to in this book, and I have some vivid images in my mind that I'm confident I will transfer to the page eventually, but at the level of starting to make choices, I find myself flummmoxed. Does the book begin in the present or in the past? After some drafting and some outlining, I will surely know the answer to this question, and my readers (when I have some) will talk about my choice. Why did the author choose to begin in the past? What does this choice tell us? For now, I can't answer these questions because I don't know yet what choice I will make.

When I have this conversation about choice with my students, I imagine a decisiveness that I now discover is sometimes elusive. Dickens may have agonized for weeks over what sort of dinosaur to put in the middle of London, and I suppose that agony just means his choice is careful and important. So, I am in the stage with this second book of making careful choices. Will I begin in the past or the present?

For the moment, the choice I am leaning toward is the present because that's where my readers are, and I think they are most likely to choose to enter into the book if I meet them in their own time. There, I just made a choice. Stay tuned to see if it sticks. After all, Dickens may have started off with a pterodactyl!

Villette and Sledding

I have always loved winter and especially snow. Even when I was at Carleton and spent most of the winter with snow on the ground, I never tired of it. Of course, the truth is that sometimes snow is an inconvenience, but when you are a snow lover like me, that inconvenience becomes an identity crisis.

We had our first proper snow of the season Friday night and got in some good sledding Saturday morning. We go to a fabulous hill a few blocks away: there is a steep slope, then a short level bit, and then another steep slope, so it's a really fun ride, as long as you steer clear of the nineteenth-century brick posts and stop before you fall in the creek. These obstacles just raise the heart rate, though, making the whole experience more fun.

After the morning on the hill, we spent Saturday afternoon reconnecting with old friends near Wilkes-Barre, and then my husband left to spend a few days with his father. This left me to manage the three kids alone, and on Sunday, I also had about 100 pages of Villette to read for my seminar. Thus, when the kids said they'd rather watch a movie than go back to the hill, I happily acquiesced. The two hours they spent in front of the TV was about forty pages of Villette, some dishes, and a couple of loads of laundry. They were happy, and I was productive. A win-win, but was it?

Villette is a brilliant book, and I appreciated its nuance much more this time through than I had in the past. The narrative is smart and self-aware and even cruel--all fascinating [and, as an aside, my students did brilliantly with the book]. But I'm not sure how I feel about choosing Villette over sledding. Instead of cutting loose in the snow with my kids, I gave in to that curse of a babysitter Disney and sat alone on the couch with Lucy Snowe and her in-your-face misery. I want to be someone who can always go sledding, not someone who is relieved when the kids don't want to go.

Another snowstorm is coming tomorrow, and I've already worked out babysitting in case the public schools are closed. Again, while I yearn to be outside in the snow, I will have to stay in with Lucy Snowe, teaching Villette. I suppose it will be some consolation to watch the snow falling while we hunker down and talk deeply about the book. And it is a greater consolation to know that it will stay cold for the foreseeable future, so we can spend Thursday afternoon dodging the posts and the creek as we sled with abandon.

Los Abrazos Rotos and Lost: Two Reviews

Last night I watched the two-hour season premiere of Lost. I should offer up front the disclaimer that I had the flu so was not in top form, though was quite happy to recline on the couch for an obscene length of TV time (I also watched the one-hour series recap that came first). I am a loyal fan, not just of Lost but in general. Once I decide that I like something, I'll work hard to maintain my attitude. This has not always been easy with Lost, which has gotten unnecessarily complicated at some points, but while some may disagree, I think I do see plot strands coming together and improbabilities are resolving. Locke didn't come back from the dead: the smoke monster (a.k.a. the man in black) is possessing him. We've seen this before (Christian Shepard, Eko's brother, Alex Linus), so rather than introducing something new, the show has given us a recurrence of a pattern that has run through the whole series--it turns out that the new and different Locke is actually the monster, something we should have guessed (and many did). Similarly, the bomb blasted apart the causal loop and created two parallel universes. Each of these is consistent with time travel conventions, and the shift from the former to the latter is pretty cool, if indeed that's what's going on, and I could be wrong. So, in sum, I still find the show too complicated for my worn-out mid-week brain, but I am encouraged and hopeful that it is on track.

In an odd contrast, I found Almodovar's Broken Embraces to be too simple. I just saw it tonight, so perhaps after I think about it for a few days I'll want to revise my opinion. The characters weren't especially complex, the story unfolded in expected ways, and the themes about vision and possession were straightforward. It's a good movie but not a great one and certainly not up to Almodovar's usual standard.