Well, I'm just about finished polishing the first draft of my new novel All We Know of Heaven and completely done refurbishing Scout's Honor based on some great feedback by a top agent. I've been reinvigorated this summer by something I heard at the WestConn MFA residency last week, which is not surprising since when I was in the program, all my invigoratory writing came from those few days in Danbury.
One of the agents giving us a little talk on the industry mentioned that he rejects 99% of the queries he receives. 99%. Think about that. Basically, my chances of getting a yes from an agent are the same as an American getting a tax cut from Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. This got me to thinking, though. I had heard so many stories of people going through 20-30 rejections before getting published.
Scout's Honor was at 41. At least.
But with this new number in mind, and some important revisions based on the aforementioned agent's advice, I'm at it again. I've decided to do a query a day until I get to 100 queries. Unless my writing stinks, which I don't think I would have gotten through my MFA program and a scrutinizing mentor like Daniel Asa Rose if it did, I should get a yes from one of the 100. Basic math, right?
Meanwhile, I'm facing revisions on novel three, which I'll give myself until next summer to fully finish. I've got plenty of readers who want a shot at All We Know of Heaven, including former students, former classmates, and a friend from church. Hopefully their feedback will make this one a winner.
Right now it just kind of blows my mind that I've written three full novels. Published or not, that kind of kicks ass. I'm pretty proud of that. And I've had enough people read and love my work to not be discouraged by a lack of publication. What's even more mind blowing is that I think I have a series brewing...at least a trilogy.
Agents beware! If you don't grab me up soon, you're going to have quite a backlog of work to deal with. Just sayin.'
It's that question that kids have been asking for centuries, the one every adult fears. Daddy, where do stories come from? Okay, so it's not the type of question that makes you cringe, but it's just as difficult a question to answer.
It wasn't my kid that asked me this recently but my baptism sponsor. We were hanging out at Starbucks, me with my manly, no-nonsense strawberries and creme frappabingosomethingorother, she with her girlie, way-too-hipster black coffee. We were talking about organ donation and how one person can save so many lives, when an idea occurred to me--one that I'm not even sure is original. I asked her, what if you wrote a novel and it followed this group of separate characters, and you didn't know why they were all connected, but then, near the end, they all end up needed transplants and get them from the same person, another character you'd been following?
She wondered aloud if that's how I lived my life. As a writer, was I always searching for a story? I didn't think so. It sounds too pretentious and writery to say (in an over-dramatic, pretentious voice), "Everything is a story to me. I comb every interaction in my life to find that *gasp* one...great...story!"
I was pretty sure that wasn't me.
After further review, though, maybe it is. I always attributed the stories I come up with to a creative mind--they just pop in there. But, alas, an examination of the facts proves that this just ain't true. So where do they come from? If you look at the novels I've written, well, I steal them.
My first novel started brewing in a Brit Lit seminar on how British Colonialism influenced British novels. A discussion spawned, one day, from Great Expectations about the nature of crime--about how Pip identified with the prisoners in London--and driving home that day, before I even was an MFA student or graduate, before I ever was a writer, I decided it would be cool to write a novel that examined the nature of crime, that there were things we do as humans that are perfectly legal but somehow were worse crimes than those that get us locked up.
Fast-forward a few months (maybe longer?). I'm driving in my car listening to Green Day's American Idiot, an album with such a distinct storyline that it was adapted into a Broadway show. The idea of a suburban kid running off to the city and watching his whole life crash down around him, forcing him to run home with his tail between his legs (at least that's how I interpreted the album) stuck with me. In the car that day, Truman Armstrong was born--a boy that runs away from home for an unknown reason, and once you really start to like him and feel bad for him, you learn his crime--he ran away because he got his girlfriend pregnant. Dirt bag, right? Criminal, right? He makes amends in the end and suffers for it, but I guess I have to thank Billie Joe Armstrong and Charles Dickens for that one. Two of my all-time favs.
Novel number two? Well, the credit for that one kind of goes to Edgar Allan Poe. It was the (possibly) incestuous twins of The House of Usher that spawned that naughty little novel. The House on Bittersweet Trail, for which the novel is named, even falls in the end like Usher's abode. I'm glad to credit Poe with this idea, though, as many who were at my reading at WestConn probably assumed I was some kind of psycho perve. Nope. Sorry. Poe had twins doing the nasty almost 200 years ago. I was just inspired by them. The rest of the story did come from my own life, traumatic childhood moments and such, but mostly it was Poe's fault. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
As for the novel I'm currently working on, the idea really spawned from a combination of my conversion to Christianity and writing the blog post about it. When I wrote that post, I quoted the poem about hope by Emily Dickinson. Well, thinking about her made me think of another poem she wrote, a poem about losing those close to you that starts, "My life closed twice before its close" and ends "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell." So the novel All We Know of Heaven was born. It follows a young lady through two near-death experiences, but also the two deaths of loved ones--the true meaning of the poem. In the end, a young man she fancies helps her to find God with many of my own personal experiences finding Him woven into the end of the book. Thank you Emily Dickinson.
So, if you're keeping score, which I wasn't until just now, I got my ideas from combining the classic literature I studied and now teach with my own person issues and interests. Every time, same combination. How boring. But if I weren't paying attention, and looking for a story, I wouldn't have found them in those pages, on that CD, or in my life. So perhaps I am always looking. Dreams. Daydreams. Television. Books. Conversations.
I guess I'm more pretentious and writery than I thought.
Basket Case by Green Day
Music video inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The sun creeps up over the horizon, sending a beautiful orange rippling over the lake. Sitting on the rocker on my wraparound porch, lazy cat by my side, I fire up the MacBook Pro and open a blank word document. A bird sings a merry song to my left. A deer rustles out of the woods to my right and looks me dead in the eye before saluting and diving back, inspiring me toward the days first work of flash fiction. I cut through the dew and the New England October chill with a large cup of Dunkin white hot chocolate. My big boy coffee. Creativity brews like morning java straight through to lunch. Alone I conquer the worlds I create. Alone I thrive.
Yeah, right!
Of course YA Highway's road trip Wednesday asked when I LIKE to write. So with that in mind, I've told the truth. That's how I imagine it. That's how I'd be most productive. The fact of the matter is, this little fantasy is just that. It's impossible. Reality bites.
First off, my house--with no wraparound porch--overlooks a pond, not a lake, and until the dead of winter, my view is completely obscured by trees and pricker bushes. It's nice enough--sure beats the two bedroom apartment in New London--but a New England retirement treasure it is not. Unfortunately, October only lasts thirty-one days, and my cats are indoor only. I can't afford the white hot chocolate daily, and the birds just yelp and shit on my deck furniture. The MacBook Pro was a fantasy, too.
Alas, as a writer struggling to make it with a full time teaching job, which includes advising both the school paper and the yearbook, two young children demanding time, and limited funds, I have to make due. So when do I really write? Ugh.
Summer is the easy answer. I'm unemployed for lack of a better word all summer, so there's ample time...you'd think. But with the children and other facts of life, it sure doesn't seem like it. My routine goes as follows. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Brush teeth. Sit at computer checking facebook, email, Twitter, etc. Send out 1000 emails to my editors at the paper and yearbook. Figure out what's trying to derail that program and stop it. THEN, I set to writing.
My daughter has been going to Girl Scout camp this summer, so only my son is home, but so is my wife, and he's kind of docile until after his nap anyway--the kid loves to sleep--so that is when I go to town. Will it be a blog? Some chapters of novel number three? Revisions of number two? Submitting to agents? Some prose poetry? Flash fiction? Who knows. Whatever happens, happens. Most days I try to take a walk when baby boy naps with his mom, and maybe when I get home I churn something out, the residue of the inspiration I got walking through scenic Niantic, CT. By the time he wakes up at about 2:30, that's it. Inspiration's gone. I'm a dad then until bed time. After their asleep, it's time to work on ideas and lessons for the upcoming school year--which usually turns into working on something for the journalism program.
When it's not summer? Not so good. Basically, there's weekends, but often I have papers to grade and publications to proof, and on and on and on... Writing during the school year is hard. I tend to try and knock my big works out during the summer and revise them bit by bit during the school year. Other than that, a flash piece or two might pop out and a bunch of poetry. But still, that's some writing coming, and a novel every twelve months is quite prolific if I do say so myself.
So, in short, in my perfect world, my life would be that first paragraph. I wanna be that guy. I imagine after lunch in that fantasy world I'd play golf and then spend the evening playing Madden on PS3. But until that day comes--and I'm a big enough romantic to still think it will once I'm a published author and the kids are away at college--I think I'm doing pretty well for myself.
Got writer's block? I suggest you go for a walk...or maybe not. I'm currently 40 pages into the first draft of my third project--which I may have stumbled upon a title for today--and because of one little walk I now have a fourth. An overactive imagination may be key to a sustainable writing career, but it can also be a burden.
It really came from one little concept that struck me on my walk. Basically, I walked from my house to a little park with cute benches at the mouth of the Niantic River, just beneath the draw bridge, which is a bit of an eyesore. However, if you sit in the park on one of those cute little benches looking out on the river, the view is inspiring. And I mean that literally.
I found myself thinking about the Transcendentalism I teach in my American Lit classes, wondering why if mankind was ruining the beauty of nature, did this view look so much more interesting and spectacular with the little houses smattering the coast and dotting the hills on the horizon, not to mention the fleet of sail boats crowding the docks to my left. Sure the hills and the river would be pretty on their own, but it wouldn't be the same. Think of all those nautical paintings you've seen hanging in seafood joints. They're something special.
Then I pictured the boats and houses just stuck there on concrete or glass or gravel or something. Just plopped down in the picture without the green strokes of the hills or the blue ripples cascading across the river's skin in varying patterns. On their own, left only to the devices of man, they simply aren't spectacular at all. I had an epiphany. As is usual with most arguments, it isn't the artistry of nature or that of mankind alone that provides us with the most perfect look at beauty and inspiration. It's the balance of both.
Think of a beautiful man-made fountain with a cool sculpture without the flowers around it or the water to pour out into the main pool. Not nearly as inspirational--just dry, hard concrete. Bleh.
Then I thought of Boston. Though I love "The Big Apple," there's just something I find more aesthetically inspiring about "Bean Town," and it's not just the legumes. It's that balance of old, historical structures juxtaposed with a new, modern urbanhood that truly makes the city grand. You can gaze upon a rickety old church and graveyard with Paul Revere's dead body rotting six feet beneath your shoes with dilapidated cultural foundations crumbling all around, and if you tilt your head up just a few degrees, you can see a monument of modern economic domination towering above. One if by land, two if by sea, indeed! Lo! They've come by air!
I love these concepts. Everything in moderation is something we all sort of except as true, but what does that really mean. It's not just food, drink, and sex. It takes the old and the new. It takes tradition and impulsiveness. Reality and fantasy. Conservative and liberal. Dogs and cats. You get the point. I often tell my students when there's a passionate argument where both sides are unwilling to budge, it's usually because both sides are wrong...and right. The answer is usually somewhere in the middle, or non-existent.
I want to capture this concept and show it working in the real world--and the imaginary. Think Anne of Green Gables and her Romanticism melding with Marilla's no-nonsense Realism. (Yes, I'm reading that book to my daughter now. What of it?)
Now, it's not just this concept that came to me out there on that hike. An entire plot, all of its twists, all of its characters...title and all, came to me on the half hour walk home from the point that had so inspired me. It wrote itself. It was an epiphany. And that's the title. Even a character's name. I love it when a plan comes together.
Now this blog is about the struggles and triumphs of an unpublished writer, so it wouldn't be right without pointing out that this poses a unique problem. As I said earlier, I'm 40 pages into my third full-length novel that I love oh so much and must, can, and will finish. So where does that leave me? I took a bunch of notes when I got home...on desktop stickies on my laptop. But will that idea still be as fresh and interesting to me in the year or two it takes to finalize this project? Well, let's hope.
It's been a long, long time. With my MFA in the rear view, along with my second novel, I'm ready to get back in the saddle and practice what I've been learning over the past two years--writing. Novel three has officially begun production, and I think it has the potential to trump anything I've ever written before...ever.
The hard part is getting used to the idea of writing something completely on my own, without a mentor. I have a dear friend who appears willing to be my first reader along the way, and my wife will certainly chime in once the first draft is done and ready to be read, but not having a professional, published, successful writer to read every word along the way is a bit frightening.
Or maybe it's liberating. This puppy's mine...all mine! Muhuhahaha! I feel like I've spent so much time on classes outside of fiction writing, and revising works I almost don't remember writing, that's it feels good to get cracking on a new project. I hope to finish a draft over the summer and then truly take my time plugging away at revisions with no artificial deadlines. I'm pretty damned determined, so I don't worry that I'll slack knowing there's no deadline. I just want it to get done, be perfect, get published, and see this puppy in print.
However, I'm not giving up on novels one and two. I have an agent meeting scheduled in August, and I'm sending out queries regularly hoping to catch some fish. I think I've gotten both novels to come as far as they can, but I continue to read and revise as needed. In fact, I'll be reading from my thesis at WestConn in August as well.
Either way, I'm excited about writing as much as possible, whether it be working on this new novel, revising the other two, or blogging right here. Yes, writing is a Bittersweet Trail, but it's one we love strolling down. So, with all apologies to Whitesnake, here I go again on my own
