I Have Very Little to Say on the Subject...

...except that I am not accustomed to being called "ridiculous" by my professional colleagues.

Publishing, alas, has as many petty personalities as academia does. I already knew that about non-fiction, but I was mad enough to hope that the fiction scene would be better.

The Eye of I

Award-winning children's novelist Richard Peck cheats at first person. There's no other way to put it. Sometimes the first-person protagonist describes the thoughts or feelings of another character as if it were known fact. In lesser hands, these oversteps would be circled in red by the editor as careless errors of Point of View.

The more I think about Peck's cheating, the craftier it becomes. His first-person protagonist can't see inside everyone's mind, just a few people very close to her. To test this approach's viability, I consider my own life. Often I can tell by the face and body language of my husband or a parent what he or she is thinking, no matter what he or she actually says.  So it's true: for people with whom the main character is very close, a limited first-person omniscience is arguably correct.

Delicate Force-Feeding

This new novel was supposed to be a fluffy, silly romp. Needless to say, I'm now doing all kinds of arcane historical research to strengthen and enrich the book. Two issues have surfaced out of this to destabilize my confidence:

First, I'm stymied by the prospect of dribbling a touch of this research into the novel without alienating or boring the reader. In my last novel, I jumped in knowing it was historical fiction for gifted kids. This one was meant to have a broader audience, so I must proceed with great caution.

Second is the timing of my research viz-a-viz the progress of my writing. I was keeping to a strict schedule of drafting two chapters per week before I realized I wanted more historical background. Doing secondary reading and digesting enough info to help the story is a distracting matter. Plus, I really can't write more until I have this research done and organized. So much for two chapters per week.

The Autonomy of Fictional Lives

Some novelists advocate intense exercises to pre-determine a character's personality before one starts to write. These explorations get down to such details as the character's favorite color, food, and music. For me, this approach is too abstract and artificial.

I find that my characters reveal their personalities to me scene by scene, just as one gets to know a person over time in real life. Somehow, the people I invent are not entirely controlled by me, but develop as they are faced with (or cause!) new situations in the plot. The way they constantly surprise me is a wondrous, miraculous thing.

Two for the Show

During my many hours on the subway each week, I often stare at print ads for novels. Mind you, these are almost always GC  (publisher of Nicholas Sparks and other zillionnaire best-sellers). The lurid ad text makes you yearn to read the thing on your Kindle before you get to work. I mention the publisher to make clear that these are not literary masterpieces. They are hugely viable commercial monsters. They are closer to TV shows than books.

Many of these ads are for two-authored novels. Think of it. Two people writing the same novel. The concept fascinates me. It really is more like the procedure for a screenplay.

I try to imagine the roles of these two authors. One guy writes while the other guy sleeps, so it's a 24-hour factory? That would explain the proliferation of such books. One guy plans the story and the other guy writes it? One guy writes the dialog and the other guy sews it together with "he said,"  "she remarked," "the girl blubbered"? One guy writes a draft in longhand and the other guy types and revises? One guy writes while the other guy does a Starbucks run?

For someone who (like most novelists, I feel safe in guessing) thinks of writing as blissfully solitary work, the collaborative novel seems as ineffectual as two people driving the same car at the same time.

The Bloom of Impatience

I wait. I hear nothing. Then a rejection. Then nothing. I send out another work. I check my submissions log. A legitimate zine that says it will respond in three weeks hasn't responded in six. For another, it's been three months. For yet another, four. An editor loves my story but has no room; she's filing it. I have a book contract and no release date. I wait.

There is no way to control that end of this process. The only control I have is over my own output. I can do a lot of writing and make it the best quality I can. Everything else is up to the fates, working in their own sweet time. Didn't Confucious say something like that, or was it some bodhisattva? He was right, whoever it was, even if he wasn't talking about writing fiction.

An Addled or an Agile Mind

I have a file full of story ideas. I have five or six novels in at least partial outline, some with chapter drafts. I can't choose which to work on, although I know which is the most logical to work on given my career goals.

How does one turn off one's fountain of ideas? Should one? At some point, I must get something done, not just get more things started. As in most cases, discipline needs to rein in creativity, focus it, keep it on a path. Otherwise, it's fruitless.

This post turned out rather like a prayer, but that just might be appropriate.