For the past week, I’ve been in the middle of a tiny war. My house, overrun by fevers and hacking coughs, stuffy noses and aches and pains, feels like a cesspool of germs. My kitchen counter is steeped in antibiotics and decorated with post-its listing reminders of when and how much.
Recovery is slow. Currently, in order to breath through my nose, I must a) walk around in circles or b) lie down on my right side. It’s like a cruel joke, this little Spring time bug. All I want to do is stomp around, throw the kleenex, complain, and beg for mercy.
Times like these test a writer, especially a writer who is in the middle of cranking out a first draft of a novel. And, here’s one thing I know about first drafts: if I don’t spend time with my story (every-single-day), I will certainly get lost.
Lose steam.
Falter.
Because colds and bugs won’t be the only thing to get in the way of my push to The End, I had to come up with other ways to keep the story alive and on track, even if the word count was stagnant.
1. Read through research.
I have a short pile of books about the setting and times of my story, and reading through them has been one thing I could do while buried under covers, conveniently turned towards the right. As I read through those books, I took notes on scene ideas that come to mind or on details I wanted to remember.
2. Put pen to paper.
I may not have been able to type on a laptop while I walked in circles, but I could – quick – hand write a scene or a stream of ideas or dialogue onto paper. That counted, as it kept the characters in the novel at the forefront of my mind.
3. Be satisfied with whatever hit the page.
If I made it to my laptop, between the time my sinuses opened up and clamped shut again, and I managed 100 or 300 or (on a good stretch) 500 words, I was perfectly happy. Every little bit moved me closer to my goal.
In the seventh grade, I signed up for athletics. I lasted for one season (skinny, asthmatic kids are better suited for things like Drama), but I stayed long enough to experience a powerful moment.
After one look, and a few practices into the school year, the coaches figured out that I was C-team material. I was too short to spike a volleyball and couldn’t complete an overhand serve if my popularity depended on it (which it did). I was easily run over in basketball and was given an alternate uniform that screamed “sub.” During games, I took my seat at the bench. But during each practice, I did the drills and ran the laps. When track season rolled around, Coach Lewis looked at me and said “long distance runner.” He signed me up for the 400 meter race.
We didn’t practice with Coach Lewis often during track season, which made him all the more intimidating when he did show up on the field. He barked orders, shouted praise, laughed once in a while. On a particularly chilly Saturday morning at a track meet, he said the one sentence that has stuck with me ever since.
“Quit your coughin’, Craig!”
Cold weather aggravates asthma, and during the middle of the 400 meter event, I started wheezing, sputtering, slowing down. I jogged in the outside lane. Coach Lewis didn’t like that. He walked up to the chain link fence that surrounded the track, stuck his head out like a snapping turtle, and hollered.
“Quit your coughin’, Craig!”
I was shocked. Had he forgotten I had asthma? Where was the sympathy? Too scared to stop and ask him, I picked up the pace. I took the deepest breaths I could manage and the longest strides my chicken legs would take. I merged into the inside lane, rounded the last turn, and passed that tall girl with the mean eyes. I focused on the white lines that marked my lane and tuned into the sound of my shoes hitting the asphalt of the track. I pushed myself, into fourth place, earning a ribbon and a big boost of confidence.
“Quit your coughin’, Craig!”
Coach Lewis’ words flashed through my mind last week as I experienced the same shortness of breath and sluggish feeling. This time, it wasn’t my asthma slowing me down, though, it was fear. I had reached a familiar point in my novel draft, the place in the story where ideas scatter and plot weakens, the moment where I stare at the blank screen and worry if what I write next will kill the energy in the work.
This is the [place] on the old maps, the murky, muddy spot where quicksand sucks at the feet and demons overtake the heart.
I’ve been here before, with this same story. In the past, I’ve faltered and quit – full stop – and gone back to the beginning to rework chapter one. But, this time is different. I’ve got Coach Lewis breathing down my neck. And, I have a few other incentives to keep me moving forward.
1. The Radio. I recently read my story, “Red Velvet Sunday,” on WUWM’s Lake Effect program(click here to listen). Nothing makes you feel more like a writer than answering questions about the craft and having the honor of reading your work to a new audience. The experience was like a shot of adrenaline, and it was a reminder that good things do happen, usually at just the right time — like during a writing lull when you wonder if you’ve got it in you to succeed.
2. Jody Hedlund. In her post,“How to Beat the Fear of Being a One Book Wonder,”she talks about old self-doubts that resurfaced while writing her second novel. Her thoughts on how to move through those fears apply to writers at any phase.
3. Ira Glass. In his video on storytelling (part 1) (the link found via a post from Jane Friedman on Writer Unboxed), he talks about “the anecdote” as a sequence of actions that move a story forward one moment at a time. That’s how I can get through this next section so that, as Barbara O’Neal says, I’ll “eventually…have a finished draft. To rewrite. So goes the game.”
How about you? What memorable moments keep you from coughing and sputtering your way to “I quit?”
I pride myself on being a quiet observer: in a church pew, during a staff meeting, behind a muffin and a steaming cup of coffee in a cafe. Most days, it takes me a long time to warm up to any conversation. But, stick me in front of my laptop (and smack-dab in the middle of rewriting a story) and suddenly I’m all talk.
At least, that’s what I’ve noticed lately with my work-in-progress. The early drafts of my novel were heavy in exposition and light in conversation. Now, I have a clearer vision of the plot, and I know my characters better. And, dialogue comes easy for me. The problem is that once the characters start talking, I let them go on and on. In rewriting another section last week, I noticed a whole page of chit chat. All that character banter started to tug at my writer’s gut, which suggested I should to rethink my use of dialogue.
Nathan Bransford posted on the Seven Keys to Writing Good Dialogue, in which he pin points one area of concern. He says, “A good conversation is an escalation…Characters in a novel never just talk. There’s always more to it.” In all writing, each character, scene, and piece of dialogue must move the story forward. I practice that in my short stories and flash fiction. But, in this novel rewrite, much of the dialogue I’ve written just fills up space. Though realistic, it reads flat and doesn’t necessarily propel the story.
Janet Fitch (author of White Oleander) has her own post, entitled “A Few Thoughts About Dialogue,” where she carries this idea of flat conversation even further. She says, “Dialogue is only for conflict…You can’t heap all your expository business on it, the meet and greet, and all that yack…If someone’s just buying a donut, nobody needs to say anything.” Then, she throws in a quick example of unnecessary talk: in response to a character asking, Want a cup of coffee? she writes, “No. I don’t. Ever.”
I’m guilty of that kind of dialogue: in the span of one chapter, my characters have discussed getting a cup of coffee or tea twice. That’s a lot of “coffee talk.”
Many writers think a story should be largely narrated, in the manner of classic literature. But here’s a good rule: fight the urge to narrate…A story should consist of one scene following another, connected by narration.
I don’t want to nix half of the conversations in my novel just because I want to avoid too much talking. So, how do I find a balance between dialogue and narrative? After reading Bransford, Fitch, and McCarver, I found three different techniques:
From McCarver’s article: Find a particularly long narrative section and see how it might be broken up into more of a scene with dialogue.
After reading Fitch’s post: Find a section in the story where the characters have a whole conversation, and then cross out the dialogue that is commonplace. Because, as Fitch says, “A line anybody could say is a line nobody should say.”
From Bransford’s post: If the dialogue does carry the story forward but still feels “thin,” look for places to add gestures, facial expressions, and/or any details from the scene that enhance that section. Bransford says, “gesture and action [are] not [used] to simply break up the dialogue for pacing purposes, but to actually make it meaningful….”
How do you balance your story with narrative and dialogue? Do you talk too much?
For the past week, I’ve been in the middle of a tiny war. My house, overrun by fevers and hacking coughs, stuffy noses and aches and pains, feels like a cesspool of germs. My kitchen counter is steeped in antibiotics and decorated with post-its listing reminders of when and how much.
