A couple of months ago — shortly after my oldest son got back from his mission — I hijacked him for a day to go driving with me in the northeastern suburbs of St. Paul, about 45 minutes from where I live. He, unwary soul, neglected to ask the purpose of our expedition prior to departure. When eventually he did discover the purpose — to check out a neighborhood and high school that I’ve adopted as the model for the set of novels I’m working on at present — much eye-rolling was evidenced. (Note my clever use of the passive voice to clue the reader in to just how clever I am. For, um, using the passive voice. Yeah.)

I’m sure the only thing that made the experience bearable for my son was the fact that he didn’t have to interact with anyone himself and could therefore more or less ignore the embarrassing way his father was acting. Later, when I told him about emailing a vice-principal chosen at random from the school website with questions about the school — and then showing up in person one day just as school was getting out — he made a comment the precise content of which I cannot remember, but the sense of which was that (a) I’m really quite weird, and (b) the publishing industry does not have enough money in it to persuade him to go out and be nosy and intrusive and chat up complete strangers. Which, I pointed out, was kind of an odd comment for him to make, given that he’d just spent two years talking to strangers about religion. That, however, was Different. Or so he informed me.

I concede nonetheless that he has a point. Being a writer, I’ve found, frequently puts me in situations where I act in ways that push the boundaries of my comfort zone — and leave my family’s far behind. I’m reminded, for example, of the time I showed up at a community PFLAG meeting for No Going Back (Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, except that now they’ve expanded it beyond the acronym to include other categories such as transgendered). I felt intensely uncomfortable going into the meeting — but I did it anyway, because I thought my writing would be better if I had actually experienced some of what I was writing about. And I think it was.

Part of the reason for my embarrassment, I suspect, is that I lack confidence in myself as a writer. Perhaps this will be different once I get a few more publications under my belt. When I say, “I’m doing research for a book I’m writing,” I feel very much a fraud, even though it’s nothing more than the truth. It’s a truism that if you act as if what you’re doing is perfectly normal, others are likely to treat it that way too.

I admit in this respect to a certain jealousy of Shayne Bell, a member of my old writing group Xenobia who (together with Dave Wolverton) was among the first to break into professional writing. Shayne had a remarkable ability to approach total strangers with what appeared to be absolutely no embarrassment when it came to requests related to his writing. So sincere was his demeanor, so clean-cut his appearance, so reasonable and modest his approach, that he could charm pretty much anyone into doing pretty much anything — or at least, so it seemed to me at the time. Shayne was a dangerous man, or at any rate could have been had he chosen to use his gifts as a con artist or politician instead of storyteller. Perhaps I’ll develop more of that kind of confidence when/if I have more published titles under my name.

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The day I showed up without prior notice at the school, I first drove around the neighborhood. My original intent had been to drive back and forth in front of the school several times (I wanted to observe while kids were getting out of school), but after a couple of passes, I decided that was a little too stalker-like. So I parked in the nearby district office lot,  walked over to the school, and then talked to someone at the school office, who in turn called out the vice-principal I’d been communicating with. We talked briefly. She said I wouldn’t be able to stay there and observe without talking to the principal first, and encouraged me to email her to set up something.

So that’s what I did. I thought about it for a couple of weeks, then decided that what I really needed was a tour of the school — ideally while students were there, but I assumed it would be less disruptive and easier to arrange after school. I composed an email to the  vice-principal, specifying the types of areas I wanted to see (halls, commons areas, auditoriums, etc.) and explaining that it wasn’t so much a matter of wanting specific information about the school but rather of wanting to get a feel for the school — which is both older and larger than the one my own children attend, and with a somewhat different student demographic. I also was careful to trot out my credentials as an actual published author, one who had even received a short review in one of the local Twin Cities newspapers, and listed my website. I then had to do the same for the principal — and was rewarded with a message asking me to schedule a time for a school tour with the principal. Success!

So that’s what I’m set to do tomorrow morning (the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — this part was originally written a week ago). I’m looking forward to it. Part of me wishes that I had been more self-assured from the start — it was kind of awkward talking to the office staff when I showed up without any kind of appointment, saying, “I just want to stand somewhere and watch the students going out the doors.” But comfortable or not, the fact remains that I actually did it: another small-but-real challenge surmounted in my quest to write my stories.

#######

So. I went into the office, spent about 10 minutes waiting — which was actually kind of nice, since I got to watch students going back and forth during one of the breaks between classes — then spoke with the principal. He had concerns about confidentiality, but when I explained that what I wanted was all in the nature of background and that I wasn’t planning to share any specifics about their school and its students, it seemed to allay those concerns. I also gave him a copy of No Going Back — don’t know if he’ll read it, but it seemed like the thing to do. (Note to self: remember to record the cost of the copy as a research expense…)

After we had talked, he fetched a counselor to show me around for about 20 minutes. We got to see open areas, the library (er, media center), the lunch area (with students eating lunch), the gym, and the halls. I took some notes — more as an immediate aid to memory then as anything else. I took in the ambience. And then I went home.

Back when I was in college, one of the best things I ever did was join Xenobia, an sf&f writing group. It was a great experience. I didn’t do much writing back then, but the process of reading, giving critiques, and listening to other people’s comments taught me a lot about both writing and what I value as a reader. For several years, it served as one of my primary social groups. Some of the people I met there have become longtime friends — people I’m still in contact with today.

As a writing group, Xenobia is no more, alas. (It still exists as a kind of email list where people share news and encouragement from time to time.) And I truly regret it, because now that I’m finally trying to get my own creative writing going again, I find that I need both readers to react to my work and people I can bat ideas around with.

This occurred to me again the other evening as I was thinking about the teenage empath in my current YA science fiction novel. I want him to be able to sense other people’s feelings (not their thoughts), but also physical sensations as well, such as pain or lust. I’ve been trying to figure out whether those are two truly separate things (in which case one might conceivably develop into the other), or if physical and emotional sensations can’t really be separated. That’s exactly the type of question we could have had a good discussion about back in Xenobia days. But I don’t really have a place to start that kind of conversation nowadays.

#######

I didn’t feel the lack of a writing group with No Going Back, partly I think because I knew that even without one, I’d be able to find people who would give me good feedback. And I did. Part of that was because of the kind of story it was — people had an intrinsic interest in the subject matter, and were relatively eager to give feedback on a book that was exploring new territory in Mormon fiction. Another part, I think, was because I’d been fairly engaged already in the community of Mormon letters. To some extent, AML, A Motley Vision, et al., were my writing group.

It’s different now. Partly that’s because no one has any community investment in the kinds of stories I’m working on right now. Mostly, though, I think it’s because I’m working in a different genre (YA science fiction). I feel the need to talk to people who read and write the kind of stuff I’m trying to write and get their take both on my writing and on the ideas I’m trying to make work.

#######

Thinking about what kind of a writing group I’d want to be a part of, I find that I’m a bit… picky.

As I indicated above, one of the things I really want is people who have first-hand knowledge of the genre I’m trying to write. It doesn’t necessarily have to be as a writer, but at least as a thoughtful reader. Indeed, in many ways a thoughtful reader might be an even better reviewer than another writer. Unfortunately, the way these things work, there’s very little most writers (including myself) can provide in pay to their readers — except an exchange of comments, something that has value only to another writer.

The underlying economy of a writing group lies in the exchange of comments. If I want to get good comments, I have to be willing to give good comments. That’s something I’m pretty good at, based on past experience — except that I’ve gotten a lot slower at it in recent years.

Back about 15 years ago, I reviewed a book manuscript from a friend of mine who’s a professional writer. It was an excellent story. I put in about 40 hours looking at the manuscript and making comments, which he told me were more valuable than what he got from the editor at his publishing house. It’s an experience and an accolade I treasure to this day. I have also never been able to make myself read the published novel, nor the stories that were its sequels (though I’m hoping that will change someday).

For me, writing stories and reading/reviewing stories by other writers occupy much the same (highly exhausting) mental territory. I could easily see myself putting energy into critiquing other people’s stories that should be going into my own writing. But I know that if I want to make my stories as good as they can be, I need good comments — which means that I need to be willing to give them in turn.

That being the case, I would ideally like for the people in my writing group to be on a level that’s more or less comparable to my own in terms of skill and/or knowledge. Working with people who are still trying to figure out how to write sentences and paragraphs is likely to prove frustrating for them and me both. On the other hand, I don’t think I belong in a writing group with the professionals either. I’m still learning too many of the basics.

This is a problem that solves itself naturally when you get into a writing group early in your writing experience. To some extent, all of you in the group get to grow along with each other, with people dropping out along the way (as I did) if they aren’t ready to go there yet. Unfortunately, I took a 20-year detour between college and the start of my creative writing career, so I need to start over at this point more or less from scratch with respect to finding a writing group.

The other thing I don’t want is people who think it’s their job to fix my story. Mostly what I want is people who will tell me what worked and didn’t work for them, how they reacted to things as they were reading them. An articulate and intelligent test audience, as it were. Then once a problem has been identified, I may want to throw it open to the group for discussion. That’s a point where suggestions from other experienced writers could be highly valuable. Most of the time, though, I want to try to fix it first myself.

It also turns out that I don’t react well to theoretical or model-based criticism, by which I mean critiques that start from some particular model or theory of what a story should be like rather than from a reader’s perception of what worked or didn’t work in a particular story. Basically, I don’t react well to appeals to authority in any form, aside from the authority of the reader to describe his or her own experience. I can easily see where this tendency on my part could give (and take) offense in some contexts.

#######

So where does that leave me in the quest for a writing group?

Up to now, this has been something I’ve thought I could defer until such time as I have a more complete manuscript and am ready to show it to someone. Basically, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I need to do my best to do the things I already know how to do before I go out and collect other people’s opinions about what I need to be doing better. And in terms of motivation, I know of old that involvement in a writing group is far more likely to function as a (highly enjoyable) social distraction from writing than as a stimulus to produce more.

Despite all of which, my frustrated wish for someone with whom to talk over the logic of my story serves as a reminder of the potential benefits of writing groups, even before my manuscript is ready to show to people. Maybe it’s time for me to start looking.

Every minute of every day, each of us has to choose what he or she will do next.

Okay, maybe not every minute of every day. Practically speaking, most of the time we’re in the middle of tasks we’ve already started, and so not really actively thinking about our options. I suppose that technically, even at those times we’re choosing to continue what we’re doing by not choosing to do something else, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the times when we pause at least briefly between two or more options. So maybe every 15 minutes, or every half-hour if we’re particularly focused or stuck in a meeting or something. Then again, who knows what we’re actually doing mentally while we’re in those meetings? (For the purposes of this paragraph, I’m choosing to ignore all those hours we spend sleeping, in comas, being experimented upon by aliens, etc., on the grounds that they’re not relevant to my point. Not relevant, I tell you! Bad reader! No milk bones for you.)

Ahem.

Anyway, it occurs to me that one very simple definition of a writer is someone who — among all the myriads of other things he or she could be doing — chooses to write often enough to actually produce something. The rest, as Einstein might say, is details. (And don’t you just want to whap Einstein upside the head when he says that? And people like me when they quote him?)

I like this way of thinking, because it puts the emphasis at a level where I find it manageable. I’m not the sort of person who can decide to sit down and write something for four or six or eight or twelve hours, five or six days a week, until I get it done. What I can do is choose to write in this particular moment — sometimes — and see what follows from there.

#####

Science fiction author Robert Silverberg (so I’ve heard) can produce 25 pages of text a day when he’s in writing mode. (Pause for all the writers and would-be writers to contemplate the pleasant thought of taking out a contract on Robert Silverberg.)

I can’t do that. Okay, maybe I could do that, if I was high on the Mormon equivalent of speed (and when you find out what that is, could you tell me?), but anything I produced would be garbage. And after two days of that, I’d be useless for the next month.

Much of the process of being a writer consists of strategies to increase the likelihood of choosing to write at any particular point in time. The process is illustrated admirably (both literally and figuratively) in Edward Gorey’s very brief story, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, which by the way I highly recommend for all the writers on your gift list, assuming that they have the right kind of offbeat sense of humor to appreciate Gorey. (But then, they’re writers, which ups the chances significantly.) I quote: “For writing Mr Earbrass affects an athletic sweater of forgotten origin and unknown significance; it is always worn hind-side-to… Mr Earbrass belongs to the straying, rather than to the sedentary, type of author. He is never to be found at his desk unless actually writing down a sentence. Before this happens he broods over it indefinitely while picking up and putting down again small, loose objects; walking diagonally across rooms; staring out windows; and so forth. He frequently hums, more in his mind than anywhere else, themes from the Poddington Te Deum.”

Some writers have routines. I highly recommend that, if you can pull it off. I have bad habits, which I’m constantly trying to evade for long enough to be at least a marginally useful human being. In the case of writing, rather than trying to write at a set time, what I’m learning to do is try to recognize those moments when story ideas and writing impulses are tapping on the window of my brain, and then go and let them in rather than run screaming into the night.

And then (to push the metaphor a bit) I do my best to jog along with my visitor as far as I can, until he/she/gtst vanishes into thin air or goes off in some crazy direction or leads me on until I drop, exhausted, by the side of the road. Not that crazy directions are necessarily bad, mind you. But it’s important to distinguish between crazy-good directions and crazy-falling-off-cliffs directions. At least, once one has fallen off the cliff, it’s important to be able to recognize that you and your story did just go over a cliff, and maybe it would be a good idea to get back up, climb out, and choose another route.

A certain degree of courage is required. Or, as the common misreading has it: “let no spirit of discretion overcome you in the [writing] hour.” The point is that you move. You do something. You write. Without that, nothing else one says or thinks or does as a writer is really important.

#####

Story writing (as I believe I may have written in a previous post for this series) requires a variety of self-induced monomania. Unfortunately, in my case at least, the tricks I use for throwing myself into that state are likely as not to backfire. Sitting down to “get to it” increases the pressure, and thus the urge to run away. Easing into it by doing other related things (such as writing a blog post about writing) can quickly become a substitute for the thing itself. At this point in my life, I find advice and experiences from other writers depressing rather than motivating. And the last time I tried to tell my wife and daughter about a story idea, they told me to go away. (The idea, so they informed me, was too embarrassing for them to listen to.)

The best and most productive times, I often find, are those occasions when the impulse to write sneaks up on me en route to doing other things. I can’t quite make myself believe that scribbling story scenes during sacrament meeting is a sign either of my own spirituality or the worth of my stories. (Indeed, logic rather suggests the reverse.) But writing moments are too precious to sacrifice, whenever they come.

It’s my hope that someday, once I’ve proven to the muse (and to myself) that I can be trusted to write at the times I’ve set aside for writing, that it will become possible for me to create and keep a real writing schedule. In the meantime, my goal is simply to find time to write, on a frequent if not regular basis, and see what happens.

* For some particularly dubious values of “popular demand.”

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.

They say that when you wipe out on a bicycle, the thing to do is get right back on and start riding again. At least, I think that’s what they say. Personally, it makes more sense to me to put on some bandages and let the scrapes heal first.

Be that as it may…

A couple of months after No Going Back was published last fall, I decided that I wasn’t going to try to write a novel in 2010. I’ve held to that, mostly. Instead, I’ve focused on my freelance informational writing and editing (which actually pays bills), reading and reviewing work by other people (a matter partly of paying off the karmic debt I feel I incurred by pushing my manuscript on other people for their reviews), working to promote No Going Back — which can be quite time-consuming — and generally catching up with things. More than once, I’ve congratulated myself on making a decision at once so wise (ahem) and so practical. Indeed, so nice has it been not to be writing a novel that I often doubted, during the first few months, that I should ever want to write another story. Alas, over time I started to feel that certain creative itch again…

During this past summer, I spent an hour one Friday morning in a local swimming pool celebrating the end of my younger son’s swimming lessons. (My older son hates swimming with a fiery passion, but the younger son is fortunately proving less hydrophobic.) He, of course, was off playing with his friends. Left to my own devices, I soon found myself observing my fellow swimmers, pondering their interactions, speculating about their internal motivations and mental processes, and generally thinking about them as inspiration for potential characters. That’s when I realized that pleasant fantasies aside, the habit of story writing has gotten too firm a grip on my soul to be set so easily aside.

Since then, I’ve been stumbling back toward writing, trying to figure out how and where to get started again. My hope is to reproduce the conditions, habits, and mindset that resulted in a completed novel, compared to the stalled efforts of years past. So far, the outcome is uncertain.

#####

Story ideas, for me, often start with the notion of a particular character in a challenging situation. Ideally, there’s also some general sense of where the story is headed and how it has to end. Usually, though, it takes work to get to that point. I’ve generated countless (because I don’t particularly want to count them) ideas and possible starting points that haven’t gone anywhere — at least, not yet — because they haven’t connected with enough other story pieces, of the right shapes and types, to make a decent narrative.

Back before my older son (the non-aquatic one) left on his mission, I sat him down and made him read some of the various fantasy story beginnings and ideas I’d generated over the years. As he did so, his frustration mounted. “They all look okay, Dad! You just need to choose one and finish it!” (Or words to that effect.) And yet most of what I’ve done in the last few months consists of trying out still more starting-places.

Part of the problem is that I’m simply too aware of the universe of possibilities each new story represents. Without any effort, I can envision myriads of possible directions for any given narrative. However, one of the things I’ve learned is that charging ahead at random isn’t a good strategy for me. Instead, I need to play around and wait for that faint inner click that signals an organic rightness to the direction I’m contemplating. Proceeding without that internal confirmation leads to wasted efforts and a sense of dissatisfaction and doubt in my own writing. Since the enemy (for me) is largely my own internal doubts, that’s an experience that’s best avoided. I also have to believe (though I have no firm evidence of this) that the story ideas that feel better to me also result in better final products.

#####

Young adult fantasy novels (which is what I’m hoping to write next, at least in part because I hold out some faint hope that they might result in a positive financial return) are pretty different from a realistic contemporary novel about a gay Mormon teenager. Still, I can’t help but hope that some of the lessons of my first novel might help give me a leg up on future efforts. Pondering on my experiences, I’ve distilled the following mix of declarative observations and imperative guidelines — tentative hypotheses about what works for me in writing fiction:

• In trying to write a story, it’s good to know where you’re going.
• Persistence over time can produce a novel, no matter how slow the progress seems to be.
• If I can tell I’m writing crap, it’s best to go do something else for a while.
• It’s important to get away from the computer from time to time to refresh my brain.
• On a related note, writing in spiral notebooks can be a useful strategy for putting in quality writing time.
• I’m more balanced and content when I’m writing regularly on a story, even if it’s only a little bit per day.
• When I get stuck on one scene, I can jump ahead to work on another scene.
• A lot can be figured out by taking the time to think about my characters and their situations in depth.
• When the writing’s going well, it’s best to run with it. Even if it’s in the middle of the night.
• When all else fails, (a) take a walk, (b) wash some dishes, (c) play with your kids, (d) grumble in your journal, (e) read a good story (by someone else), and/or (f) all of the above.

How all this applies in my current circumstances is a bit of a mystery. At present, I’m surrounded by fragmentary story ideas: characters, voices, setting. So far, nothing has jelled properly. Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t persisted to the point where one of my ideas starts throwing out roots and branches to become a real story.

In short, I’m floundering around. What I have to keep reminding myself is that I need to flounder. Floundering at least means I’m in the water (so to speak). Horrid and uncomfortable though it feels, to cease doing so means giving up — because all stories, based on my experience to date, lie on the other side of prolonged and profound discomfort. Floundering can ultimately lead to other things, if I gird up my loins (pull on my bathing suit?) and flounder in earnest. At least, that’s my hope.

If art is, in part at least, the imitation of reality, it’s an imitation that’s largely bounded by and grounded in artistic convention. That’s something I’ve long been aware of from a literary/critical perspective, but writing a novel myself — and then seeing the reaction of different readers to the specific choices I made about where and how to be “realistic” — has borne that truth in on me in a particularly vivid fashion.

No one actually writes scenes, dialogue, storylines, and internal thoughts to match the way things happen in real life. Stream-of-consciousness, that most famous of experiments in literary style, tends to strike readers (in my experience) as self-consciously attention-drawing rather than realistic: yet another way for the writer to get between the reader and the experience. Attempts at realism can, ironically, make readers all the more conscious of the writer’s craft.

And then there’s the fact that what strikes one reader as realistic isn’t the same thing that strikes other readers as realistic. Case in point: the dialogue of my teenage character in No Going Back. I’ve had reviewers comment on the awkwardness of their dialogue as a negative thing. Other readers described the realism of my teenagers as a particular strength. It’s occurred to me that both may be true, since one of the things I was trying to imitate was the awkwardness of teenagers in grappling with serious subjects. They start and stop sentences, they interrupt themselves, they dance around what they’re saying. I’ve wondered if that attempt at realism is part of what irritates some of my readers, and whether a smoother and (to my mind) less “natural” style might have kept them more engaged. It’s hard to know.

Listening to my children talk, I’m struck by how repetitious and bizarre a transcript of their speech would look, lifted verbatim into a story. And then there’s the matter of capturing intonation, tone of voice, gestures and other signals that accompany speech. Which details do you include? Frequently, I wound up cutting pieces of information just because they made a scene or paragraph or sentence go on too long. Less is more.

Thinking about this now, I’m reminded of BYU professor Steve Walker’s insight into the invitational nature of J. R. R. Tolkien’s prose: that by including only a few key details, he invites readers to co-create his characters inside their own minds. It is, as he points out, a rather different approach from the values of the realistic tradition in fiction, where the goal is seen as creating a picture of life that is so detailed and real readers can imaginatively step directly into it.

Extending this thought, the value of an approach like Tolkien’s may lie in its implicit acknowledgment that stories are not independent realities created by the writer and passively experienced by readers, but rather negotiated interactions that take place within the space of the reader’s mind. Of course, there’s a certain irony in applying such an insight to Tolkien, the great proponent of story as sub-created experience and one of the most detailed world-creators in all of fantasy…

#####

Writing my novel, I was struck by just how little real time is depicted in a typical narrative. Looking at the timeline I created of scenes from the year and a half covered by No Going Back, it’s quite common to see gaps of a week or more during which there’s simply nothing written.

Decisions about which life-details to include serve several masters. One is realism, which I think is essential to feeling sympathy for the characters in a story. We have to believe they are humans like ourselves before we can care about what happens to them.

The other is strategic importance to the story. Events and details that don’t play a part in advancing the story inevitably take time and attention away from that story. Stories (and readers) can take only so much of that before distraction sets in. Just how much varies, depending on the story, the genre, and (most especially) the tastes and mental/information processing habits of the individual reader.

Personally, I’m the sort of reader that rather likes a meandering storyline. I like the time that the hobbits spend in the Old Forest and the house of Tom Bombadil. One of the attractions of story reading, for me, is spending time in worlds and with characters I enjoy.

An author’s judgment in such areas is inevitably suspect. How much detail is needed to bring one’s characters and settings to life? The author can’t possibly know, because for him/her they already exist. On the other hand, as their creator, the writer is probably the last person who will tire of spending time with them.

There’s a fair amount of detail I wrote that didn’t make it into No Going Back. For example, given the age of my characters, it occurred to me at one point that they almost certainly would be getting driving lessons during the course of the novel. I decided this could provide fodder for some entertaining parent-child interaction, and drafted a couple of scenes based on that. And then I went back and took them out, because no matter how I tried to fit them in, they felt like a distraction to me.

It’s likely that I should have done the same thing on a few other occasions. Details about video games and teenage music and the like were (for me) a way of giving a more concrete sense of how my characters filled their lives when they weren’t working on homework. (I actually had included a reference to watching YouTube videos until my editor pointed out that YouTube hadn’t been founded yet at the time of my story. Hurray for Chris!) It’s my impression that some readers like those details, but I’ve had more than one comment on how distracting they can get.

And then there are the details I had originally left out that Chris forced me to put in. Most often, these were stage details, as I think of them: information about where people are physically situated, how they move and where they go while conversations and other interactions are taking place. Thinking about the way I read, it makes sense that I might miss these small details, since I tend to process scenes auditorily rather than visually. With more practice, I hope to gain a clearer sense of just how much of this kind of stuff to include. In the meantime, I’m glad I had a good editor.

#####

Stories — even nonfiction stories — are different from reality. We all know this, I believe, no matter how much we may allow our vision of reality to affected by the stories we hear and read. As Patsy says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after they’ve been oohing and ahhing at their first glimpse of Camelot: “It’s only a model.”

The thing I hadn’t truly appreciated until I tried to do it myself was just how arbitrary and unintuitive the choice of details can seem, in trying to tease readers/viewers/listeners into supplying what’s missing to create the internal illusion of reality. Over and over, I found myself deliberating quite basic questions, from whether to accent a bit of conversation with an accompanying eyebrow lift to how much detail to include about a boy’s physical reaction to a hormonal moment. Something that had appeared quite seamless to me from a reader’s perspective was revealed to be the result of considerable craft, at a nuts-and-bolts level. Maybe that’s one of the things they talked about in all those creative writing classes I never took…

The next time I undertake to write a story, hopefully I won’t be quite so clueless about these things going in. In the meantime, I feel that I’ve gained a greater understanding of one of the things that makes narrative writing such a complex and judgment-driven endeavor. I hope it’s made me not only a more wary and alert writer, but a more appreciative reader as well.

Fear is, I’ve come to realize, one of my great personal enemies as a creative writer (along with laziness). Part of this is probably just because of the kind of person I am. I suspect, though, that part of it may be endemic to the writing process.

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Possibly the hardest time for me personally during the writing of my novel (and since) was the time after the manuscript was finished, while I was sending it out and getting feedback from as many people I could entice into looking at it. I remember several days sitting at my computer, incapable of putting in time on my paid work, almost mindless with fear about the kinds of responses I would get. Fortunately, I was able to get past it with several long walks — and prayers, most of which ended with me putting my work, and my pride in it, on the Lord’s altar: accepting that if it turned out that what I had written wasn’t any good, that was still okay because I had tried my best to do something I felt was worthwhile. Ultimately, the only way I was able to achieve peace was through a sense that my effort in writing No Going Back might be an acceptable offering, even if the work itself lacked value or worth.

The whole experience was something of a surprise. I had no idea that I cared so much what my would-be peers in the community of Mormon letters thought about my work. I had no understanding of just how debilitating that fear might be — that I could be tempted to pull my work from consideration by a publisher and readers, even after I had finished it, just to avoid finding out that they might not like it. I didn’t do that, of course — but I can’t help but wonder how much of that was because of how public I had been about my writing of the book, and how embarrassing and essentially impossible it would have been to suddenly pretend it didn’t exist. At one point, I consoled myself with the thought that if everyone hated the book, I could just drop out of the community of Mormon letters and find something else to do with my time: curl up in a ball and hide, essentially. It was good, I thought, that I lived in Wisconsin, not somewhere like Utah where my social life might involve regular in-person interaction with a lot of other Mormon writers and readers — perhaps the first time I’d been glad of that particular fact. Usually, my lack of ability to spent time at Mormon literary events is one of the few things I regret about not living in Utah.

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Back in my graduate school days, I came to a realization that unless you’re in one of the “sexy” fields like queer theory, in order to succeed as a literary scholar, you have to be willing to care more about your own research and writing than anyone else ever will. This presented a substantial challenge to me, since as an externally motivated person, I tend to judge the value of what I do on its value and interest to others and the “ego strokes” I can get from their praise.

Typical advice given to people like me often suggests that we should just somehow choose not to care about what other people think — an act as impossible in my case as flapping my arms and flying to the moon. I’m simply not built that way, and the evidence I see from other people like me is that this is not an area where people typically are capable of change. Yes, it may be somehow better or loftier or more godlike to do what one is doing purely based on internal motivation, but I’m convinced that’s just not an option for some of us.

Including, interestingly, Joseph Smith, based on some of the evidence from his life. Can you imagine Brigham Young ever saying, “If my life has no value to my friends, it has no value to me”? Brigham’s version would have read more like, “If my life has no value to my friends, I need a new set of friends.” But I digress . . .

Fear, it’s sometimes said, is a useful emotion, focusing our attention on potential dangers and ways to prevent them. I’m here to tell you, though, that fear — or the desire for praise — serves little or no useful purpose in writing, unless its value is to point us to some other kind of less risky and more rewarding activity. Which, despite those risks, is not always a good thing, since I daresay there are some things that can only be accomplished by writing books.

I waited the better part of 10 years for someone else to write the first Mormon novel about a gay teenager trying to stay in the Church. No one else volunteered (something I understand a little better now that it’s been published . . . ). Regardless of whether the novel I wrote was worthwhile or not, the idea that someone needed to write a novel of this kind (and many more, hopefully, still to come on this topic) was something I still believe. Now it’s been done. The next one (by someone else) may be — hopefully will be — better. But it won’t be the first, and the reason it won’t be is because I did manage to get past those fears and put something out there.

A couple of months ago, I was listening to an interview on NPR with someone who was talking about the death of mass marketing and mass media. I can’t really do justice to the man’s arguments — I didn’t hear the whole thing, and besides, I was paying more attention to the thoughts inside my head, some of which I may write up someday as a post about the future of book publishing.

The other part of my thinking had to do with marketing for my book, which — now that the book is wending its way toward actual publication, past the editing and desktop publishing process — has been taking up an increasing share of my mental attention, as to my dismay I realize all over again that publication notwithstanding, Books Don’t Sell Themselves.

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First, the relevant facts:

My book is being published. Yay! Hurrah for me. I need to cheer, you see, because aside from family and friends, it’s highly unlikely that simply publishing my book will really excite that many people — especially if they never know it exists.

My book is aimed at a Mormon market. I flatter myself that it’s acceptably written and might be accessible to some non-Mormon readers. Still, it seems pretty clear that most of those who’d ever want to read or care about the story will be Mormons. (I’ve had some people suggest trying to sell it to a national market — but no one, so far as I can recall, who’s actually read the story.)

My book will almost certainly never be carried by most LDS bookstores, due both to the Deseret Bookstore “inappropriateness” policy (my book is at least a PG-13) and the fact that DB and Seagull prefer to work with multi-product vendors and/or a developed marketing plan through established distributors. I’m giving it a try, but I don’t hold out much hope.

My book is on a topic (Gay! Teen! Mormon!) that is likely to push most of my target audience (adult, relatively orthodox Mormons) away. As my brother-in-law put it, after reading and enthusiastically enjoying my manuscript: “But you know, if I saw a book about this topic on a bookstore shelf, I’d put it back again without a second glance.”

What does all this tell me? Basically, that any attempt to sell to the Mormon market has to get past problems of access and initial perception.

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One thing I remember from that NPR show is the notion that social connections are coming to mean more to many people than traditional marketing. In this era of Internet communities, people increasingly choose what to buy based on what their friends tell them, not what book publishers and sellers tell them.

This, as I see it, is mostly good news as regards my book, since it confirms that shelling out mega-dollars (which neither Chris Bigelow — owner and operator of my publisher, Zarahemla Books — nor I possess) in some kind of ad campaign probably wouldn’t work anyway. Especially in light of the concerns mentioned above, word of mouth is pretty much the only way my book is ever likely to sell to most Mormon readers.

This, unfortunately, seems like a chicken-and-egg dilemma. How do people find out about the book in order to recommend it to other people? At best, it seems like a long, slow process.

A classic solution is book reviews, which are essentially word of mouth amplified. Zarahemla’s standard marketing effort, from what I can tell, consists largely of using press releases to generate interest, sending out review copies, and then publicizing the resulting reviews. Given the realities of Mormon small-press publishing, it’s hard to see how Chris could do much more than that — and even if he could, it probably wouldn’t do much good.

We have hopes that my book may catch reviewers’ attention since it’s on a hot-button topic that hasn’t been seen much in Mormon literature. It’s nice to think so, anyway.

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I’m also trying to expand on the notion of community connections and word-of-mouth in less traditional ways.

Due to a combination of factors, I wound up with a very large number people of manuscript reviewers — 34, by my count. The polite thing to do, I’ve decided, is send each of these a complimentary print copy of the book (assuming they want it). And if they wind up sharing their copies or talking about the book with friends, that’s all to the good.

As a member of the Mormon lit community I can probably count on a few sales there, at least if they don’t all wind up with complimentary copies. That’s an awfully tiny pool, though — especially when you consider that (a) we don’t tend to be terribly rich, and (b) all of us have dozens of other books we want to buy and read as well. I figure that based on sales from AML, AMV, etc., Chris and I could probably go out to McDonalds for lunch — if neither of us is very hungry.

I’ve also been attempting (somewhat clumsily) to approach various Mormon-related blogs about distributing online PDF review copies. In some ways, this is just an extension of the concept of book reviews into a new medium. But then I start to think about the implication of PDF distribution, which means I can give away as many review copies as I like without any actual cost to myself or my publisher. The issue of lost revenue, as I see it, doesn’t really apply to those of us on the bottom of the exposure scale. Anything that increases discussion about the book can only be a good thing. Heck, if there’s a group out there that wants to sponsor an online discussion of my book, I’ll gladly provide PDFs to everyone who wants to take part. The real problem is finding people who have an interest. After all, there are only so many Mormon bloggers — and how many of them will want to read my novel, anyway?

(I should also mention blog tours, which I’d never heard of until today’s email from Chris. Hey! I’m just living up to my billing here. Part of the amusement of this Writing Rookie series for the rest of you is watching me fumble around without any idea what I’m doing…)

Which brings me to the two-market problem: i.e., the large market I’d like to reach of Mormon adults with no special interest in the issue of homosexuality and Mormonism, versus the considerably smaller but more invested market of those who do have a stake in this issue: i.e., gay/same-sex attracted Mormons (SSAMs, for the purposes of this post).

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SSAMs, as I see it, aren’t the primary audience for my book. There is, I suspect, nothing my novel will have to say to them that they don’t already know. The most it could hope to do is capture, in a sharable way, some part of what they’ve found true in their own experience — something they might want to show bishops or friends or family members, perhaps.

I’m reluctant to rely too much on this audience. For one thing, there’s a huge range of human experience occupying the intersection of “same-sex attracted” and “Mormon.” What I’ve written isn’t a map to that experience, but one specific story — unlikely in the way that all specific stories are unlikely. SSAMs are likely to notice at least as many differences as similarities between this novel and their experiences.

On the other hand, that sense of built-in investment is likely to translate into a cadre of high-interest readers who could, if they like the book, feel highly motivated to share it with others. I’ve already had several positive responses along those lines: manuscript readers who’ve said that as soon as the book is available, they plan to buy and give away several copies.

This, if it can be made to work, represents a potential answer to the word-of-mouth problem. And so I’ve been contacting various SSAM-connected people and organizations. I’m now moving toward a position where I’m likely to provide a PDF copy to pretty much any SSAM who asks me for one — on the theory, again, that if their impression is a positive one, that’s likely to translate to both word-of-mouth and potential sales down the road.

There’s a politic to this, of course, as illustrated by the reactions of both Evergreen and Affirmation — two major organizations focusing on homosexuality and Mormonism — when I asked if they’d put out flyers for my book at their annual conferences on Sept. 19-21 (a juxtaposition that speaks volumes about the adversarial relationship between the two groups, but I digress). Both wanted a copy of the book to review before letting me know if it was something they’s be comfortable publicizing, even to the extent of putting out flyers. There are orthodoxies on both the right and the left — with a significant probability that my book won’t satisfy people on either side. But then, that’s the nature of community dynamics.

(As of Monday, Sept. 14, I haven’t heard from either group about whether they want my flyers. In at least one case, I know that’s because they haven’t had a chance to finish reading it yet. Ah, well.)

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I’d like to be able to draw some general conclusions from all this. But what do I know? I’m still figuring all this out. The one thing I can definitely say is this: marketing my first novel — like writing it — is turning out to be more of a learning experience than I ever imagined. It’s a whole new world out there, Dorothy…

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.

I used to not have a lot of respect for writers who had trouble remembering the details of their story and keeping them consistent. I mean, I noticed. Shouldn’t it be easier for them? It was their story, after all.

If only it were that simple…

There is, it turns out, a very good reason why writers have a hard time keeping track of the details in their stories. Readers have it easy. They only have one story to keep straight in their head — the story that the writer actually published. Writers, on the other hand, have their heads crowded with all the versions of the story that might have been, roads taken and not taken and all the possible paths from a to b — along with those versions of the story where b wasn’t the destination at all, and where they wound up at endpoint φ instead.

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I’ve noticed what seems to be a mental split personality between the part of the writer’s brain that generates a story and the part that writes the story. The latter is a reporter — but much more than that. It’s also the part of the writer’s brain that maintains expectations based on audience awareness, genre conventions, models of good storytelling, and all the other elements external to the story that contribute to what the writer Wants To Accomplish.

Better yet, it strikes me that we might consider a threepart division into the artist’s id (the story-generating part), ego (the reporting/writing part), and superego (the external expectations and ultimate purposes part). I like that idea, so I think I’ll use it for the rest of this post. Probably.

But back to the point I was trying to make…

Unfortunately, the reporter/writer part of the writer’s brain (the ego) can’t simply build a story to order out of the expectations of the superego. Instead, the superego must place an order with the id — the story-generating part of the writer’s brain — and that’s where the trouble starts.

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From what I’ve read, heard, and experienced, writers typically begin a story with some kind of idea or image in view: a situation or scene or conflict involving some particular characters. Over time, the initial impetus grows and connects with other ideas, and eventually it becomes a plot.

Along the way, the characters and the story itself develop their own internal logic. Writers talk about knowing a story has taken on a life of its own when the characters start talking back to them, or when things start happening that the writer didn’t consciously anticipate. Both of those, I submit, are manifestations of the writer’s id doing its job.

Each story incorporates a multitude of probability arcs, as I like to think of them: ways that characters are likely to act, based on our perceptions about the nature of people; ways timelines are likely to unfold, based on our sense of how quickly events and situations can change; outcomes that are likely to result from specific causes, based on our notions of causality in the real world.

Each of these arcs must follow a path that doesn’t strain our notions of probability too much. And all of them — each probability arc for each character, timeline, and set of connected events — must work simultaneously in order for the story as a whole to work. The fact that they all inhabit the same story framework further complicates matters, since changes to one arc typically require changes to others as well.

It reminds me a bit of Bézier curves, which I was introduced to as a feature in an in-house paint program I had to document many years ago. The artists who used the program attempted many times to explain to me what a Bézier curve was. I never really did figure it out, except that if you specified certain points and various other parameters, the computer would automatically generate a curve for you that went through the points — but if you changed one of the points or one of the other parameters, you could get an entirely different curve, in ways that I couldn’t possibly predict. It was very cool.

My point is that even a minor change in one of the fixed points of a probability arc can radically change other parts of the story. This is one of the reasons why story revisions can be such a tricky thing.

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Sometimes the story that’s delivered by the id varies in some way from the story the superego wants to write.

Sf&f writer C. J. Cherryh talked once about a scene where one of her characters balked at what he had to do for the sake of her plot. “I’m not stupid enough to go in there!” he told her. “Oh, yes, you are,” she said, and generated a squadron of pursuing security forces to make sure that he did.

The point of Cherryh’s story was that it’s the author’s job to boss the characters, not vice versa. I find it noteworthy, though, that she didn’t simply overrule or ignore the sense she’d developed for what her character would and wouldn’t do in specific circumstances. Instead, she massaged the plot to make the needed event happen without violating character plausibility.

The ideal relationship between the id and superego, I’m convinced, isn’t for either side to be giving orders. Rather, there should be a dialogue between them (mediated, presumably, by the poor ego, which may be part of why writers are so generally known for having ego problems).

Case in point. One of the problems several early readers of my novel pointed out was that the story starts fairly slow. (This remains true, to some extent.) However, suggestions on introducing additional “interim” conflicts to catch the reader’s attention kept feeling false to the story I was trying to tell.

And then someone suggested that my main character’s best friend was accepting the fact that his best friend was gay far too easily. Thinking about it from a perspective of character probability, I realized this was in fact true. And suddenly the solution to one problem became the solution to the other problem as well, as the best friend’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to hide just how freaked out he was by his friend being gay became an additional source of rising tension in the story — without introducing an extra plotline that just didn’t belong there.

Working with the writer’s id often requires a process of self-interrogation. Back when I was trying to work out the plotlines for the second half of my novel, I ran into a thorny problem of just why my bishop (whom I had characterized as a convert in his teens) hadn’t served a mission — and why his father-in-law, a former bishop himself and role model, hadn’t pushed him to do it. I spent quite a bit of time working out a chronology of my bishop’s youth — stuff that mostly didn’t get into my novel. I also spent several hours talking at my brother-in-law (one of my best sounding-boards) about my bishop and the chronology I’d developed for him, just to see whether it made sense when I heard myself talking about it — and to see whether it worked for someone else.

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Which leads me, I suppose, to my closing point.

We sometimes hear about people whose stories spring fullgrown out of nowhere, like Athena from the head of Zeus. I’m skeptical about such things. For me at least, plots work better after they’ve undergone serious work — after I’ve worked and stretched and cursed (flip! fetch!) about the parts that don’t work so well, and with great effort made myself consider and try out alternative possibilities.

On the other hand, I also don’t believe stories can be composed based on market analysis, generic expectations, artistic values, or other external sources. At the most, those can guide the elements you chop up and put into the compost heap for your id to consider — the starting-points and raw materials for stories.

And then it comes to life, and the infinite possibilities of untold story make way for the possibilities of the story as it might and could be, and eventually — after long interaction (or maybe pugilism) between id, ego, and superego in the realms of probability — to the story as it finally becomes.

It is a well-established fact that any writer, in possession of a manuscript, must also be in need of readers to review and critique his or her work. However, actually getting those critiques – and then deciding what to do with them once you have them – is, I’ve discovered, one of the trickier parts of the whole writing process.

Being an experienced editor and reviewer of other people’s work isn’t as much of an advantage in this process as one might expect. In fact, a lot of what I’ve found out is just how different it is being on the other side of the red ink (so to speak).

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During the course of this novel, I’ve received extraordinarily helpful feedback from several people: comments that told me things I didn’t know about my own story, or that forced me to go back and change things which (in retrospect) really needed changing. In at least one case, a reader looked at a scene I’d written, then told me, “No. That’s not the way it happened. It happened like – ” And she was right.

I’ve also received a few comments that were less helpful, though I suspect that in some cases the problem was less with the comments and more with me. I’ve tried to think about what made the difference in these cases.

A lot of this is still stewing in my brain. After all, just yesterday I posted a request here at AMV for more review comments, so I’m still accumulating relevant experience. But then, if I waited until I knew what I was talking about, I’d be violating the basic premise of this whole Writing Rookie series. So without any further ado, here are eight important things I’ve learned (or relearned) about feedback while writing this novel.

1. Positive comments are just as important and valuable as negative comments. Sometimes more so – especially when you’re trying to figure out whether to keep going or not. Yeah, I know some writers say that if you need someone else to tell you whether your writing’s any good, you shouldn’t be writing at all. To which I respond: Why? Doesn’t it make sense to get an outsider’s objective opinion on whether you’re just throwing your time and energy away?

Quite aside from that, I’ve found that having someone tell you what you’re doing right helps you build on your strengths. It tells you when an experiment you’ve tried actually worked. Sometimes, as I mentioned above, it can even show you things about your own story that you didn’t see before.

2. Critique comments never look the same the next day. Which is why, no matter how unreasonable or negative or just plain incomprehensible they may seem on first reading, it’s essential to restrain one’s first impulse, swallow – rant at a loved one if need be (hopefully one equipped with headphones, literal and/or metaphorical) – and go do something else for the next hour or day or whatever, then come back and reread later to find out what your reader actually said. Words of wisdom I wish I’d learned more fully than I have.

3. The weight to be given to a reader’s revision suggestions should be in direct proportion to how well that reader understands and is in sympathy with the story you’re trying to write.

I recall a friend of mine who loved hokey vampire flicks. (This was back in the 1980s or so.) She made a bunch of us watch old Dark Shadows episodes, for crying out loud. She took a filmmaking class, and wrote a screenplay about – you guessed it – a vampire story. The professor, she told us, started talking about how wonderful it would be if she used vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS. Hello?

Someone who really understands your story can be tremendously valuable. Over the course of my novel, there were several people I’ve been able to engage in long conversations about plotlines, character motivations, backgrounds and such, which has proved immensely useful. But it couldn’t have happened if they didn’t have a basically similar vision of the story I was trying to tell – and if they hadn’t liked that story. When it comes right down to it, I’m not sure you should ever take the advice of someone who just doesn’t care for your story very much.

4. Manuscript readers often seem to think that in order to help a writer, they have to be story doctors or editors – in short, that they have to be able to tell you how to fix things. I used to think that myself. Based on my experience with this novel, though, “fixing” things isn’t nearly as important as just being a thoughtful and articulate reader. In other words, saying things like, “I liked this scene. This part confused me. When I got to this point in the story, I was so mad at your character that I wanted to go look for a rifle.”

The flip side of this, if you’re the one reading someone’s manuscript, is: comment! Say stuff! Say a lot of stuff! If you like this scene and that scene and that other scene, don’t think you’re being too repetitious to say it again about all of them! (Especially if you like all of them. Remember item #1 above.) A great idea would be to keep a little running account as you go along (e.g., via marginal comments) about what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, what you expect to happen next. That kind of record would be PURE GOLD to me as a writer.

5. Reader comments often require forensic skills in order to interpret, and sometimes a touch of ESP as well. Sometimes you have to work backward, reconstructing what might have been going on in the reader’s head to get him or her to a mental place where that bit of feedback might have seemed reasonable.

This kind of forensic work is very much worth the effort, particularly when it uncovers ways of misreading your text that you had never imagined before – and want to prevent so they never happen again. Case in point: If you find that one of your readers thinks the character you were sure was straight is actually gay, you really want to find out where that idea came from. (It turns out that it wasn’t my fault; he was confusing my story with another story he’d read.)

A corollary to this is that it often turns out that the problem the reader identifies isn’t the real problem, at least not from the writer’s perspective. If a particular scene involves someone acting out of character, then the problem may be with that scene – or it may be with how the character was articulated in earlier scenes. You have to ask questions and exercise imagination to figure out what the actual problem is and how it can be solved.

6. Substantive revisions shouldn’t be made until and unless you find a way to make them your own – that is to say, a way they can fit into the story you’re trying to tell.

That’s often more possible than it seems. One of my manuscript readers told me that my first 100 pages were too flat. After struggling with it for a while, I thought I saw a way I could bring in another plot thread that I’d been wanting to include. I don’t know if it fixed my reader’s problem, but I’m pretty sure the story is better as a result. (This also may have addressed some problems raised by other readers that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to solve before. I guess we’ll see.)

7. Different people have different opinions. That’s why it’s important to get feedback from multiple people, ideally including a fair number from the demographic you’re trying to get to read your book. That way, you can check and cross-check and find out if a particular comment is just someone’s bugaboo or represents a more general reaction.

The potentially nasty part of this is that when you get multiple opinions, you then have to decide which opinions you’re going to ignore – and hope that the owners of those opinions will forgive you for doing so.

Ignoring someone’s review comments creates a kind of funny dynamic. This is one of those places where I wish I really did fit the ideal of the dispassionate writing professional who takes criticism calmly, with decorum and aplomb. (You know what? I’m not sure I’ve ever had occasion to use aplomb before in my writing. Yay me!) Never mind that my exposure to professional writers convinces me that this kind of cool collected response is not terribly common among them either… (Just ask someone about the legendary feuds in the Science Fiction Writers of America – which I understand aren’t all that atypical for professional writing groups.)

And finally…

8. Bribery is the name of the game here. Reading and responding to someone’s story is hard work and takes a fair amount of time and effort. Some of the people who say they’ll review your manuscript, won’t – and you can only assume it’s because they’re just as busy as you are, or busier. So it’s a good idea to get in the habit of giving critiques, so that you don’t have to feel too horrible when it comes time to nag others to give you their time and attention.

Or else get very good at making baklava. Which I am, just so you know. Or Laurel is, more precisely. So far, I’m only so-so at it – but I expect to get better over the course of the summer, repaying all the people I’ve nagged or guilted or bribed into reading my manuscript.

(So which are you going to want, William? Story critique, or baklava? We live close enough that I could actually deliver a pan to you…)

My wife cleans one room at a time. This, she insists, is the normal, the sane way to clean a house. You start with one room, you pick things up, you sort things, and then you vacuum (or mop, as the case may be). And then you have a clean room.

That’s not the way I clean. Much to my wife’s despair, my preferred method of cleaning is to drift from room to room doing a little bit here and a little bit there. Dishes here, book stacking there. All this so that I can clean while pretending this isn’t really what I’m doing. Fool the cleaning gremlins, you know. Also, I suppose, so that once a room is finally clean, I don’t feel like I have to go all the way back to the starting-point on all the other rooms, which would be unbearably depressing. (As opposed, say, to cleaning for a while and not actually having any rooms clean, which is the natural result of my method of cleaning and which my wife finds unbearably depressing. But she’s learned to put up with it just so long as I actually do some cleanup – which we’ve both learned is more likely if I do things my way, bizarre though it may be.)

Anyway, my point – for those of you who have stuck with me this long – is that it really shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that I write this way as well.

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Back in high school, my various English teachers used to demand that I produce an outline along with the papers I wrote. Typically, what I did in these cases was to write the paper first, then derive an outline based on what I wrote.

This pattern continued through about the first half of my undergraduate college career. Typically, my writing pattern in those years was to write a first draft in order to figure out what I was trying to say – often discovering my thesis about the time I arrived at my conclusion – then rewrite the thing backwards. A very painful process, and not one I particularly recommend, unless you find (as I did in those years) that it’s the only method that actually works for you.

And then around my junior year in college, I discovered outlining as a tool for writing, and my world changed.

Outlining… outlining… The power of outlining, in a nutshell, is that it puts half or more of the mental work of writing up front, before you ever start putting words on a page. This was the great secret I discovered about the time that I started using outlining as an actual planning tool for writing. Up to then, I’d thought (and frankly my writing teachers had taught me) that you start with your thesis, develop an outline, then write. The notion that you don’t even get to the point of developing a thesis until you’ve put in substantial mental work – including the bulk of the research and thinking that wind up as part of your outline – was the insight that allowed me to bring outlining into my own real-world writing process.

(I should add that I’m uncertain whether it would have been possible for me to learn how to use outlining effectively much before I did. I think you have to reach a certain point of mental maturity before you can even contemplate putting that much mental work into a writing project before you start to write. It requires also a facility with knowing the various rhetorical approaches, so that you can imagine the direction and thrust of what you might say before actually saying it – which I don’t think I possessed prior to my twenties.)

I now write for a living: teacher’s guides and marketing white papers and such, mostly in the field of educational products and technology. Outlining is a key part of the process in much of what I do. Typically, I’ll budget about half of my time allotment for the part of the process that results in an outline (which the client then reviews), then reserve the other half for the actual writing. But it’s a lie. Really, the outlining is typically considerably more than half the effort.

So you can imagine my reaction on discovering that outlining doesn’t work for me with my creative writing.

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I admire fiction writers that can draft from an outline. One friend of mine tells me that he outlines in multiple phases, including a phase that winds up with a paragraph for every page he’s planning to write (or maybe it’s a paragraph for every scene, which would seem more reasonable).

Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be something I can do. Instead of an outline, what I started with for my current novel was a general sense of the novel’s thrust, a desired ending-point, and several tentative stops along the way.

One of the things I’ve found is that when I do try to outline things, I don’t know if they actually work until I’ve written them out. Conversely, things arise during my writing that take my stories in new and more interesting directions. I’m a better scene writer than outliner – and sadly, that often winds up involving ideas that affect the overall plot. So I’ve uneasily decided that it’s better not to outline rigidly, but rather to write one scene at a time. So far at least, the writing seems to work out better that way.

But wait; there’s more.

Based on what I’ve said so far, you might think that my ideal writing process is to start at the beginning and keep following the plot thread scene by scene, chapter by chapter, until I have a novel. (According to sf&f writer Gene Wolfe, you know you’ve reached this point – that is, the point of completeness for your novel – when your stack of paper is tall enough that it falls over.) What I find in reality, though, is that doing it this way, I get stuck: I don’t know what’s going on next or where I’m going, and I run into problems (like how to get the dialogue right for a particular scene) that I simply have to walk away from and come back to later on, or keep chipping away at in small bits – thus making my writing process even slower than it might otherwise be.

The solution I found to this was to work on multiple miscellaneous scenes as the inspiration struck me: things I thought might happen or knew would happen, even if I hadn’t got to them yet. This also worked very well for my preferred method of composing away from the computer, notebook in hand (see my earlier blog on Writing Conditions). It provided opportunities to pursue vagrant thoughts when they first occurred rather than waiting while inspiration cooled.

Over time, I’ve found that this method of mosaic-writing works remarkable well, not just for giving me something to work on when the main storyline is stalled but also for opening up new insights into where the story is headed. These in turn feed back into my earlier story, telling me things about what needs to happen to my characters in order to get them to the later scenes I’ve already composed. My chief worry – that I would be unable to make the different parts and pieces of my story, composed at different times, fit together well – has proved unfounded. In fact, I think that working on different parts of my story simultaneously has actually helped keep the story more consistent in some ways.

All this, of course, aside from the fact that it serves the valuable purpose of muddying still further the question of just how far along I am in the composition process at any given point in time. In short, it aids in the fool-myself-into-writing-a-novel-whilst-playing-quist ploy – which I must concede would probably work better if I knew how to play quist, or even had a very clear idea of what quist is. (Looking it up in the dictionary, I don’t find an entry for quist. Maybe I meant whist?)

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One of my very favorite books in the entire world is Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury. It’s everything for me that Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer was supposed to be (and wasn’t): a story that captures the essence of boyhood and summer and growing up, in a setting that’s particular to a specific time and place but somehow communicates a sense of timelessness.

I’ve heard it said (though I have no idea if this is actually true) that the way Bradbury composed Dandelion Wine was that each morning, he’d wake up and write a story about something he’d dreamed about the night before. Then he wound up weaving them all together into a single loose storyline.

Certainly the book reads like this could be the case. Some of the sections were originally published independently as short stories, and a lot of them only touch the life of the main character (Douglas Spaulding, age 12) tangentially if at all.

I’m no Bradbury. Still, I figure if it works for him, then maybe something similar is worth trying for me. If my narrative mosaic can capture even just a bit of the freshness, life, and color of Bradbury’s story, I’ll be content.