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The vast majority of accidents happen within a few miles of home.  This was an argument often heard while a nation was slowly changing its culture to include the automatic fastening of seat belts upon getting in a car.

My father understood this long before Detroit did, buying packaged seat belts and installing them himself on our family car as far back as our 50s-era Ford station wagon.  Back then they were called safety belts, and “fasten your safety belt” was the travel mantra of my family. We were routinely buckled up in belts that look like the airline seat restraints of today even before we left our driveway in what was then the very sleepy town of Danville, California.  East of San Francisco, the entire area is today covered with upscale houses, one of which is the home of Captain Sullenberger of the “Miracle on the Hudson.”

But I digress.  When that ad campaign first came out, it seemed to imply that the drive between home and grocery store was for some reason more laden with potential to kill and maim than hurtling down a freeway, or driving the switchbacks of a gravel cliff road in the Andes.  This purported menace doesn’t make any sense until we realize that on every trip we take, whatever its length, we pass through our own neighborhood twice, once going and once coming back.  We’re within a few miles of home more often than we’re anyplace else in our car, so of course the odds favor that will be where an accident will occur.

So what does this have to do with writing?  I’ve reached the end of the first section of my new novel–roughly the 100 page mark.  I can’t really call this the first draft because I’ve been working and reworking the material since day one, and I still need to go back through it a few more times now that I know my characters, plot, and settings better.

Once I’ve polished, tweaked, added, subtracted, and refined in numerous big and small ways, I’ll send the manuscript off to some carefully chosen first readers and while I am waiting for feedback, I’ll start doing some focused research and planning for part two.  A few months from now, when I am at the end of part two, I’ll revise parts one and two again.  This circling back through the manuscript will happen until the book is complete.  Because writing a book is an additive process, this means that the first ten pages will get revised countless times because they’ve been around the longest, page eleven to fifty will be looked at almost as often, the first hundred quite a bit, and so on.

But what about page four hundred?  By that point everything is usually really humming.  There’s less to go back and fill in or change, since I already know the world of the book so well. But even if that weren’t the case, it would be unlikely the final pages would ever receive the kind of repeated attention the beginning got.

It’s funny how rarely this reduced attention is apparent in published books, but I wonder whether perhaps those books that disappoint, the ones that seem to lose steam and/or focus toward the end, are impacted by the pattern I describe.

The first section of a book is like the patch of road closest to home, the one traveled again and again. When we reach an entirely new destination three to four hundred miles–or pages–later, we don’t experience every curve, every bump in the road so thoroughly.  But then we don’t need to, since every mile, every page, adds to our experience, our ability to navigate well through whatever lies ahead. We manage to get to the end one way or another even if we’re dog tired and the road is not a familiar one.

And don’t forget–most accidents really do happen close to home. Fasten your safety belt, everyone!

As I mentioned a little while back, I’ve been working with Blue Jay Tech to upgrade my photo gallery.  It’s now live!  Go to the lower left of the home page and click “view the image gallery.”  Let me know what you think (lacauthor@gmail.com). It’s still a work in progress, and I’d love feedback.

On New Year’s Eve, I watched the New York Met’s Gala on television. (Okay, I was recovering from surgery–what’s your excuse for being home on party night?) The big appeal to me was that Thomas Hampson–one of the best operatic baritones of our time–was the guest artist, and I am a big fan of his work. At the intermission there was a pretaped interview with Hampson at his New York apartment, and the conversation came around to something so relevant to the writer’s craft that it took my breath away.

He was asked whether he ever gets carried away with the emotions of the arias he sings, wanting to cry, for example, if his character is sorrowful. I don’t recall his exact response, but here it is in summary. “Look, maybe people watching this won’t understand, but no, I don’t. I am there to put over the emotion to the audience but I can’t get involved in it myself if I’m going to do that. If the soprano in the role of Tosca broke down singing ‘Vissi d’arte,’ the audience would know they had seen something unusual, something noteworthy, and they might even feel they had been privileged to witness it, but it would have totally violated, completely ruined what Puccini had in mind for that piece of music.”

In other words, if Puccini wanted snuffles and boo-hoo-hoos he would have written them in (it does happen in opera occasionally). If there are to be any tears, they should be limited to the audience, not the performer.

When Hampson made this point I was reminded of the times when readers ask me if I cried while I wrote certain scenes in my books. My answer pretty much restates what Hampson said. Writing, like singing, is a job. It is my job to produce an emotional reaction in others, and to do that I have to be operating on another wave length entirely. Imagine a scene where a character is finding out, for example, that her best friend is having an affair with her husband. The writer has to imagine how the character would feel. He or she can’t write the scene as “I just can’t believe how terrible this is–I feel so bad for her–she’s [blubber, blubber], she’s–sssuch a good person. I really hate her friend!!!!!! Oooh, I’d like to wring her neck!” The writer has to stay out of it–a weird thing to say since the writer is inventing it–but true. “How can I get the reader to empathize?” “How can I set the scene to give the maximum emotional effect? What might the character be holding, doing, seeing?” These are writerly questions, and they take a clear, not a tearful eye.

So no, I don’t cry when I write. I do admit that sometimes when I reread a scene, after it’s published and it’s too late to edit, I may tear up a little. “Wow, that’s really sad!” I might say to myself. But that doesn’t happen very often, and when it does it’s because I’m not thinking like the writer any more. My guess is that Hampson doesn’t cry when he listens to a CD of himself either. He. like artists in any field are probably far too busy being oddly detached, picking it apart. What did I do there and why? What might I have done differently, done better? And then of course there are many “ouch” moments–the points where you wish you hadn’t done something that way at all.

Cry? That’s for other people’s books.

I just took a look at the overall annual statistics for this website, which went live at the beginning of 2009. Though I imagine there are authors out there who generate as much traffic in a day as I did in a year, I’m very pleased to report that there were 20,691 visits to laurelcorona.com in 2009. Since each month starts again with zero unique visitors and a returning visitor would count as unique again, it isn’t possible to know how many of the 10,392 unique visitors were indeed unique, but it’s interesting to note that the typical visitor must have visited multiple times. In my best month (October) 1365 unique visitors made 2314 visits. Over the course of the year the most popular pages were the diary, with 31,681 visits total to that part of the site. I’m very pleased by this amount of attention, and if you are one of those returning visitors, thanks for your support. If this is your first visit, welcome! Please spend a minute or two looking around because most posts are livelier than this one!

What’s new for 2010? A revamped photo gallery will be up in a week or so, with photos organized by which book they are connected to. If you’re interested, for example, in my research for THE LAWS OF MOTION, you’ll be able to take a look at all the locations in France where the book is set. The same will be true for THE FOUR SEASONS and PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER. There will also be a section for author appearances and miscellaneous, as well as a section entitled “What I Do Other Than Write.”

Also new sometime this spring will be expanded sections on PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER and THE LAWS OF MOTION, as well as a new, consolidated section for my non-fiction, including UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH and my books for school libraries.

If you have ideas for how to improve the site, I’d love to hear from you at lacauthor@gmail.com!

Those not involved with writing books might be surprised to know that authors rarely talk about page count, but instead think in terms of how many words we have written. Editors want to know how many pages the published book will be, and this is easier to estimate with word count, since there are varying numbers of words on a page.

But it’s really a pretty simple calculation. I have now doubled the number of words I have written since my last post, when I reported reaching the 10,000 word mark. There are approximately 300 Times New Roman 12 words on a full page of text, meaning that at 20,000 words I am roughly on page 60. The same formula of about 300 words a page seems to carry over into a published book, so I have a good tactile sense of where the reader’s bookmark would be if he or she set down the book as published at this point.

What this means is that, assuming a target length of no more than 350 pages, the reader will be roughly one-sixth of the way through my new novel. That’s sobering. I know that as a reader I am either deeply into a book or losing interest by this point. But as I write, I am so involved in every scene that I know I may not be a terribly good judge of what it will be like for someone coming to it from the outside. someone who is, of course, going through the book far more quickly than I can write it.

Is enough happening, plot-wise at 60 pages? Have I developed at least the main character’s personality and story enough for a reader to want to stick with the book? Am I spending too much time on things that I don’t see going anywhere as far as the overall story is concerned?

It’s really hard to stay confident. Doubts creep in about many things. Am I taking too long establishing the background? How long will the reader wait for a big, pivotal event? Should I be hurrying up? Will the reader be able to see, hear, smell what I am sensing as I write? Should I be slowing down?

It’s always a good idea in the critical stage where I am still getting used to the characters and story myself, to stop writing new text and go back and read the old. Start to finish without stopping isn’t possible, for I find things to tinker with on every page, but I try to read as quickly as possible, to get an inkling of what the experience might be like for fresh eyes.

Fresh eyes are perhaps the most critical thing a novelist must write a book without. The words aren’t even completely fresh as they flow out of the keys onto the screen, because often we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about where a scene needs to go or what a chapter has to accomplish. To a certain extent, it’s already written in our heads, and now it’s about showing up at work to do what we know is on our desk.

Often a scene doesn’t work out the way we thought, and that’s very exciting, but once the words are out in the world, we can never look at them for the first time again. That’s for our readers to do. But I have learned to have at least a little pity on myself and squelch my concerns about the quality of my first pass at a book. The sixty pages I re-read yesterday are nothing any reader will ever see. What they will see will be richer, more compelling, more vivid, more exciting because I will grow as I write. But do I have a story? Do I have an interesting heroine? Oh, you bet I do!

Yesterday I reached the thirty-page mark in my new novel, and this feels like a milestone. Though that’s just roughly 10,000 of the 130,000 words (or thereabouts) of the eventual finished product, it’s enough to establish momentum for the story and instill confidence that I’ve got something I can pull off over the long run.

This isn’t the first milestone in a historical novel. The first is deciding to write one. This is really most applicable the first time, for most authors I know always view themselves as between books if they aren’t writing at the moment. The second is setting aside all other ideas except one. The third is feeling I’ve got a story in my head, not just a lot of material about a place and time. That was the toughest one for me this time. The fourth is conquering the blank page, even if all I have is a few hundred words. The fifth is getting over doubts and despair about the next step. And then, I have my first really good spell of writing and I am on my way.

So I’ve reached and passed that sixth milestone: I have a chunk of text behind me. From here, the next huge milestone is finishing the first draft, but along the way there will be many other smaller ones. Every scene, every section of a chapter, every chapter, provides a sense of accomplishment, a place to take a moment of rest.

But by the same token, every upcoming scene, section, and chapter looms huge and daunting in front of me. The single thing that most keeps me going into what is still unwritten is the desire to know what happens next. Though I always have intentions for the plot, the characters can surprise me, and I never work out the details until they flow onto the monitor.

I promised myself I wouldn’t start writing until 2010, even if I got up at dawn on New Year’s Day to put my fingers to the keys. I didn’t keep that promise, though I did pretty well to take a break from writing for almost the entire fall semester. What I learned from that is that I am happiest when I am storytelling. I am happiest when I have words to play with. I guess I feel a little like a child might feel confronted with a room full of toys and storybooks. You want me to wait to go in? You have got to be kidding!

So the sixth milestone this time also included for me the realization that I’d rather write than do just about anything else with my discretionary time. Even if it makes me cranky and gives me an aching back and stiff neck after a long day, the places I’ve been in my own head, and the joy I get from reading something that flows both in words and meaning, is incomparable to other ways I might realistically have spent those hours.

So here I am, happily immersed in a new project, ignoring the fact that by the time it’s done I will once again be vowing that I will take a really LONG break next time. Working at my usual pace, I predict the novel will be finished to a polish by the end of 2010. But that’s plenty of time to settle on my next great idea for a novel. WIll I want to tear into that great playroom again? Does “dibs on the building blocks!” answer that question?

Often when I talk at writing conferences, book clubs, and other gatherings, someone will ask what the process is by which I get from the blank page to a finished manuscript. I stammer through something resembling an answer, but it always seems a bit lame and inadequate.  I wish it were as simple to describe as “first I do this, and then I do that,” but it isn’t, and the truth is I am hard pressed to explain how all the little inspirations that whiz around me like electrons join forces with the imagination that has to be coaxed out from under the bed.

I’m trying to use my new novel in progress as a means of understanding better for myself what happens when I write, so I can be more coherent in talking about it afterwards.  I think the best I can do at the moment is to say that I wait for the Muse to appear, but while I’m waiting I start writing anyway.  Is what I write in the absence of the Muse any good? Sometimes. I don’t go into it with the expectation that is will or won’t be good, but just that it will be.

I am only about 4000 words in to a manuscript that will probably end up being about 130,000 words (a fairly typical novel length–around the page count of THE FOUR SEASONS), and I have already unceremoniously deleted and started over on one passage of about a thousand words, because it just wasn’t a compelling enough opening to a novel.  I needed a voice that would draw the reader in and I didn’t have it the first time around.  The second time, I think I got something not only more vivid, but also sustainable over the course of the book.  On the other hand, one scene just seemed to spill out of my fingers onto the keys and is already polished to a level I wouldn’t mind seeing published.

It feels like a real gift to get something right the first time I write it down.  The other gift is just to be writing at all.  That’s why I don’t wait for full-on, mind-blowing inspiration.  I know that will come as I work my way into the story and get to know the characters and the settings.  At some point the plot will gather momentum from that knowledge.  What can and can’t happen will be clear, and I’ve learned to wait for that to reveal itself rather than getting committed to a plot going one way or another. The hard part at that point is that I want to write faster than is humanly possible.  I want to be a hundred pages ahead of where I am, and I know I’m months away from certain scenes I can’t wait to get to.

But once I’ve had my morning coffee and sit down at the keyboard, I’m usually happy to be just where I am. Though I usually know what’s going to transpire in a scene, I can’t wait to see just how it happens–who says what, does what, thinks what.  It’s a real privilege to be in the position of getting the breaking news before anyone else does.

Who is my heroine and what is she doing on the opening page of the book?  Dear reader, you’ll know in about two years when the book is (I hope) in your hands!  Until then, its just between me, my computer, and a Muse who often runs a little late.

Many years ago, in my first professional incarnation as an adjunct professor of writing at San Diego State University, I used to break the ice in the first week of class by asking my students to write about where their wisdom came from. It could be their grandmother’s common sense, insights from a runner’s high, or the words of a poet. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to know and wanted them to tell each other.

I had forgotten about that assignment until this morning, when I read David Brooks’ column “The Other Education” in the New York Times. He wrote about how as a college student, the discovery of Bruce Springsteen’s music was like a parallel educational track for him, the beginning of his “emotional education.”
“We don’t usually think of this second education,” Brooks writes. “For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.”

Indeed. It’s where much of our wisdom comes from.

Unless you’re lucky enough to be an English major, as I was, you’re not likely to have spent much time in college curled up in bed with a poetry anthology. You had homework to do. For me, novels and poems were my homework, and my job was to understand them well. The time for college to feel like work would come later as I pursued my master’s and doctoral degree, but I am still so grateful for those undergraduate years, when wisdom washed over me and crept into my emerging consciousness, shaping me for a lifetime more than I ever guessed at the time.

“This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works,” Brooks goes on. “In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.” Quite different from the parallel track Brooks describes, where knowledge “comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.”

I don’t remember any specifics of the answers my students gave, except, for some reason, an impassioned argument about the greatness of the band The Tubes a shaggy-haired freshman offered one semester. But I do remember what I told them. For me at that moment my greatest source of wisdom was the singer/songwriter Jackson Browne. Coincidentally, just a day or two ago Pandora Radio chose his “For a Dancer” as a song I might like, and I was surprised at how even today, a voice of someone my own age could come out of the past and say things that are just as true to me today.

“Keep a fire burning in your eye,” he sang. “Pay attention to the open sky. You never know what will be coming down.”

Plenty has come hailing down in my life since then, but nothing that has left me unable eventually to dance through life again. “Dancing our sorrow away, no matter what fate chooses to play. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway.”

I love the way Browne describes the need to learn from and remain connected to others, but to remember the importance of our own self, our own unique contribution. “Just do the steps that you’ve been shown,by everyone you’ve ever known, until the dance becomes your very own. No matter how close to yours another’s steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you’ll do alone.”

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found.
Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around–
Go on and make a joyful sound.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you’ll never know.

You’re a wise one, Jackson Browne. You always were. And I’m still listening.

Last week I found myself dragging a bit at the three-quarter mark in the semester, and I kept thinking about how much I wished the end of the week would arrive, so I could be off for Thanksgiving Week.  Now it is the Monday of said week, right at the point that I would be walking into my first class.  It is indeed nice to be at home, ensconsed in all the projects I haven’t had time to get to.  And tomorrow, I’ll be playing tennis right at the time I would normally be in class, and that sounds better yet. 

And, I tell myself, when this week is over, there are only two more weeks of instruction befor finals, and then, a six-week break between semesters.  It sounds so great I can hardly stand it, but then I catch myself.

In a few weeks I will be sixty. The idea has definitely taken residence in my head that life is not endless, and even if I live heartily, happily, and healthily into my nineties (as I fully intend to do!) anyone my age is still most of the way through what the author of Beowulf so aptly called these “loan days” here on earth.

So this is the moment that I hit myself upside the head and ask “what are you thinking?”  I should never wish that time would pass more quickly, because I can’t have it back. Instead, I should train myself to stop that line of thought, take a deep breath, and look around in appreciation of the moment and the place that exists right now.  At any given moment there is so much to notice and rejoice in.

Thanksgiving is not traditionally a time of resolutions, but why not, if the resolution is to be more thankful? And so, in keeping with that, I am asking myself why I am sitting inside writing this diary entry when the sky is blue, the air is crisp, and the leaves are golden. The projects can wait.  I’m taking a walk.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  I love it because it has resisted in quite admirable fashion being morphed into a “Hallmark Moment,”  replete with cards, gifts, and candy.  I love it because it is one of the few holidays (July Fourth being the other) that everyone who considers themselves American celebrates together.  It doesn’t matter where you are from or what religious traditions you follow, it belongs to everyone. 

 I love asking my community college students what they eat for Thanksgiving.  Seems as if almost everyone has turkey, but what ends up inside the turkey is as wide-ranging in its diversity as the country itself. The sides might be tamales,  pancit,  or sticky rice  in place of, or alongside mashed potatoes with gravy, and the bread might as easily be tortillas or injera as dinner rolls.

 Thanksgiving speaks to the universal need to express gratitude, an acknowledgment of this simple fact by the nation with the most to be grateful for.  Sure we have our problems, collectively and individually, but I try to remind myself that even at the lowest points of my life (which those who know me are aware have been pretty low) , I am more fortunate than most of the people on the planet.  For many years in place of a grace that  my agnostic family could  not say with any real sincerity, we went around the table and said a few things we were grateful for.  And then we dug in and ate and ate and ate.

But my purpose today is not to write about my personal list for this year, but to talk about some of the “big picture” things I am grateful for.  I was reminded of some of these by an article by Don Harrison, editor/publisher of San Diego Jewish World, which appeared in that paper today.  He had made a visit to a local university and been moved by a corridor which featured quotations from different wisdom traditions around the world.  Here are a few that particularly touched me:

Buddhism on Service: May I through whatever good I have accomplished become one who works for the complete alleviation of the suffering of all beings. May I be medicine for the sick. May I be their physician and attend to them until their disease no longer recurs. May I be an inexhaustible storehouse for the poor and may I always be the first in being ready to serve them in various ways. May I be a protector for the unprotected, a guide for travelers on the way; a boat, a bridge, a means of crossing for those who seek the other shore. For all creatures may I be a light for those who need a light, a bed for those who need a bed, and a servant for those who need a servant — Bodhicaryavat?ra of Shantideva Judaism on Wisdom — Happy is the person who finds wisdom and who gets understanding. In her right hand is length of days; in her left hand riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life for those who grasp her and whoever holds onto her is happy. Do not forsake her; she will preserve you. Love her and she will protect you, hug her to you and she will exalt you, embrace her and she will bring you honor. The wisdom is a house built and by understanding it is established. Whoever finds wisdom finds life and obtains favor from the Lord. — Proverbs 3 Christianity on Love: Love is always patient and kind. Love is never jealous. Love is not boastful or conceited. It is never rude and never seeks its own advantage. It does not take offense or store up grievances. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but finds its joy in the truth. It is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes. — 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 Native American Tradition on Respect: O Great Spirit Whose voice I hear in the winds and Whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me. I am small and weak. I need Your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty and let my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things that You have made and my ears grow sharp to hear Your voice. Make me wise so that I may understand the things that You have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons that You have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength not to be greater than my brother and sister but to fight my greatest enemy: myself. Make me always ready to come to You with clean hands and straight eyes so when life fades as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame — Let Me Walk in Beauty Today I am thankful for the opportunity to reflect upon service, wisdom, love, and respect, and thankful for the lives of those who have passed these words on for all of us to contemplate.