Diary

My suitcase is inside the front door, my passport still sitting on top of it, just where I left it when I took my partner and sweetest love Jim to the emergency room just hours before we were due to leave for Lisbon.

I know I need to unpack, but there’s something about that hulking form containing the cocktail dresses I won’t be wearing, the bathing suit I won’t need–something as yet unresolved in my mind that demands that it stay there while I figure out what it all means.

As I sat in the hospital yesterday, I followed in my mind the itinerary that would get us to Lisbon.  Right now we’d be flying over New Mexico, I thought.  Right now we’d be waiting in Newark for our connection.  Right now we’d be hearing our plane was starting its descent into Lisbon.  And then the imaginings went dark.

Today as I sat by Jim’s bed in the hospital my only thoughts of the outside world were of my classes.  Right now the sub was walking in, calling roll, and telling the students I wasn’t going to be gone after all, except this one day.  I pictured each room, each set of faces and the range of reactions. It was far more real to me than a ship I had never been on, the smells, the sights, the sensations of a place I had never been.

I haven’t tried to figure out what time it is in Portugal.  I haven’t looked once to see where the ship is, or whether at this moment I would be giving one of my lectures, or sitting by the pool, or visiting a foreign port.  It isn’t real.  It wasn’t meant to be.

My life here with Jim is real.  My life as a professor is real. What could compare?

Talking with my sister last night, I told her I was mentally putting on my Buddhist robes and trying to process this whole disappointment–oh yes, it is certainly that!–in terms of suffering caused by desire.  What were my desires for this trip, and what do I feel I have lost?

What I wanted, deep down, was more quality time with Jim. We’re both workaholics, me with my second full time job as a novelist, and he as a research scientist with a burning desire to understand how just one little piece of this marvelous bio-physico-chemical process called life actually works.  What did I get?  More quality time with Jim, just not of the sort I pictured. Today I kissed his forehead and smoothed his hair and told him I loved him.  He told me the same, held my hand, and smiled.

“Be careful what you ask for,” my sister said.  “Remember the old adage about getting it.”

The other thing I wanted is more frivolous but still real to me. I had really been looking forward to the opportunity to dress to the nines every night, and now I must plunge into a suitcase and confront the gorgeous clothes I have no use for.  I had been joking with Jim about how he simply doesn’t know what a girly girl I can be, because that’s just not the way we live. The dresses go into the back of the closet now–for months I’d kept them in front where I could see them as my excitement grew.  Now don’t want the reminder.

Western thinking suggests that it’s good to plumb our psyches to root out every last emotion and expose it to the light of day, but I don’t need or want to. I have conquered most of the suffering by understanding what I desired from this trip and why, or at the very least knowing that I can understand it if I dig a little more, and that such knowledge will set me free, if that is what I wish for.

I’m still learning, still changing, and so grateful for the little flashes of clarity life gives us from time to time if we are willing to step away from our grievances and disappointments and just take in a deep breath of good, fresh air.

Will Jim and I step aboard a cruise ship in the future?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Will the sea air smell sharper and the waves dance more brightly if we do?  Undoubtedly.

 

 

 

A wonderful group of authors formed a group, San Diego Writing Women, last year, and I am lucky enough to be a charter member.  We are dedicated to mutual support and promotion as well as community service to those interested in writers, books, and the writing process. One of our activities is a weekly blog for which we share writing duty.  This week was my turn, so here is a link to my most recent blog post.  Please take a look at the other authors’ posts as well, and an archive of my own, if you are in the unlikely position of having more than a minute of time!

Many Thanks to Kathleen Jones, director of the NIH Hannah Arendt workshop for high school teachers, for posting this video of a talk I gave on my non-fiction book, UNTIL OUT LAST BREATH, about Jewish resistance in the Holocaust.

 

 

This isn’t about writing at all, except that I’m writing about it.  It’s about luck and a lot of other things.  Sometime in August I decided that, although I never play the lottery, I wanted to see if using nothing but “lucky pennies” might make a “lucky dollar” and get me a winning ticket. During the summers  I run most days along a pretty heavily touristed stretch and when school starts I have a brisk twenty-five minute walk each way through downtown San Diego, so I have plenty of opportunity to scan sidewalks. I started picking up pennies and the occasional nickel or dime, and I am now up to fifty cents.

The project seems so silly that I am surprised at how much pleasure it has given me. Today I found two pennies on my walk to school, and I was so excited I sent a text message to my partner. But as I walked on, I started thinking about something that happened during the summer, when I was running along a grass easement in front of the Convention Center.  It was already a good day—about ten minutes into my hour-long run I found a dime in a crosswalk used by conventioneers to get to the Gaslamp District. That will put a spring in the step!

Not more than a minute or two later, I saw a glint in the grass and saw two quarters. Two quarters!  The dime had brought me up to twenty-seven cents at that point, and suddenly I was more than seventy-five percent of the way to my dollar.  I was astonished!

As I ran along, I started thinking about the fifty cents.  It was on a stretch where a few homeless men sack out during the day, and it must have fallen out of someone’s pocket. The rest of the run I pondered a lot of things—starting with how much more important it was to him that he had lost the money than it was to me that I had found it. I started thinking about my desire to get lucky and I realized how it was hard to get much luckier than I already was.

I decided not to keep the fifty cents but to give it to another homeless person.  A tattered, sunburned woman always sitting on a retaining wall near the end of my run and calls out “have a good run!” every time I pass by.  If she was there that day, I would give the money to her.

The rest of the run I was happier about the fifty cents than I was when i first spotted it.  I felt more of a connection to the nameless, faceless soul who patted his pockets and knew the buying power of that money had drained from his life. I thought about how it would make some small difference in the day of the woman I was running toward. But mostly I thought about the Jewish concept of a mitzvah, which is sometimes translated as “good deed” but  is so much more than that.

A mitzvah is when we do something in keeping with God’s intentions for our behavior. Take God out of the equation, and the meaning doesn’t really change that much. The world isn’t fair, and that’s not right. It’s up to each of us to do what we can to bring a little more balance, a little more equity, into it.  Call it dharma, call it words carved by divine lightning onto stone tablets on a mountain in the desert–it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t keep the money because it made the world even more imbalanced than it already was.

As I transported the coins from their old owner to their new one, I didn’t really think of it as a good deed, but about my membership in something bigger.  “Have a nice run!”the woman called out as I strode to a stop.

“I found two quarters back there,” I said with a grin.  “I think they belong to you.”

She jumped up and hugged me, despite the sweat.  “Thank you so much!” she said, almost dancing.

Her name was Kelly. I never thought to ask before.

What happened to the dime? Reader, it’s in the pile on my desk.  Finders keepers!

Maybe there’s a blessing now on my quest for a dollar’s worth of lucky change, but I don’t care.  It’s a game I’ve already won.

Bad habits are hard to break, and sometimes the most we can hope for is to notice a little more quickly when we are falling into them.  I had just such an experience this week with my revision of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE.

One of the main story elements involves the women’s suffrage movement.  In the course of my research I came to admire deeply the “second generation” of suffragists, women like Alice Paul in the United States and the Pankhursts in England. I really had no ideas how much they endured to get me and all other women the vote.  I wanted to do their story justice in my novel, but i was troubled by one thing.

Suffragist leaders were decidedly middle and upper class and almost exclusively white. This makes sense, for other women probably had more pressing things on their minds.  What is not so easy to feel good about is the insistence, even by some of the suffragists I admire most, not to enlist people of color in the movement.  Many people were uncomfortable with black men voting, and suffragists thought the cause would be hurt if it was pointed out that black women would get the vote too.

I’m sure Alice Paul and the others didn’t consider themselves racist, but simply practical. I’m not going to judge, but still it was something I thought my readers should know and have a chance to ponder for themselves.  So I did what every novelist does–I work my interests into the novel through the thoughts and opinions of my characters.

Zorah Baldwin, my protagonist, has been introduced to the suffragist movement through meeting Alice Paul.  After a parade in which she has been assaulted by paint-throwing protestors, she stands with Alice on the stage of Carnegie Hall, a symbol in her ruined dress, of the strength and determination of the movement.  She should be amazed to be thrust in the spotlight in that way, pleased to be standing next to Alice, and feeling a growing commitment to the movement and greater sense of purpose in her life.

And what do I have her do?  Thoughts pass through her mind about the fact that working women aren’t there because the parade was on a Saturday, which was a working day.  She remembers a comment Alice made about not wanting black suffragist groups to march.  In the middle of a fabulous scene, I just couldn’t resist stepping in to ruin it.

Okay, that might have worked out in the end, except that Zorah, over the next few chapters, makes a deeper and more passionate commitment to suffrage.  My need to throw the negative in at the first opportunity disturbed the arc of the story, because both the reader and Zorah have already found the movement a bit off-putting. Why would she throw herself into it, and why should the reader cheer her on?

The whole story rang a little false now. Zorah could no longer be perceived the way I wanted her to be, if these serious issues were just passing thoughts she subsequently ignored. Nor did I want to write pages showing her struggle with this, just to work in some rationalizations for the reader.

I hadn’t re-read these pages in some time, and when I got to them, the answer was simple. “Get out of the way of the story!” I told myself.  Let her just be thrilled and astonished standing on that stage in her paint-soaked dress.  Let her have no doubts at all about the movement. The rest can wait–after all, this scene happens only halfway through the book.  I just took out the material.  I’ll find a way to work it in later, or maybe not.

I’ve been in wars with my books before.  I wanted to write about the crazy excesses of Venetian convents so badly that I came up with a preposterous plot diversion in THE FOUR SEASONS to have Maddalena go live in one.  Fortunately I caught myself before I’d spent much time and effort, and I’ve learned to accept that I am going to know a whole lot of incredibly interesting things that don’t end up being in my books.

Susan Vreeland has very aptly called such authorial indulgences “research dumps,” and the classism of the suffrage movement was just one of these.  I catch myself more easily now throwing something in just because I know it, and I see this in other writers’ work as well.  I guess I should think of research that isn’t dumped as one of the perks of writing a historical novel.  It’s all still in my head for me to ponder and for readers to discover if my work inspires them to learn more on their own.

 

 

 

I’m off tomorrow to New York to do research for my novel-in-progress.  I get asked sometimes about what I get out of going to the places my books are set–other than a great vacation!–and the answer may be a bit surprising.

Historical novelists rarely get to visit the places they write about, because those places aren’t there anymore.  I learned this most dramatically last summer researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD. The interior of the cathedral in Sevilla contains almost nothing–from chapels to altars to decorations–that would have been there when my heroine attended mass.  Granada is filled with a great deal of beautiful architecture, but baroque buildings have replaced medieval ones.  The palace where Isabella spent her childhood has not a remnant remaining of it.  You can get a sense for the warrens of medieval streets and countless tiny squares in some parts of the city, but I often feel a little bereft of what I am hoping for.

Rural locales are better.  The countryside probably hasn’t changed that much at least in places, and the plants and animals are presumably the same.  I get color from this–kinds of flowers, butterflies, shapes of hills–and the books are always the better for it. I had no idea, for example, how truly rural much of the Champagne region of France is, and I was  able to build that into FINDING EMILIE.

The main thing about going to the sites is avoiding awful mistakes.  Whoever said the devil is in the details must have been a historical novelist.  I had my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD looking out across some hills to the sea and discovered that despite the proximity to the ocean, there was no sea view there. I like to avoid having characters watch sunsets out of north facing windows, or cross bridges that aren’t there, or not cross bridges that are. This is especially important for places that many readers may have been to.  One doesn’t want to get details about Paris or Venice wrong!

I do have have characters do things like stop at ruins I didn’t know existed until I saw them, or spend the night in a town too minor to make the guidebooks. One good part of travel is getting special details like that. I discovered, for example, that Sagres, where my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD spent several years of her childhood, is unbelievably windy all the time–something one wouldn’t know from pictures.

I’m a college professor, so I can’t simply decide to take a trip when it suits me.  I need to go in summers or on winter break, so it’s not a matter of going before I start writing, or when I’ve finished a draft, or any other specific point.  At first I thought it would be best to go before I started writing, to soak up the flavor of a place, but it didn’t work out that way, and I think now that would have been a mistake. I can only afford to go once per book, and it’s working well to go after the first draft is done, or close to it.  That way I know very specifically what information I need.

I know where all the scenes are set, which makes it easier to put myself in the story. I stand in a garden and try to hear the characters talking.  I drive down a road and imagine what it would be to galloping on horseback. Even if I have to peel away the new housing development to see what was there before, or ignore the cars on a narrow cobblestoned street, I am there, letting it all soak in.

How much difference does travel make?  I’d say the books are ten percent better because of it.  Fiction still needs a great plot and wonderful characters way more than anything else. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of my new novel, tentatively called BREAD AND ROSES, and I have a very good sense of every local I need to go see.  I won’t see Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side, and it will be tourists crowding the Registry Hall at Ellis Island, but I’ll do what I always do:  pack light and take a good imagination.

The provocative title of the much acclaimed 1962 film “The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner” came to me the other day as I was thinking about some of the strange things novelists do to develop and sustain their stories.

 

People often ask if I work from an outline, or if I know from the

beginning pretty much everything that is going to happen in my novels.  I tell them absolutely, positively yes.

Here’s the rest of the truth. I write all this down in a roughly three-page treatment, which I then put in a drawer and don’t look at again until I’ve finished, at which point I say, “I was going to write that?”

 

I suppose there are authors who just start writing without any plan and see what happens, but I don’t know any.  I suppose there are others who have thorough outlines they stick to, but I don’t know them either.  For me, as I imagine for just about every novelist, fiction is a combination of planning and inspiration.

 

There are a few reasons for this.  At the first keystrokes I can’t know the characters as well as I eventually will. In my work in progress, the main character was originally fairly sensitive to social problems, mostly because I liked her that way.  As the draft went on, I realized how unlikely that was and went back to introduce–at some peril of losing a bit of the reader’s sympathy–hints of the unthinking bigotry she would have inherited with mother’s milk.

 

And speaking of mothers, there’s been a complete role reversal in my protagonist Zora’s parents.  My original thought was an overbearing father and docile, rather caved-in mother, but I discovered the plot worked much better the other way around.

 

Plot is the key.  Other than “what are my characters like as people?” the biggest question is “what makes the best story?”  For historical novelists, this usually involves figuring out a way to get the main character into the right place at the right time.

 

Here’s where the ruthlessness comes in.  If a character is getting in the way of the story, the or she has to be disposed of. Novelists kill off characters right and left.  They force them into exiles of all sorts whether they want to go or not.  Sometimes they don’t need to be disposed of, but they must influence the plot in an unpleasant way.  “Wait a minute!” I might hear a fledgling character complain.  “I don’t want to be a jerk!”  Tough luck, I say!

 

Ruthlessness has a bad name.  Sometimes it’s simple expediency.  In my work in progress, I needed a means for Zora to break away from family and friends who were constraining her to remain in the aristocratic social circle of wealthy, turn-of-the-century New York.  So many exciting things affecting women, such as suffrage and unionizing, were happening in the years before World War I, and I had to get Zora out of the house.

 

How to do this?  Invent an acquaintance with a different point of view, one who exposes her to new things.  Give this person exactly the traits that fit the needs of the plot. Piece of cake!  Enter Sophia. I create characters out of thin air to aggravate problems and facilitate solutions.

 

 

As I go further into writing a novel, things start to fall into place. I know how people will react (and if I need something different, I go back and change them). I know how the characters will get from here to there. At this point I can’t type fast enough. Still, there are plenty of surprises ahead, plot twists the characters will tell me about as they are happening, things they will say I am not expecting.

 

 

Fiction is driven by what is called “the arc of the story.”  As my sense of that arc is honed, necessary revisions are clearer. This brings up another form of ruthlessness.  Sometime whole scenes, whole characters just have to go because they aren’t helping.

 

 

At this point, the novel has its own feedback loop.  Just this morning I went back through the first hundred pages to add small details I couldn’t have put in earlier, little hints of the inevitability, or at least the natural progression, of what lies ahead.  Zora is now a little snobbier and thoughtless at the outset, and her growing dissatisfaction with herself and her world more clearly linked to specific events.  A new character is introduced quickly a hundred pages before she will show up in earnest to enter the story.  I see whole conversations that need to change in focus or subject, or be eliminated altogether.  I see new words that have to be put in characters’ mouths or minds.  I see how, once they have said or thought these things, I can go back and foreshadow.

 

Gradually, through new drafting and this feedback loop, I reach the full potential of the story.  Pass after pass, the novel is layered into what you eventually read. For right now, I’m just holding on for the wild and wonderful ride.