Diary

Writing a novel is such a huge undertaking that writers run the gamut of emotions many times over during the process.  I’m sure as the remaining months go by in which I finish up my work in progress, THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD, I will have times when I have doubts not just about what I have written but about whether I am capable of making the book as good as I want it to be.  I’ll be amazed by surprises the characters have in store, and saddened and angered by some of the things that must happen to them. (I’d like to keep them all safe and happy, but that’s not the nature of either real or fictional lives.)

I’ve talked in the past in this diary about how writing can be so intimidating that I get scared to open the manuscript file on my computer.  It’s hard to “go there” sometimes because the work is so intense and it takes so much out of me. Once I am into it again, I become so compulsive that my life patterns get more out of whack than I want them to.  I can’t seem to stop writing, and when I make myself leave the computer, I can’t stop thinking about my book.

I took three weeks off in June to go to Spain and Portugal to research my novel in

progress, and when I returned, family obligations kept me away from my desk for another week.  But now I’ve been back on the job for a few days, and to my surprise, I wasn’t hesitant to dive back in.  In fact, I couldn’t wait.  I already have the first seventy-five pages revised to include material from my travels and other improvements that come from knowing the characters better and seeing more clearly where the story is going.

I already sense the first signals I’m getting weird and compulsive about my novel in progress, but I don’t care.  Writing is what I most love to do.  And as I said, writers run the gamut of emotions.  Right now, I am relishing the fact that I LOVE THIS BOOK!  I love the characters, I love the setting, I love the history, I love the message, I love the story.

Hang in there, I tell myself. Charge forward!  This can be the best work you’ve ever done.  Everything is there.  All it takes is me.  The computer is glowing.  I have a book to write.

I’ve written in this diary in the past about how important travel is to getting the details right in historical fiction. It’s exciting to see how accurately I have portrayed some locations just from researching photographs and descriptions of places, and there is also blessed relief in realizing how much embarrassment I may have avoided by being able to correct what was blatantly wrong.

I’ve also been reminded daily on this trip through Spain and Portugal researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD (my novel in progress) that a lot of the value in travel isn’t to confirm or correct details but to discover what simply wasn’t knowable without direct experiences of places or chances to talk with local people.  About Sagres, for example, I would probably never have known how much of a factor the wind is in everyday life on the southwest tip of Portugal.  The hotel clerk told me, “people who live here think something’s wrong when the wind stops blowing.”  Just the three days I spent in the area convinced me that the wind needs to be a dominant part of my description of the place.

Yesterday in Arevalo, north of Madrid, where Isabella (of “Ferdinand and Isabella” fame) spent her childhood, I understood for the first time what Isabella’s mother was up against when she was declared mad and sent away to live in seclusion with her small children in a town so small it isn’t even mentioned in the Michelin Guide and can barely be found on their map.

It was the equivalent of being sent to live in a palace on Alcatraz, a place whose very remoteness and inaccessibility made it a prison even though she lived in luxury.  If she wasn’t mad when she went to live there, it’s hard to see how she could have avoided madness afterwards– or perhaps even why she would have wanted to, since there must be some solace in detaching from such a reality.  I didn’t have a detailed plot for this part of the story until I understood what life would be like in Arevalo. Now I see so clearly how my protagonist Aya fits into the place that she seems like part of its true history.

And then there are places like Sevilla and Granada, which are wonderful places to visit, but the reality is that with few exceptions, like Granada’s Alhambra Palace, there not much in the urban landscape that hasn’t been rebuilt since the fifteenth century, when my novel is set. The synagogues and mosques are gone and even the churches have gone from medieval to baroque and beyond in their styles.  Aya may have sat in the Seville cathedral but none of the decorations that dominate the experience today would have been there.  Likewise, taking a boat ride along the Guadalquivir River, I saw a number of amazing modern bridges with stunning archtecture, but had nothing resembling Aya’s experience coming up the same river.

I’m not complaining—I am lucky to be here and having a rich experience—but it’s turned out to be hard to find my story in many of the places I have visited, unlike in Venice, Greece, or France, where I traveled for the first three novels. This is due in large part to the fact that the Reconquista so thoroughly and deliberately reshaped Spain. I was told that if I wanted to know what Granada was like under the Muslim Caliphate I should go to Marrakesh. Sounds good to me—next time!

I went on high school dates with James Bond.

Well, not exactly. The first movies made from Ian Fleming’s Cold War-inspired spy novels came out when I was in high school, and I suppose the date who paid my admission and bought the popcorn thought I was only with him.

Looking back now I can see how important movies like “From Russia with Love” and “Goldfinger” were in adding wanderlust to the general–well, what can I say?–lustiness of my teenage years.

Even when James Bond movies went from the right kind of silly to just plain silly, I saw every one over the decades, first with boyfriends and then with my own children. Even when they were wincingly awful, at the very least I was exposed to some fabulous places I wanted to visit some day. Many years later I planned a side trip in Italy to include a stop at the Italian ski resort at Cortina d’Ampezzo just because I loved the way the town looked nestled in under the peaks of the Dolomites in “For Your Eyes Only.”

Except it didn’t look like that.  The street scenes didn’t match the actual streets, and the big action sequence obviously had been shot on a set and later merged with a backdrop filmed on location. I was really disappointed, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Presumably it would be hard to find a florist willing to have a motorcycle crash through the window of his or her shop, even to help James Bond make a point about how he can fend off the bad guys without breaking a sweat.

I thought about this yesterday as I took stock of the area of Portugal just west of Lisbon, the first stop in my research trip for novel number four.  Though I do the most thorough research I can on the settings of every scene, sometimes the imagination is, well, a bit too imaginary.

Sometimes every last little bit of accuracy doesn’t matter all that much. Though the typical reader might not know or care whether the ocean is visible from a particular hilltop, or what kind of trees or wildflowers grow in a specific valley, I care about all that down to the last detail, even though I know that in the end, I may choose plausibility over the exact facts I uncover.

But not always.  The first days of my research trip to Portugal and Spain  have been an odd combination of “uh oh,” “ah hah,” and “oh well,” an amalgam of things I have to rewrite because they are simply wrong, things that can be made much clearer and vivid in detail, and things that are not exactly the way I pictured but don’t really need to be changed.

An example of the first is how Aya, the heroine of the novel, arrives at the palace of Sintra. Plain and simple, I had the look and layout of the entrance to the palace wrong. Easily fixed.  An example of the second is my realization that this part of Portugal resembles the Pacific Northwest more than the Mediterranean climate I imagined.  That matters a lot.  Aya lives in a thick forest, and she would move around far differently than I thought. Many scenes will have to be adjusted, but I will be able to make the book far more vivid as a result of having visited the places where the novel is set.

Probably the most common reaction I have had is a shrug of the shoulders.  The Sintra palace garden isn’t exactly the way I pictured it, but I need certain details to be the way I have them, and because the inaccuracy is irrelevant, I’m sticking with my version.

Historical novelists, at least the ones I know, approach their work with integrity.  Our job is to fill out observable and recorded fact with what could have been. We don’t make it all up. We embellish with our imaginations, change what we must when we uncover important new information, and leave alone what works when there is no relevant issue at stake.  The facts make our books “smart reads,” but the characters and story make them “good reads.”  I’m going for the best of both!

A lookover by a booklover.  Say that four times fast!

I’m happy to announce that such an overview is exactly what will be happening at San Diego State University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in November 2010, when I teach a mini course entitled “Forgotten Females.”

I first learned about the Osher Institute when I was asked by author and PBS host Kathi Diamant to give a talk to the SDSU Osher book club, who read THE FOUR SEASONS a few months back.  I had so much fun with this lively and well informed group (of course it helped that they really liked the book!) that when the director of the institute, Rebecca Lawrence, asked me if I would like to join their faculty, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ve spent so much time teaching and writing about women who have not received appropriate and sufficient attention for their  accomplishments that I have a backlog of things I’d really like to talk about.  I came up with a four-part class, now listed in the calendar section of this website, that will focus on music and science, as well as two historical eras, the ancient and medieval worlds. There are female political and military leaders as well as mathematicians, physicists, poets and scholars whose names and accomplishments have been by and large pushed to the margins of history, but even the women who stuck to traditional roles often played a larger role in the economic success and social stability of their cultures than has been acknowledged.

Interested?  Check out the SDSU Osher website and sign up!  And if you don’t live in the area, check out the Extended Studies department at a local university.  Chances are there’s an Osher Institute there too.

In the San Diego area there is also an Osher Institute at UCSD, and if you check my calendar you will see I am giving a talk there this fall as well.

Osher’s purpose is to promote lifelong learning, and the only rule to be a member is that you must be at least fifty-five years old.  You are supposed to be retired or semi-retired, but when I bemoaned that this would make me ineligible (if you count my writing I have two full-time jobs!), I was told that basically, no one asks.

Take a look at Osher.  I bet, like me, you’ll want to sign up for just about everything.

A few weeks ago a high school friend put out a message on Facebook, asking if anyone might by chance be available to be a last-minute replacement for her daughter on a trip to the Middle East.  When it turned out that I would be done with spring semester in time to meet her for five days in Cairo at the tail end of her trip, she threw in the frequent flyer miles for the airfare and the extra bed in the hotel, and I was hooked (and booked)!  Now, just about a month after I first heard she wanted a companion, I am already home reacquainting myself with the experience of ten time zones’ worth of jet lag.

I went prepared to be dazzled by the pyramids, the Nile and the Egyptian Museum, and indeed I was, but as usual, it is the unexpected things that make the most lasting impression.  One of these is so relevant to my writing that I want to share it here.

We took the Cairo metro several times during our stay (we should be so lucky as to have a subway so clean, orderly and modern in our own cities!), and for the first few rides, the experience was typical. Men, women, and children shared the cars we rode in, and though most people minded their own business, the men, to put it politely, checked us out far more extensively than seemed warranted.  Then we noticed a sign for a women-only car and decided to hop aboard next time.

The experience was extraordinary.  While people in the rest of the cars traveled through Cairo quietly wrapped up in their own private worlds and ignoring each other as much as possible (well, except for the stares), the women’s car was lively with conversation and laughter.  When women looked at the two of us, they often did so with a smile.  It was so pleasant and wonderful to be there, part of an instant community of people who, though strangers, know something about each other through the common experience of being a woman.

I understand there is some controversy among the people of Cairo about whether there should be such cars, but I won’t go into the various arguments here.  What sticks with me about the experience is how well it illustrates the underlying point of all my fiction.  There’s a richness in women’s lives that only comes out when they are among themselves.  Though I wish we lived in a world of greater equality of the sexes, there is something precious about the space women carve out for themselves in male-dominated societies.

There’s an analogy to be drawn between the paucity of information about the daily lives of women in the past and the women in those subway cars in Cairo. For centuries men have been the arbiters of what was (and is) important to record and remember about their societies, and the result is that almost everything about the world of women goes unnoticed.  Men concentrate on the activities important to them, i.e. the cars in which they are riding. All the while, out of sight and perhaps out of mind, women rattle along on the same train, making another world with just each other. We always have, and we are very good at it.

That’s what I want my books to convey, and I am grateful for those cars full of women for giving me such a beautiful image to keep in mind as I try to bring characters to life from cultures that missed the train altogether when it came to valuing what the women were thinking, doing, and contributing.

PS–I didn’t take the photo included here, because I figured out that many Egyptian women really would rather not have their picture taken by strangers. This is a shot I found online.

I spent time this weekend with my son Ivan, going over old photo albums before close of escrow on a vacation home we have had since he was six (he’s thirty now). When he was young, “advanced” technology was to store photos in bulky albums on thick pages with sticky surfaces and a plastic film that adhered by static to the page. We had dozens of such albums, all precious, with memories if not fresh at least immediately recalled with squeals, laughter and the occasional groan. Hundreds more unfiled and completely disorganized photos had been tossed years ago into the outgrown Snoopy suitcases from his brother’s and his early childhood travels, and it all just kept coming at us until 1AM this morning.

The documentation of our past is distilled now (sort of) into one box packed to the brim with photos Ivan will scan some day.  But pleasurable–and painful–as our evening of memories was, the thing that sticks with me most is something he told me he recently heard on a radio interview. Only later did he realize how profound one tossed-off line really was, and he can’t remember now who made the comment.

“I’m living the rest of my life in the future,” the person said.

Okay, at first it sounds obvious. But is that really what we do?

As I looked at photos of my children at birth, at two, at six, and as I saw myself again as I looked in the different decades of my adult life, I found it meaningful to reminisce, but in the end, that’s allI can do.  It’s over.  I can laugh, I can cry, I can wince, I can chuckle, but I can’t go back.  Much as I love my family and friends, I don’t miss people I haven’t seen for years because I know they aren’t the same, if indeed they are still with us in this life at all. All I can miss is what once was. It feels good to remember and honor them, but there’s not much sustenance for the future in dwelling on what we can’t have back.

I do a much better job than I used to avoiding expenditures of emotional and mental energy on things I cannot change, and the biggest part of what none of us can change is what has already happened.  Still, if I add up how much time I have spent processing and reprocessing the disappointments, sorrows, frustrations, and antagonisms that people and events have brought me over time, I bet it adds up to months, if not years of my life I have spent living in the past.

I know sometimes we can’t move on until we come to grips with negative aspects of the past, but unless we understand that we are living the rest of our lives in the future, the point of plumbing that past is lost. The whole point of healing is that it sets us up for tomorrow to be as good as possible.

On the other hand, a decision to live our lives in the future is not in any way a validation of idle daydreaming at the expense of living in the present, or a decision to do nothing today because there’s always tomorrow. Far from it. Daydreaming and procrastination are not living in the future, they’re living nowhere at all.

At the lowest moments of my life, I told myself “It is your job to be happy again,” and indeed I treated my situation that way.  I didn’t expect to be happy again soon, or easily, or once and for all.  I knew, however, that if I concentrated on being open to things, however small, that brought joy to me before, and if I stopped myself from wallowing in what I could neither change nor learn much of use from, I would be happy again some day.  And I am.

Understanding that we are spending the rest of our lives in the future helps us to be ready for whatever lies ahead, and to move forward with courage, hope, energy, and focused intelligence.  It means realizing that the future will be made up of one moment after another of living in a present that hasn’t arrived yet and doing what we can now to thrive when it does.

I am living the rest of my life in the future in that sense.  I intend to be as ready for it, and as resilient, as I can be. Beyond that, I’ll just wait to be surprised.

Writers have different styles not just in the words they produce, but how they go about producing them. When fledgling writers ask the very common question, “How do you write your books?” the question is in part curiosity about the person to whom they’ve directed the question, but it’s also in part another question altogether:  How should I write the one that’s in my head?”

No writer can say the best way for another person to work, The other day I was on a panel of women authors and was intrigued, though not surprised, at how different we all were when it came to producing the words on the page.  When the inevitable “How do you write?” question was asked, one of the other panelists described a slow process of getting every word right.  She’s a novelist now but got her start as a poet, and her attitude is one of reverence for every word.  For her it’s a matter of getting everything perfect.  It isn’t complete until there’s no wasted syllable, no word that isn’t just the right choice.

I admire that approach, but it’s easy to see why some writers produce one or two books in a decade, and others, like me can keep to a pace that’s closer to one book a year.  I like to call this second approach “approximism,” a word I invented when I was a professor of research writing.  With some students the big issue is writer’s block.  With others it’s letting the finished effort go.  And of course, more often than not, writers at all levels have a little-or a lot–of both problems.

Let me tell you what approximism is NOT.  It isn’t a cynical shrug of the shoulders, a “who cares?” about communicating with the audience. It isn’t settling for poor or sloppy writing. It isn’t granting oneself permission to be less than the best writer one can be.  Approximism in no way resembles “cranking it out” on a deadline or for a grade.

Approximism can perhaps best be summed up by words from John Steinbeck I have quoted previously in another entry in this diary. Describing THE GRAPES OF WRATH, he once said, “It’s not good enough, but it’s the best I can do.”  This is the heart of approximism.

Here are the steps:

1) Make a commitment to write until you can’t write any better.  Whether you do that one painstakingly perfect page at a time or give yourself permission, as Anne Lamott famously quipped, to write “shitty first drafts,” what matters is the commitment to write the best finished product you can however you can.

2) Accept that there are always going to be different ways to say something, and don’t necessarily confuse that with better ways to say it. Try out different phrasings of passages that don’t seem just right yet, and then settle on making one possibility the absolute best you can make it.  If it still bugs you, try another way and do the same thing.  As a friend of mine once said, “I keep working on something until I quit running into things I don’t like.”  That’s the time to let it go.

3) Agonize over things as small as a word or a punctuation mark in ONE final edit (oh, okay, maybe two) and tell yourself that if this is all you can think of to do to your work, it’s done. Swallow hard at that point and go public with it, whether it’s to an open mike, a writing contest, or a publisher.  You need feedback now.

Good readers will tell you how to make something better. Even if  criticism makes you feel misunderstood and unappreciated, don’t you want to feel understood and appreciated?  How else will that happen except by knowing where your words have fallen short?

I’ll write about unhelpful criticism and rejection another day. Even published authors get plenty of both, but I think approximists may be able to handle setbacks a little better than perfectionists can.  After all, we know what we wrote isn’t good enough. Perhaps we may decide it isn’t the best we can do after all and dig back in to try one more time.

Approximists of the World, Unite!   Or something sort of along those lines….

Barbra Streisand had a huge Top 40 success back in the sixties with a song called “People.”  Though I was only thirteen at the time, even then the song made me scrunch up my face and say “huh?”

Still does. People who need people?  Well, who doesn’t?  And aren’t at least a few of them unlucky?   Although the spoon-induced gag reflex hadn’t yet reached the American vernacular, this would have been a good point for a debut.

I suppose the song may have done some good in pointing out to a typically self-involved pubescent girl that there actually are other people in the world, and that someone as popular and famous as Barbra Streisand seemed to think they mattered, but of course I figured all this out eventually without her.

Novelists have a strange relationship with people.  We write about people we invent based on our experience with people we didn’t invent. In doing so we create an intimacy with some of our creations that is deeper than with many of the “real” people in our lives (I added the quotation marks because my fictional characters are, to me, neither unreal nor fake).  Nevertheless, some writers are as reclusive as Hughes or Garbo, not wanting any of the messiness and unpredictability of the world of flesh and blood. These writers do all or most of their human interaction through their fingertips at their desks.

But even the most sociable of writers have a difficult relationship with people. Deep into writing a novel, we generally prefer the world we are creating to any other, or at the very least we are captured by it with no ability (and little desire) to escape.  It’s very difficult to go back and forth between the fictional and the “real” world.  Though it’s possible to read a few pages of a novel while on hold on the telephone, or commuting on public transportation, or waiting for the dentist, it’s impossible to write a book that way.

For this reason, many times during the long slog of writing a book, we have to choose between one and the other, between the “real” world and the world in our heads.  For most of us the choice is not easy but it is obvious, rather like the sentiments of Robert Browning’s lovely little poem, “Parting at Morning”:

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

So I have learned to accept and even to relish those times when people draw me away from the world of my novel, even though I regret the transition as much as Browning bemoans the arrival of morning after a night of love.

And what a fabulous place the world of men and women can be.  Mine is populated with a wonderful partner, a handful of good friends, throngs of great colleagues and acquaintances, an intelligent and amusing family, hundreds of students past and present, and many delightful people I meet in connection with my writing.

Case in point:  In the last week, I haven’t written a word, but I taught a full load of fifteen hours of lecture.discussion and hung out in my office hours with students and passing colleagues. Everyone has a special way of being that brightens my days.  I spent hours on the phone planning a trip at the end of May to Cairo with a high school classmate. I went to a packed memorial service for a much-loved friend, Lawrence Waddy, and reconnected with two other friends over wine and tapas afterwards. I went to an incredible production of “La Traviata” at the San Diego Opera with another friend. I played tennis twice with my sweetheart.  I had dinner with another novelist, Barbara Quick, and her partner Wayne Roden, the night before a panel on “Women, Work, and Writing” at my college, where we were joined by two other delightful friends, Caitlin Rother, and Kathi Diamant. Just last night Barbara and I were the featured speakers at a Vivaldi-themed dinner with wine pairings at the UCSD Faculty Club. Here we are in a photograph.

Peeps, and more peeps. Okay, Streisand wins–I am one of the luckiest people in the world.  But now, my other world awaits.

If I ever need a reminder of how quickly time passes (which I rarely do!), all I have to do is look at the last time I posted an entry in this website diary.  Three weeks is a long time, and I hope you haven’t given up on me.

Many things have occupied my time, not the least of which is the imminent sale of my house in Lake Arrowhead, California.  Though not a good time to sell, I had to get real about how long it would take to rebuild its value, and how much money I would be investing every month in payments, taxes, insurance and repairs if I waited for its value to rise. The ideas I had about a little nest where I could live after retirement have given way to the realization that for many reasons the house wasn’t suited to that.  I’m dealing with more than twenty years of experiences and memories, some extraordinarily painful, but most sweet and wonderful, and recognizing that it’s time to move on.

I’m working on rebuilding my strength and stamina after surgery last December. Don’t let anyone brush off laparoscopic removal of the gall bladder as anything other than major!  True, it’s not anything like it once was, but you still wake up with wounds and innards that have been poked, prodded, cut, and shuffled around, and the older we get, the less our body appreciates the equivalent of a home invasion robbery.

It’s the last month of classes before summer vacation, one of those lights at the end of the tunnel that is both open sky and a locomotive coming at you.  A deluge of work fills the last month of any semester, and I’m hunkering down, while at the same time I’m telling myself that everything I complete is a step toward the finish. Every semester after I file my grades I call my partner to tell him “I’m unemployed,” and though that is bittersweet in these days when so many truly are, it is a good feeling to be at least temporarily without work obligations.

The best news is that the lack of obligations will be lengthened considerably for me, because I will be on sabbatical next fall.  I’ll be researching the period in Spanish history known as the Convivencia, the period of Muslim rule and the early part of the Christian Reconquest when a difficult, complex, fragile, and often violated peace was achieved between Christians, Muslims and Jews, in recognition that diversity works better and produces better results for a society.  Overly simplified, of course, but perhaps there are messages for me, my students, and the readers of my books in what I will be learning.  The sabbatical is connected to my novel in progress, set in this era, though the first draft will probably be finished before the sabbatical officially starts in late August.

Busy, busy!  But why complain, with such opportunities for sustenance and growth!

Dante would have had to invent a new level of Hell if he had used a computer.  There is truly nothing worse for a writer than a computer malfunction.  I’ve had many of them in the past, most of which haven’t been the computer’s fault at all.

I’ve learned to back up everything multiple places, but even that hasn’t always saved me from working on one copy  one day and another copy the next and having different changes in different texts. Very, very hard to get it all back straight again.

I’ve learned to save something as long as a novel in chunks of about 100 pages.  My novel in progress is in Part 3, and I won’t consolidate the whole thing until it is entirely finished, after Part 4.  This is a good move, since I really don’t have to worry about screwing up more than the current section, although it does make going back through the text more complicated.

Over the years I’ve developed so many techniques for saving myself from myself that it was not as familiar a sensation as it might have been when this morning I managed to lose hours of work over what really was a computer malfunction, assisted, of course by carelessness on my part.

I love my new Mac for the most part, but there are times when you ask too much of it and it sits frozen in a holding pattern for what seems like an eternity.  Often the only way to get back to work is to shut off the power and reboot.  This morning that happened, and, assuming it would have automatically saved what I had just written, I blithely powered it off. When I went back, to my surprise, the manuscript contained nothing of my new work.  Nowhere on my computer was it backed up and I had nada, nothing, niente, to show for my effort.

If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I have taken about six weeks off from writing my new novel, and I have been finding it hard to make my way back into it. This morning was my first serious attempt to write, and it was flowing again like crazy.

“I’m back!”  I thought.  “This is good stuff!”

And then it was gone.  Instead of trying to return to where I was in my imagination, I first tried to rewrite what I remembered already having put down.  It clunked on the page this time around.  Lifeless.  Not good at all.

So I dug in again, going back into my imagination to re-envision everything, and I honestly think what I wrote is better this time.  In my first draft I didn’t see nearly as many possibilities for how this scene could both tie in the past and help move the story into the next phase.  I can’t say I love glitches, but maybe sometimes its best to see them as unappreciated friends. Just as long as they don’t act up too often!