Diary

I’m often asked how much I write in a day, and the answer is that there is no good answer.  Usually, it’s only early in the process that the word count “counts.”  The hours spent revising and editing–which often add up to far more than the hours spent drafting–contribute little to the total number of pages.  How much can I rewrite in a day?  How much can I edit in a day?  I don’t know the answer to that either.

In an excellent session, when I have a full day to work, and when I know where everything is going and I just have to get it down, I can draft about 8-10 pages (2400-3000 words).  The next time, I go back over it and spend quite a bit of time making it better before moving on to draft more. For a while, these “pages in progress” will become a starting point for my read-through before I get down to new writing, so they will continue to be tweaked and polished, by now mostly for the smoothness of the read.  Then, as a new section of text becomes my focus, these pages will recede in importance, not to be worked on again for quite a while.

I have a full-time job as a professor of humanities at San Diego City College, so I don’t have many full days to devote to writing during the semester.  Adding in early mornings and weekends, it probably adds up to a two-thirds job during the school year and a job and a half on breaks (I’m pretty compulsive about a work in progress).  Let’s call it pretty close to a second full-time job over the course of the year. SInce it takes me about a year to get a first draft completed and revised well enough to give to my agent to market, let’s call that 50 roughly 40-hour weeks, or 2000 hours.  Let’s say for sake of easy math that the manuscript is 130,000 words (typical for my books).  That’s 650 polished words, a little over 2 pages a day.

I don’t sit down and come up with 2 polished pages of text and move on the next day to do 2 more, so I can’t say if 625 words a day sounds about right. But perhaps it will be instructive for novice writers to see how little a full, tough, exhausting day’s work adds up to. And, I might add, I work faster than most authors I know.

Writing at a publishable level is a long, long, process.  I imagine if authors were asked for one single image of themselves at work, they would describe themselves mired somewhere in the middle, because that’s where we spend most of our time.  Even prolific authors don’t start a book too many times in life, and most finish fewer than they start.  It’s successfully dealing with the endless middle that matters most.

There’s a magical point in writing a novel when I start seeing the whole story laid out in front of me, when I think I know how one thing leads to another, how the pieces fit.   The conceptual outlines I make for chapters start being what really happens in those chapters rather than wild stabs at where the story might be going. I start to hear the voice of my narrator whispering in my ear, telling me how relieved she is that I have finally begun to get her story right.  I start to know instinctively how she will react in a given situation, to understand her sense of humor as well as her soft, vulnerable underbelly, and her most secret desires.

It’s a huge turning point in a novel because I know from that point forward my role  will change from inventor to discoverer. It’s difficult to explain this to non-writers, but every novelist will understand what I mean.  Of course we still write every word of our books, but the words seem to come from someplace else, as if there really are people out in the ether who have somehow managed to get into our heads and are telling us what really happened to them so many years ago.  Forgotten for centuries, they are speaking again through us.  We are not making it up.  We are recording what we are learning from them, being pointed in directions the story must go to be true.

Before I became a novelist I used to roll my eyes when writers would talk as I am talking now.  “Oh, right,” I would think.  “They’re just channeling ghosts, just writing it all down. Sure.”  I didn’t see how it was possible that writers could get to the point where they lose the feeling that they are creating something strictly from their own imagination, making it all up as they go along. But it does happen.

I’m pragmatic by temperament, impatient with supernatural explanations of things, but I do sometimes think that I have tapped into stories of people who really existed, stories that have been overlooked, forgotten. Maybe I’m putting my own shape to the  details or getting some of them wrong, but I believe that the lives I write about were actually lived by someone, sometime, somewhere. I want to get it right because they want to be heard.

And once they know they have me hooked they are merciless, disturbing my sleep, distracting my days.  “Come on,” they say, “I’ve been waiting a long time for you to hear me whispering to you.”   Hold on a minute, Aya ( she’s my new heroine)–I’m typing as fast as I can!

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.