I think novel endings are a little like nailing the landing on a gymnastics routine or a figure skating jump. That is, the ending totally depends on the beginning and the middle, and if there are any problems in the beginning and middle, they’re going to turn into an obvious wobble by the end. So you look at the end and you say, “How can I fix that wobble?”–but you can’t fix it by fixing the ending. You have to trace it back to where it started and fix it there.

I love Stephen King’s On Writing, and I’ll cheerfully endorse about 80% of the advice in it (which is high, for a writing book!), but it does bother me when he says he doesn’t plot, that plot is too artificial, that he just puts his characters in a tough situation and lets them sort it out.

Truth is, I have yet to read a Stephen King novel with a really good ending, so I’m inclined to be skeptical.

The trouble is, as a writer you have control over every aspect of the situation. You have control over the situation itself. You have control over the flow of information. You get to decide where the iceberg is, who knows about the iceberg, and what they do with that information. And without the iceberg, you have only half a plot. The difficulty in plotting is making sure the iceberg is exactly where you need it to be.

Without making your readers feel railroaded.

Because when you have a spectacular coincidence, suddenly people remember that none of this is real. It’s just words that a person thought up and wrote down, and it’s all completely arbitrary. There’s nothing wrong with being postmodern and going for that effect on purpose, but I’m not going to care about this love triangle or that person trying to survive the North Dakota wilderness if I keep thinking that they’re fake people.

So you plant the trap, but you kick leaves over it and make it look real. You build the house that looks, from a distance, like it belongs there in the forest.

Time is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. So too with plot. What does it change if that discussion happens when your main character is angry and frustrated enough to hear the worst in things? What does it change if that discussion happens after she finds out one crucial piece of information? You can’t abdicate responsibility for these decisions. You try things out one way, and then another, cutting out what doesn’t push your characters far enough and also what pushes them in ways that aren’t subtle enough. You try until you’re sick of trying, sick of considering how one decision ripples out onto another.

And this, I think, is one of the things that beginners have to learn. It’s why books sometimes get harder, instead of easier, to write. It’s easy to glom onto the way it really happened, or the way that you know from TV and movies, or the way that seems most dramatic or surprising, and get wedded to that even if it contradicts common sense, linear causality, and your characters’ personalities. It takes experience to slow down, look around, and back off the first thing that leaps into your head. It’s why I can’t do NaNoWriMo anymore.

It’s not an easy thing. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so much fun.

I keep telling people that I wrote six novels before A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend. I’m not sure that’s true. I think I wrote four full novels and, two years I participated in NaNoWriMo, two half-novels that didn’t have enough energy behind them to be really worth finishing. In any case, my computer crashed, I didn’t back up well, and most of what I’ve written has been consigned to the little “trash” folder in the sky. But anyway.

People are a little bit surprised, sometimes, that I was willing to write four-and-two-halves bad novels and keep on going. What did it mean? Dedication, perseverance, optimism?

Not optimism. The people who know me will confirm that I can panic over absolutely anything, that I usually have to be pulled back from the worst-case-scenario running through my head. I stopped believing I would ever be published years before I wrote Love Story.

But I didn’t stop writing.

I mistrust doing anything with my hopes pinned on what’s going to happen in the future, or what other people are going to think of me. I trust what I can see in front of me right now: it’s an idea that’s worth digging up. It’s a story that’s worth telling. It’s sitting in front of the computer and making myself work the problem instead of watching the Daily Show or playing Bejeweled.

I may not always believe in myself. But I believe in the work in front of me.

I find that I naturally cycle through head-work and hand-work. In college, when I was coming down from the rush of finals and term papers, I’d pick up a craft project or a musical instrument. Not that these things don’t require intelligence and concentration; they just don’t require the same kind of brain work as writing six pages on The Importance of Being Ernest.

So I handed in revisions on Wednesday, and promptly went into a round of nesting.

When I’m writing, I have a habit of letting things… accumulate. I did not do a precise inventory of my computer desk last week, but I can say I had two plates, a bowl, some glasses, a couple bottles of Coke and other snack-related trash, three partial manuscript printouts, hairbrush, hair conditioner, four or five books — there is probably more than that. When I’m ready to get down to work, the writing is more important. And when I’m not ready to get down to work, I’d rather play Pokemon or watch TV than clear off the huge piles on my desk.

But they’re clear now, and I’m all ambitious about putting shelves in my closet and hanging up some art. At some point, though, I really should figure out how to get into the habit of cleaning at times when I haven’t just finished some major project.

E.M. Forster said, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

I think I’d have to quibble on his definitions of ‘plot’ and ‘story,’ but if he’s trying to make the distinction between what works as fiction and what doesn’t, I can agree with that.

And it seems so obvious that things have to connect together in a way that makes sense; they have to connect on the level of plot, and the level of character, and hopefully on the level of theme and metaphor and symbolism. But sometimes I write something that seems like a good idea at the time but doesn’t connect up in a clear way to the rest of the story.

It’s important to be willing to cut out whatever doesn’t work. But I think it’s also important to preserve those moments of intuition if you have a hunch that they might connect up at a deeper level after all. For all that revision can be a pain sometimes, it’s sometimes surprising how you can start putting in the connections that were invisible before, perhaps floating a little below the surface, that just need to be fished out of there, strengthened and made more explicit. Some writers overwrite in their first drafts — I underwrite, blissfully convinced that whatever is clear to me is going to be clear to the reader, and whatever isn’t clear to me can be glossed over with no penalty. I’ve probably added 10,000 words to Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad during revisions, and it was only 45,000 to start out with. They always tell you to assume that your reader is smart, but I also need to be reminded that my reader doesn’t have telepathy.

November brings many things to mind. Turkeys. Cranberry sauce. Cursing out the stores that put their Christmas decorations up in the first week of November. Breaking out the hot chocolate and winter coats.

Sobbing over the computer virus that just ate 20,000 words while you phone up tech support and beg for help.

It’s that time of year again, National Novel Writing Month. When thousands sit down at their computers dosed on caffeine… and dozens appear from the woodwork to grump that the world has enough bad novels in it and for heaven’s sake stop encouraging them.

I believe in bad novels. I believe that NaNoWriMo teaches perseverance, fearlessness, creativity after creativity runs out, the ability to laugh at oneself and the whole ridiculous enterprise of writing fiction, the nobility of pure effort. No fiction writer can get by with just those – but at the same time, I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Most of all I think that we need to poke as many holes as possible in this culture where we consume rather than create. Most of us get our food and our clothing from major corporations, one way or another. And then, our fiction and television and music and news come to us via major corporations. This feels wrong to me; I chafe at it. It’s not as if I’m going to run away and live off the grid and raise my own chickens, but I do think that it’s right to take as many opportunities as possible to create instead of consume, to be playful and discover what we can do by ourselves. It’s about something more than good novels versus bad novels; it’s about participating rather than tuning out.

I believe in craft and practice and not settling for the second-best word and doing so many drafts you never want to see the novel again. But I also believe in writing badly. So, happy NaNoWriMo to all of you who are participating. Good luck and good coffee.

A friend and I were talking yesterday about what it means to follow one’s dreams – about how hard it is to define yourself as a creative person and carve out space for your creativity when you have a day job as well. In some ways it’s actually worse if you have a somewhat creative job, like technical writing or copy writing; it can take creative energy out of you and leave none at all for the novel you’re trying to write.

I have been writing novels for roughly seven years now, and there were times I was very close to throwing in the towel. The one thing that kept me on an even keel through a lot of rejection was that I tried to define, very carefully, what I wanted from writing, and what I could reasonably expect. Some people want to write, some people want to have written, some people want to be writers – you have to learn to disentangle those things before you can chase after the ones you truly want and make peace with not having it all.

If you expect publication and money and fame, you may get those things. The odds are against you, but it’s a possibility. I think it’s more of a problem to expect certain emotional things from writing, especially validation. Validation is an illusion. You can sell a million copies, win the Pulitzer and the Nobel, and it won’t be the validation that you need. There’s never any voice on high telling you you’ve done a good job. If you do get an agent and a book deal, that will feel like the voice on high at first – but, at best, it will only last until the first bad reviews. It has been a hard struggle for me not to ask for validation from writing, and I’m still terrible at it, but I think it is so important.

So what can you reasonably expect?

I started my first novel because I wanted to read it. My circumstances might be a little unusual; I was enamored with some Japanese novels and graphic novels that were nothing like what I could find in English. They were melodramatic and romantic and self-indulgent; they were not afraid to get bombastic to the point of silliness. They had a kind of adolescent intensity that I desperately wanted to emulate. When I wrote my first novel, I wanted nothing more from it than the novel itself.

Later I would write to work through my feelings. A writer needs to make distinctions between things that you should put in your novel and things that you should tell your therapist, but that was valuable to me too. I would write for the intellectual challenge of putting a story together. More than anything, still, I was writing the kinds of novels that I wanted to read myself.

But there was one more thing I wanted. I wanted to learn how to write novels. I decided, midway through writing my first one, that I was willing to treat this as an apprenticeship and accept that I’d have to put in some time before I got to be any good.

Seven years. That seems just about right for an apprenticeship.

17,867 / 65,000 (27.5%)

I took more of a vacation than I meant to, and I’m by no means done yet with moving – heck, I haven’t even begun! – but I’m still on track to finish roughly when I want to finish, and I’m moving towards getting back where I’m supposed to be.

I found this article by Malcolm Gladwell on late bloomers quite interesting, at least as a validation of my working methods. I’m still too young to call myself a late bloomer, but I do a lot of groping around in the dark trying to find solutions to problems; I work mostly by experimentation and trial and error, without having a really firm idea of where I’m supposed to be, and I’m becoming more and more comfortable with the idea that this is okay.

…And even if I am too young to be a late bloomer, Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad is my seventh finished novel, so I know something about failed attempts!

Two girls go shopping for an apartment. First they see one that has a steep narrow staircase going into a basement bedroom. Then they see one that has tiny bedrooms and almost no living room. Then they see one that has a brand-new kitchen and bath, but just not quite enough space. Then they see a huge place that has a weak floor that sags when you step on it, and gang graffiti outside the building. Finally they see a place that has new appliances, lots of space, and a good location. Yay, the end!

This isn’t much of a story.

In a lot of writing books for beginners, or creative writing classes in school, I’ve heard that the basic formula for a story is a protagonist who has a problem, tries all kinds of different solutions to the problem, and finally finds one that works. But I think there’s something fundamentally missing from that formula: there are lots of stories that could fit that basic outline while still being deeply trivial.

-If all that’s required of the character is to keep doing the exact same thing they’ve been doing before, for longer, it’s not enough for a story.

-If the difference between one failing solution and another successful solution is purely technical – if the character needs to try club soda to get the stain out instead of a Tide pen – it isn’t enough for a story.

-If the problem just isn’t that big a deal, it isn’t enough for a story. Mavens advice you to raise the stakes, especially if they come from a screenwriting background, but that doesn’t mean you have to put your character’s life in mortal peril; you just need to take away her Plan B, Plan C, and Plan D.

So how do you get enough for a story? The solution has to be something that the main character can reach, not through luck or persistence, but by achieving deeper insight or greater moral character. Even in a detective story, where mere cleverness is enough to arrive at the solution, it’s a cleverness that allows the detective to sense the deep connections between unrelated things.

Let’s say I wanted to write that story about two girls going shopping for an apartment…

-Carolyn had a relationship in college with a gambling addict, a relationship that bankrupted her. Even though Erin is her best friend, she never told her about this. They keep finding great apartments, but Carolyn won’t let Erin apply for any of them because she knows her credit isn’t good enough. Meanwhile, Carolyn is dragging Erin around to tiny apartments in dubious neighborhoods, bragging about the local flavor – she can’t bear to tell Erin the truth.

“Can’t bear to tell the truth” is a story idea that you can mine forever – the TV show “House” certainly does. You could probably get some mileage out of a story where Erin is secretly gay, or has a secret illegal exotic pet, or is secretly a wanted felon, or… and they might not be keeping secrets from each other; it could be that they’re a gay couple who just moved to Nowhere, Alabama for some reason it might be hard to justify in the story, and they’re scared that a landlord who knows they’re a couple won’t rent to them.

Or maybe the issue is insight into one’s own self:

-Carolyn feels ambivalent about moving to a big city where she knows hardly anyone; she doesn’t realize how ambivalent she is, but she can’t seem to find any apartment that doesn’t have some huge problem.

-Erin has never thought of herself as a racist, but when she starts getting nervous whenever she goes into certain neighborhoods, she has to ask herself whether the neighborhoods are actually unsafe or if there’s something else going on.

-Maybe there’s a personality conflict between Erin and Carolyn: Erin, a vegetarian, refuses to live by the shop that sells live chickens. Carolyn can’t understand why she’s so adamant about it.

These are just some off-the-cuff ideas; none of them appeals to me so much that I’d want to write a story about it. But they have the bare minimum for a story: a problem that matters, and a solution that isn’t trivial.

I just about thought that “Light Under the Floorboards,” as a weblog title, is a little bit too – pretentious? Sentimental? Well, that’s what I’m going with at least for the moment, and the reason is that it comes from two songs I absolutely love. One is about friendship, and one is about a serial killer who dressed as a clown.

I’ve been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I’ve formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
-Bruce Cockburn, “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?”

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
-Sufjan Stevens, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

When I first heard the Bruce Cockburn song, it took me about two months to be able to listen to it without crying. It’s about friendship, of course – and then, it’s also about writing. For those of us who read habitually, compulsively, who hasn’t felt that at some point or another?  You’re reading, and then, unexpectedly, you come across some ray of beauty and comfort and hope, and how did this person who lives hundreds of miles away, who might not even be alive any more, know? And you’re not alone any more, because of the words this total stranger is giving you.

That’s not advocating books that are all about puppies and sunshine and rainbows, though, because you can’t lie to people. They’ll know. They can tell the difference between real comfort and false comfort. False comfort is what tells you that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, you’ve been wronged terribly through no fault of your own because people just don’t understand.

That’s why the Sufjan Stevens quote is also about writing. I think that the kind of writing that gives any real comfort also requires the courage and clear vision to haul out the skeletons that are in your closet or under your floorboards, not with the intent to explain or exonerate yourself, but just for the sake of truth. I don’t want to write tell-all romans-a-clef about my traumatic childhood (no, I didn’t have one); I don’t want to stick to the literal truth, but I do want to draw on the emotional truths of my life.