I hope to resume posting (not to mention writing!) soon; I broke a finger last night and my cast is giving me a hard time with the typing.

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!

If I had to make a top-ten of books about feminism – or if I had to assemble my Printz shortlist, as poorly-read as I am this year - I’d put E. Lockhart’s fabulous The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks on either one. So I’m pretty thrilled that it’s nominated for the National Book Award. But I can’t exactly call it my favorite until I finish reading the other ones.

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’m about to take a short break from writing, I think, as I tend to do when I have guests around from out-of-state or when I’m wrangling a particularly difficult life problem (like moving). So let me get my word count in now:

16,496 / 65,000 (25.4%)

I have no doubt that I’ll change my mind about this a lot when it isn’t October any more. But right now, on this day, I can say with absolute certainty that October is my favorite month.

There is something comfortable in the way it’s after sunset by the time I get off work, in the chill in the air that makes me wear fingerless gloves indoors and needles me to put the kettle on. It’s weather for drinking tea and curling up in bed with a book — right now I’m reading Graceling by Kristin Cashore, which is an excellent book to read in bed with a cup of tea.

This is the weather that makes me feel like I don’t have to bother with running around every which way getting things done.

I do, unfortunately, have to bother with running around every which way getting things done; I’m starting an apartment hunt this weekend and intend to finish it this weekend. But tonight I can stare at the dark outside my window and listen to the trains roll past.

Note to self: the trains rolling past are loud. Try an apartment further from the tracks this time?

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.

Okay, I have a confession. Anita Silvey at School Library Journal has a point.

In the course of doing readers’ advisory, I have never handed a kid Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, or The Higher Power of Lucky, or Criss Cross or Kira-Kira.

I thought that Good Masters was excellent, Lucky charming, Criss Cross beautifully written but slow, and I had some issues with Kira-Kira. But what all of them had in common is that I’m hard pressed to find the actual child they would work for — except Lucky, maybe, although even that has trouble finding its audience. I think that it’s written on a 2nd grade level for someone with the emotional maturity of a 4th grader.

Now, I know that the Newbery committee isn’t supposed to consider “kid appeal” as a factor in their decisions, and I totally approve of that, because kids will always be able to gravitate to Twilight and Harry Potter and High School Musical novelizations regardless of what has a shiny gold sticker on the cover. But even from a standpoint of pure literary quality, I think I would have chosen different books.

And so would anyone. This is subjective stuff.

Still – yes, I think Silvey has a point. That disconnect I see in Lucky between the target age group and the emotional maturity a book requires of its readers is also present (I think) in Criss Cross and Kira-Kira. They feel more like adult books about childhood than children’s books.

I wonder if there’s an inevitability to that. There are the occasional magical books that relate to young people so completely that they encompass great truths without going over anyone’s head; the Frog and Toad books, Where the Wild Things Are. In the absence of a book like that, the prize for literary merit goes to the books that reflect emotional maturity, and ask for it.

That’s no bad thing, but I do think it leads to Newbery winners that only really work for a few readers.

In literary fiction for adults, as well as for children, I would like to see more appreciation for play, for pure silliness, for broad strokes of black and white (like A Wrinkle In Time, from an adult perspective so lacking in moral nuance). But you only have to go back one year to find that among the Newbery Winners, in The Tale of Despereaux… and that is a book I do hand to kids.