Week two was terrible. I didn’t respect the schedule nearly enough, allowed other things to get in the way, and didn’t do half as much work as I’d promised myself.

With Monday already under my belt this week, things are already looking off track. Spent this morning sleeping late because of an over-active weekend (two soccer games plus one reporting in the press box, a four-mile walk home from U of Portland on Sat night, lots of family time).

Assessment: I need more work and more diligence in terms of refusing plans. Remember what is most important.

So you silo your work and you protect your spaces (physical and mental) carefully.

For me it’s fairly straightforward: when I’m writing a story or part of a chapter in the novel, I need to push out any lingering distractions. That’s why establishing the writing dungeon was such a high priority, and also why my best writing happens in the morning when I wake up, keep work thoughts at bay, stand over my stove until the hot water is ready to make coffee, and slink downstairs to write for a couple of hours. It’s also why my work computer has and will never cross the threshold of that room. It’s a little silly how vehement I am about that rule, but it’s served me well so far.

Of course, the fact that so many excellent writers never had the desire or the opportunity to protect a physical space for writing makes me wary of my own need, and, to be honest, makes me wonder why exactly I have that need in the first place, but whatever the case my current situation is working out and I’m not rushing to change a functioning setup.

As for Jewel, sounds like she’s looking for a way to have similar divisions online: a space for her personal writing and photography, a place for her professional consulting portfolio, and a place for her professional photography. Sounds like the same practice of division will work well for her, instead of trying to clump all of her public-facing work into a single presence (I predicted yesterday that such a clumped arrangement would lead to a persistent confusion about what projects she was focusing on when).

Anything that improves productivity, right?

Yesterday I wrote about my plan to stop worrying and love the outline. In short, the idea was that, since going through my graduate program in creative writing, I’ve avoided the process of actually sitting down and laying out scenes on paper or in, for example, an application specifically designed for creating outlines (OmniOutliner is a strong candidate at the moment).

I did not mean to imply that writing programs in general or my own specifically encouraged the writer to sit down, head blank, and head in some unknown direction. Instead, the idea was that the writer should have an “idea” of where the story was headed (where this idea existed, other than the memory, is unknown to me) and allow the words to flow. The dreadful things that might happen if you didn’t heed this advice are aluded to in the previous post.

So my only revelation, if it may be called that, is that I actually need to have real, no-kidding outlines. Almost like a storyboard, if you will, complete with scene location, characters, purpose of the scene (gasp!), and notes for the future me who will actually sit down and write the thing out.

Anything to help you out, future me.

As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree, going to school to become a better writer burdens you with at least a few bad habits that can take years to shake. Having graduated some three years ago now I feel that my process should be clear of that cruft, but I keep finding new things that slow me down or send me down the wrong path. The fear of overplanning is the latest example.

In school I was taught that to outline was to kill innovation and the ability to jump on new narrative threads as they emerge, as if chapters and characters would jump out from some typo or rambling passage and take over the best threads in the whole story. The idea, as overplayed as it is trite, is that your characters will surprise you. I bought that for a long time, and I still think there’s some truth to the phrase, but what I didn’t consider is what that logic implies (and which I think is incorrect); namely, that to plan out a chapter is necessarily devoid of creativity, surprise, fertile tangents. The other night I came face to face with a chapter that I’ve been working on for months. Yes, months. And part of my inability to move forward is a lack of visualization on how the central scene progresses, ends. In short, I don’t know where I’m going here. So I dusted off some old outline notes and got to work.

Let me go back a step, because I’ve been thinking about this problem of process from a variety of angles, one of which comes from the world of software development. I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about how to build process around software development as a service (hourly rates for developers to solve specific problems and produce working code). To project manage such work, one needs to have discrete goals that developers can complete, with every day (hour, fraction of an hour) bringing the whole closer to fruition. So I tried to apply that thinking to my own writing process, given that the results I generally produce in a given hour of writing would be absolutely anathema to the software project manager. Like, I’d get fired. What is my excuse for spending an entire day–a day that I’ve dedicated to my own writing, my own book–at the desk and not moving the book closer to completion? There is no reason. I decided to project manage myself and keep tabs on how the story is progressing.

Hence the plan. How am I supposed to check off goals if I haven’t created them? This evening I was talking to my brother Peter about his process when working on the first issue of his comic. He’s having a similar problem in that he’ll sit down to work on the comic and end up working on something else. His solution, at this point, is to find and mimic the process of a successful artist, and I think that’s a great idea. (That process is to write, ink, and color one page at a time, taking care to finish one page per day. That’s measurable progress.)

So I’ll end this post by declaring my new dedication to and focus on process as a central (critical) means for moving the novel to completion. And if that involves outlines, diagrams of narrative pace, and other analytical tools, so be it. Besides, who said the act of writing an outline can’t be a creative, surprising act in and of itself?

So what’s the connection between a long-deceased, politically abhorent Nobel Lauriet from Norway and a living American writer who lives and works in Spokane, Washington? Mistakes, flubs, broken promises, and reversals. Not on the part of the writers themselves. No. It’s in the characters.

This may sound exceedingly obvious at first. And in a way, I agree. Of course characters in a novel need to screw up and go against their nature. And as a reader, I possess an innate hunger for that quality in a book. But as a writer I’ve had more difficulty 1) recognizing the need for my characters to possess a quality of going against their best interest or goals and 2) injecting that quality into the book.

And after my conversation with Jess, I realize why. For so long I’ve written and thought about my novel as if it were a mathematical proof. I have ideas about the characters, what they desire, how they want to navigate the trials I toss their way, and the writing itself becomes a way to make good on those characteristics. For example, if Anson thinks of himself as an academic, he’ll find a way into the basement reading room of the library. If he wants to be kind to his brother, he’ll be kind to his brother. Proof. Wham! See my characters? They’re just as promised.

It’s clear where this is going, so I’ll skip ahead one step: isn’t the intentional interjection of error, &c. just as mathematical and calculated as the opposite problem, which I’m trying to overcome? I don’t believe so, and I’ll tell you why (since you’ve asked so nicely): When the writer proves his characters motivations through action, there’s a limited scope of what can come to pass in the novel, and the reader can see what’s coming from a chapter away. If the character’s flaws drive much of the action, both the writer and the reader can remain surprised. Anson is headed to Marcus’s house to reconcile their recent fight, but he doesn’t make it there. Where does he end up instead? The error smacks of variation whereas the proof (Anson shows up and begs forgiveness) is flat, expected, preconceived.

Hamsun is a master at harnassing the vicissitudes of his characters. Take the scene in the third part of Hunger, in which the desperate, starving narrator receives a handful of money from the clerk of a grocery store who mistakenly (?) gives him change for a bill that wasn’t his. The entire novel up to this point is consumed with the narrator’s search for money and food, and here he’s given exactly what he’s wanted? And what does he do? Immediately purchases a steak his body can’t handle (“The food began to take effect, it gave me great pain and I wasn’t allowed to keep it for very long. I emptied my mouth in every dark corner I passed, struggling to suppress the nausea that was hollowing me out afresh…”)[1]. And after a series of episodes in which the money becomes an increasing burden, he finally smacks the remaining sum into the hand of a cake vendor with whom he’d previously had an unpleasant encounter. And to bring the series to fullness, the narrator finally revisits the kind grocer and absolutely lays into him, furiously berating him for what the reader could be excused for calling a kindness. Hunger is arresting and unforgettable work.

And here I am trying to write a book that proves its own thesis. Bleh.

I’ll close this entry by saying that my new efforts are very much guided by these two types of advice: one from a talented and generous living author, one from the work of a celebrated master. Here’s to the persistent disasters our fine characters must face.

[1] Hunger. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Sverre Lyngstad translation. 1998. Page 114.