Pivotal moments

Good fiction writing, and I would guess good poetry as well, is based on a rendering of pivotal moments into scenes that move the characters and the reader forward into a new space of knowing and feeling. While I was on writing retreat recently, I read through my current novel again and began charting the pivotal moments. Did I have one in each chapter or segment of a chapter? Did they add up to forward movement (with perhaps an occasional two steps back)? And I saw I had done a pretty good job of that and I saw what I needed to fix.

That experience has helped me in editing a manuscript for a client this week. Some of his chapters have pivotal moments but too many do not. While they are full of information, the information is about two things: pivotal moments that happen off-stage and all the choices and preparations and decisions that get made for the on-stage and off-stage pivotal moments.

Readers can tolerate quite happily a few minor moments that happen off-stage. But after a while, it's unsatisfying, like watching somebody's slides of their trip to Egypt. You can get an idea but you don't experience any of it emotionally. We want to be in the story, not read about the story. This is the old show,don't tell axiom.

In the second instance, informational reporting is just damn tedious. He told me that she told him that the check had been mailed on Friday from a post office in a little town. Such information is only of value if the information links directly to an upcoming pivotal moment. Otherwise, we don't care how the check got there. Only that it did.

Writing as exorcism

I was on a writing retreat last week and for the first two days I was feeling a bit low. That's unusual for me as I really love the retreat center where I go and the women writers who had come along were all wonderful. Yet I couldn't seem to find any energy for working on my novel even though I had been looking forward to this concentrated time. I'm not a procrastinator by nature and I did want to make progress.

Towards the end of the second day, I realized that I was feeling low because the things I was writing about were sad. The women in this book are not only metaphorically me, they are almost literally me. Frankie's interactions with her mother are not taken from my own life in their circumstances but they are in their emotional tone.

What I had discovered when I got to the retreat was that I needed to write several very painful scenes between mother and daughter. And of course, there was no way around that, only a way through. I did manage to do them both on the fourth morning and was exhausted afterwards and relieved.

Yesterday I was telling my therapistabout  this and she said, "What do you want to accomplish in your relationship with your mother through writing this?" It was hard to articulate my answer to her, but today I know that I want freedom. I want the writing of this book to be a sort of exorcism of old demons.

Mything information

As you may remember, I've been stuck the last several weeks in figuring out how to structure my current novel. I've even taken a 10-day hiatus from early morning writing and worked on poetry instead. Now I'm on an 8-day writing retreat up on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. At the last minute (well, about 20 minutes before I was to leave), I glanced at my bookshelf and saw The Writer's Journey, a classic on the structure of story based on Joseph Campbell's work, by Christopher Vogler. I've had this book on my shelf for about a year and took it on another writing retreat some months ago but didn't even open it. But this time, something said, take this.

So, on Wednesday, my first full day of the retreat. I read several chapters, including a piece called "A Practical Guide" that Vogler circulated among his colleagues at Disney Studios for analyzing and repairing scripts. In the guide, he outlines the 12 phases of the hero's journey, derived from Campbell, and I could very quickly see which parts of my story (i.e., phases) were present and what was missing.

As I've said before in this blog, I'm a "pantser" as a writer. I write by the seat of my imagination, letting the story unfold, rather than outlining and engineering it all in advance. So in the unfolding of the first 3/4 of this novel, characters have appeared that I wasn't quite sure what to do with, in particular, a young boy. At first, I thought I was writing a mystery novel about this young boy but that isn't how the novel began to evolve. And then I couldn't figure out what to do with him, why he was there. I thought about eliminating him but it was too intriguing a beginning to the story.

When I read through Vogler's 12 phases, I suddenly knew why he was there and it was extraordinarily exciting. While that hasn't solved all my structural issues, it has resolved several other major plot problems and I am happily writing again.

A wonderful poetry resource

This past week, I've returned to poetry for my early morning writing. I reached a place in my novel where I needed some longer sessions to resolve the issues and I have a writing retreat coming up next week that will be perfect for that. But I didn't want to risk losing momentum and the habit of writing first thing in the morning so I've gone back to poetry.

It was such an abrupt shift and I was feeling a bit bereft, missing Frankie and Lola and Callie, my characters, that I couldn't seem to get going on the poetry. So I perused my shelf and pulled out Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop. This book bills itself with a third title: "A lively and illuminating guide for the practicing poet."

Well, it lives up to that and more. Steve has a wonderful way of explaining things, of teaching the reader about poetry and how it works. He is encouraging, inspiring, and so clear. His ideas got some things really going for me, both his selected examples of other poets' techniques and his suggestions for writing our own.

If you've been interested in writing some poetry or enlivening what you are already writing, I highly recommend this book.

Filling the creative well

When I am doing a lot of creative work, as I am lately, it's easy to get depleted, to run out of ideas or solutions. Julia Cameron recognized this early in her work and Artist's Dates are an essential part of all her programs. On an artist date, you take yourself off exploring something new or perhaps forgotten that can stimulate your creativity, fill the well as it were.

When I did the Artist's Way program years ago, I visited a fabric store (I don't sew but I bought some fabulous ribbons), a bead store (I don't make jewelry though I tried my hand at it), a foreign film I would probably never have seen otherwise, the zoo, a gallery in our Pearl District that I hadn't been to before, the Japanese Garden, an Ethiopian restaurant, a rhododendron garden, a sex accessories store, the art museum, the town's science museum, and a chamber music concert.

Recently, I've decided to do this again. I'd spent six months heavily immersed in my freelance editing business and working on my novel. I wasn't stuck or bored, but I was weary in a way that was different. I recognized that not only did I need to come up for air, but I needed to fill the well with fresh sights, sounds, smells, touches, shapes, and colors.

So in the last month I've been to the theater a couple of times, went to a great musical review of the blues, got a friend to join me in a long-overdue visit to the art museum, sat down with a couple of great art books that have been on my shelf for years without me cracking them open, got some strange films from Netflix, visited a big plant store. And ideas are really flowing again.

So if you're feeling less inclined to make something new or push the envelope on your writing or your other creative pursuits, try a few Artist's Dates and see what happens.

16 ways to kill Callie's husband

In one of the big sections of the novel I'm working on, I need to kill the character's husband. I wrote an ending where she comes home to discover the kitchen awash in blood but no body and she hires a clean-up crew so she can disappear. And while it was a great chapter with a lot of writing I liked, it was too murder mystery for the context of the novel, too dramatic, too gory.

So last Friday I set about writing a list of 16 solutions to his death. And I thought I'd share them with you.

1. Hit by a bus (accident)
2. Hit by a car (not an accident)
3. Just disappears without a trace
4. Disappears but leaves a note of farewell but with no clues as to whereabouts
5. He decides to leave the country and she won't go with him.
6. She decides to leave him (divorce).
7. He commits suicide in some way.
8. He has a heart attack and dies at the office.
9. She agrees to kill him under threat from the wise guys who control them.
10. She shoots him accidentally (they fight over a gun and it goes off).
11. He gets arrested and killed in jail.
12. He's murdered and there's blood but no body (the original idea).
13. She poisons him (drug overdose).
14. He falls, hits his head on the tub, and drowns. (accident)
15. He disappears and she gets a phone call about it from the wise guys.
16. His body is found in the woods.

After I did this, I could see that I had criteria (or rather the story did) for what would work: The solution needed to be complete: the relationship over. Callie could not be implicated (I didn't want her talking to the police or visiting him in prison). I need her to move on. It had to be believable in the context and not too dramatic. And it needed to have an emotional component for her.

I'm working now with a combination of 7 and 14--an overdose that looks like suicide but with a whiff of wise-guy involvement so I can use the clean-up crew. I think it's going to work out fine.

Creative practice as an integrity issue

Many of us set intentions around our creative practice: to write in a journal every morning, to work on a novel that's long been in the creative hopper, to learn to draw better, to design and make a sweater for a gift. And for a few days, we do step into those intentions. And we feel good about that and are sure we have the practice nailed down. But then it's too hard to get up one morning or we're too tired one evening after dinner or we discover we aren't very satisfied with what we're creating and the practice either comes to a screeching halt or dwindles away rather quickly.

In my coaching work, I encounter clients who have had this experience too frequently to be very optimistic about anything else occurring for them. So we have a conversation about integrity, and about aligning their intention for a creative practice with their integrity. By integrity here, I mean keeping your word. Many of us are good at keeping our word with others but not so great at keeping our word with ourselves. It's this latter issue that I'm addressing here.

There is an added bonus of satisfaction, I've found, when we say we are going to do something and we do it. There is the satisfaction of creating, which for many of us is important: writing, painting, knitting, sculpting, however that creative impulse manifests itself. But that enjoyment is greatly enhanced when we also live into the value of keeping our word.