Pumpkins

This week-end, I did a two-hour workshop at the wonderful Wabi-Sabi, the goal of which was to create a felted pumpkin. Something just for fun. A little harvest themed bit of "me time."

The instructor showed the three of us how to wrap our wool to make the pumpkin shape. It was all very herbal tea and hand-knitted sweaters. Not one of the six women I encountered that morning wore an ounce of make-up.

I was pretty sure I'd be able to finish my pumpkin first, once I worked out a hold for the form that allowed me pierce the thing faster. I moved on, before anyone else, to the gussets and stem. Unlike the others, I fashioned my leaves without resorting to cutting. Everyone oohh'd and aaah'd my final product, as they continued to finish their own.

Of course, I concealed the ridiculous amount of pleasure this gave me.

I have a problem.

I'm working on it.

The Mark

You know that thing about how 90% of success is showing up? I thought about that as I hustled to Pilates class the other day. On my way to showing up,the way I do every week.

On my way to showing up, exactly three minutes late.

About 20 minutes before class, the bargaining starts. I know its time to go. A voice whispers to me about one more phone call, or an email. Or maybe the voice just tells me to stare out the window. I obey that voice. 7 minutes later, I'll be flying out the door, still deluding myself that I won't be late. Again.

"How can I always miss the mark?", I wondered. Until I saw that I was right on target. Every time. Precisely, predictably 3 minutes late. I just hadn't seen where my real mark is.

My real mark isn't failure. But it sure isn't success, either.

Time to move the mark.

Perspective

Boys spark the imagination.

I mean the ones who have only recently become men. The ones who seem unaccostommed to their beards, and the squareness of their shoulders.

I used to try on the skin of their girlfriends. Of the girl who woke up, perhaps, beside that sleepy boy. Or who broke up with the tall, lean one, who always thrust his hands in his pockets. I used to look at a boy's hands, and feel his touch on some other woman's skin.

I would gauge whether he could break her heart.

These days, my vision is stronger. I see into the past, to smaller hands, reaching up. To bike-riding lessons. To playground days and sleepless nights. I see boys as their mothers see them.

From this perspective, you feel the heart break every time.

Why, Revisited

Most of my meta-writing thoughts are about how, rather than why.

Why I write seemed obvious. Because I want to; it makes me happy. Five Lies made me re-consider all that.

Five Lies (which I wrote) was part of the Ottawa Fringe Festival, hence my recent hiatus. We sold out our 35 seat venue (a pub basement) almost every night. The actors and director did an amazing job with our limited space. We got great reviews. Audiences seemed to like the thing.

Each night of our 8-night run, I stood at the back and watched. That was cool.

It just wasn't satisfying.

It wasn't satisfying, I think, because I want to write a novel. Novels have been my friends all my life. I need to produce one. Its just really, really hard. Probably because I care about it so much.

More than I cared about Five Lies.

Back to the drawing board.

Exhaustion

Its been a complex summer. Some of it was good (Bermuda, Muskoka and completely re-decorating my teen daughter's closet). Some of it was bad (won't bore you with that part).

I didn't write. Too exhilarated and empty from my play being staged in June, too tired from the bad stuff and too unsure about which of my 3 unfinished novels to dive into.

I also have a great new novel idea, but four unfinished novels seems promiscuous.

Its my birthday. I did some stock taking, registered for some courses in pleasurable things like felting and pottery. Today I get celebrated by people who love me. That's pretty great.

I was exhausted, but I'm not any more. I feel cleaner. Ready to go. Maybe exhaustion is like a good mental bleach.

I hope so, at least. I'm going with that.

Doing What Comes Naturally

My 12 year old daughter, who has a flair for things artistic, recently told me that she can only write when she's "emotional."

"Why is that?" I asked. She told me that the words only flow when she's wound up about something.

I get this. When I was 12, I wrote only when gripped by unbearably strong emotions. Fortunately, this happened every hour or so. In my twenties, the hormonal storm subsided, along with my productivity.

A lot of what makes writing good - the structuring, the editing, the organizing - is entirely unnatural. It needs to be learned. It can be practiced even when your inspiration is minimal.

If you're no longer 12 (alas!), you can wait a long time for inspiration to flow naturally. When it won't, why not focus on the unnatural stuff? I think of writing exercises as being akin to gardener's work. What's natural may bloom more easily once you've cultivated your skills in an entirely unnatural way.

Rules

As you may have noticed, I love making them up. I'm not as big on following them. Your personality, like mine, is rooted in how you relate to rules.

Ready for a test? Which one of the five answers below best describes you?

Rules are:

1. Helpful guidelines for stupid people;
2. The basis of civilization as we know it;
3. Valuable in direct relation to who made them and why;
4. Always capable of being turned to your advantage;
5. What rules?

Made your pick? OK, here's what you should be writing:

1. Novels
2. Non-fiction
3. Plays
4. Self-help
5. Poetry

Make sense? Good. Remember to send me my commission.

My Youth in Pizza

How many slices? Hundreds? Thousands? Like kisses, few are individually memorable. The Bronx pizzas of my eary childhood are lost in the mists of time. Only a handful (plateful?) of others offer themselves up for recall.

1. Mike's Submarines, Montreal, 1975. I was 11. I had never seen mozza that artificially elastic. Appallingly, I was expected to eat it with a knife and fork. Worse was in store. I had to take off my shoes on entering suburban homes, use a "serviette," and attend a sex-segregated Sunday school. Hello middle-class Canada, good-bye preppy/bohemian NY.

2. Portofino Pizza, Vienna, 1979. 15 years old. My best friend was an orthodox Jew. The pizza wasn't great, but (accidentally) it was kosher. We felt utterly grown up as we sipped our cheap wine. Three topics of conversation (boys, school, the future) in endless rotation.

3. An unnamed counter, Rome, 1981. 18. I threw countless dorm-room parties at my boarding school. As these reached full-tilt, and often just as some boy was starting to hit on me, I'd head out into the cool winter night, wearing my grandfather's green jacket.

The place was 2 blocks up the hill. Standing room for three customers. Two men, shirts pasted to sweat-soaked backs, heaving massive slabs of ai funghi from the ovens. 800 Lira/100 grams. Then I'd go back and let the boy keep hitting on me. This rarely turned out as well as the pizza.

4. Gino's, Kingston, Ontario, 1985. 22. A dozen toppings graced the Gino's special. My boyfriend and I substituted pineapple for sausage, and got anchovies on (my) half. After months of phoning in this order several times a week, we discovered that Gino's was only 2 blocks from campus. Gino was so tickled when we made our first order in person, he gave us free drinks.

That boyfriend has been my husband for 19 years.

There have been many pizzas since. Some were memorable. But you remember the slices of your youth with a sharpness and sweetness that the others never achieve.

Building the Platform

Not so long ago, I was fat. Sixty pounds overweight to be exact.

I hardly even saw it. I assumed that clothes were getting shoddier (and tighter) and that there was something wrong with my haircut.

When I started going to the gym, it was because a half-hour on the stationary bike meant I could watch TV uninterrupted by my 3 year-old.

One half hour. Three or four times a week. At the pace of a senior citizen.

After three years of this, I got a trainer. I ignored half of what she recommended.

But I did the other half. Three or four times a week.

A few more years passed.

I wasn't fit. I wasn't strong. I was still fat. But I was ready. I had built the platform.

When a rare lull at work let me go to the gym every day, the scale started to move. So I trimmed my intake, just a bit. In a year, I lost 40 lbs. 20lbs more went in the next few months.

Without the platform, I never could have done that. Five years where I got little to no results, except for the pleasure of dropping by the gym, watching the tube, and showering in peace.

The Lessons:

1. Keep writing, undettered by a slow pace and barely adequate performance.

2. Make it a pleasure. Otherwise you'll quit. All that slow work you've done on your platform will be lost. Write about what you like, when you like.

Don't worry about progress, as long as you're showing up at your desk at regular intervals.

Just like the lull at my work, your great opportunity may be coming. Make sure your platform is ready when it does.

How I Know

I've been busy lately. You know how it is.

The busy has been snowballing. When this happens, I build a pebbly crust around it. The current crust is about a week thick, and consists mostly of emails, and bits of my to-do list.

Not so long ago, the layers of my crusts were numbered in years.

The crust's insides can ripen into dusty emptiness, if left unchecked.

When I find some quiet time, the crust cracks. The busy blows away.

Then I start to write again. It makes me happy.

That's how I know.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #4

So how do we clear the forest from the trees of your writing? Today, some cheap tricks.

Its a beautiful day, you should be writing more of your novel, but you're blocked.

Try this.

Take a good chunk, say 15 pages or so. Ideally, this is something you DIDN'T write recently and haven't read in a while.

Cut and paste this chunk into a three new documents. Open the first document. Take a deep breath, go through and cut out every other page. It'll take you less than thirty seconds.

In the second document, cut out every other paragraph. This will take longer, maybe 3 minutes.

In document three, cut out every other sentence. Its sounds tedious because it is, but it'll take less than ten minutes. Your writing is worth that, right?

Close the files and let them cook for a week or so. No peeking at the original chunk during this time. Now open the first of the files. Fill in the missing bits from memory if, and only if, you need them to maintain the integrity of the story.

Repeat with the other two files.

Prepare to be amazed. And yes, I plan to patent this technique.

A short bit of clarification....

I promised you tips for pulling the weeds out of your work, but that's going to have to wait for tomorrow.

First, a brief note of clarification.

I know you are probably not trying to write a bad novel. I get that. I'm not trying to write a bad novel either.

I'm a realist, that's all. Our stuff will likely be bad. Oh, I could use weasel words, like amateur or starter, but I respect you too much to waste your time.

Loads of other people will tell you how to a novel. They'll suggest that you can get great results by just following the rules, or, at the very least, they'll hide from the truth that the odds are dead set against this result.

I consider my willingness to admit that our results will likely range from adequate to abysmal to be my distinguishing feature.

Any badness is just a result of the probabilities and our own frailties.

As for writing a good novel, I don't think any one can tell you how to do that. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Ditching the junk

Lurking in your work are likely flashes of truth and beauty. Odds are good that they're buried under a load of junk. Your junk.

If you lack faith in your readers, you do a lot of explaining to them. This would make sense if you were teaching grade 9 English, but you're not.

If you lack faith in your ideas, you repeat them. Again and again. Over and over. See how annoying that is?

The antidotes for this faithlessness will be personal. Good editing requires detachment. There are a few tricks that can help (which I'll share next post). But there is one pre-requisite before any of these will work, and that's time.

You can't edit something you just wrote. You can and should proof-read it, but that's not editing. Your only hope of seeing your work as others see it is to put it in a drawer and forget about it.

For how long? Here's a rule of thumb: One month for short stories, 2 for one-act plays, 6 for longer plays, and a year for a novel.

A year.

Why?

In a year you will become a slightly different person. And you need those new eyes to show you what your old self couldn't see. Because your new self will see the junk covering up whatever your old self wanted to say.

My Microwave

My $800 microwave died four months ago. Its metallic corpse is still mounted above our stove. Like an exotic thoroughbred, it was elegant but frail, and fell ill if handled without ritualistic care and attention.

Life without a microwave was unthinkable. We consoled ourselves that we could drag our old one (an unsightly plastic workhorse), out of the cellar in an emergency, until we bought bought our replacement.

Imagine our shock to discover that you don't need a microwave. Period. You can defrost your breakfast blueberries on the stove top in the same time that it takes to zap them. Bagels are tastier from the oven, as is anything involving cheese. Popcorn without the chemicals is a revelation. Other foods no longer taste like science experiments.

There's even a convenience advantage to ditching the microwave. Thirty seconds too long in the mike can be a disaster. Five minutes too long in the oven is (mostly) no big deal.

Life without a microwave is not only manageable: its better.

I haven't missed the microwave once. Really. The old one is still in the cellar. I would never have thought that was possible, if it hadn't been forced on me.

Sizable chunks of your writing (and mine) are just like that microwave.

Next post, we'll talk about how to find them.

Filling up the Bank

This morning, I had 2 clear hours when I could have been writing.

I didn't.

Instead, I surfed youtube for every inspirational movie or voice performance I could find.

Sometimes you have to take it in before you can put it out.

Writing about Race

I'm all for it. I'm all for White people writing Black characters. I'm all for Black people writing White characters.

I don't give a damn about appropriation. We appropriate each other's air every day. We live in each other's world, and often in each other's pockets. Of course we think about each other. We should write about each other, too.

As for the inevitable prejudices which will surface, I say: Bring 'em on. Absent actual hate speech (I draw the line, for example, at anti-Semites writing about Jews), all of it could make for fascinating reading.

Writing beyond your experience is a risk. Boundaries (gender, class, nationality - all that blah blah) create comfort zones. But no one lives exclusively in their safe zone and no one can write exclusively from it either.

Crossing borders is a gamble. Some gambles pay out. Big time.

Whether your cross-boundary writing is good depends, ultimately, on your imagination, not on your identity. If you want to write about a one-legged, Hispanic, lesbian adoptee, and you're none of that, go ahead.

Write what moves you. At worst, you'll get a bad novel. You might get a great one.

And good luck with your lottery tickets.

Like Me

There are a lots of strong views on writing about race. They don't come from people Like Me.

When I was little, no one was like me. Of course, all parents say: "You're very special, dear - there's no one just like you." Generally, this is a patent lie.

Most kids had virtual doppelgangers - same blond hair, same dimples. Same cowlicks. OK, maybe they weren't identical, but the likeness was so close it forced Moms to use that weasel word: "just." And that was in my school alone. Nation-wide, I knew those kids would resemble gazillions of others.

There were no kids like me, because there were no couples were like my Black father and White mother. On TV, at least, we could watch The Jefferson's long suffering neighbours. But they didn't live in my neighbourhood, or any neighbourhood. They were fictional and childless.

Now, we're everywhere. Some of us are famous; Barack Obama, Malcolm Gladwell, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry. Many of these people side-step the issue by being known as black.

That's not a lie, but its also not the whole story.

I wish I'd known more of us. I'd have asked a lot of questions. Like, how did they answer stupid questions about their "nationality" or "background" ? I found my own road, but it would have been nice to talk to a fellow traveler.

Some people say you should only write about your own race. Especially if you're White. My views on this follow, next post.

Characters or Concepts

In script writing class, we share our initial ideas together.

This process used to scare me. I now liken it to a circle of eager farmers comparing the seeds which each cradles in the palm of his grubby hands.

Some of us talk about concepts. Class struggles, redemptive missions, the tense pull between nature and technology. The ideas sound lofty. The better ones have the potential to be spun into essays, or even textbooks.

Some of us talk about characters. Jill's still secretly furious with Emma, who had an affair with her husband twenty years ago. John got the promotion Marco wanted. Leanne fancies her priest.

The characters often sound cartoon-ish. Worse still, they reveal things about their creators. Like the time our obese classmate mournfully outlined a character who needed to escape the heavy woes "weighing her down." The rest of us steadfastly did NOT make eye contact with each other.

Here's what I've noticed, over my two years in the class. The concept plays may shoot up a few hopeful scenes, but eventually they wither and die. Every last one of them.

The character plays don't all grow to maturity. But at least some of them do. They have a fighting chance.

Let your characters tell you the story.

Concepts may have gotten you A's at school (especially when you lifted your prof's) but, as the basis for a story, they suck.

46

My age.

I remember my own mother at 46. I was 19. Invincible. My Mom, newly divorced, worried about whether she could get a job or date. Or make new friends. Or dance. Ridiculous, I thought. She's only 46.

Only 46. I'd like to reinhabit the glibness with which I spoke those words.

46 is old enough to give rise too the question: Why haven't you? As in why haven't you won the Nobel prize? Or had one of your novels published? Or even finished one?

Because lots of people have done all those things (except winning the Nobel), by this age.

Why haven't I? Why haven't you?

The answer we're afraid of is: Because you can't.

That's why authors first published in middle age cheer me enourmously. Thank you, Annie Proulx.

It can be done, even if my mother never really did learn to dance.

True Confessions # 2

I'm an adult-onset atheist.

I was an easy sell for the warm and fuzzy parts of religion. But not for nothing am I a lawyer. I can recognize a losing argument.

Religion endures. Not for much longer, perhaps, but its had an awfully good run. Sure, lots of the Bible now sounds bizarre. Like offering your daughter to satisfy the sexual appetites of house guests or the death penalty for wearing mixed fibres. Or human sacrifice. The Bible's world was different from ours.

How different? Well, 100 years ago we seriously debated whether women should vote. 250 years ago, slavery made a lot of sense to a lot of people. 2000 years ago, 1000 was M.

Now, imagine the world was 1000s of years ago. The earth is flat, and almost everything in it is a mystery. You likely believe in lots of Gods, on the QT, even if you're Jewish. Your tribe is your universe.

That's the world of the Bible. A world I love.

Not for the mind-numbing genealogies. Not for the obsessive-compulsive brutality of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or for the psychedelic sadism of Revelations.

I love the stories. Jealous Cain. Joseph, weeping on his reunion with the long lost brothers who almost killed him. Esther's courage. Jacob's love for Rachel, burning bright for all those years that he tended her father's sheep. The good Samaritan.

Thousands of years ago, without pens, pencils, books, or paper, people recorded these stories. They're still compelling.

That's more than miraculous enough for me. If I have faith in anything, I have faith in stories.

Where does it happen for you?

Ideas have been hurling themselves at me for a long time.

Sometimes they slip by before I can write them down. Sometimes they stay with me stubbornly over months or even years, until I yield to their demands to let me out of your head and onto a page, goddammit!

I don't pursue them. Not usually. Every once in a while I have to: for assignments, or because I'm expected to make some original remarks, or something like that. I find inspiration doesn't take well to being chased down and trussed up. The results of this process are rarely appetizing.

This morning, an idea came to me as I was lying in bed, with an hour or so left to go before the alarm would sound. I've now lost that idea, which is annoying, but its also quite aside from the point I'm about to make.

It also struck me - and I managed to remember this part - that most ideas come to me in the wee hours, while I wait for the alarm.

Why? Its warm and secure, perhaps. Most of the year, where I live, its also pitch black. I won't be interrupted. I'm relaxed. I'm still wrapped in the texture of dreams.

I'm also just a little bit bored. Ideas abhor a vacuum.

In about 40 years of thinking about stories, I never appreciated the importance of being in my bed, 6 am.

Where and when do your ideas get delivered?

How much do you value your Unwritten pages?

I see you there, in the thin winter dawn, on your way to work. I see you on your way home too, in the frigid twilight of another forgettable day. I see the dream glowing warmly inside you. That dream is as familiar to me as my porch light.

A dream is a song your heart sings, right? Its what Martin Luther King had. You gotta have one. Otherwise, how ya gonna make a dream come true?

I want you to extinguish your dream.

As long as that dream is your identity, you'll never risk it. Your unwritten pages will be worth more than your written ones. I can't give you a new identity; you'll have to find something else to burn inside you, to fuel you through life's slow and mushy sections.

If you actually put pen to paper, perhaps you will become famous. But the odds are against it. That's what makes artists courageous. They exchange their fantasies of what might be in order to create what is.

That's also why humility is part of creating just about anything. I know there are plenty of artists who seem stuffed with their own cultural importance. To toss your own work into the unending river of human creativity, and hope that it will surface, even if only briefly - that takes guts. And maybe some bravado, too.

It takes an even deeper fortitude to know that what is so very dear to you may end up not even being the froth on a wave.

Trade the theoretical perfection of your undone work for the truth of what you can complete.

If a little puffery helps you out with that, you're forgiven.

As long as you actually write.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #3

Hand-writing

Personally, I find handwriting to be quite magical.

Typing makes editing easy. Most of us are good at editing. Way better than we are at writing. So we favour the strong editing muscle, making it stronger, and neglect the writing muscle, making it weaker still.

Handwriting helps level the playing field. It makes editing a bit harder. Messier. Which encourages you to keep writing, which is what you really need to do.

Its easier to type a lie than it is to write it. No really, I mean that. Just like its easier to tell a lie dressed in a suit and positioned behind a desk than it is to do so in your favorite jeans while walking the dog in the park on Sunday morning. True things, the things you really want to write, are more likely to flow from your pen than a keyboard.

Writing, for many of us, is just plain old scary. This not just because of all those would-be editors out there (although they're also part of the problem). Its because we're all scared of going deep inside and coming up with nothing.

I handwrote the first 20,000 words or so of my longest novel. This also means its the only one of my three novels that had a true "first draft," because the manuscript had to be transcribed, a job which was surprisingly worthwhile.

I think its no accident that this is also the novel on which I've made the most progress. If you're not a pen addict already, why not try this for the early stages of your next idea? Could it hurt?

Added bonus: its fun to sit among the netbooks in Starbucks, and be the only one with a notebook - a real one, I mean. Deliciously Luddite. And you never have to worry about the batteries running out.

Altered states

I'll be travelling for work next week. The day time will be taken up with law stuff, and some of the evening, too. But there will be a few hours, above and beyond that. Wee hours, perhaps.

Hours that are just for me.

No dishes, no kids, no last call to make, no pile of recycling I really should take out. Just a hotel room and the minimal temptations of cable.

So its back to Untold Stories, the novel I hoped I'd finish by Christmas. The one that's long enough (70,000 + words) to be a novel already. Except I'm not done with it.

I love this story. One character is an art historian. In my publication fantasies, the book is loaded with beautiful, glossy pictures, the same ones which fill her mind.

Here's my problem. I've been away from this thing for about 2 and a half months now, between pagan Saturnalia, finishing the play, raising two kids and earning an income. So I need to re-immerse and reacquaint. To reread.

But when I re-read, I edit. Editing is so very seductive. And its way less scary (and less work) than actually writing new material.

So, I think what I'll do is put a deadline on the re-reading process. First night away only. Might even force myself to skim in some areas. If I could come back with two new chapters, even rough ones, I'd be delirious. I need to write a dinner party stand-off and some connective tissue wherein two characters cement their relationship into a (holding) pattern.

I can do this.

Wish me luck.

Back on the Wagon

I'd like to pretend that you noticed that I've been away for the last week. Actually, I do pretend that: in my mind I have a whole cast of readers. They all comment, too. I'm even getting to know some of them.

There's Jim, who'se tall and skinny and writes science fiction. His comments can be snarky, but never, ever when my own post sounds depressed or disheartened. Reading between the lines, his day job must be a menial bore.

There's Eloise, a know it all teen. She's already written 3 adult novels; two have been published. They didn't do well. She shows up here to lord it over the rest of us and forget that she's washed up at 19. We all scavenge her posts for scraps of info about the real literary world.

There's Heather, a housewife in Miami. And Peach, who's teaching on a native reserve. And Edgar, a highly erudite 70 something who I really worry about, because he has Parkinson's and talks alot about death.

sigh.

Anyway, I fell off the blog wagon last week. Big time. Work, volunteer commitments, my yellow lab's operation, kids, house, etc. etc.

Oh, and I finished the play I've worked on for the last six months. Finished. A delicious word.

Don't feel too slighted - I also had tickets to two plays I didn't get to see.

While having a full life means you can't write as much as you'd like, it does give you a great guilt shield at times like this.

And as of today, the wagon's got my weight to carry again. Four pounds less of that, btw. Another thing that kept me busy.

True Confessions #1

Before we go much further, I need to tell you about the romances.

Of course, I read other books. Lots of them. Very high-brow stuff, too, for the most part. You know - Shakespeare, Shelley, Virginia Woolf. And Genest, Rilke and Tolstoy. All that.

I got hooked on pink crack as a teen. Do you remember Barbara Cartland? She was a popular icon at one point: an octogenarian in rose silks, trailed by swaths of pekingese. Even I cringed at the gilt candelabra and pseudo-Versailles back drops.

But the books! 140-160 pages, paragraphs of no more than five lines and dialogue which, way before texting, often ended in "...". Schmaltzy beyond belief. Never more licentious than a kiss. I started when I was 14, gradually expanding my tastes to novels by other romanticists.

Over the following dozen years, I read over a thousand of them.

Yep, you read that right. Over. One. Thousand. I'll help you with the math. That's about 90/year. One or two a week. Except that doesn't reflect the reality of periodic 3 book a day benders.

I eschewed the bodice rippers, and had no time for Harlequin. For a long time, I told myself this meant I hadn't quite sunk to the bottom.

While I wrote a thesis on romances, I make no pretence that the authors I read were more than competent (one exception - see below). Collectively, however, the books formed a literary river into which I am now glad that I was baptised.

It was all there. The importance of setting. The right balance of dialogue and narration. The impossibility of ever being completely original. The tension between voice and genre.

And I loved them.

The exception, by the way, is Georgette Heyer. A genius. Why not overcome your own prejudices, read her and find out why?

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #2

Cheat on the one you love

You have this great idea right? So good that the awesomeness of it quietly blows your mind when you're riding the bus home. So good that you're afraid to tell anyone about it. So good that it will change the history of the written word, and make critics bow down in awe.

So good that your fingers cramp with fear as you sit down to your key board. Assuming you even manage to get that far.

If this sounds familiar, it may be that you aren't ready for your great idea. Yet. Just because you're in love with the prettiest girl at the high school dance doesn't mean that the time is right to sweep her onto the floor.

Try practicing your moves first. With a partner who's less intimidating.

There are lots of things you can write besides novels. Like letters to the Editor. Facebook posts. The Parent/teacher report.

No, I am not joking. You're a writer. Get out there and write. Hone your craft in a less pressured atmosphere. Take it seriously, or it won't count. Enroll in a course in some other kind of writing. Become a contributor to your community newspaper. Do something -anything - other people will read.

I learned a lot about writing from drafting legal submissions. Go figure.

Come home to your love when you've acquired enough polish to woo her properly. Trust me on this one. It'll go a lot more smoothly.

Why Bother #3

No one's reading it now, and likely no one ever will

This one held me back for years. My husband wasn't that interested. I was shy about sharing with anyone else -even my parents. How could I give them proof that their only child wasn't the next Virginia Woolf?

And I most assuredly am not that. My tastes - you might even call them proclivities - run to a shelf far from Virginia's, at the back of the bookstore. Browsers there make furtive selections. They ask for bags.

More on that tomorrow.

You can write a novel without an audience, but it won't be as good as it could be. Why? Think about it. You clean up your house for guests. You dress up for a date.

Writing improves if it will be read. It will be better still if someone reads it thoughtfully. And comments, gently but firmly.

A very intimate assignment.

How do you satisfy intimate desires, absent willing volunteers? You pay for services rendered. You could hire a reader. That's straight-up prostitution, of course. With the attendant pit-falls.

I put down (a good deal of) hard-earned money to join a script-writing workshop. The authors' equivalent of a singles dance. I was prepared to bail if it was in an way a downer.

I'm lucky. Its just a few other souls, sitting in mis-matched chairs around a battered table. But it works. I'm a regular now, class after class.

Never again will I dance without a partner.

Why Bother #2

Because I'm a miserable person if I'm not writing something.

I won't notice that its about the writing. Not at first. I get mad at my husband. And my kids. And my job. Also politicians, the beauty industry, major corporations, newspapers, courts, television shows, films, etc. etc.

And myself. Especially myself.

Then I get back to writing, and I even out.

That's worth the bother.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #1

I'm reading a book on writing. I don't do this often. Most writer's guides take a "you must" approach. Lots of rules.

This one is no exception, and its a bit preachy, to boot.

I'm still reading because the book considers the problems writers encounter. That's right - problems. Like math, or physics.

How do you introduce a character? How do you get backstory across without boring the hell out of people? How much dialogue is too much? Or too little? When does reproducing a regional accent cross the threshold of annoyance?

The author gives her take on how other writers (none of whom are my favorites) solve these kinds of problems.

These solutions interest me only very little.

What does interest me is the problems themselves. If you can identify a problem, you can fix it. Next time you're blocked, try identifying one problem with your work (even if its only a little one). Then fix it. Now repeat.

Works for me.

Not enough

Not enough time today.

That phrase plays in my mind most evenings. Not enough time to write. What I really mean is perfect time, of course.

Not enough peaceful, uninterrupted time, during which I'm wide awake.

What's too little? A half an hour? Fifteen minutes? Isn't something better than nothing at all?

Not always, at least for me. I have kept personal promises to write daily, even when it meant weeks of writing for less than half an hour at a shot. The result? A lot of fragmented bits, most of which were crap.

I can resign myself to writing a bad novel. I won't write a crap one.

I'm not winning this battle. I think I need to leave the house at least 2 nights a week and write for a few hours.

Which means commitment.

Or I can just keep blaming my lack of progress on not enough time. Funny, that was an appealing option until I admitted it was what I was doing.

Which happened just now.

Day Jobs

I've been busy with my own for the last few days, hence no posts. Dressed in my suit, under flourescent lights, with a bunch of other folks dressed in the same drag.

I like my work. Mostly, I mean. As much as anyone does. By global standards, I'm amazingly, staggerly, heart-stoppingly lucky. I try to remember that. I suppose billionaires try to remember that, too.

I'm a lawyer by the way. For a trade union. That means good pay, great benefits, job security, and a pretty office with walls. And work that's about 80% interesting. I get to help people, which feels great.

But the law does suck up the time when I could write.

I'm way over resenting that, though. I'm certainly not letting it get in between me and my bad novels.

And I am confident that I will eventually evict my nagging fear that it might be getting in between me and a good one.

Why Bother #1

Why Bother When Books are so last Millennium?

Soon even good novels won't sell, right?

Wrong. People need stories. Stories will always sell.

Books, however, are another matter. A quick review:

Most of history. No one has texts. Priests and King's scribes, maybe. No one else. Paper and binding have yet to be invented.

1100s. Books (mostly Bibles) take forever to make by hand. New stuff sneaks in by the marginalia - like that great story about Mary Magdalen.

1400s. Printing = more books. 1880s.Industrialized printing = even more. But books are still pricey. They have to be worth it - leather bound and filled with colour plates, pasted in by hand. Margins are wide. Paper is thick and creamy.

1900s.The Penguin revolution. Cheap paper, cheap covers, thin margins, no pictures. Great, affordable ideas. Genius. 2000s. The net supplies all those ideas, plus an infinity more, cheaper, better and faster.

What a computer can't do is put something beautiful in your hands.

Books need to be beautiful again. We need books that look, feel and smell like luxury. Books that are a status symbol and an accessory. Books that are expensive.

Designers like Chip Kidd aren't the last practitioners of a dying art. They're the wave of the future. We need them to transform our books into masterpieces.

Because there's always a market for masterpieces.

Actually, I'm deadly serious

This is not one of those tongue in cheek things - you know what I mean. I'm not going to go all cutesy and parody common writing errors.

I have many failings. Cutesy isn't one of them.

There is some good writing of this type out there. My personal favorite is a comic called How to Avoid Making Art, by Julia Cameron. An added plus - you can read the whole book in, oh, let's say 10 minutes. Cuteness, like Bailey's, is acceptable only in small and infrequent doses.

If I knew about all those common writing errors, I'd stop making them. I don't know how to write a good novel. I'm not promising good. I'm promising what I can deliver.

If you somehow discover greatness of your own here, please take all the credit.

I'm assuming your current state of progress lies between complete paralysis and a few sputtered sketches or chapters. I can get you beyond this. That may not be much, but its what I've got.

Why bother writing a bad novel? Look, would you want your first girlfriend to be Angelina Jolie? Would you take Versailles as a starter home? Would you consider Secretary-General of the UN for your internship?

Of course not.

So strap on some training wheels. Set your expectations at low to abysmal.

That way, you and I may one day be able to dazzle each other with our adequacy.

The last thing you MUST do...

....to write a bad novel.....is...... .....You MUST.....

5. Finish the God-Damn Thing.

I don't have a lot of tips on this one. I'm still struggling to bring my own ships into port.

Allow me to introduce the fleet:

1. Untold Stories

The odds on favorite to actually get finished, it stands at 79, 649 words - long enough to be a novel already. Not sure why I chose a working-class Austrian as my protagonist or why I made his Dad such a skunk. But I love this story.

And I would love to finish it. And I will. I really, really will.

2. Sickness and Health

The runner-up, length wise, at 38, 332 words

Tom, the main character, is a union lawyer. He's got the hots for a co-worker. She is, at least to all appearances, mentally, ah, ahem....(searching for polite words) unbalanced. But maybe Tom, who prides himself on having all his shit together, isn't as balanced as he thinks.

3. Before and After

Started 15 or so years ago. Yes, really. (Sigh.) Set in the afterlife. Yes, really, again. Some good scenes, but the plot is hip-deep in mud. Stalled at 28, 232 words, each of which flowed like blood.

Am I really writing a how-to for something I haven't done? I mean, how dare I?

Yesterday, I blithely told you (my dear and, so far as yet, non-existent, readers) to find your own "how," and your own "why." Remember?

That's what this blog is all about, for me. That, and high-octane procrastination.

The Musts, continued...

Continuing a List of Five things you Must Do to Write a Novel

3. You must be willing to follow some rules

"But why?" you're asking. What if I want to break ALL the rules?

You not only won't, but you can't. Yes, there are rule-breaking (and ground breaking) novels. But they don't break ALL the rules. However loosely some novels conform to the genre, they are still recognizable as novels because they are 1) stories, 2) conform to a certain length and 3) reference certain aspects of human existence.

So a novel-writer, even a bad novel-writer, needs to know a few rules. That's why I'll be talking about some of them.

If you want to break all the rules, then you aren't writing a novel - you're writing something else. Go ahead with my blessings, and good luck.

4. You must be able to break some rules

On the other hand, if you're looking for a step-by-step, how-to manual, abandon hope now. Your inspiration, your working methods, your characters, your settings, your dialogue - all these things are unique to you. No one can manufacture your voice for you.

Others can help; you can (and should) seek out, and try on, techniques that work for other writers (and writers luv to write about writing, so that's easy pickings). Just don't pretend that these "try-ons" can substitute for real comfort with writing - the sort of comfort that will give you the stamina needed for a novel.

In the end, no one can tell what, or how, to write. You have to figure that out for yourself. You even have to figure out how to figure it out for yourself.

That's the fun part.

Final "must" (drum roll, please) coming tomorrow....

There are a few musts......

Not many. But there are a few things you absolutely must do to write a bad novel.

1. You must write.

Obvious, no? But so easy to get wrong. The novel can't happen in your head. It happens on paper. Aside from the need to (eventually) show it to readers, or submit it to publishers, there's a good reason for this. I don't care what your IQ is, or how amazing your memory may be, you can't keep a whole novel in your head. No way.

Writers write. If you're not putting a pen to paper at predictable (and preferably daily) intervals, you're not a writer.

Its ok not to write much. Its ok if its bad.

Just write.

2. You must write stories.

Not outlines. Not character sketches. Not snatches of dialogue. Not scenes. Don't get me wrong, these things are all fine, if they're useful. They are the lumber with which stories have been built. They are not stories, though.

What's a story? A story is a narrative in which something or someone the reader is curious about is revealed. That's it. Whatever you have on paper, if you can't squeeze it into that model, its not a story.

This is long enough, already. More musts tomorrow......

Anything really worth doing is worth doing half-assed

I know, I know. You'd rather write a good novel. A nobel prize winner or a GG, a least. Me too.

I can't tell you how to do that.

I can tell you how to write a bad novel. There's no fame in it, or cash. Sure beats sudoku, though.

Think of all the things you do, but not so well. Your dinner last night - was it gourmet? Your ride to work - a ferrari? Does your job come with an oval office? Is your work-out preparing you for the Olympics? (If the answer to any of the last three is yes, please make my day by commenting).

I'm not even going to bother to ask about the quality of the sex you had last night, or whether it involved a partner.

Here's the point - adequacy is often compatible with fulfillment. A bad (but written) novel is way more satisfying than an unstarted one.

So stand-by. I'll be revealing all my literary secrets, and welcoming you to share yours.