Fairy God Witches

Today, I started The Architecture of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook by Jane Vandenburgh.  Even though I'm only about 50 pages into it at this point, I wish I had read it the first week of interim.  In the forward, Anne Lamott says "This book is going to ruin your excuses, and your tendency to procrastinate" (page xiv).  I think this - excuses, procrastination - is what I've been struggling with most during interim.  Every morning I find myself distracted by anything that isn't my computer and the blinking cursor.  I've cleaned out the refrigerator, the pantry; I've even organized my closet.  I've had to force myself to sit down and wait for the moment to come when I forget that I'm sitting down at all.  Of course, I didn't quite believe Lamott when she said Vandenburgh was going to make me want to sit down and write.  But by page 6 I was only half-way reading the words on the page.  The other half of my brain was thinking, escaping, occasionally returning to the page in front of me only to flint off again into the realm of inspiration.  I think Vandenburgh would agree with Goldberg's idea that "only writing does writing."  She writes:

We seem to encounter our characters - their speech, their looks, their complex and interesting situations - instead of inventing them: The good-time girl living upstairs from the bodega already has her own story, and this entire story comes to us expressing an entire world of narrative context (page 6).

Reading this, I thought about the characters of my novella naturally for one of the first times this January.  For the first time, I wasn't panicked at the thought of having to write a novella about...something.  Somewhere, the story already exists, the story is already happening, has already happened.  This thought freed me from the panic, and I felt like I could actually write.

Vandenburgh breaks writing up into three elements: Plot, Story, and the Mechanics of Narrative Time.  Writers rely upon these "three weird sisters who crouch together over the pot of narrative, whispering as they concoct the future, making it up out of a pinch of this and a pound of that" (page 7).  Plot is the glass, Story is the water in the glass.  That is, "Plot has in its bag of tricks all the ways we manipulate narrative time: flashback, flash-forward, expositions, digression, backstory, narrative pauses, the bridges and ellipses" (page 273).  The story, on the other hand, forgets about language and structure and beginnings and ends and all things plot.  A story must be believed in and become a reality before anything else can happen.  The mechanics of narrative time "make certain that all parts of the novel hang together and remain coherently united" (page 8).

Vandenburgh says begin a novel by writing the story, which means you have to begin by writing scenes or episodes.  You write one scene "that lies somewhere in the neighborhood of what might turn out to be your storyline" (page 28).  Then you write another scene.  Each of these scenes must be active, present; they occur for the sole reason to tell us that something is just about to happen.  The key to story is to remember to offer "no opinions, no asides, no digressions or tangents, and allow no character to think long thoughts, since thinking great long thoughts almost always goes against a story's need to its next piece of action, and is usually a way of trying to import background" (page 47).  Another key is to not reread what you've written, because you might start to rewrite and worry about plot.

You seek always to create intimacy, to get deeper in scene, to go further, to sense risk, to feel an ever-stronger sense of narrative immediacy, so you borrow directly into narrative time to see for yourself what your story holds.  There will always be a reason your story has asked you here, as the scene contains something it needs for you to find (page 53).

Once you've written down scene after scene after scene, you have a provisional draft.  Only after you have a provisional draft can you begin thinking about your novel in terms of plot.