Wordplay

"...I write ... [in my Journal of a Novel] consistently because I know that later on, it will help me through whatever bad time I may encounter in the process."


Over the course of the last ten years, I’ve written six novels, two novellas, and hundreds of short stories. Even considering that many of those works are utter tripe that shall never see the light of day, their mere completion is a triumph. I’ve seen the hulking beasts that stand between every writer and the end of our stories. Procrastination. Discouragement. Fear. Disorganization. Boredom. Burnout. I’ve seen them, and I’ve conquered them.

Yep, I’ve licked all those nasty buggers. So, if you’re one of those lucky humans who happen to be in favor of logical thinking, your next thought would likely be that, having conquered all these foul beasts, I now stand a victor on the field of every novel, every story. Nothing stands between me and “The End.” I have seen the enemy, and I have conquered him.

However, if you happen to be one of those even luckier humans who inhabit that sometimes less-than-logical mind of a writer, you probably already know that such is not the truth. The enemies of a writer are never vanquished. They lurk in the shadowy background, breathing down our collars as we hunch over our keyboards. Sometimes we type furiously, trying to escape the monster’s breath. And sometimes we freeze solid, every thought in our brains fleeing. The fact that anyone ever manages to complete a story is a victory in itself. Forget good literature; completed literature is the writer’s greatest conquest.

Still, you’d think the battle would get easier as time goes on. You’d think that, as I sit down to work on my seventh novel, the road ahead would be vastly clearer compared to that same road of years past when I wrote Novel #1. Not so, unfortunately. If anything, the monsters breathe harder with every passing “The End.” The happy carelessness of my first novel is long gone. Back then, I had nothing to prove, nothing to surpass. No pressure.

No matter how much I’ve researched my settings, interviewed my characters, hammered out my plot points, my fingers always type that first draft like a blind man stumbling in a junkyard. While writing Behold the Dawn, a historical novel of the 3rd Crusade (see “Current Projects” in sidebar), I have the distinct memory of staring, blank-eyed, at the computer screen and thinking, I’ve lost it. Whatever talent I had for this just flew out the window! I can’t make this story work. I don’t remember ever struggling through this mire with previous stories! What’s going on here?!

It was about this same time that I read mystery diva Elizabeth George’s stellar tome Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life. Of all her gems of writerly wisdom, the one I remember most is her description of her “Journal of a Novel,” styled thus after John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden letters.” After explaining other intricacies of her daily writing routine, George comments that:

“...I pick up my Journal of a Novel for the last novel that I wrote. For the last three or four novels, I’ve copied John Steinbeck’s activity from East of Eden, and I’ve begun every day by writing in a journal, sometimes about the writing I’m doing, sometimes about what’s on my mind at the moment. So for each novel I now write, I create a new journal entry, but before I do that, I read a day in the last Journal of a Novel for the previous novel. This allows me to see that, whatever I might be experiencing at the moment, I have experienced it and survived it before.
“Once I’ve done that reading, I create my journal entry for the new Journal of a Novel, the one I’m creating as I write the current book. This may be a single paragraph; it may be a page or two. But I write it consistently because I know that later on, it will help me through whatever bad time I may encounter in the process.”

I picked up on George’s habit around the same time I began Behold. I wrote faithfully in my battered mulberry notebook, generally recording only two or three paragraphs a day. My opening words summed up the journal’s purpose: 1-11-05: “I’ve decided to keep a journal of my writing. I don’t have time to go into any depth, but just enough to maybe help me later on.”

Sometimes I recorded my word count for the previous day, sometimes I recorded my frustrations (4-5-05: “My writing of late seems to be regressing back into the flabby”; 5-30-05: “Well, here we go—another day of plugging along.”), sometimes I celebrated my triumphs (2-1-05: “Wee! I had a great writing session yesterday”; 7-13-05: “Oh, I’m loving this! This is why I slog through the bad days to reach the pieces that just sing!”), sometimes I would jot down instructions to myself (1-25-05: “I don’t know how many times I’ve read that the writers who take risks are the writers who break boundaries and write the best and most memorable stories”; 10-25-05: “Music is so important to my writing process. More than almost anything else, Behold has taught me that if I don’t have a strong enough soundtrack, I’m probably going to struggle.”), and always I grounded myself and focused my thoughts on the writing session to come.

I didn’t, however, discover the journal’s true power until two years later, when I began writing my (temporarily shelved) novel The Rain Still Falls, a story of World War II’s Battle of Britain. I continued my journaling with this new project, and, just as George suggested, I returned daily to Behold’s journal to read an entry.

Almost immediately after typing the words “Chapter One” in this new story, I fell headlong into the old fears and naysayings. I can’t do this! I stink! Everything good I wrote up to now was just luck! Peculiarly enough, I found myself reading almost the very same words in my journal of Behold. In fact, one day I scribbled down “I hate beginnings!” in my Rain journal, only to flip to the corresponding entry in the Behold journal and find the very same words staring up at me. I laughed. And I was comforted.

The writing journal was tangible proof that this wasn’t the first time I’d been through all these canyons of frustration and doubt. I’d been in the pit of despair, I’d fought my way out, and I’d even emerged with one of my best stories. I could do this. I’d done it before, after all.

Now, two years later, journaling has become a vital part of my writing routine. As notebook after notebook fills with my untidy black scrawl, all I have to do is look at them piled on my desk to know that I’ve faced these same monsters many times before. I have conquered them before, and I will conquer them again.

By this point, you'd all better be scratching a big fat black check in the “Yes” box. If not, you’re either lying or catatonic, and in either case you probably won’t be interested in the rest of this post, so you can stop reading and return to your regularly scheduled tea and biscuits. However, for those of you honest people who answered correctly, allow me to add one more response to my admittedly incomplete list of cathartic techniques in the paragraph above.

How about... reading? Or writing?

Since flushing the telephone only seems to back up the plumbing (not to mention frying the phone), and since I ceased to fit beneath my bed some time ago, I often find myself forced to take other measures. And, more often than not, my gut instinct is to reach for the surprising cathartic power of the written word.

Interestingly enough, the very word catharsis comes down to us by way of the Aristotelian theory that suggests “a purifying of the emotions brought about in the audience of a tragic drama through the evocation of intense fear and pity.” At its core, the idea of losing our own troubles by immersing them in those of someone else remains closely linked to the literary experience.

I had no intention of writing about catharsis when I sat down this evening to type up this week’s post. But, having spent a week on the rough side of life, the title for this post understandably popped to mind. When I’m depressed, hurt, frustrated, or angry (or, more likely, all four at once), the urge to lose myself in someone else’s story hits me with redoubled force.

When I open the pages of a book, suddenly I’m no longer little me facing down the firing line of my own problems. Like Snoopy, suddenly I’m flying my own Sopwith Camel, taking on the life of a World War I flying ace. Or maybe I’m lost in Narnia with the Pevensies. Or, very likely, I’m fighting off Malaysian natives with Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. If fiction had no other redemptive power, then escapism, by itself, would certainly seem blessing enough.

Even more than the stories of other writers, I find solace in my own writing. Last Sunday, minutes after having a bombshell explode at my feet, the very first instinctual response to follow the petition of divine guidance was the urge to immerse myself in my writing. Why? Why this powerful sense of security amid the hurricanes of my imagination, why this need to purge my emotions in the crucibles of characters who have sprung from my own brain?

The whole notion of catharsis has always fascinated me. It’s a bit sadistic, when you think about it: watching the suffering of others so that our own burdens might be lightened. But perhaps it is, in part, what the Apostle Paul intended when he instructed us to “rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” If we can find it in ourselves to identify with the rejoicings and the weepings of other humans around us, is it not a natural progression to identify with the trials of characters that we know better than we sometimes know ourselves?

Or is the catharsis perhaps found in the knowledge that, in a story, we can always see the light at the end of the tunnel? 
Human beings aren’t known to be very farsighted when it comes to trials. We tend to think that because we can’t see beyond the clouded present, the clouds must therefore continue all the way to the horizon. But, in a story (especially stories of which we are the authors), we know that the trials must end. We can feel the pile of pages beneath our thumb slowly slipping away, and we know resolution—for better or worse—is right around the corner. The girl is going to fall in love with the right guy. The good guys are going to stomp the bad guys into subatomic particles. Or, if worse comes to worse, and a happy ending doesn’t await our heroes, then at least we’ll get to know why.

Perhaps that’s why I read. Perhaps that’s why I write. Certainly that is at least part of the reason I seek catharsis in the magic of the written word.

I’ve been thinking lately of two decidedly minor characters in two of my works-in-progress. Although both impact the plot in crucial ways, neither is irreplaceable or deserving of more than a handful of scenes. But both of them taught me some vital lessons in the art of the minor character.

Lady Eloise stormed her way into my novel of the Third Crusade, Behold the Dawn (see “Current Projects” in sidebar), as the wife of Lord Stephen of Essex, the man who would provide sanctuary to my hero’s beleaguered wife, Mairead. Eloise’s only necessary role in the story was to indicate Lord Stephen’s matrimonial state and, perhaps, give Mairead someone to converse with. She could so easily have become a vapid, two-dimensional talking head: a sweet, meek old woman in a wimple. But, thanks to a reminder from best-selling author James Scott Bell, such was not to be Eloise’s fate.

Minutes before sitting down to write Eloise’s introduction, I read Bell’s article “Second to None” (Writer’s Digest, June 2005), in which he reminded writers that “minor characters should add spice to your novel, not dull it down. Well-conceived minor characters add an extra spark that distinguishes the best fiction from everything else.” With his words ringing in my head, I approached Eloise’s scene from an entirely new vantage point. What could I do to bring this seemingly irrelevant character to life? How could I keep her from falling into the role of a stereotypical talking head? What would make her pop?

From there on out, Eloise (like all good characters) took over: “The door banged open again, and a silver-headed woman bustled into the room. Quick gray eyes took in the two visitors and landed with visible delight on Mairead. She bowed to the room at large and turned back to Annan. ‘Master Annan—delighted to see you, of course. I rather expected you to be dead by now.’”

Her unexpected and acerbic comments, her physical energy, and her unequivocal opinions made her jump off the page. She wasn’t a likable character; she forced her unwanted opinions on other characters too often for that. But she was a real character. Her foibles and her quirks were balanced by a stout moral core. Eloise did whatever she thought was right and hanged the consequences. The fact that she wasn’t always right only deepened her dimensions.

The lesson Lady Eloise taught me in the summer of 2005 was brought home again more recently by another character. Dreamlander, an active work-in-progress, demanded a relatively minor character to fill the role of my hero’s ex-girlfriend. The story itself has undergone dramatic changes since its conception, but somehow Brooke Delano had failed to change along with them.

In early sketches, she appeared on the page as a blonde Barbie type: self-centered, arrogant, and even vampish. She was stereotypical, at best. Worse, she refused to act on the page in anything even approaching three dimensions. Surgery was obviously the order of the day. I didn't want a Paris Hilton carbon copy roaming my pages, but neither did I want her to be too nice, lest my hero, Chris, forget the reason she was the ex-girlfriend.

Suddenly, Brooke’s hair went from long and sleek to crazy and curly. She sprouted freckles and dimples. She became cute and spontaneous, and I was immediately drawn to her. But she was also obsessively ambitious. Gone is the aloof clothing designer, and in her place quivers the manic energy of a beat reporter. She’s still self-centered, but her selfishness now springs more from her blissful oblivion than spite or arrogance. She's flaky, a smidge vindictive, and—since the story demands that she employ a top-notch psychiatrist—she’s also just a little paranoid-delusional. In other words, she’s perfect.

Like Eloise, Brooke is now a well-rounded, three-dimensional character. Both characters have a healthy balance of good traits and bad traits. Both characters add to their scenes, instead of adding so much dead weight. And—I can only hope—both characters are capable of bringing that extra spark of which James Scott Bell fortuitously reminded me years ago. May his words remind you too.