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Another Day Zero goal complete! Friday night I read at EWU’s monthly Voiceover. I read a three-page piece and it marked the first time I’ve ever shared my work in public (it counts as public even if the only non-program-affiliated person there was tending bar…). We had a relatively low turnout (probably due to end-of-year stress), but I think that, on the whole, my piece was well received. And someone even told me afterward that I had a good reading voice. So yay! I should have thought to have someone take a picture or something, but apparently I’m not that thoughtful, so you’ll all just have to take my word. If you’re in Spokane, I’ll be reading again at our graduate reading on June 11. Still no idea what I’ll read then—NOT my thesis.

p.s. I have some thoughts on LOST, but I still think I’m not quite ready to share them; I found the finale to be deeply moving and I want a bit more time to let my thoughts percolate; maybe I’ll even rewatch it before blogging about it.

Not everyone loves kittens, even when they are this cute.

Character is one of the biggest things—if not the biggest thing, depending on who you talk to—that will influence whether or not a reader likes a book (or story, or essay, etc.). Plot (that dirty word!) is probably the other, followed by language. But what makes one character better than another? What is it that  separates a likable fictional creation from an unlikable one?

For me, the answer to this question usually has to do with character motivation. Do I  believe the character would act as he or she does? This means getting to know a character’s background, history, culture, social motivations, emotional responses, opinions, and a whole slew of other things, of course. But I’ve noticed an interesting trend lately in that there is a whole group of readers out there who dislike characters for acting in ways the reader can’t imagine acting in his or her own life.

Some examples:

• Clare Abshire from The Time Traveler’s Wife
• Any of the five Lisbon daughters in The Virgin Suicides
• Edna Pontellier in The Awakening
• Faile Bashere or Perrin Aybara (and many others) in The Wheel of Time
• Anna Karenina from Anna Karenina
• Nora Helmer from A Doll’s House

Gender issues aside (since I’ve already covered this over at Bark), I think, as I said above, the commonality here is that these characters all make choices that the reader feels he or she wouldn’t make if put in the same place and so, somehow, this is an unrelatable, unlikeable character.

I too have fallen into this in the past, but that just makes me more sure that, when this happens, it is usually the fault of the reader rather than the author. Not, of course, that that means the author bears no burden for making well-rounded and believable characters, but the question is who is the character supposed to be believable to?

A few months ago someone told me she hoped I wasn’t writing a book with sex or profanity,  because she refuses to read books with those elements. Well, I am. There’s both sex AND profanity. And my main character is angry and often lashes out at people. But these elements aren’t included because I want to shock, or because I somehow feel cooler for including them: They come from the characters.

But then other people tell me they don’t want to read books that feature these types of characters. They ask, “There’s enough of that in the world already so why do you have to write about it?” I can’t speak for all writers, but I know why I do.

Because I’m interested in these characters.

I’m interested in pulling away the layers to get at the rawness that exists in all people: The lies told, the contradictions inherent in every day, the cruel thoughts and, sometimes, actions. But I also like the way these dark things jut up against brighter things: the moments where people act for each other, when they breakthrough to a new piece of honesty. To have one or the other—the struggling homeless man who never steals, attends mass every Sunday, and has an all-around cheery outlook on life, or the cruel rich man who cheats on his taxes and his wife, treats anyone lower than him with disdain and scorn, and hates kittens—this is not believable! Not even in genre—even Darth Vadar had that whole pesky I-sort-of-don’t-want-to-kill-my-son thing.

In the end, I feel it’s my job as a fiction writer, when I see something ugly or shameful, to not look away, to not try to ignore it, but to instead look a bit closer.

As some of you may already know, I had to cut 30% of my thesis last Monday. Due to a lack of understanding certain character motivations, the story was starting to unravel. In the end, in addition to cutting the offending pages, I decided that the base of the story—the first fifty pages—was also flawed and so before working on replacing the 23 lost pages, I did a heavy revision of the 53 remaining.

It’s been a rough nine days, not least because I can really feel the clock ticking: I turn it in on May 26, exactly two weeks from today, and defend on June 9, exactly four weeks from today.

Last night I finally finished the revisions, culminating with one scene being almost entirely rewritten. As of this morning I have sixty-two pages, all of which are much stronger than they were before. The clock is still ticking, but suddenly it doesn’t feel quite so looming—mostly because I have an idea of where to go next, something that was markedly lacking before.

Anyway, I know I’ve been a bit low on actual informative posts lately, but my thesis is getting all of my attention right now. If you’re just totally missing my awesome insights, head over to Bark and check my Monday column!

I have a confession to make: I never outline. Or, rather, I never outline successfully. I’ll try every so often to jot down some notes for future scenes and, in one case, I actually plotted out an entire book, but it never works. Oh, I wrote the book to the outline successfully (during National Novel Writing Month back in 2006, I think the year was), but every time I outline, I run into the same problem.

Melodrama.

In the aforementioned novel, I had a wedding, a lottery winner, a little old lady who found a cat and gave it to her granddaughter without parental permission, a girl drowning in a pool because her mother was on the phone, and then that same mother running away (and her husband chasing her, of course) because she couldn’t face her guilt—all in 50,000 words. And trust me, it was much more melodramatic than the above list makes it sound.

You see, I tend to like subtle tension in my writing, the small moments that open up into larger ones, but when I try to write that down in an outline, it looks like there is no tension in the story, and so I add more.

For my current book, I haven’t done any outlining. I just finished part one, and I don’t know yet what the first scene of part two will be. Instead of planning, I’m going to go back to what I’ve already written and decide what seems natural based on what I already have.

This reminds me of a quote by Nabokov about how his characters are galley slaves—he doesn’t let them take over the book, as many other authors will tell you their characters do (and that that’s how they know a story has life). And despite what I said above, I think I fall in the middle—if I let my characters do whatever they wanted I’m sure I’d end up with a boring book. Instead, I focus on character motivation but always remember that I have the power to to change that motivation to fit what I want.

For instance, I was writing one of the early scenes in my book and decided that it would amp up the tension if one of my characters could potentially be pregnant. However, the way I’d written her, she was a very sexually-conscious woman, well-versed in contraception, and I didn’t want the maybe-I’m-pregnant tension to come from that 1% chance of failure; THAT felt like melodramatic manipulation. So I spent weeks brainstorming reasons this very forward-thinking woman would make a decision that was very likely to end up with an unwanted pregnancy. Had I let the character take over, I would have had to cut that thread and lost that tension. But had I been set on getting her pregnant from the beginning, I probably would have created a different character, a more soap-opera worthy one.

It’s been an insanely crazy week! There were a few hours on Monday when I thought I might have to turn in my thesis next week (when I was expecting late-May), and, as you can imagine, this triggered a sizable panic attack. But luckily for me my thesis advisor has my back and I’m now scheduled to defend June 9 (instead of May 20). Commence sigh of relief.

My novel (!) is now just over 75 pages and I’ve got the entire narrative arc of section one written. It feels incredible to be able to say that. That means I’ll spend the next three weeks revising, revising, revising. I want to tighten this first section as much as possible. For the first pass I think that will mean continuing to drop little seeds for me to grow later in parts two and three of the book. For instance, one subplot that is going to become pretty big in part two had fallen away by page 35 so I went and dropped a few more small details around page sixty, just so the reader doesn’t forget (and so the eventual importance of that move seems believable). Now I know why it took me twenty-five years to learn how to revise: It’s hard!

In short story news, I wrote my first one today in about a year. It felt good, but those particular writing muscles are a bit rusty. I’m looking forward to being able to spend at least one day a week on short stories once I graduate. (I’m supposed to be breathing thesis right now, but I didn’t really cheat because the short story featured characters from my book.) I’m hoping that will mean I can start sending off more short stories again, for publication. I decided to stop (with Sam’s advice) because if an editor likes my story but it isn’t quite right, and he or she asks to see more work, I don’t have anything to send. Oh, I have other short stories, but none are ready to be sent off, and I don’t have the time right now to devote the tens of hours it would take to get them in shape. So I’m waiting.

Other than that, I’m just pushing my way through my thesis reading list. Right now I’m working on The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s fantastic. Now I just want to find one (or preferably two) more male writers to add to my list; it’s decidedly female-friendly right now with only two men.

Oh, and I need some sort of working title for my book (other than Working Title of Thesis the Awesome). I hate titles.

I recently read The Gathering Storm, the 12th volume of The Wheel of Time fantasy series. For those who don’t know, the author, Robert Jordan, died after completing book 11, but he left behind about a gazillion notes and so now another author, Brandon Sanderson, is finishing the series. And at one point while reading the book I noticed that a character was in a completely different country than where she’d been in the previous scene. And I thought, if I noticed it, why didn’t Sanderson!?

Well, I can now tell you: It’s really frickin’ hard.

Some mixups from my last few days of writing (and I have only part of one book and nowhere near the thousands of characters in the WoT):

• a five minute scene started in the morning and ended at night…the day  before
• I sent my characters to play miniature golf…in November…inMichigan…while wearing church clothes
• a guy working a 9 to 5 job was home showering at 3:30 on a weekday
• a bottle of white wine mysteriously changed to red

You get the picture.

So what silly mixups have you found in your own writing?

Since coming back from AWP, I’ve been in a heightened state of thesis panic. My defense date (which hasn’t actually been set yet since the grad office is dragging their feet apparently—but that’s another story) is looming ever closer, and for some reason, coming back from the conference really threw that into sharp focus for me, resulting in a minor (or not so minor) panic attack in the office last week. (Though I’m not the only one; I hear other of my fellow conference attendees have had similar mental breakdowns since returning to Washington.)

So now I’m churning out pages, and for the first time in my life, I find I’m able to keep to a strict writing regimen of at least two pages, six days a week.

I know that won’t seem like a lot to everyone—maybe to most people—but it’s been a big change for me, who, in the past, has participated in more of a binge-writing lifestyle. But I’m nearing the end, and for a few months, I was stalled; it seemed that every time I sat down to write that I had fewer pages than the last time. So for now my concern has to be getting raw pages down. I’m still focusing on the writing, of course—it seems that I’m incapable of doing the 5,000 words a day I could sometimes manage back when I wrote for NaNoWriMo—but my biggest concern is churning out new material every day.

It’s a new way of writing this thesis for me, but I think it’s ultimately good and I wonder why it took me so many months to get to this spot. How do you handle when circumstances mandate a change in your writing? Are there certain times in the first draft when you care more or less about quality?

Last weekend was the annual AWP conference, and I spent Wednesday through Sunday in Denver attending. As this was my first ever conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect beyond some nervousness and a whole lot of people. As it turned out, however, I need not have worried about the first, as after about ten minutes, I realized there just wasn’t time to be nervous.

I spent about half of my time working the Willow Springs table, talking to people who came by and giving away magazines, which apparently makes people angry because we are “devaluing” the work. I think it’s always a good thing to get your work into the hands of people, though, so whatever.

After that, I spent a good chunk of time walking the bookfair, learning about presses and journals and meeting my peers. I got some leads on what I want to do when (if?!) I graduate and am going to start writing book reviews for the online journal, The Collagist (if they like my stuff, of course). My advisor walked around with me too, and that was probably the most useful hour of the entire conference, being introduced and having a long talk about the writing/editing career I’m starting on.

Finally, I attended a few sessions, though not nearly as many as I thought I would. Going in I thought these would be one of the highlights of my conference, but I learned pretty quickly that there was more to be gained by networking.

And all that was just during the “official” conference. My nights were spent attending readings and, once, a party at a bar where I was able to mingle with a group of writers who have found ways to make their art their life. Okay, so I might have pissed off Robert Lopez by not sharing my chicken and rice, but it was a great night (and he’s actually very nice). Three of our Willow Springs writers were at the event, and I got a chance to talk to all of them (two of whom I’d previously exchanged emails with).

I’m home now (actually, I’ve been home almost a week but it’s taken all that time to recover), and I’ve never felt so inspired to work. I have a bad habit of skipping days of writing (successive days, even), but I’ve done at least some sort of creation every day since. It sort of pointed out to me how real this creative life can be, and how close I am to possibly achieving it.

Anyway, this feels like a very trite blog post to me, but I’m in a rush to head out to an event for our literary festival: I’m assisting with a workshop for teen writers this afternoon, but more on that later.

Thesis revisions have not been going well this past month. Not only was I super busy and didn’t spend near as much time as I should have on my book, one of my revision tasks threw me for a total loop. I needed to add tenderness to a relationship, because if the reader doesn’t see why the relationship would exist in the first place, you can’t expect them to care if it lasts or not. The problem is that my main female character has a bit of a temper, and I didn’t want to sacrifice her character (as I see it) for plot conventions.

That said, yes, I can see that these revisions needed to be done, and what’s been taking me so long was working these in. I knew, theoretically, that I could accomplish what I needed by adding bits here and there (without, in other words, adding an entire new scene), but my first few tries ended up feeling either really forced or no different than the original. By my calculations I’ve got between eight and ten weeks to finish my thesis, and so the stall that was early- to mid-March really had me panicked. But I am moving again, finally.

My goal for break is to add between fifteen and twenty-five new pages—and that’s in addition to the revisions. It’s going to be a lot of work, and it means I won’t get to relax as much as I’d like, but if I can add twenty-five pages I’ll have the required eighty for the thesis and then will be able to go back to revisions again. That route gives me a more polished thesis but leaves me with more to be written once I graduate. On the other hand, I can aim for a total of forty-five-ish new pages, which would probably get me through the first quarter or so of what will be my final book.

Other than writing, I also want to get through at least two more thesis books. I still need to finish The Sound and the Fury (which I may ultimately leave off my list because I’ve struggled so much with it), and I’ve also started on Amy Hempel’s complete works (through two of her four collections).

So yeah, that’s what’s on my plate right now. Busy busy!

I’ve never had more blog visitors than I did on March 1, the day I started my Day Zero Project. It’s inspiring to know how many people were interested in what I’ve decided to do with the next few years.

Technically I’m already a bit behind, since I need to be completing one goal every ten days, but I’m not concerned. Not only do I have something like 988 days left, I’ve also made some progress toward some of the bigger goals (such as blog posts [2] and massages [2]). I’ve also started filling a box in my room with items I want to give away (or get rid of). I haven’t counted how many things I have in there, but there are some books, some shirts, two sweaters, a pair of sweatpants, and some hats/gloves/scarves. I’m also preparing my old computer to be donated, along with an old router and modem.

I also submitted a piece of fiction to a new journal today. It’s a piece that’s been rejected twice already, but that’s just the way things go. And actually, now that I look at my list, that does cross something off, because I had “Resubmit something that’s been rejected.” Awesome!

I know that sounds like sort of a cop-out goal, but rejection is something that I’ve struggled with over the years. Namely, I have this crazy large fear of failure that often means I won’t try anything that I’m not positive I will be successful at. So to continue to send something out even after failing is a big deal for me. The piece is out at two journals right now and I have a long list of other places to try if I get more rejections (which I probably will because I’ve decided to start at the most prestigious places and work my way down).

I also am submitting a piece to a contest this week. As part of my nonfiction portfolio we have to send a piece to either a contest or as a general submission, and I decided, for the first time ever, to try a contest. Now nonfiction isn’t really my thing—if anything, the workshop showed me that I have a much stronger natural affinity/ability for fiction than I do for nonfiction. I have some theories on why this might be (one of which involves an unencouraging professor), but I’m really okay with being stronger in one area. Besides, I enjoy fiction more. This one, however, I won’t be crossing off the list, since what I really intended when I wrote item 12 was “submit to a fiction contest,” since I feel that will be a much better gauge of my skill level.