Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: novels (Page 1 of 2)

Sanctuary

April 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

awproom
It’s that time of year. AWP 2015 has arrived; I’m writing this now from my third-floor hotel room, looking out over Washington Ave., in Minneapolis.

Emphasis not on Minneapolis, although it’s nice to be out of Indiana for a bit, or AWP, although that’s certainly the reason I’m here, or third-floor, even though it gives a bit of a view. No, emphasis on my.

When I was sixteen, my ever-indulgent parents got me a retreat for Christmas. Nothing extravagant, because I didn’t need extravagance; it was just five days at the Super 8 maybe twenty minutes from our house, but for me, with a brand new draft of a novel sitting in front of me, begging to be torn apart and reworked, it was a perfect writerly sanctuary. I stayed in my room with DO NOT DISTURB on the door, blinds drawn, music playing, and manuscript pages and maps and note cards splayed out all around me.

I drank alcohol-free merlot, ate tortillas with pesto, kept my own hours, and hermitted it up (although I think I reached out by text a few times for advice).

I’m not going to hermit in Minneapolis; I’m going to the conference, and to the book fair, and around the city. Still, I have a room, and it’s mine. Not in a permanent way—just in an exclusive one. My little hotel sanctuary.

This evening I took myself and a book to dinner at a restaurant across the street, Sanctuary. I’d read the menu online, and it looked exciting—and it was, but it was also much classier than I anticipated. (Seriously, look at the website. I feel like it was not an unreasonable assumption on my part.) I walked in and was seated by the very well-dressed host … and then looked around and realized that it wasn’t just the host—everyone was very well-dressed.

My first impulse was to apologize profusely—my jeans and Payless shoes and shirt with hops on it had tripped and fallen in here by accident, and I would get out of the way right now. Instead, though, I stayed; I lingered for two hours, over …

garlic, spinach, and parmesan artichoke tartlets, provincal olives, cornichons and a shot of white verjus

liquor 43 bread pudding with salted caramel ice cream and ristretto espresso crème anglaise

a quasi mojo—and absinthe mojito

and a cup of coffee

Not surprisingly, especially to anyone who looked at the menu, it was an expensive linger. Still, it was mine, whether or not I fit in.

Plus, part way through my meal, more conference types started to come in, and writers are a notoriously shabby lot. Suddenly I was not so out of place after all.

Sanctuary takes different forms, see?

What Big Teeth You Have

September 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned before the fiction workshop I’m taking this semester, specializing in linked stories. (If you want to follow along with the course, check out our class blog.) The basic idea of linked stories is that they’re too connected to be wholly separate stories and still have the same impact (that is, they function as stories alone but become more powerful in combination) but too distinct to be a novel(/novella). If this sounds like a slippery definition, that’s because it is. There’s a whole messy space between collections of unrelated stories and novels that’s inhabited by linked stories, story cycles, novels in stories, composite novels, etc.

I took something of a hiatus from writing anything complete from 2003–2005 (during which time I considered, among other things, becoming a high school band director) and picked it back up on a whim when a friend of mine instructed me to do NaNoWriMo. (I do mean instructed. There was no, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. Want to do it with me?” There was only, “Do NaNoWriMo.”) It was a messy month—I came up with my concept at the last minute, realized when my planned plot concluded that I only had half of the 50,000 words, and only finished because Thanksgiving Break afforded me the opportunity to lock myself in the bathroom, away from distractions, and pound out 7,000 a day. But I finished a project that I lovingly called the SVN, because titles have never been my strong suit.

The SVN involved five different viewpoint characters, and although that messy first draft didn’t make the best use of them, by the time I’d been through several revisions (for three years, although I had other side projects, it was my focus) each of those characters had an arc, all of which converged in the penultimate scene.

In other words, the SVN could, in a way, be considered a collection of linked stories, interwoven with one another.

I wrote another NaNoWriMo novel in 2008 (my next serious project) that had two viewpoint characters who spent the majority of the plot not knowing of each other, much less their connection. Again, their arcs joined up as the story neared its end; again, I could rephrase that as, their stories joined up as the piece neared its end.

My current project is a single viewpoint chronological narrative—free of murkiness—but it occurred to me that it’s the exception. Of the novels/sort-of-novels I’ve written, almost three-quarters have been, to some extent, separate but linked stories.

That said, they’ve all be much closer to the novel end of the spectrum. There are separate character arcs, but they’re all structured around the central conflict, whatever that is, and even when the characters don’t yet know each other, it’s clear to the reader that they’re all directly tied to that conflict, so they’re only ever as distant as a friend of a friend(/enemy of an enemy, etc.). I consider those pieces to be novels … but I suppose it’s rarely quite so simple.

I’ve adamantly defended my novelist identity; the idea that I might be dipping so much as a toe into that murky in-between water seemed, until about 3:15 this afternoon, impossible. It’s disconcerting. Because Continue reading

Pulpy Marshmallows (or, how I became an embittered novelist)

August 19, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. Cathy Day is the reason I applied to the graduate program I started today, and although she isn’t the sole reason I picked it over the others that accepted me, she is a big one. This semester, I’m taking a fiction workshop with her, and in preparation, I read this.

I was going to quote some passages, but then I realized I wanted to quote the whole thing, so instead, just go read it. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Still here, because you didn’t actually go read it? I’m not kidding. GO.

Now that you’ve read it, let’s talk. My writer friends will back me up on this: I hate short stories with a passion that borders on pathological. (Okay, they might not say borders.) If pushed, I will grudgingly admit that now and then, I do come across a short story I enjoy, and I have written a few that I found tolerable, but those are the exceptions. I hate short stories.

So when Day writes, as you recall, “I know without a doubt that when I was growing up, I absolutely loved to read novels and rarely read short stories unless they were assigned in a class,” I’m with her. It’s #9, though, Writing Right-handed vs. Left-handed, that really got me.

Sometimes a left-handed novelist is wise or stubborn enough to realize that he is not a right-handed story writer with horrible penmanship, but more accurately a beautiful left-handed novelist with perfectly fine penmanship. When he is alone, away from school, he brandishes the pencil in his left hand and sighs. Ahhhhhh. Then in college, he takes a workshop, which is full of nothing but right-handed desks. He puts the pencil in his right hand. Out of necessity, he’s become ambidextrous. And so, he goes through the motions of writing right-handed short stories for class. Assignments that must be completed. Hoops to jump through so that he can be in this class, read books for credit, and get a degree in the writing of fiction. At night, he goes home and puts the pencil in his left hand and works some more on his novel, the pages of which he never submits to his teacher, whose syllabus clearly states that they are to submit short stories that are 8-15 pages long.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve called short stories a hoop to jump through, I could buy so many more cereal marshmallows than one person needs. And then I could eat homemade Lucky Charms, gnashing my teeth and enjoying the bitter fantasy that the marshmallows were made of the pulped pages of short stories (which, let’s be honest, is plausible).

That’s the key: bitter fantasies.

When I was eleven, I wrote my first novel-of-sorts. It was a hundred-something pages, and I entered it in our local 4-H fair. The rule book didn’t have a page limit for creative writing submissions. I checked.

Come show day, I plopped my binder on the table in front of the judge. She looked the size of it, read the first paragraph, and gave me an honors ribbon that I knew had nothing to do with the quality of my work.

The next year, the rule book specified a ten-page limit. I brought in the first chapter of my new novel-in-progress. Suffice it to say that the year after that, they also instituted formatting requirements.

It’s always been that way. When I want to have the work I care about read, the Powers That Be won’t read it, so instead I put forth work that, to be honest, I don’t really care about. I get grades (which are what count) and feedback (which I file away, in case at some point I need, say, application material) and go back to what I do care about.

There are things fiction writers can learn from poetry. It’s the same line I hear when I say I want to be a novelist, and it’s true—there are things a novelist can learn from short stories. Still, my poetry-focused undergraduate program left me feeling adrift, alone, and embittered, and my short-story-focused education has left me the same way.

I’ve been lucky to have friends and family who have been supportive and interested in my real work. But am I really just spending thousands of dollars and years of my life in the hopes of jumping through enough hoops that one day I can get a couple letters after my name to identify me as a Real Writer, then go be a novelist in peace?

I think not. I hope not. My graduate program is not well-suited to novel writing, and I knew it wouldn’t be, just as I know my professors don’t have the resources to work with me on a novel. Wednesday, though, I start that fiction workshop. We’re focusing on linked stories. It’s not novels, no, but you read the article—I don’t have to tell you that it’s a sign that somewhere out there, there exists something bigger than the standalone 8–15 pages.

The Gobi Desert (or, by the end of this post, you’ll be glad I chose the camel image)

August 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Edith Wharton, late in her writing career, wrote:

What is writing a novel like?
1. The beginning: A ride through a spring wood.
2. The middle: The Gobi Desert.
3. The end: A night with a lover.
I am now in the Gobi Desert.

I’ve been working on my novel-in-progress for just over a month, and just over 31,000 words. It’s hard to predict exactly how long it will turn out to be, but I can safely say that I am out of the spring wood … and I think I would know if I’d reached the night with an unidentified lover.

So this must be the Gobi Desert.

I don’t often watch survival-type shows—you know, Man Vs. Wild, Survivorman—because I am easily squigged out by survival. I can’t even think about 127 Hours (which I never saw) without having the impulse to curl up in the nearest corner and watch YouTube cats until the bad thoughts go away. But on the occasion I do end up watching something survival-related, a common theme shows up: keep moving. It makes sense. Unless you have the resources to set up long-term sustainable camp where you are, the longer you take, the more you expend.

This, I’ve found, holds for the novelist’s Gobi Desert, too.

It’s all about momentum, about keeping the story and the characters fresh and alive. Stagnation—true stagnation—has never helped anything. That’s not to say I subscribe to the write every day, without fail philosophy, because I don’t; I think stepping away to contemplate can be, at times, just as productive as actually putting words on the page. Sometimes we need to pause and think things through, because if we don’t, we might well end up with days, weeks of wasted work we could’ve avoided if we’d taken that time for thought.

I don’t need to write every day to make my way through the Gobi Desert, but I do need to have the writing on my mind every day. Even a few minutes, just to keep it present.

Of course, three hours of thought rarely gives the same satisfaction as three hours of writing, because there’s something wonderful about seeing that quantifiable progress. It often feels more valid, too. I can post on Facebook, I wrote two thousand words on my novel today! and my internet friends will understand at least to a point what that means, maybe even leave me little Yay! comments. But if I said, I spent two hours drinking tea and talking to my cats about my novel, I’d be lucky to get a lol.

It’s hard to measure the worth of contemplation, and I think that makes it easy to brush aside as a form of procrastination (which, don’t get me wrong, it sometimes is). But when you’re making your way through that Gobi Desert, you don’t do yourself any favors by charging boldly onward without stopping now and then to make sure you still have a sense of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

After all, what good is a night with a lover if you retire to the bedroom, begin to undress, and discover that your toes are purple with frostbite?

Scapple

July 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Last time, I talked/gushed about Literature and Latte’s application Scrivener. Not so long ago, I decided to try out another program of theirs, Scapple.

The basic premise: Scapple lets you put down ideas, make connections between them, shift them around, and more. Literature and Latte describes it as a “freeform text editor” and explains,

Scapple doesn’t force you to make connections, and it doesn’t expect you to start out with one central idea off of which everything else is branched. There’s no built-in hierarchy at all, in fact—in Scapple, every note is equal, so you can connect them however you like.

I tested it out in the early stages of prep work for the novel I’m working on (the ghostless ghost story I mentioned a few months ago). Here’s the end result, zoomed out to show the whole thing:

And here’s a smaller section that’s actually legible:

About five years ago, I went through a phase of freeform brainstorming a little like this. I had a big pad of newsprint paper (something like this) and a pack of these multi-colored markers, and I’d sit on my dorm room floor, writing down different questions and answers about the project in different colors and orientations. I fell out of the habit, but working with Scapple reminds me a bit of that. The primary difference, of course, is that my marker notes couldn’t be rearranged, connected and disconnected and changed to a different color.

So, Scapple. What can I say about Scapple? I haven’t used it much beyond what’s above, so I can’t speak to/gush about it to the same extent I can Scrivener. I wouldn’t say I’ve fallen in love with it yet, but it was certainly a useful process to map out my novel as the concept developed (I sometimes think of this prep work as a sort of skeletal first draft) and Scapple provided a flexible way to do that.

Here’s an analogy. One of the more difficult things about taking lecture notes can be connecting and ordering them in a way that will make most sense later. Is this mention of a study with conflicting results going to be a passing mention that should be another subpoint, or are we going to explore it in detail in its own right? And if it becomes its own point, should the first study’s authors’ rebuttal be noted in the margin back up there, or should it be included with this second study?

This is a place where taking notes on a computer can simplify the process, because if I discover as the lecture goes on that something would do better indented farther, or moved back out, or expanded on, or cut and pasted somewhere else, it’s an easy fix. The flexibility of Scapple works in a similar way, allowing easy expanding and moving and reclassifying. Different people, obviously, prepare for novels differently, but my initial work is sloppy—to an outsider, it might look like I write a bunch of unrelated things on index cards, shuffle them up, and pick five of them to give me a randomly generated premise. Scapple supports this, letting me toss tidbits anywhere on the screen and, once I begin to see connections, shape those tidbits into something that becomes more and more cohesive.

Scapple has been a fun exercise. It hasn’t been as revolutionary as Scrivener, but I have been able to put it to use beyond frivolous experimentation. Should you buy it instead of groceries? No, probably not. But if you’ve got $15 to spare, Scapple is a better investment than many alternatives.

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