let down

Two days before Christmas I sent a completed draft of my novel to my agent. I've been working on this book for more than three years, and I have come to love it -- not just the finished product (although I do rather like it) but the process of writing this particular book. In the end, I became obsessed with it. I did almost nothing but work on it. Okay, I snuck online for Christmas shopping, but that was pretty much it. Christmas shopping and writing Perfect Red. I stopped talking to people, stopped exercising, stopped eating anything that couldn't be eaten at my desk. Worst of all was the way I roped my 15-year-old into my craziness. In a desperate effort to re-jig the very last pages of the book, I bribed her to read the entire manuscript and help me sort out the ending. She's a very good reader and a very good writer, and having her to bat ideas around with was a godsend.

So on the appointed day, I was done. I hit send. And even though I know my agent can't read it right away, it was off my desk. I was happy.

And then I was sad. I missed my book. I missed working on it. I missed the obsession. I felt exhausted, let down, bereft. My house and my world seemed suddenly empty. I want my book back, just so I can work on it. There's nothing particularly I feel the need to change. I just want it back.

But, alas, we make books so that they'll leave us, just like children, and my book is gone.

If nothing else, it reminds me that the real thrill of writing is the writing.

writing the old fasioned way

I'll admit right off the bat that Amherst College has deep ties in my family, but imagine my delight when I was reading a newsletter from the college and found an article about an "after dark" event in which students were invited to write letters using either typewriters or quill and ink. Since my novel in progress is set in the golden age of typewriters, I've become a bit obsessed about them. I lvoed the image of a bunch of college students hammering away at typewriters and I HOPE that a certain sophomore was among them. I'll be checking my mailbox every day for confirmation.

letting your characters inside your head

I went last night to see my friend Laurel Olstein's new play, Esther's Mustache. It's a charming production featuring four very talented actors. One of the most interesting things from a writing perspective was the physical representation of how we let character's inside our heads. The main player in the show is Maddie, a cartoonist. Her strip. "Oh My Goddess" is a hit -- and the goddess "lives" on stage within the frame of Maddie's apartment window.

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can you ever forget cancer?

It's hard not to fall in love with a man who draws on your body in black Sharpie pen as if you are a priceless canvas and who then uses his scalpel and thread to craft you a new breast from the cancerous wreckage of your original one. Add in the fact that the man looked like Matthew McConaughey, walked with a Harrison Ford swagger, and spoke with the authority of a general on a mission to save the Earth from alien invasion, and you can see how natural it was for Dr. Black to become the hero of my recovery. I fell hard -- but I'm a happily married woman and it wasn't real love. It was fantasy love, a schoolgirl crush, something I would never have declared out loud, or acted upon, or even, probably admitted. But still. It was love. Read the rest at HuffPo

so you think you know how to write?

I had a dinner party over the weekend, and after dinner, we decided to play some games. Usually they're board games or card games, but this time we played a game with paperback books. (I don't know why they had to be paperback, but that was the rule that was presented.) The "director" of each turn picked a book, read the dust jacket, and then silently wrote down the first sentence of the book. Everyone else at the table had to make up a sentence and silently write it down. Then the director read all the entries and we all voted on which we thought was the real opening line. It was hilarious -- and informative!

The first book we did was The Devil Wears Prada. Most of the fake opening lines were about shoes or fashion or, um, donuts. The real opening line is about a young woman navigating taxi cabs on a busy New York street. When all the lines were read, I could identify the real one immediately. Why? It had texture, detail, voice. It named a character. I was the only writer in the group, and I was smug in the fact that I could sniff out the real first line. (My fake line for this book, which involved peep-toed red suede pumps, garnered a few votes, but not enough to make me grand champion of the universe.)

The next book was The Russian House by John LeCarre. This time, all the fake opening lines had detail, texture and voice. Many of them named a character. We had learned fast!!! There was one fake line, however, where someone really went too far. Their sentence named a character with a suitable Russian-sounding name, and mentioned a building made by Stalin, and went on and one about some Soviet Committee for Something or Other. We all laughed and laughed that one of us had taken the lesson from The Devil Wears Prada and turned it into a SPOOF. Very clever, we all thought.

Except that this turned out to the real opening line. It just goes to show you there is no formula for writing a good opening line -- or a good book.