Pete Lit

Gong!

A small East Coast press, which I greatly admire, has apparently declined Wheatyard without even telling me. I sent them a query last summer, and after not hearing anything for months, I asked a writer friend of mine (who has published a book with the press) to casually inquire about the status of my submission. The publisher told my friend that he wasn't interested in my book, and that he doesn't reply to queries unless he's interested. In other words, no news is bad news. Though it doesn't seem like that much of a bother to send a boilerplate email to a writer as notification of a rejection, apparently that publisher feels otherwise. This now makes five official rejections for Wheatyard, but never mind - I just mailed off a new query (with sample chapters) to another East Coast press yesterday. The fact that I went to the trouble of stuffing a manila envelope and trekking to the post office should tell you how much I revere this publisher. Fingers crossed. Onward.

Gong!

Wheatyard was just turned down for the fourth time, by one of the very best independent presses out there. They said that while they were "intrigued" by the story's premise, it just didn't fit their fiction needs. Which, for all I know, might just be their boilerplate language for rejections. As has been my habit, I immediately turned around and submitted a query to another great indie. One of these has to hit eventually. Onward.

"Life doesn't have to prove itself."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Shirley Hazzard (talking with Vendela Vida) discusses the place of coincidence in fiction:

Hazzard: In that same book (The Transit of Venus) I say a similar thing: that one wouldn't dare put into a novel the amount of coincidence that occurs in life itself.

Vida: Yes, one of the characters says: "I've thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books." Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair or convincing.

Hazzard: Life doesn't have to prove itself. Life happens; we have to accept it. Reading fiction, the disbelieving, skeptical critic likes to feel in control. Yet his own existence, all existence, is subject to the accidental element, to the inexplicable or magical, or dreadful intervention that cannot be justified by logic.

I completely agree with her, partly because I'm facing a similar quandry with publishers' reactions to my novel, Wheatyard. Not with coincidence - nobody has yet questioned the plausibility of the narrator (a recent business school graduate) first encountering the eccentric, reclusive writer Wheatyard. Instead, questions have been raised as to why the narrator becomes so fascinated/obsessed with Wheatyard.

I think I did address this question - as I tell in the story, just a few weeks after graduation, the unemployed narrator has already begun to doubt the corporate finance career he once so thoroughly believed in, with his growing disillusionment making him more receptive and attracted to Wheatyard's independent lifestyle and outsider status. Not that the narrator is eager to embrace that sort of lifestyle himself, but it does show him another side of life that he hadn't experienced before, with Wheatyard's sudden appearance becoming an interesting diversion from his own depressing prospects. Of course I could have spelled out the point more bluntly, but bluntness is something I generally hate in fiction. I'm a quiet, subtle person, and I'd rather tell my stories quietly and subtly than hit the reader over the head with my message. I don't understand the need to baldly explain everything - Why is the narrator so fascinated with Wheatyard? - when the reader could easily take the cues I've given and answer the question himself.

Just as Shirley Hazzard doesn't feel the need to justify coincidence, I don't feel the need to justify my narrator's every motivation. That's just how he is. I've already explained enough.

Gong!

I just received rejection number three for Wheatyard. I really had high hopes for this one. The publisher is an up-and-coming indie outfit that really seems like it has its act together, and they liked the first two chapters I sent last spring well enough that they recently requested the entire manuscript. (For a writer, I suppose that's like getting a second interview from a prospective employer.) Unfortunately, though they said they admired my writing and had many nice things to say about the book, it just didn't quite work for them.

One specific issue they mentioned was a supposed lack of impetus for the narrator's fascination with the protagonist; though other readers have also made this point, I thought the impetus was fairly clear, and if I said it any more explicitly I might as well beat the reader over the head with it. Since I feel like I need to keep moving ahead with my writing and working new material, I'm hesitant to dive back into the manuscript for yet another revision, so for now I'm keeping it as-is. If some publisher likes the book well enough to give a tentative acceptance that's contingent on resolving the impetus issue, then I'll do more revisions.

This rejection was a real disappointment, but I'm not despairing - in fact, I've already submitted it to another well-regarded publisher. Onward.

Quote

"There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without."
- Booth Tarkington, who was born on this date in 1869

Echoes of sentiments expressed by my narrator in Wheatyard, though those were about Central Illinois, which has very similar terrain. I've never read Tarkington, but I think I'll add The Magnificent Ambersons to my Summer of Classics longlist for next year.

Gong!

The second rejection of Wheatyard just arrived. It was from a small publisher that I thought I might have an "in" with (via a mutual friend), though the publisher probably wasn't aware of that connection. When I submitted I refrained from any name-dropping; I kind of want the book to stand on its own merits, independent of any connections, even if those connections might open doors for me. The notification was standard boilerplate ("We've decided to pass on this one") and not too encouraging. Given the volume of submissions that publishers are seeing these days, I'm sure I'll get many more like this before the book finally finds a home, so this doesn't trouble me very much. Onward.

Gong!

That subject line is in honor of Chuck Barris, and marks the first time that my recently completed novella Wheatyard was booted off the stage; that is, declined by a publisher. My plan is to post an update here whenever I get an official "no" from a publisher, while keeping all names anonymous. In this instance, the editor was extremely kind, reading the entire manuscript and giving me his decision and constructive criticism in only about nine hours. He also said it was the first time he had received an over-the-transom (that is, unsolicited) manuscript, which is certainly some sort of distinction. Onward.

Wheatyard: more unconscious influences

Several years ago I posted about unconscious literary influences - specifically, bits of Kent Haruf's Plainsong - that somehow snuck into my novel-in-progress, Wheatyard. The Haruf influences were relatively minor. But when I read Joe Pintauro's 1988 Algren essay just last week, I was floored by this passage that describes Algren's house in Sag Harbor:

Almost every inch of wall space was covered with heavy framed homemade collages consisting of old headlines, letters, clippings, and photos depicting the recent history of the world in terms of rape, war, sports, violence, literature, and art. Framed photographs, paintings, and documents hung from thick nails that bristled the walls. At the foot of the stairs was a huge blowup of the famous photograph of a Vietnamese girl, doused with napalm and running toward the camera screaming. Nearby, another blowup depicted a man from Bangladesh carrying his wife, who looked as if she had been beaten or raped. From the walls stared D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln: "The family heirloom is that Lincoln — my grandmother saved that. It was from Lincoln's assassination. She was in New York at the time. Oh, I’ve got stuff don’t have room for," he said in all innocence. "I’ve got almost all the wall space used up that I can." Only the corner where he kept his desk and typewriter was spartan and clean.

The plastered-wall aspect of Algren's house is heavily echoed by Wheatyard's living room, which is similarly covered with magazine advertisements, studio photos of old movie actors, German Expressionist artworks and the like. But the strange thing is that until I read Pintauro's description of Algren's house last week, I had absolutely no recollection of it. I certainly hadn't read Pintauro's piece before.

The only place I could have possibly read that description was from Bettina Drew's autobiography of Algren, A Life On the Wild Side. I checked my copy, and discovered that Drew had indeed quoted from the Pintauro passage, though I hadn't remembered that at all. So while I hadn't read the biography since around 1998, I didn't write my own description of Wheatyard's living room until 2005 or 2006. And yet somehow Pintauro's description of Algren's house (via Drew) must have subconsciously stayed with me all that time, and finally resurfaced as I wrote about Wheatyard's own eccentric dwelling, years later. Odd how the mind works.

Milestone is finally reached

Wheatyard is finished. (Or momentarily finished, until some editor starts tearing it apart.) I first started writing the book in late 2005, and just this morning, sitting in a drafty corridor in Union Station, I typed in the final edits. I didn't even mind the cold. When I stepped outside the sun was shining and I didn't mind the cold there either. I'm relieved and maybe even a little proud of myself for getting this done at last. Soon I'll start hunting for publishers, but for now I'm savoring the moment.

What I'm writing

I'm finishing up the fourth draft of my novel-in-progress, Wheatyard. For almost three years now I've been carrying a hard copy of the manuscript (bound in a navy blue Mead binder) to and from work in my messenger bag, for it to be handy should the editing whim strike me while I'm riding the train. That copy is now heavily marked up, and also supplemented by a newer notebook where I've been jotting ideas and longer revisions as they've come to me. During the past few months I've been transcribing all of those edits into a new Word file on my laptop, but even seeing all those words on a screen hasn't prevented me from feeling (undoubtedly aided by the constant presence of that messy hard copy and notebook) that the book is still an unruly mess that's far from completion.

That is, until this morning. I'm still working on one critical section (in the second-to-last chapter, and what I think of as "the revelation scene"), which I wanted to print out in order to do further revisions. However, our home printer recently ran out of ink, so I emailed the document to myself so I could print it out at the office. (Relax, Employer, it's only ten pages and not the entire manuscript.) On the train this morning, while checking email on my iPhone I came upon that self-sent message, and opened up the Word file. And up it popped, looking neat and tidy and not unlike several published ebooks that I've been perusing on my phone.

Immediately it occurred to me that, indeed, this does look like a book. And reading through it, the writing is good. GOOD. Not perfect yet, but good. I now realize that I'm a lot closer to finishing this book than I had assumed. In another month it should be ready to send to publishers. Hurray!

Quick update

Hüsker Dü did the job last evening, and I eked out three or four pages of line edits. Not a major accomplishment, but at least it's a start. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

What I'm writing

My weekdays give me two hour-long blocks of down time: the train ride to and from work, morning and evening. Mornings I've set aside for reading, as then I seem to be at my sharpest and most refreshed, which I need to fully engage with serious fiction. But when I'm tired I can't really focus well enough to read, which is why I've devoted my evening train ride to writing, which is a less passive and more mentally engaging pastime. The evening train is also essentially the only time I write, since when I'm home in the evenings and on weekends I focus on family time instead of the relative isolation that writing requires. (Yes, I'm surrounded by others on the train, but I keep totally to myself and have no "train buddies.")

Since my last update on my progress on Wheatyard (a post which seems, when I read it now, overly self-congratulatory and/or self-pitying), I've done almost no work on it. This despite originally wanting to have this draft finished (and readied for submission to publishers) by the end of December, and then (when that didn't happen) the end of March. What little writing I've managed during the past month was a flash fiction piece which, due to its brevity and derivative structure, didn't really require that much effort. The rest of the time I've squandered playing euchre on my phone, browsing The Reader, or napping, which puts me no closer to getting Wheatyard published than I was before. I might even be further away now, as what little momentum I had achieved a month ago was soon left behind.

None of this latest update is at all intended as self-pity, and I hope it doesn't come across that way. I'm just trying to impart what an ongoing struggle this book has been. Inevitably I have my sights on newer, fresher story concepts that I want to pursue, but I know that if I don't show any ability to finish a book - and Wheatyard, despite its stagnation, is the closest I've ever come to finishing - then thinking of other books is totally pointless.

This week I'm trying another tack. Over the weekend I burned three heavy albums onto my iPod - Hüsker Dü's The Living End (live shows from their final tour, in 1987), Minor Threat's Complete Discography and Sonic Youth's Dirty. Those albums are pretty out of character with the lighter, poppier stuff I usually listen to, and I thought it might jar me out of my evening-train rut - not only keeping me awake, but also away from euchre and focused on writing. Those three bands brought such power and passion to their art, and if I can inject even a tenth of that into my writing, it might be enough to get this book finished. We'll see.

What I'm writing

I'm currently in the fourth draft of my novel, Wheatyard. Until recently, the latest revisions have gone well - the existing narrative has been significantly tightened up, while several new sections have been added that provide a clearer view of the narrator. (Thus correcting one of the biggest flaws of the earlier drafts - the focus was too much on the protagonist, Wheatyard, while the narrator was too thinly drawn.)

I've now fully revised five of the six chapters, but have been intentionally writing around (that is, avoiding) the fifth chapter. That one is the longest and thorniest chapter in the book, when Wheatyard finally reveals details about his personal life and his past, which the narrator has been tentatively seeking out for the entire book to that point. Before the holidays I sketched out that chapter, focusing on its key points and identifying parts that could be trimmed or eliminated entirely. Right now the chapter is much too long, wordy and redundant, and needs a lot of intense work. Then during the holidays I set the manuscript aside, partly to take a breather but mostly because I wasn't totally sure I was ready to plunge into heavy revision.

Last night, on the train home, I finally dove in. And I hit bottom. Though I had a sense of what needed to be done, I had little idea of how to go about it. I read through my sketch notes again and again, trying to decide what needed to be cut. I went back and forth between the manuscript and my handwritten notes, which literally required juggling while sitting in a tight train seat crowded by the stranger in the next seat, a woman whose handbag, for further discomfort, was pressed against my hip. As I struggled to organize my thoughts, I accidentally dropped my pen into the narrow gap between the seat and wall, and then later, as frustration mounted further, a stack of looseleaf sheets fell out of the manuscript cover and scattered on the floor. I picked them up, swearing. I was utterly, completely overwhelmed. I shoved all my papers together, stacked them on my lap, folded my arms across my chest, leaned back and closed my eyes, at that moment not caring if I worked on this novel - now five years in the making - ever again.

I stayed that way for several minutes, trying to calm myself - not calm enough to resume writing, but just to feel like a normal person again. Then, to my surprise, when the train's first stop was announced the woman stood and headed toward the exit. I opened my eyes as she departed, and wondered if she was truly leaving, or just tossing something in the garbage or needing to use the restroom. But when she stopped to wait in the line of departing passengers, I realized I had the seat to myself. I shoved my messenger bag to the other seat, leaned my elbow on it and stretched out, cracking open the manuscript again. I was still on edge, but that brief pause and the extra room changed things just enough. I also thought it was best to ignore the big picture for the time being, and instead of thinking about theme and major cuts, I focused completely on line editing - deleting phrases, changing verbs, all the detail work that the manuscript would eventually need anyway. And I made progress, slow but steady.

When the train reached my stop, I packed up and departed, and even the bracing cold outside was unable to dampen my mood. As I walked to my car I felt much better about things - about both the novel's potential and my general self - and decided that I could keep the writing going for a while longer yet.

Pretty...oh, so pretty...

That's three copies of the latest (third) draft of Wheatyard, just back from the printer. Once I find some envelopes I'll be mailing them off to three trusted readers who I'm hoping will be as brutally honest as I need them to be.

Wheatyard - Small Edits and Big Edits

I'm working my way through the third draft of Wheatyard. As of this morning, I'm finished with what I call the "small edits" - tweaking words and phrases, adding a sentence here and there, fixing minor inconsistencies and streamlining the narrative.

Now it's on to the "big edits" - major revisions and additions that didn't occur to me until this most recent re-reading of the manuscript. One of these is the narrator's attitude toward the small town in which Wheatyard, the protagonist, lives. The narrator is a grad student in his final days of college town life, soon to return to the big city of Chicago. While he admires the simplicity of Wheatyard's town, he also sees its shortcomings - notably the small-mindedness and insularity of its inhabitants. But re-reading the manuscript, I was struck by how much my narrator, while considering small-town life, veered from admiration to condescension and back again. One day he was seeing something he really liked, while another day he was bitterly critical. The narrator's attitude is one aspect of the book that is in need of significant refinement.

Another thing I need to develop further is Wheatyard's relationship with his older sister, which was once close but by the time of the story has become completely non-existent. As it stands right now, the story doesn't at all address why the sister suddenly disappeared from Wheatyard's life. Julie was kind enough to point this out after she read the second draft, and it's something I definitely need to fix.

But the work is progressing very nicely, and I expect to have the third draft finished by the end of June. I've already lined up one writer friend, one whose judgment I greatly respect, to read the manuscript, and I'm soliciting a few others. If all goes to plan I'll have the final draft done by the end of this year and ready to send out to publishers. I hope.

Wheatyard - Unconscious Influences

I just started reading a book that I've owned for more than three years, whose first chapter brought me an oddly pleasant pang of recognition. The book is Plainsong, Kent Haruf's critically acclaimed novel of life in a small Colorado town. Our local Starbucks has a book case which the store encourages customers to permanently take books from, provided that the customers donate a book of their own to the shelf. Sometime in mid-2005, I visited that Starbucks with my family, having brought along another book which I had started, not enjoyed at all and then abandoned, and I figured I'd give that book a chance at finding a more welcoming home than my own. I deposited the book on the shelf and was quite pleased to see Plainsong, which I had been meaning to read for some time. I read the first chapter as we savored our coffee, then I took the book home, shelved it and didn't finally return to it until yesterday.

The first chapter of Plainsong involves a father, two sons and an all-but-invisible mother who live on the outskirts of the small town of Holt. Their house stands directly opposite a set of railroad tracks, on the very sensibly named Railroad Street. When I read this chapter yesterday (for the second time, the first having been at Starbucks in 2005), it suddenly seemed very familiar, and for very good reason.

I started writing Wheatyard in November 2005, several months after reading the first chapter of Plainsong. The eponymous protagonist of Wheatyard just so happens to live - you guessed it - on the outskirts of a small town, directly opposite from the railroad tracks, on Railroad Street. (Albeit childless and unmarried, in Central Illinois and not Colorado.) Although the similarities between Wheatyard and Plainsong end right there, I find it very interesting that these fairly minor elements of Plainsong found their way, unconsciously, into Wheatyard. Until yesterday I had completely forgotten that first chapter, and had absolutely no idea that Haruf's book had at all influenced my writing of Wheatyard. But the influence is definitely there, although to a very small degree.

Other than the name Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard (which my daughter Maddie made up) I have had really no idea where the concept of Wheatyard came from. At the outset, I simply reasoned that anyone with such an odd name had to be quite an eccentric, so I just started with the idea of an eccentric protagonist and improvised from there. Or that was what I presumed to be the extent of influence, until yesterday. Now that I recognize the fact that I borrowed some basic story elements from Plainsong, I realize there is undoubtedly a myriad of similar influences that went into the creation of Wheatyard, most of which I'm still only vaguely aware of. I expect the revelation of other influences in the future will be a similarly rewarding experience.

Wheatyard - The Epigraph

I have mixed feelings about epigraphs. When used appropriately, they effectively convey and summarize the author's thoughts about the work - but when misued, they can come across as pretentious and desperate invocations of earlier classics, as if the author is saying, for example: "By quoting from Milton, I am insisting that my book is every bit as great as Paradise Lost."

Erring on the side of caution and wanting to completely avoid the latter case, at first I gave no thought whatsoever to an epigraph for my novella-in-progress, Wheatyard. I finished the first draft last spring, epigraph-less, but then during my Summer of Classics I happened to read Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and was struck by this passage from the narrator's introduction:

Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.

I immediately saw the obvious (and, I hope, non-pretentious) parallel between Bartleby and Wheatyard. Both protagonists are mysterious, idiosyncratic individuals who have mostly withdrawn from society and want to live their lives entirely on their own terms. Both interact with society only to meet their most basic needs - Bartleby for employment (and a clandestine place to sleep), Wheatyard for outlets willing to publish his fiction. And both Bartleby the Scrivener and Wheatyard are narrated by individuals who discretely and over-cautiously seek to find out the truth about the protagonists - tiptoeing around the periphery of the protagonists' lives without directly confronting them to get an immediate answer to the mystery.

Obviously, I could write for centuries and never achieve the status of Melville, and hope that in choosing this epigraph I'm not being too presumptuous. I'm doing so because Bartleby's sad story is very much reflected in the life I've conjured up for Elmer Glaciers Wheayard, and not because my writing in any way approaches the greatness of Melville. I'm merely standing on the shoulders of giants.

Wheatyard - Another Milestone

I've reached another milestone - the second draft of my novella Wheatyard is now complete, with the edits typed up, the whole thing printed up and bound, and handed off to my wife Julie for her thoughtful but tough assessment. The manuscript weighs in at 91 double-spaced pages, and about 38,000 words which, at an estimated 300 words per published page, would equate to 129 words in final book form. (War and Peace, it ain't.) As soon as I've absorbed Julie's thoughts and impressions I'll start in on the third draft which, when complete, I plan to distribute it to a few writer friends whose opinions I greatly respect, for further feedback. I'm planning on finishing the third draft by April and if everything still looks positive at that that time, I'll start to seriously evaluate potential publishers. Right now I have a few dream publishers in mind, none of whom I realistically expect to take a flyer on a first-time novelist such as myself. I'm sure I'll have to aim lower than that upper echelon, although I still might send them manuscripts on the proverbial wing and prayer.

If you're at all interested in how this book has progressed, I've created a new index, the very imaginatively named Wheatyard, which compiles all of my past references to the book. The past references are a bit sketchy, I'll admit, but now that the book is becoming more of a viable entity, I plan to comment on it here more regularly, and also publish some excerpts for your reading indulgence.

NoNaNoWriMo

Despite my enthusiastic participation during the past five years, I've opted out of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. The past five Novembers have left me with three unfinished novels, two finished stories ("Immortality" and "Ectoplasm", both of which have been published) and two unfinished stories. Rather than add a fourth unfinished novel to my inventory, I'm instead working on my most advanced novel, Wheatyard, which I started during NaNoWriMo 2004. Presently I'm typing up the hand-edits of the second draft which, once completed, I'll hand off to Julie for a close reading.

NaNoWriMo has been a great experience. It really gets you in the habit of writing every day and finally starting a book you've been kicking around in your head for years but never put to paper, and getting the story written without dawdling over rewrites and research. And it also makes you feel like you're part of a big community of fellow writers, all of whom are as overwhelmed by the process as you are. Writing is such a solitary pursuit that it's easy to feel like you're all alone, and NaNoWriMo helps you realize that you're not. There's thousands of people just like you, which is really nice to know.

If I'm ever going to get a novel published, though, I really have to finish one first, so I thought it best not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. Maybe next year.

Writing in Progress

Another update on various writings which are floating around, both in manuscript and in my mind.

New to the list:
Emboldened by the publication of "Deep in the Northwoods", I'm resuscitating my project of stories based on Farm Security Adminstration photographs, under the working title This Land Was Made for You and Me (with a nod to Woody Guthrie). Half a dozen stories are written so far, with at least another ten needed to make a decent collection. The stories are a bit on the short side, but I'm planning to publish them accompanied by the corresponding photos (all of which are in the public domain), so I'm counting on the pictures themselves telling a good portion of the story. Worth a thousand words, right?

Still on the list:
As I previously mentioned, I've finished the handwritten edits on the second draft of the novella Wheatyard, which are now waiting to be typed up.

Once I finished reading that second issue of Steampunk Magazine, my early interest in The Engine Driver quickly drooped. But I just picked up the first issue of the magazine, so maybe the piece will come to life again soon. Still, though, it's another novella, so I probably won't start writing this in earnest until the second draft of Wheatyard is finished.

Removed from the list:
The story "The Fable of the Small 'Suburb' Which Aspired to Be More Than It Was." As I suggested last time, the corner of my mind that contains this story has been gathering cobwebs. Best to set this story aside. Maybe listening to some more of Ron Evry's wonderful George Ade podcasts will bring the tale back to life someday.

Milestone

Yesterday I finished the second draft of my novella, Wheatyard, and I'm pretty pleased with what I've accomplished. I'm generally good at starting things but not so good at finishing them, so while writing the first draft came relatively easy, knuckling down and revising the entire thing took some rather concerted effort. So finishing the second draft feels like an even greater accomplishment than finishing the first one.

Now I need to type up my handwritten edits into polished form, and then hand it off to my wife Julie, whose opinion (literary and otherwise) I cherish more than any other. She's only read a few fragments of the story, several years ago, and I'm very eager to see what she thinks of the whole thing. Once the third draft is finished - I'm guessing it will be about six months from now - I'll probably recruit a few other readers to look it over and give me more feedback.

Writing in Progress

New to the list:
I've just started to mentally sketch out a novella called The Engine Driver, which will be set in the Wisconsin wilderness near the end of the Civil War. The story is inspired by steampunk without actually being steampunk per se - it will be very much grounded in realism, with little or no sci-fi/fantasy elements. I just finished reading the second issue of SteamPunk Magazine, which I greatly enjoyed (more on this soon) and which is really stoking (pun intended) my imagination. And I just bought a new composition book to write my first draft in, which is always a sign that I'm getting serious.

Still on the list:
I'm halfway through the second draft of The Wheatyard Chronicles, and am already foreseeing the need to refine the narrative to focus even more on the title character and less on the first-person narrator (which is loosely based on myself).

I've kind of set aside the story "The Fable of the Small 'Suburb' Which Aspired to Be More Than It Was", and might have to remove the story from the list for a while. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this one. I've pretty much been writing it on the fly, without any definite idea of how the story will be resolved, or even which characters to focus on. This might be one of those story ideas that collapses and is swept into the Dustbin of Good Intentions.

Removed from the list:
I finished a flash fiction story called "One Evening in St. Paul" for this contest at Eximious Press. Alas, the story just missed being shortlisted, garnering a special Honorable Mention. (The editor really liked the story, but I'm guessing it was too long, at more than twice the requested word count.) I'll post the story here over the weekend. The story is nothing earth-shattering, but it's a gentle little piece that I really enjoyed writing.

"Writing in Progress"

I've added a new section to my sidebar, called "Writing in Progress." This will give you a hint of what writing I'm currently working on - or should be working on. Though I probably won't formally announce any periods of slackness, if I don't update that section for a few weeks you'll know that I've been irresponsibly neglecting my writing. Currently underway:

The Wheatyard Chronicles: My novella in progress, which I started writing during NaNoWriMo 2005 but didn't finish the first draft of until a few months ago. I'm about one-third of the way through the second draft.

"The Fable of the Small 'Suburb' Which Aspired to Be More Than It Was": A satirical short story inspired by the antic writings of George Ade and, as I've only just realized after re-reading Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis as well.

As-yet-untitled flash fiction for Eximious Press: The story, tentatively called "One Evening in St. Paul", is the latest in a series of stories I've written which were inspired by old photographs or ephemera. I finished the first draft on the train this morning, and am pretty happy with it so far.

If you notice that this section of the sidebar hasn't changed for weeks or months, do me a big favor and send me a nasty email, telling me to get the lead out, get cracking, etc.

Tale From the Crypt

Like a zombie arising and staggering to its feet, my novella-in-hiatus Wheatyard, which I've barely touched since late 2005, has suddenly sprung back to life. I finally wrote the final chapter on the flight back from Hilton Head on Saturday, and this morning I finished off another key new passage. Now I need to type up the new sections and add them to the old manuscript before diving in for a very close reading of the entire mess, so I can determine whether or not there's a feasible book in there somewhere.

I'm crossing both my fingers and my toes.

Urgency and the Novelist

Ed Champion recently posted an excellent quotation from Anthony Burgess, following with a fine question that I'd like to address at length. First, the quotation:

The practice of being on time with commissioned work is an aspect of politeness. I don’t like being late for appointments; I don’t like craving indulgence from editors in the matter of missed deadlines. Good journalistic manners tend to lead to a kind of self-discipline in creative work. It’s important that a novel be approached with some urgency. Spend too long on it, or have great gaps between writing sessions, and the unity of the work tends to be lost. This is one of the troubles with Ulysses. The ending is different from the beginning. Technique changes halfway through. Joyce spent too long on the book.

Next, Ed's question:

To what extent does a novelist have an obligation to remain urgent?

My personal experience, as a fledgling writer, tells me that a novelist first has an obligation, to himself, to remain urgent. There's an obligation to readers, too, but that comes secondary to that of the writer. In crafting a novel, the writer is obliged to devote as much attention as possible, in a compressed amount of time, on the novel. Lacking this, a consistency of voice, tone and theme (Burgess' "unity of the work") is inevitably lost. Along with, perhaps, the finished novel itself.

(More, much more, after the jump.)

Thus far as a writer I've focused almost entirely on short stories. The only times I've worked intensively on novels has been during the Novembers of 2002, 2003 and 2005, as part of NaNoWriMo: I worked on a historical novel, Eden in 2002 and 2003 and a more contemporary novel, The Wheatyard Chronicles, in 2005. (In November 2004, I wrote only short stories, recognizing that I owed it to Eden not to start a brand new novel before the earlier one was completed.)

Eden is a pioneer novel set in northern Illinois during the mid-19th Century which tackles a lot of big themes: pioneer settlement, the Utopian commune movement, Irish-American identity, community versus self-sufficiency, personal isolation, and the canal-building mania of that era. As is typical of NaNoWriMo, I wrote the novel in a flurry of creativity, churning out page after page of promising but far from polished prose. Although during NaNoWriMo 2003 I wrote the story straight through to its conclusion, I did so while skipping over a significant portion of the narrative. That skipped passage involved my protagonist, Miles Farnham, adopting a New York City orphan as a foster son, through an ambitious program run by a New York-based charitable organization. I had only read about the orphan relocation mission (which actually existed in real life) from a newspaper article which was based on Steven O'Connor's historical study Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed. I was having a bit of trouble with the narrative in conceiving the foster son's upbringing in New York, and how it would impact his relationship with the protagonist and his behavior on the desolate prairies of Illinois. I thought that reading O'Connor's book would give me valuable insights into the foster son character, though I obviously wouldn't have time to read the book until after NaNoWriMo. So to avoid allowing my progress on the novel to flag, I skipped over the foster son section and continued writing. Though I did finish writing the novel, I did so while leaving a yawning gap in the narrative.

And that gap continues to this day. I still haven't read O'Connor's book, due to any number of competing distractions, and until I do so I don't feel I can adequately create the missing passage. Yet until I have what I consider to be a "complete" first draft, I can't really justify undertaking the heavy editing that the entire manuscript requires. Thus, the novel is in limbo, and I'm not sure I'll ever take it up again. The 19th Century setting, language and tone makes it a somewhat difficult novel to write (even though my style is relatively straightforward and coventional) which makes resuming the writing to be a formidable psychic challenge. Had I not set the novel aside at the end of November 2003, with the missing passage unwritten, and continued on to finish a complete first draft, I might very well have had the courage to delve into rewriting, and might conceivably have a finished novel today. But I let it lapse, to the novel's detriment. Burgess would undoubtedly say I lost the necessary "urgency."

Wheatyard is a completely different novel, set in the early 1990s and told from a much more informal, first-person perspective. The narrator (ostensibly me) relates the story of a summer spent in a college town, jobless after finishing grad school, and the odd-duck fiction writer he happens to befriend. The writing of Wheatyard (during NaNoWriMo 2005) went extremely well; I really liked the plot and the overall tone that I was able to create last November. However, as NaNoWriMo concluded, the novel was still unfinished.

NaNoWriMo, with its goal of 50,000 words written in one month, is a pretty intense experience for writers, and even more so for myself, as I limited my writing sessions to my train ride to and from work, with no writing during evenings or weekends or the Thanksgiving holiday. (Those are family times, and I never want to be the kind of writer who abandons his family in some lofty pursuit of his art. For me, family comes first, no matter what that means for my writing.) When November ends and one finds himself without the arbitrary stimulus that NaNoWriMo's 50,000-word goal creates, there's inevitably a letdown, an enormous exhalation, and for several weeks afterward one wants absolutely nothing to do with writing. By the time one begins to decompress, and might otherwise start consider resuming writing, it's late December and the holidays have arrived as considerable distractions.

I really want to resume Wheatyard, which I feel is a very promising novel or novella (much more so than Eden), but in reading it now I'm doubting if I could ease back into the narrative, and in particular I'm wondering if I could get the tone just right after being away from the manuscript for nine months. I'll probably still attempt it (it's much easier writing than Eden was, since the former is based largely on personal experience while the latter relies heavily on historical research) but I'm not at all confident that the novel I'd end up with in any way resembles the one I started writing last November. Again, I lost that urgency; had I kept writing during the first couple weeks of December, I'd now have a first draft, with nothing stopping me from revising it into a finished novel. Instead, I have doubt.

So, yes, the novelist does have an obligation to remain urgent. Because without urgency, without churning out prose as if nothing else matters, without later editing and editing and editing some more to get the sentences and paragraphs just right, the novel will never be written.

Attention, Writers!

Have a novel in progress? If so, don't worry about minor concerns such as plot, structure, character, theme, dialogue or any other trivialities. What your book really needs is a bang-up, attention-grabbing, tried-and-true title. To aid your title development, I direct your attention to Lulu Titlescorer.

Want to know if you've got a killer title for your novel? Now, for the first time in literary history, you can put your title to the scientific test and find out whether it has what it takes for bestseller success.

Intrigued and, quite frankly, tired of working for a living, I ran the model on my two novels-in-hiatus:

Novel-in-Hiatus #1
Working Title: Eden (72.5% chance of being a bestseller)
Prospective Title #1: Furrows Through the Earth (35.9%)
Prospective Title #2: Midst the Green Fields (20.1%)

Novel-in-Hiatus #2
Working Title: The Wheatyard Chronicles (35.9%)
Prospective Title #1: Scribe (45.6%)

For comparison, The Da Vinci Code only scored at 35.9%. The obvious conclusion is that I should quit my job right now, so I can devote my full energies to finishing off my twin goldmines, Eden and Scribe. I'm cleaning out my cubicle as we speak.

(Via Bookslut. Michael, best of luck with Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza.)

There's Lots of Room For You on the Bandwagon

Poets & Writers joins the podcast parade, with Sigrid Nunez reading from her latest, The Last of Her Kind (8.6MB mp3, 18:16). I hadn't heard of Nunez before reading the latest issue of P&W, but I'm intrigued by her melding of the autobiographical and the fictional. My NaNoWriMo novel, The Wheatyard Chronicles, is the first time I've explored this terrain, so I might read some Nunez for pointers.

Final Tally: 32,068 Words

I'm quietly celebrating this morning. NaNoWriMo is officially over, and not only did I reach my word count goal, but I also achieved my personal best, finishing at 32,068 words. More importantly, I actually have the makings of a workable novel, The Wheatyard Chronicles (title very much subject to change).

The story has been somewhat challenging to write, since it's written in first person singular, with the narrator (a rough proxy for myself) not being the actual protagonist. The protagonist (Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard) is a rather reticent person who reveals little about his past life. The narrator is intrigued by Wheatyard, and throughout the story attempts through various means to find out his life story. Since Wheatyard is less than forthcoming on the subject, the narrator has to state many of the fact of Wheatyard's life as mere conjecture or hunches. I'm already aware of the fact that there's far too many appearances of words like "seemed" and "presumably" and "maybe." I suppose that adds somewhat to Wheatyard's mysterious aura, but I still need to improve the prose quite a bit.

I'm also having a bit of trouble with tone. The story starts out revealing the quirks and intellectual antics of Wheatyard, an eccentric and incorrigable rogue, but the passages I wrote during the past few days, when Wheatyard finally opens up to the narrator, are considerably darker (in a Stephen Elliott sort of way, to give you a hint). Once I start rewriting, I'm definitely going to have to figure out a way of better integrating the lighter and darker tones of the narrative. And I do intend to start polishing this story up, possibly as soon as a few weeks from now. I may have lost the urge to rewrite my other novel-in-progress, Eden, but hopefully I'll manage to be more diligent about Wheatyard.

NaNoWriMo: Day 20

Derailment struck last week on my NaNoWriMo mission. Though I doubled my word count during this second 10-day block, I was less than pleased with the results. It seemed like I had decent characters and somewhat of a vague theme, but virtually no plot. Plenty of long-winded conversations, often veering dangerously close to monologue. In short, I was in a rut and couldn't write my way out of it. So I imposed a four-day NaNoWriMo vacation (Thursday through Sunday) to hopefully recharge my creative batteries.

I resumed writing The Wheatyard Chronicles today on my morning train, trying to focus more on developing a plot. The results so far are modestly encouraging. I've lowered my goal to 30,000 words which, if attained, I'll be more than happy with. I'd rather finish November with the basic makings of a decent novel, rather than reaching some arbitrary word count. (If I really wanted the latter, I could easily monologue my way to 50,000 words.) It's not as if I'd get any pleasure from strutting around telling people I wrote a 50,000-word novel in one month. I'd much rather be able to tell them I've written something they might actually enjoy reading.

NaNoWriMo: Day 10

I didn't have particularly high hopes for NaNoWriMo this year. I knew I'd never get to the 50,000-word goal, since I'm only writing on the train to and from work, and would be losing two workdays due to family medical needs, giving me only eighteen writing days for the month. More importantly, I had only a vague idea where the hell my story would lead. Beyond the protagonist's name (Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard) and general situation (eccentric, unpublished and possibly brilliant writer living in a farm town in Central Illinois), I didn't have much of anything. No major plot ideas, no overriding theme, no other characters, nothing.

So I just started writing, and voila: as of this morning I'm already up to 10,434 words, with hundreds surging out of me every day. Right now it's all very episodic (or, to use my favorite newly discovered word, picaresque), which I suppose is inevitable if you're writing on the fly, with no clear plot direction in mind. I'm just kind of writing scenes as they occur to me; I guess I'll get them all written down first, and then edit them into a more coherent form later. But so far I'm pretty pleased with my progress. Hopefully I can sustain the early momentum.

You can read excerpts from The Wheatyard Chronicles here (click on "See NaNo Stats & Read Excerpt"). I rather like the nifty Flash-based profile viewer they've added this year. It's cool to see the story excerpt in pseudo-book form.

And So, It Begins...

I'm trying NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again this year. Basically, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Rough draft, of course; nobody (other than maybe Joyce Carol Oates) could write a finished novel in a month, or at least not one that anybody would ever want to read. The point of NaNoWriMo is to unlock the creative process, and get as much written down as possible without regard to any editorial concerns; it instills the routine of writing every day, workmanlike, rather than sitting around, procrastinating and waiting for inspiration to hit. My first two NaNoWriMo's were spent writing my novel-in-hiatus, Eden, and last year I attempted (and failed) to write 20 2,500-word short stories to get to my 50,000-word total; it did, however, produce two finished stores, "Ectoplasm" and "Immortality", which are currently out on submission to various literary journals.

This year I'm writing The Wheatyard Chronicles, about an eccentric writer named Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard (possibly his real name, more than likely not) who lives in a farm town in Central Illinois, not far from Champaign, where I went to college. Yes, I'm a character, too, narrating my interactions with Wheatyard and trying to figure who the hell he really is. Interestingly, the name "Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard" was coined by my five-year-old daughter, Maddie, during one of her imaginative flights of fancy. And I, pretentious artist wannabe that I am, have inflated that single name into what I hope turns out to be a compelling character. I'm attempting to write this on a laptop on my train to and from work, forsaking the longhand-in-notebook method of prior years which has obvious limitations. Unfortunately, the laptop has its own limitations as well, as it's an outdated Sony which doesn't hold its battery charge very well. But I'll try to make it work, somehow.

I wrote 1,130 words on the train this morning, on top of about 1,400 words that I had already written in October that don't count toward my total. You can monitor my progress, and read occasional excerpts, here.