Justine MuskJust another Storytellers Unplugged weblog

by Justine Musk

1

My first novel BLOODANGEL sells well and I decide to write a sequel. This does not happen within the time frame my publisher would like (first I write another novel, a YA supernatural thriller called UNINVITED).

I submit a proposal and fifty pages. I am delighted to be in a position where I can sell a book I haven’t written yet. My agent reports that my editor likes it, except for one chapter that features a character modeled a little too obviously on a certain blonde socialite. I like that chapter – it cracks me up – but I see the problem: the tone gets a bit too satirical, belongs in a whole different kind of novel. I revise and hand it in. Nod of approval. Negotiations begin.

Editor floats out the first offer. Agent blows a raspberry, especially once she gets the sales numbers for BLOODANGEL. I am nervous. Editor comes back with a considerably higher offer, but they want a two book deal. Agent and I insist on a one book deal, because the money wasn’t good enough, I don’t want to be locked into anything and I’ve heard too many horror stories about the damage that can happen if your editor changes publishers and the new editor who inherits you doesn’t like or respond to your work. Roc also makes an offer for UNINVITED, which surprises me, but it ends up going to MTV Books (now an imprint at Simon & Schuster).

Back at Roc, my editor and I exchange notes about how glad we are to work with each other again. I mention my reluctance to take a two-book contract in case she does not remain at Roc. “Oh,” she emails breezily, “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here for a long time.”

2.

Of course, after the delight of a new contract wears off, I realize: I actually have to write the damn thing.

I complete a draft and hand it in. I have a bad, edgy feeling about it. I know in my gut it’s nowhere near as good as it needs to be. I ponder the creative process in general and where I might have gone wrong.

I get the publication dates for each book. UNINVITED is slated first, for fall 2007. The as-yet-untitled SEQUEL (which my editor cheekily calls “Bloodangel 2: Revenge of the Bloodangel”) comes out July 2008, nearly three years after its predecessor. I realize my publisher’s concern: with such a time lag between the two books, will readers still care? I discuss this with my husband, who is logical and rational to a fault and always chooses the blunt truth over sparing those silly things called ‘feelings’ (this used to bug the hell out of me, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate it). He suggests that the time lag might actually work to the book’s advantage: BLOODANGEL will have had longer to circulate, to get read and recommended to friends. I ask myself: if I loved a book, would the time lag affect my purchase of the sequel? My answer is immediate: Hell no. Meanwhile George R R Martin’s new book comes out, and despite the time lag between the books in his series, sales are definitely not a problem for him. I am not George R R Martin, but I take some cold comfort from that. I also make the firm decision that book 3 in my own little series – if indeed there is a book 3 – will come out much more closely on the heels of book 2.

3.

There is a long period in the publication process when absolutely nothing happens. It reminds me – and I note this on my blog – of standing in line at a bank. There are a number of manuscripts ahead of you. As each month ticks by, and another release date is met, the line shuffles forward and you get closer to the front, where your editor is hunched over her desk with her red pen and her massive thermos of coffee. Every so often she lifts her head and says, blearily, “Next.”

Meanwhile I am busy with rewrites for UNINVITED. Then I decide to go back and rewrite SEQUEL on my own, to ease some of the angst that just thinking about the book has been causing me. I send the new draft to my agent, who’s talking possible foreign sales. She reads it, and instead of sending it off to foreign subagents, says, “Let’s wait and see what [editor] has to say about it.”

I am not surprised. My sense of the book is that while much improved, it is still deeply problematic. I also begin to realize that in my eagerness to write a sequel I didn’t “honor my creative process” enough to let the story deepen and flesh itself out in my mind. Usually when I come to writing a novel, it’s been living in my head for months or years. Which was not the case here. I started writing it for the wrong reasons – I wanted that new book deal, I liked the idea of writing a sequel – and not because it was demanding, or even ready, to be written.

I wait for my editor’s editorial letter, looking forward to pinpointing what’s wrong and fixing the damn thing. Because I do think that somewhere in that mess is a really good story, and despite my difficulties with the manuscript I’m excited about its final shape.

Then I get the news.

My editor is leaving Roc. She’s taking a new job at a different publishing house.

4

I’m not just waiting for an editorial letter; I’m waiting for a new editor.

Weeks pass, then a few months, and the book remains without an editor. My agent sends me an email. Time is slipping by, she points out – it’s now spring 2007, and the pub date for SEQUEL is a little over a year away. In publishing terms, this is not long at all, especially when your manuscript is still as screwed-up as mine. My agent is polite and does not phrase it quite this way. What she does say is that she has some thoughts on the book, would I like to hear them or wait for the new editor’s comments?

I say, Bring it on.

So the editorial letter I receive for SEQUEL, pointing out flaws and problems and suggesting certain revisions, ends up coming not from any editor at all, but my agent.

It’s not quite as brutal as I expect.

The first quarter was good, she says, and got her excited. Then the book “kind of falls apart” from there. The plot is complicated and confusing and relies too much on characters speculating and explaining things to each other. Parts of the book feel like “cool set pieces” that don’t really move the story forward. And the characterization also suffers: the nuances of several of the characters, she says, “just get lost” in the second half.

Despite all this, she says she is “genuinely excited about the book” because she recognizes all the layers of conflict (she then lists them, just in case I doubt her). She also sees a possible new direction for the book, highlighting some dialogue between two characters that could open up a powerful storyline. Odd thing is – or maybe not so odd — I had had that same thought myself while writing that same scene. I’d sensed that perhaps the real story lay down that path instead of the one spelled out in my outline. But I had chosen to override that thought, that instinct, staying loyal to my outline instead.

That, I finally realize, was my mistake.

My other mistake lies in the outline itself. Everything hinges on plot events, plot points, “cool set pieces.” In my anxiety over what happens next I had forgotten to ask the true central question that should define any novel:

How do(es) my character(s) change, and why?

That one question brings the focus to where it should have been all along: on character. Which very quickly brings the real story into light. And it is completely different from my previous two drafts.
Damn.

I keep maybe thirty or forty pages, toss the rest, and begin again. I keep an eye on the deadline but also take the time to really sink into the writing. To give myself the mulling and dreaming time I’ve learned that I need — away from the laptop –so that I can return to the book with tweaked ideas, new ideas, better ideas. Despite the pressure and frustration of a new deadline, which I realize I am not going to meet, I am finally enjoying this work. I feel myself writing from a different place now, a deeper place, and some of the scenes leave me shaken. This is a good sign.

And now I have my title: LORD OF BONES.

5

I finally get a new editor. My agent knows her, approves, and seems relieved. My new editor was promoted in-house and remembers me, she says, from when I visited the publisher’s offices in summer 2005 and brought my editor a basket of gourmet chocolate which we shared with anyone who wandered past her open door.

I discuss with my agent and new editor that I am not doing a rewrite so much as a whole new book, and it’s taking me a lot longer than I anticipated (in fact, I will continue to grossly misjudge how quickly I can get this thing done). My editor proves very understanding, possibly because, as my agent points out, I’m in this situation partly because I spent so long without an editor at all.

My editor prepares for her first meeting with the art department to talk about the cover. For this meeting to be productive, however, she needs to have some idea of what the book is actually about. I hand in the first 180 pages and a synopsis. Both agent and editor say things like: fantastic, LOVE IT, superb.

My editor sends me a note asking for detailed physical descriptions of two of my characters. Apparently they’re going to be on the cover.

My editor waits for me to finish the book. She waits. She waits. Copyediting needs it by October, but she tells me she can hold them off until November.

I get it to her in December.

It’s not that I find it difficult to write this book; I don’t. I take a deep pleasure in this world, these characters. I want to meet my deadline, but I also want to give the story its due. So I follow the ebb and flow of the writing process, I let myself “write long”.

My editor finally gets a manuscript that’s 420,000 words. She is nonplussed. But I know the book is genuinely overlong, and it’s easy, now, to recognize the excess and a relief to carve it away. My editor very quickly gets another version that’s 15,000 words lighter. She is relieved.

6

My editor emails me a heads-up that she is overnighting the copyedited manuscript. She tells me gently but explicitly that she will absolutely need it back by Jan 23. There is no room for extensions on this, due to the extensions on extensions on extensions she has already given me. Whether she intended to or not.

This is my last chance to spend real time with the story. All its bones are set, and I cannot change them; but this time to get at the language, the details and inconsistencies, the line-by-line flaws, and I can still add bits of new material where new material is required. The next time I see the manuscript, it will be as pageproofs, where changes I can make will be limited to fixing typos.

To my surprise, the sequel to the sequel is already pushing at my mind, demanding to be written. (First, though, I want to finish a manuscript called SHADOW HILL, about halfway written and put aside to re/write LORD OF BONES.) My editor explains that because of the time lag between BLOODANGEL and LORD OF BONES, Roc won’t be able to make an offer until the presale orders for BONES come in, which will be in March or April. Hanging over this is the possibility that Roc won’t make an offer at all.

The book won’t come out until July 1, but by then so much of its fate will have been decided: the presale orders determine the initial print run, which determines the confidence Roc will have in the book and the support they’re likely to put behind it.

By then, I will be promoting BONES as much as I am able.

I will also be deeply involved with another novel. And it’s not just because writing is a compulsion and the publication process – despite its frustrations, long pauses and disappointments – is addictive, culminating in the incredible experience of being read by strangers who pay actual money for this thing that you made out of nothing. It’s also because the best way, possibly the only way, to recover from the novel you just published is to engage yourself in the next one.

—Justine Musk

By Justine Musk

 

This is me at nine years old, trailing my mother into the record store, a fairly unusual place for her to be.  We were in Lansdowne Place, one of the big shopping structures springing up along the outskirts of town and steadily sucking the breath from its center, where the other mall, Peterborough Square, hung on for dear life, and where a huge stuffed bear towered over the sidewalk and regularly scared the bejesus out of me (when I wasn’t wondering why the hell it was even there in the first place). 

So I was looking at my mother flipping through the big flat squares that used to hold those vinyl things called ‘records’ — CDs still off in the future and the iPod not yet a gleam in the eye of the public body — and I asked what she was looking for and how come we weren’t going home yet because I was bored to death dragging around after her when I would rather be reading a Lois Duncan novel.  I don’t think I phrased it like that. 

“Scott’s son is a musician,” she said.  “He has a record.  I’m trying to find him.”

Scott was a writer.  He was a sports journalist who wrote so well about hockey that he had been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.  He also wrote novels.  I have a vivid memory of Scott at our front door, stomping slush off his boots: a big broad-shouldered white-haired impressive man who no doubt played a lot of hockey himself, back in the day.  (This was in Canada, where hockey was so woven into the fabric of smalltown life that, like the air you breathe or the way you walk, it never occurs to you to think about it. It’s just there. It seems natural that when Wayne Gretzky defects to the LA Kings, an entire nation convulses with grief and outrage and turns his blonde American actress wife into an evil Jezebel, luring the innocent and naïve and lovestruck Gretzky out of his Alberta paradise into the hellscape of Beverly Hills.  Those evil palm trees! — those godforsaken sexy people! — those satanic ocean breezes!  — what was Gretzky thinking?)  He was talking about his new book, about two young hockey players who solve a murder mystery, and the excellent review it had gotten in Maclean’s (the Canadian equivalent of Time).   “It said the book was ‘masterfully crafted’ and the phrase just kind of hung there in front of my eyes,” he said, and lifted his hands to demonstrate.

My mother worked part-time for Scott, transcribing interviews; it was a familiar sight to see her at her electric typewriter, earplugs sealing her off into her own world, fingers flying along the keys in a way that I would emulate.  (I’ll have you know I became the county Typing Champion three years in a row, each time lugging an impressively massive trophy back to my high school. You never would have thought that trophy was for typing.  You would have thought it was for hockey.)  Scott quickly became less of an employer and more of a family friend (perhaps my mother was slightly attracted to him, although my mind refuses to go there) and his visits to the house were happy things.  I was very shy around him; I was shy around everyone.

I didn’t know his son was a musician.  I didn’t know he had a son at all. 

Because this was Peterborough, Ontario, I knew the kind of musician his kid had to be:  maybe like my cousin, in a band that played around Toronto and maybe, if they were lucky, got nice reviews written up in the The Toronto Star and maybe – maybe –an actual record deal for a record that got made only to sink like a weighted-down corpse. That, to me, was pretty much the epitome of the success a musician from my area seemed capable of, for reasons that had little to do with their actual skill and talent, and everything to do with the area itself.  (Flash forward two decades or so, and a hometown band called Three Days Grace would prove me wrong.  My sister dated a guy who used to play for them, but quit to join another band when he didn’t think Grace would ever go anywhere.  They landed a million-dollar deal shortly after.  I suspect he regrets that decision.  I might feel sorry for him, but then he cheated on my sister, got another girl pregnant and married her instead. I suspect he regrets that decision as well.)

Back to that afternoon in Lansdowne.  My mother kept flipping through the rows of records.  She couldn’t find Scott’s son, which disappointed (if didn’t surprise) both of us.  We wanted to buy that music and take it home, as an act of benevolence, of warmth toward Scott, no matter how much his son’s stuff likely sucked.  She thought the band’s name involved a crazy horse.  The son’s name, she told me, was Neil.  Neil Young. 

The name meant nothing to either of us.

 Many years later, at Queen’s University in snowpacked Kingston, Ontario, I would play ‘Harvest’ so many times that my roommate who slept above my ceiling would finally lose it, stomping down the stairs (he was a big guy) to yell,  “You are ruining that album for me!  You are ruining it for me and it is one of my favorite albums ever!  I love that album!  I would rather suffer through New Kids on the Block than hear you play ‘Heart of Gold’ one…more… goddamn time!  Because  ‘Heart of Gold’ is a great…goddamn…song!”  And I would play that CD not out of charity or benevolence, but because Neil Young is a rock god I would have discovered on my own, eventually, even if I had never known his father.  But because I did know Scott, because I heard the man tell anecdotes about this kid whose family broke apart and who moved around a lot and got into some trouble, Scott’s big hands splayed across the armrests as he leaned forward a little in his chair, Neil became mortal for me in a way that, say, David Bowie never quite did.  (Once I was at a music awards fund raiser thing and Bowie walked right behind me.  My friend waited until I finished speaking, then said, “David Bowie just walked right behind you.”  I turned, but he was lost in the crowd.  I could have killed my friend for being too polite to interrupt me, for not being a Bowie fan herself.  She just didn’t know better.  But still. A pox on her.)

But when I was nine, and ten, and eleven, I was still a long way from realizing just how influential a musical figure Neil Young truly was.  Scott himself never told us.  Maybe because he was amused at our ignorance – the way I was once, when American friends of mine met this guy at a house in LA who introduced himself as Robbie Williams. When they asked him what he did, he said, a touch awkwardly, “I’m a singer,” and they gave him these bland, that’s-nice expressions, the way you do when you meet any random person in LA who says he’s an actor or musician or screenwriter.  Eventually they went off to look him up on Wikipedia. They came back impressed.  They took me aside to explain why.  I knew who he was: my husband and I regarded his lesser-known song “Me and My Monkey” as ‘our’ song, because it is so oddly stirring even as it cracks us up.  (‘Heart of Gold’ it may not be, but the title also has the word ‘monkey’ in it.  This is  important to us.)  

But I don’t think Scott was just amused. This was in Canada, after all, and Canadians as a general rule are self-deprecating and modest.  (Also ironic.  A national magazine once held a contest to find a slogan that started off “As Canadian as…”, in hopes of finding the Canuck equivalent of “As American as…baseball and apple pie.”  But since Canadians would rather listen to New Kids on the Block twenty million times than model their [very fierce, very proud] sense of national spirit after America — or any other country, but especially America — the winning slogan turned out, “As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.”  Which still strikes me as incredibly funny and makes me swell with pride for my vast northern homeland, in itself a very Canadian reaction. When your national animal is not an eagle, or a bear, but the cute hardworking little tree-chomping beaver, irony is a good way to go.)   I have a friend in LA who is a self-made multi-billionaire, has dined with international royalty and Angelina Jolie.  He’s also one of the most low-key, unassuming dudes in the room, extremely polite and exceptionally nice and the last person to tell you about any of his achievements unless you corner him and ask him direct. And maybe threaten his life. He’s Canadian.  ‘Nuff said.   (He’s also fond of hockey.)  

And fame itself, although the concept may exist cross-cultures, is a weirdly American thing.  One of the paradoxes about Canada – one of the ironies, you might say –is that you haven’t really made it until you’ve made it in the States.  Achieving fame in Canada alone isn’t enough to truly qualify.  Except, if you abandon Canada to become successful in the States, you then become a kind of traitor who is no longer very Canadian at all.  (“Bryan Adams.”  Sniff.  “He’s practically an American!”)  And if you mention Robbie Williams in a group conversation, you can pretty much count the seconds until someone says, “But, you know, he never broke through in the States.”  (Just as some of you Americans and Canadians are thinking right now, I’ve never even heard of the dude, so how famous can he be….?)   

Scott told us about a time he and his son came to Peterborough.  Scott had moved to a farm in nearby Omemee, and Neil was visiting him there for the first time. He was shocked, aghast and dismayed to discover that his father had no piano.  If Neil was going to spend maybe a week a year at this place, there must be a piano.  So father and son trucked in to the sprawling metropolis of Peterborough (pop. 60 000) and went to a music store tucked into a plaza ten minutes’ drive from our house (on Cumberland Avenue), the same plaza where teenage me would become addicted to physical exercise through an infatuation with a martial art (tae kwon do)  and its older charismatic instructor (whole other essay).

So the bored young salesman killing time in a store that few people went into (and would soon close for good) looked up at the tinkle of the bell and watched Neil Young step through the door.  The expression on his face, Scott said, was comical.  He could not speak. Neil sat down at the different pianos, played a few notes, and said,  “I’ll take that one.”  The process took maybe ten minutes.  The youth found his voice enough to complete the transaction, but his hand was shaking so hard that he nearly dropped the pen he handed Neil to sign the receipt. There was a second half to the anecdote – Scott went on about the struggle to get the piano up an ice-slicked road and through the highly inconvenient doorway of his farmhouse – but for me the story always stopped there, with the expression on the kid’s face, the trembling pen.  Neil might as well have dropped in from another planet.  He wasn’t a scruffy-looking amiable Canadian boy anymore, but a huge blue three-headed alien who happened to write a good lyric. Except to listen to Scott’s anecdotes, he was also the new kid in funny clothes who got bullied at school until Neil very calmly got up and went to the pencil sharpener at the back of the classroom.  He picked up a big dictionary and walked between the desks.  He brought it down solidly on his main tormentor’s head.  He was suspended.  He was also never picked on again.

Fame is a funny thing.  Something about it, the aura of it, seems to destroy all rational thought. It’s either light years away or right in your face.  I once picked up that when Brad Pitt became famous, a handful of guys from his college fraternity also lit out for the territories of Hollywood.   People think fame is mythical, impossible, until someone they know actually achieves it, and it’s usually not the person you expect  (Pitt?  That slacker with the bad skin who lived down the hall? He made it?  Darryl Hannah?  That strange gangly girl from high school?  She made it?)   LA exemplifies how fame manages to be both everywhere and nowhere.  You see famous people often enough to be surprised when an out-of-towner reacts like it’s a big deal.  Famous people have a startling habit of looking like normal folk, if somewhat thinner and more attractive and better-dressed – than average (but then, so are LA denizens in general). Jessica Alba?  Just another pretty girl sitting in an outside café.  (Supermodels are the exception to this. They tend to be kind of freaky.)   You think if they can be famous, why can’t I, why can’t I just reach out and take it, what have they got that I don’t?  If you’re a teenager who thinks he or she was born to be famous, and that this conviction of yours is just another sign that you’re destined to be so, you might tell people you have a 50/50 chance at it while allowing to yourself that you’re just being modest.

This, after all, is not the kind of country where people go to shrines and tempt cajole beg and bribe the deities to bring them good luck; not a country where people readily admit that you might not be the captain of your fate, at least not all the time, that a human life can transform spectacularly in a moment of extreme and random luck.  

Fame, though, is usually the abnormal result of an abnormal obsession, and obsession by its nature is a weird and solitary thing, a thing that drives people to decisions that other people consider stupid or foolish or insane.  But fame becomes such an object of fascination in itself that it gets disconnected from the actual work it requires – or, especially, the genuine need to do the work that drives these people in the first place.  People want the success, and maybe an inspiring soundbite behind it (she was a single mother on welfare! She wrote in cafes with her baby because she couldn’t afford a sitter! J.K. Rowling has balked at the way the myth of her life has been streamlined into something she considers both inaccurate and unfair).  What people are not so interested in is the tedium, the daily grind and fatigue and sheer inconvenience of the struggle.  It’s dull.  It’s too much like their own life.  So what we get is a culture that inculcates kids with the desire to be famous and the youthful conviction that they can and will be, without any real knowledge of how to go about it:  how to evaluate themselves realistically, absorb tough honest critiques of their work and grow and change, practice every day and most likely alone, make sacrifices, weather constant doubt from others and self, cut against the grain, etc., etc.  You know how it goes.

What we also don’t get is the idea that there’s actually a spectrum — a whole existing range of possibility — between being wildly famous and a total starving failure. 

In your face or planets away.  Everywhere and nowhere.  

If Neil Young was like a messenger from a faraway place who opened up this idea in my life that, yes, you can go out into the world and experience amazing things, no matter where or how you start out, then his father presented a different possibility, a lot less glamorous but exhilarating in its own right.  You can build a rewarding and workable life around the creative work that you love, and have a bit of talent for, and work very, very hard at –  and, of course, persist like a crazy person. 

There’s a scene from the documentary ‘Comedian’ (it’s good, you should watch it) where a rising young comic bitches to Jerry Seinfeld about how he’s spent his twenties busting his ass across the country in obscure smoky clubs while his friends get promoted and buy nice cars and houses in the suburbs.  He works just as hard as his friends do, the comic complains, but what does he have to show for it?  Where’s his suburban paradise? Jerry gives him a cool bemused look and says something like, “You mean there’s something else you wish you’d been doing all this time?”   

In high school I realized there was nothing I’d rather do than write fiction, find some way to travel to farflung places, and maybe have kids, maybe even a lot of kids, if my life went in a direction that allowed motherhood without giving up writerhood (turns out it did – at least so far, knock wood — in a way that no one in my hometown would ever have believed or predicted).  My own life to date has turned just as much on luck – both very good and very bad –as it has on other things, not least because I came so young to such a clear idea of what I wanted.  Although that’s not completely it: most kids, if you give them enough unstructured space and time to discover themselves, will figure out what they love to do.  This might not translate so easily into what they want to be, since the world has a tendency to keep changing and professions and job markets have a way of changing with it, but it will point them in the right direction.  If   they don’t get steered off into some much more sensible but ultimately inappropriate path instead.  I’m lucky not because I started writing young; I’m lucky because I never stopped.

I could say that Scott Young was a major influence in my life because he was the first adult outside of parents and teachers to take my writing seriously; when my mother told him I’d written a novel at 13, he asked to read it, then called her up to tell her how good he thought it was and that he wanted “to show it around to a few people.”  I could say it’s because his girlfriend, a writer and teacher, told my shy and awkward phone-phobic self, “If you could hear these people talking about how talented you are, you wouldn’t be afraid to call any of them ever again.”  I could say it’s because Scott exposed me to the whole process of agents and editors, submissions and feedback, critique and revision; and how to navigate the endless loop of hope and rejection, hope and rejection, getting so close to a book deal that your father drives you out to meet the editor face-to-face, only to have it all fall apart the way these things often do.  How to move on to the next thing, the next book, the next loop of hope, but this time with the knowledge that you’ve gotten better, and with the next book you’ll get better still. I could say that by the time I left high school, I was so invested in my life as a writer that even Apollo and his horses couldn’t drag me into any other profession.

(None of the professional contacts Scott gave me over the years ever panned out, by the way, in terms of actual publication; I’d love to end the story like that, but it’s nowhere so neat and even depressing in terms of how many years it still took me to sell. I went to university, went to Japan, went to California, made some contacts on my own that never panned out either, and eventually landed the agent who landed me a book deal through a random query letter.  Just as if I’d never had any contacts at all.)

Scott was a mentor, but he was also a living local example that it was even possible.  You could go out there and make a living as a writer;  you could go out into the wild blue places and make a living with your guitar and your shaky, husky, not-so-great voice that still knows a compelling melody.  He showed me that this was possible even as he showed me the  effort and daily commitment that goes into it, no matter how good or smart you might actually prove to be (and which is never enough on its own, not close). He showed me the craft as well as the art.  When I went to my first writer’s conference with the first pages of the first draft of what would become my first published novel, a novelist and workshop leader sitting at my dinner table absorbed my youth ( I have always looked younger than I am, thanks to a once-rounded face, once-oily skin, and freakish inability to tan that you give up all attempts and read indoors instead) and gently tried to reality-check me by stressing how a writing apprenticeship doesn’t take just five years of real effort, but ten.  Or fifteen.  But I had already learned this long ago, from Scott Young.  I had been writing seriously, at that point, for ten years, give or take a break here and there.  I figured I was getting close.

Not so long ago, I found the courage to approach Neil Young at a fund raiser music-awards thing (same thing, different year, where I almost glimpsed Bowie) and asked him about his father.  He seemed surprised.  He conveyed to me, through the dinner noise that filled the big room and the rapid thud of my own heart, that Scott was “not doing too well”.  His mind was going.  His health was gone.  I tried to express how much Scott meant to me, how much I’ve come to appreciate him, in ways I didn’t know how to when I was still that tongue-tied kid.  Everyone, I suppose, has that person in your life who leaves it for good before you ever get the chance to tell them what you’ll always wish you told them.  I didn’t get the chance to tell Scott.  So I tried to tell his son.  And now I’m telling you.

Scott told me something else, a long time ago, that I have held verbatim in my mind ever since.  No matter how old or young you are, the job remains the same: 

Make it sing.

 

                               — Justine Musk 

(Sorry if days are getting mixed up here, not sure exactly what happened. In any case, here is the story Justine gave me to post this month. Enjoy. DNW)
by Justine Musk

I was backing out of my parking space when she came out of nowhere and for a moment I thought she might be an apparition, if such things could exist behind the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at a busy Los Angeles intersection.

Her skin sagged in on itself, a muddy color that suggested a vague ethnicity or years in the sun or both. There was a piece of duct tape across the middle of her face and it went in where her nose should be. Cancer? I thought. Leprosy? She held up her hands – in ratty, fingerless gloves – and I shook my head and mouthed Sorry because I didn’t want to stop the car and roll down my window and hunt in my purse for change, because I wanted to get the hell away from her. I had visions of her crowding the car, hands held out for whatever I could spare, that duct-tape covered concavity where her nose should have been pressing up against the window. Instead, she stepped back. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her beside her shopping cart, a small woman bundled in a dirty orange sweater coat, brown hair hanging.

As I joined the flow of sunlit traffic on Beverly Glen I felt disgusted with myself. Here I was, a youngish healthy woman in a goddamn Porsche Turbo, a car that cost more than the vast majority of Americans earn in three years and I couldn’t be bothered to shell out a buck to a woman so unfortunate? She wasn’t some kid playing a con game; she was old; she was sick. I considered going back.

But I didn’t.

I saw her again in the parking lot by Whole Foods. My housekeeper does most of the grocery shopping but I was taking cooking classes to get my mind off another failed fertility treatment and I had the impulse to surprise my husband with a romantic, candlelit table. Coming out of the grocery store, gripping two bags of groceries, I saw her waiting just behind the Porsche. I wondered if she recognized the car. If she recognized me.

“Hi,” I said.

She stepped back as I approached so I could open the back door. I put the front passenger seat forward and arranged my groceries in the sloping space behind. She didn’t say anything. I could feel – or imagined I felt – her gaze, cool damp moss on the back of my neck. I checked my wallet. I removed a hundred-dollar bill and held it out to her. There was the leathery rasp of her fingers as she took the money and then I was turning away, getting into my car, hoping I was done with her, please was I finally done.

I stood outside the back of Neiman Marcus with my friend Laura. My husband had returned from his business trip and reclaimed the Turbo, so I was back to driving my Mercedes Jeep. I saw the glinting hulk of it emerge from the garage. It pulled up in front of the station and as I walked round to the driver’s side, money folded between my fingers to tip the valet, I saw the beggar woman on the far edge of the carport. She had one hand on the edge of her shopping cart, as if to protect or claim it. She was looking at me.

Instead of stepping up into the Jeep I turned and walked back to Laura. The beggar woman was still there, standing apart from the loose group of people waiting for their vehicles, none of whom took any notice. The duct tape glinted in the sunlight as she turned her head in my direction.

“My God,” I said to Laura, who was eyeing the approach of her Saab. “I think she’s following me.”

“Who is?”

“That – person – over there! I gave her a hundred dollars the other day and she’s still—“

“There’s no one there.”

“She’s right there.” I pointed. I didn’t care if it was rude. The beggar woman looked at Laura, then to me. Her face remained impassive.

“Christa.” Something odd had crept into Laura’s voice. “I swear to you, there’s no one there.”

I looked away from her. There was nothing I could think of to say. I knew the woman was still looking at me, and I also knew what Laura must be thinking: She hasn’t been right since the child died.

I met my husband at the movie theatre at Century Plaza but afterwards couldn’t remember what we saw or who was in it. Bill was troubled, something about stocks in southeast Asia not performing like his hedge fund expected and costing them twenty million dollars. “Comes with the job,” he said, and tried to shrug it off, and we sat in the restaurant with our salads and our lobster, not saying much, but then we never had to.

I woke up in the middle of the night. I stared at the ceiling and heard it again: a faint, rhythmic squeaking from somewhere in the house.

I got out of bed. I was naked, and grabbed my kimono from where I’d tossed it on the wool-and-silk carpet. Yanking the sash, I ran to the landing that overlooked the first floor.

The beggar woman was pushing her shopping cart across the area rugs, the stretches of bare white marble. A space of silence, then the squeak and clatter of wheels, then another silence. Every so often she would stop to contemplate a Ming vase, a teakwood cabinet, a small Picasso in a gold frame. “You,” I said. She stopped, craned her neck in different directions until she found me. “Get out of my house,” I said. “You have no right to be here. You have no right.”

By now I knew what to expect from her. She would keep looking at me; she would say nothing. And suddenly I found it easy to fill all that nothing with words.

I described the accident that killed our baby girl. I described our inability to get pregnant. I wasn’t looking for sympathy. At least I don’t think I was. I was trying to make a point. What that point actually was, I don’t actually know, something about how misfortune touches us all. This seemed very insightful to me, at three o’clock in the morning.

“So we all take our knocks,” I said, “one way or the other. We all get torn apart and dumped on our ass, one way or the other. I’m not any different from you. Okay? Okay? Will you leave me alone now?”

I turned and fled.

Through the rest of the night, I heard that lurch of wheels on marble, then muffled by rug, then rasping off marble again.

When morning lit the windows, she was gone.

I asked around, discreetly. I didn’t believe in psychics, but I hadn’t believed in ghosts either, so I found myself open-minded.

The psychic’s name was Daniel, and he lived in a charming Spanish bungalow off Sunset and Doheny. “Come in,” he said graciously. He was a lean man of indeterminate age with slicked blonde hair and a face that had seen one too many plastic surgeries; his features were doll-like, his skin stretched out and smooth. He wore black leather pants and a Cavalli blouse. I had the same blouse in my closet.

He led me past shabby-chic furniture, to a small sunlit porch. A canary trilled inside its hanging cage. A pitcher of lemonade and glasses waited on a wrought-iron table. He offered me some. The lemonade had champagne in it, which I was glad to discover. “This will relax you,” he said. I began to feel relaxed. He was supposed to be very good. He had given my one friend the full name and Colorado address of her long-lost biological father; he told a friend of a friend that his daughter’s Olympic-athlete boyfriend would be exposed for drug use and banned from his sport. It hardly seemed possible. But it happened.

“So, my dear,” he said. He pointed at a Lalique crystal sculpture on the table in front of him. “Sorry to revert to such nasty clichés as crystal-gazing, but truth is, it does help one focus the mind and senses. You have never been to a psychic before.” This was not a question. “You’ve never even had your tarot cards read for fun. So why seek me out, why now?”

I was formulating an answer in my head when he said, “I see.”

“I’m sorry?”

“This visitation,” he said, “this woman who plagues you. I am sensing a certain…noselessness….is that correct?”

I managed to mutter, “Duct tape,” and he made eye contact with me and nodded.

“So the ghost is real,” I said, “and I’m not crazy?”

“Come, now. You may not know yourself like you should – or at all — but you know that you’re not crazy.”

“How can I get rid of her?”

“I’m not sure you can. But you’re lucky. I’ve seen worse.”

“You’ve seen worse?”

He was silent, tapping his fingers on the table. The canary stopped singing and jumped from perch to perch.

“I don’t think your ghost will hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” I snapped. “I just want her to go away.”

“Ah, but that depends if she’s haunting your life, my dear, or your lifestyle. The latter you can walk away from. The former is a bit more complicated. I wish I could help you more, but I specialize in matters of the living. Things like this are rather beyond me.”

“Is there someone else, then? An exorcist or something?”

He pressed his lips together. “There’s a woman in Iceland,” he began, but then gave a sigh. “Except she’s comatose. So no, I’m afraid, no one comes to mind. The best option is just to ignore her. Maybe then she’ll go away.” This was the same advice my parents once gave me about dealing with schoolyard bullies. I did not remember it being successful.

“Well thank you,” I said, and stood. “I appreciate your seeing me at such short notice. I understand you have a huge waiting list.”

“Your name leaped out at me,” Daniel said, smiling, “as something different from the usual troubles. I wish you the best of luck. And…there’s something else? Something else you wish to ask me?”

I shook my head.

We stood in the doorway. His eyes were dark and kind. “Ah, my dear,” he said, and touched my face. “You’ll have two. A boy and a girl.”

My throat went thick. A boy and a girl, I thought. A boy and a girl.

As I turned away, he added, “But not with Bill.”

Or rather, it’s possible he said that. It’s possible I didn’t hear him right.

I rented out a nightclub on Hollywood and Vine for Bill’s thirty-seventh birthday. The beggar woman stood in the corner all night, both hands on her shopping cart, as Bill’s friends and cronies flowed past and around her.

We joined our friends Anita and David for a trip to London on David’s private jet. When I opened the door to the washroom at the back of the plane the beggar woman was sitting on the toilet, in her orange sweater-coat, her long dark hair tangled round her shoulders. We stayed at the newest greatest hotel, and the beggar woman pushed her stroller through the glossy lobby, rode with me in the elevator. Bill wanted to have sex. At first I said no. The beggar woman was camped out by the window, watching. But then I thought, What does it matter, she can’t hurt me, a boy and a girl, a boy and a girl, and I reached for him in the middle of the night. As I wrapped my arms and legs around him and held him as close as I could, I felt a thrill of hope. I can do this. I can ignore her until she goes away.

Bill got up before I did. I snuggled into the billowy duvet and listened to him order room service, coffee and juice and eggs benedict. He disappeared into the bathroom and I dozed off to the sound of the shower.

“That’s strange,” he muttered. “That’s really strange.”

I opened one eye. Our breakfast had arrived. He sipped coffee and said, “Hello sweetheart. Come get some protein.”

“What’s strange?”

“There’s a shopping cart outside our door. I wonder how it got there.”

I sprang out of bed as if I’d found a snake in it. The cart was empty. There were thick ridges of rust along the handles, there was an odd, metallic-rainwater scent.

“So you can see this,” I said to Bill.

“Of course I can see it. It’s right by our frigging door. Honey,” he said, “why are you shaking?”

As I passed through the lobby, a black-clad woman behind the front desk called out to me. “Mrs Sutter?”

“Yes?”

“I have instructions to return this to you,” the woman said. She disappeared through the door behind her and returned with something orange and tattered in her arms. She held it out to me, her face a polite, impassive mask.

The orange sweater-coat, crusted with sweat and dirt, gave off a powerful odor. I could feel my whole body cringing away from it, even as I cradled it in my arms. I wanted to drop it on the floor but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“Who gave this to you?” I demanded.

“I believe it was left with the night shift.”

“Find out,” I said.

She only looked at me.

“Find out,” I said again. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She sighed, and reached for the phone. I gripped the coat and charged through the lobby, through the glass door a handsome bellman held open for me, into frosty London air. I merged with the crowd on Oxford Street, where traffic lurched thick and noisy. I dumped the coat in the first trash can that felt far enough. I’m sorry, I thought. Without the coat to fill them, my arms felt strangely empty. I trudged back to the hotel.

At the reception desk, the woman looked at me oddly. “You did,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You,” she said, and I couldn’t help noticing her lovely British accent, “left the coat with us.”

I snorted. “That’s hardly possible.”

The woman shrugged.

Two days later, I stood at the bookstore counter and reached into my purse for my wallet. My fingers touched cloth, ragged and alarming: I drew out a pair of frayed fingerless gloves. The countergirl smirked at me. “Excuse me,” I said, and dropped the gloves beside the book I had intended to pay for, and got the hell out of there.

I was agitated, my own blood thumping at my ears. I roamed the outdoor mall. Food, I thought. If I could get some food into me, I would feel better, I would figure out some way of dealing with this. I went into the nearest restaurant – a small Italian place – and ordered a bowl of linguini. I was wolfing it down when my fork drew out a clump of hair, long and ratty and dark, tangled in with the pasta.

I knocked back the chair and scurried to the ladies’ room, one of the waiters pointing the way. I collapsed beside a toilet and banged shut the stall door. There was something edged and papery working its way up my throat. Stomach acid flooded my mouth. I hung my head over the toilet and retched, retched again, nearly doubling over with the force of it. Everything that was in me – my grief, my life – I suddenly wanted purged from my body. I wanted to feel hollow and clean. But instead I was choking, my hands scrabbling at my throat, as the rough scratchy thing – what had I eaten that would do this? – lurched upwards again and settled at an angle that blocked all air. I tried to take a breath and could not. I banged at the door but couldn’t figure out how to open it. I tossed my head back and strained for oxygen and the part of me still calm behind my panic thought how undignified this was, to die this way, in a public rest room, yet I also felt something else. A little flowering of relief. Of peace.

Then the thing jarred free and flew into my mouth. I tasted paper and bile and something coppery, salty, that might have been blood.

I spat it out into the toilet.

A piece of duct tape floated in the water.

I would not, could not think on it. I pressed the lever and listened to the churn water flushing. The duct tape was sucked out of sight and I closed my eyes and fumbled my way out of the stall, to the sink. I turned on the taps. The shock of cold water felt good on my face. She’s gone, I thought. I got her out of me. She’s gone. It will all be okay now.

It wasn’t until I was nearly home that I realized I no longer had my wallet – I’d been in such a rush to leave the restaurant I’d left it beside the bill I’d forgotten to pay. I thought of my cash, my credit cards, my ID. My identity.

The potted palms that flanked the front doors shivered in the evening breeze. My front key wouldn’t open the door. I pressed the buzzer, but it didn’t seem to be working. I pounded on the door. No one answered.

I stepped off the slate walkway, my heels sinking in grass. I could slip through the back gate, hope the doors off the terrace were open.

The dining room window was lit up.

Bill seemed to be having a dinner party.

I saw the table laid out with linen and flowers, porcelain and silver, the crystal wine goblets he’d inherited from his grandmother and which we hardly ever used. He sat in his usual place and seemed to be talking to somebody. He lifted his fork to his mouth, set it down, took a sip from his goblet. There was no food anywhere on the table, nothing in the glasses. Yet my husband kept eating and drinking the nothing.

He was the only person at the table.

The only living person.

The beggar woman stood behind him. And this time, I saw, she had brought along others. They kept to the corners, the shadowy walls. They were leathered, wizened figures bundled in cast-off sweaters and coats, trailing scarves, growing hair and beards and jagged fingernails, they moved in a shambling gait, their shoulders hunched, their limbs twisted. They ignored me, perhaps they didn’t see me the way I saw them, but the beggar woman knew me. She met my gaze across the room and through the glass. She had always known exactly what I was. She settled a hand on Bill’s shoulder and he tipped his head towards it, a blank dreamy look on his face. I slammed my hands against the window and screamed his name, already knowing he couldn’t hear me, he’d never hear me again.

– Justine Musk

by Justine Musk

This is not the essay I intended to write.

I write this in a lodge somewhere in Iceland where
I’ve been staying the past two days with my spouse,
assorted extremely-bright accomplished people, and a
famous actress. This gathering is meant to be a kind
of think tank retreat/salon concerning one issue in
particular. I won’t say what that issue is, because I
want to talk a bit about the famous actress without
giving away her identity, and, like any movie star,
which is why they become a movie star in the first
place, she has such a unique presence that it wouldn’t
take much to give her away.

It is going on Icelandic dawn. There is much drinking
of spirits and playing of music (electronic/dance
music, in case you’re thinking it’s something local,
which would strike me as rather humorous). Earlier I
was dancing with some of the others, and the actress
and I were comparing martial arts moves (I got my
black belt in taekwondo in my early twenties for no
real reason I can think of; she had to train for a
role).

Whenever you meet someone you already know through the
media, it is a strange feeling. It is strange because
you know stuff about this stranger you probably
shouldn’t know about any stranger; and they either
have to a) pretend they don’t know you know, even
though you know that they know that you know or b)
find some way of dealing with it gracefully. (Robert
Downey Jr, for example, throws out wry
self-deprecating comments about his past in a way that
is very charming, and takes a tense awkward thing and
puts it at ease).

There’s also the inevitable disconnect between your
sense of the person that’s come filtered through the
media, and the real person who turns out to be behind
all that. Who is usually shorter than you thought
(although not in the case of this actress) and not
quite as flawless-looking.

With this actress, though, the disconnect between the
media/public perception and the reality that I
experienced (and am experiencing right now, as she
sits on the floor four feet away from me and converses
with the others) is shocking to the point of seeming
downright unfair. Which is why I want to write about
it now, given the subject of my last Storytellers
essay (about working with the more subtle and unusual
angles of point-of-view).

Because when I mentioned that one of my
three-year-olds is a high-functioning autistic, she
said, “So am I.”

And I believe I said something like, “What?”

“I was diagnosed with that when I was a kid.” Thanks
to a loving determined supportive mother, she avoided
the fate of institutionalization, which would have
destroyed her. Of this she has no doubt.

I stared at her in a way I had managed not to do since
meeting her for the first time hours earlier in a
small private airport.

Because with this piece of information, and given what
I now know about mild autism, the rest of her suddenly
made sense. She is an elusive, quirky presence in the
media in a way actors and actresses are not supposed
to be, even as they complain about the burden of fame
(and then go for lunch at the Ivy and sit outside on
the patio while black-clad photographers gather along
the fence like crows along a telephone wire). She went
into acting because it seemed like a lovely way to be
in her own imaginary world. She was truly never in it
for the fame. That kind of attention came at her like
an attacking, invading thing. Because of the visual
way autistics acquire language — through linking it
with the visual images they collect in their mental
library — their first reaction to things is to take
them in a literal, concrete manner. Which is why,
when a well-known talk show host asked her, “So what
are you doing in New York?” and sat back and waited
for some entertaining banter, she could only look at
him blankly and say, “Press.”

“I don’t really care what people think of me,” she
told me, and I believe her. I believe her because
indifference to public opinion is one of the
characteristics of autism, part of the “being in their
own world” thing. It’s why someone with autistic
tendencies might neglect simple hygiene. It’s not like
they don’t understand how and why to take a shower,
wear clean clothes. They just need a better reason to
care — so what if someone doesn’t want to stand too
close to them?

I named another famous actor — someone I’ve been a
fan of for years — who demonstrates a lot of the same
traits that she does, and said, “Do you think he’s on
the spectrum?” (Autistic disorders fall along a
spectrum from very mild/high-functioning to Rain Man
severe).

“I’ve met him and I know people who know him,” she
said, “and you know, I’ve never thought of that
before, but given what my friends have told me about
him — I am one hundred percent certain that you’re
right.”

Here’s the thing. Talk to this actress, read an
interview with the actor I just mentioned, and it
becomes very clear that these are two intelligent,
interesting, articulate people who are better-informed
and better-read than most (her light plane reading was
a novella by Calvino, and she easily referenced a
short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I won’t list
this actress’s accomplishments outside of acting,
because I don’t want to give her away — but they are
impressive, certainly more so than the average joe or
jill who dismisses her as some ditz.

Because they do. Because both this actor and actress
are regarded within pop culture as — well — as kind
of dumb, actually, and not all that talented. Who
just lucked into the kind of success and acclaim that
they surely don’t deserve, even if they do happen to
be extraordinarily hot.

High-functioning autism has nothing to do with IQ; it
has everything to do with a disordered sensory
perception. People like these actors — and my son –
process the world in ways that basically render them
aliens in a country that speaks a different language
than they do and is not set up to understand them.

One of these things has to do with the way they
acquire language. They think visually instead of
verbally, which means they learn to understand the
world through images and video clips they collect in
their memories, replaying whenever they need that
specific information — if a kid wants a cookie, for
example, he references the video clip that shows him
how to pull out the chair, stand on it, open the
cupboard door, etc. He doesn’t think of it in words.
Eventually they start linking language to those video
clips — literally laying down a soundtrack — and
over the years they assimilate those words in ways
that allow them to use language more spontaneously and
‘naturally’.

So they don’t speak with the same inflections that we
do (those of us not on the spectrum). My son, for
example, delivers much of his language in a sing-song
type of voice, or in a rather flat robot-like
monotone. He also has some words and phrases that he
delivers much more ‘naturally’ because he’s
assimilated their meanings and uses and is comfortable
with them. Because my son’s autism is mild, and
because he’s ‘quick’ in ways that indicate a good,
bright mind behind the autistic tendencies, I have no
doubt that one day he’ll use language as fluidly and
masterfully as, say, the famous actress who will soon
be flying back to LA with me.

But he’ll never sound quite ‘normal’; he won’t be
quite as expressive and animated with his spoken
language as we are.

And because of that, he might get taken for ‘dumb’ or
‘ditzy’, even if he’s anything but, even if he’s
actually smarter than most of the people he deals
with, even if the fact of everything he’s overcome in
order to be dealing with people at all as a ‘normal’
if quirky person, is, to put it mildly, a huge
accomplishment in and of itself.

He won’t care, of course. He honestly won’t care what
other people think.

But I probably will.

When I was an English major at university, it was one
thing to sit around in classrooms and discuss the
importance of literature, of reading. It illuminates
the human condition, shows you different ways of
living a life, enlarges human understanding, yadda
yadda yadda. I believed all of those things, but in a
vague and abstract kind of way.

This is changing for me. I am a proud writer of
popular, escapist fiction, and I want to be
entertaining and compelling and emotionally moving.

And I also want to do my bit to “enlarge human
understanding”. It’s not such an abstract thing to me
now. It’s not quite so vague. To take someone and put
them behind the eyes of someone like my son. To give
them empathy where before they had none — not because
they’re insensitive, they just didn’t know any better.
None of us did.

I once snapped at someone who put me in the stereotype
of a certain kind of Los Angeles woman and wife. It
wasn’t the stereotype itself that bothered me; I’m
used to it, and I take pleasure in dismantling it on a
regular basis through being my own quirky, atypical
self (scratch a high functioning autistic, find family
members who share some of their characteristics, if
not to the extent that actually lands them on the
spectrum). I snapped at this guy because he was a
writer — or an aspiring writer — and I expected more
and better from him. Something more closely observed
and original. Something that might actually show us
something new. Cliches and stereotypes certainly
don’t. Kneejerk reactions to people certainly don’t.
We all know this, of course; we know how this makes
for bad writing. But it makes for bad living as well.
We realize this, of course. We just tend not to
realize how much.

—- Justine Musk – Somewhere in Iceland

–Justine Musk

1

My 3 year old son was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. At that point my understanding of such things began and ended with the movie RAIN MAN, but it turns out that autism falls along an entire spectrum, from very severe to very mild. My son falls into the mild end and, thanks to early childhood intervention in general, and speech, play, and occupational therapies in particular, gets more expressive and interactive all the time. One day he might fall off the spectrum altogether. He might become this kid who’s just a little bit odd, gets hopelessly lost in his own thoughts, processes the world a bit differently than others.

Like most autistic people, he shows signs of being highly visual and detail-oriented. Words seem a touch alien to him, as if his brain has to twist itself through some yoga positions in order to accommodate them (but yoga gets easier with practice, especially when you’re so young). By two, he could barely talk. Although he seemed to largely understand you, he would not answer a simple yes or no question. He could, however, identify every letter in the alphabet, both upper and lower case, and count to twelve — things he learned off one of those “make your baby a genius who gets into Harvard and rules the world!” DVDs when we were still allowing him screentime. (His fraternal twin brother also watched them, learned nothing, and requested Power Rangers instead.)

He has a collection of stock phrases he’ll use to mean different things, as if playing the same tapes for different reasons. Recently, though, as he becomes more comfortable with language, his language is slowly but steadily turning more spontaneous, flexible, and individualized to the situation at hand – and I expect one day he won’t sound that much different from the kids on the playground. I also suspect that he’ll have trouble following a long string of verbal information until he sees it written down. Abstract concepts might prove difficult for him. He’s quick to learn nouns, the names of things: he can identify a staggering number of animals, and seemed to learn colors and shapes overnight. Ask him to point out the hexagon, or the cylinder, and he can. But ask him if he had fun at the park, and he’ll turn blank. He knows what ‘park’ means, but ‘fun’ is a bit of a mystery.

2

My husband also seems to be a highly visual thinker. He writes and speaks extremely well, but on the whole he’s kind of a quiet guy whose mind ruthlessly orients him towards logic, pattern and detail, whether it’s large scale (building a company, building a rocket) or somewhat smaller (noticing the clothes I left on the closet floor).

Most people – or so I’ve read – are not like my husband and my son. Most people are verbal thinkers.

There was once an experiment called Gorillas in Our Midst. The psychologist, Daniel Simons, showed his subjects a video of a basketball game and asked them to count the number of passes made. During the game, while the viewers were watching and counting, a person in a gorilla suit walked onto the screen, faced the camera, thumped her chest several times and walked off.

Half the people in the experiment did not see the gorilla.

And I don’t mean they saw and then forgot the gorilla – the gorilla simply did not register on their visual radar. When the interviewer asked them, “Did you notice the gorilla?”, it wasn’t like the question jogged their memory (“Oh, right, the gorilla!”). Their reaction went more along the lines of , “Gorilla? What the hell…?”

I would have been one of those people.

For all my interest in art, I’m verbal, perhaps to an extreme. I have never managed to develop the habit of taking photographs. I do, however, have a knack for remembering movie scenes and conversations nearly verbatim. I can hold the dialogue in my head, complete with dramatic pauses — which comes in handy when I blog (and disconcerts my friends).

When you pair a verbal thinker like me with a visual thinker like my husband, you get some frustration and argument, especially in the first years of learning how to live with each other. My husband finds it impossible to believe that two weeks have gone by and I still haven’t noticed that one of the outside lights has gone out (“…gorilla? What the hell…?”) And I can’t figure out why he cares.

3

As writers, we understand the importance of empathy – of being able to slip inside someone else’s skin, view the world through a different set of eyes. So much of our craft depends on it. But when we talk about taking on different perspectives, chances are we’re talking about gender, culture, race or class, or perhaps sexual or political orientation.

It never occurred to me that there might be different kinds of empathy until I came across this paragraph, written by a woman who herself is autistic. People who claim that autistic individuals can’t empathize, she says, have a limited idea of what empathy even is:

“I have observed that normal people have bad visual empathy. They are often not able to perceive how another person would see something. Many people leave out essential details when they give driving directions because they are not able to imagine what they other driver would be seeing. People have told me that they do not get lost with my directions. Normal people have emotional empathy but some of them lack empathy for sensory over sensitivity in autistic people….Some of the best therapists who work with [autistic people] can empathize with these difficulties because they themselves have struggled with sound, touch, or visual oversensitivity.”

(Temple Grandin, “Thinking In Pictures: My Life With Autism”, Vintage, 1996)

So learning about my son also turns into a lesson about writing, as lessons about life tend to do. When I ask the question, How does this character perceive the world? I have to remember to consider not just belief systems and upbringing and personality, but to bring the question into the body itself. How does the character absorb the sensory world? What does she notice – what does she not notice? How does this shape her life, the kind of profession she goes into?

4

Considering the perspective a character takes on the world – without even realizing she’s taking it – reminds me of something urban fantasy writer Holly Black once said. She was speaking about the nature of urban fantasy, how the genre itself is defined by an abnormal slant of seeing:

…most urban fantasy puts the fantastical in the margins and interstitial spaces of life. Therefore, lunatics, drunks and the like–people that are also on the margins–often are portrayed as having greater access and understanding of magic…It, like film noir, is home to flawed and damaged characters and often a troubled loner of a protagonist. There is a sense that beneath the veneer of “normal” life, there exists another world and that to know its secrets is to sacrifice normalcy. That there is an upside down world where the runaways and the disaffected, the criminals and the drunks know the truth but truth’s price is a kind of exile.

And so, the world gets turned upside down, the fool is king, and the structures of everyday life become unstable…

One of the reasons Holly’s words struck me when I read them was because I had deliberately tried to write against the tradition of ‘troubled loner of a protagonist’ in my YA novel UNINVITED. I made my protagonist, Kelly, a likeable, well-adjusted, popular teenage girl. Except as the story worked itself out, Kelly got pushed more and more towards the margin. By the final draft, she had turned into a girl who had once been popular and at the center of things, but no longer. Now she was out at the edges, positioned to see things that would destabilize the structures of everyday life and push her outside ‘normalcy’ altogether – into the place where my story needed to happen. It’s also the place that allows, as Holly puts it, “the possibility of possibility” — which is the true magic.

5

There’s always that threat of exile.

The danger of an unusual perspective is that you might get trapped inside it, unable to understand other, more ‘normal’ people or enable them to understand you.

I look at my small, happy son and think about this.

My son will grow up noticing things most people miss. If he doesn’t grasp the big picture — the overarching idea of things — quite as well as those around him, he’ll specialize in a piece of that picture and learn it more deeply than anyone. It’s my job, as he grows up, to help him bridge his private world with the structures of everyday life, so that he can explore the reaches of his own perspective and share with us the strange magic he finds there.

By Justine Musk

1

One of the most common questions people ask me about writing – other than “where do you get your ideas” (or, as my mother-in-law once put it, “How does a nice trophy wife like you come up with stuff like this?” I assume she was joking, or at least half-joking, because that question still cracks me up, although when I share it with others they tend to look slightly horrified ) – is “Do you outline?”

And one of the things that annoys me about talking about writing is that so many people tend to come down so definitively on one side or the other.

If you don’t outline then you risk aimless, self-indulgent writing and months or years of wasted time and you’re a fool!

If you do outline, then you risk rigid, formulaic, predictable fiction and you’re a fool!

2

Ultimately when we talk about outlines, we’re talking about process, and the process behind novel-writing varies from writer to writer and book to book.

I made an experimental decision not to use an outline for the novel I’m working on right now. The result so far as been 100 pages of the strongest first-draft writing I’ve done in a long time. But to get to the point where I could feel confident writing a novel without an outline required many, many years of writing with an outline.

Outlines have worked for and against me. It’s important for me to understand why.

3

I outline because plot and structure don’t come easily to me. So I get insecure. It was not enough for me to vaguely know how the thing would end 300 pages from now; I wanted to hold the shape and structure whole in my head before sitting down to write the first page.

The benefit of an outline is that it requires so much thought and happily musing, meandering note-taking that once I was finally working off a completed outline, I knew I would complete the book itself. I’m not one of those writers who has a lot of half-finished manuscripts languishing in a basement somewhere (since our Los Angeles home lacks a basement) – from as early as my teens I took great pride in the fact that even my crappiest manuscripts were whole and entire in their crappiness. So I not only learned about navigating middles and endings – tough to do if you always quit 50 pages into a novel — I also developed a sense of myself as someone who not only starts novels but finishes them.

This helped me in the early part of my marriage. BLOODANGEL took so long to write and involved so much lulling, musing, backtracking and rewriting that my husband worried that I would give up altogether and sit on my laurels – or rather, on his laurels, which by that point had become shockingly financially lucrative – and then go somewhere nice for lunch. When he raised his concerns – repeatedly — I could laugh and swat them away. I knew I would finish.

4

So an outline lays out the bones of the story. You can take in with one sweeping glance how one thing leads to another leads to another, in a chain of action and reaction and proaction and ever-building consequence, while the stakes get higher and the characters get in deeper.

And an outline keeps me on track, particularly important since I’m happy to lose myself in the kind of backstory and tangents and details that turn out to be interesting to no one but me. Once I hit the bleak, thorny stretch of novel where you often feel so disoriented, muddled and lost – otherwise known as ‘the middle’ – an outline pointed me back to the path that led home to the end.

Sometimes this was a good thing.

Sometimes this was the problem.

5

I was struck by something Josh Waitzkin said about his success in the chess world. Josh – the subject of the movie SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER, which I loved and have watched several times – was an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth. In his book THE ART OF LEARNING, he links his style of play to his personality and recognizes a major advantage:

“It is my nature to revel in apparent chaos.”

Unlike his child competitors, who relied on sophisticated opening gambits to win the game, then began to lose confidence and fall apart the longer and more complicated the game became, Josh liked to play the edge, found joy and interest there. He didn’t mind losing some advantage to his opponent in the beginning. He knew he could prevail by guiding his games “into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence that I would be able to sort through the mayhem more effectively than my opponents. I often sensed a logical thread to positions that seemed irrational….” (p 41).

I myself do not play chess. (My husband, however, plays computer games, and sometimes I like to watch. For a few minutes.) But Josh’s observation made me immediately think of all those movies and novels where the writer sets up an excellent first act – and then the story goes into decline, falls apart, disappoints.

Some of my practice novels failed for these kinds of reasons. I set up intriguing premises – that went nowhere. I was like one of those chess players with a good opening game that then fell apart. It was partly because I didn’t know the rest of the game as well as I needed to — had yet to absorb the knowledge of craft in order to truly work it – and also because I had an issue with artistic control. I wanted to dictate my process, instead of respecting the ebb and flow of the story as it evolved deep in my mind.

This is the thing about outlines. If I’m not careful, they give me an illusion of control that turns out to be just that – an illusion.

I used to think that, to be a writer, I needed to write pages of my novel everyday. I’ve since learned that this isn’t true. A lot of novel-writing takes place away from the computer screen, in that mysterious elusive territory of the unconscious – the ‘undermind’, as I call it. I can sit in front of my laptop for four hours and manage five pages. Or I can jot down some ideas, notes about the scene I plan to write – perhaps sketch it out briefly – and then turn it all over to my undermind and go out and have a life (or try to). Later, I return to the laptop and write five pages in what feels like minutes – and the pages are richer, deeper, my undermind serving up a new twist or insight or cool detail that I didn’t even know I had in me. I don’t know how that process works, but I know that it does work, and in order to write well – and efficiently, since my life now requires I use every moment in the day or else I’m sunk – I need to trust it.

The outline vs the undermind.

The conscious vs the unconscious.

The controlled, planned-out approach vs the freefalling leaps of intuition.

In recent years I noticed a pattern to my spats of ‘writer’s block’. I would be writing well and easily for many days in a row, the pages would be piling up and then – bam. Roadblock. Sometimes I would surrender to it, go days without writing anything, and then a lightbulb popped off in my head, usually while I was working out or driving –activities that lull me into a contented zoning-out while engaging in forward motion, a condition my undermind seems to quite like. I’d realize a new story insight, a change in direction. Perhaps I’d realize that the scene I thought I had to write I shouldn’t even write at all. Then the writing started moving again and I’d be humming along.

Sometimes I took a different approach. I would use the outline to grit my way through the writing of scenes that did not want to be written. Then, later, I would come back to those same parts that caused me trouble – during revision, often at the agent or editor’s request. It became clear that this was the point in the novel where the novel itself had gone wrong. Here, the outline and undermind had parted ways, formed a fork in the road – and, by relying on the outline, instead of respecting the STOP sign my undermind was throwing up, I had made the wrong choice and would pay for it. The only way I could make things right again was by backtracking to the fork and dumping pages of material — in the most recent case about three quarters of a 90,000 word novel – in order to try again. This time in the proper direction, inventing a new outline that respected and listened to the voice of the story as that voice steadily revealed itself.

6

So I learned this: there’s a difference between using the outline to guide my undermind, and using it as a means of control, forcing my narrative into something that turns out wrong and unnatural. In order to learn how to properly use my original outline, I had to learn when to give that outline up. But doing this seemed a plunge into uncertainty and tension – that feeling of being muddled and lost, trapped inside your own story – and often I refused to do it even when I sensed I should.

“It was my nature to revel in apparent chaos…”

“…guide games into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence I would be able to sort through the mayhem…”

But when you surrender the original outline, you free up your mind to better ideas. The thing about the original outline is that you wrote it before you started writing your novel. Before you started exploring and learning the novel in the way you can only do by actually writing the damn thing – not by talking about it, not by jotting notes and doing ‘research’. It’s common knowledge that when brainstorming, your best ideas will not be your early ideas. The best ideas work their way up from a much deeper part of your mind; they require some time and thought and patience to let surface. They also require some trust. Trust enough, when writing a novel, to step off the edge of the cliff. To plunge into complexity and mayhem with no clear idea of how you’ll get out of it. To write calmly and confidently from that position of apparent chaos while the undermind finds the logical thread leading you to a triumphant endgame.

The novel I’m working on now – called SHADOW HILL– was originally intended to be a novella, which I figured would be a good length for my little experiment in writing a story without a detailed outline. I wanted to dream and mull and muse the beast along, follow my undermind wherever it took me, and see what resulted. Since this is very much a work-in-progress I can’t tell you exactly how this turns out; ask me later. But so far it feels pretty good.

My strategy of navigation involves a lot of rereading, paying attention to things that in previous projects I have blithely ignored — a too-prominent moment with a seemingly toss-off character, a recurring image, a suggestive piece of dialogue that opens up, if I would only let it, a new, exciting storyline. It’s not that I was oblivious to these things. My mind tagged them for what they were – signals from the undermind — but then I brushed past them, eager to stay in control and keep working the outline, which always seems easier than digging deep and readjusting my course. Inevitably, though, someone whose editorial opinion I trust would point out what I already suspected but did not want confirmed: “Your story is somewhere back here. Right here. This is where you lost the trail….or where the trail lost you.”

Let me give two examples.

During the writing of the first act of SHADOW HILL, I came across in my non-writing life an article about the evolution of the paparazzi in the age of the Internet, where hunger for images is obsessive and all-consuming and extremes are required to get the money shot. My undermind worked this into the story, which is set in Los Angeles and deals to some extent with the otherworld of celebrity. My protagonist and her romantic interest have a moment with a pap. The moment deepened, took on unexpected detail: I begin to see this pap in my head: he wasn’t speaking Italian like I’d originally thought, but Portuguese, because this guy was a hardcore dude with a beat-up face from the slums of Brazil who has a long-running adversarial relationship with the romantic interest and has made a lot of money off him already. Because I was indulging and exploring this moment, the scene – inspired by the article I’d read – became weighted in a way that made it ‘important’ which was not my intention. Instead of ignoring it, though, I posed myself a new question: “Okay, is there some way to use this, to make this pay off later? How can I justify keeping this material when it comes time to revise and streamline?” Later, when my undermind served up an answer, a big chunk of what has now grown into a novel clinked into place. By letting that moment grow, I found a ‘logical thread’ linking up a significant subplot to impact on the main plot.

Another issue involved my protagonist’s visions of – and conversations with – her dead brother. This book is not, however, a ghost story; it’s an urban fantasy that pivots around a hidden world that has nothing to do with ghosts. And yet the brother was there on page one and provides foreshadowing and tension to keep things compelling while I gradually introduce my vulnerable ex-academic bad-girl protagonist to the hidden world lurking in westside LA. So I knew the brother had to stay. (Besides, I like him.) I also knew that this was a problem. An urban fantasy novel requires a huge suspension of disbelief from the reader. You, the writer, only get one such suspension. One other-reality, hidden-world, element of the fantastic, whatever you want to call it: the reader is willing to roll with you assuming you establish the ‘rules’ of this reality and ground it within the everyday contemporary world.

My other-world in this novel concerns the true nature of certain celebrity characters my protagonist encounters. Throwing a haunting into the mix was, I sensed, too much. Too contrived. If I couldn’t find some kind of link between these two elements – so that the reason she sees her dead brother is directly related to the story’s ‘otherworld’ instead of incidental to it – I’d have to lose him. The easy solution – the original-outline solution – was to trot out that catch-all device of ambiguity, imply that perhaps she’s imagining him, he’s her way of interrogating herself or warning herself. But I wasn’t satisfied with this. Honest ambiguity can be great and necessary. False or lazy ambiguity is something else entirely: it’s the writer taking the easy way out, being obscure and mysterious and pseudo-artsy in order to cover up flaws in conception and craft. Falling back on some “is the ghost real or imaginary?” thing would be a cop-out. I needed a different idea.

So I wrote the first part of the book while absently mulling this over, posing the question and feeding it to the undermind. And when I did figure out the relationship between the dead brother and aforementioned celebrities, it was a different feeling from the paparazzi example above. The story itself remains unchanged. What happened, though, is that a new dimension to a particular set of characters opened up: the paranormal nature that forms the heart of this story acquired a power and originality that, I think – I hope – will set this book apart from the many other urban fantasies already out there. We will see. But right now, it feels good. It feels like I am writing in the right direction.

7

Although I am still relatively young – especially since female writers are allowed to age more slowly than, say, elite gymnasts or supermodels or Los Angeles trophy wives – I have been novel-writing for twenty years now. Some of those years were more productive than others, of course, but what strikes me is how long it takes to get a true sense of what the hell you’re doing, especially since the process itself will change from book to book. You don’t just need to learn to write a good novel, you need to learn to write the novel you’re wrestling with right now.

For me, an outline can serve as a teacher, introducing me to the basic movements of the novel that I need to learn. Perhaps a difference between a mediocre novel and a good novel, or a good novel and a great one, has to do with learning that story so well that you absorb it right into your bones. Rather like a dancer who learns her choreography so well with such skill that she transcends it: when you watch her, you don’t see her thinking through her technique, you see her becoming the dance and the dance becoming the music. Knowledge, intuition and technique come together, become something greater than the sum of their parts – not just art, but the fine, compelling kind.

When the writer truly learns the story, becomes in touch with the flow of the story, the outline itself becomes part of that flow. As the story moves and grows and changes, the writer steps to the outline to gain a long-range, heightened view, adapting and adjusting all the while. Then back into the story, moving farther and deeper, gathering new, intimate knowledge of the terrain only previously glimpsed.

Or at least, this is how I’ve come to understand my own process, given the nature of my personality. I am highly intuitive. I also appreciate a good plan. For me, the question of whether to outline or not sets up a false dichotomy: my own personal answer falls somewhere in between. I need to outline, but only if that outline keeps reinventing itself as my intuition sees fit for it to do. Otherwise I get stuck and my game breaks down.

The answer you figure out for yourself – as you absorb the lessons of others as well as from your own growing mountain of experience – will say a lot about who you are, not just as a writer but as a person. That, of course, is the fun of it.

— Justine Musk

By Justine Musk

(**Note from the “management**) This column was supposed to appear last month. It never made it from the overseas Kiosk to US e-mail, but we bring it to you now as Stan has company this weekend…flexibility is good. Justine wanted me to leave in the happy birthday to Skipp, but notes it’s over man…better late than never…
…..DNW)

(Happy Birthday John Skipp! Seems like just yesterday I was an impressionable young slip of a thing first discovering Splatterpunk….)

In the last few years I’ve often heard myself referring to “the writer’s personality” and so decided to sit down and take a look at some of the traits I think this ‘personality’ consists of.

Fascination

Persistence is important, but it’s not enough on its own. You can persist at a thing for twenty years and not get anywhere if what you’re actually doing amounts to the same thing in the same way over and over. Behind persistence is, I think, the engine that drives the whole process: a fascination with story, with narrative, with the process itself, and not just the vision of the book in the front window with your name in huge letters on the cover.

It’s that fascination that makes you choose reading over other activities and pastimes. It’s that fascination that propels you down the necessary road of writing, revision, rejection, more writing, more revision and more rejection; and which makes you pull apart other works of fiction to try to understand how and why they work in ways you haven’t quite managed yet.

Above all, it’s fascination that keeps you writing for the sheer sake of writing. Those who write for money, fame, publication, or just for the pose of being a writer — people who don’t find an inherent reward in the process itself — soon drift on to other things.

Curiosity

Margaret Atwood once observed that young poets focus inward, exploring the self; as they grow and mature their vision extends outwards, as they realize there’s a whole world out there that goes above and beyond them.

If you’re not curious about the world, other people, ideas, relationships, history, etc….then where the hell are you going to find stuff to write about?

The standard maxim delivered to aspiring writers — “write what you know” — was crippling to me for a long time. It helps to turn the phrase around — “know what you write”. Be curious, follow your obsessions, research the heart and soul and guts out of them. Give yourself interesting stuff to write about to go along with your developing craft.

Playful

I was struck by something bestselling YA author Holly Black (IRONSIDE) said at the start of her book tour with (also bestselling) YA author Cassandra Clare (CITY OF BONES). They were discussing fan fiction and the online communities that have risen up around it. Holly commented that when she discovered these communities, she was already very deep into her own original fiction and had forgotten that writing could be….fun, like it seemed to be with these fanfic writers who were telling stories for no other reason than their own pleasure.

Writers love to bitch about how hard writing is. And it is. This cannot be denied. But on the other hand, it’s not like we’re shoveling coal or digging ditches under a brutal summer sun. In my own progress as a writer I find it necessary to keep returning myself to the sense of writing, of storytelling, as play: messing around with what-if scenarios, with ideas and settings and characters, with language, with ways of dividing or chunking up the narration to get different kinds of effects. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, that’s what revision is for, and you’re wiser for the trial and error.

One of my favorite quotes is from an interview with eternal rock god David Bowie, who said something like, “Art is the one place where you can crash your plane and still walk away from it.” There are no lives or limbs at stake. We should take advantage of that knowledge and feel liberated to reach high, take risks, mess around — to play — maybe even embrace failure as part of the process of play. Children arrive at valuable life skills, awareness and knowledge through spontaneous, open-ended play. Sometimes we should maybe take our cues from them and just lighten up a bit, allow ourselves to slip out from beneath that sense of writing-as-burden.

Solitary

Writing is a freakishly solitary profession. This is a job where you turn your back on friends, family and the world in general and go into a little room and shut the door in order to spend hours in the company of people who do not exist outside your own rather questionable head. Of course, you can also take your laptop to the nearest Starbucks, but the fact remains that writing is an inward-looking, inward-dwelling activity.

So I would imagine that an unusual capacity for solitude is characteristic of a writing personality. Maybe some of us numbered among the popular kids in high school, our lives abuzz with constant social activity, but I myself sure as hell wasn’t one of them. It’s more likely that we were — as I was — the misfit who read too much and used too many odd words and couldn’t quite click with the peer group until you were old enough and free enough to go out and hunt down other members of your tribe.

And maybe it’s our drive to be alone — not all the time, certainly, but enough to read and dream and reset our mental energies in order to deal with People again — that at least partly impels the drive to write. Reading and writing become the bridge crossing us from our carefully guarded alone-zone into the world, into the human condition itself. We contain multitudes, and those multitudes contain us.

Tough

It takes a real mental toughness — even if it’s the kind that comes and goes — to put your ego aside in the way that’s necessary to develop as a writer, and I’m not just talking about the rejections.

You have to be willing to write a bad first draft. “All first drafts are shit,” declared Ernest Hemingway, and although this is more true in some cases than others, there’s a soul-releasing freedom in embracing the crappiness of first-draft writing. All you have to do is get it on the page. It’s allowed to suck: that’s what revision is for.

Which means you also need the strength to seek out the kind of tough love criticism from genuinely helpful individuals who will kindly but ruthlessly (and perhaps not even kindly) let you know just why and how that first draft is crap. When you finally pinpoint what is wrong, you can figure out ways to fix it, and the final shape and weave of your novel will begin to form in your mind.

You also need to understand just what a hard long haul it is to become a published writer (and the exceptions — the twenty year olds who get huge deals — only prove the rule). Two years of reading and writing seriously won’t do it. The general wisdom is that a writing apprenticeship takes ten years, sometimes fifteen. So you need to find pleasure in the process and take a long-range view.

—Justine Musk

By Justine Musk

I was a judge in a ‘hook’ writing contest held by the fangs-fur-fey livejournal community (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey). Writers of related genres sent in their ‘hooks’ – that paragraph of a query letter describing the novel in such concise, compelling terms that the agent has no choice but to request five pages, then fifty, then the whole thing, then representation.

The judges were all published novelists who at some point had written a hook that got them all the way out of the slush pile and into your local Barnes & Noble.

Each hook was posted online, as were the judges’ critiques. The idea was to give at least some of the thought process behind the decision-making that went into which hooks were chosen and which did not.

It surprised me how much time and work this contest involved, just to give a two- or three-paragraph critique – and not a particularly well-organized one at that — of each hook. I was given thirteen hooks and only managed to get through eleven – the final two ended up assigned to other judges. It took up massive chunks of my weekend – when I could have been working on my own stuff or hanging out with my family or reading or going to the movies or taking a hip-hop dance class or just blissfully wasting time.

It was my job as judge to select “the best of the lot” – my favorite of the hooks — and then request the first five pages of the manuscript. I will then critique those five pages (which I’ll be doing after writing this essay).

To be honest, there were no clear winners. I am doubtful that even one would prove tight, structured and interesting enough to hook an actual agent’s interest. Which is a shame, because the art of writing a good hook is different from the art of writing a good novel – it’s possible to be good at the latter while totally sucking at the former, and vice-versa.

However, a hook really is your book’s first impression. It implies a lot about your book. Flaws within the hook will suggest to the agent, as they did to me, that those flaws are indicative of the state of your manuscript – that the understanding of what makes for compelling story and character just isn’t there, or that the story isn’t quite ready yet for submission in the marketplace.

Having said that, sometimes – as one poster put it – “the heart of the story will shine through the crappy presentation”. I ended up choosing two hooks as the “best of the lot”, agreeing to critique an extra set of pages, because I saw something through those flawed presentations that I didn’t quite see in the others.

They both managed to convey a complete sense of what the book actually was. They had a voice I felt I could spend some time with as a reader. And something about them struck me as original and lively enough to get under my skin a bit; I found myself thinking about them while I was off doing other things. Which made me decide to declare them winners of this round.

A hook, first and foremost, should convey the shape and arch of your story

And by story I mean: protagonist, setting, conflict, resolution.

The limit on each hook was 300 words – brevity is everything when you’re querying an agent – and I was impressed at how much information people managed to pack into such a short space. But it tended to be the wrong information. The stuff I needed and wanted to know wasn’t in there.

People did seem to realize that details were important – but they just weren’t the right details.

I wanted a vivid sense of who the protagonist was. Most hooks gave me the protagonist’s name and gender — and little more. Age would have been helpful. Profession. Perhaps a touch of background. A hint of the protagonist’s dominating personality traits. Anything that would flesh out the generic shape of Protagonist into someone specific and intriguing, someone I’d like to read a whole book about.

What would have been especially impressive: some inner conflict or wound the character will somehow resolve in the course of his or adventures, some sense of how the character will grow. An inner, personal struggle to both reflect and amplify the external struggle.

Speaking of that external struggle: show me the conflict! After you tell me who the protagonist is – better yet, create an interesting detailed image of that protagonist – show me who or what that character is in direct conflict with. Show me the antagonist to balance out the protagonist (and I don’t necessarily mean hero vs. villain, I mean the person who wants the thing that cuts against what the protagonist wants and needs).

Show me what motivates your characters. Most hooks completely neglected to do this, which is a shame. Think about how much work a character’s motivation actually does: shows a great deal about the character and a great deal about the plot. It shows me how the protagonist and antagonist must inevitably come into conflict. That’s a lot of work done with not a lot of words.

There are two kinds of conflict: the major conflict that shapes the novel and serves as a kind of throughline to drive you through the storyworld, and what my own agent calls ‘line by line conflict’. If the major conflict is the key question or two that the reader becomes anxious to see resolved – will the Rebel Alliance destroy the Death Star and win freedom for the universe? Will our heroes survive? – ‘line by line conflict’ becomes the series of questions that keep the reader actually reading the pages (is Darth Vader Luke’s father? What will happen to frozen Han Solo? Will the characters escape Jabba? Were those Ewoks truly necessary, and did they have to be so bloody cute? Okay, the last doesn’t really apply, but you get my point). Plot isn’t just things that happen (and why), but also how the author deals out that information to the reader: the rhythm of questions being raised and answered and then how those answers bloom into more questions, that makes for a satisfying storytelling experience.

When stories ask too many questions and don’t provide that countering rhythm of answers, readers get bored or frustrated and drop out – think about how ratings fared for once-popular television shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, or The X-Files, amid criticism about how the shows had handled (or mishandled) the questions so compelling to viewers. They refused to actually answer them. Withholding information will keep the reader’s interest – but only to a point.

Many hooks broke the story apart into a list of plot elements. Some of those elements were indeed intriguing, but I couldn’t see how they added up. It’s a bit like listing the ingredients of a lemon meringue pie without showing me the pie itself – I see the flour and lemon filling and sugar and other things, and yes they do look promising, but I don’t see what the final result is, how the ingredients bake into each other, to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. You have to keep focused on the story, the ‘more’ of the sum of those parts. The pie. If you simply rattle off a list of Cool Things That Happen without showing how they build on each other to create ever-greater urgency, tension, rising stakes, then I will think that the novel doesn’t hang together right – that it’s too episodic, just one thing happening after another while the characters kind of wander around. And by trying to cram in so much, you end up focusing on too little. Some of that extremely valuable wordspace should go towards fleshing out those line-by-line questions (when you raise an interesting question, the natural human impulse is to crave an interesting answer – and then you’ve hooked the reader’s curiosity, a powerful thing indeed.)

But above all, see the forest for the trees, and make sure the agent can, too. Stay focused on the most important elements of the book and how those elements hang together. Show me how they link up to each other, weave around each other, braid through each other. Give me a sense of the motion of the story – how it sets up, complicates, and resolves – so I can get a sense of the shape of the thing, or even just the sense that the thing has a shape at all. That it won’t fall flat. Or apart.

And please, please tell me where it’s set. The setting is a character in itself; a love story set in Chicago will be different from a love story set in West Hollywood which will be different from a love story set in my own hometown of Peterborough, Ontario (in which at least half of the characters would play hockey). Much like character motivation, ‘setting’ is one of those great, fantastic things that conveys so much about your book in so little.

More bang for your word-buck.

Take advantage.

I chose one hook because the voice appealed to me. Originally I wasn’t going to send it through to the next round, but I found my mind going back to it. So finally I just figured, Hell with it. Let’s take a chance. Plot problems, after all, can be fixed, assuming the writer is someone you can work with (and agents do not take this for granted, will often work with a writer to see how that goes before agreeing to take on the manuscript). But a good, developed ‘voice’ isn’t something that can be so easily revised. It’s either there or it isn’t. And if it makes me think that, yes, I might like to curl up for three hundred pages with this voice — that’s a powerful thing indeed.

So what is voice? A strong grasp of grammar and vocabulary should go without saying. Beyond that, it has to do with an ease in handling language, perhaps – but not necessarily – a flair, a love, for words themselves. It has to do with the tone of the writing – light-hearted? Poetic? Colloquial? Sinister and creepy? — and the sense of the storyteller’s intelligence and personality surfacing up through the writing. A good voice rings with a natural sense of authority; you know you’re in good hands, and can surrender yourself to the grip of the story.

Most of the hooks I judged had a flat voice – the writing doesn’t lift up from the page. There were a couple of instances when the writer was actively experimenting with voice – and yay for that – but it just didn’t seem to work: the tone was overly cute or too condescending, or seemed at odds with the nature of the subject matter.

And of course this gets highly subjective. A voice that appeals to one agent – enough so that the agent might overlook some apparent flaws and take a chance on the material – might not appeal to another.

Remember when you’re writing the hook that you are indeed writing. Show me why you chose language as your storytelling medium – rather than filmmaking or dance or theatre or, heck, finger puppetry.

The two hooks I sent through also had something in them – an idea, or character, or situation, or ‘voice’ – that caught my interest, that gave me hope there was something in this story I hadn’t quite seen before. We all swim in the same pool of general mass culture; we have seen many of the same movies, read many of the same books. Make it a point to be influenced by strange and obscure things as well as the popular things; make sure your mix of influences is unique to you, because it will make for more unique fiction.

At least one of the better-composed hooks was rejected because although it presented the story relatively well, the story itself didn’t seem worth the effort. Things just felt too familiar. Sometimes ‘familiar’ can mean that the writer fell back on vague, generic language instead of fleshing things out with detail, and creating images in the reader’s eye. Sometimes it means that the ideas behind the language were just too wellworn to be truly interesting. Does the world need or want another fantasy novel about elves? Well sure, if those elves are interesting in some new way. Show me how they’re interesting. Reinvent them for me. The blurry shape of ‘elf’ just won’t do it anymore.

Yes, this process is maddeningly subjective. That goes without saying.

And the odds are overwhelmingly against you. That also goes without saying.

You fight the odds by writing a structured, focused hook that conveys protagonist, setting, conflict, and maybe some complication/resolution, and through fleshing out the spine of the story with well-chosen details. You fight the odds through your unique, intriguing voice. You fight the odds with the brevity and professionalism of your query letter. Accomplish this, and you will vault yourself into the small group of query letters receiving serious consideration from at least a small percentage of the agents queried (which is why you will play the numbers game and query a massive – massive — number of agents).

To write a good book, you have to read a lot of good books, and some bad books as well in order to learn from others’ mistakes and not make so many of your own. So it goes with hooks. It’s difficult to learn everything you need to know – and get a sense for what makes a compelling hook – just from one critique alone, even if that critique is a thoughtful, in-depth one and the hook in question is your own.

So read all the hooks and critiques you can. Look for the patterns of mistakes, of praise, since the same issues seem to crop up over and over. Develop a sense for yourself of what works and what doesn’t; what makes you want to read the manuscript, and what makes your roll your eyes or shrug your shoulders and move on. The archives at Miss Snark (http://misssnark.blogspot.com/), Evil Editor (http://www.evileditor.blogspot.com/) and the fangs fur fey (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey/) are good places to start.

– Justine Musk

Justine Musk

1

People who live in mostly-glass houses rarely throw stones. They’re not that stupid. They do, however, have to deal with the small corpses of birds who fly into the windows. There is a lesson in this, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

2

I read once that there are two kinds of readers. The first, and most common, is the bright, well-adjusted child with decent social skills who absorbs reading from his or her environment. There are many books in the house. Both parents model the act of reading on a regular basis. Etcetera.

The second kind of reader has a different narrative hunger: more obsessive: the child in question is unusually solitary. Readers in the second group find their way to books despite – and not because of – their environment.

This made me think of something Dean Koontz said in an interview. He was speaking about the poverty and abuse of his childhood, spent at the whims of a crazy, violent father. There were no books or magazines in his house. He found his way to them regardless. “It makes you wonder about fate,” he said. It certainly makes you wonder about genetics, how we come into this world already hardwired. He was a reader of the second kind.

There were many books in my house. My father not only gave me money for books – although sometimes he made me rake the leaves first — he brought home books from the elementary school he administered in order to “get my opinion”. My parents read frequently and often: cosy scenes involving fireplaces and Canadian snow blown against the front windows. I am grateful for this, but ultimately it would not have mattered. I fall into the second group.

This kept me out of sync with my peers for many years.

Eventually I found new peers. The way people do.

3

When I was a little kid, I knew a lot of bright little kids, and quite a few of them liked to read – none as much as I did, but as already mentioned, I was a bit freakish – and showed a flair for creative writing. My stories were singled out, but so were theirs. At some point, however, they pulled back, and I kept on going.

Throughout my twenties – and I’m making a bit of a leap here, but bear with me — I’ve been close to certain people, have had some wild times together, and I started to recognize how, at a certain point of hedonism, I pulled back, and they didn’t.

When I don’t write, I get anxious, edgy. Pressure builds inside me. I need to write in order to release it — fiction is the best, but a long email can be just as effective. I crave exercise the same way, which means I spend a lot of time on the treadmill or weight machines or in a dance/yoga studio. Joyce Carol Oates has written about her obsession with running, and I’ve often wondered if these things are linked – the urge to work out some kind of physical, complementary manifestation of a similar urge to write. Sure, I want to communicate, entertain, go deep, maybe find some fame and glory while I’m at it – what the hell? – but ultimately I suspect it’s a fairly primal drive. For release, escapism, calm. The calm lasts for a short time, and then the need builds again.

I write because it takes my crooked soul and lies it straight. The world is a better place when the writing goes well. There is a term – ‘graphomania’ – which refers to some kind of brain quirk compelling you to write, and maybe that’s what I have (although if that’s the case how come I’m not much more productive? 15 pages a day, every day?). Maybe all writers have at least a low-level case of it.

4

I read somewhere that the Japanese character for ‘inspiration’ brings together ‘elegance’ and ‘strength’. I love that so much I might get it tattooed.

5

China Mieville points out that the fantastic literatures don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. He agrees that 90 percent of fantasy writing is crap. He also points out that 90 percent of anything is crap. (Which reminds me of something a film professor told a friend of mine back in college: “People will tell you that for every opening in the film industry, 500 people will apply. What they won’t tell you is that ninety percent of those people are morons. The trick is not to be among the morons.” Easier said than done.)

I have a writer’s crush on China Mieville. I love how his book ‘Perdido Street Station’ is too long. There are these leisurely sections devoted to the exploration of his world and its cultures, characters attempting to define and redefine themselves in places where cultures intersect. He spends a lot of time fleshing out his themes in a way that doesn’t necessarily advance the plot, certainly not in the way of a typical genre novel. An American editor would have had him streamline the hell out of that baby (and his follow-up novel, which he worked on with an editor at Del Rey, did indeed emerge tighter and leaner). I’m glad ‘Station’ found its way into America only after it had made Mieville’s name in the UK.

Now that I think of it, I grew up on big books. Your average King novel could moonlight as a doorstop, of course, but it’s not like Peter Straub or Sidney Sheldon or Norman Mailer were turning out slim little volumes. There used to be this belief that a novel should be around 500 pages so the reader would feel he or she had gotten good storytelling value for the money. Now anything over 100,000 words – roughly 300 pages – is pushing it, especially if you’re a first-timer.

When I submitted ‘Bloodangel’ to my agent, I was advised to cheat in the way that books and articles always order you not to: alter the line spacing from 2.0 to 1.5 in order to come out with a manuscript that seemed a bit less of a blunt weapon. Apparently this makes it psychologically as well as physically easier for the editor to bundle up the damn thing and take it home.

My book sold, so conclude from this what you will.

This was after I’d already cut fifteen thousand words from the draft. Readers assume I deliberately set the book up for a sequel, or series. Although I was certainly never opposed to the idea, the truth is that I crammed as much of the story as I could into the space I felt I had to work with. In the end, there was story left over.

Funny thing – the leftovers end up seeding new story. At the moment I’m like Jack looking up at the beanstalk, wondering how high the thing is growing.

6

Before you are a writer, you are an individual of your culture and era. The Dickens of contemporary London would be a different writer than the Dickens of Victorian London. He would be the same man but shaped by different forces. So would his fiction.

The novel is like any other art form: it changes with the times, with the culture, with the advent of new technology. Technicolor and sound revolutionized films. Photography forced painters to reconsider the nature of painting, which started a drive towards the depiction of inner life – and color, and material itself — as well as the world around us. If Van Gogh was producing his works today, would people be paying millions of dollars for them? I suspect they would not. They would say, “This has been done.”

7

In Dickens’ day, the novel was a relatively new form – compared to drama or epic poetry – and people were just beginning to figure out its possibilities, moving from epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s‘Clarissa’ to a more integrated kind of narrative. Because the form was new, it had a taint of the trashy and sordid. This made the form acceptable and accessible for women, even if the ‘serious’ ones still had to use a male pseudonym. Which is why great women novelists have been with us pretty much since the beginning. So “yay” for the new and sordid.

8

I think one of the great illusions of writing – one that trips up a great many people – is the sheer accessibility of it. If you want to play the piano, you need to find a piano and a teacher and a place where you can practice without annoying the neighbors. If you want to make a movie, you need to gather enough crew and equipment. If you want to become a brain surgeon, it’s generally understood that medical school is the desirable route.

It often strikes me that people who say they want to write don’t fully understand how a writer’s education actually works. They think it’s enough to have pen and paper and a reasonable grasp of vocabulary, a sense of where to put the commas. Anybody can write a novel. This is true. But writing a novel that other people – especially people not related to you – actually want to read is another thing entirely.

When you talk to an aspiring writer you can get a strong sense of how good they’re likely to be and how far they’re likely to go just by asking them about their reading habits.

9

I have an academic streak, a literary bent, and a taste for the gothic. I read for language and character and meaning.

I also read for thrills.

Thrills are important. No amount of traditional English-major education could ever convince me otherwise.

10

A huge part of learning how to write is learning who you are. This is one reason I tend not to trust writers under 30. For every gifted soul — a Zadie Smith – there seem to be a handful of young things overhyped and oversold on the story (and author photo) behind the story. But in the end, people care about the real deal between the covers. You can curl up with an author photo for only so long.

To deliver story – and do it more than once — you need time and experience and practice and a great deal of seasoning.

But I like this about writing. I like how, four or five years from now, I will still be considered a ‘young writer’ – or youngish — simply because I’ll be under 40. This is not the perception in other professions, or within the culture at large.

11

Writers exist outside the established structures of things. Outside the normal commute to the office, the day-to-day existence within the office, the need to wear a pantsuit (or even anything at all). Outside the usual things that measure and define the kind of security that might, in the end, prove illusory anyway. Outside the kind of career track studded with developmental milestones that friends and family recognize as you go along. People understand what it means when you graduate law school. They don’t understand how great it is the first time you get a detailed, personal letter from an editor rejecting your work but encouraging you to submit again. They don’t see the huge forward leap from form letter to actual contact with a professional editor; all they see is the rejection, right up until you’re the overnight success story with copies of your book in Barnes & Noble you didn’t sneak in there yourself.

Part of the challenge of being a writer is finding the balance between living outside the world and inside it. The act of writing pulls you into your private space, out on the edges of things; when you are writing, you are not living in the world. You are living in your head. But you need to feed that head – and the writing – by living in the world, even though, when you’re in the world, you often feel you should be writing instead.

I’m still working this out.

10

Most of us start out thinking we’ll be famous – it is the privilege of young people to believe they have a 50/50 chance of being famous – but at some point a much harder reality sets in.

Many of us keep on writing regardless.

In the end, when we talk about writing, we’re talking about a form of obsession. This of course is true of many things. The difference between an obsession and an occupation is that our obsessions choose us; we decide whether or not to deny them.

This makes writing sound like some kind of Calling, but there is nothing particularly sacred about being a published writer.

It is, however, a cool thing to say at parties.

– Justine Musk

(so what the hell do I do now?)

Justine Musk

1

Perhaps theme gets a bad rap.

Its twin, Theme with a capital T, deserves all the potshots and ridicule and dressing-down that it gets. But if Theme is the pretentious dude decked out in Gucci and Prada who wears sunglasses at night and brags about how many thousands of dollars he dropped at his VIP table at Hyde or Les Deux the other night — which was a worknight because only wage slave losers save their partying for the weekends – I live in LA, so you’ll have to excuse these kinds of analogies – then its sibling, theme, is the cute one in jeans and t-shirt, hanging out at your local pub, inviting you over for an engaging conversation.

2

Theme’s ego has been greatly inflated by all those English teachers who inflicted all those essay assignments through high school and maybe college, in which you learned to digest various lectures and Coles notes and serve it back in some lukewarm rearranged stuff that, if cast into proper essay structure, would get you an easy B. As in: b for Bullshit, or so you chuckled to yourself, having merely scanned the book involved (you rented the movie, so who needs to read?) which looked very Boring anyway.

So when you first try to write a piece of fiction, Theme has a habit of sauntering in, smoking Gauloises and readjusting its beret in the mirror (this was before Theme realized that a fedora is a much cooler choice of headgear). And Theme talks very loudly to you and throws around a lot of big words and you think, Okay, maybe this guy really is Deep and Profound. I don’t think so, but I’m a neophyte and what do I know? It’s not like I speak with a French accent or anything, like Theme does. (Of course, Theme himself grew up somewhere in Iowa, but you haven’t figured this out yet).

Thing is, you want to write something that’s fun and compelling, sure, but also layered in a way that resonates. You have something to say, dammit, even though you’re not really sure what that is.

So you take what Theme likes to prattle on about and try to force some kind of story out of it. You take it to your writing group and your group throws around words like ‘contrived’, ‘pretentious’, ‘boring’. Or maybe you submit it to a number of places and one or two years later you collect the rejection slips. By then, you’re fed up with Theme’s endless monologuing and the way he clings to you and invades your space because he doesn’t have any real friends. You’re not his real friend either, but that’s only because he’s a longwinded self-important prig. You order him out of your life. He starts haunting artsy cafes and lecture halls looking for someone new to buy into his schtick and make him feel sufficiently admired.

3

On top of all his other personality flaws, I suspect Theme suffers from an identity crisis. He doesn’t know what he is, exactly. His name gets thrown around so much that he suffers from overexposure, and – much like other phrases (‘self-indulgent’, ‘a powerful new voice’, etc.) – the word itself has been rendered kind of meaningless.

And the poor guy is confused by his relationships with other things, the same things he likes to peer down his nose at (premise), or dismiss as far too plebian to ever bother bothering with (plot).

Thing is, theme and premise and plot are like Siamese triplets who share too many organs to ever separate successfully. Because of that, definitions get messy. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll take a whack.

4

A premise is a general sense of the milieu of the novel. It’s kind of like the storyworld in which the story takes place. In my novel UNINVITED, the final revisions of which I just handed in to my editor at 2 am and so the story is still painfully (painfully!) fresh in my mind, I would say the premise is the loose idea I started out with.

I wanted to write something about a teenage girl in a small town that somewhat resembles my own hometown. And she has this older, golden-boy brother whom she idolizes. But something triggers him to run away and stay away from home for over a year. One day he reappears. But he brings something menacing and dangerous back home with him, and the girl herself is somehow (and unknowingly) at the heart of it (both at whatever thing triggered his leavetaking in the first place, and the consequences that unfold upon his return).

If premise is your story’s storyworld, then plot is the road that leads the reader through it. Plot is the focused sentence or two that you can toss off to someone during an elevator ride between floor two and floor six (especially if it stops at three, four and five along the way). Although I know my premise going in, it takes me a lot of thinking and brainstorming and reflecting and writing (often an entire first draft) to figure out what my plot actually is. In the case of UNINVITED, it goes something like this: A troubled young woman mourns her beloved older brother, who disappeared from home after a car accident killed two of his friends but appears to have left him unharmed. He returns unexpectedly, and the girl must help him fight off a supernatural enemy who’s come to collect him, not realizing the extent of the bargain her brother has made with the bad guy, or how it involves her.

If plot is what you carve out of premise, then theme is what emerges naturally out of plot, kind of like Venus rising naked from the water. If Theme is something you try to hammer plot and premise into, the inner logic and organic growth of the story be damned (and some writers, don’t get me wrong, can actually pull this off, and with style), then theme is something low-key and relaxed, who gives a friendly wave at the beginning of your trip and whose relationship with you, the author, deepens over time and the work of several drafts.

Back to UNINVITED. You can look at the plot statements and a couple of things jump out of you. The brother-sister relationship at the core, siblings depending on each other to fight off some kind of mysterious menace (I named that menace Archie, by the way, in direct homage to Robert Cormier’s Archie in his books THE CHOCOLATE WAR and BEYOND THE CHOCOLATE WAR. The fact that Archie implies ‘archangel’ just made it much more perfect).

That, for me, was kind of the heart of the thing that I wanted to tell. UNINVITED is meant to be a fun, hopefully compelling, supernatural story that gives you a nice case of the creeps here and there, but running underneath is a kind of storyteller’s rumination on family vs. the abyss. In the last handful of years I’ve been either writing or attending to the details of creating my own family (or watching reality TV, but we shall not speak of such things), so it’s not surprising that I’d end up writing about family. I’m not interested in anything sentimental or saccharine (or the inverse of that, the look-beneath-the-surface-of-the-sunny-suburbs-and-find-dark-crawling-maggots kind of story, although I do enjoy those).

What I’d been thinking about has a lot more to do with how cold and difficult the world is, and not just because of the basic struggle of making a meaningful living, both physically and emotionally. But also for the vast temptation of its dangerous playgrounds, how you can get sucked into things and consumed, lose your soul (it’s no coincidence that the supernatural storyline runs parallel to, and intersects with, the protagonist’s experiments with a popular drug), how much we all need someone not just to watch our backs but help shield us from the cold and the wind.

So that, to me, was the ruling theme of the story. (Someone else might take something completely different from it, which is cool. That’s what stories are for.) Something about family vs. the abyss. Something about the balance between walking your own line and finding your own freedom while remaining connected to others in that way we need, in order to nurture and safeguard our souls.

5

Where I find theme really steps up, though, is in the end revisions (unlike Theme, who wants to run the whole show, usually loudly and obnoxiously, from the get-go).

Revising is awesome. The bloody, messy, difficult work of first-drafting is done. You know your story, your characters. The end is in sight. Instead of marking off your daily wordcount – 500 words, 800 words, 1500 words, yay, now I can go have a beer – especially those days when the writing comes hard and you have to push yourself along, you can lose yourself in the depths and nuances of this complete, pre-existing thing. By this time you’ve been living with the book for a while, so certain things are becoming clear to you. And clarity, as they say, is good.

If the early draft is all about getting the stuff from head to page, revising is about choosing what stays and what goes (and what needs rearranging or fleshing-out). What you’re supposedly ‘supposed’ to do is take each scene, each element of the book, ask yourself, “Does this advance the plot?” If it does, good, if it doesn’t, out it goes. (This is why it’s so important to figure out just exactly what that plot is in the first place. An obvious statement to make, yet any agent will tell you about all the well-written, engaging manuscripts they read that they’re nonetheless forced to reject, because, in the end, for everything it does right, the book just doesn’t hang together. It has a muddled, confused center. It lacks clarity, unity.)

The danger of abiding solely by this question is that you end up with a book that is too plot-driven, too stripped of color and nuance and life.

The simple fact is, characters cannot thrive by plot – or outline — alone. They have (or should have) lives that extend beyond the page. They have relationships with other characters, and they need to have conversations within those relationships that advance the plot, yes, but still create the illusion of full-bodied psyches and personalities at work, as well as an involvement (even if it’s a lack of involvement) in the world around them. They have personal histories. They are haunted by things. They’re living in an environment that goes on around them and impacts them even as they impact it. This is the kind of stuff that grows not just from whatever kind of outline you tend to use, but the actual novel-writing itself, and which the outline itself needs to fully incorporate and keep adjusting to as the writer moves along.

So how do you build on the bones of plot, how do you layer in meaning and substance and flair, without sandbagging the plot itself? How do you respect and use your outline without becoming a slave to it? How can you step away from it without losing sight of the road altogether?

Perhaps by realizing that theme is the thing nestled inside your plot, and by drawing it out more, you create a bigger story.

Perhaps by reaching a point in the process where, instead of asking, “How does this advance my story’s plot?” you start asking yourself, “How does this build on my story’s central theme?”

6

In the case of UNINVITED, by the time I hit the final draft I could recognize some of the push-pulls going on in the novel, the dueling forces and tensions of the narrative. If the book’s themes center on family and personal responsibility (one of the reasons why it’s more or less a ‘young adult’ novel), then the opposing forces have to do with the abyss (alienation, isolation, and the temptations that pull us in that direction), and also with notions of freedom and carelessness and recklessness, and the damage and consequence that can result. And if connecting with other people, having someone who gets your back while you get his, is what steers you away from the abyss, then I somehow wanted to weave that through the material also. So when I got the notes back from my editor, I was able to make decisions accordingly.

For example, my editor pointed out that one character’s motivation for helping out the other characters needed to be further explained and developed. So I invented a backstory in which the brother had helped out this character in the past, and the character felt obligated to return the favor. I had a lot of fun with the idea of the ‘abyss’, which, since this is a supernatural novel, gets to translate into literal terms, and also helped me understand the essential nature of my bad guy and how my protagonist could end up defeating him (and what she needs to discover in order to do so). If banding together helps the characters get strong, then longstanding baggage and fissures within their relationships make them vulnerable; the bad guy knows this and exploits those points of personal conflict to get closer to the thing that he wants.

Also, certain words reoccur throughout the narrative. The characters talk about ‘fixing’ things – whether it’s fixing a meal, fixing a problem, fixing each other. They talk, or argue, about living in the moment. And my young female protagonist is forced to redefine herself not just as younger sister to a protective, and often overshadowing, older brother, but as a soon-to-be older sister to unborn twin brothers, a relationship in which she will assume the protective, wiser, mentoring role her own brother takes with her. During one important plot point in the novel, she and her romantic interest (who need things to talk about and bond over in order to advance the subplot of their relationship) discuss stuff like this. The romantic interest conveniently (for the purposes of theme) has a younger brother of his own (who at one point is also endangered). Not to mention, my protag’s older brother’s psychology – what haunts him, what motivates him to make the decisions he makes that gets them into this mess in the first place – has to do with a backstory event in which he failed to look after his younger sister, and the guilt he’s carried ever since.

The danger of laying it all out like this is that it starts to sound a lot like Theme, and not theme, was at work here. Hopefully in my book this kind of stuff isn’t too obvious (and if it is, that’s a failing). Hopefully the reader will just skate along through the story, but when she closes the cover she’ll feel moved enough to recommend my book to a friend. Theme isn’t about a grand statement so much as one creative decision after another, one creative decision building on another.

In the end, what you find, hopefully, goes beyond a simple chainlink of action plus consequence plus another action plus another consequence. You end up with a story more thickly, deeply braided. Without theme to bring together the different strands, the story itself can get flat and one-dimensional – or messy, muddled, overlong, with a lot of extraneous and seemingly pointless material.

7

If premise is the world of your story, and plot is the road that guides you through it — weaves you over the mountains and through the desert and finally to the relief of the coast — then you might say that theme is the car you’re traveling in. It makes the people you pass take admiring notice, or look away in disgust or pity, or just shrug and get on with their day.

Needless to say, the kind of car you’re traveling in is totally up to you. Choosing is part of the fun of the ride.

And when you see Theme swaggering along the side of the road, thumb cocked with a lot more confidence than he’s actually feeling, you might want to speed up.

Or take pity on the guy. Pick him up. Buy him lunch.

You can always drop him off at the corner.