Posts by Barbara O'Neal
As I write this, it is just past ten pm. I’ve left my partner to go to sleep on his own, since this column must be posted before morning, and I haven’t had a chance to get to it. It’s just been one of those days…at the end of one of those weeks…at the end of one of those seasons. For months now, I’ve been saying, “When I finish _____, then I’ll have a little down time.” The weeks come in, the weeks go out, and that down time has been absent. I suspect, at this point, that it’s not coming.
Which means I have to make peace with life as it is.
Often, people who are not writers express the most envy over my hours, the fact that I work for myself, and thus don’t have to punch a clock or report to anyone, or (especially if the person is a woman who has been required to wear pantyhose), get dressed to do my work. In Colorado Springs, where I live, it also snows a lot in the winter, and the fact that my commute involves walking down the hallway in my slippers elicits a great deal of envy, too.
All those things are terrific, don’t get me wrong. But you see the clock. You see that I am working. And I have been working 60 and 70 hours a week every week for most of this year. I often work weekends and late at night, when there are fewer distractions.
Balance is the single most difficult part of a writing career, at least for me.
Read MoreBoth Therese and Allison have talked this month about the anxieties surrounding the publication of a book. It has been on my mind, too. In my other role as a writing teacher, I sometimes have the pleasure of watching an aspiring author cross the barrier of a first sale and join the ranks of published authors. Several of my students are publishing their first books in the next few months, and I’ve been thinking a lot about their journey.
In our internet savvy world, most writers are well-educated in the process of creating the public relations spine they will need to promote their books—a good-looking, professional website; a social media presence; probably newsletters or blog tours. Some may pen articles. Writers have learned to take control of PR to supplement publisher strategies, and it’s been good for us and our books. It’s important to ask for numbers and pay attention to what those numbers are, and stay in touch with editors and agents to know what’s going on.
However, what we don’t always talk about is how to prepare internally for the publication of a book. First books, of course, since the experience is new and can be surprising and unsettling, both for good and ill. There are also subsequent books that can try a writer’s mettle: the book following a huge, smash success (see Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful talk HERE), or a when the writer has particularly fallen in love with a book, or it has special meaning.
In all cases, the process is the same. You spend months or years slaving away to perfect a book. It goes through dozens of readings from peers and professionals, and is rewritten and rewritten and rewritten until you can recite entire passages from memory. It has tested you and you’ve stretched and you’ve done your very best work. When it’s finished, it goes through another set of hurdles—being admitted through the gatekeepers of agents and editors and editorial boards and publishers. Largely, at this point it leaves your hands. Publishing professionals and sales people take over, finding cover images they think will work, and titles they think will sell the book, and writers to give quotes. Agents talk it up at various meetings; editors brag, orders come in, print orders are set.
The book stands in the wings, ready to come out on the stage and shine.
Reviews come in. Maybe they are admiring. Maybe they are disdainful. Most likely, there will be a mix. Maybe readers suddenly send a flurry of emails and comments to web pages. Maybe they don’t. When the numbers come in at the end of the month, maybe it will have sold a lot of books and maybe it won’t.
The writer has zero control over most of the things that happen during this period. After having complete control, it’s dizzying to suddenly face the fact that all the work is done. It’s like sending a kid to college—you’ve done your best. Now they have to live their lives.
Two things are important to remember:
Read MoreIn a perfect world, all writers would always get exactly enough sleep. In the morning, we’d drift down to a nutritious, leisurely breakfast prepared by someone else, then amble into our beautiful study to write with joy and abandon on the current project(s).
In a perfect world, no writer would be awakened three times in the night by a child or a cat, never have an extra glass of wine or a fight with our mothers. We would not worry about getting money into the right account for bills or fuss about a furnace that needs replacing. Our children and spouses and relatives would all respect our work time as Utterly Sacred and—if this was a really perfect world—we’d never do any dishes, publishers would always pay on time, and —
Yeah, my world isn’t perfect either. I love my job, but right this moment, I’d rather not be writing. I slept funny and there’s a catch in the middle of my back that’s bugging me. I’ve been working hard for a fairly long stretch, and there are naps and hikes with my name on them that I probably won’t get to take. I have a small headache. The weather has been eternally rainy. In a word, I’m grumpy. I’d like to crawl into my cave and watch movies for about six weeks.
But I’m a commercial fiction writer, and work is always better than no work. Always. Even if I didn’t do the blog that I am slated to do, there are other projects that need addressing, and if I ever want to take a month off again to travel, I’ve got to work.
So how to get it done? How do you work when you really don’t feel like it, when you are tired or grumpy or slightly under the weather? It’s easy to say, “Sit down and write,” but it’s not psychologically satisfying. There’s no map to it, no plan.
This is my toolbox for days I’d rather get a root canal than do my work.
When my eldest son was about six or seven months old, he had a milk bottle toy. You’ve seen them—a plastic bottle with colored plastic balls that go inside. The idea is simply to put the balls in the mouth of the bottle.
One afternoon, Ian sat on the floor of our apartment, playing with the bottle. He wasn’t sitting up perfectly yet, so he was a little wobbly, but that bottle had his complete, undivided attention. He held a ball in one hand and I held the bottle still. He wobbled, lifted his arm, aimed for that opening—and missed. Tried again. And again. Over and over and over. When we started playing the game that day, I hadn’t yet discovered a critical part of his personality was tenacity. It never occurred to me that a baby wouldn’t give up eventually.
We sat there for a long time. Over and over. And over and over. But that child did not give, not one inch, no matter how many times he failed. Or fell over. He would lie on the floor, furious, then roll over and grab for a ball, and I would sit him up, get him stable, hold the milk bottle. He didn’t want my help, either, thank you. He knew exactly what he was doing, it was just that his understanding of the task outstripped his physical capacity to achieve it.
Eventually, he actually did get a ball into the mouth of the bottle. He looked at me, startled, cheered, and of course, I praised him to the ceilings. And Ian, being Ian, reveled in his success for exactly 3.5 seconds, then turned and looked for another ball.
As writers, that kind of persistence is the most important quality we own. Persistence is far more important than talent or native ability. Showing up, day after day, even though there might be rejections or bad reviews or really crappy writing (I know what I should do, but I can’t seem to actually accomplish it), keeping focus on whatever the next task at hand is, shutting everything else out. Trying again, and again, and again.
Ray Bradbury says you have to write a million words before your work is publishable. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier puts forth the idea that anyone who succeeds has put in ten thousand hours of work before they actually make a breakthrough (as in selling a novel). If you divide those hours down, an hour a day equals about 27 ½ years.
Don’t let that scare you.
Read MoreOne of the best sources of fresh, original, authentic character development comes from the seas of real life.
As a young journalism student, one of my favorite tasks was to be assigned a feature on a professor or a student with an intriguing history or pursuit. I loved interviewing them, taking notes on whatever details seemed most intriguing. What did they have on their desks? What did that little repetitive circle of the arm have to say about them? What details set this person apart from all others, what made her unique? I wasn’t particularly interested in making anyone uncomfortable or uncovering some awful thing. I wanted to know who they were and what story they would tell me.
I learned that nearly everyone has a story they want to tell, some story that defines who they are, some moment they carry around day after day, year after year. Even the worst criminals have some soft moment, a time before they became hardened to the pain of others. Even the most saintly of church ladies have some moment of shame they cannot shake.
It’s fascinating.
I didn’t spend long in the world of journalism, but my habit of collecting stories, gestures, clothing, histories, has continued apace. My partner learned early that if I am exhausted, one way to perk me up is to take me into a new environment where there might be stories for me to harvest. The old man at the drugstore in Albuquerque, the Frenchman with thickly furred, burly arms who drove us (much too fast!) around Normandy and took me to task for drinking coffee with my meal. My partner calls my methods interrogation, but I prefer to think of myself as a student of human behavior.
Read MoreI am enormously, painfully pregnant with my current book. It’s the eighth month, and wherever I go, it comes with me. It’s due in less than a month, and this is the stage when I’m swimming deep in the midnight waters of the book, trying to identify the last beautiful fish, the waving fronds of that particular yellow plant over there. There is a water roar in my ears, so of course I can’t hear anything you say to me, and all my words are spent on the book, so when it comes time to talk to humans, I have a very bad case of aphasia. My hair has grown out to the middle of my back. I haven’t returned emails or letters or phone calls for a month or so now. My mother wants me to come visit—just for the afternoon—but she’s been here with me before, so she knows it’s probably not going to happen until I’m finished.
There is always something quietly crazed about this stretch. I’m as broody and prowling as any pregnant creature, and as I made my usual apologies to my partner, the (luckily) unflappable Christopher Robin, last week, he said, “I know how it is. I’ve written books before, you know.”
At first, because I am somewhat real-life challenged at the moment, I thought he was being dryly English, as he is wont to do. Then he mimed taking out a notepad and repeated all my end of the book declarations back to me: “It’s a piece of crap.” “I am brilliant!” “I want a job a Starbucks. Really this is just too hard.” “I cried all day as I wrote.” “I’m going to study dog massage.” “It’s freaking beautiful.”
Only I use much stronger language.
Read MoreWhat is your natural writing pace? How long does it take you to write a book?
On a private email loop of mostly long-time professional writers, the subject of writing methods came up. Quite a few of us had pressing deadlines and we posted our progress, our challenges and triumphs each day in order to stay on track, and to feel less alone. It can be awfully isolating to be slaving away on a deadline. Heading out to the water cooler of the internet to tell somebody who knows what it means that you’ve written three pages since the last time you check in feels pretty good.
We ended up in a discussion about our various methodologies. We’ve been together a very long time, and it’s easy to see the natural rhythm of a writer when you’ve been watching her process for a decade or two. Just as each of us seem to be stuck with certain themes, we are stuck with certain methods, too. In our group, one of the writers plods away, writing at an unremarkable pace for most of the book, then blasts out the last 60, 80, even 110 pages in a few days. Every time, on every book. She writes in the morning, but when those blasts come, she writes morning to night until the book is done.
Another writes six pages a day, six days a week, year in, year out. Another doesn’t write much at all until she’s close to deadline. She shows up just in time to start writing her pages, and writes seven days a week, every evening, until the book is done. She’s a fast writer, a former journalist with a clean, uncluttered style. When she finishes her book, she goes off to putter with her hobbies, her family, her avocations until it’s time to write the next book.
One of our group bemoaned her inability to stick to the goals she sets. But book after book, she has said the same thing, suffering through the not-meeting her goals, and manages to finish the books, over and over. The suffering seems to be part of what she needs to get the book done.
As I said here before, my books are written in my head for a year or more before I start to put them down. What I fret about is the fact that I end up having to write and rewrite, write and rewrite, a process that feels like combing long hair, over and over. The first hundred pages take three times as long as the rest of the entire book, and there always comes a point where I leave this reality for the book world, and stay there for the last couple of months. It’s just too exhausting to live in both worlds at the same time.
This is a subject that causes a lot of concern among all writers. And as with so many other things, it’s a subject that’s almost doomed to make us feel like a failure, no matter where we are on the continuum. Fast writers are sometimes viewed suspiciously as hacks. Slow writers are often seen as precious and full of artist angst. Obviously, some of it has to […]
Read MoreWhen Therese told me that WU would focus on plotting this month, my original reaction was, “Uh-oh.” Plotting is by far the most challenging part of writing for me. However, since I was plotting and carrying out a novella through January, it was a good time to observe the process.
There are several challenges:
–A book doesn’t come to me in a linear fashion.
–I don’t seem to like to know too much ahead of time, but…
–I do require a general structure to work with, one that is flexible but also provides some kind of girding to hold up the characters and ideas and themes and moods I’m working with.
As I plotted and carried out my novella, I realized that my plotting methods are designed for the severely right brained; I am always holding the entire project loosely in my head, a collection of images and emotions and impressions. It feels to me that a story is a living entity, living somewhere, whole and beautiful and complete. My job is to draw it over to the physical realm as authentically as possible. To do so, I’ve created a system of worksheets and plotting rituals that are tools for brainstorming my organic process.
By the time I sit down to write a novel, it has nearly always been bubbling away on the back burners of my imagination for a year, sometimes far longer. I usually begin with a character and a situation, and as time goes by, the book begins to pull itself together, taking a snip of dialogue there, a beautiful room in a magazine, a sizzling steak, a piece of glass, a photograph, and often quite a lot of surprisingly concrete details, like a scarf or a dish or a gesture that is peculiar to one character. Eventually scenes, themes, character arcs begin to emerge. During the brewing period, I don’t write anything down. If the characters, themes and ideas are strong enough, I’ll remember them–sort of a natural selection of the ideas world. (If I do a lot of research, I’ll simply make notes about the materials I’ve read so I can find them again later.) By the time I’m ready to start writing, I will know most of the story (albeit vaguely), main characters, a few scenes including a strong opening image, a major conflict or opposing force, and a visual or a scene from near the end of the book. This is when it’s time to start sketching out the story as it has assembled itself to this point.
That’s plot step #1, sketching out a little bit of the story—beginning, middle, end. For The Lost Recipe for Happiness, I knew it was about a woman chef who would get her own kitchen; that she had a dog and a lingering injury from a car accident of which she was the lone survivor, and that she would, eventually, have to make peace with her life. I knew I wanted to set it in Aspen (because…well, if you’ve ever been there you know it is amazingly beautiful) and that my protagonist was from New Mexico because I am insanely […]
Read MoreWe begin writing with a burning, a need to say something, to tell a story or explore an idea. We begin in delirious happiness, skulking away to scribble in private, stealing moments to capture a paragraph, a character, an essay. We slip into a study or a coffee shop with laptop or Clairefontaines and fountain pens to write in full-throated explosion, with passion, surety, even grace and some success. It is often difficult, challenging, frustrating, but always exhilarating.
But there is another side to writing. You might know this one, too: The house is empty. The weather is exactly right beyond the windows, and you know what you need to do, but nothing is there. It isn’t that you’re blocked, exactly. It’s that there is no joie de vivre in any of it. Each word has to be scrounged from the bottom of a deep barrel, and every metaphor feels like it’s been tossed out of the day-old store into the free bin. Writing feels like going to the dentist.
When that happens, how do you get your joy back?
Read MoreWhen I was a girl, my grandmother lived for a time in Denver. One sharply bitter Christmas Eve, she took us downtown to see the animated shop displays, where dolls moved and the Nutcracker bent and lights glittered. It was unbearably cold, the night air needles on our cheeks, but my soul was enchanted.
I remain enchanted by Christmas Eve. Here in our Western tradition, this is a most sacred of nights. Stars shining in a black winter sky. Blazes of excess on suburban rooftops. Lights twinkling on trees and along the rafters and around the windows of the shops. It is the one night that we are still allowed to invest with purest wonder and possibility, when even the most cynical among us are wont to look at the sky and wonder….what if? What if that was the echo of a ho, ho, ho? What if those sleighbells really did ring? What if, long long ago, wise men traversed the desert bearing precious offerings, and angels sang in the heavens to herald the birth of a king?
And if those things might happen, what might happen in our own lives? One of the most powerful aspects of the Christmas story is the humble images—the simple people bearing a son far from home. A sleeping baby, oblivious to the fuss of trumpets and magi bearing sweet-smelling gifts, a mother humming a lullaby.
So much potential!
Christmas Eve bursts with that potential for each of us. Each of us are born with a vocation, a calling, something we are meant to do. I believe that if each human finds that task and aligns with it, the world, then, becomes a peaceful, productive place.
By “vocation” I don’t mean some Big Dramatic Task You Must Do To Single-Handedly Save The World. Quite the opposite.
Read MoreTonight, I have just opened the first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau of the year. It’s not a fancy wine, and hardly expensive, but every year it’s such a rush to see the sign in the shop windows—Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!—and the brightly colored labels on the bottles. They make me think of butterflies.
And like butterflies, the wine is a fleeting thing, only drinkable for a couple of months. There is much relish in opening the bottle, that first first bottle of the year, and pouring a juicy dollop into a glass, and then taking that first, bright sip. Ah! Light and fresh and fleeting. Tasting it, I think of the people who planted the grapes, and the sunlight that made the vines grow, and the hands that harvested them. I think of rain and winds and moonlight, and someone whistling a melancholy tune as he walks home over cobblestone streets in the late evening. I think of men sending the trucks off with their boxes of wine and think of their hands—probably deeply tan, with oval nails—tearing a baguette for lunch.
Therein lies the pleasure of writing about food. No food is a single, isolated thing, suddenly arriving on our plates or our glasses as if born in a replicator. It comes from the earth and from the bodies of animals that lived on the planet with us. It passes through the hands of harvester or hunter, though the market, to the cook and then to our mouths and bellies.
Nothing, except perhaps sex, is as elemental, with so much potential for both joy and disaster. (At least bad sex doesn’t usually kill you, while bad food certainly can.) Nothing else has so many endless variations and possibilities for a writer. Or at least for this writer.
I came by my passion honestly.
Read MoreThere are so many of us in the world. I sometimes think about this as a plane flies over neighborhoods in some city I have not yet met. There are those tidy streets, the trees, the circle where children play, where teenagers fall in love. There is the mall, the swimming pool, the neighborhood grocery store. I peer out the window thinking of the kitchens and dishes, the rituals of dinner (what dinners do they eat?) in that house and that one and that one, of the people who ride their bikes there. By way of positive thinking, I try to imagine copies of my books on nightstands, borrowed from the library, bought from a store, reading it for the book club that meets in that house by the park or for the recipes or because she is divorced and trying to get through it however she can.
These imaginings are my way of grappling with the staggering number of us that there are in the world. Each of us unique, rare, incredible. There used to be a feature on one of the Sunday news programs wherein a man would throw a dart at a town, travel there, and pick a name out of the phone book, and then find out what that person’s story was. He always found a story. (Every single week, I said to whoever might be listening, “that would be such a fantastic job!”)
Because the news comes at us with such ferocity and in such massive quantities, we all have to draw away from that vastness, keep the greatest tragedies at arm’s length. As writers, however, our job is to dive in and gather them up, to notice—without initial judgment—what people do. How they behave. What narrative their lives take over time. From those gleanings, we gather our fiction.
It’s been a terrible news week here in the US. We are all probably half insane with the buildup to the election, and maybe that’s why it has been such a violent week. A Little Rock newswoman, young and beautiful and charming, beaten to death in her own house, and no apparent motive. The murders of Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother, and nephew. Horrific crimes, both of them.
But the one that caught me was one about five high school cheerleaders going home from a football game who died in a “fiery car crash.” They always say it like that, “fiery car crash.” The other news stories are terrible in their own way, but as a mother, that particular disaster, of teenagers getting into some terrible accident, was my absolute nightmare. Yours might be something else—my mother fretted obsessively over leukemia because she knew someone who lost a daughter to it.
A year or so after my youngest graduated from high school, there was one of those horrific crashes in our neighborhood. The teens went to school with my son, and the accident itself was on my walking circuit, so I had to change my route for awhile to steer clear of the giant altar that grew there.
As we all know, writers can be a bit too empathetic. […]
Read MoreSome books are gift books. They arrive fully cloaked, with feathers and beads and exquisite shoes, all in place. The writer is required only to transcribe the material and send it off into the world. Books like this tend to be written very fast, with little of the gnashing of teeth and throwing of typewriters out the window that accompanies the usual writing process. I have no idea where they come from, or why they arrive whole and complete. If I did, I’d make it happen every time.
Instead, most books seem to arrive as a big collection of things dumped in a tall wicker basket that I have to sort out. Each one so different from the other that the process almost doesn’t even seem like the same thing at all.
They’re like my children, my actual human children, that is. Who are lovely children, don’t get me wrong, but they were not the easiest kids on the planet to raise. One made an art form of adorability. He was popular and beautiful and the class clown. Teachers were not amused.
The other is a bona fide verbal genius. Which means he can be exceedingly entertaining, and after all, we pray for brilliance. Except, do you want to debate the finer issues of the Constitution with a twelve-year-old? Me, either. Nor did his teachers, who didn’t take kindly to his insistence that he knew more than they did.
Everyone wanted to tell me how to raise these very, very different children. Everyone had ideas on how to transform them magically into good little citizens who could then take their tidy spots in society. They gave me scripts and manuals and Techniques Guaranteed To Work.
But…they were, after all, my children. Eccentric. Inner directed. Independent. My job in raising them was not to impose some outside idea of what they should be, but to pay attention to the individual child and find ways to facilitate his growth, help each one find his way into a life that would him joy and a sense of purpose and satisfaction, with enough money that they could meet their needs and some of their wants.
My most recent book, The Lost Recipe for Happiness, wasn’t exactly a gift book, but I had the luxury of retreating for a whole winter to write without external influences. It had been brewing for a fairly long time, so by the time I got the chance to write it, a lot of the material had been combed through. It was like receiving a juicy scholarship to the best school in town for a whole year.
By contrast, the current book is like my eldest child’s fifth grade year.
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