Harry Potter as Inspiration

Our family has just emerged from Harry Potter, like miners coming off shift surprised to see the sun in a new position. We spent Saturday morning through Monday in full immersion, barely taking time to eat or fluff our pillows.
And I know we are not alone. How cool is JK Rowling? She went from being no one, from a un-glamourous single-motherhood to being the second richest woman in Britain.
Number one is the queen.
This is the power of writing. This is what being a novelist could possibly accomplish -- making people around the world stop the rhythms of daily life and let themselves be drawn into the imaginative life. On Saturday, our friends Breeann and Rob showed up at 8 in the morning to begin reading with us -- the ten year olds at our house were haggard because they had stayed up WAY past bedtime to attend the midnight Harry Potter party (and win a golden snitch for costumes.) The grown ups were tired because we are old and were also up past midnight. But we made coffee and began to take turns, chapter by chapter. We put our family bets in writing (a combo of who will die and whether or not Snape is evil) before beginning since a cake was at stake.
And we have been reading ever since. Breeann and Rob had to return to their own lives but we kept reading (if you've tried to call and we didn't answer, don't take it personally.) At several points I had to hand the book to my husband as chapters made me cry (I'm a total sap.) Once, he had to hand the book to me, since I married a man who is not afraid to cry.
On the final night, the ten year olds stayed up past midnight again, because once we were that close to the end we just couldn't stop. I wonder how many hours we spend hearing every word that Rowling wrote out loud, or attempting (pathetically) to replicate British accents. Sure, our lives and our housekeeping came to a stop. I didn't write a word, or try to sell myself to any agents.
But talk about inspiring. I won't ruin anything, but I loved this book. My friend Kurt said that I only liked the books because I'm a mom -- I don't think so. Yes, I admit that reading out loud is more intense than reading silently. Someone putting sad things into the air for children makes me far more emotional than I would be reading silently to myself. But really I think I love them because they changed our vocabulary, and our rhythms.
How cool is that?

Plumbing the Depths

I put up all my notecards again (having carefully taken them down off the windows in our cabin.) I started to put them on my sliding glass doors, but they blocked out too much light, so I decided to make the most of the wasted wall space in the family room bathroom! Perhaps it will help me keep things in perspective when I start to feel like my writing is s#*t?

(No comments, please, about the horrible wallpaper. When I moved in almost thirteen years ago, I swore that the faux-Anasazi petroglyph wallpaper was the first thing that had to go. Now here we are in an entirely new century, and I still suffer with it every day. It is, however, at the top of my list of home improvement things to do. I even have the wallpaper steamer in my garage waiting for that slow weekend. Wallpaper removal tips, anyone?)

On another note, now that Letterlady and I are back in the same state, we had lunch and she told me that she has made the revisions that Careful Reader Susan and Lettermama suggested. Then she mailed off manuscripts to four agents who want to see it! She wants to target about ten more, and then she has to sit back and wait two to six months for their responses. Good thing school's starting soon and she has that lower-case Letterbaby to plan for...otherwise she might go a little crazy -- crazier? Strange to think that it takes longer for a book to be published than it does to gestate a human baby...or an elephant baby, for that matter.

Corrective Lens

I had dinner last night in Pasadena with my bosom college friend of twenty+ years, Tiné (on the left). She has had my chapters for the last several days, and is my only other reader besides Letterlady. Tiné was wonderfully helpful and very candid. She said that as she was reading it, she realized that it was like someone handing her their newborn infant, looking down and realizing that the baby is cross-eyed. I thought that was a perfect way to discuss a draft and plan to use the same analogy with my students. My draft is on its way to becoming a book, but it's cross-eyed and needs some vision therapy.

Tiné was able to articulate what I suspected was the biggest issue, which is that right now it is entirely plot driven, and that there are big gaps that need filling in. Everything written up to this point serves to advance the plot, and what's missing is a lot of the information that will help create a fully realized world around our two heroines. She described the heroines as existing right now in a vacuum, and wanting more information about everything and everyone around them so that the reader can inhabit their world, not just their points of view. She suggested that I continue to write the plot, and then when the whole draft is articulated from beginning to end, go back and add all the stuff that will answer the questions and fill out the world.

As a result of needing more of the characters' inner monologues and backgrounds, Tiné said it was hard to know who to sympathize with, especially since they all make morally questionable choices. I think the solution to that is having more access to their thought processes as they are making their choices, so that we are in on their own self-reflection and therefore understand why they are doing things. That way even if they make choices we wouldn't make ourselves, we can at least know why they made them, and sympathize with their dilemmas if not their decisions.

Other hugely helpful observations she made:

The names I've chosen for my characters are often hard to pronounce and trip the reader up. I need to revisit all of them and think about that aspect of it. I love names, and I love unusual names, so this could be painful.

I need to really figure out who my audience is, and how overt all the Greek stuff wants to be. Is it a titillating beach read for readers who may never have heard of Ovid and won't notice the allusions? Is it for more erudite, literary types who will get every allusion and criticize me when I stray from the original? How does the answer to the question affect the way it's written?

I think in a lot of ways, my background with dramatic literature (two degrees in theater) is in part responsible for the problems Tiné pointed out. So far, I have written a lot of dialogue and plot, both of which are central in a dramatic script that's intended to be performed. But in a script, dialogue and plot are only the sheet music for the actors to interpret. (In a play, names can be difficult because the actors will say them for the audience and the audience doesn't have to figure them out for themselves. Just think about Shakespeare and Shaw's names. There is a good reason that theater companies employ dramaturgs and speech coaches.) A novel needs to be fully formed and leave far less to the interpretation of the audience, as the novelist is both playwright and actor. A play needs to be relatively short. A novel is far less limited. I need to give myself permission to leave the momentum of the action and explore the more literary elements of fiction. I need to let in more poetry and figurative language, more flavor, more color. I need to allow more meandering into the lives of the other characters who interact with the heroines, so that when they do interact, it's from a three-dimensional place and not a vacuum.

SO, the challenge I feel right now is to create a paradigm in which I can continue to write this book while working full-time and being a single mom. Since this next fall will be my first ever in that capacity, a lot will be trial and error, I think. Surely there is a way to be productive without being isolated for days at a time in a tiny house in the mountains? In that regard, writing poetry is easier. An hour stolen here or there can result in a poem. An hour of novel writing is like ten minutes of physical exercise: barely enough to get warmed up enough to make it safe to proceed...

Collective Unconscious?

Interesting that in the past month, I've read two articles in the New York Times about new works of theater that use the Eurydice and Persephone myths.

The first is Sarah Ruhl's new play Eurydice, currently playing at the Second Stage Theater in New York City. It's apparently about Eurydice's experience in the underworld, and creates a central relationship between Eurydice and her father. I find that particularly interesting, as I have not been able to find any back story about Eurydice's family or lineage. In some versions of the myth she is called a nymph but in others they don't even say if she's mortal or not. Maybe I should email the playwright and ask her if she found any research into her family, or if she invented the entire relationship. I have chosen to leave my Eurydice's family life deliberately ambiguous.

The second work is Jake Heggie's opera To Hell and Back, in which Patti Lupone was recently performing. The New York Times describes it thus: "Reframing the Persephone myth as a contemporary tale of domestic abuse, [Heggie and Scheer] had conceived the 38-minute operatic piece with Ms. LuPone specifically in mind to sing the role of the battered wife’s mother-in-law."

My dad says the Collective Unconscious explains the rise of these themes all in seemingly unrelated places by unconnected people. I wonder if it isn't the same phenomenon that occurred when I named my daughter a very unusual name and then started noticing it everywhere. Was it always there, or was I unwittingly part of a trend about which I was previously unaware...?

Give me an L-E-T-T-E-R-L-A-D-Y!

Since she is too modest (or busy) to post it herself, I thought I'd let our loyal readers know that Letterlady has four agents interested in seeing her manuscript. These are folks she networked with two years ago when she was shopping her anthology of short stories. They each told her there wasn't much of a market for short stories by unknown authors, but to contact them when she had a novel. Well, now she has one, she has contacted them, and they all want to see it. Yay!!

When she gets her draft back from Susan, the Careful Reader, we are going to set up some times to get together to edit, revise and generally prepare the drafts for sending out. I predict that they will be in the mail before school starts and she'll have an agent by Thanksgiving (maybe a book contract by the new year??)

Rah Rah Rah! Sis Boom Bah! Go-o-o-o-o Letterlady!!