Read the essay here. 

Thanks!

At the time, I was trying to finish my first novel, and Max Perkins, who worked at Charles Scribner’s Sons for almost forty years, editing Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and many other luminaries of the 20th century novel, became my patron saint, secret friend, and ghostly counselor during the last phase of the process. His death in 1947 in no way diminished his importance to me over the final three months of writing and revising.

How could I not have heard of Max Perkins? How is it possible that I took course after course in literature, both undergrad and graduate, studied the authors Max introduced to the world–created, in one case–and still thought of these authors as self-made men, nobly sweating last night’s alcohol away at their manual typewriters?

Were it not for Max Perkins, we probably would never have heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose books neither sold well nor earned early critical success. Scott partied away his royalties when young, then spent them on his wife Zelda’s mental health care when he was older, but Max sent him loans from Scribner’s, or even out of his own pocket, just to keep him writing. Max caught what the critics missed about Fitzgerald: that he wasn’t just a spokesman for the Jazz Age, this new, unserious generation, but a novelist for America, for all time.  Perkins persistently urged him to write, encouraging any new project, imploring him not to waste his talent. Fitzgerald died at 44, at work on his fifth novel. Were it not for Max, he might not have made it to his third, The Great Gatsby.

Without Perkins, we certainly would never have heard of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote all day in longhand, standing up, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk, dropping each sheet of paper on the floor behind him as he finished. He wrote obsessively, chaotically, almost madly. He brought boxes of these anarchic drafts into Max’s office at Scribner’s, and the two of them spent hundreds of hours cutting and rearranging them into a novel. Max came to Wolfe’s apartment once, calmly informed him that his second book, Of Time and the River, was done, whether he thought he was finished writing it or not, and set him to work organizing the oceans of a paper into piles, which they later spent months shaping into a novel.

Times have changed. The advice for new writers is never to show your work to an agent or editor unless it is perfection itself and you have tried it out on your own private focus group of readers who don’t love you enough to lie to you. Would-be authors mortgage their lives for MFAs, fly to conferences, practice their elevator pitches, build their platforms. Unpublished writers know (or pretend they don’t know) the truth: the world is full of writers. No one is waiting for your novel. If you died with your story untold, only the people who love you–and not even all of them–would consider it a tragedy.

Max Perkins existed in a world where a book could matter enough to make his intensely personal interactions with his authors worthwhile. He fed them, sympathized with them, drank with them, and wrote them letters and telegrams telling them everything they needed to hear, which was really only one thing: The world is waiting to hear what you have to say. Don’t let us down.

During the last three months of finishing and editing my novel, I pretended he was also speaking to me.

P.S. Thank you, Nick.

I began writing this story over twenty years ago in the New Jersey Writing Project and worked on it in short bursts of intense activity, followed by months or years of barely thinking about it. It seemed like just another one of those craft projects at the bottom of my closet that I had started with good intentions but abandoned, half-finished.

Then, almost two years ago, I attended a reunion of the special-interest dorm I lived in while at Rutgers. Kibbitzing in an ice cream parlor in New Brunswick, NJ with former dorm-mates from the Performing Arts and Creative Writing sections of Demarest Hall, I asked myself what had become of the artist I had once been. Others were asking themselves the same question. (Several of us had life-changing experiences that evening, and I hope they’ll tell their own stories in the comments).

A few weeks later, I started this blog and decided that I didn’t want to die without having finished my novel. I sorted through the several hundred pages of handwritten drafts, notes, maps, character studies, and genealogies I’d accrued over the years, many written on the back of what I was supposed to be doing, and evaluated and arranged the chapters I’d written so far. What I believed at the time to add up to at least half the book turned out to be only about a fifth of it. I’m glad I didn’t realize that, or I would never have found the courage to continue.

Since then, I have written almost every day. I stopped watching television (not that I had watched much before) and almost stopped reading. Every night, after working all day and then taking care of meals and whatever my kids needed, I went into the bedroom, opened the laptop, and got to work. Every weekend, I devoted hours to drafting and revising. I got serious about writing, and when my family saw my commitment, they began to respect the time I had carved out to do it.

I know I’m not really finished, of course. While most of the chapters have been through multiple revisions, I have not yet revised the manuscript as a whole. I can see the flaws that need to be addressed (dropped threads, overwritten passages, the repetition of certain favorite words, the complete lack of animals, some shaky structure), but I know how to fix them now. I’ll be spending a few days at the When Words Count writer’s retreat this month, and many more evenings and weekends, working on my next life goal, which is not just to complete a manuscript, but to make it the best one I can possibly produce. After that, I’ll work on finding an agent to represent it who can persuade a publisher to publish it, and, if all goes well, get it into the hands of people who will love to read it. Kinehora.

*

I grow uncharacteristically tongue-tied when asked what this book is about. I’m going to need to develop an elevator pitch, but it’s a long book, and a little hard to describe in under a minute. Here’s my best attempt so far to summarize the plot without too many spoilers:

Lily in the Light of Halfmoon is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl so scarred by years of bullying that she has shut down her personality, hoping to disappear enough to be left alone.

Lily arrives with her mother in Halfmoon, an offbeat tourist town in Vermont, where their task is to prepare Great-Aunt Annie’s Victorian mansion for sale by emptying it of 150 years’ worth of family treasure and junk. Brilliant, imperious Aunt Annie has removed herself to a nursing home, refusing to see her many friends or to explain why she has chosen to leave the house in which she was born and in which she had always hoped to die.

Lily soon meets Jesse, the bright, outgoing homeschooler who takes care of her aunt’s gardens. Despite the temperamental differences between them, Lily and Jesse fall in love.

Jesse introduces Lily to the funky people and places of Halfmoon, but Lily has so internalized the voices of her tormentors that she cannot connect to the friendly locals. Afraid that Jesse will reject her once he discovers her social status at home, Lily reveals almost nothing about herself, hiding even her remarkable talents.

Working through the strata of junk in the attic, she finds a trunk containing a never-worn party dress and a diary written by a romantic young poet whose story has  a tragic, though maddeningly ambiguous ending. Lily longs to discover the diary girl’s identity and fate.

As the summer progresses, Aunt Annie’s behavior grows stranger. Lily’s parents are barely speaking to each other. Jesse becomes impatient with Lily’s bizarre secretiveness. And the Voice in Lily’s head never fails to remind her that soon the house she loves will be sold, the summer will end, and she will leave Halfmoon to return to her miserable high school, losing the only friend she’s ever known and what she’s sure is her only chance at love.

It’s part romance, part multi-generational saga, part bildungsroman. It contains a diary, some letters, a sestina, a few songs, and even a fairy tale. The point of view shifts between six different characters, though most chapters are told from Lily’s perspective.

It consists, in its current iteration, of 139,552 words, which works out to 558 manuscript pages.

It took 20 years, 8 months, and 13 days to get from conception to completed draft.

It is not yet finished.

Back to work.

Here’s what I came up with:

“Following“

Let me know what you think.

I paid more attention than usual this year to people’s New Year’s resolutions and to the obligatory articles in the media about the most common resolutions and how long people keep them. Unsurprisingly, people want to improve their health, financial security, and happiness. Unsurprisingly, their resolve does not last much longer than their holiday leftovers.

Looking at resolutions and how we word them, it’s easy to see why people hasten to break them. A resolution to improve your life couched in terms of self-hatred is doomed to fail.

“This year, I’m finally going to get off my lazy ass and lose these extra 25 pounds that are making me look like the fat pig that I am.”

This is a vicious thing for a person to say to herself. If someone else said it, it would be a relationship-ending insult. If you heard someone say it to a friend, you would rise in furious defense. But people say this kind of thing to themselves all the time.

Of course, we rebel against the nasty person telling us we’re fat, lazy pigs by doing the opposite of whatever she wants us to do. If past is precedent, most of us will overthrow this tyrant before February.

A self-compassionate resolution might have a fighting chance:

“Starting today, I am going to take better care of myself. I’m going to move more, in ways that feel good. I’m going to fill myself up with more fruits and vegetables and protect my body from too much junk food. I am going to find healing, loving ways to deal with sadness, stress, and boredom, so that I don’t overeat. I’m going to forgive myself when I make a mistake and move on.”

“Starting today” can happen on whatever day we choose. We get a lot of New Years in every calendar. In addition to January 1st, we get our birthdays, our own private New Year. For students and teachers, the beginning of the fall term is a chance to begin again. The Jewish calendar has four different kinds of New Year celebrations for different purposes throughout the year, like Tu Bishvat. The trees won’t mind your borrowing their New Year at all. The Christian liturgical calendar offers opportunities for new beginnings in its seasons of Lent and Advent. The earth itself gives us equinoxes and solstices, and even cross-quarter days, if you like your new beginnings about six weeks apart.

You can always begin again.

*

My resolution this year began as a blessing and turned into a rubric. “May you be content with the consequences of your choices,” I wrote on Perfect Whole’s Facebook page on New Year’s Eve, and every day since, I have asked myself whether I am content, in this moment, with the consequences of the choices I have made, and if not, what I can do to change.

The choices can be as minor as what I chose to eat for lunch, or as major as what I decided to do for a living. A bad choice can have good consequences (“I should never have married that idiot from the motorcycle gang, but I love this beautiful child we had before he went to prison!”). A good choice can have bad consequences in a given day (“I’m glad I went to pharmacy school, but if I fill one more Tamiflu prescription today, I’m going to scream!”).

I’m looking more closely at how I spend my time, too. I chose to spend an hour on Sunday night watching Downton Abbey, and the consequences were well worth it. On the other hand, I have also chosen to spend some time recently reading A Discovery of Witches, and I can’t say that I’m thrilled with the consequences of that decision. I chose to spend most of the weekend writing, and the long chapter I finished drafting was a consequence that made me very happy.

Choices are permanent. Managing the consequences of those choices is an ongoing, moment-to-moment process. One of my resolutions is to ask myself this question frequently. I do a quick CCC (“Content with the consequences of my choices?”) check in my journal, and it’s amazing how much nonsense the question cuts through, how quickly it gets me to what I really need to be thinking about.

Of course, we get angry, anxious, and sad about the bad things that happen to us that we can’t control: illness, accidents, death, bad luck, car trouble, irritating family members. But that only makes the things we have freely chosen all the more precious. I may, for example, get the flu through no choice of my own. But if my husband brings me tea and chicken soup until I’m well, I can still be content with the consequences of my choices. I didn’t choose the flu, but I did choose him.

So, are you content with the consequences of your choices? If not, what are you doing to change them?

*

One of my resolutions for 2013 is to finish the novel I’ve been working on, which I may have mentioned once or twice before. I’m close to completing the current draft. Revising will take several more months, after which I would like to find an agent to sell it to a publisher. Since this project is my primary creative focus, I will be taking a hiatus from Perfect Whole, updating it from time to time, rather than on a schedule. I will also continue to post on Perfect Whole’s Facebook page.

I have been  very happy with the consequences of the choice to write a new Perfect Whole essay twice a month for the past twenty months. Now, I’d like to focus my writing time and energy on the novel, and see what consequences arise.

Thank you for reading. Happy New Year. Every day.

(Were I less polite, I’d ask them what they do instead of read, but if people enjoy the idea that they would be raving bibliophiles if only they weren’t so busy, who am I to disillusion them by asking them to name their favorite reality show? Many activities compete with reading.)

However, no one has ever told me that they don’t read because books are too expensive, nor that they would read, if only books were free. We’ve had sources of free books for a long time. They are called “libraries.” And extremely cheap books can be picked up at yard sales and thrift shops. Price has seldom been a barrier to reading for most Americans, as countless biographies of poor kids who educated themselves in libraries will attest.

This is why I’m puzzled by the proliferation of offers on Twitter and in other social media of free e-books from indie authors. Of the many obstacles standing between me as a potential reader and a self-published author, price is not one. Free books are not an unmet need of booklovers. Free is a feature, not a benefit, the steak, rather than the sizzle.

The free book giveaway can be unwittingly insulting, too. It implies that the potential audience is willing to exchange our time and attention for a book, simply because we don’t have to pay for it. Do these authors think we value our time as little as that? That’s not who we are, we readers. We want so much more out of the bargain we strike with a writer.

Here’s my unspoken contract with every author I read: I am going to give the writer something valuable, something that many people want–my attention. At times, this is something that rightfully belongs to my children, my husband, my family, my friends, or my community. At the very least, it belongs to me. I’ll also give the  author something even more precious than my attention: the few moments in my day that are mine, sometimes only a handful of minutes between waking and sleeping, when my brain is done thinking about the day that’s past and planning for the one to come, and is ready to go someplace else. I will give this precious time and attention to an author and pay for the privilege, whether in money or in the effort it takes to borrow the book from the library or a friend.

In return, the author will tell me an original story, written in fresh, gorgeous language, using technical skills I have not mastered myself. I want to see tricks done that I don’t know how to do yet. S/he will introduce me to characters who are so real I can feel their pulses, and either take me to places I have never been and never could go, or show me familiar places in radically unfamiliar ways. The author will challenge me, entertain me, teach me, distract me, enrich me, and amaze me.

If a writer can do that, I am happy to pay. $25 is a steal.

Recently, I bought Michael Chabon’s new book, Telegraph Avenue, retail price $27.99, for $18.47. I would have paid more because Chabon’s books give me experiences I need like oxygen. I cannot do what he does with language. Reading and re-reading his sentences is like opening little gifts with secret drawers and compartments. Seeing what he gets away with as a writer teaches me to be freer, more inventive, less concerned with balancing metaphors like chemistry equations. His books are genre-bending and boundary-crossing, and always take me places I didn’t even know I wanted to go. They’re also witty, erudite, and wise. I admire and envy him, and get far more pleasure from his books than the value of the cover price. I’m getting a whole lot of brilliance for my $18.47.

Maybe brilliance is not what everyone wants from books. I don’t always want it myself. Right now, I’m taking a rest from brilliance and reading a book that prominently features a sexy vampire (no, not that sexy vampire). But whether readers long for books that are educational, romantic, diverting, thrilling, amusing, erotic, scary, or all of the above at different times, they expect to pay in money, time, and attention.

The aspiring indie authors giving their work away for free are trying to build an audience in hopes that someone will eventually pay. But giving those stories away as a regular practice (not just a contest or a special promotion) perpetuates the idea that these cultural products should be free, that authors write just for fun, and that readers are doing writers a favor by downloading their free book onto their Kindles, and maybe throwing the book a few stars on Amazon.  But authors cannot eat stars, and we as a culture cannot afford the idea that writing novels is a hobby that some very creative, kind people do in their spare time after they work all day at their real jobs,  just so that they can give the rest of the world the pleasure of a free downloadable story.

Self-publishing has made some authors, like Amanda Hocking, rich and famous. But Hocking was selling her self-published e-books, not giving them away, and what attracted the attention of the traditional publisher with which she eventually signed was her off-the-charts sales. It’s a capitalist game. Money is how we keep score.

The free e-book undermines the relationship between author and reader, devalues literature, and fails to support authors in their careers. We don’t need free books. We need to nurture our developing writers so that they can grow into the kinds of artists for whose work we would feel privileged to pay.

*

“And that is worth some money. Think about it. That is worth some money.”

How can we responsibly prepare students for whatever the future brings, knowing, as we must by now, that projections about the future are almost always wrong?

Below is a 22-minute speech I gave on Friday, December 14. 2012 at a meeting of the New Jersey Educational Computing Consortium, addressing just that question, beginning with the tale of a visitation from a very New Jersey kind of angel.

(Since I’m not very good at audio editing, the content begins 15 seconds in.)

Here are some links related to this post. Careful readers may note that some of these are essays originally published on Perfect Whole:

Shift Happens 6.0

United Nations Releases Population Projections to 2100

Post-Apocalyptic Career Counseling, Part I

Post-Apocalyptic Career Counseling, Part II

Post-Apocalyptic Career Counseling, Part III

Teach the Timeless

“Trivia vs. Power: Let’s Be Clear on Exactly  How We Are Using Technology in Education” by Marc Prensky

“Why K-12 Schools Are Failing By Not Teaching Search” by Jeff Utecht

“Are We Preparing Students for Life?” by Tom Whitby

Habits of Mind

You can find that Julie Goldberg at her tumblr, 30 in 30 and follow her on Twitter @julie_goldberg.

Julie Goldbergs are a vast tribe, including, the Google tells me, a classical guitarist, a biologist, several dermatologists, and a number of attorneys.

Photo ©2007 skagitrenee

At a workshop I attended recently, Emmy Laybourne, author of the Monument 14 series, shared a rule, well-known among screenwriters, that I had never heard before:

“Chase your character up a tree and throw rocks at him.”

It’s smart advice: put your character in a tough spot, then multiply his problems. You’ll let him down from the tree eventually, but don’t make it too easy. Create doubt about whether the character can succeed, or even survive. The more he suffers, the more desperately the audience will want him to get down from the tree safely, and the more they will enjoy his eventual triumph.

Action, thriller, and mystery authors have no problem following this rule. They torment their protagonists pitilessly. Those writers aren’t happy until their main character is reflecting ruefully, while suspended by flimsy ropes over a vat of boiling oil in the sub-basement of the psychotic killer’s apartment building, that the guy’s idiotically contrived “maniac laughter” is going to be the last sound she hears before dying in agony.

I’ve been struggling with this rule in the novel I’m working on. Having lived with these characters for a long time, I feel great affection for them and want them to be happy. Some are based on people I know and love, and I don’t want bad things to happen to good people. This misplaced protectiveness leads to narrative mistakes. In initial drafts of new chapters, I keep finding that I’ve mitigated the characters’ problems, shooing them up saplings, lobbing only Nerf rocks, and letting them shimmy down far too easily.

The emotional climax of the novel, the section I just finished writing this week (bringing the word count past 100,000!), is a fight between two young lovers, followed by a reconciliation and a series of revelations. The quarrel is an existential threat to their relationship, and for the main character, it jeopardizes any hope she had of ever connecting with another human being. For the story to work, readers have to wonder if she has learned anything over the course of the story, whether she has developed the strength to reach out, to trust someone who has done everything possible to earn her trust, to risk telling a secret she had hoped to keep forever. And in order for readers to wonder, I have to keep the characters apart for a while and let them stew.

But in  the early  drafts, I kept getting them back together. They texted apologies, acknowledged responsibility, explained their points of view, sought to understand. Within 24 hours of the fight, their conflict was resolved, all blunders forgiven, their love and trust deeper than ever.

And all that evolved, mature behavior made for terrible storytelling.

In later drafts, I allow them to endure rage, regret, and depression for three days. They can’t sleep. They can’t eat. They have no idea how to mend what has been broken. The girl nearly drops out of reality in her grief. The boy can’t concentrate on anything but his confusion and longing. Three days were as much as they or I could bear, but the chapters were vastly improved by prolonging and deepening the young couple’s anguish.

What made this so difficult for me was the gulf between my role as a writer of this story and my roles as a mother, a wife, an educator, and as all the other mature, grownup characters I portray in real life every day. In our relationships at work, at home, and in community, responsible adults try to cool the temperature, reduce the drama, lower the stakes, smooth the rough places. We eke out compromises. We make Plans B, C, D and E, in case Plan A doesn’t work out. We try not to get too attached to Plan A, nor too disappointed when it fails.

We try not to let things matter more than they should. We don’t want every marital spat to be another battle in the twenty-year covert war over which partner cares most about the relationship, and it would be nice if every time we sliced a piece of cake for children to share, it didn’t become a verdict on which child mommy loves more.  We try to lower the stakes–it’s only cake, kids. We try not to have winners and losers at home or at work, so we try to find ways for everyone to win. Even people so confounded by the sociopathic behavior of their friends and relations that they write to Dear Prudence about it ask her what they can do to make everyone, even the sociopaths, feel okay and get along pleasantly.

For fiction to draw a reader in emotionally, though, the outcome of a conflict–even a quiet, interior conflict–must matter to the character as much as life itself. The smaller slice of cake really does have to indicate an inferior and insufficient love. What the character desires, he must want so badly that his life can never be truly right without it. Sometimes he gets what he needs, and sometimes he doesn’t, but readers can’t care about it if he doesn’t. Narrative conflicts must have winners and losers, and the losers have to lose something important to them, if not everything.

In my professional and personal life, I work hard to find outcomes with the greatest good for the greatest number of people, as often as possible. But my writer self needs to let characters bleed, struggle, and desperately desire all the wrong things without lifting a finger to rescue them. I must not give them sound advice, and they must reject most sensible advice they hear. Characters, unlike my children or my students, need to learn everything the hard way.

I write at night and on weekends, after long days of smoothing paths, dispensing counsel, minimizing conflict, and cushioning falls. If I see someone who has been chased up a tree, I help her down. But I have to leave those responsible grownup habits behind if I hope to write a novel that anyone will want to read.

“It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

(Just for a change, a practical post.)

Several people asked me about the oil candles I referred to in Perfect Whole, Superstorm Sandy Edition, so I thought I would post some pictures and directions for anyone who also finds herself running out of candles at a crucial moment.

These worked so well that I am putting cotton twine and vegetable oil on my list of emergency supplies for the next time the lights go out.

Here’s how you make them. 

1) Gather supplies. You will need:

• Scissors
• Cotton kitchen twine (a.k.a. beef twine)
• An empty tea light OR a piece of aluminum foil OR something else to stabilize the wick
• Vegetable oil
• A heat-resistant glass dish, such as this Pyrex dish (a thin glass votive I tried shattered from the heat, so avoid those).
• Something to pierce a hole in the tea-light foil. I used a corkscrew.

2. Cut a piece of twine a few inches long.

3. Pierce the center of the tea-light foil.

4. Pour an inch or two of oil into the Pyrex dish and saturate the twine in it. The more oil in the dish, the longer your candle will burn.

5. Remove the twine from the oil and thread it through the hole you made in the tea-light foil. Leave about 1/4″ poking out of the top. This is the wick of your candle. The length of this portion will determine the height and brightness of your flame. (The ancient admonition to “trim your lamp” will suddenly make sense when you experiment with wick length, just as all those agricultural proverbs start to mean something when you begin gardening.)

6. Place the foil and wick in the center of the dish and light it.

Voila! Light!

You can also use this trick to extend the lives of candle stubs. Under normal condition, you might just discard a leftover candle, but when you don’t know when you’ll have electricity again, every bit of light counts. Pour enough oil in the Pyrex dish to level with the candle stub, and soak the remaining wick from the candle in the oil. Stand the stub up in the center of the oil and light the oil-soaked wick. As the candle melts, the wick will burn the oil instead of the wax, and it will last for some time. I burned a two-inch stub this way for hours, and the red wax looked pretty melting into the golden oil.

Before a storm and during a blackout, stores frequently run out of candles, but I have never heard of a store running out of kitchen twine and cooking oil.

Our electric lights are on now, but I burned our leftover oil candles while I was cooking the night after the power returned, just because they were warm and cheerful. Five days of candlelight was, apparently, not quite enough.

If you have any good blackout tips, please post them in the comments.

“The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins” by William Blake, 1822

Nota Bene: As a responsible blogger, I should probably point out that things you light on fire get hot. Please be careful.