Writing Short

I'm a writing fool.

I finished a novella yesterday, which was great fun. Unfortunately I can't tell you much about it. Stay tuned.

I celebrated finishing said novella by having ice cream for dinner. Don't judge: it was 86 degrees in my house at seven o'clock last night. (For more of why I don't just buy an air conditioner already, see this old post from last year's hot season. Still true this year.) I had a chocolate shake from McDonalds. With a cherry. Mmmmm. It was delicious. It was 750 calories. That's dinner.

This week I'm also working on a short story, which has brought a few things to light:

1. It's been a long time since I've written a short story. Like, more than six years. This blows my mind since writing short stories used to be what I did best. That's what I was trained in, after all. I have written two separate collections of literary short stories. I also got my publishing start with short stories; in fact, it was an old short story of mine that brought my agent to me. So writing a short story again feels like visiting a past version of myself as a writer. A ghost of the writer I used to be.

She's more concise than I am.

2. Writing short stories is hard. Before I'd written any novels, back when I was simply a proud short story writer, I used to tell my students that good short story writing was actually harder than good novel writing. You have to be ruthless. Economical. Smart. You have to make an arc fit within the span of fifteen or twenty pages. You're not free to ramble about the way novelists do. Every single word has to count.

Then I wrote a novel. And another. And another. Today, if somebody told me that short story writing is easier than novel writing, this would be my response:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

And then I would quite possibly slap him/her.

Short story writing is not easier than novel writing. You don't have to keep 1400 pages of story straight in your head all at once. But short story writing is hard. It requires an intense focus. It's like a fast sprint, whereas novel writing is a marathon.

3. I am rusty at being ruthless. I find this odd, since my writer's brain is in good shape right now. I've been bench pressing more than 1000 words a day for quite a while. I'm fit. But this week as I sat down to write this story, thinking to myself, this will be easy, I can do it in an afternoon, I'm sure, I was struck by how lazy I've become when it comes to word count. I'm used to writing horizontally as opposed to vertically, which means that I often just let myself go and write whatever strikes me, focusing on getting something down and fixing it up later. (As the writer Chris Offutt used to say, "When I write, I throw in everything but the kitchen sink. . . and then I throw in the kitchen sink and turn on both faucets." Yeah. That's me. Sidenote: Is Chris Offutt that guy in the rocking chair on the credits of TrueBlood? Because I swear that's him.) Writing this way allows you more surprises, more discovery of the story as you go, but it's also less meticulous than writing vertically, when you don't leave a sentence until it's as good as it can be.

Writing horizontally also makes for chubby drafts.

This is the part of this blog where, if my editor was reading this, she would snort and point out that my last draft of Boundless was close to 115,000 words.

It's not fat. It's big boned, I keep telling her.

So this writing a short story is good exercise. I'm slimming down.

Big News

I'll have to make this brief, since I want to be working on my novel during my son's precious nap time.

I have officially heard from my agent. I broke down and sent her a very casual, "hi, just checking to make sure you got my manuscript, I'm available to discuss it whenever you're ready, thanks for reading," email on Friday and on Monday afternoon I came home from lunch to a long, detailed reply. K said she'd read my novel over the weekend and had enjoyed it. Woot! Then she talked about similar books on the market and encouraged me to read them and become more savvy on what the YA readers expect and like. She followed that up with several very specific and spot-on suggestions for revision. "This draft just needs a little of work to get the details just right. YA readers are tougher judges than you’d think!" she wrote.

And then: "I’d love to represent this for you if you’re up for making revisions. Congratulations on completing what I imagine is a very early draft of a much tighter, stronger novel."

These last few weeks as I have been waiting for her reply I've imagined three possibile responses: 1) "this book is not my thing, I just wasn't grabbed by it, best of luck" (which is fairly normal agent speak) 2) "the book is good but needs some work before I'll try to sell it" and 3) "the book is fantastic, it blew my socks off, I've sent it to all the biggest publishing houses and they've already sent you this ginormous check." I had ruled out number 1, simply because I have some degree of faith in the story I'm telling and I know K likes my writing, plus she had already seen/liked the synopsis for my novel and asked to read it. I understood that number 2 was fairly likely. But I was really, unreasonably hopeful for number 3, the way you buy a lottery ticket and sit waiting for the numbers to be announced on TV.

And darn it, you never have those right numbers.

So when I read K's email I was hit with a surge of pure adrenaline and a crazy mix of elation and disappointment. It took me hours to smooth myself out. In the end, when I floated back down to rational thought, I was left with this: this was a very good response. K ultimately wants to sell my book as much as I do (or at least half as much as I do, which is plenty), and she needs to make sure it's solid enough to make a real, honest-to-goodness attempt at it. Her job is not to pat me on the back and tell me how great my book is. Her job is to sell it.

So I am back to the draft, every single day between the hours of 2 and 5. Revision Round 3, which yes, does make this a fairly early draft. I have to remind myself that I started writing this novel in March. Just six months ago. And I may still have a long journey ahead of me before I move to the next stage. I need to be patient.

J recently pointed out to me that my last blog post was a tad melodramatic, me going on and on about waiting for K when she'd only had the manuscript for 3 weeks, which is a very short waiting period in agent-time. Plus, our kid didn't really smell funny and there was no leaning tower of dishes in our sink, thank you very much. So here, all joking aside: I need to be patient. And hammer away on my book. And then be patient some more.

In the meantime, par K's suggestion, I got my college roommate and bestest bud Amy, who is a high school math teacher, to round me up a group of students to read the manuscript. I am eager to see how that turns out, as most of the people who've read the book at this point are people my own age or older.

Writerly Limbo

K has had the manuscript for over 2 weeks now, and still not a peep. The first week I was fine. The second week was harder, because I knew that she was probably in the process of reading it, but I was determined to be patient. This week it is taking all of my willpower not to pester her. Literally. I have no will to fend off sweets or resolve to keep my kitchen floors clean. I have eaten almost an entire raspberry sour cream pie and there’s a heap of dirty dishes in my sink and my kid is starting to smell funny. All my energy is being used to restrain me from emailing K (or even worse, calling her) and saying plaintively, “So, you read the book yet? What do you think? Huh? Do you like it? Do you think you could sell it? Huh? Do you? Do you?” If I lived in New York I’d be pacing outside her building right now.

She’d better get back to me soon, is all I’m saying.

In the meantime, I've heard from a few friends I sent the book to, all sunny, positive reviews and pats on the back. Even from my super smart literary friends, which feels wonderful but a bit suspicious. These are your friends, the little voice in the back of my brain whispers. They love you. They’re obligated to love your book the way a mother loves her ugly baby.

So I discussed the first half of the book on the phone with Cali, former Boise State M.F.A. alum and confidante. Cali generally speaks her mind, which I’ve always found refreshing. I had no doubt that if she found my baby ugly, she would just come out and tell me. We sat with the document open in front of our respective computer screens 2636 miles apart, and I took a deep breath and prepared to examine the warts.

“Okay,” Cali said, “page 19. I really had a problem here.”

Here it was. The truth. I prayed earnestly that I would have the capacity to fix whatever the problem was. I prayed I wouldn’t go crazy in the process. I prayed that I wouldn’t end up on my patio making a bonfire out of the whole darn novel.

“I want more,” she said.

This, nine times out of ten, turned out to be Cali’s request. More description. More inner narrative. More explanation.

Phew. Sure, I can do MORE. I just cut 25 pages from the novel before I sent it to K. It looks like a skinny kid to me anyway. So I am back to work, writing more, filling out the bare places, and falling in love with my story all over again.

All the while waiting, in this strange writerly limbo, for word from K.

The Eagle Has Landed

So usps.com tells me that at 1:01 p.m. this afternoon, my novel arrived at my agent's office. It could be sitting on K's desk this very moment. This fact makes me a) completely excited and eager to know what she thinks, yet determined to be patient and just let the woman read (because she's a busy person with, no doubt, a tall stack of manuscripts on her desk) and b) nervous, like a mother sitting on the edge of an uncomfortable chair in the waiting room of a doctor's office, waiting to hear whether her child is basically healthy or major surgery will be required.

A word about agents: they are the best thing since peanut butter, in my opinion. I feel extremely lucky to have this woman who I can email out of the blue with a new project, who is so encouraging and enthuiastic about my writing. The week I first connected with K was a good week for J and me: he won the Stegner Fellowship and we found out we were moving to California. K worked for Watkins Loomis then, and she had seen my story "The Sugar Shell" in The Iowa Review and liked it. I'd had a couple of agents contact me about the story during that time, which blew my mind, but I gravitated toward K. She was professional but approachable. My office mate at UNL was conferencing a student the first time K called, so I dragged the phone out to the hall, sat on the floor against the wall, and explained my current project to her. I hardly knew how to talk about the novel, let alone sell it. But right away she latched on to what I was attempting to do with the novel, and it was like immediately having a cheerleader on the sidelines. A cheerleader who really knows how to sell your book.

Seriously. Better than peanut butter.

A few years ago K moved to a larger agency, one that began in 1905 and represented some of the greats like D.H. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne, and Ayn Rand, not to mention the huge list of amazing clients they are currently working with. I am awestruck looking at the list of writers these people have helped, and thrilled beyond belief to have K and that agency in my corner right now. It truly makes me want to write my best.

Speaking of which, I began writing the prologue for book two of my series, which is tentatively entitled Broken Wing. I expected to throw myself right into the action where I left off in book one, but then I thought: prologue. Book one has a prologue. Shouldn't book two? Suddenly I was writing a completely different scene about a moment when my main character was seven years old. I was literally following her home from school. It's marvelous how that happens; you sit down to write and something truly unexpected shows up on the page. I don't know if I'll keep the scene, ultimately. But in spite of all my whining about starting the second book before I had fully celebrated the completion of the first, it felt good to be writing forward again, after weeks of revising in circles. It felt really good.