A Curious Art

I've been thinking today about the curious disconnect that exists between the act of producing writing and the act of consuming it. Artists of other media have the potential to watch their art being consumed. A singer can look out on the audience as she sings. A painter can stand in the gallery as people look at his paintings. A movie director can sit in the movie theatre and see if the audience is laughing or crying where he intended.

While a writer can read his work out loud, for the most part this is just a variant of acting; he's reading a script, and the success of the reading will depend not just on the words but tone, inflection and body language.

But the one thing a writer would almost never have the chance to do is to watch someone sitting silently reading his book. I suppose it could happen every now and then by chance that a famous author might be on a plane and spot someone reading their latest best seller. But, even then, reading is such a silent, internal process... how does the writer know what the reader is seeing and hearing as the pages turn?

Each story we write is only a message in a bottle. We will never know where it may wash ashore.

Essential Loneliness

I haven’t had a lot of success in my life building my own family. Both my marriages ended childless, which saved a lot of paperwork on the divorce, I must say, but that’s not a huge consolation. I’m deeply envious of people who’ve managed to select their mates wisely and raise children. It is, I think, one of the highest possible achievements of any human to launch a child safely and securely into adulthood.

Still, while my romantic entanglements have always been something of a mess, I’ve been much luckier in friendship. I have a wide circle of friends, including some I would count as true friends. As the old joke goes, a fried will help you move… a true friend will help you move a body. Fortunately I haven’t had to put these friendships to the body test yet, but I know in my heart who I’d make the first call to if the situation arose, and I know that not only would he help, he’d probably have the foresight to bring power tools. Of course his car isn’t very big… luckily I have another friend with a pickup truck, and I’m certain she would loan me a tarp, and I know she won’t rat me out.

I fear I’m veering off topic.

What I meant to get at when I sat down to write this post was that I think I have stumbled on to a key element to being a writer worth reading: the writer must always possess an essential loneliness.

Having a successful marriage and family won’t necessarily preclude this loneliness. Having good friends can’t truly cure this loneliness either. A writer, or any other artist, must always possess a sense that he is an outsider. Place him in the middle of a crowd, and he can never truly think of himself as part of that crowd. He is, instead, an observer of the crowd. If he’s participating in whatever the crowd is doing (cheering a rock band, for instance, or walking through a crowded mall the weekend before Christmas), he’ll still feel like he’s only pretending to be part of the group; on a deep level, he’ll never truly fit in.

It may be that everyone feels this way. It’s certainly a common theme in movies, books, and song lyrics. Far more likely, feeling this way may be a motivator to write movies, books, and song lyrics. Because one of the things that keeps me writing, day after day, year after year, is this never ending quest to explain myself. I am forever crafting small homunculi of myself and sending them out into the world via fiction, hoping they’ll find acceptance.

Writing has a way of weeding out a lot of lesser motivations. If you’re writing seeking fame and fortune, this might keep you going for a book or two, but you’re going to realize fairly quickly that fame as a writer means that in any random crowd, nobody is going to have a clue who you are. As for fortune… I suspect panhandling would probably provide a more steady income, and would keep you out in the fresh air and sunshine to boot. Most writers I know are pale people deficient in Vitamin D.

The one thing that kept me typing year after year, until I had committed a million words and then some to paper, was this quest to ease my loneliness by revealing hidden aspects of myself in fiction. When I first started writing, I used to have a fear that people would see too much of me in my writing. One reason I think I have found the modest success I have as a writer is that at some point I stopped being afraid that people would discover my dark secrets and started to embrace this as a hope. The stories that receive the greatest reaction are stories where I confess the things I least want the world to know about me. Admittedly, I do this obliquely… I place my hate into the character of Bitterwood. I place my more sadistic thoughts into Blasphet. My sleazier, cheesier elements find voice in Pet. In Nobody Gets the Girl, I confess my sense of being an outsider rather nakedly in the form of Richard Rogers, AKA Nobody, a man moving through the world as an unremembered ghost, invisible, intangible, hungry for the simplest human connections.

It is possible, of course, to write stories that don’t have this confessional element. I’ve certainly done so many times, and with some success… “Final Flight of the Blue Bee” will soon see publication for a third time, and I’m hard pressed to say that a reader would learn much about me reading it… except, perhaps, in the last moments of the story, when Stinger is falling to his death, and he yells out his final message to the Blue Bee. His voice is drowned out by the drone of the millions of bees that surround him. The most important words he’ll ever say go unheard. I think this moment captures my fundamental belief that, in the crucial moments, the things we most want to communicate are almost always missed somehow.

In the end, the feeling that I’ve never truly said what I most wanted to say is what keeps me coming back to blank pages again and again. I am forever tapping keys to fill the empty space with words, in a desperate attempt to keep myself from fading from this world, unknown, unremembered, a nobody.

Racing toward the End

I've been hunkered down writing a good bit of the day. There's also been some bill paying and air conditioner purchasing and installation mixed in there... we're pushing 100 degrees here in NC. I bought a 12,000 BTU model that's supposed to cool 550 square feet--roughly the area of my living room, office, and a bit of the kitchen. So far, the day is really testing the unit. Tomorrow, I'll install the much smaller 65000 BTU model in my bedroom and see if that helps things out. Days like today make me wonder if I'm wrong about global warming. But, of course, the data from any given city on any given day is pretty meaningless. And global warming is one of those issues where it really doesn't matter much if my opinion is right or wrong. So what? The reality is, we as a species are going to be pumping a lot more CO2 in the air next year, and we'll be pumping out more the year after that, and more the year after that. The AC unit in my window is making my carbon footprint bigger, but I'm one of the select few people on the planet that get to have AC. That's not going to last for long, though. The chinese are putting in AC. People in India are installing AC. Coal is going to be powering most of this.

And, of course, that's not even the big driver of greenhouse gasses. The big drivers are the agricultural systems that keep American's fat and happy... and, coming soon to a planet near you, steak-eating Chinese will make American's look like vegan sissies. Food follows money.

So, we're all doomed, unless we're wrong, and there are feedback systems in the planet that keep the thermostat stable, or unless the extra heat turns out not to matter all that much. The ice caps will melt, and we'll lose some tropical shoreline, but we'll start building beach houses in Russia and Canada, and life will roll on.

This wasn't at ALL what I sat down to talk about by the way. I'm actually sitting down to report that at some point tomorrow, I'll roll over the 120k mark on Dragonseed, the third Bitterwood book. Actually, there's a decent shot I'll roll past the 125k mark. I worked on Chapter 29 today. Tomorrow I'll do 30, and maybe go back and fill in a scene or two, and that will be the end of the first draft.

Right now, I'm in a good news/bad news sort of area, plot wise. I had really set myself a goal of finishing all the major plot threads raised in the trilogy at the end of this book. Any further books set in the Dragon Age were going to follow a different cast. But, while I'm confident I'll end the story of Bitterwood, it looks like I'm going to have to leave a few of the rest of the cast with some dangling plot threads. Not major ones, but my goal had been to have all the characters by the end of this book either living happily ever after, or dead. Now, it looks like I'll be getting many of my characters out of the fire at the end of the book, but still in a frying pan, so to speak. Ah well. These things happen. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the human/dragon struggle for dominance can't be completely resolved in a few books. It's like waving a magic wand and saying that the Palestinian/Isreali conflict is all better now.

Sunday, I plan to nap. Maybe go fishing, even with the heat. Maybe stretch out in front of the AC and read a book. Then... the rewrites begin. But, that's the thing about endings. They always seem to morph into beginnings.

You Never Write Alone

Most fiction writers write alone. Sure, you might occasionally go out to a coffee shop with a laptop or a notepad and scribble down a few lines. Yet, for the most part, writing requires an active concentration and a certain amount of stillness to allow you to hear the unspoken words inside you. Even if you are sitting in the coffee shop writing your stories, it’s a good bet you’ve tuned out all the voices and distractions around you. When you are writing, there is nothing in the world but you and your words as they seep out one by one.

I remember hanging out with my artist friend Eric Buchanan in his studio in the years after college. He would paint while a half dozen friends came by. Everyone would sit around chatting and Eric would talk but keep painting. I was very envious. I cannot imagine carrying on a conversation while writing. Harlan Ellison may sit in the windows of book stores and write short stories, but writing isn’t going to be a public event for most authors.

Yet, the title of this article is, “You Never Write Alone.” Kind of at odds with my opening paragraphs, yes? So what do I mean?

Two things: First, and most importantly, all fiction writers must learn that there is one more person involved in the creative process other than themselves and their fictional cast. That unseen person is the reader. The sooner you become aware of the reader’s presence, the better your writing will be.

One eye-opening thing that happened to me at Odyssey ten years ago was the response I was getting from a room full of twenty people. Some of the readers in the room seemed to get me, and liked my stories. But, the majority always seemed to miss some point I was making. They were confused by the character’s motivations, or bewildered by the setting, or just couldn’t follow the leaps of logic in the plot. I could read my own story and have all these things make sense, but I was failing to put what I knew about the characters and the setting onto the page in a clear and easily grasped way that readers could understand.

Looking back, I believe my biggest problems were that I was trying to be coy, or subtle, or clever with my writing. I had an innate fear of simplicity and directness. Subtlety and cleverness are fine qualities for a writer to strive for, but they are also pitfalls that many a fine story has fallen into. One bit of advice I read years ago was, “Never be afraid to be too obvious.” It’s advice I try to follow. If you are too obvious, an editor can understand what you are saying, see that it’s worth saying, and tell you, “You’re being too obvious here. Tone it down.” If you are being too subtle, however, you aren’t going to get feedback telling you what it is that the editor doesn’t get. It may be you’ve placed a very subtle clue to your character’s motivations on page three of your thirty page manuscript. So subtle that the editor doesn’t get it, and ten pages into your story decides that your characters are behaving in a random and unconvincing fashion and simply moves on to the next story.

It is vital to understand that you are writing to be read. You don’t need to talk down or pander to your unseen reader, but you shouldn’t be afraid to offer them any help you can in order to understand your story as quickly as possible. College literature classes have skewed many young writers because they expose writers to stories that require footnotes and multiple readings to understand, and hold this up as the pinnacle of fine writing. But, most readers in the wild, outside the confines of a classroom, aren’t looking for a novel they have to read multiple times to fathom. They want a story where they know who the characters are, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are doing it. Get all this onto the page as directly as possible and you will have a larger pool of potential readers than if you purposefully craft prose that is obscure, arcane, and downright unintelligible.

Of course, it may be that you wish to target fans of the downright unintelligible, as James Joyce did with Finegan’s Wake or Burroughs’s did with Naked Lunch. You are free to choose the unseen reader you most want to engage. If that unseen reader is a literature professor, there’s no shame in that.

My unseen reader has changed over the years. It began as a teacher, then a college professor—they were being paid to read my writing when I was a student, and I wanted to write stories that pleased them. Then, my unseen writers started to include close friends. Of course, my friends often knew what the story was about because I talked to them about the writing it before I ever wrote it. My unseen reader expanded when I joined the Writer’s Group of the Triad in Greensboro. Suddenly, strangers were reading my writing, and I was getting very different feedback than I had from my friends.

The more people who read my work, the more I found myself adjusting my writing strategies. I kept honing my style to fix the points that readers kept stumbling over. I began making my plots more linear. And, I kept building my circle of readers. While with the WGOT, I’m guessing 50 people over the years read my words and gave me feedback. Oddyssey added another 20 people to this, then maybe 20 more in the online critique group that followed. I later went to boot camp, which added another 15 readers to my circle, and began posting stories on Zoetrope.com and roped in another 30 or 40 readers. Codexwriters.com added dozens more.

Now, when I write, I may be sitting alone in a room, but I have the comments, criticisms, and kind words of about 200 people echoing in my ears. I cannot possibly name them all here, but I maintain strict POV within scenes because Rick Fisher used to catch each and every time I didn’t. Elizabeth Lustig used to hand back my pages to me filled with red ink. I still find myself in the middle of fifty words sentences from time to time and try to imagine how she would fix it. I remember Harlan Ellison delivering a scathing critique of one of my stories because I’d been purposefully obscure in the opening paragraph. He told me I wasn’t good enough to pull it off and he was right; his words still push me to strive for clarity. Suanne Warr wrote a blog post about Bitterwood where she said she’d found the multiple POV’s distracting. I thought it was a good point, so I made the choice to limit the number of POV characters in Dragon Forge to only a half dozen or so before I got too far into it.

Currently, as I rewrite Dragon Forge, I keep sending out chapters to a fairly large group of people. Some have read Bitterwood, some haven’t. Feedback I got from my live critique group of Alex Wilson, Suanne Warr, William Ferrus, Mike Jasper and Jud Nirenberg has already reshaped the draft I’ve been sending to my second draft readers of Laurel Amberdine, Cathy Bollinger, Ada Brown, Guy Stewart, and Oliver Dale. Slowly a consensus is building as to what’s working and what isn’t, and soon I’ll be starting a third draft where I try to address their concerns and put in more of the stuff they liked.

While the individual reader feedback still resonates with me, it’s the collective reader I write for—and that collective reader just gets better the more people I get feedback from. Now that I’m published, I get have the advantage of having my stories reviewed and blogged about. I check Amazon all the time to see if some new feedback has been posted on my books.

For the beginning author, your best source of feedback is other writers in training. They are all over the internet. Unless you are the world’s least competent googler, you can find something that suits your needs pretty quickly. You can probably also find a live critique group in your area that meets frequently. If you live in the Research Triangle Area and are looking for a group, let me know. We’ve got open slots in the one I attend.

The key, I think, is not to get locked into just one group. You want feedback from as varied a population as possible. If the same five or six people keep reading your work, you will have a harder time moving forward than you will if fifty or sixty people read your work. And when I say, “your work,” I don’t mean one story. To grow as a writer, you need to write a lot of stories, and have them read by a lot of people. Your goal here is to allow your style to develop over a body of work, not to keep revising the same story a dozen times based on the feedback of a dozen people.

Finally, there is one final important presence in the life of writers—their peers. It’s vital, if you are a new writer, to get out and talk to other new writers who are blazing their own paths to success. Some people will say that you should go and get the advice of old pros. While I found advice from Orson Scott Card and Harlan Ellison helpful, I also realized that so many of the bridges they crossed to reach success have long since burned. If you are at the beginning of your career, it’s useful to talk to other writers near the beginning of their careers. They are going to often have more realistic and practical advice than authors who’ve had years to build a fan base.

Speaking of the realistic and practical advice of my peers, I’ve sent out a challenge to some of them to see if they would be interested in sharing their wisdom, and several have graciously stepped up to the plate. So, in the coming weeks, check out the blogs of Lisa Shearin, author of the fantasy series that launched with Magic Lost, Trouble Found; Edmund Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show; Ken Scholes, author of a five book fantasy series from Tor; and Andy Remic, author of War Machine and many other fine tales of future combat. I’ve hung out with most of these people at cons or other events, and think you’ll find their insights illuminating.

Stories are made out of scenes; scenes are made out of nouns

This post may fall into the category of "pretty darn obvious." Still, I've been participating in writer's groups and critique circles for fifteen years at this point, and I've read a LOT of unpublished and unpublishable writing. Heck, the majority of stories I've written are unpublished and unpublishable.

The number one problem I've encountered over the years in reading unpublished stories is a pretty simple one: I get to the bottom of the first or second page and I don't have a clue what is going on. Often, I get to the end of the first sentence and know that I'm in for a rough ride. Writing fiction isn't exactly the same as writing a lead paragraph for a newspaper article, but some of the principles are the same. If I'm reading your story, I want to know the following things as quickly as artistically possible: Who is your lead character? Where is she at this moment? What is her problem?

Yet, again and again, I pick up stories where these simple bits of information remains elusive. One common pitfall is the first person voice. The story starts off with someone telling the story: "I was sitting in the chair thinking about my grandmother, etc, etc." Time and again, I'll be two or three pages into the story and find that the only thing I know about the narrator is that he or she calls herself "I" a lot. I won't know her name, I won't be certain of her sex, her age is a mystery, I'm unclear as to what time period she's living in, and, while I sometimes have learned her back story, I have no picture of where she is in the here and now.

A few years ago, I figured out that one quality my writing possessed that people were responding to was a sense of immediacy. I wasn't interested in the character's long and complex history so much as I was interested in what their immediate problem was. I could write a good moment in a character's life, and people responded to it. On the other hand, when I would write fuzzy, sceneless prose with backstories and flashbacks, I would lose readers. So, I printed out in large, bold letters these two words:

HERE

NOW

I taped these to the walls above my computer and have tried to abide by them ever since. I never write without being able to answer the question, "Where is my character? What is happening to him now?" Even if the scene is one where a lot of backstory will be revealed, this backstory is revealed in the frame work of a scene. One of my most successful stories, "Final Flight of the Blue Bee," the first story I ever sold reprint rights to and foreign rights to, has a tremendous amount of story that happens forty years before the current story. The present story is taking place in New York City. The action is unfolding in a hotel room, then atop the Empire State Building. To reveal the back story, however, I didn't use the typical flashbacks where the character slips into memory. I simply cut between two parallel storylines. In my odd numbered scenes, the events of the present day unfolded. In my even numbered scenes, the events of the past unfolded--but they unfolded in moments that had immediacy. They took place in specific locations, with a specific set of characters, and were written as if they were unfolding now. The reader had no problem, hopefully, shifting gears between the past and present. Keeping all the events immediate and specific helped keep the reader engaged. If I had fallen into a memory based flashback, or into a page long speeches explaining the past, I would have risked losing the reader.

So, it seems very simple and obvious, right? Build your story out of scenes. Each scene unfolds in a definitive place, in a specific timeframe, to identifiable characters. Each scene exists to accomplish something--we get introduced to an important character; we learn a clue to the mystery; we discover a terrible secret; we get to see a character tested by conflict, either internal or external. In my novel Bitterwood, I can tell you what any given scene was meant to do. The scenes existed to give the reader a piece of information they needed to understand the plot, the settings, or the characters (often all these things at once). If you don't know what you are trying to accomplish in a scene, then the scene may not belong in your story.

Which isn't to say there isn't room in fiction for sidetracks and diversions and meanderings; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite novels, and it's almost nothing but diversions and meanderings. But, the strange places that book takes us to work because Hunter Thompson was a masterful enough writer to actually take us places. While he can go off on rambles about history or politics or drugs, these things occur in the context of his here and now.

As long as I've brought Hunter Thompson to the party, we can use him to move into my next point: Scenes are made out of nouns. The opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Brilliant! In one sentence with very simple language he's introduced his setting to us--the desert near Barstow--and his problem--he's tripping on drugs. As the page unfolds, he describes his convertible as a Great Red Shark. He talks about bats swooping down from the sky. Images form in your mind as you read--the attorney in the car next to him pours beer onto his chest to facilitate the tanning process. He builds a here and now that intrigues us in his first few hundred words--then swings into a quick bit of backstory explaining how they got into this situation. But, he doesn't use the backstory until he's already hooked us with his setting and characters. We want to read the backstory because the front story is so fascinating.

When you study Thompson's style, it's built of very simple words. Nothing on the first page is going to send anyone running for a dictionary; we may not all know where Barstow is, but we know it's in a desert, and since "Las Vegas" is in the title we can figure it's taking place in the American Southwest. Later he introduces us to a rather formidable catalogue of drugs the two men are carrying; a few of these exotic items might throw a reader, but they are exotic in the best possible way--we know from the context that they are drugs, and the fact that they aren't all familiar drugs gives us insight that these are hard core users on a far different level from your friendly neighborhood pothead.

Hunter Thomson is writing his novel in first person, which provides a special challenge. We know a little bit about the characters from their immediate situation, but the first person voice means he's talking to you as if you already know who he is, and you don't. So, he does a very simple yet brilliant thing: He has the characters pick up a hitchhiker, then they introduce themselves to this new character, providing a formal introduction to the reader. We learn their names, their jobs, their mission, and quick summaries of their world view. Simple, straightforward, and completely effective. I've never read a critique of this novel that complained about the rather naked storytelling device of introducing the hitchhiker as a way of getting this information onto the page. The fact is, it's information the reader wants. He tells it to us in an engaging fashion. And when the plot device of the hitchhiker has fulfilled its usefulness, the hitchhiker runs off into the desert and plays no further significant role in the book.

On the first draft of this post and the previous post, I wrote that "scenes are made from words." Which is true in a very broad sense; every word is important. Your choice of verbs and adjectives are vital. But, I revised "words" to "nouns" as my essay developed. It's nouns that truly paint the pictures in people's heads. And not just any nouns--you want concrete nouns all over your page. Words like love, justice, god, and antidisestablishmentarianism are all nouns, and may all be important things to write about, but they don't build scenes. You build your scenes out of concrete elements, things your characters can touch and taste and feel and see. Your story may be about the absence of God from the universe, but your scene should be full of things like cigars or pines or elephants or t-bone steaks.

Time and again I've read the advice that writers can punch up their style by avoiding the verb "to be," and choosing verbs with a lot of action. But, let's return to Thompson: His opening sentence has three verbs: were, began, take. His verbs are almost invisible in order to let the nouns take center stage and build the scene. Would the opening be improved in any way by more active verbs? "We zoomed toward Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs gripped us." Ug. Save your action verbs for actual action. Don't be afraid to let your nouns do the heavy lifting.

Here's a simple exercise: Grab your favorite book, go to the first page, and circle all the nouns you see. Good, scenes are built out of familiar, quickly grasped, specific nouns. Thompson first talks about the bats swooping around the car--the juxtaposition of bats and car is interesting to our mental eye. Then, he gets specific about the car--a huge red Chevy convertible. He gives the car a name--the Great Red Shark. If you were to erase all the words on the page but the nouns, you would still have a good chance of building the scene in your mind--drugs, desert, bats, beer, convertible, highway. I'm guessing that your favorite novel will possess the same quality--strip it down to the nouns, and the nouns tell you who, what, when, where. Good nouns are like flashbulbs, popping in the darkness of the mind, lighting up a picture. Here's a trashcan, here's pizza cheese stuck to a cardboard box, here's a raccoon.

I'm sure there are exceptions. The only nouns on the first page of your favorite novel might be utterly bland--man, woman, building, city. And it may be that you are a brilliant enough story teller that you can draw readers into your world even with generic language. But, I would challenge you to think about how much more story you can wring out of the right nouns.

So, here's a second exercise: How much story can you get out of four nouns?

Take "man, woman, building, city" and replace them with more evocative nouns.

"Cop, nurse, Superdome, New Orleans" There are hints here. I can see a story taking shape.

"Shuttle pilot, astronaut, launch pad, Cape Canaveral" Hmm. Throw in a diaper, and you've got something.

"Cowboy, princess, sushi bar, Havana"--Okay, perhaps the story isn't obvious, but you've at least got my attention.

One last note on nouns: I find that one effective tool is to mix something sinister or strange with something fairly mundane. My first sale to Asimov's starts: "There was a shark in the kitchen." It's the juxtaposition of the dangerous thing--the shark--with a familiar setting--a kitchen--the makes the mind sit up and pay attention. A skull in a graveyard is okay; a skull on the coffee table is better. A lion in the zoo provokes a yawn; a lion in a laundromat opens the eyes. A giant lizard attacking Tokyo creates interest; a giant lizard reading to a kindergarten class demands explanation.

Scenes. Nouns. Here. Now. Go write something.

Five things I've learned about writing

I had a 12 hour drive back from World Fantasy and spent a good chunk of that time thinking about writing; not just my immediate projects, but larger lessons I've drawn from my experience to date. Much of this has been prompted by my dinner with fellow Odyssey grads. I'm returning to Odyssey next year as a lecturer, speaking on the subject of style, and I was trying to work out things I would say on the subject but kept spinning out into larger issues. So, in the spirit of the "five things few people know about me" posts I did back in February, I'm going to do a series called "Five things I've Learned About Writing." I'll flesh out all these topics in the coming weeks, and may refine or alter my list. But, right now, five things I think I know about writing that I don't think I fully understood when I went to Odyssey ten years ago would be:

1. Stories are made out of scenes. Scenes are made out of nouns.
2. The best way to write a good story is to first write a bad story.
3. Momentum matters!
4. Embrace your demons.
5. You never write alone.

Some of this probably seems pretty obvious, especially #1. But, I'm constantly discovering really simple things about writing that just shock me that I didn't figure them out years ago.

More soon. Right now, I must get another chapter of Dragon Forge behind me. Because of #3.

Things Few People Know About Me #5: The True Origin of Nobody

I wish I could claim that the ten-day gap between my fourth secret and my final one was some attempt to build suspense. In truth, I've spent most of the last ten days immersed in the galleys of Bitterwood, hunting for typos and fine-tuning the prose. If my count is correct, this is the sixth time I've read this novel cover to cover in a year. It's disturbing to think that I'm still discovering mistakes and infelicities after so many passes. Of course, Nobody Gets to Girl made it to print with what I consider a pretty glaring problem in the second chapter. I call my hero by the wrong name on page 17! The protagonist is named Richard Rogers, and 90% of the time I call him Richard, but on page 17 I slipped up and called him Roger. The book was in print before someone pointed it out to me.

This isn't my fifth secret, by the way. But, I've been struggling to figure out a fifth secret that met the following criteria: 1. It should be something I haven't wanted people to know about me. I think this exercise is only of use if I'm pushing the limits of what I'm comfortable revealing about myself. 2. It should be PG 13. My family reads this blog sometimes after all. 3. I shouldn't take anyone else down with me.

The last criteria is a real stumper. Because, so much of the stuff I don't talk about is stuff that happened between me and someone else. I've been divorced twice. There are dark and juicy mines of secrets in both those past relationships. I could conceal the identities of my fellow students from college twenty years ago with fake names, but fake names wouldn't really work in concealing the identity of my ex spouses, since there are only two possible candidates.

Still, I think I'm going to break the third criteria and reveal something that very few people know about the creation Nobody Gets the Girl. I owe this novel to the collapse of my second marriage. In the fall of 2000, I'd been married to Anjela for about five years. Our marriage had been through many rough patches prior to that fall, but, still, around October things were taking an especially dark turn. I won't go into the details of what was going wrong with the marriage since I would like to respect Anjela's privacy at least a little in all this. But, during this time, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. I actually went to a doctor about my insomnia. And, when I did sleep, I would sometimes have the most vivid dreams. Some writers really mine their dreams for inspiration. I seldom remember enough of mine to find them useful, and the few I do remember seem too incoherent to shape into fiction.

One common thread of my remembered dreams, however, is that they are usually set in the same house. This house is no place I've ever lived, but I know it well... it's my dream house. It's a big, Victorian mansion, full of secret passages and hidden rooms. It sits alone in a field, with no neighbors in sight. The layout of the house is nothing I could ever sketch out in my waking moments, but, in my dreams, its a very tangible place, and I move around in it with a certain familiarity.

But, one night in October of 2000, I had a very vivid dream about a woman wrecking my dream house. The woman wasn't Anjela, or anyone I could immediately identify. But she was moving through the house, reaching out with fingernails like swords and ripping the walls. The strangest detail of the dream was that she was traveling along a heavy iron rail, wearing elaborate wheeled boots that had long iron spikes shooting out from the ankles. I remember in the dream chasing this woman, watching her tear the house to pieces, until suddenly the whole front half of the house collapsed, leaving what was left of the place looking like an enormous dollhouse.

In retrospect, it's easy to interpret the dream as my fears about my own house falling apart, at least metaphorically. At the time, though, when I woke up, I took the time to jot down some notes about the dream. Due to my having sought medical help for my insomnia, I was keeping a sleep log of when I woke up at night. The following day, I held on to that strong and strange image of the woman with swords for fingers and spikes on her heels. I began to think about who she might be and what her story was.

Also, it was around this time that, grasping at straws, I decided that the reason Anjela no longer seemed to be in love with me was that I had stopped writing. When we met, I'd been at a very productive and creative stage in my life. I'd finished my second novel, a very bad book called Dragons. And, I'd started my third novel, a much more promising book called Bitterwood. The first year we were together, I was writing all the time, churning out chapters and stories at a rate that I look back on with a certain degree of envy. Of course, back then, I could crank out story after story because I didn't really have a sense of what was a good story and what was a bad story. I would just take any cliched idea, pop in some cardboard characters, drive them toward a twist ending, and call it a story. As I grew as a writer, I found my output slowing. It took time and thought to write a good story, not just an afternoon's whim. I went from writing a couple of stories a month to writing a couple of stories a year. So, in October 2000, I felt like the reason Anjela had lost interest in me was that I wasn't the person I'd told her I was when we met. I'd told her I was a writer, but I'd evolved into someone who was only tinkering with the craft. I worried I was a poser, and she'd found me out.

So, I decided that I'd win her back by writing another novel. And I wouldn't screw around with this and drag it out for years like I had with my previous novel efforts. It was November. I'd finish my book by the end of December. I told people at the time that I was doing it in honor of the new millennium. If I started a book in November and finished it at midnight of New Years 2001, I could claim I'd written the first novel of the new millennium. But, the real drive behind my writing was my desperation to prove to Anjela that I was still the same creative writer that she'd fallen for a few years before.

I had plenty of ideas for novels when I sat down on November 15 to start writing my next novel, stories I'd thought about for years, and put a lot of planning into. But, when the actual typing started, I decided I'd tell the story of the girl who'd destroyed my dream house. The woman became the character Rail Blade. My protagonist was a wannabe stand-up comic who never was quite brave enough to quit his day job and chase his true dreams.

There was some good news/bad news with my plan to make Anjela love me again. The bad news, duh, was that it didn't work. She moved out sometime in December without having read a word of the book. To this day I'm not sure if she ever read it. The good news is, before that novel, writing had always been a very intellectual pursuit for me. Suddenly, I was writing in a state of high emotional stress and it all comes out in the pages of the book. I felt like my life was being taken from me by forces I had no control over... which was, of course, the same problem that Richard Rogers must confront as his entire life gets erased by a time machine accident. All of my existential angst found a voice in Richard.

There are other hidden parallels, things that no one probably ever suspects are drawn from real life. Right before Anjela left, we had a cat named Easter put to sleep. Easter had long had serious health problems. We were there with her as the vet slipped a needle into her veins and put her down. A night or two later, I wrote the scene where Dr. Know kills Rail Blade with a syringe of the same poison. Dr. Know is crying in the aftermath, claiming he killed her because he loved her and didn't want to see her in pain anymore. I know that Dr. Know is sincere, even if Richard doesn't believe his motivations in the book.

As fate would have it, a few days later I arrived home and found Anjela packing up her truck. The doors of the house were wide open so that people could cart off her furniture. I walked into the freezing house as an icy rain was starting to fall and found that the furnace was only blowing cold air. She drove off with me sitting in the rain removing the cover from the exterior furnace trying to figure out what was wrong. I didn't solve the mystery of the broken furnace. I eventually gave up and went inside broken home and wrote the next scene in my book... the scene that had given birth to the whole novel to start with, the scene in which a woman with spikes on her ankles rides a rail through a house and destroys it.

On that cold December night, it sucked really bad that my cat was dead, my furnace was broken, and my wife had left. Still, I wrote that scene that night, and the next scene the next night, and kept going until my book was finished. The whole time, my brain felt full of lightning, like the story was an electric current and I was merely its conductor. It was a deeply satisfying creative experience, worth the price I paid for it.

And, once it was on paper, I slept like a baby.

That's it, the fifth thing almost no one knew about me. Thanks again to Eric James Stone for tagging me. Now, it's time for me to turn this over to five people. So, Nancy Fulda, Oliver Dale, Vylar Kaftan, Rick Novy, and Gail Z. Martin... tag! You're it!