Steps in the dark

I get up early to run before work two days a week. In the summer months it's usually just breaking dawn, though the sky is still dark blue enough for bats to flit over meadows. Bats at dawn; who knew?

Getting up early to write is tough, but at least I have the consolation of coffee. Getting up early to run is nearly impossible some days. Especially in the winter, when it's pitch black outside. Full-on, middle-of-the-night darkness. If I'm lucky it's clear enough for starlight; once or twice a year the moon is just right. But for the most part it means waking up in the middle of the night, leaving a warm bed, dressing, and stepping outside for that first shock of cold. Walk down the driveway swinging my arms to warm up, hating every minute of it. Every step. It is so dark and so cold and it is just. pure. misery.

Then I take a few steps and all of the resistance melts away and I'm just running. I'm still sleepy, still cold, still groggy ... but I'm running. Steps in the dark.

Road races are the same way: a few weeks or a few days of anticipation, the trembling adrenaline feeling making my fingertips throb I'm so nervous, shaking my hands, standing in the crowd at the start, nerves jangling into a crescendo. And then the gun goes off and it all melts away and I'm in the race, just running.

See, I realized it's all the stuff before the effort that's most difficult. The effort itself is no picnic, don't get me wrong -- the pounding gasping merciless last miles of a race can be almost transcendentally painful. But all the badness, all the getting-ready, all the self-doubts and uncertainty and wishing I was somewhere else ... just melts away once I begin. Once I commit.

This is where I am with writing. The starting is hard. Don't get me wrong: enduring through the shifty flaccid mealy-feeling mediocrity that plagues all first drafts is not easy. But something clicks into place when I start and I think: Okay. Now you just write.

And so I find myself coming up with reasons not to start the next book. "More research!" I tell myself. "How cold is the Baltic Sea in March? How do guns work? Why don't birds have four wings like dragonflies? Why don't dragonflies have tiny feathers? What if they did? Quick! Off to the Internet!"

Sigh.

I think one of the tricky things about writing fantasy is that the "fantasy" aspects of the story can distract us from the human issues at its core. Certainly I can feel that pull to always add more details, always pursue other ideas, always to do anything but sit down and write the dang first draft already.

Because a first draft is not a road race, with mile markers and a certain protocol and things you can expect at certain points. Heck, a first draft isn't even linear, much to my frustration. It's a great swirling jumble, a mess of false starts and dead ends and meanderings. Laini Taylor has a great metaphor for this: the exploratory draft.

Thinking of it that way -- as an exploration -- is a great way for me to lighten that crushing pressure of having to forge the absolutely right path, the right story, the first time. How could anyone do that?

And so I know that the first draft is an exploration. And I know that all the uncertainty and doubt and need to do just-one-more-bit-of-research will, to some extent, melt away when I begin to write. And I know that writing is work, it's just hard hard work, like building a stone wall or hoeing iron-hard ground or training for a marathon.

I know all this and still I delay. Surely there's some more plotting I can do, right? Or research. Or map-sketching. That it, I have to figure out ocean currents!

But then comes the whispering, as it always does. The flicker of an image or a snatch of music, a twinging emotion and I know: there is a boy fleeing over the mountains. I can see him. I will tell his story. And it will be hard.

But not as hard as starting in the first place.

Big and Small II

I've been thinking more about big and small, not in theme or story but actual physical details. This is one of the magical parts of writing (and reading): the way we can squeeze very, very close in and then, almost in the blink of an eye, rush out, way way out.

Things that are big:

• "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." The sea, the heaving grey sea, so broad and deep that at first it doesn't even seem to move.
• Thunderclouds that rise like blue castles to blot out the sun.
• A hurricane viewed from space, that delicate furious spiral.

Things that are small:

• A drop of salty water flung from an ocean wave onto your lip.
• Hairs on the leg of a spider.
• Flat facets and mineral cleavages on a single grain of sand.
• Salt spilled on a slate floor.
• An individual wood pore.

We don't just read stories, they take us places, help us change size, direct our gaze. I love that this means the scale of the story -- epic, personal, and everything in between -- as well as what we're experiencing -- a speck of dirt, the thunder of war, a bloodred aphid, the trade winds.

P.S. Extra credit for anyone who -- without Google -- can identify the source (author, work) of the quote in the first bullet point. Extra EXTRA credit for anyone who can recite the work from memory. Don't worry, it's very short. And very cool. Comment ... away!

Sieve Mind

Blast and crap and cripes and criminy. This is not the first time I've pounced on a nugget of wisdom and then forgotten where I found it. Curse my sieve-like mind! This is why I write things down. In this case the nugget is this: Plan cold, write hot.

That is, be merciless, even surgical in researching and whatever level of planning is appropriate before writing. (I need a skeletal outline to keep me on track; even then I tend to meander. But the key is that it's just the highlights. 6-10 words would describe the whole book.)

The writing is magic: write hot. If only it were as simple and poetic as releasing the fire of the story onto the page! Ha ha, what a concept. Since that happens very rarely, I think what "write hot" really means is: glance at the outline every once in a while, but plunge into the story and write the first draft with fervor and energy and heat.

Plan cold, write hot. Who said that? It's brilliant.

It's similar to something I think Anne Lamott said in Bird by Bird: You have to hypnotize yourself in order to do the writing and truly, truly sink into the story. And then you have to un-hypnotize yourself to get back to that cold merciless place to revise it.

Plan cold. Write hot. Revise cold.

Right now

Right now in Scotland, far in the north where the light lies long and cool and no trees grow, there is an empty beach. Maybe gulls cry in the distance, maybe the brown moor is dotted with sheep droppings. The seawater is so clear that it's turquoise but Arctic-cold. The wind hauls in from the west and there is no land on the horizon.

On that beach, maybe, a waterfall drops from a cliff, spilling peaty water onto the sand. Maybe the waterfall has scoured a deep pool on the beach. Maybe at the back of that pool there is a dark fissure in the rock, little more than a cleft but reeking of seaweed and wet sand and the cold dank exhalation of underground.

And maybe in that cave is ... what? Who? An old man made of feathers? A gleaming cup? A floor spongy with dead fish? The smell of heather and sunlight? A doll made of bones?

Somewhere else there is no land to be seen, nor water, nothing but towering snowy clouds and the blue muscular edges of a thunderstorm. The air smells of rain and electricity, and whistles past your ears as you flutter like a dry leaf through darkness and light.

Or maybe it's a thin, thin, gleaming trickle of water across a verdant stretch of cropped grass, a bright meadow on a sunny day with a gurgling creek. Songbirds fill the trees and you shade your eyes with your hand to see ... what? Smoke behind the mountains? Something in the creek? Dark birds?

A whale dives and bends his dripping tail to follow the sinking curve of his body; a wooden ship drives up on shore with a rattling scrape; a tree bends in an autumn gale, pale with leaves in the rain.

I have no lesson; no Words of Wisdom® to impart about writing. Just scenes that flicker through my head and which I alternately -- depending on mood -- call inspirations or distractions. We do, after all, find various creative reasons not to write!

Conditions improve on the Chesapeake

From this morning's NOAA forecast:

 SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM EDT THIS
 AFTERNOON THROUGH LATE TONIGHT

 THIS AFTERNOON
S WINDS 15 KT. WAVES 1 TO 2 FT.

 TONIGHT
S WINDS 15 TO 20 KT...BECOMING SW 10 TO 15 KT LATE.
WAVES 2 TO 3 FT...SUBSIDING TO 1 TO 2 FT.

I do TOO have a day job!

Few phrases make my heart jump more than "Small craft warning." Or "advisory," in this case. They save the "warning" for even stronger conditions.

I have on my desk at work a stainless steel bolt with a pronounced arc to it. This 1/4-inch thick piece was stressed and bent solely from the pressure of the wind on the sail of my small boat. Partly that means that even a small boat in a fresh breeze can generate surprisingly high stresses.

But it also reminds me of the real world outside the office, where wind bends steel and bats flutter and herons stalk the shallows. Is it any wonder my characters often end up in boats? That's me bleeding through into the story.

Big and Small

Once upon a time there was a furry blue monster with oddly thin arms named Grover. In one memorable scene, Grover leans close in to the camera, nearly filling the frame.

"Near," he says, and then huffs and puffs back, back, back until he's just a far blue dot.

"And ... far!"

That's the image that occurs to me as I work through the ideas of big and small. Big concepts and small examples. Big stories and little characters. I mean the elastic springiness that any good story must have to deal with large, universal themes on the one hand, and the characters through which those themes are explored, on the other.

It's easy -- well, as "easy" as writing can ever be -- to write a sweeping epic, full of noise and battle and ... shallow characters. Conversely you could also write a very tight, focused story dealing with nothing but character development. Both are good, and everything in between.

(As an aside, this is one of the many things I love about books: nothing is off-limits. Everything is possible, from cell phone novels to novels in verse to nine-word stories. Everything.)

What I want to do is take some of those universal human themes -- courage, guilt, betrayal, defiance -- and bring them to the reader through the characters, to the extent that it's possible. When I can show a twelve-year old character grappling with guilt, or making the right but hard decision, or struggling to understand a world -- and a story -- beyond his understanding and which doesn't patronize him, when I can do all this I'll be pleased.

I've been thinking some more about D. M. Cornish's Foundling and this is one of the things I loved about it. The main character, Rossamund Bookchild (how can any writer not love that name? we are all children of the book) finds himself in a rich, vibrant, and very dangerous world that does not make things easy for him. Neither the antagonists nor Cornish himself patronize Rossamund ... which means as readers we also are not patronized. Plus the illustrations are incredible!

It's difficult to explore these larger themes yet still make the characters and the story approachable. As a reader I want to see this, as a writer I want to build it. In close where the characters think; then swoop far, far out to issues that resonate beyond the characters and even the book itself.

Otherwise we'd just watch trash TV.

S Winds 10 to 15 Kt. Waves 2 Ft.

That's from the NOAA coastal marine forecast for the lower Chesapeake Bay. 10-15 knots is a handful of wind, enough to feel and hear on your ears. It's about what you'd feel while riding a bike; enough to swirl leaves along the road; enough to press behind a small boat with sails outstretched like the broad wings of a gull, water foaming alongside all the way north.

"There come thoughts now..." This imaginary voyage isn't that of fog and icebergs and the "whale's path" I mentioned earlier. No, it's a Chesapeake Bay trip in a smaller, one nimble enough to shove off a sandbar when you run aground, but large enough to carry a stove and some supplies and a sleeping bag.

Luckily, I'm building that very boat! (Pictures here; scroll down.) It's a daily ritual of cutting plywood, calculating numbers, the acrid stickiness of epoxy, the scrape of a plane. But someday it will be a boat and I will pray for days like this with good strong winds out of the south.

The idea, you see, is to circumnavigate the Eastern Shore of the Bay, encompassing portions of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. Why not? There is no better way to see that low watery landscape than from a small boat, and wind is free and inherently better than puttering along with an outboard. There are miles and miles of marshy inlets to explore, blue crabs and herons and the sweet smell of mud, and miles and miles of open Bay to sail across.

Starting at charts is what sailors do in the off-season. Or when their boat is still just a pile of parts in the garage that hasn't been assembled yet.

Though I have to admit: as idyllic as S winds 10-15 sound, this sets me afire:

WITHIN 180 NM NE OF A LINE FROM 55N59W TO 50N51W TO 44N44W
WINDS 25 TO 35 KT. SEAS TO 12 FT.

Now that is a handful of wind. And it gets much stronger than that.