Some of you may not know this about me, but I have two extraordinary gifts. The first is for pairing the perfect tupperware container with the amount of leftover food. It’s uncanny how I get it right every time. The other is for taking every positive message that comes my way and using it against myself. But somehow, those really nice comments about the one year anniversary of this blog really got to me and I felt good all weekend. Thank you.
Let’s get back to tupperware and how it relates to writing. When I studied and wrote poetry, I loved using the forms that most of the other students balked at. I loved writing in quatrains, and sonnets, and my magnum opus, my personal Howl, was a sestina, ” Calories and Other Counts”. What I loved about form was that it forced you to make decisions, it put you in a box, and half the fun was seeing if you could get out. It fit or it didn’t. I’m not saying poetry is easy, but there was a template if you wanted it. Or wanted to break it.
How the hell do you start a novel. With an idea? A character? A situation? Is it a novella, is it a trilogy, is it 300 double-spaced pages. I never once in my life asked the following two questions but always appreciated it when someone else did: Is it going to be on the test? And, how long does it have to be? A lot of writers ask me how long their novels should be. How long does it need to be? Does it say everything it needs to say. Did you finish or run out of steam. How many writers get to between 75-150 pages of a novel and hit a dead end. Was is a short story whose eyes were bigger than its stomach? A novella? The beginning of novel in earnest, but one that you were not yet ready to write? Length seems to be the least of it. Most important, does it say what it needs to say? And when it’s done, can you find the right lid?
Filed under: Writing |
Betsy Lerner 
Poetry and containment–brilliant introduction to the subject of story construction.
I started with an ending and wrote backwards, writing toward a known inevitability. Like poetry I made the telling fit the poet’s (protagonist’s) need. Unlike poetry that need altered, as if passing through real time. I knew I had a novel when I finished the first chapter.
Willie Nelson song in my head the entire time? “If you see me getting smaller I’m leaving.”
Theme of the book? Escape.
When I was in college I like gravitated toward writing poetry in the forms, too. Sonnets rocked. So did iambic pentameter. It was like solving a puzzles where you got to create the pieces.
But I still have problems with tupperware.
When I was writing songs, I was well-aware of the restriction of meter and rhyme. I realized that I could say more than I had originally intended within this poetic discipline.
And this may sound bizarre, but when “safe sex” started in the 80’s, I never had a problem with it, and actually compared it to poetry: that you could say more, express more, within the confines of limited activity.
As for prose, I just sat down and began both my novels, never knowing how long they’d be or what would happen next. In a way like Wagner, who began with the end of his Ring Cycle, I knew how they would end, but had no idea how they’d get there. I had to start at the beginning, which, in both cases, was also the end.
I just want to say that I have the exact opposite problem with Tupperware – I always pick the wrong one for the amount of food left over. I figure this is because my brain doesn’t know how to calculate amounts of food (one whole cow = one serving of beef). I can’t get out of the kitchen unaided.
On books, mine is a memoir which, when I was done writing, had probably three times as many words as the right word count. I knew I’d have to make cruel cuts and I did.
“How the hell do you start a novel. With an idea? A character? A situation?”
A situation. In the form of a bill or a bank statement that comes in the mail. Then I sit down and calculate how much money I can borrow from credit cards and various increasingly-wary friends, and I plot that against our monthly expenditures. This gives me the amount of time I have to write and sell the novel, with six months added for the check to arrive. (I don’t write short stories, poems, or novellas, because I’m not that good yet–I need 75,000 words.)
Then I send my agent fifteen proposals in two weeks, until he ‘accidentally’ copies me on an email about taking early retirement. Then I’m ready to write.
Love it. I’m laughing.
It’s all about the “what if” for me–what if my father had succeeded in killing my mother? What if I had a baby from that affair? Oh, yeah, I love me some nightmare scenarios
I start with a character, and simply keep writing until I come to the end of his/her story. It’s never long enough, especially once I cut out all the crap. Then I have to figure out what’s missing, because it’s always lacking some important element. Usually, this is a cycle I repeat several times per ms.
And is it just me, or in the above photo, does the woman’s slightly askew head appear to be sitting on the shelf amidst the Tupperware? I’d have a tough time guessing the right lid for that.
I can measure out water and other liquids for cooking or tea, without the aid of a measuring cup, fairly precisely. A cup, two cups or more. To within a cc or two. Not perfect every time, but close enough to impress my husband. I’m sure most experienced cooks could say the same of themselves, though.
I had the characters and, weirdly enough, their backstory. They changed, and it took 3 starts (one of which went to like 80 pages, the other to 100) before I finally finished version 3 (draft 1 anyway). But even knowing the ‘basics’ of where they’d come from, they showed me so much more over the course. So…I usually start with characters.