rebeccakuder

The reluctant outliner

Outlining, after having written 150 pages of mess. All this will amount to a novel some day, but now, it’s a snarl of words in my computer and notebook.

And in my head.

I sometimes write an outline when I have something to write that needs a clear, simple structure. But with my fiction, which can be (and usually is) a mess, I tend to write an outline when I’m near the end of a draft, and stuck, not sure what happens, or needs to happen next.

Today, stuck, resuming after an uncomfortably long break, my smart husband suggested I write an outline, figure out what I have, and where I need more stuff.

It sounded quite unappealing. No romance, no forward motion.

But once I got started, it was welcome, easy, comforting busy-work. “I’m doing something in aid of my novel!” I thought. It’s not the exhilarating fall of writing new stuff, but feels productive. Like something a grown up would do. Like someone who Writes Novels would do.

Here’s how I do it:
1. Make sure all the handwritten notes are typed up into the computer file. (I write new matter on paper, with a fountain pen. It’s much more fun for me. And I usually write down scenes and new stuff as they occur to me, trying to put them in an order that makes sense, but not always in a linear or chronological way.)
2. Open the computer file, and start looking at it, page by page, but from a bird’s eye view (anyone who has a better way to put this without using a cliche, please share!).
3. With paper and pen next to the computer, write an outline, scene by scene. Mostly focus on plot (what happens) but sometimes on themes or other important things to note, things to pick up on later.

It takes a long time, but in the past, I have found it very useful. Sometimes the outline ends up being like a stage manager’s “bible” with set, costume, prop notes, and actor’s motivations, etc. Often, that’s how I find big gaps, things that need to be rearranged, or just taken out. I hope this will be true this time around.

At least it feels like I’m doing something.

rebeccakuder

Waifs and orphans

Why do I write about waifs and orphans? I am neither, but they stir me. Why?

Recently I realized that the characters in my novel-in-progress are all, in some manner, orphaned. I’m still uncovering, discovering, or making up the extent to which this manifests itself (and matters) in the mess. But I know that’s an emerging, and somehow important, current through this work, and much of my other work.

In my novel, The Watery Girl, Claire and the watery girl are both alone.

I am an only child, and the mother of an only child. But I don’t think my obsession with waifdom and orphandom is that simple. It could be the notion that we are all alone in some deep sense. I’m still figuring it out.

Community and family are really important to me, and day-to-day, I don’t feel alone. Honestly, I would like to have more actual time alone. But I don’t want to feel alone inside. There’s something scary about that feeling. And yet I also understand that independence is important, dependence can be tricky and dangerous, and I am okay with the occasional loneliness of being alone.

But the waif. The orphan. Something about their vulnerability (which is, perhaps, in all of us, in some deep, hidden place) attaches itself to what I am doing, or trying to do, in my fiction. Do these waifs and orphans need me to tell their stories? Does this render me less alone?

rebeccakuder

Public breastfeeding on parallel with public urination? Really?


I am the breastfeeding mother of a two-year-old.  If you’d told me, when I first had the baby, how long I’d be breastfeeding, I would not have believed you.  However, I know that it’s a great benefit to my child, myself, and our family.  And I have a part-time job, a very flexible schedule, and a supportive baby-daddy, so I know how lucky I am in being able to breastfeed this long.  Also, I know that it’s a nearly political choice these days.

Plenty has been written, blogged, ranted about when it comes to breastfeeding, but this little ditty by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail really offended me.  After a short diatribe against a breastfeeding mother who was chastised for feeding her baby in a shop changing room, Ms. Moir goes on to say:

“Campaigners and mothers always like to occupy the moral high ground by insisting that those who object are curmudgeons. Why, breast-feeding is the most natural and beautiful thing in the world, they cry. Well, so is urinating, but no one insists on doing that wherever and whenever the need takes their fancy. Not outside France, at any rate.”

Well, there is at least one major difference that I can see. Breastfeeding is eating, or more accurately, drinking, and doesn’t that make it sort of like the opposite of urination? And while I’m sure plenty of otherwise upstanding citizens urinate in public, my image of public urination usually has to do with men who have been out drinking and can’t make it to the nearest toilet.

Her comparison just doesn’t hold up, and more than that: the inane backlash against breastfeeding women depresses me. Yes, it was weird when I first began breastfeeding in public. And yes, I’m sure that some people are uncomfortable seeing me nurse a two-year-old on a bench or in a restaurant. I try to be discreet. I often take my child to the car, so at least we are not in someone’s face. But the idea that I should only stay home while nursing, or wean her in public, is neither fair nor realistic.

Okay, I guess I am a bit more militant than I thought. However, I would never judge another woman’s choices about where, when, how or whether to nurse. It’s a personal decision. I just hope that the world will evolve until women–the world over–have plenty of support and freedom to do something that is natural, free, and clean.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to piss on a tree.)

rebeccakuder

Magic (might be) where you find it


I have been ruminating about Lynnell Edwards’ question on the Red Hen Press blog, and wanted to post my thoughts here.

I don’t have a policy on vampires. I have read beautiful, strong, amazing prose in a variety of genres, including “literary realism.” I haven’t read Twilight or Harry Potter, but I have read Lord of the Rings. And though I don’t want to compare a television show to a novel, I do love “Buffy,” because the writing is excellent, the characters rich and complicated, and the issues they deal with (ethical, moral, metaphysical) are important and paradoxically what I would consider “real.” These are some of the same characteristics I would look for in a good novel or story.

Different genres have different sets of expectations from the readers, and publishers. It can be hard to run a workshop or a class with a mix of genres–if only because other writers, leaders or teachers aren’t necessarily familiar with all genres. That can make things tricky, especially when students are just learning how to operate within a workshop setting.

One problem is that writing students (and readers in general) may be reacting to having been fed more visual media or media tie-in books than original books within the fantasy and science fiction genres. But as small children, most of us read plenty of fantastical things. Dr. Seuss, Harold and the Purple Crayon are a couple things that come to mind. It makes me sad that so many adult readers lose access to what is magical in literature by way of shedding childhood and heading into the “real world.”

Ursula LeGuin has some interesting things to say about the genre silos, and the “literary” biases against fantasy. If this problem interests you, check out her essay collection, Cheek By Jowl. I find a lot of bias in academe against work that is other than literary realism. Magical realism is acceptable, usually, and a few other lucky or pushy writers who have slipped with their novels into the list of acceptable, despite the fact that they write science fiction. I am thinking of Margaret Atwood. She has protested long and loudly enough to have convinced many readers (who might disdain other works of “science fiction”) that she’s not writing it. If something can be translated or packaged as allegorical, it “transcends” the genre. (Even the word “transcend” bothers me here.)

Overall, I don’t care where my students aim to publish their work. If it’s good, it’s good. I strive to help students learn about what I think makes fiction work, what makes it strong, what might make it transcend whichever box it ends up being placed in by a publisher.

Or, to quote Shakespeare’s Juliet:
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet…”

And: There’s a Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s novels. So I guess he is another who slipped through the cracks.