June 2008 Archives
I don't know if it's hormonal (I didn't think I had any of them left) or what, but in the past year, I've gone back to crying over just about everything. This is "good" crying, as opposed to "wanting to slit my wrists" crying. By good crying, I mean that it feels healthy and cleansing and normal--for me, anyway.
When I was younger, I cried easily. Yes, those Hallmark commercials got me every time. I remember going to a drive-in when I was about 18. My date and I arrived during the last five minutes of Midnight Cowboy, and I was absolutely inconsolable, without having a clue what the first 108 minutes had been about. (I don't think that guy ever asked me out again). But then, for some unknown reason, I stopped crying. Not completely. Real life losses could certainly reduce me to tears, but I definitely was not the crybaby of my earlier years.
Now I'm back at it, and I'm glad. It feels, as I mentioned, cleansing. Here are a few of the things that have made me cry in the last year: a documentary on John Lennon, certain movies (The Namesake, Into the Wild, Atonement, Waitress, a few episodes of The Wire), a documentary on Martin Luther King, the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death, the new NASA documentary, listening to my brother sing a song he wrote at my niece's wedding, holding my new granddaughter for the first time and on and on. I'm also getting weepy as I write my work-in-progress (remember the sobfest??), which I view as a very good thing. If I weep, chances are fairly good my readers will be touched as well. During my "dry" period, however, I didn't cry at all as I wrote, yet readers still reported their own tears, so perhaps my weep-o-meter is not terribly predictive.
Here's what made me cry today. This is happy crying, so don't be afraid. You may have already seen this video, because it's made the rounds in the last week, but I saw it for the first time today and have to share. It's a true story; I checked it out. The reunion is from the early 70's. Make sure your sound is on, and let me know how it rates on your own personal weep-o-meter!
"It's never too late -- in fiction or in life -- to revise."
I love that Nancy Thayer quote, but I'm not sure how accurate it is when it comes to either fiction or life. I have about a week left to go in revising After the Storm, and then I'll have to set this draft free.
Maybe I say this with every book I write, but I swear, this is the hardest set of revisions I've ever had to make. Imagine putting together a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle of, say, a stampede of horses, and you have an idea of what I'm going through.
What's made this particular story so difficult, both to write and to revise? It's a sequel, for one thing, which I naively expected would make it easier to write. After all, I already knew the characters and the backstory. That knowledge, though, created enormous problems. I couldn't make anything happen in After the Storm that would be inconsistent with what happened in Before the Storm. Dates, always my bugaboo, (my long-time blog readers may remember my "when they need to have sex" post), tripped me up repeatedly. A second challenge was both intriguing and frustrating: viewing scenes that occurred in Before the Storm from a different character's perspective in After the Storm. Oh my. The world can be a very different place when viewed through a different lens.
What do I mean by revisions, exactly? Here's the way it works. I write a novel. I turn it in. My editor says "this is perfect just the way it is." I faint. LOL. That has happened a few times, actually, but not with After the Storm. I knew something wasn't working with the story, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. That's where a good editor comes in. I think my editor is frankly brilliant, and she was able to zero in on the area that needed work. It's a major minor problem. Yes, I said major minor. Minor, because the pieces of the story are all there and the characters are well-developed. But major, because it's the pacing that's off, and pacing can be a bear to fix. An absolute bear. In the first draft, for example, Character A met Character B on page 230. In the new draft Character A meets Character B on page 80. And that changes everything. That's where the 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle comes in, because when you alter what happens in one scene, it impacts the scenes around it, and they impact the scenes around them, and quite soon, you're surrounded by post-it notes and sheets of yellow lined paper and four different colored drafts and wondering if you will ever, ever be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
It reminds me of my previous career as a clinical social worker. I worked with families in my private practice, and one of the major principles in family work is that when you change one part of the family, it changes all the other parts of the family, so you must constantly be alert to the possible repercussions of every intervention you make. Ultimately, you want all the parts of the whole to function smoothly together. That's the same goal I have for this book. I'm getting there. One more week of late nights should do it.
I can never gripe about writing without adding this caveat: I am so grateful for this career. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to create worlds that feel real, to tell stories that touch people, and to make a living from my passion. I'm truly living my dream.
Finally, the first commenter to tell me how many different metaphors I've mixed together in this disorganized post will win an autographed copy of one of my books! Her (or his) choice.
And now it's back to work. . .
This weekend, The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes officially became the summer Bookclub Pick for Target's Bookmarked program! If you have a minute, pop over to Target's Bookclub site, click on the cover, and see what a great job Target and my publisher did in creating a lovely showcase for CeeCee. I'm excited that one of my stories--one that's very close to my heart--has the chance to reach so many new readers. I feel like a very lucky writer today!
I never met Tim Russert, but I'm going to miss him. I can't think of another newsperson so irreplaceable, and it's impossible to imagine Meet the Press without him. I know enough about Russert to know he was a Democrat, but that was immaterial to his interviewing style. You could never truly tell whose side he was on, because he treated everyone he interviewed, regardless of party affiliation, with the same dogged incisivness designed to get past their politics to their souls. That's why a Tim Russert interview was so yummy to watch. It was bound to be brilliant, penetrating, different, fair, and above all, informative.
I'm big on integrity. I try to have it myself, and sometimes I succeed. I strive to create characters who are, at their core, decent and honest and who struggle with themselves when they stray from those values. I wouldn't care about my characters otherwise, and I certainly wouldn't expect my readers to care. I think that's the quality Tim Russert had that I'll miss the most: integrity. There are many other interviewers I admire, but there was only one I knew I could trust.
Here are a few pictures from the event.
I'm getting ready to speak in this shot, above. I'm afraid I'm at that age where, to be comfortable, I need not only a bottle of water and reading glasses, but my personal mini-fan as well.
Here, I'm describing how my characters talk to me. I was getting some strange looks from a few of the audience members!
A much-appreciated round of applause!
Signing books. This is just about where we ran out. :(
Part of my neighborhood bookclub showed up to give me support (no, this is not the entire club! I think we must have the biggest book club in North Carolina). They wore these little labels that read "I'm a friend of Diane's" and "Diane and I read the same books." I was so touched by their show of support!
All in all, it was a wonderful night. I hope people went home happy and that Before the Storm is keeping them well entertained!
Our air conditioning is out. Not a good thing In North Carolina. The prediction is for highs near 100 all week, so I hope we can get this fixed pronto! Meanwhile, I have my office ceiling fan on high speed, my hair up, my cooling Neckbandoo around my neck along with my portable mini-fan, but my computer glasses are still steaming up. I have a laptop I could take to Starbucks or the library, but I'm smack in the middle of revisions, and I've never been able to comfortably revise on a laptop, so I'm stuck. I feel terrible for Keeper and Jet, who are stuck here with me in their fur coats.
I thought I'd take a short break from revisions, though, to write about one of my pet peeves in movies and books. Have you ever seen a movie in which the writer tries to convince you that the characters are very much in love simply by showing (or telling) you that they make love often? A couple of nights ago, we watched an older film, The End of the Affair, with Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes. Although I like both these actors very much, I had a problem with the central premise of the movie--the supposed love story. The characters Moore and Fiennes portrayed were at it repeatedly, in various artfully-lit positions, but they didn't do much in the way of talking (except to express jealousy and distrust). Clearly, though, we were meant to believe the love they shared was the deepest of the deep. Undying. The sort you'd make great sacrifices for. Am I the only person who doesn't find this believable or am I just getting too old and jaded? I think the challenge for a writer who wants to show deep love between two characters, whether in a novel or a film, is to move way beyond sex scenes. Showing the development of a relationship and all the levels of communication that entails, while keeping the story entertaining, is difficult, but a relationship based solely on sex, as most of us know, usually has a short shelf life. (I need to add that this movie is based on a novel by Graham Greene, which I haven't read.)
Here are a couple of examples of deep love between characters that I really bought into--hook, line and sinker--as a viewer. Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton in Out of Africa and at the complete other end of the spectrum, Ross and Rachel in Friends.
I'm curious to hear what you think. What makes you believe that two fictional people have a lasting love between them? Can you think of examples where the writer, in film or book form, pulled this off especially well (or not)?
While you're thinking about that, I'll be calling the air conditioning company.
