The Writer's Toolbox: What Goes In It?

Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.

The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it.

So when I read this post on plotting out stories, I decided to use it to plot out mine. All you do, according to the oridinal webpage, is complete the sentences. I’ve thought about the story and its theme and know it about halfway well enough, I think.

1. Once upon a time . . . there was a woman who could not forgive herself.

2. Every day . . . she tried to kill herself in the very smallest of ways, cigarettes and high heels on stairways.

3. Until this . . . she meets a new neighbor, who is bossy and ominous and presumptuous.

4. Because of this . . . she tries to make friends and allies in the rest of the apartment complex.

5. Because of this . . . The bitchy neighbor, who is a witch, attacks her in increasingly powerful ways, leading up to a third neighbor’s death.

6. Until finally . . . the protagonist is pissed off enough to stop feeling guilty and react in a way that saves herself.

7. For every day . . . I’m not sure what to do with this last, but I’ll wrap the story up with some gesture that shows that her forgiveness of herself is a lasting and life-changing thing.

Okay. That let me start thinking about it in terms of scenes, once I had the overall arc in my head. From there I did start from scratch and write the story from my head. In the process I found myself adding a frame story. Once I finally had that draft I could go through the first version and fold in passages that I wanted to keep. I’m still not happy with the end, but at least I have a complete story now that I can tinker with.

What I’ve realized I need is a system with a single notebook. One problem with decluttering has been the number of old, half-filled notebooks that have surfaced amid the piles and books, some taken from the storage locker after lingering there a literal decade. I’m writing this originally in one of those: 5×8, unruled, a stiff, translucent purple cover, originally intended as a spiritual journal. Since then it’s accumulated a number of to-do lists, some pieces of stories, a few book review notes, and some timed writings (including “Prophetic Lobster Man,” which appeared in The Mad Scientist Journal).

But it must go in a box and soon. I can’t trail fifteen gazillion notebooks along on a trip. I need one at a time, and preferably one that fits easily in a purse so I can have it ever handy but still has enough page space that I don’t feel cramped. Writing on scraps of paper when no notebook is handy has been my undoing in the past.

At the same time, I need to back up what I’m doing, so I’m contemplating a system where I write in my (solitary) notebook and then transcribe either every night or as time permits.

I hope to go through (many more) than one notebook, so I’ll mail the filled ones as they accumulate, probably to my friend Caren.

I have been thinking about why the idea of losing writing bothers me so much. Part of it is my consciousness of having lost big chunks of it in the past: an entire novel, multiple half-finished short stories, poems, and journals entries (the last of arguable interest or value to anyone but me).

Because I could see myself going back to some, at least, of that stuff to remind myself of what that age was like when writing a character somewhere around the same age. Or to mine for stuff. Or simply to see how I’ve changed.

I feel as though most of my writing should be out there working for me. Ironically enough for someone with socialist leanings, I think of the pieces as rental properties, which should be actually housing readers, however temporarily, and earning me either money or fans who will buy other pieces.

In this attitude, I am a crassly commercial writer, despite my literary background, and I feel that when writing that could be out there earning for me isn’t, it’s wasted. It’s not that I feel every word of mine is so valuable that I must get paid for it — there’s plenty of journal maunderings and half-finished stories or essays and always will be.

It’s more that, as a writer, and particularly as someone who’s been primarily a short story writer, I am painfully aware of how crappily we’re paid.

So I want to make the most of the words that spill out of me and, more than that, I know that I’m vain enough that praise is a worthy form of coin. I love it when someone’s read a piece and praises it in an e-mail or a public recommendation.

So how can I best preserve these efforts, in order to most effectively sing for my supper? Notebook and Google Docs seem my best bet so far.

And crucial to this effort as well: putting away all these current half-filled notebooks. One more part of the de-cluttering, a process where I’m currently down to the last 10% or so, a few loads for Value Village and a suitcase or two now that the storage pods have come and swallowed up the heap of boxes that had towered in the front room here. Doing a load of laundry, I’m mentally consigning half the shirts to the discard heap, weighting clothing on a new algorithm of comfort plus presentability plus durability/discardability.

Almost ready to launch.