 You know with a broad topic like this it's easy to get down on the weeds and tell horror stories and Get off topic completely, but we're only going to talk for ten minutes each and then do some Q&A, so The reason I did the handout is I'll refer to it, you know, not extensively But I want to be a sense of what the process was like My project is a little different than the others that are going to be talked about because mine was a very specific kind of focused project It was an immersion journalism project. I decided okay I wanted to ride with the fire department for a year and write a book about it So what I didn't understand then but came to understand after a while was that there are six Essential parts to the process and I think this probably applies to a lot of your projects Whether they're journalistic or novelistic or whatever they are And here are the six steps You get an idea Whatever it is In immersion journalism you have to get access which is very important Let's say you want to shadow two spinal surgeons for a year. Well, that's not so easy with HIPAA laws, right? You got to get permission from the surgeons that all the patients they work on in my case It was a little easier. I you know, there was a city manager and a fire chief and then that was it I signed up for him so I could do it Sometimes access is very hard to get Three gathering material that's the the largest part of an immersion journalism project You've got research. You've got reporting in my case where I wrote for the year and took all the notes Then once you do all that you have to organize and select John McPhee when he talks about the hardest part about nonfiction is selection Because it's kind of easy to gather huge amounts of material as you'll find out Not too easy to select what goes in Fifth step is writing Six step is finding your audience Whether that's an agent and editor readers, whatever the three that I'm going to talk about very briefly are three four and five So I wrote for a year with the fire department and I had four basic Methods of doing research apart from buying books and reading about it. I Kept a handheld cassette recorder in my uniform jacket, which I Flipped on at the beginning of every single call Often when we jumped in the truck after the alarm it sounded I would turn it on because I wanted to hear what the guys in the truck We're talking about as we went to the call So you would have as you can imagine I ended up with a lot of material 221 90-minute cassettes full Which is daunting daunting I also took photographs right so I had a bag that I carried with me And I had two or three lenses an SLR and I was all black and white and I shot photographs whenever I could You know, you couldn't always do it in my hospital. You couldn't do it You know three in the morning and you know, somebody's father is dying of a heart attack You probably don't want to stand there while they're on their pajamas crying and be taking pictures of their dying father That's not such a cool thing either So I did that I had notebooks that I kept Wrote on every call usually during the call but often afterwards when I was back there So I ended up with four big really thick notebooks of material So and the fourth section was with research. So what I ended up with you can see from Where's the handout? You can see from the handout that this is um a Part of the tape and sorry the first thing I did when I finished is I took these 221 cassette tapes God help me and I listened to them and as I listened to them I made an inventory of what was on each tape. I thought really I would kill myself And I kept saying why did you do this? What was so important? You have to record everything guy eating lunch telling jokes really you really need to do that So anyway, I made this tape inventory and as you can see from this was pretty detailed Right well turns out that was a great tool that tape inventory because when I got to the select organizing and selecting process You know, what are you right about? You've got a year's worth of it In mince material, how do you write about that? Well, you have to go through and find out what the important incidents are I knew it was going to be a year-long Chronological linear book so that was kind of easy October of one year to October the next year So I started with the first call and went through and you know highlighted those things that I thought were most dramatic most interesting Another thing I did is I had done interviews with all the firefighters An entrance interview a middle interview and an exit interview So I knew that I was going to have some kind of way to present the actual voices of the firefighters So I transcribed all of those 1700 pages of transcription Another thing I do not recommend doing a Lot of this talk is a cautionary pale Look at it and say Jesus. That was dumb. I'm not going to do that On the other hand what I ended up with was a fabulous portrait of each of the 11 firefighters that I worked with and When I finally, you know chose that one thing and put it in as a bridge chapter was very effective They had so much material to choose from so that's the tape inventory And I put in the Bloomfield arrest the piece that I read the other night was This was part of the transcription from the tape for that. I'm not going to read any of this You heard it the other night, but this is the actual transcription and this is about these three pages are about two minutes on one of the tapes To give you a sense of what a what a job transcription is from a tape inventory It's really daunting to do on the other hand. How else do you get? Perfect dialogue. How else are you? You know, this is nonfiction So how else do you really have authentic dialogue except by recording and transcribing carefully? One way to organize and select your material As soon as I had done all that and I have the tape inventory and I had all these transcriptions And I had chosen the one I wanted to do I Didn't know how to do it and So I wrote a screenplay because I had written three of those already and I thought well at least I'll take these incidents I've chosen and I'll have some sort of dramatic presentation of these and I will tell I'll tell a story It won't be like this one-year nonfiction chronicle, but at least I'll get a sense of how they do it So I did that and at the same time was working on the prologue The prologue has to do with a guy named Mike Kelleher. It happens a couple of weeks before I started writing Mike Kelleher worked at a liquor store and one morning he was working and a guy came in to rob the store and They had a massive battle in which this guy pulled liquor bottles off the shelves and broke them over Mike's head as they fought And Mike had 180 stitches in his head and almost died and came back several months later And I thought what there's a kind of interesting opening for the book. I'll tell Mike's story But when I first wrote it, you know, the book I'd written before this book was a book of poetry And I thought gee, you know, this is creative nonfiction, right? So I'll tell the story of Mike, but I'll also put in these little sections which are lyrical You know, they have to do the city. They have to do this or that Same time I had gotten an agent named Don Condon who now is dead unfortunately, but his son Michael runs the agency and Don was a pretty big time agent. We had done In Roanoke, we had gone to a conference together and I presented on dramatic writing and he presented on being an agent And so we had bought my novel and read it and said send me what you're working on. I'm really interested in representing you So I thought great, you know, I'll send the prologue to Don, right? Now, here's the big mistake The finding your audience part is step six and I elevated it to step four So while I'm in the organizing and selecting stage, I send it to Don End of Fred Chapel, my friend in North Carolina, but I'll read you the first paragraph of Don's letter back to me And I'm thinking big time agent, who's Ray Bradbury's agent? We've siren's agent. I mean, it's like the big time, right? And I'm thinking, yeah, so dear Bill The book was called Window and Else Will at that time We got the photographs and also the samples of when no one else will Although I had quite a few other things to read before I was taken with the idea and so I got to it about a week ago Unfortunately, I've had so much on my plate. I haven't had time to catch up on my phone calls or dictate a letter to you until now However, I think this section doesn't work at all. I Believe this kind of story has to be written quite straightforwardly and depend upon its narrative This description the characters and dialogue We've gotten a little fanciful with the stream of consciousness And even in places the writing really isn't very good. Well, which was a great surprise to me Not to me Possible because you are a poet that it is harder for you to control or repress your need To write sentences without subjects or predicates Oh That was unnecessary and it goes on And worse and I tell you, you know, I got it and I thought holy crap I'd like to be completely screw up here, and then I thought what's totally wrong, right? This friend chapel had written me and said, you know, I really like it. It's good and I realized You know it not was better than a screenplay it was better than anything else because it's somebody in the business saying You're not getting there dude wrong wrong direction. It's not how you do it And so I went back and took all the fanciful stuff out of the prologue. It's about two weeks later And just wrote the prologue expanded and sent it back to him and he called me and he said why didn't you tell me this in the first post this is great Now After that after I had a proposal 120 frames pros proposal put together once again Step six, don't do this before you get your book written We sent it out to 21 publishers. They all said exactly the same thing Great proposal terrific writing wonderful idea. Who cares? Who cares it's called saving Troy. It's a regional book. We're not interested if he sets it in Chicago or Houston or Miami will buy it Well, you can't do that, right? Okay, so organizing and selecting I Had all this stuff all the all the dramatic events I wanted to do I still had no idea how I wanted the structure of the book to be if you look on this handout After the transcription, you'll see this was about the third outline for my youth revised structure for saving Troy And it was fairly I mean I was pretty far into it as you can see I did the first five chapters And I had determined how I wanted to do the chapters I determined that I wanted a bridge chapter between them, which meant all those interviews I've done with the firefighters had a place and So I thought you know this this is good This is this is helping at least I'm organized at least I know what's going in each chapter And I wrote about three or four chapters and realized that they all sounded alike They were all the same and I thought this this isn't what I wanted to do This doesn't represent my experience at the fire department where yes, there's uniformity to it You know you've got the same 11 guys on the platoon you show up and you work a 24-hour shift But that's just the external structure. That's like a linear chronological structure of a year. That's fine But every call is so different that you've got to find a way to show the variety of this and my structure is not representing the variety and that's when I completely And Didn't know where to go took two years off Wrote a different book and then came back to it and by the time I came back to it. I started to develop Some of the ideas on this other sheet that I handed out now this One side is my story development checklist that we had out in the workshop and the other side is from Shelley Story development questions, and I wanted you just to help both obviously. I didn't have Shelly stuff when I did it but you know sort of catching from screenplays and You know novel work and everything else like hey I'd come up with this list of things about How to construct tools for the process of writing a book and if I had had this at the beginning I think I would have understood better how to structure the book how to write it and it took me organically about I'd say six years to understand that every single chapter had to be different had to be told differently if I wanted to represent The variety of these it's not a big leap to get there You know, I mean if I come here to a workshop somebody would have said hey Bill Here's a good idea do it this way and it would have saved me all those years of experimentation But you know from being in being of a project you it's all ectoplasm. It's all like boom moving around And you don't know where to go with it So I hand this out to you in the sense in the hope that you will read it and say I will get you You know for those of you who read the John McPhee piece, I just want to recommend you to The New Yorker radio hour podcast. He was just interviewed by David Remnick like in the last couple weeks and it's an amazing interview and he talks a lot about the writing process I mean, he's got to be close to 80 or over 80. He's been writing for over 50 years and In part of this interview he talks about how the beginning of when he actually sits down to write a new piece It's as if he's never written anything in his life ever before and how terrifying How lost he is It's a great and then he talks about rewriting and how he actually that's for him when you know He started he can relax and enjoy it But what agony it is and it's never changed. This is a guy who's written a book almost every 18 months For his entire career. So that's a lot of books if you're that age, so it's a great great great interview I'm just this is really anecdotal and It's really just a list of things that that I've learned and Along the way about it from writing novels and and a lot of this really has to do with the rewriting what you learn when you rewrite and now you're Those of you were when I did from I did a book last summer. I told the horrific tale of Having worked on a novel for ten years and like these multiple drafts. So one thing when you do Have multiple drafts and rewrites and rewrites One thing now that I mean in the beginning I was working on a typewriter. That's how old I am So I would just print I would just I would has had drafts like copies of everything hard copies. Okay, scissors tape that whole thing slowly I moved over to the computer and I would just recommend that you open a whole new folder every time you begin a rewrite and name it like Redux one redux to whatever you want to want to do but name it something so that you know Date everything because you know you tell yourself. You're not gonna forget But you will forget and and also you think that's like gonna be your only rewrite It's not so don't label it rewrite And the other thing I do is I have an outtakes folder So that way it's much easier to cut, you know, you cut stuff and you're like, I'm not really putting it in the trash It's going in this folder Date it date it date it date it so you know because you're gonna go back and look for that stuff at some point You're gonna need some information like that Writing a novel if you're writing realistic fiction I I Recommend that you make a calendar So and really like not in your head like a vague calendar I mean like right out of calendar like when things happen on what day Because invariably you'll say something like two months after that two weeks before that, you know, three days later And you'll forget like really you got to write down like when stuff happened on what day even if it's not in the in the Um, it's helpful. I would suggest that Maps I'm really big on maps like the real kind that like well, I don't know where you get them anymore But I used to like send away like you can send away to like states or triple a and stuff So if you're right, you're setting Your novel in a state even if you've been there You want to like see, you know, somebody's driving from point a to point B Like you got to get that right like how long it takes so your look you're also with great maps or You know, you can Google like the names of towns and in a state you We'll get into that later But whether or not you want a real place or not you can you take names from some like place names are great to get from maps But you should have a really pretty clear mental idea of what you're talking about where this is set Where the streets are? Map, you know a lot of my fiction takes place in houses and offices You should see that house really clearly like really know the layout inside not vaguely, but really so when a character is moving around You know, I had like a copy editor say to me wow, you know and chapter one the carpet's gray chapter five It's beige But you know, that's kind of new to you so just List things if you start furnishing things if there's something important like an object that's important see it really clearly Jot little notes about it Your main characters. Yeah, you know their ages It's actually a good idea to give them birth dates. It's not in that's never is going to be in the novel They don't you know, but if time goes by you kind of like got to pay attention to how much older they're getting And if you work on something for a long time, honestly, you will forget that I also just because we all know that it's really fun to stop writing and Fact check every five seconds. That means we feel like we're working, but we're not writing Try to keep just a list of things you need to fact check And and then save that for the end of every week for a day when you're not writing for so that you're not interrupting the flow And and that's just sort of a discipline thing. I think If you have a sense of Where you are on your trajectory and you know that you're getting close to having a finished draft and You have a sense of when you're going to start to rewrite I really recommend that you apply to a Residency so a residency where you can go away from where you live Write writers read artist residencies Typically those applications are at least six months before the time you'd be there So this does take planning But when you have a whole novel that you're trying to keep in your head so that you can rewrite it Having to like run a carpool or You know Pay your bills even I mean all the stuff of daily life all that left-brained stuff Will be the death of you rewriting this book So even if you can get two weeks where you can go somewhere where all you have to think about Are these people in your made-up world? The real world will fall away in one of those artist residencies and you can get so much more work done I really really recommend that you can ask anybody here about that process that does take some planning and some some research Let's say you can't do that. I met somebody at one of these residencies who told me that twice a year He works like crazy as a really really stressful day job and he writes He has his own he called it. Oh, I do my own McDowell in my apartment I take off a week from work and I tell everyone I know that I'm going away And I don't let myself check email or I don't answer the phone and I live like I'm in a dorm room if something drops on the floor. I do not pick it up I only get takeout and And I have to say against a deadline. I've done this too. It's amazing what you can get done in a week If you do if you tell yourself, that's all you're going to do you can work like especially rewriting you can work Eight ten hours a day. I mean, it's a it's a different process than then when you're generating so that but if to be you know, you have to decide to do that and Be determined to do that but you can really get quite a lot done And there is a point at which you have to hold that whole story in your head at once So I think that can be really useful and one last thing I'll say so we all do this like along the way Depending on how anxious we are we ask people to read stuff, right? People list of who those people are Save one person at least one You don't know how many drafts you're gonna have and you can't keep asking the same You can and if you know But actually it won't be helpful to you because one of the things that you're gonna need in the end is stuff that you've changed a Lot of stuff now, right? You've changed the character's names. You've taken out whole parts Somebody who's read it before they're gonna get mixed up. You want fresh eyes So really think about that ahead of time. You always want at least one person who has never seen this newest Draft, okay, plus, you know, it'd be nice to like maintain some of your friends and you will really wear people out I'm gonna stay Still on top very different so I had to read the Kent perifese and The reason I did that Well, I'll get to that in a second. So one of the reasons I did that is that I have a very strong analytical mind and And that's good, you know Like it helps me in terms of rewriting and being able to figure things out about my book And I think it helps me a lot with teaching etc But it also really gets in my way because it's really strong And so one of my things with writing is that I have to turn that off I have to find look for ways to turn it off And so when I read that Kent perifese the first time this was from writers on writing Which this was a wonderful series if you don't know about it that was run in the New York Times over for a Number of years, so I read it first in the New York Times But they had a lot of different these are the best of them and they put them in a publication and I And so it's all writers talking about their process and you'll find that what's wonderful about it Is that all the writers processes are so different? But I remember reading this in the New York Times and I was like oh wow because he does did was do I was doing already Just what he was describing, which is that not all the time But sometimes when I write I find a way of blindfolding myself So I take like a in the winter I take like a cat and I pull it down over my eyes Because if I that's a good way for me to shut out not only the world that's around me But also shut off that part of my brain that thinks it knows everything because I'm trying to get into the side that doesn't and so So then my question my own question and approaching this panel for myself was Then if if writing is if the if my process of writing is literally writing in the dark Then how does a writer like that work with structure, which is something that demands organization and demands a lot of analytical thinking so um so that's what I'm going to talk about and So I'll mention the kind of process of how that process has changed over the course of a few novels So I had the good fortune when I was writing my first novel patchwork that I got an agent really early on and I have got an agent when I just had 50 pages and And it was sort of almost like I didn't even know I was going to get this agent which turned out to be this really wonderful wonderful agent had a long relationship with her and She said she wanted the book and she wanted me to send her I don't know that this happens any more Unfortunately where agents really work with writers while they're writing the book But she wanted me to send her a hundred pages hundred fifty to a hundred pages every time I had more And she wanted a plot outline. She wanted a plot line outline She wanted detailed and she wanted it updated each time So I this was my first experience with writing something longer So I was fortunate in a way that I had that imposed on me And I took it to heart and I was trying to do everything right of course So I like used Roman numerals and capital A Eventually she told me no Karen you could just like let that go Adding there But you know basically this that novel took place in it with a few different parts that were sections each one was a number of Years so what I was doing was listing that the characters and character development in those sections And then what I thought were going to be was going to happen or what the scenes were going to be and of course I didn't know it was going to happen at the end So I was just sort of guessing and I had to keep changing it So the two things that helped me in that in terms of the Rigidity that might have set in for me if I in terms of my overly analytical side If I were to have gotten to into that plot outline, which I could have is That number one we talked about it afterwards So she made me rethink things and the other thing that really helped that I held on to and I still do is As I was moving forward even though I already had a sense of what was going to happen I always made myself change one thing and it had to be significant and then that changed everything else And I think what it did does is it it made me stay flexible and it made me stay You know it it made me Abel I guess it opened me up more to Possibilities of other things that could be happening Because I think that one of the biggest challenges for a fiction writer and particularly for me in terms of writing something longer Is that everything that happens in the book really in the pot actually has to be believable You have to totally believe it. Yeah, it has to be totally believable, but it also has to be Unpredictable and those two things are they're they cancel each other out so those two qualities are just they're always in opposition with each other and so by changing one thing I forced myself to You know keep seeing all the story lines differently and And to kind of keep that sense of things being unpredictable Now the other thing that's been really helpful to me in terms of a bigger Organization I'm talking about kind of like bigger structure now of like conceiving of the whole book as I'm writing it is Images, so I think images can be very useful For some of us if you think the way I do again taking me out of the more of the of the kind of more rigid analytical view of things So for example, my second book Is a lot of it are these letters that are taking place in the 1800s And it's this journey that's going on across country that this woman takes and she's part of Part of part of these the small wagon train And so one of the things that helped me initially with that was in racial mentioned maps and I agree with that And this was a map. I was able to find and I tried to find it. I searched all day on Tuesday And I couldn't I know it's in my house somewhere still Because I blew it up a lot I had a map of all those a really old map of all those trails And it had all the landmarks and stuff which is how they used to make the map So you could see the the crossings and the dangerous places and the mountains and all of that And there were things written on it, you know, somebody had written on it So anyway, I blew that up and that was my image for writing a lot of it And I took the trip across also so I had pictures from my trip but I kept going back to the map and and and that gave me a sense of like of like the Movement of a journey that image of the the line, you know And how we go through Texas and across these rivers And then I also was able to then things that happened along the journey came out of the map Like the river crossings which were very dangerous to something happens there So I started like put my actual plot was on that map So another thing that helped me with that book another image Was that I struggled and struggled structurally with the fact that I wanted to have a front story also with these letters So the front story of the person who finds the letters and then connects with this other story And so I was trying at these different ways like alternating chapters and stuff and the alternating chapters was an example of That kind of rigidity that wasn't working. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel spontaneous There was some way in which I was trying to force something with my Analytical mind because in my mind I could see how each one of these chapters You know alternating chapters related to the one before like it all made sense to me rationally But I knew when I read it that it wasn't working like you were kind of jerked back and forth Then it just it there was something emotionally that was like totally missing from that So the image that I suddenly came up with that really helped a lot was I because these were letters again Like the every other chapter was a letter and then every other chapter was this modern-day narrative Was oh what a letters have they have it on below right it seems so obvious So when I started conceiving of that front story as an envelope that would hold the other story It all came together so not just that I would have some at the beginning of the novel and some at the end But the ways in which the pots and the stories and the characters would connect that though that again That the old that the present-day time would be holding this old time And then it became kind of the reverse of that too at some point So that's that's another way in which like an image works The last couple of books that I wrote were really tightly plotted and So this has kind of been mentioned already, but the idea of drawing out your Plot line is I found very helpful. I do still keep out I Still do really rough outlines kind of from that habit that I got into and I keep just keep them in my notebook But I try not to put put too much store by them or pay too much attention to them They're just kind of my thinking out loud But the thing that really is has been great is drawing it out so Like one thing that can be helpful is if you have a lot of different plot threads, which often a novel will have like like each one might be driven by a different conflict for example and Is drawing them out? I got one time I was working on the River Road and I was up against a deadline and I couldn't get these Plots to work right together because so tightly plotted So what I did is I went and got some butcher paper and I just unrolled it Down like a room in a hallway, which then no one was allowed to enter My house signs up do not enter and I just drew them all out in different colors And then I was able to see where they started to intersect So I was able to go this was when the rewriting phase Of course, I had already rewritten it a number of times But I was able to go in and start fixing some of those places And it actually revealed to me a couple of plot points that were really great that I had missed like opportunities I have missed, you know where things could intersect and I could have And I hadn't written that scene and then Another image that I worked with when I wrote Cineville was the image of the explosion Some of you know that that book starts with an explosion And so I wanted that feeling of an explosion throughout it And so I just kept drawing like all these spirals and trying to kind of figure out like oh I know this is it somehow I know it's a spiral and then more and more as I wrote and pictured that in my mind I got the image of these different characters because there's a few different characters that you follow in that Who didn't really lot of them don't really know some of them don't really know each other real well to start with But they're moving there's a big fire in the first that takes up the first third of the book that they're moving You're moving around the fire in a circle almost through the views of these different characters And then after the fires out, which is where I was stuck for a long time with what am I going to do with that image? Eventually that became this spiral that was circling the killer who person who started the who set this explosion who was generating this viral So that and the characters move closer and closer to him and as they do that they get closer and closer to each other So so I kept reworking with that and I drew it out many many times So this is just real quick anecdote about the book I'm working on now that that is Kind of revealing I think But I tend to come up with these really complex ideas and then I can't figure out how to structure them And so the current one that I have is this Very very quickly speaking is just this woman who's in a memory unit. She's in the her 80s She's been having small strokes. She's in the memory unit, but she's plagued by memories and It's based on my experience of my grandfather when he was in memory unit And and so then a lot of the book are these up-close memories We're just very up close in this men with these memories of these few days that happened in the 1950s and then the events that are related to that And so the thing that was so hard about that structurally was that I knew that and she's a composer so she's inside the memory of her life and then That the memories are inside her and then those memories those particular memories that I'm writing about are inside the bigger memory of her whole life and Then that is all inside of this older woman who is inside of the memory unit and I could not figure out how to do that and I remember there were a couple of Resonancies it would go and I was talking to both of you about this and you and you were great Like they were giving me some ideas or you're just talking listening to me and they gave me books to read Which was all very helpful I read some books of kinds of things to do that which I really recommend you have to do that kind of thing And it gave me more ideas and I kept trying to write it and trying to write it and I and I had a draft I had like almost 300 pages of scenes, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it and So finally I just got really Flummoxed and I felt like I was just at the point where I would just I just had to put her aside I can't keep doing this and I was talking to this friend of mine Who's a novelist? She's written a lot of novelists and she's really good and we novelist and writer and kind of teacher and so we've exchanged work We exchanged work and so occasionally and so she was asking me about it And she said Karen just send me some of it send me like up to 50 pages I just want to see what see what it looks like so I centered I didn't send her that much and I agree with what racial said I normally don't show my stuff at that stage to anyone even but I sent her 35 Pages You know you have to be careful that you don't overload people and you want to be able to maybe use them later as a reader And so she read that read it and you know We talked a lot about the voice and kind of what was working and all that stuff and then she says to me in this very Gentle kind voice. She said Karen because I was trying to do all this complicated stuff would like skipping into different time periods Karen. She says What about chronological order? I just felt like you know, I just got slapped in the head it was like of Course like I would have told the student that a year ago like what is the matter with me? I have to write this in chronological or like like eventually I'll figure out the other thing But like to write it right in chronological order and so that and that's completely worked Working for me in terms of the process But you know she went on to say something and I'm just gonna say this last thing to pass it on to you So I felt like it was very wise And that's that what she said is that writers need to complicate things first and That you have to complicate it and complicate it and complicate it beyond belief Sometimes until you yourself are lost because that's what I felt like I felt like I have this mess on my hands and then You have to simplify it And you just can't go to you just can't cut to the chase. You can't just simplify it So then all the complicated stuff is inside it still I almost think that it that is the process that you go through over and over and over again So if you don't get a handout or even if you do you can go to my website And then you click on blog and then the most recent entry is how to write a book in two weeks So I like going right after Karen because Karen has an orderly mind and my mind is like this spineless The only way that I can I need to terrify myself into temporary structures So that's what this is about So I A friend of mine asked me to if I wanted to write a short book on Hillary Clinton in a very Timeline at the end of this past semester and I said no because I just didn't have any strong feelings You know one or the other about her and then But then I like a challenge which has gotten me to so many challenges And then also I was sort of curious as a writer about why I didn't have an opinion You know, what's that about? That's kind of ridiculous so So I didn't know but I back and I said yes I would do it and the goal of the book they said they needed it like in just like a month and They wanted it's primarily It's a UK publisher. So they wanted to orient Readers in the UK like who is Hillary Clinton explained her from the beginning. What does she mean to America? So what I'm going to talk about is all the ways that I used to like get the goo into some kind of order Basically first I love what people have said about The different ways that you know, we have to structure our heads I Sort of went from this core anxiety of what am I going to say to? What has troubled me and what don't I understand that various Pages about Hillary Clinton and so basically what I did as far as an outline was just this branching tree of all the things that I Didn't understand and then the terror of those unanswered questions towards like sort of more Detail in terms of the outline So basically I'm going to just talk about a few tools that I use that are really helpful And I use all these programs at once and if you go to the blog site There they're all the links are there. So I use word which a lot of us use But I found also that over the years I've gotten really frustrated with word as the only container for structuring a book I think because I'm very Associative and so I I'd like to see all the pieces and be able to move them around and see what different structures exist So I use Evernote. Does anybody use Evernote? So awesome, right? You love it. It's great. Basically, you can download it for free And it's a series of like imaginary journals with pages You name the journals and you can always make more and you can move pages to different journals That's my for this project that was my basic idea bucket I would just barf into that like I'm so scared. I'm never gonna get this done I don't know how I feel about Hillary, right? All that went in there in Evernote and then Well, I you'll also use Dropbox Anybody use Dropbox? That's sort of an essential, right? So it's a way to back up your files, but I also use it as a Bigger bucket that contains all my drafts and then also research from outside sources So PDFs downloads During the process of having to just move forward like a machine and vacuum up anything I could on Hillary Clinton, which has been a lot of information I just would you know take PDFs take screenshots and just dump them all into this folder and figure I was gonna sort them As best I could when I had time so The other major tool that I use is Scrivener anybody use Scrivener or hurt a Scrivener Okay, so Scrivener is a program. It costs about $45 and it's sort of got a learning curve But it's not immediately intuitive, but I really Have come to rely on it and I'll think I could write a book at this point without it Because what it does and you'll see that there's it's hard to see in here, but it's easier to see on the website You can have a big project and then along the left-hand menu You can actually you can break your document up into any as many little chunks you want and just drag the chunks up and down You can compile it really quickly to see how it looks and then it comes back apart So a lot of times what I'll do As Rachel was saying like at the end you can export it Export to word so I'll take it out the word thinking I'm done and then read it in word and realize no I need to take it back apart but What I really loved about Scrivener is that I hate outlines because it feels they feel so constraining to me But that left-hand list of my topics I could make an outline, but I could then change it in the next second And so what I did is I would have different little sections for each question I didn't understand about Hillary and then some of them seemed easy and some of them seemed hard and I get tired a lot and So what I would do is I just say like do I have energy right now? I've done an hour. I have energy to do a hard Hillary question or an easy Hillary question So I would just pick one of these chunks at random So totally the opposite of a systematic writing process And I would just sort of dump something in there to try and make one of these chunks longer And then eventually from just playing around with them It started to make sense What the order of the book had to be which ended up for this case to be chronological too I needed to figure out before I could take anything about Hillary now I had to briefly talk about Hillary's role in in our in our you know the 80s and 90s, so So basically on page 2 you can see that I describe a little bit of my very messy process I read three books and I had You know in this handout is titled how to write a book in four weeks But then I looked in my calendar and realized that it had been to and so this is for context This is 40,000 words and then But then I was thinking like I'm working on a memoir. That's only you know, double that like 75,000 words This is two weeks that memoir six years So the whole product just hope what we're doing makes no sense, right? But this is easier in some ways because it was not No emotional attachment to talk right for me it was pure inquiry and I was really outside the subject matter Whereas if it's your own life or characters you're attached to it's a lot harder So you'll see that on the bottom of page two I started with a bunch of questions and what I try to do with a nonfiction project is ask the hardest questions I can and then That sort of writes the whole document for me. I'm working on a couple freelance articles right now the hardest questions about a topic and the most interesting questions is how how a whole piece always gets written I Decided not to cover things that I was sick of hearing about so that's something you can do with a nonfiction project Just say like see here and here that's boring to me and go to what you really care about I talked about number nine about my random writing process I Tend to I think like Bill was talking about I dump everything into My word folders and drop box and then you know take key quotes But it's much easier to have all your raw stuff first so that you know where to where to look back from And then number 14 Ted from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure is my one of my research spirit animals So I think it's important in nonfiction really with any writing process to really give yourself permission to not have to sound smart And it's in the challenge to sound as dumb as possible like ask the question that nobody else Like that no one's asking because they don't want to see me done as you do so, you know, why don't people like her? I let myself start right at the beginning and see if I can unsnarl that for myself Oh And then the last thing that I want to show you is that even with edits on the very back of the handout is This checklist that I got I got sort of like I said the thing to the editor and she was like, okay great, you know, here's a 188 page word document with all my comments and track changes and then several problems, right? And I always get that point of like Like oh, no, you know, like you guys were saying like it cannot be done. It cannot be done a panic and so what I do always is like I Switch mediums So I had to I always have to make when I'm at peak anxiety is to make a handwritten list of the things that must be done And then I don't do them in order because I feel Intimidated by that so I would go with what seemed easiest at the moment and I I jump around constantly just so that I don't feel like I'm getting stopped or cycled and Yeah, and then I just basically one thing at a time answered all of her hard questions which involved often having to do some additional research But doing a handwritten to-do list like that made me really feel like That even the hardest part of the project was doable So, you know in closing I just want to say that no one should ever write a book in two weeks I gave myself some like health problems that are just now clearing up as a result but on the other hand It was kind of fun and I'm very I mean Jesse Jesse was talking in his grad presentation about The masochism of an athlete, right? So there's something pleasurable and being like yeah, I could do that But yeah, I mean I think like Karen was saying to the subject matter really does end up telling you a lot about the structure Okay, so now we're open to questions Yeah, yeah, sure sure um so ever know I Could probably use ever know bigger. I'm like up against the memory You know what I mean like after a certain point you've got to pay for it for the full version And I've stuffed mine so full that so I try actually my my dropbox is now full too So there's a problem with me in the digital pack wrap, but um For some reason I just tend to lose stuff and ever know because you can make a document as long as you want And so I could always stuff stuff at the bottom, but if it's in a folder in word I always feel like okay. I have I used all those sources. I can see the whole list and then the check marks This is like some religious thing. I've developed over time There's like complicated symbols and like every check mark. I don't know what it is. It's just like a little victory in life That's my Leslie note side No, the check mark just is like a But some of these symbols like sometimes I'll like if it's underlined like the one at the bottom has an underline That means this is a special issue and the underline is like waiting for me to resolve it I'll put parentheses if it doesn't need to happen now. There's I don't know. There's bunch of symbols I develop anxiety management Good question There are There's so many different methods Yeah, yeah Thematic you can do it thematically you can do it chronologically it kind of depends on subject matter We've been talking a little bit about this with your stuff You know thematically if you go through and find out well I've got these family poems, and I've got these social consciousness poems, and I have you know these historical poems You know they kind of make themselves into their own sections of the book My one two three my third book These upraised hands. I had three very very different sections. I didn't realize it at the time Because it was you know poems from over seven or eight years I had a bunch of personal poems, and then I had a Bunch of historical poems so which were rewritten for my first book, but you know far expanded So I thought well, that's you know, that's the really weightiest part of the book That's gonna be the center of it, and then I was on I had won the Great Lakes College's awards So I was on that three-week tour of the Midwest Which is almost like a punishment. I was like you win you get a week in Dover, Delaware See I can't say anything here when I'm in Phoenix. I agree with you So anyway, I started this trip and it was right after teaching at Fiji, and I was really kind of open to all experience And the first place I read out was Holland's College No, not Holland. What's the one in Kalamazoo? Kalamazoo, right? Yeah, it was a Kalamazoo in Michigan, right? So they had this they had this really really interesting Museum Museum show about real stories where they collected stories from the community, and I thought that's a good idea And so I just started talking to everybody like taxi drivers on the trip And I wrote a whole section about real stories about the people I met on that trip And so once again, it's always arbitrary You know and just say okay, that's the section that's the section that's the section I think there's something about you know like within each section Maybe there's like the mixtape idea of alternating energies, you know Well, and there are a lot of There are a lot of collections out now Which I like I happen to like these kinds of collections and sort of twain with an idea for one But where it's all around one subject So all the problems are somehow or another related to Something in history like sure an old father Natasha Yeah Yeah, that's a great. Yeah, I think I addressed that in my panel last summer. Yeah That's a great A great question. I do Always ask somebody I know To identify and I try to pick like in different parts of the country Give me the name of someone who's a fast reader who's in at least one or two book groups Who thinks it would be fun like some a non-writer You got to have non-writers who just as a reader and that's a very that's always a hysterical process And then I asked if I can just call them when they're done reading, you know I send them in a script and you have a little phone conversation and you will get very interesting feedback But basically you just want to know stuff like did you keep turning the pages? Did it make sense? Yeah, and let me tell you they will tell you why didn't really believe you know They'll tell you what sounded off That's a really really good thing to do and actually Within this program Tom Tom Siegel I've worked with him a lot he lives near me in Connecticut and he just emailed me in May and said Don't give me like some writer person like I He said I want a smart person Who I just need two readers Can you identify two people for me and I found two people I know who do like advertising writing marketing writing But they're not and he said that's exactly I want to know if this flies. Yeah You know that the emphasis is different so It's not as They don't complicate things as Karen, you know They'll just and they'll get right in there and tell you like you know that part that I think you thought was funny It wasn't funny Go for like ask people like who do you know is blunt, you know And you really want to get feedback if anybody has like late teen early 20s children. Yeah Oh, you will get people get plenty back But yeah, that's a really good thing plus you just want to know did it make sense Did you understand what happened? Did you keep turning the pages? Tell me where it lagged? Tell me where you think you wanted more information just that basic stuff. Yeah, and sometimes too. You'll get the feel I mean you'll worry maybe I worried with one of my books like is this too crazy and out there and my Non-writer readers were like, yeah, it's fine. Don't worry about it. What do you think I am stupid, you know Like whereas the writer readers were like, maybe it's too experimental people gotta get it, you know The best people I've found are good rock good readers who have no connection to you. Yes Obligation friends are the worst Well, exactly either you get no nothing or they're afraid to say something because I don't want to hurt you Or there's a hidden agenda and they do want to hurt you And I've been waiting to say that 20 years Yeah, but people who have no relation to you that is great. So you ask them But yeah, and then you thank them in the acknowledgments you thank that You know and you send them the book and you know It's kind of nice for somebody who's just in a book group somewhere and yeah Father yeah, yeah, right Okay, that I realized I did skip over that after I stopped talking I realized I so and I don't mean just like and when I'm talking about rewriting I'm not talking about going through and line editing So this is just my process. Everybody should probably talk about theirs when I have a first draft done Um, I put it aside for like two or three weeks and I don't look at it Then I sit down and I try to start early in the morning on a day when there's going to be no Interact I try to read the whole thing in one day. I'm a slow reader even if it's my own work I'm just I'm slow And I take a legal pad like this and I tell myself very intentionally to read it like I'm some kind of like nerdy grad student and it's not my work And I just kind of respond. I don't line at it. I don't let myself get into that I just make notes about and it's amazing what you put into your book that you didn't know that was in there You know the subconscious is working and then there's just stuff that will make you cringe like crazy And you just note it page what page what page what page and you write stuff down You make notes and you try to get all the way to the end in one day because you have to contain this in your head Now you've got the you trying to get the feel of the whole like what's the shape of the whole? I really loved what Karen said about the way she structures it based on theme. I mean that I um Say and you that's where you can feel pacing like what what else is what's wrong here Then you just start making tons and tons of notes about what you think The changes need to be then there's probably more time in there where you're gonna I'm talking about the kind of rewrite where you've probably already rewritten it a few times but now I shouldn't say rewrite. Let's talk about like wholesale revising Um, there's something really wrong here. Yeah, there's something really wrong with this character And I've got to fix it or this novel will never fly that's when you need to like remove yourself from your analytical brain and Your regular life that doesn't ever let you go too deeply into your imagination That I I was very old before I ever went to a residency and I was amazed at what happens even after about 24 hours When you don't have to like just think about the stuff of daily life somebody's like You're completely infantilized like someone's cooking making food for you. You have a place to work. That's all you have to do It's great if there's other artists there aren't writers. That's really good, too But you very quickly fall pretty far into your own imagination And you're able to work stuff out without thinking about working it out and and um and stuff all stuff can happen that way So that's what I'm talking about or like maybe if you're at the point where Like I've never done a real residency, but I've done like Everybody happens to be gone So I'm just gonna write you the takeout thing and hide in my basement And it's great if you're at a point where like you figure out like Like the voice might be wrong or the point of view might be wrong And so you know that in order to solve that you've got to rip everything apart and like look at all the pieces and just see like You know, what am I trying to do here? It's just the whole thing to be strung together differently. Yeah The thing that's helpful. I think about a residency is that you're in it you're moving you're you're in a different place that you don't know and And even just being away like when I was in Ohio this past semester I was here for four months and I got a lot of really good work done I was teaching and everything out there. So it's not that I wasn't working But I was in a new place. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know I just was sort of just locked down somewhere And so that what that does I think because I I started I had a draft of my novel and then I did a big revision while I was there And I think that just being in a new place Can make you See things differently you see things you wouldn't have seen I wouldn't have seen while I was at home I mean in addition to what Rachel was saying before about how like, you know, my house wasn't calling My attention and the kinds of things that might normally interrupt me weren't there And the other thing is that I was alone a lot And I think that is the other one of the other keys What both of the experiences you're describing is that you really have to spend a lot of time alone at least I do To find the voice of the book and to To just be have that world allow that world to be bigger than the world that's around you I do want to say that if I know some of you have You're in the stage in your life where a long time is at a premium And you really can't get it and you can't get away from your kids or whatever and I went I mean I've done like You know four books that way and it's totally also doable But you just have to be more aggressive about like sort of militant about those two hours, you know And really using the time when kids are at school. So it's doable. I've done that Also when my kids were really really young Um, I would get a babysitter and go to the library for two hours And I go to like one of these study carols or go somewhere where you're not looking at anybody Put things in my ears a hood would I didn't yeah, or a mat, you know But then you're you're paying somebody so that you can write guess what you will write Yeah No one earplugs definitely earplugs. Oh, yeah Before you do that Your question brings up the notion that we're sane at the end of the book No, I'm not You know, I'm serious here. I I always feel crazy by the time I get to the end of the book And some of my levels of discrimination are, you know, intellectual Emotional spiritual I I'm just instinctive. I have no idea what the goddamn thing is At the end So I need outside help, you know, we were talking about readers. I need readers I need other people to tell me Peter Matheson when people would say to him, how do you know in the book side? He'd always say when every day I write it gets worse And it's kind of the same thing where you're at the end you're trying to be discriminating But you've read it and written it a thousand times. You don't know what it is anymore You know, so I think you need a period of rest from it and other opinions I also think bill made a really good point something that often happens at the end Is that you're spending a lot of time you get like obsessed like I always think I'm gonna get hit by a boss and it won't be finished. So I mean like you and you starts like You start spending you can hope anyway Yeah, you start spending weird amounts of time and you then aren't really that great at relating to other people So you're getting like increasingly isolated and you're in it. You're just about to go around the band usually Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's how you know Laura I was wondering if you could use the blocks. I like it because I can get to What I've written on my work theater my home, you know my laptop, my cell phone But then you know, I guess it's more like Let's save it in the clouds that say And if you do that How important is it also save it in a hard drive? And then if you do that you save my most places in your line editing You know, you do a microphone for the sound. So the great thing about Dropbox is that it syncs So that it's one bucket and wherever you sign in you get access to all of your files, right? Although now they limited it's just two sign-ins, but you could do home and work All right, so that's why Google Docs. We've also been talking about doing anything your work document So why is it like that? I I just paid for carbonite One fee once a year everything you do is backed up I pay for the drop box also I don't use the free one when you pay for it you get you get more storage But yeah, but what I do is I you know, if I've got multiple devices I'm working on a desktop at home when I get finished. I upload it Anyone I go upstairs a bit at night. I download it into my other computer. So I always just go like that There's another another Software I've been using for oh my god forever, but I've used it for business mainly But I also works really good system and writing it's called paperport And paperport is by nuance nuance is the company that makes it but it's really a it's really a a document preparation software And the good thing about it is you can be you can be typing anything in your computer. You can actually print to paperport It printed it to make it into a PDF You can change it into anything you want to but you can also separate pages I mean, it just doesn't mean it wants different things But it's called you know, I mean I work for everybody but it works for me because I've been using it for so long in business And I just realize oh my goodness. I can use this also, but it's a fantastic software Lauren Another answer to that question is I tend to keep one foot in the 19th century one on the 21st I mean I do everything longhand first And I keep notebooks I like that connection between you know my head and the paper in my hand And I mean, you know as soon as I do that I Transfer to the computer. So I you know work on a normal way, but I think it's important to have things you can go back to notebooks and things In your handwriting that you can look at it's amazingly inspiring to go back and go. Oh There's a note. I didn't I didn't use that at all and it might be a key to this part of it You know in the visual aspect is good Yeah I'm just trying to understand What it looks like I know I wish I should have been able to find that I would have brought it Um, so like do you do care each character or each situation? Or like how does that how do what is the plot that's Plot the different plots that are developing or they like Yeah So it would depend I'll just say that to generalize it to make it applicable to like something you might be writing It would depend on kind of what the What the different Like most things that are longer longer novels or even even a lot of stories Have threads they they're made up of all different threads And so one thread might get and so it might be plot threads that a plot thread is introduced And then another plot thread usually and often in a novel they're introduced At the beginning and then they develop together or sometimes separately and they come together so that if the clearest example would be If a book Has a couple of different view points Then say it's got three different points of view then each one of those would have a different line And so what's happening so then those lines would come together when those Characters are both in a seed together No, so what I would do and you can see You know, it's kind of helpful to do this. I I did this I drew this out for other people's books or stories too and I've sort of putting all this idea of doing it in my mind together and so um, I'll be All of kittridge stories work very well for this There's in there more they're shorter. So it's a little bit, you know easier to see Elizabeth Strout But there's there's a lot of things that would work for that and I've also done it with Alison row, but um, you Each one would have a long line that would just go all the way and I wouldn't necessarily mark where the chapters are But what I do is um, I have peaks and valleys So if there's like a climax that occurs for that character like a big realization or a big event Then I mark that and often what I would do also is Put like a little star there for myself so that I know that and I write out in shorthand what that is And so then I can also start to see where these line up with the different threads And so, you know, it might be that like one of the changes I made And one of the books when I was doing that that made a big difference Was it showed me that I had two of those big events too close together in terms of the pacing So I pulled them apart a little bit and it just became much more effective So I think it's very helpful When you already have a draft to do I've done that after I've got a draft And um, although I in my mind I'm sort of and sometimes just on paper doodling because I like to doodle a lot and I draw So I'm sometimes drawing it out But to really write it out like that in detail you would have to have a draft I think and what you are doing is using it to help you rethink your draft And see how because the other thing that can happen is that and so they don't all have to be plot threads For example, it could be an image thread too like you realize. Oh, I've got this image and it's reoccurring throughout the novel And then you start looking at where is it reoccurring? Okay? How is it different when it's reoccurring and in what scenes related to one of these other threads? Is it reoccurring and it just gives you some ideas and kind of loosens You maybe you'll think of another way to do the image or you'll think of Well, something that the image could then Had up to by the end I wanted to mention there's there's a function in Scrivener where it's a corkboard view So you have index cards and you can color code the index cards and a novelist friend who I'm in a writing group with Uses that so she can sort of see like do I have even distribution among all my threads or characters? Yes Yes, and the other thing I've done that you can do that's very similar that if you don't want to do it on a computer Is if you take a bulletin board and you've got a bunch of index cards Then you can keep moving them around and stuff and You you can get us when you when once you've got a couple of drafts and you're really trying to develop like one thing That at one point or another in writing a book I always find myself needing to move in closer to material and really flesh things out So then, you know, sometimes I've had an index card For a scene and I'll write down it's again, it's shorthand like all of the my thoughts for development in terms of Like imagery or sensory Experiences or all that stuff So there's that would be another way to do it and I've combined the two to be quite honest to make it even more Complicated so like on a piece of long paper with those lines than placing That's awesome But you're so wondering what it looks like, right? Well, yeah, I kind of get a little visual because sometimes trying to take pictures with Here you go. It's a standard script writing tool. It's a horizontal timeline and you can do one for each character So this might be like a little peak where like a climax or something happened And then I've got to make sure that I've got some things proceeding that and then kind of the wave comes down and then it goes up here Say this is something shorter short stories. I don't have much so say this is the climax for the whole story Then if I've got another thread here Well, what ideally would happen like this one might look a little different like this one might look I don't know like this, but what ideally is going to happen is this Right is that they're going to cross because that's one of the things that's going to make the climax powerful So that means both of these have to contribute or be They both have to this has to be the climax of both of them or they have to be right next to each other No, would you label these a plot and b plot while you are doing it? Well, yeah, I usually do something more descriptive But yes, like I might write down the character's name I associate with it Or I might write down the conflict if it's all for like one character's point of view Like currently I'm writing something that's from one character's point of view So I might write down, you know music because that's one of her Conflicts is all around music and another one. It's all around something else. So I write that down So it really depends on in terms of how many of these you have and what they are would really material Yeah, if you had a main plot you could put that on the top Let's say you have two subplots Maybe you've got a main action plot and then you've got a romance And then you've got something else underneath you just label them all a plot b plot c plot Or put the character names and then as you go across vertically put the different Events the different incidents as they go and set up some sort of a timeline or grid on the tops You know where they occur like day one, right? Exactly And then you just look down and you see oh, well, I've got these two things happening on the same day Maybe that's not so cool, but I can't I just want to Karen This is something you do after you have a draft. Exactly. Okay. This is something she does after she has a draft That's a really important point to make And sometimes it's after I have a couple drafts like when I first did it on the butcher paper with the river road Like I said, I had a lot I've done a lot of drafts And I was I still had some things that weren't working in terms of a tightly plotted novel And because there was like mystery and all that And I did there were things that weren't set up right about it. I just and I I was under the gun like I had like five I don't know. I had like I think I have two weeks to fix to fix everything So that I then it was really helpful, but I did I already had a lot of material See now you could have written about what Hilary in that time Yeah What Karen's talking about and this is essentially what you end up doing You're always problem-solving. So you have you have a drought you've gone over many many times, but you still know there's something Isn't right, right? No one else is that that kind of thing No one else is going to help you with that that you have to do And so that's why that yeah That's why you're driven to drive And why exactly and why you have to stay flexible because you might have already tried something that's no longer working for you So then you have to be able to come up with something else Even if it's just like I said an image in your mind or or something You have to just keep trying different things And you might also don't you think you might also have a thing that works good on the map But then you go into the text and it like doesn't actually you can't transport an earth of being wrong Right for me. It has to come out of the text, right? So so that that again that I think that's part of having to work in the dark Um, so that um Yeah, that That map thing was generated The initial one well the one that I did especially that I did that was very linear like that was generated by the actual text and and this kind of uh feeling that I had when I was writing it that there were all these different Lines, but that's that's a very good way in which From the I think for narrative structure Well, I just want to say two things one is that I think you can learn an awful lot About narrative structure of something longer by taking a book that you love like a novel or or could be a book book of nonfiction that you really love right and cutting it up And seeing how is it? Physically just because that's really visceral and then you're going to see how Or it's wrong. It's like just wrapping it and then and then After you cut it up. So then you're going to find out what the different threads are You can think of this as a braid or like a rope. I often think of it as a plot as a rope So that all of the different strands which are all those different threads, right? They what makes the nothing whole I think you'll find if you cut it up And then do that because I've done this with several books now Is that it's it's that that is the same thing that makes a rope strong You have to keep twisting the fibers together And so they have to keep crossing and and and he and and so that's what's going to hold the weight of the story That's a great Good