Maureen McHugh (my yoga hero) on thickening the plot:

We are so hardwired to make assumptions about other people’s interior states, that we make assumptions about all sorts of interior states. We personify stuff. We describe houses as ‘happy’ or ‘gloomy’. We think that the grocery cart has it in for our car door. We think that characters in fiction are people. We can leap to rather complex assumptions about them on the basis of fairly flimsy details. The details that we find most telling tend to be their actions. So in fact, part of character is what I describe them doing, and if I think of situation and describe characters acting in the situation, I am in fact characterizing as much as I am generating plot.

Alan at the LBC on poetry and fiction informing each other:

Which is a roundabout way of saying, I think, that the poetry reading and writing that I was doing post-MFA was beginning to have an effect on my fiction–but not in sense of a specific technique, but rather a mindset–or let’s even call it a position–that I wanted to take with my writing. That I wanted to push myself into real engagement with the world, and how I was situated within it. Sometimes, but not always, that led to a more political type writing; it also, for sure, helped open up the aversion to philosophy that I’d harbored for some time, and began to read philosophers speculatively, in ways that could open up new ways for me of looking at both writing poems or stories. These are obviously tenative baby steps, and when I mention being "comfortable" earlier, I should make it clear that this involved being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And, finally, David Lubar says it short and sweet:

An insprirational message for any writer who has gone online to procrastinate: There is nothing on the internet as interesting as the book you are supposed to be writing. Get back to work.

It seems like whenever I resolve to post more about writing, it just doesn’t happen.

My packet was actually due this morning — I wrote down the wrong date on the calendar. But it was almost done and I got it in around noon and Tim was, of course, a champ about my space-out, which is only to be expected. This is my fourth packet; I believe the last one I talked about in any detail was number two. That’s because my third packet fictioneering consisted of the kind of crap you occasionally crank out in a novel when you know what happens in thirty pages, but not exactly what happens in the thirty pages you have to write now (I can’t write out of sequence, just can’t). I gave myself a couple of good breadcrumbs in those pages, but it was mostly treading water — some nice, entertaining dialogue, but where was the tension and action?

So, I spent this last month on tension and action. You know, making Actual Things Happen. Letting the antagonist(s) show up for work, etcetera. For a little while, I was feeling as if I hadn’t gotten enough done this month, but that was only until I remembered that I was expecting to have gone on to the next 50 pages or so rather than rework these. In reality, I messed around with a short story (that I still need to get into better shape soon), substantially reworking it, and turned out about 50 pages of mostly brand-new novel. That’s a pretty good month, all told. Especially since I did the PW piece somewhere in there.

I still feel like the slowest writer in the world, but, oh well. These pages are still a little rough, but better (I hope — will find out soon). The thing that turned it around was getting back to my lunchtime hour of writing in the corner at work with my headphones and no wireless. I probably wrote half of the new stuff this week and it was the key stuff. As a concept, I have always hated routine with its associations of boringness. But really, what is it except a rhythm you get into? I’m not advocating writing every day for every writer — I certainly couldn’t manage it forever. But.

It does make a real difference when you show up at the page most days. It really, really does.

Now, to keep doing it. Which should be somewhat easier because I mainly know what happens from here on out — when I stop working as much as I should be it’s because of one of two things: 1)too busy and stressed or 2)consciously or subconsciously hung up on some detail that always turns out to be much easier to solve While Writing Than While Thinking About It. On number one, I just have to keep doing the yoga, the magical, magical yoga and on two, well, I’ll fall down, but I need to remind myself it’s always eventually solved at the keyboard. Or while sleeping.

Now to figure out what the hell I’m submitting for the summer workshop (and write my fingers off on MN so I make my last packet of the semester really count) … something old, something new or something in between?

Anyway, cheers. Good weekend, everybody.