Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – Part 1

Hi everyone! Hope you are having a great summer with kids in camp, coming home sun-warmed and tired and sleeping soundly through the night.  We are judging the Fellowship entries while we are on hiatus from Salons and let me tell you – there is some stiff competition this year!

Meanwhile – we are thrilled to welcome a terrific novelist, Scott Elliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington.  Scott is the father of two boys and two books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel.  Click here for his bio.

Take it away, Scott—

Is it a good idea to go on a book tour with two boys, aged two and five?

Probably not.

Nevertheless, my wife Jenna and I recently hit the road with two red-headed, fun-loving, mischievous imps we happened to have around.  I’ve long described the experience of having children in one’s thirties as a descent back into the tumultuous emotional zone you’ve worked your whole life to leave behind. As soon as you feel yourself standing on solid adult ground blessedly free of such swings you look at your life’s clock and say, “better have kids”  and embark on the wildest, emotional swingiest ride of your life. There are occasions during certain confluences of child raising madness when one looks to the sky and says, why… why?  balanced with times of such beautiful tender reawakening to the world and its wonders that one struggles to find words for such sweet perfection. Both states intertwined.

Rather than have me hit the road alone, we decided to morph an early summer vacation with a small Pacific Northwest book tour for my new novel Temple Grove, which is set on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.  The tour took me to some wonderful independent book stores in Western Washington and Oregon. I started on my own at Annie Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland, and the family went with me from Walla Walla, where we live, to Olympia (Orca Books); Seattle (Elliott Bay Book Company); Bellingham (Village Books); on up to Vancouver, B.C where I read at a tribute to Joyland Magazine at the Railway Club.   

Going on a book tour puts one in touch with one’s own day-to-day persona to a greater degree because you also begin to think about what your authorial persona ought to be. This persona may be a little different from who you are.  Fiction grants you license to tap into selves who are not you—who may be more extreme in different directions—to go into very adult and complex zones, sometimes verging on, or squarely within, our capacity for depravity. So, the fiction writer’s persona in readings may be pulled by the material away from the more accessible, friendly self your friends and family are used to seeing.

We decided to keep the readings and time with children separate, though we did plan to have the boys come see daddy read at least once….

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Ghost writing, blogging, and writing a novel in a year

As writers who have to support little hungry mouths, we are (well, like everyone else) always searching for a way to make money.

So what about ghost-writing?

Articles like this one from the BBC, make it sound so easy - write two or three books a year, put your kids through private schools. Live in a fancy house. Meet celebrities who love you. Done.

Of course, no one knows who you are.

But why do we write, exactly? I mean, none of us can stop, right? Whenever we think to throw the pen out the window we are haunted by ideas, gripped by the fear that we have tossed away our talent. When our PTA asks us to write for the newsletter we squirm, as angry as the doctor who is asked to "just take a quick look" at this weird blister-thing on Sybill's back during a Fourth of July barbecue.

We want to be read, and really, we want to be paid for our work.

So how important is it that people know we are actually the author of that work?

Interesting question, isn't it? How would you feel if you wrote a whole book and it became a best seller -- but then some dipstick actor who could barely focus thoughts into a verbal sentence, much less in an email, gets credit for writing that fascinating book and gets to talk to Oprah, Ellen, and Jon Stewart about how gripping their story was to read. Would the money be enough to keep you satisfied?

If it's just about the money, why aren't we all writing creative ad copy? I can find a million job offers for blogging about random things. Here's my position on this:  do whatever day job you have to do to keep your kids fed and your rent paid, but leave time for your own creative work.

Ghostwriting can leave you drained. Yes, you are using your craft (writing) to earn a living. But you are also asking your inner artist to draw a picture that did not rise from your own soul.

Writing is of two parts: the story is the art, the writing is the craft. A great novel has both, and both belong to the author.  Ghost-writing is a good way to pay the bills, but don't let it be the only writing you do. Make time for your own story, even if it's not as marketable as Angelina's.

Better still: make something up. Write a story that has not yet been lived.

If you can't find time to work on your own creative stuff, then you have to give something up.  You can't (and shouldn't) give up your kids. You probably should exercise a little and leave at least a few hours for your spouse and for eating and sleeping and, let's be real, a few hours for detox with your favorite addictive TV show. But what you can give up is a day job that makes you feel like you are writing without actually letting you write. You can stop pretending your low-paying blogging job is really what you want to be writing, and instead you can take a stupid-mind-numbing job where you are being paid GOBS of money and then you can take that extra money to hire a sitter so that you can actually work on something creative.

And if you just yelled at this post, then maybe you are secretly happy at what you do and you need to JUST ACTUALLY WORK ON YOUR NOVEL. Here is a kick-in-the-pants blog (warning: really colorful language) I found to help you write a novel in one year.

Good luck & get to it.

Three-part writing process: a theory.

Tragedy.  I wrote this idea out in an email to a friend. Wrote it in gorgeous, bloggy detail. Then I cut it from the email, realizing that she (not a writer) wouldn't be interested in my theories. Intended to paste it into a blog entry.

But, as life would have it, I got randomized and forgot to paste it...anywhere. So when I finally got to this window, I discovered the computer actually has the link to a website stored in the paste function.

Rats.

But! It was my brain that thought it up to begin with, so I'll recreate. Less than spontaneously, but maybe more thought out.

Here's the concept. Writing has always been considered a two-step event. Writing and then Editing. You write your novel. Then you edit it. Sometimes you edit it over and over again. 

But let me pose this theory:

Great writers write in three steps.

Creating. Polishing. Editing.

Yes, those are in the correct order.

Writing is really a combination of creating and polishing. This is where the various "writing styles" come in - some people create an outline first, then fill it in with details. Others write copiously, then cut and rearrange. No matter how you come up with your fully functional narrative - that's your goal in the creative phase. A narrative draft that is "finished". That's what people mean when they say "I finished the first draft of my novel." It means, "I have written a narrative that holds together, and I won't be rearranging it in any significant way." 

(probably.)

Most of the work of new writers is to figure out how they best hammer out the skeleton: whether through the inspirational and copious bloodletting known as "getting it all on the page" followed by major manuscript surgery (as I do) or by thinking hard and writing from an outline that's been a few months or even years in the making and then filling in the prescribed scenes and details (my friend Nick Kaufmann writes his fantastic urban-sorcerous crime novels this way).  Professional writers are really good at knowing when a skeleton is unfinished. They are slaves to the feeling that "something isn't right here." And they will tweak and cut and rearrange until it feels "finished."

Before sending out that "finished" story, they polish that filled out skeleton. This is where you edit your own writing. You choose better verbs. You cut characters that steal scenes for no good reason. After you absolutely know the frame of your story (Victor LaValle has some great things to say in interviews about this) you go through and "fix" -- whittle down scenes that are too long, add descriptions so that scenes don't happen in empty rooms with blank walls unless they're supposed to. 

This sounds so obvious, right? So why do writing students so often send out stories in the middle of the Creative phase? Teachers of writing often have to select the scenes to cut and mark where the story actually "begins". 

A great editor I recently worked with agreed with Victor that you can write your outline AFTER the novel is written, but you still have to have an outline.  Every story has to have a skeleton that makes sense and that can be filled in (with scenes that function...like organs?) and can be overlaid with details (skin, eye color, hair?)... despite my extended Halloween-induced metaphor, I do think that the skeleton of the story is important, and the creation of this core of every narrative should be thought of as a separate action from the polishing (finding the perfect words, describing the perfect weather, adding the crazy character traits that will make Mr. Blusty an unforgettable professor of science) -- but I also hold that the polishing of the story is NOT the editing of the story, because polishing is still fun. It's making your story all shiny and glimmery and yours. 

The editing is the painful part. After you already think the story is perfect. "As good as you can make it" - you give it to your trusted readers. Then your agent. Finally, professional editors. Each of these rounds will give you feedback which you can opt to use or not - but which you MUST look at with a critical eye. Not your inspired, vulnerable, genius writer self. A critical, consumer, teacher, word-count, sort of eye. And that is editing. Editing hurts. It's letting go of the paragraph you kept in (though you kind of knew it should go, certainly you moved it six different places)... 

So what do you think of my three-part writing process? 

Emotional Garbage Truck

Okay, so here's what last week's crazy parenting moment reminded me of: 

I was writing a novel while I worked (at my fancypants corporate job I was required to look busy but there was often no work to be done) and one day found myself in an all-out war with a secretary over the office supply products that kept vanishing from my desk. It wasn't exactly a "stapler" moment (have you seen Office Space?) but very very close. I resolved to leave as soon as I got into an MFA program. And luckily it was the right time of year and I was able to schedule and take a GRE within a week and the applications sent by the end of the month and I was in by the end of the year. Never looked back. 

That's how I tend to deal with situations in which the emotional weight is preposterous compared to the actual reality of the situation. I assess, I change things, I fix it or I go away from it.

But last week, I got caught up in a stupid emotional undertow that was all about parenting. A riptide of useless anger at things that I have no business being irritated by. Normally, I would tell myself to asses, change, fix, or go away. How can you do that as a parent? I find myself in emotionally overwrought situations daily, if not hourly. I discover I am yelling over the fact that a kid wants to wear a summer dress when it is obviously a fall day outside. I find the last, uneaten bite of scrambled egg can give me hives. Pajamas on the floor? Look out.

It's not like I can give up parenting and go to grad school. I haven't even paid off the last one.

This is what a time-out is supposed to be about: this stepping away from it to asses and destress. But we don't usually. We have too much to do. If we manage to extract one kid (by giving them a time out for yelling back at us) we usually still have another kid or spouse or bills to pay or someone texting us or a dog to feed or garbage to take out or god knows what to deal with - we can't just duck into our laptops and try to write about it. 

And yet, writing your situation into words helps a lot - write it down, get it out of your head. Use the back of a receipt or email it to a close friend. This is why Facebook posts are good, or Tweeting. Because it forces you to take your emotions and turn them rationally into words. In order to do that, you have to assess. 

On the other hand, be sane about it - FB, Twitter, even emails - you're sending out this stuff into the universe. People are going to respond. Think before you publish! 

And that's hard as a writer. We love to publish.

Here's a tip: write and then assess. Was I writing this down in order to clear my head? If yes, then it's emotional garbage. Don't try to publish every piece of emotional garbage that was cluttering your head. You're writing to get it out of your head, not to put it into the world. Put it away. Post in on FB if you have set up appropriate privacy standards. Or better still save it in a file. Don't look at it again. Head cleared, get back to your real work.

Obviously if your real work is a memoir, well, it's interesting isn't it? Memoirs and creative nonfiction are such a delicate balance of the author needing to process his own feelings (listen to our podcast of Darin Strauss discussing why he wrote his memoir) and wanting to advise others on how to deal with the issues you faced (Abby Shur, our very first Pen Parentis Fellow, wrote a memoir about obsessive praying. The podcast of the panel discussion that night is available to logged-in members of Pen Parentis.) And the noise of the garbage in our head can be so damned loud sometimes that it's hard to find the creative space to actually write fiction. So maybe that memoir is important. But take some real time assessing whether it's important because it cleared out the creative space in your head, or if it's important because it will actually help other people get through what you went through.

We as writers forget that writing does not necessarily equal readers reading. So many writers publish too quickly and are appalled at the horrific feedback they get in comments (too easy for response, no one writes you a letter flaming your book, they just post it to the whole world after they give you one star on GoodReads.) So think twice before you publish your personal junk. Be sure. And then treat it like any writing - get an editor, make every word count, and like I said last week, make sure your main character (that would be you) is clear on what they want. In a positive way.

Remarkably? this helps with parenting too. If you are clear on what you want "I want you to wear shoes that will not get damaged in the rain today." Then your kid can assert what they want "I want to wear my diamond studded felt-and-cork flip flops" and you can discuss without fighting. "Will your diamond-studded shoes be damaged by the rain?" "Yes, and I don't care." "I'm sorry you don't care. However, you must find shoes that won't get damaged by the rain." "I hate you, you are a horrible mother."

Well, it's dramatic, anyway. Write it down on the back of that receipt for those shoes (what possessed you to buy those in the first place??) In the novel you're writing, that girl would have put on her rhinestone-studded rubber flip flops and gotten to school on time. When you drop off Princess at third grade, come home and change the scene to reflect the much-more-entertaining reality of conflict. Or have your character wear the shoes to school and they'll dissolve into a puddle of actual money that slips down into the sewer...

One day you'll be stuck in your writing and you can go to your file of angry moments and you can harvest it to get your characters in a scene again: all scenes have drama and as a writer said at our salon, Kids are drama all the time. For them the stakes are life-and-death over everything: which shoes to wear to school, who took their chair at the table, the fact that they erased something they meant to keep. Use these moments. Be inspired by them. It doesn't have to be a memoir or a blog - it can be inspiration to get your paper characters acting like flesh and blood.