About Writing

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book-review, books, creativity, dog, dogs, fiction, internationaldogday, novel, pets, psychology, writing

Hello!

I’ve been reflecting on “International Dog Day” and on a year-long course on novel writing I took a couple years ago. To me, writing a full-length novel is more difficult than writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Writing non-fiction such as a dissertation requires research, discipline, organization, and being willing to work hard.

Writing a novel requires all of those but it also requires keeping track of the implications of many little decisions. It is not only a cognitive strain but often an emotional one as well. It’s a never-ending series of choices. Science is often, but not always, a series of choices where there is an agreed upon better answer. Even when there isn’t agreement, there are a much smaller number of choices.

To me, writing non-fiction is like taking a long trip on existing roads. You may certainly face unanticipated difficulties such as construction zones, flat tires and bad weather.

Writing fiction is more like bushwhacking. No-one has ever trod (or will ever trod) your exact path. You may learn something by discovering or following the paths of previous writers. You might, for instance, discover that some writers go over logs that lie across their intended path. Others, may crawl under. Still others might go around the fallen log. Others might choose to back-track until another path is found. What should you do?

It depends.

And, that’s the nature of fiction. It all depends. It depends on what else happens in the book. How you choose to construct and describe one character depends on the others. Even what you name them depends on the other names. What happens in character development interacts with the plot. The plot interacts with the landscape and the mood. The mood depends on the tempo. The tempo, if it’s dialog, must be consistent with the character who’s doing the talking.

Our dog Sadie and I have been co-creating and co-evolving games from the days she first came to live with us. We often played variants of “fetch.” Here’s how one worked. One of us (most often Sadie) finds a squeaky ball. At some point, I get a squeaky ball from somewhere in the garden and say, “Get up on the deck! I’m going to throw the ball on the deck.”

Now matter where she is when she hears that, she sprints to the deck and awaits my throw. She sprints with spirit! I love to watch her run, not only for her grace and speed but even more so, for the whole-heartedness with which she runs every single time. I throw the ball up and she catches it in the air more than half the time. Even when she misses, she’ll scramble after it and proudly perch on the spot on the deck where I can see that she’s caught the ball. After elaborate and genuine praise, she sprints down the stairs to the lawn near me. Then, she will lie down with the squeaky ball in her mouth. After a time, she’ll move the ball away from her some distance. I walk over casually, as though I am not trying to “steal” the ball from her. When I get close to the ball, she quickly re-grabs it. After she’s had a few “successes” she will start hanging out farther and farther away from the ball. At some point, I’ll grab the ball and announce, “I’ve got it!” At that point, she again sprints up the stairs to go the deck where I will throw the ball up to her.

The part of this scenario that I think is most like writing the fiction is the part where Sadie is judging how far away the ball should be from her buzz-fast jaws. If it’s too close, I won’t even try for it. If it’s too far away, I’ll immediately grab the ball. Similarly, as an author, I want to keep the reader interested. If my writing is too predictable, it might be clear, but it will be uninspiring and dull. The reader will quit before they get to the end of the story. On the other hand, if I write too far from the reader’s expectations, they will quit because they cannot grab the threads of the narrative.

To me, the benefits of co-creating with Sadie (rather than “training her” to play the game in a particular and predetermined way) include that I can learn a lot by observing her. Another benefit is that it keeps both of our minds more flexible and more engaged (just as does good literature). Of course, there are two of us in this exercise and that is also true in the reading of fiction. Every author, including me, will make miscalculations about how far to stray from expectations. But whether you can follow across those miscalculations is not only a measure of my skill as a writer but is also a measure of your skill as a reader.

In the past, I’ve self-published my books on Amazon. These are mostly non-fiction, but one of them is a collection of fictional short stories. Next time, I may try traditional agent/publishing. I am also thinking of putting together several more books, using the blog posts here as the seeds.

After a year long writing course, the single most important piece of advice I can give is:

“Get a dog.”

Don’t get me wrong. We have six cats and we love them dearly. The cats are smart, and I can certainly empathize with the cats. But their ability to empathize with me is either very limited or, as I suspect is more likely, they really don’t give a damn. On the other hand, Sadie is a pleasure to co-create with because she intuitively “gets” cooperation and collaboration. We accommodate each other and neither of us has any idea how the game will evolve.

The games with Sadie became more complex when we got a second dog, Bailey. Bailey is also an excellent ball player. But, unlike Sadie, Bailey almost always prefers to race after the ball, bring it back to me panting and lay the ball by my feet for an instant replay. That works quite well when I am playing only with Bailey.

The complexity arises when I try to play with Sadie and Bailey at the same time. Sadie wants to play the game of bringing the ball near me, but if she drops it near me, Bailey swoops in and grabs the ball before I can play the threshold game with Sadie. The easiest way is to deal with this is to play ball with them separately. Sometimes, I do.

My wife and I have also taken great pains to try to teach Bailey to take turns. Bailey is a smart dog and he is quite good about taking turns when it comes to eating, say, or going out to pee. But—when it comes to ball-chasing, it seems nearly impossible for him to consistently “take turns.” He’s much more likely to grab the ball, even if it means stealing it out of Sadie’s mouth.

One invention we’ve come up with is the “Three Balls on the Roof” throw. It works like this. I gather up three balls and throw all three up on the roof at the same time. We have a tiled Mediterranean roof and the balls bounce around unpredictably before coming down. This generally allows each dog to catch at least one. After they catch the ball, they both try to “touch” the other two balls. In the case of Bailey, this often entails stealing the one that Sadie caught. That has happened so many times, that generally, Sadie drops the ball she caught before Bailey gets a chance to “steal it” out of her mouth.

This “compromise” is not ideal. It reminds me though of another difficulty in writing a novel. I experience this myself, but I see evidence for the same difficult for many other writers. Here’s the essence of the dilemma. I like my hero(s). I care about them. I like to see them succeed. But…

For maximum reader engagement, the main character(s) must go through hell. I know many ways to put them there, but it’s painful to do so. One solution is to write about villains. I don’t mind if they go through hell.

Another solution is to use the “Three Ball Trick.” In this trick, I put the hero in a situation that looks dire, even impossible. But before resolving that puzzle, I put them (or a different hero) into yet another dire situation. Hopefully, the reader is already imagining that the hero is likely going to die or at least be permanently injured, possibly in two different ways. Before either of those two sticky situations gets unstuck, one of the main characters gets into yet another jam. And they must get into this jam before the other two jams are resolved.

Does this comport with your intuition as well? Compare two structures:

Hero encounters nasty situation one. (E.g., loses job).
Hero encounters nasty situation two (E.g., loses lover).

Hero encounters nasty situation three (E.g., gets arrested for a crime).

Hero “solves” situation one. (E.g., inherits money).

However, the apparent solution leads to further complication (makes them look guiltier in the crime they’ve been arrested for).

By contrast, we could imagine:

Hero encounters nasty situation one and solves it.
Hero encounters nasty situation two and solves it.
Hero encounters nasty situation three and solves it.

The latter structure is like throwing three balls on the roof, but one at a time. What would happen? My prediction is that Bailey would steal every ball that Sadie caught and she would soon stop playing.

In writing, the result would be that I would be more “comfortable” because my hero would never “hang out” in mortal danger. But the reader would not experience the joy of apparent repeated resurrection.