I love the holidays but I’m with everyone else: Things become so busy and accelerated that it’s hard to find time to write. Not to write emails, of course, and Christmas cards and this invitation and that, but to work on fiction–it’s the last thing I put time into doing. After my ongoing deadlines–The ASJA Monthly and teaching, there are cookies to bake, shopping to do and costumes to construct. (Tonight my one class is having our annual party, and this year we’re going as literary characters. Brian and I rented costumes yesterday so I think we’re going as characters from a Dickens novel or The Count of Monte Christo.)

So this is one more thing I love about the holidays, this year, anyway: I’m too busy to work on my book. So Starletta awaits me, and I dwell on what I want to do with her and the story when I return to it. Which is good because I’ve hit another wall and need to figure some things out.

Are you finding time to write?

One of my online students feels she’s lacking in the basics and asked me which books I recommended she read.

Here’s my short list:

Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Spunk & Bite by Art Plotnik, a great follow-up to Elements

Woe is I and Words Fail Me by Patricia O’Connor

And if you’re interested in writing fiction, Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story would make for a great beginning.

What are your recommendations?

A few sites to peruse to eat up your writing time. Kidding! You should only visit web sites and waste time when you’ve doneyour writing. (Uh-huh…)

The Quality Paperback Book Club. I used to belong and I’m thinking of joining again (like I really need more books). I found editions of books I didn’t see anywhere else. A little compendium of Hemingway quotes which I still use.

A Los Angeles Times story about the graying of protagonists in fiction (thanks, Elle, for the tip).

And a blog with writers’ tips (submitted by Allison Johnson).

That’s all for today. Time to get out of these PJs and go to an event at a Barnes & Noble in Covina. Other speakers will be Susan Kandel and Lisa Fugard. Maybe see some of you there?

A friend on Goodreads.com sent me an email and said, “I’m fascinated. Tell me about the sixth draft of a novel. How does that process work? When can you decide that you’ve said what you wanted to say? Why didn’t you say that the first time? What changes between drafts, when is it finished and, when it is, is it the same novel?”

Great questions. I’ll see if I can answer them.

For me, the process of writing a novel is a matter of finding the story, chipping away. I’m not an outliner. The one time I actually tried outlining a novel, by the time the outline was done, I was so bored with the story. So now I write to discover what I’m trying to say. An instructor of mine, Judith Beth Cohen, once said this, that she didn’t write because she had answers but because she had questions.

So the first draft is the discovery draft. I kept about 30 pages–the last 30!–of the very first draft of Starletta’s Kitchen (working title). The next draft had all sorts of things going on in it that I later realized didn’t belong, or were story lines, or characters, that bored me. If I’m bored, then my readers will be bored. Chris Bohjalian has said this, that he’ll stop writing 100 pages into a book if he’s bored.

A couple of my drafts were read-throughs. Another draft was comprised of carving. And now this draft….I’m cutting, streamlining. The story is coming into focus. I doubt that this is the final draft.

So many of the novelists I respect go through many, many drafts. First (and second and often third) novels are on the shelf, in storage. The novel I end up with will not be the same one I started. But…why should it be? A novel is written over a few years. You’re not the same person you were when you started it. A novel will change as you change.

When is it done? Someone said a project is never finished, but abandoned. Or published. I could tweak my first published book, Pen on Fire, still. It can be painful, seeing things you’d like to change but it’s published! So you know you’re done when you feel you’ve done the best you can do or you have no energy left or an agent likes it and shops it and it sells.

A way to keep organized, by the way, is to type subsequent drafts on different colored paper. My 7th draft is on blue. I’m going to buy pink paper for the 8th draft. Maybe it will be a happy draft…pink…happy…finished! But who can say?

On “Writers on Writing” tomorrow, Marrie Stone and I will talk to Emily Listfield, author of Waiting to Surface and Tom Perrotta, author of The Abstinence Teacher. You can listen at iTunes (go to Public Radio, look for KUCI-FM) or go to www.kuci.org and listen live. If you’re in the O.C., it’s at 88.9 FM.

Listfield based her novel on her husband’s disappearance. Perrotta did some research into abstinence at a Christian church or community in NJ, and is author of Little Children, so he should be interesting as well.

You can hear a ton of shows at http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com.
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Did Jessica Seinfeld crib recipes or not? Mr. Seinfeld, on the David Letterman show, seems to be a bit wacky over the whole thing.

I don’t know about anyone else out there, but when Travis was a wee tot, I mushed up vegetables, too. I haven’t seen the cookbooks so I don’t know how close the recipes are, but the books came out at the same time, so I don’t see how Ms. Seinfeld could have cribbed–unless the publisher cribbed for her. Now the casserole thickens….

What do you think?

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Also it’s Nov. 1 and that means it’s Nanowrimo month. Who’s writing a novel this month? Only have to hit 50,000 words, a book the size of Brave New World or 1984. On your mark, get set, go!