I began the novel I’m currently working on in 2006.  No other piece of wtiting has taught me more about revision than this novel.  Each draft, and there have been about 7, changed the novel dramatically, new incarnations each time- not at all a matter of line-editing or polishing.  But rather, massive changes in plot, a tonal shift, moving the story an entire decade, a timeline spanning 25 years to spanning about 6 months with an epilogue two years later, structure overturned, characters obliterated, and a major historical event excised.  As always, I’ve had the input of my writing group- on multiple drafts.  My husband read it and gave extensive editorial notes on the two-draft ago version, and finally this past September, my agent read it and gave the latest revision’s major notes- excising historical event, among others. 

Since September I’ve been doing this final rewrite.  By the way, in the last 2 drafts, the novel lost a hundred pages.  I don’t miss even one of them.  But I’m ready for this to be the end of a six year lesson in revision.  I’m ready to see the finish line.  I’m ready to read the thing myself, like a reader.  And then, do that last “revision” that’s really a polish, a line-edit, deleting the last adverb standing.  And I’m ready to give it back to my agent in a new shining form.  Something like done.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to drop in here and do some writing.  Life has been so hectic recently that all writing, my fiction, email, letters have shrunken considerably.  140 charcters would suit me fine, but the last thing on my mind is tweeting.  The only writing that has lengthened of late is grocery lists and to-do lists.  I’m back at my day job in public health, maximizing my evening hours with the baby, and then after he goes to bed, steaming and pureeing baby food, laundry, my dinner, occassionally talking to my husband, even more occassionally talking to someone else, and so on.  We’ve been a little more crazy lately because of my husband’s writing life, a new freelance script, a film festival, family visiting.  But yet, here I am, very much in the mood to write something and connect again to anyone who cares.  My second novel hasn’t fallen away from me as badly as this blog has.  I’ve been reading it.  A very important step that you writers out there will knowingly nod at.  Ah, she’s reading it.  It’s a sympathetic task, let me assure you.  I got to the end of my restructuring.  I implemented a lot of people’s notes.  I took a step away and went back to the beginning.  On the front page, I changed my name.  I’m now Rachel Stolzman Gullo, depending on which ID you ask.  I added a quote that helps explain the title.  I took a step back, and I started reading.  I’ve now read the first six chapters.  There were two chapters I broke into four from reading it.  That’s what reading can do.  Reading, by the way, means printing a clean copy and reading it on paper.  Hopefully it is pages you haven’t read in six months or more.  Hopefully, you don’t recognize the words, and have laser sharp criticism of your own work.  What’s wrong leaps out in all its stupidity.  What’s particularly weird and unexpected gives you a satisfied sense of pride.  You did that weird thing.  So, I’m reading.  A little too slowly, and getting through another degree of revision with each chapter.  It’s inching.

But I’ve spent more time lately in other genres.  What are they?  One is called Lotus Notes.  That’s the New York State’s Department of Health email system.  I’m on it from 9am to 5pm, and respond to most emails in real time.  I’m instant messaging with the agencies around the city who are conducting HIV prevention and care with women and with my DOH colleagues in Albany and New York City.  We received an email recently about appropriate emailing.  It reminded us not to be overly casual and familiar in our outgoing emails.  That our emails are not from us per se, but represent the state.  Wow.  But I kind of liked being reminded of that.  It made me notice how often I told someone, “This is crazy- how can I ask you to do this- it’s insane- please forgive me!  I need a new budget mod.”  I’ve known half the people I now manage for ten plus years- why wouldn’t I get casual and familiar.  But I’ve been dialing it back.  I pretend the new Commissioner of Health is reading all my emails.  Which he can, our emails are not in any way private of course.  I tell people the simple news.  Here’s the situation, what I need, what they can and can’t do, how I can help.  And you know something, they like it just fine.  And you know something else, my fiction would benefit from this too.  And there’s always the phone when you want to say, “What the fuck!”

The other genre I recently wrote was a birth story.  I’m a doula and when I support a family with their birth, part of the job is writitng their birth story.  Well, I’ve been doula-ing and writing birth stories since 2005.  And what do you know, but I’m changing the way I write those too.  In 2005, and 6, and 7 and 8….I thought it was only proper to write a clinical, factual, primarily medical account of a birth I attended.  It would be wrong to leave out unpleasant memories, low points, hostile providers, negligent husbands, bodily fluids.  Was I insane?  Please forgive me!  How can I ask you to read this!  I’ve grown up, I’ve learned.  No mother or father needs to know exactly what time their membranes were stripped, the third resident gave a painful vaginal exam, or what words they spoke when they felt most defeated.  Or how many hours exactly they kept their doula in the hosptial, how many damned nurses changed shifts.  I recently supported a beautiful birth, for a family I worked for four years ago too.  I wrote this recent birth story to their newborn daughter directly.  I told her how awesome her mother was- which was utterly true.  I told her how her personality showed from even before her birth and how her tiny hand shot out like a rebel warrior during her own birth.  I told her how her parents loved and supported each other for the whole labor.  And you know what?, it was as true and precise as any birth story I ever wrote, and it didn’t mention a single time of day or night.

I’m gonna go work on the song I’m writing now on my ukelele.  Because there’s still plenty of time to be new again.

I have an accelerated new pace with finishing this draft of my novel.  My goal this go-around is restructuring, as I’ve said before, and the work is rather mid-range in terms of mental effort.  I’ve re-outlined, losing the chronological order and placing historical scenes in the context of the front story.  So my task at-hand is cutting and pasting and smoothing in, and there are at least two plotlines I’m dramatically changing.  So when those arcs appear, I do some mental heavy-lifting too.  It’s been good work, an enjoyable process and I’m pretty sure I’m seeing positive results.  Honestly, a much better draft.  The process also naturally helped me to cull less engaging sections from the characters’ histories.  There will be yet another comb-through after this, but that thought can wait.  

This draft has been taking quite awhile in and of itself.  I squeeze the work in during baby’s naptimes.  And once a week, I leave him with his dad and go to the library to get a real work session.  I recently had my mom and then sister visit and they both gave me baby-sitting time to go get some work done.  And then in their absence and my looming return to work, something miraculous happened.  Enrico offered to help me finish the job at a faster pace.  I’d been looking forward to utlizing our beuatiful library together, the main Brooklyn branch at Grand Army Plaza, and I had even made a big deal about our first visit there.  I tried to get our librarian friend to join us, but in the end took him alone, and relished reading him his first picture book in the children’s wing.  

But what I’m talking about here is different.  Enrico has agreed to coming along, not to the children’s wing, but to the long tables where mom likes to work and can plug in, and has offered to sleep or quietly read to himself (in his daydreams) so I can write virtually everyday.

And therefore this week alone, I went from 85 pages til the end, to 50, to 30, to 15.  Thank you Library Assistant!  We’ll get the job done together. 

In the surreal, dream-like weeks right after I had a baby this past September, I was contacted by someone interested in making The Sign for Drowning into a movie.  Novelists dream of this, and its the only way a novelist can get anywhere near making a living as a writer.  Or to put it another way, I wouldn’t be opposed to my book being made into a film.  Not at all.  So, this dialogue began in some pretty uncertain terms.  For one, I thought the woman getting in touch with me was a television producer looking for material for her network and interested in buying the rights to “Sign.”  Or to put it another way, I thought I met my perfect match.  Well, I was sort of right.  She is a producer of sorts, but that’s not what she was interested in.  You never know where opportunity will come from; I’m sure you’ll all agree, and I was more than happy to consider various ways a total stranger might help adapt my only novel into a screenplay and have it actually made into a movie.  But this proposal was hard to get a grasp on.  For one thing, I had a brand new baby, and only slept 2-3 hours at a stretch, for another the woman pursuing our collaboration was deaf and we started off by exchanging rather cryptic emails, which finally gave way to slightly clearer phone calls (she turned out to be hard of hearing and a good phone communicator.)  But the problem lay in our differing goals.  She wanted me to write the screenplay with her.  Oh, no problem, I thought, I just have to inform her I’m not a screenwriter.  No such easy exit.  She didn’t care, neither was she.  But still, she thought the two of us were the right team for the job.  The Sign for Drowning is about a girl, Anna, who embraces sign language as away to coomuniacte with her younger sister who drowned.  As an adult, Anna teaches deaf children and adopts a deaf little girl- helping her heal from the loss of her sister.  So my potential collaborator’s thinking was that a lifelong hearing aide wearer (she) and the author of  this novel were the most likely team to make a go of this project–even without the necessary experience.  To be fair, my husband, who is a screenwriter, thought she could be right.  He urged me not rule out the possibility of spending a year or so writing my first screenplay with someone I didn’t know, who had less experience than myself even.  Well in retrospect the way I handled the whole situation was a lot more post partum than I realized at the time.  I was communicating with this potential collaborator before I’d even left the house from bringing home our new baby, and in those first weeks, I got out maybe twice a week.  Everything outside the apartment, including wearing shoes, taking a subway, walking my dog, going out for a pint of beer seemed otherwordly.  So you can imagine how otherwordly I found this unknown woman dropping me notes about potential scenes, extended metaphors, and a mysterious financer seemed.  But what really tipped me off that I was operating from an altered state was that I very outrightly told her I’d be persuaded by money.  I found myself talking like some totally unknown Hollywood player, suggesting that we should both be paid at least $10,000 to even touch the thing.  My own book.  She seemed to like my new sundance kid way of thinking, and we made a clandestine plan to meet at Grand Central Station.  We picked a Starbucks, then a H&M, then another Starbucks.  She said if I couldn’t find her to just keep calling her cell phone, reminding me she was deaf and didn’t always hear it.  We met.  It was maybe the third time I’d left the baby.  We talked about him, and her children, and both our professional backgrounds.  We got along just fine.  If it were a sanity check- which was partially on my mind- we both passed.  We talked about meeting on her next trip to New York- Thanksgiving time.  We talked about working together for a year, every weekend, on Skype, or travelling together to a retreat to outline and write this screenplay.  “The reason she was on the planet,” she said on one phone call, my book as an example- not the literal reason.  We both said we needed to decide if we would take the plunge or not.  Would we go against the odds of our lack of proven ability, of our not knowing each other, of our limited time.  My own desire to finish my second novel while on maternity-leave weighed in heavily.  And then there was the fact that all I’m really doing with great commitment these days is caring for my boy.  Well, the decision went unmade.  We never spoke again.  Perhaps it was another 2010 dream, in a year full of unthinkable and dreamlike happenings.

In July I came to the end of my second novel.  As, I mentioned in another blog entry, Life and Writing Are Different, I had a marathon writing session when my baby was a few days late, where I created a new outline for this novel.  The scoop is the novel spanned from 1976 to 2003, and it’s not titled The Godfather.  One of my writing group friends made an astute comment that sealed the deal for me that I would change the structure.  She said books that span the charcter’s childhood, youth and adulthood are coming-of-age novels.  That seems to pretty much hold up as a rule, and this book is not.  I feel I just needed to write it that way, chronologically and capturing the essence of the main charcters’ backstory and childhoods.  But as any of you could tell me, ‘just cause you had to write it that way, doesn’t mean we have to read it that way.’  So, since Enrico’s been a few weeks old, I’ve been chipping away at reconstructing the book with a different timeline.  It will start in 2001, and valuable backstory will appear as flashback.  There’s a writing expression, “Kill your darlings.”  It means every writer has some material that they adore that doesn’t serve the story- get rid of it.  I did kill some darlings.  And in the light of- dear god please let me get somewhere with this novel while my darling boy naps, kicks on his activity mat, hangs out with his Pa, gradually grows up…those literary darlings that weren’t working didn’t seem so darling.

When I started this blog, two and a half years ago, everyone had a blog.  But now, everyone has a blog.  I don’t mind.  Actually, I want to spend more time reading really good blogs.  They can be inspiring.  They can be about subjects that really interest me.  They can teach, connect and help us with our careers.  But they do even more for the people who write them.  They are a way for us to flex a writing muscle, develop a different voice than we write with in our respective genres, write things that other people actually read in our daily lives, instead of once every 38 years, as in my first novel.  The things we write in blogs are most often read by our friends and family, and they provide a way for us to move them and to let them get to know us better, a part of ourselves that we want to be known.

My husband and I have a an 8 week old son.  So last weekend, my big dream for Friday night, was to get a couple people to come over for a four person card game and cocktails.  This idea felt like it could salvage a pretty claustrophobic week.  So, in the evening, after my husband Bill had visited a friend for tips on his new blog, one friend, Shannon, came over to have a bite pre-cards, and we talked about what she should name her new blog.  Then during our five person card game it came out that all five of us have blogs.  We made fun of each other’s blog’s names.  And still, I’m excited about all these things to read from interesting people I know- who are even willing to play cards with me on a Friday night, while Enrico gets used to living in this bloggy world.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m ready to show this draft of my new novel to a few people.  It was important to me to have a few readers at the same time, since I don’t think the novel is ready to go out into the world and I want feedback to do some more revisions.  Well clearly my agent was the primary person I wanted to give it to.  And Bill, my husband (still unbelievable to say), won’t read my work until it is finished, and was a great editor for my first novel and the first draft of this novel, so he is another person that will read it now.  And I chose one member of my writing group who is relatively new and hasn’t seen that much of the book or the first draft. 

So, first I mailed a hard copy to Joelle- my agent.  Can’t say I feel great- there’s much insecurity in putting a book in the mail.  And let me add, stay away from it once you do!  Suddenly every sentence could easily be improved.  Then on Monday, I dropped the bulky manuscript at my group mate’s house.  We had a lovely short chat (the time of 3 quarters in a parking meter), and I met her two sons.  One of whom is 7 weeks old, and I confess I gave him extra scrutiny, being 8 weeks from having my own!  Then this morning Bill was off to Palm Springs for a film festival, so last night he peeled off chapters 1 and 2 from the manuscript for plane reading. 

So it seems, we’re off to the races.  I expect everyone will need about a month to read the book and give me comments, and I’m looking at the writing sessions I could have in the next month with a sideways glance: a new new novel?  A young adult novel?  A play?  Take a deep breath!

Once again, I’m appreciating my writing group, affectionately and embarrassingly named, the Exiles.  During the summer, due to ever-increasing work schedules, we lost several members and shrunk down to a core four members.  We did a recruitment through NYC writing spaces, like the Brooklyn Writing Space and Paragraph, etc.  (These are places where writers can pay a monthly or quarterly fee and show up anytime of day or night, let themselves in with their own key, and use a cubicle in a silent space- just for writing.) 

I’ve been told that applying for the Exiles is more onerous than applying to grad school, and having done both, I agree.  Yet, grad school is for two years, in the case of an MFA, and you can avoid the writers whose work and feedback you don’t care for.  Our group is pretty much for life it seems, and each person has a huge impact.  So, we had a lovely response and we took in three new members and the group is dynamic and lively once again.

It just so happens that a number of us are at or nearing the end of a draft of a novel.  I’m about 25 pages from finishing a draft of my next book, maybe a month or two of work and since we only submit our work to each other at a chapter or two at a time, I started to fantasize about swapping novels with someone in the group.  Reading each other’s full length work and giving notes- a novel swap.  I sailed this idea past the group, and it’s gonna work!  Sometimes being in exile isn’t so lonely afterall.

I’m not always happy with the way I’m writing.  I recently responded to an interview question for Barnes and Noble (to be posted upon release) that I do not write similarly to my favorite writers.  Certainly many of the writers who I think have influenced my own writing style, I also deeply admire.  But I am just not like my lifelong favorites including Philip Roth, Hemingway, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow.  I cannot emulate them.  Not that I’ve actually tried, but I know instinctually that their distinct prose styles, whether incredibly verbose, lightning fast, dry as hell, or beautifully simplistic are not my voice.  You’ll have to read my B&N interview to know who I do think has seeped into my voice.

But on days when I’m particularly not liking what I’m writing, when the sentences are piling together with much too much emphasis on language, I stop and sigh, and ask myself, “what would Hemnigway do?”  It works, the adverbs come out, then most the adjectives, then I try a sentence or two that’s subject verb only.  It’s refreshing- the reader leaps at the change- I myself do.

I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.  I could certainly ask myself on any given writing day, “what would McCarthy do?”  He’d give you the action.  What were they doing- that’s all he cares about.  This is almost the opposite of my highly internal characters- and that must be the way it should be.   But a dose now and then of the subject verb, the action only, can only add oxygen to the thing, if you know what I mean.

I’d hate to think what a MFA workshop would do to a Cormac McCarthy piece.  What is he thinking, feeling? they’d all ask.  Forget it- you don’t always get to know.  And isn’t that the best sometimes?

I’ve kept a journal on and off for most my life, tending to journal most often when I’m down or confused, thus making the collection of old journals a pretty sad lot of documentation.  But in recent years, my journaling habit has narrowed down to travel logs, an end of year re-cap and my new years goals and hopes (resolutions.)  I’m happy to say that the last four or five years have contained writing-related resolutions.  I say that, because there was a period of time between my MFA and 2004 or so that I wasn’t prioritizing writing.  So some writing goals for 2010?

1.  Finish current draft of second novel, which I will show my agent.  This goal is very likely to happen because I’m on chapter 12 of 14 and I’m determined to submit this draft to my agent and her editor.  

2.  Choose a night per week that I will go to writing space.  Tuesdays are the best candidate.  Consider it done!  

3.  Reap all the benefits of, and give all my powers of critique and support to, my amazing writing group, the Exiles.

3.  Continue to blog throughout 2010, hopefully a few times a month.  Setting the bar pretty low here, when I certainly could say once a week. 

4.  Write a play.  It’s true- I have a play idea, and I’m craving the experience of collaborating on a writing project.  We’ll see what happens.  This one will take back seat to finishing the novel, but sometimes a session every week or every other week on something else can be invigorating, right?

5.  I don’t have to make a resolution about reading, becasue I’m constantly reading, usually novels.  But I could and should say it’s a goal to read some of those mighty giants that I haven’t- Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, the Dostoevskys and Faulkners that have held me at bay, the list goes on and then there’s non-fiction. 

Any writing resolutions of your own?