Sandra Gail Lambert

Novel Writing - Never Say Never

After eight days of every day having people work in my house (or waiting for someone to come work in the house - I still haven't seen that plumber), the Little Dog and I are alone, in the writing bed, with two yellow pads and an open computer file spread over my lap and her back. 

It's time to get serious.  To organize.  To see what I have so far and pull it together a bit.  In my other, non-writing life, I am an effective and efficient organizer.  I mean, I used to run a bookstore - talk about detail management.  But with my writing I've always been a "go with the (messy, spacey) flow" type.  Just Saturday I was at the Lesbian Potluck and Readings evening (23 years of meeting almost every month) and going on and on about how I found making an outline just impossible, maybe even detrimental. 

This morning I'm making an outline.  It unsettled me enough that I had to take a break and write about it.  I don't think it's a real outline.  But I'm breaking down the days and days of yellow pad writing into scenes.  And organizing the order of the scenes.  And deciding what the friggin' point of each scene is.  And noticing when I need to allude to the next scene and the past one.   

Okay, back to this, whatever it is.  Wish me luck.      

 

Research Road Trip

I wonder what the players at the Poker Room down in Citra thought about the lady in a wheelchair, tucked close along the wall, scribbling into a small notebook. (I thought a yellow pad might be too obtrusive.)  

No one seemed to mind.  Everyone either ignored me or was friendly.  And I had to keep from shouting when, while watching the different styles of dealing (flicking the cards across the table, floating them, slapping them down), I suddenly understood that my main character's ex was a dealer and had the whole scene of how they meet again right there complete in front of me. 

Now, who knows which, if any, pieces of this will make it through draft after draft, but the energy of these moments is what gets the blank pages filled. 

 

Researching the Novel: Poker rooms, bog bodies, and car wrecks - oh my!

Okay, this is how it works for me.  Characters, places, events come into my mind.  (Do not ask me how that happens because I don't know.)  I scribble them down onto yellow pages. 

"Poking around" research follows.  This is way fun, but it must stop before any deep, novel-constricting, procrastinating delving grabs hold.  I put aside, for instance, the four hundred over-sized pages of Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery  (Did you know that 7,000 years ago people took great care with the disabled and elderly members of their community?  And that their weaving - no, no, shut the book.) 

Anyway, I return to those friggin' blank yellow pad pages and each day write scene after scene.  I try not to worry about how they connect.  I try not to worry about sentence structure.  I write without looking back, whatever came to me in the night - a whooping crane in flight, the emotional difference between eyes that sparkle and those that glitter, or the sudden, certain, concrete picture of the opening and closing scenes. 

But that writing energy collapses.  Which is where I am now.  So on to the next layer of information gathering, but this time the emerging novel guides the research not the other way around.  I've interviewed friends about their car wreck experiences, soon I'm off for my first visit to a "Poker Room," and the five pound weight Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery once again leans against my hip. 

I hope this lasts awhile, because next is the pull it all together, probably a year's worth of actually writing the novel stage.  Yikes.