THE END

Yesterday, at 2:55 p.m., when my last class was watching the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies, I tapped out the last scene in School Spirit and typed "The End."

I made my goal of five months with one day to spare! The first draft came in at 226 pages.

Now I'll let it sit for a week or so and start revisions during summer school. I hope to have the second draft done by the end of summer school (six or seven weeks from now). In the meantime, I'm rethinking the opening of the book and I may work on the synopsis or query. At that point, I will give the second draft to some carefully selected readers for feedback and make more revisions.

With luck, I'll be sending out queries by the end of the year. Now that the book is officially done, the real work begins!

DANNY CAN'T COME TO THE PHONE RIGHT NOW

All writers take notes. And I try to have a writing implement and notebook handy most times. But that's not always possible. So I thought I'd mention here one method I use for recording--literally--those brainstorms that occur when a pen and paper aren't so handy.

Typically, I have my cell phone with me and/or I'm close to the home phone (yes, we are the household that still has a landline. I think it's hooked up to Sara, the operator, in Mayberry, North Carolina). Since I do my writing at work before the school day begins, whenever I get a brainstorm that I can't immediately write down (while driving around town, for example), I just ring up my office phone and leave a message on my voicemail with whatever note I have about character, plot line, structure, detail, etc. Yesterday, for example, I called my voicemail because I realized now that the dream the main character has in the beginning of the book should echo how the bad guy is dispatched at the end of the book. So I called and left a message and, when checking messages the next morning, I wrote it down and put with my School Spirit materials.

This is an amazingly effective method for capturing those hard-to-capture thoughts.

THE SMALL SUCCESSES. . .

Not everyone in the world wants to write a book. So writing one, to some people, isn't that big of a deal. So you have over 200 white pages sitting on your desk with little black squiggles on them. So what?

But I do want to write a book. I might even like to someday publish a book. And so, for better or worse, those 2oo plus pages represent a percent of my labor for the past five months of my life.

Finishing such a project, then, is something of an accomplishment. At least to me.

I've always thought that when we have the small successes in our life, such as reaching the small goals we set for ourselves, that we should stop, reflect on those successes, and yes, even celebrate.

To that end, since I know that by next Monday I should very likely be finished with the first draft of School Spirit, I have planned a small celebration.

To wit, I will be bringing in a box of donuts to share with some of my colleagues at work who know what I've been up to and have been kind enough to listen to me as I've talked about my trials.

You have, too, of course, but I'm not sure how to get you donuts.

But the point is: when we reach the small goals in life, when we have the small successes, the merry-go-round should stop, if only for a moment, and they should be acknowledged in some way.

DENOUEMENT. . .WHATEVER THAT MEANS

I was so excited this weekend because I knew that I had only two chapters left in School Spirit and I knew what was going to happen and I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard. It was especially difficult to withstand the excitement, though, as Monday was a holiday.

Chapter 19 would be comprised of two scenes: 1) the end of the climactic car chase and 2) the main character saying good-bye for all time to his ghost girlfriend. On Tuesday I wrote scene one and today I wrote scene two. Today's writing was very sad, actually. Finally, I spell-checked and printed up chapter 19, hole-punched it, and added it to the blue notebook.

That leaves Chapter 20, also slated to be comprised of two scenes. I expect it to take two days (one scene each day--Thursday and Friday) and then I will enjoy, as I have five other times in my life, typing the words "The End."

And then my work will be roughly 35% done.

Sigh.

DOWN TO THE WIRE

I finished, spell-checked, and printed chapter 18 this morning.

This is the officially the climax--the big finish that takes place in an old revival house theater. The hero finds out what's going on and goes after the bad guy.

I have also officially passed 200 pages--211, to be exact.

I have exactly two more (relatively short) chapters to write.

My goal was end of May for the first draft. It's gonna be tight, but I might make it.

First part of June would suit me just fine, though, and that's a lock!

Then it's time to celebrate.

Thanks for staying tuned.

KNIT ONE, PEARL TWO

Two days ago, I sat down to write the fifth and final visitation of the ghost girl, as she attempts to guide her earthly boyfriend toward her killers. The good news is that it went very well: it was engaging (at least to me), deepened the relationship between the characters, and employed a fairly creative and artistic use of language (syntax, vocab, tone, etc.).

On the other hand, the scene went in a slightly different direction than I was planning and it ended much sooner than I was anticipating. But I didn't really want to change it because I liked it. The problem, however, was that I knew what was coming next and what this scene needed to do to connect me to the next section, but what I had written hadn't done that. So I looked at my outline (which was no help) and I thought and thought: how, I wondered, am I going to get from what I wrote that I didn't want to change to where I needed to go? After much thought, I realized I did need another short scene to follow in that chapter. At first, I was only able to generate a few scene ideas that might be covered in a way that could make that connection. I was concerned though that, being so close to the climax and the end of the book, that I might be sacrificing pace.

I went home for the day and, as usual, percolated subconsciously on what I would be writing the next morning. I had a few more ideas before arriving at school the next morning at my usual time, but still hadn't come up with any solid answers. I still wasn't completely sure what direction to go in as I walked across the campus.

Then, as if by magic, right as I was arriving at my classroom door, the entire structure of the scene knitting together several issues, popped in my head completely spontaneously. Usually I don't like scenes that designed to be entirely utilitarian, but this one seemed fully formed and virtually seamless. I sat down and wrote that bad boy during my thirty minute writing time that morning and it turned out pretty well.

The moral?

You never where or when inspiration will (or won't) strike and sometimes writing answers come--if they come at all--at the last possible moment.

COLORS, REVISITED. . .

As I said once in another forum, teaching Lord of the Flies to ninth graders is a bit redundant. That said, I've learned something new about the book during my most recent trip--probably my 15th or 16th journey into Golding's abyss with the English schoolboys run amok.

I had no idea that Golding used so many colors in his writing. This time through I noticed that, on almost every page, Golding uses color to create a more vivid experience for the reader.

Here are some examples:

Describing the conch shell: "In color the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink " (16)

Describing Jack: "Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms " (150).

Describing the destruction of the conch: ". . .the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist" (181). And in the same paragraph:

Describing the death of Piggy; "His head opened and stuff came out and turned red" (181).

There are a thousand other examples I could cull from, as I said, most every page. I have been sensitive lately to the use of color in writing since heeding my colleague's advice to add more color to my own writing, especially in School Spirit. In subsequent drafts, I plan to write the word "colors" at the top of the chapter I'm revising and look for strategic places just to add a color or two to make the scene more visual, vivid, and, well, colorful.

"You need more colors," my colleague said.

He was right.

Golding novel proves it.

FOUR CHAPTERS AND COUNTING. . .

I finished typing, spell-checking, printing out, and page-numbering chapter sixteen.

I know, for a fact, that I have exactly four chapters left in the first draft.

As of the next chapter, seventeen, we are officially involved in the Big Finish.

And, since chapter sixteen makes 189 pages, I know that I will make my goal of just over 200 pages. With editing--both addition, subtractions, and general tightening--I hope to end up with a tight 200 pages to peddle to the agents.

Interestingly, a little bit of life got in the way yesterday. Some of my papers from school were piling up, and we are nearing the end of not only the grading period, but the entire school year, so I needed to take my writing time to grade and enter student work. In an unprecedented move, I took my laptop home and did about thirty minutes of work on chapter 16, effectively finishing it up so I could print it up today. I expect to get back to the keyboard before school next Monday to start the climax of School Spirit. It will be close, but I might still make my goal of finishing the first draft by the end of May.

I will be happy, of course, to finish it even a bit past that, but I'm shooting for end of May.

Wish me luck.

RAISING THE STAKES

In most every writing manual, writers are admonished to "raise the stakes" if they want their readers riveted tot he words on the page. This is communicated nowhere as well as in Donald Maas' excellent Writing the Breakout Novel. In fact, Mr. Maas goes a step further and talks about the difference between "public" stakes and "personal" stakes as a way to deepen and intensify the plot. Public stakes refers what the character stands to lose externally if things don't go the way he or she wants, while personal stakes refers to what a character stands to lose internally. In short, want to captivate your reader? Make it clear that something--something BIG, in fact (or even better MANY BIG), things are at stake. Put something at risk.

Just the other day, I put this very concept to work in School Spirit. I had been reading a murder mystery called Darkness, Take My Hand by the very talented Dennis Lehane. In the climax, the detective faces down the killer, an old friend and neighborhood local as it turns out, who had been killing people for decades. Certainly, on the surface, fairly typical fair for the climax of a mystery novel. But then the killer opens the trunk of his car and removes two hostages, a mother and her small baby who is in a pouch that the killer puts around himself, right next to the 12-gauge shotgun. Lehane has just raised the stakes. Endangering the woman would have raised the stakes plenty, but to then put a BABY in danger puts the reader on the edge of his seat and compelled to find out what will happen to the poor infant. At least it did for me.

During my next writing session, the main character is cornered by the bullies in the story and pushed around a little bit. He's not completely beat up (I'm writing THAT scene tomorrow!), but they try to scare him. Having finished Lehane's novel, and realizing how he raised the stakes in his climax, I was wondering how I could raise the stakes in the scene I was currently writing. So, learning from Lehane--and also remembering what a good writing friend told me during the revision of my last book that I should put more family in the story because people have families and that needs to be reflected--I made it so that the main character was picking up his brother at guitar lessons and the bullies hassle the little brother as well. I raised the stakes by having the main character worried that the bullies might hurt his brother, too.

After writing the scene, I realized, quite simply, that Maas (as well as all those other books) were right.

Get Maas' book. It's like an fiction writing MFA between two covers.