The Stuff of Life: Friends, Loss, Food

Food! Is there anything more soothing to the soul, more indicative of one's mood, more uplifting when down, more celebratory when up?

I spent yesterday afternoon, Leap Day, sharing nibbles and a golden bottle of blanc de blancs from a local wine shop after a long walk on this surprisingly warm sunny day in Cardiff, UK. My extra day, well spent.

Which brings me circuitously to Liz Moore's HEFT, which I reviewed recently for The Washington Post. What I both liked and admired about this book is the life in it.

But I've already said what I thought in this review.

Novel Class, Week 5: Quantity vs. Quality

So the inevitable question arose these last two weeks as, a few sentences and a few pages at a time, we typed and scribbled our way to 40,000 words by Dec. 15– Is this quantity over quality?

Well, sure. Probably. Maybe even absolutely.

I want to assure you that this is okay, that this is positively the kind of discipline one needs to write a novel, that you can’t hesitate, you must keep rolling ahead.

But the truth is I don’t know that. In Winchester, Michelle worries about abandoning her usual writing process. Sometimes she just needs to think, she told our class, and she’s so worried about the word count that she can’t do that.

So am I putting her at risk of writing 40,000 crappy words instead of 5,000 good ones?

The truth is, I don’t know.

Plowing ahead may not always be the best way. Where’s the time for playing with words and images? Can a character grow on the page if those pages come out in one sitting?

And as a colleague of my partner said the other week with a friendly smile: I guess you don’t practice what you preach.

But for now, I’m making her – and all of you -- do it anyway. This is an experiment, a challenge, a jump off a cliff.

We are not alone in this endeavor, by the way. Mary Kay Zuravleff, to whom I owe the idea for this class, did a similar thing at George Mason University last year. You can read about her class at her Web site, www.marykayzuravleff.com.

And if you think 12 weeks is a short time, Chris Baty, author of No Plot, No Problem, runs a natonal novel-writing month from San Francisco, in which people write 50,000-word novel in one grey month: November. Check out his Web site, www.NaNoWriMo.org.

Egging us on, one of my undergrad students, Harriet, wrote: As committed Nanowrimo-ists we feel compelled to shout down to the 40,000 words-in-a-semester brigade (wimps). "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!"

Back in our MA class, a bit of irony. We all saw some of Michelle’s novel-in-progress this week. She is writing scenes here and there, we can’t tell quite yet exactly what her story will be, but there are three characters coming alive on the page, along with a world Michelle is making real for us.

Who’s complaining now?

You can’t think out the problems in a novel, my MFA advisor at Columbia, Stephen Koch, ( Web site: www.stephenkoch.net) once told me. You have to write them out.

And so, off we go to our desks. Write it all out -- 16,000 words by next week.