The Story Scarf

Last year, Sarah told us about "knitting a book is like writing a sweater" but I'm going to tell you that stories are scarves.
Actually, just this scarf.

This scarf is made with a mind-bogglingly simple pattern by fellow writer Ivy Reisner, simple enough that when I really started knitting and crocheting, this pattern was the first project I made -- and four of the first seven projects. And here's why it's like a story. It's made of scrap yarn.

Every line in that scarf is made of the yarn left over at the end of another project. So when I look at that, I see the green from some slippers I made my daughter, gold and blue from a hat I donated to the homeless shelter, blue leftover from fingerless gloves that went to someone on the Giving Tree, and yarn from a Christmas gift I sent to another writer when she was having a really terrible time. (She may read here, so that's going to drive her nuts, figuring out which is hers.) Most of the yarns are 100% wool, so they're warm and nearly waterproof.

It's all one piece now, and it looks like it belongs together. It was up to me to meld the materials so they all worked together. The only thing "new" in there is the brown, which I knew would work well with all the colors. And I left out a lot from my leftovers bag, too. The oranges, the pinks. They wouldn't have gone with the greens and golds.

Then I gave it a good soak and a wash, and I blocked it, and it's soft and supple and warm. 

Your stories are made of the "leftovers" of your life, the half-thought notions, the experiences that left you questioning your ideals, the stories you heard around the dinner table when you were too young to understand. Your stories emerge from the bits and pieces of a life lived fully, and when you're "crocheting" a story out of what seems to be nothing, you're drawing from the scrap bag of your own experience. 

And it's up to you the writer to decide what to include, what to leave out because it's a lovely bit but it just doesn't match the rest of the story, what new material to add to unite it all together. It's up to you to decide what order the scraps go in and just how long to make it. It's up to you to work the details together such that they seem as if they always were that way, no matter where they came from.

That's why there won't be two stories identical, no matter how similar they seem, and no one will ever have a scarf like this one. Even if another knitter had all the same leftovers in her yarn bag, she probably wouldn't put them together the same way.

Writers and knitters/crocheters know the value of a single effort. As Ivy Reisner says (again, although I don't have a citation for this one) that a single stitch alone isn't going to produce anything, but thousands of stitches do. As a writer, you know one single word alone doesn't produce a book, but thousands of words do. Stitch by stitch, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, row by row. And in the same way, one person alone can't end injustice or hunger, but many of us working together? I think that's pretty powerful. It's aggregate effort, and you're doing it every time you pick up your work.

Moreover, if your writing is a gift -- from God, from Fate, from the muses -- then you have a responsibility to use all that gift to benefit others. You're going to want to use up every last bit of your gift to bring light and warmth to others with this gift you've received. We belong to each other, so you're going to be leveraging your word-craft to help other people. 

Novels may be your passion, but you're also using your words every day to encourage, to explain, to persuade. You can be conscious about finding ways to volunteer your wordcraft -- maybe writing press releases for a charity or an organization you love; maybe helping a deserving student write a college entrance essay.  Maybe the best thing you can do for someone is to listen to them, because as a writer, you know and appreciate that what they're sharing with you is a story -- it's their heart.

To you all of these efforts might seem like just your "leftovers," but to other people, they'll see the whole of what you're doing and it will make their world better. 

Kind of like my scarf. Although it's not mine anymore because last night I gave it to the homeless shelter. The recipient won't know which strand came from a hat I made for a friend and which is from the hat I made for my son. But I hope he wears it and feels warm all over. Warm and loved.

Stay warm. Warm others.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or making scarves. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.

Project Writer

If you're like me, you've spent several hundred hours in front of Project Runway, admiring the sartorial hits, dissing the fashion misses, and fantasizing about having lunch with Tim Gunn. In fact, it was Runway that rekindled my childhood passion for sewing. Not long ago, I treated myself to a new sewing machine, and set out to refresh my skills with the easiest pattern Vogue had to offer (an unfashionable A-line skirt that would give Tim a case of the horrors). And as I struggled with pattern adjustments and bias cuts, I had an epiphany: sewing is an awful lot like writing.

A new piece of fabric laid out flat is a lot like the story in my head, and the pattern is the outline. A cleanly executed seam is akin to a polished, fluent sentence. The garment takes shape in much the way a plot does, piece by piece. Even the language is similar. You start a project. You cut. You edit. You adapt and revise for fit.

Back in the day, I learned most of what I know about sewing from my Italian grandmother. A fine seamstress and frustrated designer, she spent most of her professional life working in a garment factory in Newark. And she was a tough taskmaster. She had no compunction about handing a piece back to me, saying, “That's a bum job. Take it apart and start again.” Sometimes she would just silently hand me the seam ripper. Nothing seemed as daunting as starting over.Nothing seemed as painful as taking apart all my hard work.

During my search for an agent, many of whom passed on my first project "with regret," I could practically feel Nonna Mary at my elbow, looking over my shoulder and shaking her head. While my book was not exactly “a bum job,” it wasn’t a good fit. It needed to be picked apart, redesigned, and reworked. So I got to work. And got an agent as a result.

Since then, I've completed a second and third novel, and I'm currently at work on my fourth. It's in the first draft stages, so I'm beginning to piece the story together. So far, it's taking shape nicely. It feels like a fit. But I won't know for sure until it's tried on by my editor, who is very likely to send it back for alterations.

Let's just say I'll be keeping that seam ripper handy.



An earlier version of this post appeared on rosemarydibattista.com.

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, will be released October 1. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives fifty miles from the nearest ocean  in central New Jersey, with her husband, two of her three sons, and an ill-behaved fox terrier. Visit her at www.rosiegenova.com.

No Excuses.

Let's talk about that novel that's been in progress for ages, the one you're pretty sure you'll finish someday (especially if it's your first novel but even if it's your twentieth). Let's talk about why it's stalled.

I'm finishing my novel for Lent. For reasons we don't need to get into here (but I did elsewhere, for the curious) I've turned the runup to Easter into my own personal NaNoWriMo. You may remember I said I don't do NaNoWriMo, and I don't -- I've set the word count at a sustainable rate for myself, and I've been able to nail it every day except for the time the school called and said they foresaw an ambulance ride in my son's future. (There wasn't. He's okay.)

What I've realized is not just that I required a swift kick in the pants to get finished, but why I needed it: I was allowing normal problems to derail me. So let's back up a bit. Are you too-easily discouraged?

The problem with being an instinctual writer, the kind of seat-of-the-pants writer who navigates the drafting process via instinct rather than road map, is that sometimes our instincts are wrong. Or rather, as instinctual writers, we believe it should be easy. When it gets hard, we may mistake resignation for a writing pause.

This kind of stall is not just the writer making excuses for not writing. I mean that sometimes we legitimately get derailed, only by something that shouldn't have had that much power over us. Maybe in those cases, it's time to borrow tricks from our more-disciplined outlining and word-counting siblings to clear the hurdles. Maybe that's the time to pull out the yardstick and figure out just how much we should be producing per day. And then produce it. No excuses.

Just after the midpoint of my WIP, the reader needs to know a minor character has realized something vital to the plot. The problem? He's not a POV character. Another problem? He keeps this information to himself. I couldn't figure out how to convey his realization, but I had to because it's going to explain why things start going wrong for my protagonists, and yet no solution I came up with resolved the problem to my satisfaction.

I asked my agent. I ranted at my Patient Husband. I lamented to a friend. I wrote nothing. I wasn't even at that part of the novel, but I stalled.

But once I resolved to write my daily minimum, that scene came up, and when it came up, I had to solve the problem. I had no choice. No more dithering. And while I walked out to get the mail, on the day I needed to solve it -- I found the solution.

It's not just that one scene. I've discovered repeatedly that when I'm forced to solve a problem because the word count demands it and we're at that scene...the solution comes. What's the next scene? I don't know. But that doesn't mean I need to take five weeks to figure it out. It's not going to be any easier to figure it out in May than it is today, right? The pace forces me to settle on a solution and enact it -- today. Otherwise I won't get today's pages done.

That's not to say I haven't revisited those pages the next day to do it better. What I'm saying is that sometimes if you're a SOP writer, the tendency is to say, "The solution will come when it comes."

Maybe instead it's better to get up and stride toward the solution. Because now I'm chugging ahead on the manuscript, and I'm furious at myself for the time I've lost waiting for The Idea Fairy to present the next scene, or a way to convey a third party's information, and so on. 

I still hold to the idea of a literary pause. But not literary laziness. Only the writer can tell the difference.

Here's my suggestion, though. If you've got a work-not-in-progress when it should be, and if your literary pause has lasted longer than a week, pick it up again. Write all the way up to your trouble spot. Force yourself to write through it. If it works, then you're steaming ahead. If it doesn't, then rip out those pages and try another approach. But don't discount the idea of momentum. Sometimes going through the motions does lead to real results.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or ejecting stink bugs from the house. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. 

Scrivener or yWriter: why I use neither

We've heard why Carolyn uses yWriter and why Sarah uses Scrivener. I'm going to join in with my cutting-edge technology. Well, cutting-edge from several centuries ago: why I write with a fountain pen on paper.

And before you say, "Wow, look at the time! It's 2013!" and turn back to your computer (thank you, Regretsy) I'll state for the record that I switched back to using a notebook after drafting four books on my computer. I'm not afraid of the machine, but I also know its limits. And mine.

So, why pen and paper?

1) Portability. If you're hanging out in the karate studio waiting area where there are more parents than seats, you don't want to be writing on a device that takes up any more room than your lap. Same goes for the subway. It's far easier to hunch over a notebook-of-paper than a notebook computer. And if you drop it or one of the kids steps on it, no biggie. (Don't try that with your MacBook Pro.) Just throw it in your hand bag or diaper bag or backpack, and you can write wherever you want. You also don't need to bring your charger.

2) Cost. The one I'm writing in now sports a thirty-eight cent price tag on the cover. 

3) Aesthetics. And it's maroon. The next one in the lineup? Is green. Deep forest green. It puts me in a meditative mood. My daughter has a sparkly tie-dye notebook for her first novel. She says it's groovy. I didn't know anyone still used the word "groovy," and if I hadn't let her pick out a notebook, I still wouldn't know. See? Paper enhances your vocabulary!

4) Quirkiness.  There's something awesome about holding a bottle of ink (or a ball point pen) and thinking to yourself that your entire novel is in there already, waiting for you to stretch it out. 

Or buying purple pen refills, telling yourself that finally you have a reason for all that purple prose.

Okay, all kidding aside, let's get to my most important reason:

5) Emotional intimacy. The key to writing a novel that stays with the reader is the emotional story, so it's vital not to let anything impede those emotions. I found for myself that while typing, I was losing contact with the emotions in the interests of hitting my word count or even just because there was more physical distance between me and the words. When I picked up the pen and wrote the same story, the emotions came through with much less inhibition.

Quite possibly because I associate the computer with blogging, letter-writing, and business interactions, I found myself typing up sterilized, numb stories. My thirty-eight cent notebook, despite not having Many Cool Features, never got in the way. The ink flows from the pen, and my hand is in contact with the pen and the page. (My husband knows I'm not a jewelry person, but if he ever wants to give me a romantic gift, it's a fountain pen.)

And finally,

6) Enforced editing. You cannot submit your first draft anywhere when it's hand-written. You cannot scene-bomb your critique partners, and you cannot query your unedited manuscript. You have one enforced edit-through because in order to share it, at some point you need to type the manuscript into some sort of word processing program. And while typing over every single word, you're going to catch things you'd gloss over if merely re-reading it (such as that ninety-six word sentence. Or the fact that the characters rolled their eyes five times in two pages. Not that I'm totally guilty of these first-draft gaffes.) 

Moreover, when you have to hand-write and then re-type your entire manuscript, you're going to notice the five-thousand-word-long road trip in which nothing happens, and you'll wonder why it's so important that you have to spend over an hour typing it. (I type at 100wpm, but even at that speed -- fifty minutes. Really? Do we really need that scene?) It's my opinion that the explosion of 500-page novels happened at the same time as the advent of the word processor, and it's not always a good thing.

I wait until the end and retype my whole manuscript at once. A friend of mine writes three chapters at a time and then starts typing up a chapter for every new chapter she writes, so she's always typing about three chapters behind where she's written. Whatever works is best.

And that's the final key: whether you find a fountain pen makes you feel more intimate with your characters or whether you want a program to shuffle virtual index cards, try multiple methods until you find the solution that works for your writing. And then don't be afraid to switch around as your projects demand. Your tools don't have to be cutting-edge as long as your method supports your creativity. For linear writers who need mobility, the best solution may be the good old-fashioned way.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, two cats, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or ejecting stink bugs from the house. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise a family. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.