Keeping a Notebook: A Podcast on Writing by Nina LaCour

S3: E1 Five Strategies for Your 2020 Intentions

Hi everyone! Welcome to a mini-season of Keeping a Notebook: A Podcast on Writing. I have some big dreams for this year, and I bet you do, too. So hey, let’s dream them together. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be here to help get your 2020 off to a good start with some short and sweet and actionable episodes. This one is on mindset and productivity and practice. The rest of them will be about craft. So let’s dive in.

How can we set ourselves up for a productive and fulfilling year of writing? How can we see these goals or resolutions or intentions to fruition?

1. Get clear on what you want—and make sure it’s something you actually have control over. I mean, it’s totally fine to fantasize about being signed by an agent or getting an amazing book deal or hitting the bestseller list. We all need a little escapism sometimes—and we can gain motivation that way, too. But our goals have to be things we make happen for ourselves—not things we wait to be given.

So what do you want for yourself this year?

Is it to begin or finish a specific project? Is it to establish and stick to a regular practice? Is it to experiment, to play, to create energy in your work? Is it to try a new genre, or to get your work out there for more people to see?

Get as clear as you can on what it is you really want, and if you’re like me and you have a whole list of things—determine what you’ll prioritize. What will come first. Overwhelm is a powerful opponent of productivity—but if you’re clear-eyed in your priorities you should be able to fend it off.

2. Let go of what’s burdening you. (It’s only holding you back.) Are you a little sheepish—as I am—that you’ve been putting off finishing a project that’s important to you for an incredibly long time? Has it been on your list of New Year’s resolutions every year…only to remain unfinished? (It’s been fifteen years for me, in case you want any consolation.) Or maybe sheepish is far too gentle a word. Maybe you feel real shame over something. Maybe you’re deeply afraid to get started. Maybe you have loud and formidable voices in your head telling you that you shouldn’t be doing this, that you’re wasting your time, that to hope so fiercely for something is foolish, that your best is not enough. It’s okay. You aren’t alone. Do what you need to do in order to let go of it—at least for the time you’re working. Write those thoughts down and tear up the paper. Write yourself a new script—one that tells you what you secretly know: That you can do this. That you have just as much a right to chase your passions as anyone else. Speak to yourself as you would a friend. Today is a new day. Today can be the day you write.

So let go of what burdens you—even if it isn’t that easy. Even if it’s only for a little while. As Emerson wrote to his daughter, “You must finish every day, & be done with it. For manners, & for wise living, it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could — some blunders & absurdities no doubt crept in forget them as fast as you can tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well & serenely, & with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good & fair. It is too dear with its hopes & invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.”

3. Make time. It’s difficult to make time in our days. It might take sacrificing other things you enjoy in order to do it. It might mean waking up a little earlier. It might mean saying no to social engagements. But the more flexible we can be in where and how we write, the more we can make writing a part of our actual lives—our lives as they are now and not as we imagine them in a future when our dishes are washed and our children get themselves to school in the mornings and all of our work emails are answered—the better we tolerate the imperfectness of the conditions, the more we will write. Rarely will there be a moment of calm in your day, the light hitting your desk just right, the coffee brewing already, a wave of inspiration washing over you. When it does appear, it’s a gift and you should take it. But in the meantime, here is what I suggest: Schedule time for writing. Put it on your calendar at the beginning of each week. And then, show up. Whether or not the coffee is hot, or the light is right—whether or not you are in the mood for it. Writing is a practice. The more you do it, the better you’ll become at getting words on the page.

4. The biggest change I’m making in my writing practice in 2020 is to make my progress visible. I got this idea from an online class I took called RESET by Jocelyn K. Glei (which I highly recommend, by the way) and the concept is based in part on research by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, who states the following:

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.

Glei shows how she charted her progress on a big sheet of craft paper on a great blog post that you can find in the show notes. By physically writing down what she accomplished, step by step, she was able to feel progress in a way she couldn’t by entering it into a spreadsheet—or by not tracking it at all. As I prepare to reenter my fifteen-year-long work in progress, I’ve been figuring out what I’m going to use to track my progress in a tangible way. I want to see myself moving forward in a way that tracking words or page count is not going to give me. So, what about you? How will you make your progress visible, make it tangible, make it something you can feel?

5. Keep your eyes on your own paper. Think of the joy you feel when you write, when the words are coming and you aren’t worried about what everyone else is accomplishing. For many of us, as much as we sincerely celebrate the accolades and successes of our friends and colleagues, it’s difficult not to wonder what’s wrong with us when we don’t have those same successes of our own to share.

But remember this: Those agent announcements and book deals and starred reviews and bestseller lists and awards exist in a world outside of your work.

Your work is a gift from you to yourself. Even when it’s messy, even when it’s not yet nearly what you want it to become. You get to return to it, day after day, and lose yourself in it, and shape it into what you want it to be. So eyes on your own papers, my friends. That’s where the magic happens.

And that’s all for today!

If you’d like to share your writing goals with me and a bunch of other writers, come join us on Instagram at theslownovellab. The link is in the shownotes. I’ll be back on Thursday with another episode all about your character’s histories—and the act of determining where and how the past fits with the present.

Thanks to my brother Jules LaCour for the music and Sonics Podcasts for the editing. And thank you, so much, for spending these minutes with me. Happy New Year, everyone.

S3: E2 The Past & The Present

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Keeping a Notebook: A Podcast on Writing. I’m trying something new this month: a mini-season of even-shorter-than-usual episodes to start off the new year.

A few months ago, during a video call for my novel-writing class, a student asked me about backstory. The timing of the question felt significant. I’d been wrestling with it in my own novel for months, trying out different methods of weaving my character’s past into the present of my novel. I had tried doing so in one big middle section. I had tried spreading out in extended, evenly placed flashbacks. I’d considered a lengthy first section followed by a leap forward in time. I cut some flashback scenes way down and delivered the information through dialogue and small glimpses of memory. I wondered if I even needed the past at all. (I definitely did.) But nothing was feeling right.

So when I addressed her question, it was as much for myself as it was for her. And now, I hope this exploration of backstory can be of service to you, too.

When you’re deciding how to tell the reader what happened in your character’s past, begin with two questions.

The first question is How much of the past story does your reader need to know and when do they need to know it?

Some information must be shared by necessity and it’s useful to identify it early on. We need to set the stage for the story, and your opening scenes or chapters are opportunities to anchor your readers, make them feel oriented in the world of the story—or disoriented in a way that makes them want to know more, if that’s your intention. Either way, we need something to connect to. Details of setting. Histories. Hints or statements about how the characters came to be who and where they are. If your character has just returned to her hometown after living far away for a long time, there is no reason not to let us know where she’s been, and to where she’s returning.

How has your protagonist coped with her past? Is she mostly at peace with it, is she unaware of it, is she in denial, or is she actively trying to make sense of it all as the story progresses?

If the character is in denial or a secret has been kept from her, that’s an easy one: The information will most likely come later as a big reveal or revelation.

But if the backstory is one that requires you to lay a lot of groundwork, you’ll probably rely on parallel storylines, or immersive flashbacks, or journal entries, or letters or any number of structural or stylistic elements that help you tell two stories at once—the story of the past and the story of the present. This is where writers grow concerned about pacing, and it is a bit of a dance. But if the past is in itself a story, don’t worry about it detracting from the forward momentum of the present. Allow the past and present to have their own plots and progressions.

So, to summarize: If we’re only talking about the facts of the character’s life and not something they are actively coming to terms with during the present of the story, the information simply needs to be conveyed to us at the appropriate moment. Don’t keep us guessing for guessing’s sake.

But if the character’s journey centers around something that happened in the past, some experience your character isn’t facing, and the plot and character growth build up to a revelation about the past—well, that is when you wait.

Okay. So, you’ve determined how much of the backstory your reader needs to know and when they need to know it. And you’ve gauged your character’s level of awareness, and identified whether a revelation about the past is a necessary element of your novel.

So let’s move on to what backstory actually looks like on the page.

1) While we tend do foundational work in the present timeline of the story, with flashbacks, we have more freedom to cut right to the heart of the moment. Ask yourself what really needs to be on the page, and allow yourself to be spare with the past.

2) One of my pet peeves when it comes to writing advice is the phrase “show don’t tell.” Showing is great, of course, but telling can be powerful. So don’t shy away from stating things plainly when your story warrants it. For example, “My father died and we had to move.” You could spend ten pages showing all of it, or you can tell it in a line. Only you will know which way is better for your story and your character.

3) Funnel backstory through dialogue. Have one character open up to another and tell them things. But, of course, only do this if it’s a conversation they would actually have.

4) Access your character’s thoughts. Our pasts and our presents are intertwined, and they can be this way in fiction, too. A character can remember without plunging into full scenes of flashback. They might remember something someone said, or something that they felt. An image. An event. And then the moment might pass as they go on with their lives.

Thanks to my brother Jules LaCour for the music and Sonics Podcasts for the editing. And thank you, so much, for spending these minutes with me.

S3: E3 Conveying Emotion on the Page

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the third episode of Keeping a Notebook’s mini-season. Before I dive in, I want to let you know that my online class, The Slow Novel Lab, is now open for enrollment. It’s a lot like this podcast, but much more in depth, with video lectures and six phases of themed exercises and explorations to move through together. We have live video chats every week where I answer your questions about mindset, craft, self-promotion, and the business of publishing. And a private forum connects you with other writers, so that we can keep the conversations going between video chats. I only offer the class twice a year, so if you are considering it, this is the time. It begins on February 16th and runs through March 26th, 2020. Learn more in the show notes.

If I had to identify what I search for in a piece of fiction more than anything else—more than a good plot or a compelling concept or even characters I love—it would be that it move me. I want to experience the pleasures and sorrows of life through the page. And I want to feel what it’s like to be the characters, to inhabit their lives in all of their confusion and sorrow and anger and gladness.  

It’s no small feat to make a reader feel what your character is feeling, and much of my drafting and revision time is spent making sure I’m getting it right. That I am conveying emotion on the page.

I am passionate about this subject and could talk about so many methods to try. But for this episode I’m going to focus on only one of them. It’s the most foundational. It requires the most work. But it’s also the best way I know how to ensure that a character’s emotional reaction is believable and compelling enough to make your reader feel along with them.

It relies on story and narrative. The progression of scenes, actions, events and moments as they unfold for my specific character.

Let’s begin here with this sentence: He leaves the party.

Is any emotion inherent to that sentence? I don’t think so. It’s a statement of fact. If you feel something in response to it, it’s most likely due to your own associations or your imagination getting to work—not the simple statement of it.

But let’s see what happens when we lay our groundwork first. To show you what I mean, I need to tell you a little story so I’ve made one up to illustrate my point. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written so please don’t judge me.

Here we go:

As a child, J was badly teased. He was called a terrible name by his classmates, singled out at school as inferior for reasons that were never quite clear to him, leaving him to doubt almost everything about himself. Did he laugh too loudly? Did he love the wrong things? Was it the way he moved or the food he ate or how he looked?

He found solace in his neighbor, M, who attended a private school, and who found him to be a wonderful friend.

During the school days J was ostracized, but when he was with his friend, he was accepted. I’m okay, he told himself whenever he was with her. I’m not that terrible thing they call me. I’m fine just the way that I am.

Then M’s situation changed and her family could no longer afford her private school. They rode their bikes to the public school together on that first morning, and J was relieved he’d finally have a friend at school—his best friend.

But it only took a few minutes that morning for M to hear the terrible name the other kids called him, to hear how they laughed at him, and she turned to look at him. He could see it in her face—a question, a confusion, disappointment and disdain. By lunchtime M could barely meet his eye. She let a group of girls usher her into the cafeteria, leaving J behind.

What was it? he wondered. Did he laugh too loudly? Did he love the wrong things? Was it the way he moved or the food he ate or how he looked? He had been perfectly fine to her before. What was it she was now discovering?

At the end of the school day, when he went to meet her by their bicycles to ride home together, hers was already gone. He rode home alone.

Day after day, when he passed M in the hallways, it was as though they’d never known one another. He kept to himself. He got through it. He graduated, grateful to be done with it.

A lonely summer passed, and the day he was to move into his college dorm, he braced himself for rejection—but it didn’t come. His fellow students welcomed him wholeheartedly. His roommate wanted to eat together in the cafeteria. The group down the hall included him in their movie nights. He worried about his laugh and whether he loved the wrong things. He worried about how he moved and the food he ate and the way he looked—but the more time he spent with the kids in his hall, the less he worried. He searched their faces for irony or disdain but couldn’t find either.

I’m okay, he began to believe again. I’m fine just the way I am.

One night, the group of them headed to a neighboring college’s party. They walked through the door together, and he caught sight of a person and then someone else: Classmates from his old high school. Hey, they said. Look who it is. They called him the horrible name, and they laughed, and slowly, one by one, his new friends turned to look at him. He recognized their expressions; he’d seen the same one on M’s face that day at school. He left the party.

He left the party. It’s the same sentence I read earlier, but now it does something different, doesn’t it? And I don’t have to say that he feels lonely and sad and betrayed and exposed—you already know that, because you know what came before this moment. You also understand that this isn’t a small hurt—you know how deep and painful it is for him. And if I’ve done a good enough job telling the story, it’s painful for you, too.

Alright. So let’s apply this concept to your story now. Grab your notebooks and pens if you can. Identify the moment in your story where the emotion is at its highest point—we’ll call this the emotional climax. It’s what your character’s emotional journey has been leading up to. If you have a couple of these moments—that’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry. Just pick one.

Write a sentence or two to describe what is happening during that moment for your character.

Then, list all of the emotions that your character feels as it happens.

Once you’re as clear as you can be on this moment, start from the beginning of your story or work backwards (whichever feels right to you) and examine the ways in which you’ve laid the groundwork for this emotion—or what you can go back and be sure to establish early on. If you do it well enough, your readers will experience the feeling along with your character. You won’t have to explain how they feel. You won’t have to convince the reader of your character’s reaction. You’ll simply be able to allow the story to take its course.

I’ll end by saying that if something isn’t working emotionally in your story—if scenes that you intend to be meaningful are falling flat, or if reactions seem forced or difficult to believe—go back to what came before. To what hurt your character. To what they need or fear. To how they’ve struggled to reach the place they are in that moment when things change.

Make sure your readers fully understand what’s at stake for your character in that moment. That’s when they’ll truly know what to feel.

If you’re working on a novel and would like many more strategies like this one—including a deeper dive into conveying emotion on the page that looks at pattern and language and a method of developing a collection of emotional and physical responses for your characters, I hope you’ll join me in The Slow Novel Lab! Something I love so much about the class is that I get to know you and your work through your questions and our video chats. We get to see each other’s faces! It’s fun and inspiring and makes the process of writing a novel a whole lot less lonely.

Thank you for joining me for another episode of Keeping a Notebook. And thank you to my brother, Jules LaCour for the music and Sonics podcasts for the editing. I’ll be back next week.

S3: E4 The Middle

Hi everyone, welcome to Keeping a Notebook: a podcast on writing. I’m Nina LaCour. I have two quick announcements for you. One is that I finally have transcripts available for the show. You can find them at ninalacour.com/transcripts

And the next is that my online class, The Slow Novel Lab, is currently open for enrollment. It’s a lot like this podcast, but much more in depth, with video lectures and six phases of themed exercises and explorations to move through together. We have live video chats every week where I answer your questions about motivation, characters and plot, self-promotion, finding an agent, and finding your way in this often difficult business. A private forum connects you with other writers, so that we can keep the conversations going between video chats. There is one more week to sign up. It begins on February 16th and runs through March 26th, 2020.

On to today’s topic: The Middle.

We know where we’re starting from. We know at least a bit about where we’ll end up. But as important as beginnings and endings are, the vast majority of our stories—hundreds of their pages, in fact, if we’re writing novels—take place between the two.

Most of our stories take place in the middle. And the middle is where we often get stuck. For me, it’s where I tend to overcompensate for my worries that my novel isn’t interesting enough or eventful enough, and I add in all sorts of things that I don’t need. When you’re in the middle, it’s easy to feel lost at sea. Just you in your little boat, no land in sight, so many directions you could turn toward, nothing certain.

But there are ways to find your story’s internal compass, and I’m going to share the one that I turn to the most, which is to list a ton of questions, and then use those questions to identify distinct phases of my novel.

It’s a brainstorming exercise that turns into an outline of sorts—and it’s part of a bigger process that I guide my students through in my online class, The Slow Novel Lab, but it also works really well on its own.

So, okay, let’s get started.

The first step is to make a list of the story’s questions. And I like to put these in two general categories. The first category contains events and developments—in other words, plot questions. These are the little mysteries of your story—the questions that keep readers turning the page to find out what will happen next. Questions like:

Will they reach the house they’re driving to?

Will they run out of gas or money?

Will she tell this person how she feels?

What will the house look like after all this time away from it?

Will she find the person or the object she’s searching for?

So that’s the first category—the easier one.

The second category is internal and thematic. These are the big questions the character and the story is asking. And maybe also the questions that you are asking as you write—these cut to the heart of what this story is and why you’re telling it.

Questions like:

Is it possible to truly know someone?

When something deep is broken, what grows in its place?

And how do relationships endure as the people within them change?

That’s the second category. The big stuff.

Make these two lists as detailed as you possibly can. No plot or thematic questions are too small to be considered here.

Okay. Once you have your lists, it’s time to move on to the next part of this, which is to identify the phases of your novel. This is where the brainstorm turns into an outline.

I’m going to get very prescriptive here: Make a line across your paper or screen. On one side will be your plot notes. On the other will be your thematic notes.

What we are working to identify here, are phases of your novel, so that your middle isn’t one big, difficult-to-navigate block and instead is made up of several sections, with some of them overlapping others.

So this line down or across the center of your page is going to become a chronological timeline for your story. If you have a non-linear storyline, you might make two of these for the past and the present narratives, or for various characters if you shift points of view. You get what I’m saying—make any adjustments you need for your story.

On the plot side, mark the points when the story shifts, when characters enter or leave, when the setting changes, when time passes, when important events take place.

Now, look at your list of questions, and mark when each question is first introduced and when it is resolved. You’ll start to gather great information by doing this. You’ll see if there are times in your novel where big stretches pass without any significant events or revelations—those might be places to look at for pacing to make sure those sections feel dynamic enough, or if you should move some things around.

Once you’ve finished on the plot side, move on to the internal side of the line now. Where do things shift internally for your character? This is, of course, far more subtle and complex and nuanced than the events, so accept from the beginning that the transitions won’t be quite as clear or neat. Still, there are factors to help guide you toward a loose timeline of emotional and thematic progression: What are your character’s hopes and needs? When are they established? When do they change, or become fulfilled or denied? What philosophical, spiritual, or existential questions is your character wrestling with at different points of the novel?

Also consider your character’s feelings toward others, and their feelings toward themselves—their self-control, self-acceptance, self-worth, self-image . . .

Once you have both sides of your line filled in, take a look at how the plot side and the internal side synch up. Hopefully, you’ll see a partnership there. That as things happen, the internal landscape is shifted, and that the internal changes also influence the external events. And I imagine, at this point, the phases of your story will start to become clear, and you’ll see that within each phase is a journey of its own. That there are beginnings and endings all throughout your story. That the middle isn’t a wide-open ocean at all, and that it has a logic to it, a bunch of little pieces in it, and all you need to do is write them one at a time.

Maybe there’s the phase where he starts a new school and he’s seeking acceptance, and then the phase where he’s found it but doesn’t trust it yet. And then comes a big event, and he’s plunged into a new chapter, with different hopes but the same, persisting doubt, until he makes a choice, and a new phase begins.

Now, I know this was a lot of information, so I will remind you again that you can find it all written out for you at ninalacour.com/transcripts. And I also want to let you know that there is just about a week left to sign up for my online class, The Slow Novel Lab. If you find this process helpful, know that it’s just a small piece of the unit we do on plot and pacing.

Thank you for joining me for another episode of Keeping a Notebook. And thank you to my brother, Jules LaCour for the music and Sonics podcasts for the editing. I’ll be back next week for the final episode of this mini-season.