What do you want?

When I was in Montauk for a month of writing, I did it every day, mostly in the mornings. I did it because I felt obligated to get words on a page. I'd asked my work and my family to give me this time, and it would be irresponsible not to keep my part of the bargain and meet my word count every day.  But only sometimes did I enjoy it. Rarely. Often, I would have to pause and get up from the chair, go pull a book off a shelf and hope something from that novel would give me another paragraph or a new direction. For the first two weeks, I also read books at night about the craft of writing, John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, E.M. Forester's Aspects of  Novel (dry, difficult), Stephen King's On Writing, and books about organ donation (because that was the subject of my novel). Or short stories. And also Josh Ferris' book about the dentist. His book was the most inspiring in some ways because he does weird things like spend two pages describing the character trying to remember the names of the cast of Friends. And so I emerged with 175 pages single-spaced of words on a page. I haven't been able to read it yet, and I haven't thought about working on it more. But I did have a minor epiphany about what's missing from it the other night in the mystery writing class.

The teacher passed out an article by Brian Garfield called "Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction." It's basic stuff. The first two are "start with action, explain later" and "make it tough for your protagonist." Rule number three was the one that stayed with me "give the protagonist the initiative." That's basically reminding you that the character must be actively seeking something. That's what my book is lacking. There is no question that she's trying to answer, or mystery she's trying to solve. Not in a literal sense; when you're writing about organ donation, you could easily try to tell a story about illegal organ procurement practices, but that's the exact opposite of what I want to do. And the book isn't a mystery or a thriller or a detective novel, but she has to be seeking something, or there has to be a question she's trying to answer that makes the reader keep turning the pages.

I had an idea for a while, but it became so heavy and unreal and cliched that I couldn't keep it up. I wrote about her having a sister who killed herself when they were both young and then I wrote a few scenes about the main character trying to go back and figure out why this happened. It didn't work. I was embarrassed by it. I even tried to read Ordinary People to understand how a brother copes after the death of his sibling (more suicide), but that also didn't work. And I felt like an impostor trying to figure out how an early death of someone close to you might change you. It also became a super convenient answer to her inability to connect to others. And anyway, what was she going to find to help her reach some greater understanding of the death? Her sister's diary? A conversation with an old therapist where a new truth is revealed? A collection of stuffed animals? It also was too much in a book that already was all about death. So, I've scrapped that subplot and am back to where she doesn't have forward motion of any kind, other than trying to fit into a new city, at a new job that requires you to ask people to donate their loved one's internal organs. The job itself has drama, conflict, suspense, but the day to day timeline of the story beyond that isn't clear.

I had another subplot about a little girl she works with who is waiting for a heart, and she gets it, and she dies. That too became difficult to manage, and it also took time to build to that moment, because she has to attach to the child for her death to matter.

Do you know how most books about organ donation end? They end with the main character begin a donor herself. Well, two bad books I read about it did that. So, no become living donor at the end, much less a car accident victim.

I'm also reading Remains of the Day right now, and even that book has an unanswered question of sorts as well as a purpose. The character is telling us about his life, as if he's trying to get us to understand the nobility of being a butler to a good family, but underneath that, you suspect that he may find that his life has been meaningless. He is so bent on justifying it, you see he may reach a different conclusion about how he has spent his time. Secondly, he's on a literal journey to meet a woman he worked with in earlier years, and so we keep reading to see what she wants from him, or how they may be together, and in reading the account of his life, we are rooting for him to make something more of his life in these last years. No bloodshed, no dead sibling, no suicide. Simple. How do I do that too?