Robert Jacoby's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

I'm still working on my next two books.

First, my next novel (working title is Dusk and Ember) is a prequel to my debut novel, There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes. I have more than 50,000 words written, but a lot of it is still jumbled, on paper and in my head. I imagine it might take a year or more to sort through it all.

Second, my nonfiction book (working title Never Stop Dancing) co-authored with my friend John Robinette who lost his wife, Amy Polk, in a pedestrian traffic accident in Washington, D.C. in 2010. I interviewed John during the year after Amy's death, while he re-built his life with his two young sons. It's pretty harrowing stuff; and listening to John tell his journey helped me gain new perspectives on life, loss, and love.

You can read more at my website www.robert-jacoby.com or visit John's blog at http://hole-in-the-sun.blogspot.com/.

I just finished my tenth notebook. I was curious, I had to try to figure out how many words were in it. I calculated: maybe 90,000. I started September 2011. I went to the box to put it away with the others. As I've done on every other occasion, when I put away a finished notebook, I pulled out one of the old ones and flipped it open. Started reading. Flipped through more pages. It was from more than 20 years ago, before my first child was born. I wasn't liking what I was reading. The past was coming alive in a way I did not need it to, right now. I pushed it back into place. I set the newly finished notebook on top of the others and closed it up. Where they'll sit for many more months until I'm done with another 100-page notebook. Filling time, filling pages.

I have an idea of writing a memoir, using as background material these notebooks, where close to a million words now sit. I started in 1985, writing every day or every week; once, I remember, I took about 7 months off, but then came back to it. I could not deny who I was/am, and what I needed to do. No matter what others were telling me.

Don't let others tell you who you are; figure that out on your own. And rejoice in it.

I left off writing my second novel—Dusk and Ember—in 2007. Or 2009. I was about halfway through, as word counts go. I thought I was done with my first novel ( There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes ), and I was most definitely done with my first memoir-by-interview ( Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying ). Neither book was published, though. My life was in some upheaval, personally and professionally. Many things were unsettled. I started graduate school. I put the second novel away.

Fast forward to Fall 2012. The first two books are published and a collection of poems is coming along, thanks to a creative rediscovery. My master’s degree is completed. Now it’s time to re-visit that second novel.

But not just yet. All of Fall and into Winter 2013 are consumed with marketing that first novel, writing book bloggers to see if they’d like to review it, doing online interviews and writing a guest post or two. And also revising my second memoir-by-interview (tentatively titled Never Stop Dancing) so that it’s in shape to send to literary agents.

OK. Now it’s Spring 2013. Now I can pick up that second novel. And when I did ….

It’s great to be back writing a novel again. The ideas and words flow; I can’t stop them. It’s like they’ve been pent up all these years. And the novel itself? I’ve ripped into it, repurposing and sorting and sifting and revising, revising, revising. Working it until it feels good and right and proper. It feels good to jot notes. It feels good to key in corrections. It’s great to be back writing a novel.

Lots of things. Keeping the balance. Keeping the faith. Trying to.

Keep trying to get published. There's always that. That's always a driver. But it's becoming less so the more work I have published. Funny how that works.

But I persist. I like putting my material together and sending it out and waiting to hear back from editors and agents. Right now I have query letters out for my nonfiction book, Never Stop Dancing. This is the memoir-by-interview I did with my friend who lost his wife to an automobile accident in 2010. I approached him with the idea for this book 3 months after she was killed. And that's when I started interviewing him. And then we met periodically over the next year, up until the 1-year anniversary of her death.

What trauma.

Every time I returned home from one of our interview sessions I would need to detox. Nobody knows how they would react in that most horrible of situations: losing your husband/wife, so young, so suddenly. And having two young children left to raise.

Many times over the year I worked with him I questioned myself on the project. Why did I want to do this? Who will want to read this? I persisted. I thought then and still think now that the book we've completed will be of interest to many people, to hear about John's journey through grief. (He's been blogging since Amy's death; visit him at Hole in the Sun blog)

I'm still working on poetry, too. Over the last few weeks I've worked on chapbook material (collection of 10-16+ poems) and a book (48+ pages). I think there are maybe 18 or so poems already published. I'm pleased with them all, really. I (mostly) don't let the "dogs" out, y'know? (FYI, all my poems are available on my website poetry page.)

Besides tidying up the book Never Stop Dancing and sending out query letters to agents, and working on the poetry and those books, I was working on my second novel, Dusk and Ember. I was chugging along nicely for several weeks. Then I lost steam. The all-important "Why?" and "What for?" It felt like I was writing for myself, in a vacuum.

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I set it aside to focus on my poetry. And some Wikipedia writing and image contributions. Toying with some new article ideas for Wikipedia and for professional publication. I'm a website content manager, and my Wikipedia user page has my articles, but also check out website-governance.com, the website I built last year as part of finishing up my MIM degree at U Maryland.

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I started back into music, too, downloading many new songs. I'm a big music buff. Some of my latest favorites include:

* Rise Rise Rise by Praything
* This Mess by Collapsing Cities
* Your Ghost by Playfellow
* If I'd Known by The Frank and Walters
* Tales of Kamanakera by American Wolf
* Freemason Waltz by Clinic
* Up on the Ride by Guillemots
* It's True by Longwave

If you like alternative rock music, try any of these. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

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I stopped writing in my journal and notebook for awhile, too. I think my mind needed a rest from everything. Yesterday and this morning I wrote, and for exercise it felt good, just to write. Some words and phrases and thoughts and ideas were coming. It felt good. The words coming felt good.

It's coming up on the one-year anniversary of publication of my debut novel There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes. I wanted to share some thoughts about what it's meant to me:

Few of us can imagine the anguish that precedes a suicide attempt and the wreckage involved in recovering from a failed suicide attempt. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, suicide is the third leading cause of death in young people (15- to 24-year-olds) and the second-leading cause of death in college-age students. Suicide attempts occur up to 20 times more frequently than completed suicides. Suicide is the ultimate loss of self (the ultimate self-cancellation of self).

But who can speak for the suicide survivor? Only a suicide survivor.

I wrote my novel There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes from the perspective of a young man (19-year-old Richard Issych) suffering with undiagnosed clinical depression. Richard is a suicide survivor, and the novel begins with his “second birth”; that is, he wakes up in the inpatient unit from his failed attempt at killing himself: “Void, and he in its midst, rising, consciousness materializing, blank black blanketing him, warm, so he understood he was alive, failed to kill himself.”

His distress is like that of a newborn thrust violently into a world he didn’t ask to be brought into: he cannot communicate, light hurts, the world looks and feels foreign and frightening.

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The novel is written in the close third person point of view, through Richard’s eyes. I tried writing from different points of view, like the father and the mother. There was a scene between them, at their home, that I started early on in the writing of the book, but I soon dropped it because it was opening up the world beyond Richard. And I felt the story had to remain in his confused, claustrophobic new world in the institution.

I also tried writing from the third person omniscient view. With this view I could dip into any character’s mind to offer up their thoughts or feelings. I wrote this view in several scenes—up to the scene with Richard sitting at the table with all the young residents—but gave up because I felt the story unraveling and becoming cumbersome and, again, losing its focus. The omniscient point of view is supposed to be the most freeing for a writer, but, with this novel, I found it suffocating. And frustrating.

I had to go back and smooth everything out. I felt that it had to be about Richard only. My gut was telling me that the story had to come back to him and his foggy, limited, disjointed, and sometimes stunted worldview and follow his effort to put back together the self he had longed to destroy. So that’s what I did.

My experience with the novel was one of discovery. I was discovering elements of the story as I was writing it, I was discovering Richard as I was writing him, and it felt like I was seeing unknown parts in myself, too. I hope, as you’re reading the novel, you’ll be able to discover something of your own journey inside Richard’s journey, re-discover your own timeless truths, and clarify your own needed reasons for being.

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People have told me the novel is a difficult read, not only for the writing style but also for the subject matter. I wanted the writing style to flow naturally out of, and because of, the subject matter. So I’d suggest reading the book from Richard’s point of view. I know this will be challenging for most people, because most people have no experience with major depression that leads to suicide. But this is partly why we read fiction, isn’t it? We read fiction to discover and experience someone else’s life and, perhaps, along the way, to come to some new understanding of our own life and our own place in the world.

So, read the novel as if you are Richard, and let the words on the page become the words in your mind become the experience for you become you as it is happening. If you can experience Richard’s story in this way, you will have a glimpse into the mind of a young person working his way back from the brink of self-destruction. And a glimpse may work its way into understanding, or even sympathy or empathy.

I've finished (again) chapter 1 of my second novel. I say "again" because I've worked and re-worked and revised this opening text so many times that I've lost count. It feels like I'm working a fine piece of wood, sanding and smoothing and smoothing until it is just so. To get the feel of the text and what I want to say I must keep working the words.

MS Word shows 60,000+ words in 236 pages. I just came back from the store with my newly printed novel. The last copy I printed out was in May. Never mind the word count or number of pages, then, I tell myself. That's not important. What is important is that I've printed out a fresh clean copy. All this white to ruin now. To enliven. To make something of nothing. I have so many notes. So many notes, scattered across three little notebooks and a yellow pad. I was able to revise the first few chapters over the last couple of months into something that gelled in my mind as working. This could work. I can make this work.

On the drive to the store to print my new copy I saw a parking lot being leveled to make way for new stores. Rubble. The word rubble came to me, and also a place for it in the novel. I kept the word with me all the way to the store. (I did not bring my little notebook with me, which I usually do, always, everywhere.) As the novel printed I stood by the printer, waiting. When the pages came out I scooped them up. On the page where I thought it would work I penned the word "rubble".

That's how it works for me sometimes. One word at a time.

In a poem, every word matters.
In a short story, every sentence matters.
In a novel, every paragraph matters.

Years ago when I first started writing seriously I read something like that, and it's stuck with me to this day. I'd only been writing short stories and poems, then. I had a thought for a novel (which turned out to be my first novel, There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes ) but I'll admit that even the *idea* of writing a novel was scary to me. At that time I think I'd written maybe 4 or 5 solid short stories, the set that got me accepted to 2 different MFA writing programs. (I ended up not going to either for personal reasons; that's another story altogether.) So, I was confident in my fiction-writing abilities--maybe too cocky, looking back on it--but, still, the thought of writing a novel. Man. I didn't know if I could pull it off.

Now, I've been writing my second novel, Dusk and Ember in earnest since the beginning of this year. That's after a few fits and false starts over 2013. And that's after it had been lying fallow for a number of years. I think I started D&E soon after I thought I'd finished Noah, somewhere around 2005 or 2006. Then things started getting in the way. My second book Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying ; digging back into writing and publishing poetry, which took up much of 2008 onward; getting my masters degree in information management (from 2009 to 2012); being a dad; being a partner/boyfriend. Neither of those least.

So what matters?

Plowing ahead. One thing at a time. One word at a time, if it's a new or the reworking of a poem. One paragraph at a time, if it's my novel. One paragraph at a time. I keep plowing it, pushing it.

In the current version I have about 140 pages. Maybe the first 40 or so are semi-solid; they won't move around too much, I think, at this point. But I don't really know. Past page 40 there's lots of material. I know where it's going. Sort of. The grey wax figures, the characters in my head when I'm writing, know about as much or more than I do. I watch for what they're doing; where they want it to go, too. I have another 200+ pages of Extra Material I call it, which may or may not ever be in the novel, ever see the light of day. That's alright. It matters to me. It matters to me when I work through it, picking through it, sifting out things I might re-use, re-purpose, or just lift out entirely.

So many lines are lost. So many words are lost.

Plow ahead. Plow ahead.

Just finished a session digging into "leftover material" that went back years. I haven't looked at it in a while because I didn't want the current draft of the first 50 pages veering off into old material, old ideas, that may not work now.

Still.

There are nearly 150 pages (more than 30,000 words) of notes, scenes, bits of scenes, ideas for scenes and characters. I scanned through looking for bits and pieces to bring forward. I went through all the pages. Mostly.

I brought forward maybe 2 pages of material for different part of the novel. And also some epigraph material.

I spent only 45 minutes or so, but it felt much longer. It was tiring.

I don't want to get too ahead of the material. I want the story to grow organically from the characters coming together in the story, in the events they're living. I have to give them time to do this. Be who--show who--they are.

There are still three small notebooks of 100 pages each to go through. Written over the past 4 years or so.

Just back from vacation, mostly at an end-of-the-road kind of beach place. It was very helpful for my reading and writing. I was able to read three books and start a fourth:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Sophie's Choice by William Styron (started)

Not sure which ones I'll do reviews for, if any....

I was also able to write for many days in a row on my second novel, for a couple of hours at least each morning. And then any time I wanted throughout the day. It was glorious. I gained speed and rhythm only a few days in. The beach heat and freedom of time were exhilarating.

I'm missing it already only a few days back. Time now to take all the marked-up typed pages and yellow legal pages of handwritten work and key everything in.