Susan Swan's Blog, page 7

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Thirteen)

  Image by Jonathan Moreau In my last blog, I admitted that I’m moving out of the middle of the novel. What does that mean, really? It means that I’m starting the drive to the finish line and there are a number of plotting details I need to be clear about before I go there. [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Twelve)

  Image by Jonathan Moreau In my last blog, I admitted that I’m moving out of the middle of the novel. What does that mean, really? It means that I’m starting the drive to the finish line and there are a number of plotting details I need to be clear about before I go there. [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Twelve)

I said I was going to write about Barry Michels and the Shadow, as Jung calls the part of ourselves we hide from the world. Michels is a neo-Jungian therapist who advises Hollywood screen writers to get in touch with their Shadow because it helps them be more creative. When the Shadow is involved, your [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Eleven)

I said I was going to write about Barry Michels and the Shadow, as Jung calls the part of ourselves we hide from the world. Michels is a neo-Jungian therapist who advises Hollywood screen writers to get in touch with their Shadow because it helps them be more creative. When the Shadow is involved, your [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Eleven)

Yesterday I mentioned the temptations of a novelist. The phrase was coined by the late Arthur Koestler, the European novelist who wrote Darkness at Noon. In his essay, The Novelist’s Temptations, Koestler said that writing a novel was like sitting in front of an open window with your feet in a hot water bucket. Koestler [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day ten)

I know I said I was going to write about a Hollywood shrink called Barry Michels today who has good advice for writers. But I’m moving Barry to tomorrow’s blog because yesterday I ran into one of the temptations of the novelist. What’s that? Simple. It’s called politics. Last night I went to the meeting [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day nine)

There’s a term for what I’m feeling, the winter blahs. The blahs have come upon me slowly because I usually love winter. I love the cold air and how it helps my thinking, and I love winter sports like cross country skiing. But yesterday I couldn’t ski for more than half an hour because the [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Eight)

This was supposed to be my day off. But I find myself at my computer worrying about my main character’s relationship with the celebrity he’s drawn in the dead pool lottery. My main character Dale Paul is getting too attached to his pick, a boy actor, now a heroin junkie. And like my character, Dale [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Seven)

This image is how it looks and feels when I have a good day–I feel excited and stimulated in a beatific kind of way because new thoughts keep occurring to me and everything and everybody I meet seems to give me something that helps my story. So not all days in the middle of a [...]

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Six)

I’m doing something I’ve never done before–extensively revising the first draft as I go along. Usually, I blurt out the first draft, either by dictating it or by typing it, or by a mixture of both. This time I’m revising a lot as I go, and revising can be tricky. How much should I revise [...]