This is an on-going journal about writing a novel. I’ve published nine of them with Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and have always meant to keep a log. My new novel (the first in a series, actually) is written for boys who love cars and hate their English classes. However, all novels are more alike than they are different, so here goes. . . .

July 5, 2007 Novel deadline looming, but it’s difficult to write much before the Fourth of July in Minnesota. It’s just too nice out of doors– green grass, bird-chirping, loon-calling upper Mississippi on-the-river living. But my editor, Wes A., at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York wants the second MOTOR series novel by the end of August, so I have to get rolling. The contract says delivery on November 1, but things have been informally moved up. “In case somebody misses a deadline, we want to be ready to take their place in the pipeline,” Wes says-- the publishing pipeline, that is. With that kind of enthusiasm, I’m happy to push harder and try to deliver in August. Hardly anybody outside of the business knows how long it takes for a novel under contract to get published. There are several months of writing and editing, then weeks and weeks of proofreading, copy editing plus the book arts (cover design, etc.). It can take up to two years, though FSG moves more quickly than my previous, bigger publisher, HarperCollins, which moved at an agonizingly slow pace—one of the reasons I’m now at FSG. The above sentences are all avoidance behavior. I’ve GOT to get going on the second novel after Saturday Night Dirt. But let it be said that a series is not an easy thing. Each novel has to stand alone, yet intersect with the previous book. SND took an ensemble approach—multiple points of view all focused to one Saturday night at the race track. Wes wants a more singular point of view—a main character—in this one. And he might be right (editors usually are).

July 6 Am going to go with Trace Bonham, 16, from SND, as the main character for the new novel. He’ll “own” the book. His story. Working title is Super Stock Rookie, but I don’t like “rookie”. I set the stage for this at the end of SND, when Trace’s driving skill is noticed by Cal Hopkins, well known Late Model driver. Hopkins feels strangely real to me—maybe more real than any character I’ve created for some time. A friend and racing enthusiast, Marsh M., is partly to blame; he loved the Cal Hopkins character, and now when we go to the actual races in Knoxville, Iowa, or Fargo or Grand Forks, North Dakota he’ll study the program, then catch me off guard with some remark like, “I wonder if Cal will be here tonight?” Anyway, it’s Trace. . . . Now I have to set about ruining his life. I think this is going to be a Be-Careful-What-You-Asked-For kind of story. Novelists have to be tough on their characters. It’s easy to be too easy on them.

July 7 Spent a couple of hours working on the plot and cast. My process is to briefly summarize the plot, and name and describe my characters. A third of a page or less for the plot summary. The characters need only a few sentences of description, mainly about their personalities. Delicate decisions here, especially on plot. Snares abound at this stage. A lot can go wrong right here. A bad decision can cost me weeks worth of work later on. My “donnee’” (great French literary term for the “given” of the novel): Trace tries out and is selected to drive for a new team, a team all about marketing a new product. I’m interested in several things here: how drivers move up from the local tracks to the pro level; how the forces of sponsors and marketing dominate auto racing; and—more interesting—the effects of success on a kid who might not be ready or even want it. As well, I particularly like the matter of Trace being chosen as much for his looks as for his driving skill—sort of an inside-out look at being a sex symbol (nearly always it’s the girl).

July 9 Have chosen a racing team name and product. “Team Blu” is behind a new energy food to be marketed to teens. Their strategy is to a choose a “kid from nowhere” and make him and their product well known: “Out of the Blu” …. Risky business plot-wise, but hey, this is fiction. Plus following my movie SWEET LAND, I have good contacts in Minneapolis advertising biz who can help me with how new product marketing works. I don’t like creating research for myself, but the facts have to be authentic. I really could care less about that whole marketing side; I’m interested in how things bear on my characters; on Trace. How he deals with new people who are not like him at all. Fiction writing is all about revealing the true nature of your character’s character.

July 10 I’m rolling with the chapter break-outs. By this I mean I’ve started listing—briefly—what’s going to happen chapter-by-chapter. Just a few sentences up to a short paragraph. Sort of like Melville, “Chapter Seven: Ahab Sights the White Whale” but a bit more. Lots of the old novels had names for each chapter—not a bad way for the author to stay on track.

July 11 Some new character types are wanting in, and I’ve made room for them. The make-up of Team Blu was sort of predictable: young advertising types from Minneapolis. In contrast, today’s light bulb (I hope) was to give Trace a car/crew team made up largely of “real” racers from southern Indiana and beyond. Some good ole boys, both smarter and dumber than they look. They see a good dollar to be made on Team Blu, and have bamboozled the Team Blu marketing types with their drawl and race talk/name dropping. They will crew for Trace. A thought on my process: when I first start a novel, I can’t sit and work on it for more than an hour at a time. But gradually my “seat time” (to use a racing term) increases. When I’m fully up to speed—when the novel is real in my head and I’m writing out of that realism—I can work for several hours, and come back again for a second shift in the evening. But those first days are agonizing.

July 16 Note-taking and chaptering (is that a word? ) continues. I have nine chapters blocked out with a short paragraph of summary for each, but I know from experience that those nine will “slip”. By that I mean, I’ll discover that I’m trying to do too much in one chapter, and will break off the last part to begin a new chapter. My current nine chapters will probably end up being twelve or more…. Did a library gig in Brainerd, MN, today, with a standing-room only crowd. Many had seen SWEET LAND, and wanted to hear about its making, the story of the movie so to speak. My wife, Rose, says that filmmakers will be interested in the MOTOR series, too; we’ll see. In any case, a writer should never write with an eye toward the movies (unless he or she is a scriptwriter, of course). Write really good stories, strong on imagery, deep on heart and soul, and your audience–and maybe a film option–will find you.

July 17 Day one on the new novel. It’s like starting a marathon: stiff, edgy, no rhythm, no feel for the road. Three very rough pages.

July 19 Two “shifts” today, with the prose starting to loosen. The first day’s three pages turned out to be skeleton thin; by going back and adding flesh (mainly more imagery and detail), they grew to five pages–and pushed me nicely into new material. That’s part of my daily process: begin a new day by revising what I wrote yesterday. I recommend it.

July 20 Got an email note from Wes A. who finally saw my movie on DVD. He loved it, and talked kindly about my “vision”.   We had a good chat about the ongoing MOTOR novel, which he really wants in August, “for all kinds reasons.” Say no more from my end, I said. I don’t need/want to know office editorial politics, and can only imagine that they are brutal at times, plus I know that this car sponsor thing has put its pressures on Wes. In truth, the reason I mentioned The Fire, was that its donnee’ feels like a sure thing. In case the racing novels go end over end off the track and up in flames, this little novel will bail us all out.... Now back to your regularly scheduled broadcast, i.e., me out of here to go write fiction.

July 22 Took Saturday off for a family reunion, but got a couple good pages done on Sunday before the races. My (real) driver, Skyler, finished third in the Modified feature—his best race yet–but my race team is another story (sort of). There’s quite a bit of intersection between my actual racing team and my racing novels, though I haven’t drawn closely on my real team– yet. I suppose I have in terms of technical details, but not in terms of the characters. That will likely come later. Right now it’s all material in the bank, so to speak. (Detail from last night’s race: “The track was so dry the lights were shining off the dry slick.” –Skyler.) … Back to SSR, after five days I’ve hit page twenty. A decent pace especially at the start, but I’ll have to pick it up to make my end of August deadline. And, as predicted, my first chapter split into two.

July 26 Limping along, still not feeling the rhythm, and lots of details to fill in. My initial drafts are always thin; they need more texture, more imagery and detail. And in a way, each draft is like a camera or binocular or a lens of some kind sharpening its focus. I write to make it the scenes intensely real to myself…. Took a day of to go actual racing in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, on a very hot Wednesday night. We got beat up and finished last, but it was our first race under the lights and on true dry slick conditions. Skyler continues to impress with his instincts and technical driving skills. He spun out in turn three, did a full 360, and got back on the gas and headed down the straightaway without missing a beat. A fun night, but the heat (90’s and 75 percent humidity) and four hours of sleep took it out of me; couldn’t write a word the next day until 3 p.m.

August 1 Missed a couple of days here, but that’s a good thing—I was writing. I’m through four chapters, closing in on page 50. I’m liking it. So much so that I’m not going to jinx it by talking about here.

August 8 Have entered chapter six, about page 75. Chapter 5, with Trace heading to Minneapolis to sign with Team Blu, has a particularly nice shape. A chapter should have a rounded feel to it, with some stand-along qualities. Am set up nicely for chapter six, wherein Trace goes back to Headwaters sans Street Stock; his contract has lots of exclusions, including no “independent” driving. Plot aside, I’m more interested in the descriptive qualities of this chapter–which now can be deep and tonal. Without his car, he will see his home track in new and different ways, noticing things he has always overlooked. This matter—call it the set-up for description–is the key to good prose. Think of Tim O’Brien’s piece “The Things They Carried.” He gets by with extremely close-up, nearly obsessive description because of the alienation of the men from their environment (‘Nam) and the presence, all around, of death. Same, at a lower level, with Trace: his comfort zone is ending.

August 9 Tough to write today. Had a commentary appear in the Minneapolis Tribune today entitled “War, Language and ‘Heroes’” in which I make the argument that our returning soldiers, just because they were in Iraq, are not all heroes. I’m gonna take some heat on this one, but the piece is clearly reasoned and pretty well written, if I may say. Writers write what others don’t. Writers say what others won’t. If we (writers) are not in trouble in occasion, we’re not doing our job…. Will take the weekend off to go the Bayfront Blues Fest in Duluth, MN. This is a calculated absence from the writing desk and my novel. It’s important, when writing, to be as well rested as possible. One should be (ideally) brimming over with thoughts, ideas, energy and the desire to write. This is hardly ever possible. Therefore, we have to take the next best position: write no matter what, but recognize when the well is empty, and take a break.

August 15 Too much sun and the Blues (a collective noun, it occurred to me after Big Walter Smith’s groove, “The Blues is all right….”), but a long weekend away from the novel was good. Back at it haltingly on Tuesday, but four good pages today and better prospects for tomorrow. Page 75 so far…. The novel is reaching that dangerous middle part, when things can go flat. It’s the novelist’s most difficult task—to sustain the arc of plot and reader engagement through the middle zone. What’s needed is major plot lift, as in Memory Boy (he said, shamelessly referencing himself) wherein the Newell family, having escaped disorder, chaos and environmental collapse in the city, finally arrive at their cabin “up north”—only to find it occupied by squatters. That twist gave MB an injection of energy sufficient to carry it through to its (problematic) ending. (Sequel slowly on the way, dear seventh grade readers.)

P.S. Only one counterpoint letter in the STRIB on my “War & Language…” essay; the guy was clearly annoyed, but couldn’t get any kind of grip on my piece.

August 19 Page 85 today. Rolling along nicely. Have a nice shape to chapter six that includes Trace back at his old track sans car and at loose ends. Managed to make use of the season (mid-August) and the Perseid meteor showers. Tip # 97: don’t ignore using the weather—why not make it a player?—as well as the season. So much modern fiction is written indoors, so to speak.

August 21 I’m getting worried. My page count needs to be higher, and a five day vacation is looming. I don’t see how I’ll finish by month’s end. I’ve thought of taking my laptop along (a train trip to Glacier Park, then some hiking), but I need to be in the present moment on this trip with my wife and another couple. They put up with enough from me, the fiction writer. But I’ve come to see, over a career of twenty-some years of work, that there’s a vast, world-wide conspiracy against the act of writing. I’m not unserious here. Life does not wish to be slowed down, sped up, manipulated, excerpted or fiddled with. It wants only to roll on like an endless river to some far off sea. Happy people cast their boats in the water and just go with the current. Writers don’t. It’s they who beat on against the tide (F.S. Fitzgerald writing at the end of GATSBY).

August 24. Got myself to page 95, then hit the wall. I need to be sharp for this trip—and no, I’m not taking my lap top. Not taking my lap top. Not taking my lap top.

September 1 Back after a head-clearing trip to Glacier Park, which was lovely at summer’s end. Took the train out, four of us. Rocked and rolled through North Dakota and Montana, with plenty of naps, glasses of wine, cards, reading (Alice Munro’s “short” stories) and conversation. Could see taking the train more often; I could write on a train…. But now back to matters at hand: the last short half of my Super Stock novel. I’ve been worrying about too much plot, and resulting believability issues—but that anxiety evaporated last night during a viewing of the latest Bourne movie. Action films like that one have defaulted to a kind of short-hand, code-for Realism. Jason Bourne hotwires a new Audi in three seconds real time—impossible of course—but acceptable to viewers because we’ve all seen it before. There’s very little true realism in such films, but we accept it nonetheless. So why worry, it follows, about stretching the limits just a tad in a YA novel? Would a 17 year old nobody driver really get picked to drive a new Super Stock, and be paid good money to boot? He would if I get just enough details right about his good looks, the car, and the marketing machine behind the team. I mean, it could happen, right? And if it could, that’s Realism.

September 2 Have been agonizing about a plot-line, the matter of the Trace’s Super Stock being built “down south” (Indiana), that and the southern-leaning Bubba-type crew. But I think it will work, thanks for a conversation with my first and best editor (and wife) Rose. She has a way of cutting through the fog and keeping me on track. (I love writing; it’s plots I hate.) Together we talked the plot back onto the straight and narrow road forward: the Southern crew was hired for a reason—to give Trace an advantage, but it’s advantage that only creates more trouble for him. This was what I and all novelists do: create characters, then put them in trouble. The rest of the novel is them wriggling their way out. Ninety-five pages, FYI.

September 6 Slow going, but I like my scenes. Am trying to avoid southern clichés with my car crew, and at the same time get maximum value from north-south culture clash. Much of literature, plot-wise, is based on “And then a stranger came to town….” (Not my original observation—maybe Northrup Frye the crusty old Canadian?). That or else some kind of intrusion into the pastoral, which will certainly be the case when Trace’s top dollar car and hauler arrive at Headwaters Speedway. I anticipate some irony: my south-Indiana crew will be used to much more modern speedways, and think they’re in Hicksville. Hey, novelists have to have fun, too.

September 8 Just about over the hump (a literal narrative rise) at 110 pages, but laboring. Many second thoughts about this whole project: I should be writing “serious” adult fiction, I should be rereading Shakespeare, I should be finally getting to Haldor Laxness, etc. Am I wasting my literary talent on teen car novels? Then I’m reminded of how thinly the chain of literacy is stretched—broken in some cases–and how many kids and adult don’t read. There are two approaches to Literature: the first is to treat it like a museum, wherein the Great Books are housed and guarded by critics and intellectuals; we can visit the books and pore over them, but we cannot hope to live up to their gravitas. The second is literature as a living, breathing organism, one that belongs to all of us, one in which we can all participate—if only we find something to read that catches our attention and speaks directly to us. And there’s the challenge: to catch people’s attention in this Century of Distraction. At no other time have young people had so many demands on their ability to sit still and focus on a single endeavor, such as reading. Most will never come to Literature except through a carefully constructed, ascending stairway of the right books at the right moment. My ideal reader in this Motor Series is the boy wearing the cap in the back row who can read but doesn’t like to. But once he reads Saturday Night Dirt and the Motor Series, he goes onto Vision Quest (Terry Davis) My Losing Season (Pat Conroy), A Fan’s Notes (Fred Exley), The World According to Garp, Death in the Afternoon, Into Thin Air, then onto Ralph Ellison and Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee and David Sedaris and Philip K. Dick and Lorrie Moore and. . . you get the picture. This is over time, of course, and it assumes that he doesn’t get humiliated by his friends for being found with a book. But gradually, reading lifts him out of the very small orbit of his life, a life that he comes to see as a confinement, even a trap, one from which he has managed to escape–and into the full complexity of the world as a thoughtful, open-minded citizen. And now, back to work on Trace Bonham and his Super Stock.

September 15 No comments for seven days. That’s a good thing—means I’ve been hard at it. Close to the end now, at 145 pages, a “non-scary” length, as Wes put it. Finishing a novel is like fifty mile long hike in, say, Glacier Park. Lots of terrain, days of so much space that it’s easy to forget one has a home. Life becomes a march, with the only truth being that one will never get there (wherever that is) if he doesn’t keep moving. Then, suddenly, the pass is crested and the trail is mostly down hill. I began to remember that I have a Jeep waiting in the parking lot, and that the keys are secured on the left rear leaf spring. Or at least I think I own a Jeep. On the final slope there is an exileration but no rush to the conclusion; too much has been invested, too much of life is this march, right now. In fact, there is tendency to slow down a bit, to make this last. After all, isn’t this where I live now, on the trail?

September 16 (Below is an email exchange in passing with my good and literary friend Marsh M., a writer and a pilot. The occasion was my pointing out yet another fatal crash at an air show…..)

M: And speaking of air shows and race pilots, do you recall the somewhat obscure William Faulkner novel "Pylon?"

"He stood back and tugged the cap off his face and then he found why the boy had ceased: that he and the men too with their arrested tools and safety wire and engine parts were now looking at something which had apparently crept from the doctor's cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherized patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world. He saw a creature which, erect, would be better than six feet tall and which would weigh about ninety-five pounds, in a suit of no age nor color, as though made of air and doped like an aeroplane wing with the encrusted excretion of all articulate life's contact with the passing earth, which ballooned light and impedimentless about a skeleton frame as though suit and wearer both hung from a flapping clothesline; -- a creature with the leashed, eager loosejointed air of a halfgrown highbred setter puppy, crouched facing the boy with its hands up too in more profound burlesque than Jigg' because it was obviously not intended to be burlesque."

Perhaps you should slip something like this into race novel II just to get the editor's reaction....

W: My heavens. And I thought Dylan Thomas was drunk on language. There's nothing like Faulkner on a roll. Some of his best sentences unfurl through "Barn Burning", in the (ironically) inarticulate thoughts of the lad Colonel Sartoris Snopes. It might be that Faulkner will come 'round again as hip and postmodern.... I'm pushing rapidly through the end of Super Stock Rookie. Lots of drama at the very end, with engines protested, girl friend problems, etc. but not much license for Faulknerian prose, alas. You'll meet Wes Adams next summer at the races, I hope. He's a good editor--quick, decisive, and aware that the writer's imagination can only carry him (writer) so far. It's the editor's job to start where the writer’s vision ends, then push the novel forward from there….

September 17 “Done.” Finished the draft last night at 9 p.m., looked back through the chapters, and streamed it all to Wes by 10 p.m. so it would be on his desk this morning in NYC. I’m fried today—didn’t sleep well last night, largely from the usual, part-of-the-territory anxieties: the novel is stupid and poorly written. Ending a series book is always tricky, and I worry about this one—but once I get some sleep and exercise my confidence ought to return (as the middle of least three novels, SSR had to end in motion and with all sorts of trouble on the horizon). Anyway, time to let go. Have written 160 pages in eight weeks. I’m headed into the woods.