It’s ten in the morning today when I stumble out of bed. I usually tell everyone that I hate to sleep, that it’s boring, or sleep troubles me with bad dreams that cling like a dryer sheet, or that sleeping is a waste of time, but this morning, it’s all I want to do. I am blessed with my husband Jeff, who lets me sleep in, who makes me laugh, and who is a writer, too. Best of all, Jeff waits for me for breakfast. I admit, breakfast today, like always is a problem, the same as sleep. I don’t like cereal. I hate yogurt. For a while, I was happy eating pasta and tomatoes, but that got old fast. Today, I reach for the last of the pumpkin pie that I made yesterday, while Jeff sighs and then ruffles my hair.  “Pie for breakfast,” he says. I need the fuel because, besides promoting my new novel, Is This Tomorrow, I’ve sold my next novel, Cruel Beautiful World, on the basis of an outline and first chapter, and now I need to write it. I make coffee from a Starbucks tube. I’ve only started drinking it a few years ago and am still astonished how it boosts my mood.

After breakfast, we head for our offices. It’s an easy commute! We live in an 1865 row house that we renovated, turning the whole third floor into our workspace. There’s a skylight and tin ceilings and my office has two big windows and a big wide desk, and two Mac computers. Everywhere I look delights me. There are rows of old beaded purses from the fifties hanging up. A painting of my tortoise by a high school friend. A framed Modern Love column I wrote about the tortoise, which not only reminds me of my pet but also reminds me not to give up. It took me six tries to get into Modern Love, and when I asked the editor what made him finally take this one, he said, “Because it was good.” Beside my desk, messily taped to the file cabinet, are images of what I think my characters look like. It makes them more real; it makes them haunt me. Coffee is never far from my grasp.

I go immediately to work, and stay at work for four hours. I blast Pandora so loudly, my husband sighs and shuts his door. Two o’clock is the tipping point. Either we break for lunch (and because we live in a city, we ramble down the block to have Thai Food, or Mexican, or Indian) or sometimes, we just say, screw it, and go to the movies, rewarding ourselves, knowing we’ll both be up until eleven working. Today, I keep working. I’m in the zone, and the characters are talking to me. Although I have two years to write this novel, I know that’s not such a long time. And I know I have to push myself, which is hard because I’m still on tour–where I have to switch gears from the private, focused writer to the jazzed-up writer I need to be in front of a crowd. Still, I feel this novel is possible!

At four, our son arrives home. He’s sixteen and in high school, and the first thing I do is kiss him. He rolls his eyes but lets me kiss the top of his head. Because I’ve spent all day writing, I’m a little disorientated as I come back into the world. I feel my characters fading, which is okay, because I can’t fully engage with my husband and son if my characters are still whispering in my ears.

The weather is hot, sultry, so humid I feel myself wilting. And we did work through lunch. Dinner out, a movie—that’s what I want to do this evening. I need to be with my son, who will be zooming off to college in another year. I rub my husband’s back. This is a day I won’t get back, and I’ve given most of it to writing. Now I want to give the rest to the two people I love best in the world.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• The Pink Hotel by Anna Stotherd and I didn’t choose it. It was sent to me for review.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Do. Not. Give. Up. Not when rejections pile up. Not when everyone else around you is winning prizes and you have not been able to get an editor to answer your email.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I always have to read the last page first, and I always have to know the last line of the novel I’m writing.

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By Caroline Leavitt:

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

July 1, 2013: Caroline Leavitt

I have the perfect book for your summer reading list: Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt. She had me on the first page. And each day I was reading it, I couldn’t wait to get back to it.

Speaking of Caroline’s best-selling Pictures of You, Anne Lamott said, “It’s so exciting whenever, on the Best Seller List, there’s a real book.” Lamott goes on to define a real book as follows: written with a … sustained narrative voice, an author who has four or five plates in the air, who has done it with grace so you don’t notice the effort, and again who is working hard to find the right verb so you don’t have to have endless adverbs and adjectives…”

And also as Anne Lamott noted, Caroline Leavitt is a storyteller, which is an ability I admire and aspire to. Here are two examples on the sentence level that you are in the hands of a sure narrator:

Ava leaned against the kitchen wall, shutting her eyes. She wasn’t afraid. Not then.

He wouldn’t remember this moment, but she would never forget it.

Speaking of sentences, here are some of my favorites and why.

Moves form the concrete TO the theme of the book TO a bigger theme of all of our lives:

He paid attention to the buildings along Lexington Street so he wouldn’t get lost, something that often happened, leaving him tense and disoriented as if the world had changed shape without his knowing it.

For its sound:

If you didn’t know what had happened, you’d think nothing had.

Yes, I said. That’s how fast it happens and how it feels:

Not Mommy anymore, but a truncated syllable, like the bang of a screen door. Mom.

From a fact TO a theme of the book TO a bigger idea that gives us another way to think about life:

[T]his street is only a tiny part of the world. People leave it all the time. That’s what life is.

Creates a picture:

When he talked, he shot the breeze about the hospital or Madison. It was all casual, loose as pocket change that never added up to anything.

And now look at these examples that in addition to whatever else they do, the create MOVING pictures, pictures that are alive, videos (going further than the last example above, which is already good), and Caroline does it with those verbs that Anne Lamott commented on above.

Begins with a concrete detail and then expands it into a video I can watch:

He listened to her breathing, and then his own, almost as if it were a conversation, her quick, short breaths, and his longer ones.

Moving from the moment TO a picture/video:

She felt their stares, like a film on her body she wanted to scrub off.

From the concrete (also a theme) TO a sensation (that also creates a video);

When he left, the door slammed and the sound traveled up her bones.

Creates a picture that is alive and a sensation, and a new way of thinking about loneliness:

His loneliness pounded like a headache.

Creates a moving picture and a sensation:

His rage was like a hot little heart and all she could do was listen to it beat.

Is This Tomorrow, full of echos and subplots, creates a fictional world that comes alive on the page. I just ordered Pictures of You.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how Caroline Leavitt spends her days.

The next writer in the series is announced as close to the 8th of each month as possible so you can read ahead!