Lady and the Tramp

This past spring, when I was shopping around for ideas for a new project, I studied musicals. I knew I loved them, that they were of great importance to me. I always like to have music in my books in some way. I am the type of person who is often humming or dancing or even singing a song out in the world. (My current obsession is Elton John's “Elderberry Wine.”) So I watched a bunch of old favorites from my childhood, and primarily as a lark, I added Lady and the Tramp to the mix. I remembered bits of songs from it. I wanted to see the spaghetti scene and the Siamese cats once again. I had no idea whether it would hold up. I thought at best I would view it as an entertaining piece of fluff. To my surprise, when I finished the movie, I immediately grabbed my notebook. I wanted to write down the story because I thought I could learn things from it. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on Lady and the Tramp.

The story begins with Lady, a Cocker spaniel, entering a new world, the household of Jim Dear and his wife, Darling. (These are the names Lady hears, so in this story, these are their names.) Lady is a gift from Jim Dear to Darling, and it becomes quickly clear what Lady's goal is in this story: She wants to be loved and to be seen as a member of the family.

Right away, Lady begins to work on her dream. She successfully lobbies to sleep on the bed at night instead of being shut off in a separate room. She chases off a rat in the backyard in order to protect her family. She is rewarded for her efforts—she proudly shows off her license, proof that she belongs, to her neighborhood friends, Jock, a Scottish terrier, and Trusty, a bloodhound who tells the same stories over and over again, a dog who may have lost his sense of smell.

Then the story shifts to another world. We meet Tramp, a mutt from the other side of the tracks, who prides himself in being footloose and fancy free. The film shows why he loves his life. He successfully save his friends from the pound wagon. He has friends all over the neighborhood and eats at different establishments each night.

When Tramp wanders into Lady's neighborhood, he warns her of the danger of a domesticated life. Soon, he says, she will be thrown out of her cozy home and sleeping in the doghouse. Lady's friends dismiss Tramp's predictions, but Lady now has information that she can choose to worry about.

At this point, Lady's household does go through a change. Darling is pregnant. Both Darling and Jim Dear now act differently towards Lady. They are not as focused on her. They are not as easily charmed. They are preoccupied. Lady is upset. She doesn't understand. Her friends have to explain it to her. However, when the baby is born, life goes back to normal. Lady is reassured. She loves the baby and her life with Jim Dear and Darling.

But when Jim Dear and Darling go away for a romantic weekend, Aunt Sarah comes to look after the baby. She also brings her two Siamese cats. The cats create havoc, and Aunt Sarah blames Lady. She is afraid that Lady will hurt the baby, and she takes her to the vet and has her fitted with a muzzle. The horror!

Lady runs away. Tramp rescues her from a pack of wild dogs. He takes her to an alligator and a beaver to saw off the muzzle. They have a romantic dinner at an Italian restaurant. She spends the night with him (!). The following morning, Tramp asks her to stay in his life. She says, “But who would take care of the baby?” They are from opposite worlds. It's time for Tramp to take Lady home.

But, on the way,Tramp is distracted by chickens. He suggests that they just have a little more fun, that they spend just a moment or two chasing chickens. During this game, Tramp leave her behind. Lady is picked up by the authorities and taken to the pound. There she meets his friends. She learns that Tramp has a reputation as a ladies' man. Because of her collar, the pound contacts Aunt Sarah who brings her home, but she is left chained outside to the doghouse, fulfilling Tramp's predictions. Jock and Trusty come over and offer marriage proposals so Lady could live with them and leave the doghouse behind. Lady graciously declines. Tramp also visits her. She tells him that she now knows all about him. She tells him to go away.

It is an “all is lost moment,” a dark and stormy night. While she is chained to the dog house, Lady sees that rat again, but this time, she is powerless to stop him from entering the house. Tramp returns, and she instructs him on how to get in the house and save the baby from the rat. She finally is able to break her chain and join him.

When Aunt Sarah discovers them in the house, she immediately thinks the worst. She calls the pound for Tramp. They tell her that he's been wanted for a long time. They will put him to death immediately. Lady is once again chained to the doghouse.

Trusty and Jock hear the story and now know that they have misjudged Tramp. It is up to Trusty to find the pound wagon and rescue Tramp. The entire situation is reliant upon Trusty to be able to find the scent and track down that wagon.

In the meantime, Jim Dear and Darling come home. They find the house in shambles. When they enter the baby's room, they find a dead rat near their child.They figure out that Lady and the Tramp have saved their baby.

Out on the streets, Trusty and Jock are racing after the pound wagon. After several miscues, Trusty does find the scent, and they catch up to the wagon. The final shot of this scene is Trusty charging the horses to make them stop so Tramp and Jock can rescue Tramp. In this heroic action, you see Trusty run over by one of the wagon wheels. It seems dire. The scene fades away—

To Christmastime at the Darling household. We see the baby. We discover puppies that look like Lady and the Tramp. And there's Tramp looking so proud in his collar. Lady looks like a happy wife and mother. Aunt Sarah has sent the dogs a box of biscuits for the holidays. And then Jock arrives, followed by Trusty, with a bandaged-up leg, telling all the puppies the story of how he was a hero. It's quite clear that this has been told many times, but no one minds. It's a solid happy ending.

In addition, there's terrific songs, cowritten by Peggy Lee, whose voice is something to hear, whose Peg is a wonder to behold. This movie is going into our regular Christmas rotation. It inspires and delights me.

Writing First Drafts

I am currently working on a first draft of my next project. I previously wrote a bit about drafts in my posts on my writing practice and Scrivener, but there's always more to say. In this post, I would like to discuss some commonly held beliefs about first drafts and what I think about these ideas.

1. Just sit down and write it. Sometimes, in writing advice, I see an emphasis on word counts and writing speed. However, for me, there's a certain amount of dream time that has to occur before I actually begin to write chapters. I first have to imagine a project. It has to call to me. To the outside observer, this may look like incredibly inefficient dilly dallying. But I need to write notes about characters and the world. I need to figure out the story to the best of my ability. I take my time and fill my head with ideas before I start to write actual chapters.

2. Keep writing. Don't look back. I give myself permission to work on a scene until it feels right to me. I don't move forward until I'm happy with what I have on the page.

3. Write the scenes in whatever order you'd like. I have followed this idea before and have since abandoned this practice. As an anxious new writer, it felt great to just choose a scene that felt the least intimidating on any given day. But when it came time to revise, I found that the tone and the emotions in this draft did not progress in a way that made sense. It made for a lot of work in subsequent revisions. I am still in love with scene lists as a way to organize stories. (For some reason, graphs make me profoundly uncomfortable.) But I like to write the story in order so that I can go through the journey with my characters.

4. It's a painful process. Sure, there are challenging times, but I seriously enjoy writing. I find a lot of joy in the experience.

5. No one writes in longhand any more. I do. Before I write a scene, I create a mind map in my notebook. Then I write it out in longhand there. I feel I dive in further when I write it first in my notebook. Then I rewrite it in Scrivener. (I attach it to a new digital index card with the chapter title and number and color code it to correspond with note cards I've already created that pertain to this scene. Once I have finished the scene, I move all those notes to another folder, Saved Notes. At the end of my draft, in my Scenes folder, I will only have one card for each chapter with its corresponding draft.)

6. You need continual feedback on your draft as you write it. This works for some writers. It stops me cold in my tracks. I am private about my work until I feel that I can't “see” it any more, and that's when I turn it over to trusted readers to hear what they can tell me about my story.

As always, every writer is different. I am continually tweaking my own process and checking in with myself to see what feels good to me. But I hope this is helpful, and I wish you happy trails on your writing venture.

The Glory of A Little Princess

Before I mustered my courage to write my first novel, I studied books in the genre that I wanted to write. I knew I had to revisit one of my favorites, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Sara Crewe was one of my childhood heroines because she was able to keep her spirits up during adversity, because she realized that she could make any situation infinitely better by actively using her imagination, because she was a champion of the underdog, because she loved animals, and because she was kind and generous with anything she had. I would have been very surprised, rereading the book, if I came to a different conclusion about Sara's character, and I didn't. I still adored her. But what I didn't realize early in life was how much I could learn from this book as a writer.

Let's start with Chapter 1, the third paragraph, where Burnett first tells us about Sara:

She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

In The Little Princess, Sarah Crewe, a girl whose mother had died when she was very young, now must also say goodbye to her father. She is of the age where girls of her class go to boarding school. Her father will be returning to India to pursue his business ventures, while Sara will study at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Girls. Here, Burnett has encapsulated the strengths that this character will need to get through her troubles in this story: an incredible maturity, an adult perspective on situations, and an ability to imagine and think out of the box.

Later in this chapter, when describing where Sara will be spending her days, Burnett gives us a sense of the harshness of the world and the headmistress in Sara's new life.

Sara often thought afterward that the place was somehow exactly like Miss Minchin. It was respectable and well furnished, but everything in it was ugly; and the very armchairs seemed to have hard bones in the them. In the hall everything was hard and polished—even the red cheeks of the moon face on the tall clock in the corner had a severe varnished look. The drawing room into which they were ushered was covered by a carpet with a square pattern upon it, the chairs were square, and a heavy marble timepiece stood upon the heavy marble mantel.

Sadly, the father doesn't pick up on this cruelty. He leaves his beloved daughter here while he returns to his business. But, as the reader, we are forewarned. We know this will be a dangerous world for Sara.

This book is written from an omniscient point of view, which Burnett uses to her advantage at various times in the book. For example, on the occasion of Sara's eleventh birthday party, Burnett goes back and forth from the party scene, a sumptuous celebration, to an unexpected meeting between Miss Minchin and Sara's father's representative, where Miss Minchen learns that Sara's father has died, and that Sara is now penniless, and all the money Miss Minchin spent on this party, fully expecting to be refunded, is now her loss. For a while, the gaiety and the horror stay in separate rooms, switching both and forth from one to the other, but, after the representative leaves, Miss Minchin exits her office, and the scene becomes one of complete desolation.

Later on in the story, in Chapter 14, Burnett chooses to tell the story from the point of view of a rat, Melchisedee, who Sara has befriended in the desolate attic where she now lives. We first hear of the strange goings-on in the attic through the rat's observations—how two Indian gentlemen made their way through the skylight into the attic and began discussing how they could transform this little girl's garret into a kind of a paradise. Their employer lived next door, and he had heard stories of Sara and had dreamed up this idea to comfort this child. Sara's dreams of a comfortable room, one that she had imagined to make her life bearable, was now coming true.

When I closed the book this time, I also marveled at the title and its many meanings throughout the book. Before her father's death, Sara would imagine herself to be a little princess, someone with a fortunate life who helps others. It is used as a term of disparagement by Miss Minchin and Lavinia, one of the older girls at the school, implying that Sara has frivolous clothes and manners and puts on ridiculous airs. But at the end of the book, Sara becomes in her own way a little princess. The kindly Indian man next door turns out to be her late father's business partner. He becomes Sara's benefactor, and she once again lives a life of privilege, one in which she is always thinking of others and behaving in a manner that befits the graciousness of a truly benevolent young woman of fortune. A Little Princess remains a great read.

The Power of Scrivener

This September, when it was time to hunker down on a new writing project, I decided that I was going to use Scrivener. I had heard good things about it on Joanna Penn's The Creative Penn podcast.  It was reasonably priced. I had a feeling that it would be a more effective way to write than my previous process.

Here was my situation pre-Scrivener: From April to August, I had been in editing/production mode for Kate and the Horses (beta reader feedback, rewrites, developmental editing suggestions, more rewrites, copy-editing corrections, further revisions on my part, and then several rounds of proofreading). While the readers, editors, and proofreaders reviewed the text, I researched what I thought I would write next, and when I had that figured out, I filled up one-and-a-half notebooks with ideas. (I don't like to seriously focus on the next book until the one that's about to go out in the world is done. It feels rude to me. Maybe I'll change my mind on that further down the road, but that's my current feeling about it.)

When it was time to focus on this new book, for the first time in my life, I felt overwhelmed by my notebooks. I knew that I needed a better system, and I thought Scrivener would be my solution. But, at the beginning, I did have serious doubts. When I sat down to look at their tutorial, it felt like it was in Mandarin Chinese. I did find a ten-minute tutorial on YouTube that I quite liked. But, even then, when I sat down with Scrivener, I spent an hour, flummoxed.

Immediately after that writing session, I ate dinner with Mike. I told him that I actually hated Scrivener. I said that I felt that it was going to stymie my creative process, that I had this beautiful project that I wanted to do, and I didn't want to let this frustration get in the way of my creativity, that I had written two novels, and why should I reinvent the wheel? I knew how to get things done.

Mike listened to me. Then he quietly said that he felt that Scrivener was a powerful tool, that if I could be patient, one of my weaknesses in life, that he felt that I would recognize how this tool could help me. He said that he would support me in any way that he could. I think I thanked him. I was so frustrated at that point that I may not have. I said that I was not going to guarantee that this was the right way for me.

But then the next time I sat down with Scrivener, something clicked. I understood how to do what I wanted to do. I quickly shifted my feelings from hate to love of all things Scrivener.

So this is how I've used Scrivener so far. I've created folders. In the draft binder, I have a scenes folder. In the research binder, I have folders for inspiration (right now, this is song references that I may want to quote or mention), characters, worlds, and themes. Then I went through the notebooks. I typed the ideas that I wanted to keep on digital index cards in the correct folder. As I went through this process, I realized that many of the things that I wrote in my notebooks were redundant. It made me feel more convinced that Scrivener was the way to go.

After I had gone through all the notebooks and captured everything on cards, I went back to the scenes folder, and I went through the cards again, placing colored labels on the cards that linked ideas that belong together in a scene. Once that process was complete, I rearranged the cards in the order that I thought the story would go. Then I created a document outside of Scrivener, where I wrote the story in chapters, glancing at the cards every now and again to ground myself, but mostly writing “off the top of my head.” In this document, I let myself write any dialogue or detail that I wanted for any moment. I thought about characters' motivations and what would lead to the next thing. I remembered my main character's goal and made sure that it was being represented in the actions that occurred. (I'm actually still in this process. I've worked on it for three writing sessions, three hours, and I'm on Chapter 10.)

Once I've finished that document, I will import it into Scrivener into my scenes folder. Then I will create index cards with the working title of the chapter name on them. (This book is going to have chapters with titles. Squee!) After that, using the Scrivener “compose” button, I will attach a draft to each chapter index card. I think I will make a folder for my note index cards and put them in there so I can have a relatively uncluttered digital work space, but I can still look at them at any time. And when I'm writing the draft linearly, I will probably work in split-screen mode, so that I can refer to the bits of dialogue and business that I have already dreamed up for each chapter.

Once I start writing the chapters in this way, I will also use Scrivener's Target Goal feature. You can set up your goal for the word count of the overall project and your writing word-count goal for each day. I want to see how that feels.

I need to hasten to add that I'm not abandoning my notebooks. I've written in notebooks since I was a child. I want to always write in notebooks. So I now use them to brainstorm (clustering) before writing scenes. Before I write anything in this blog, I first write it out in longhand.

So that's what I know so far. I'm sure in this project in and in future books to come, I will refine my process. But I don't think it will ever be straightforward for me. There needs to be some meandering. There needs to be some walks in the wood. But I am excited about Scrivener and the possibilities it offers.

Thoughts on Reading Harriet the Spy as an Adult

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

As part of my quest to write coming-of-age stories that would appeal to middle graders, I went back to read my favorite books from that time. Harriet the Spy was one of the first books that I reread. When I was young, I loved Harriet the Spy because she was a working writer. She wrote every day in her notebook. She was my role model. I even had a red hoodie. But I didn't have a spy route. That was not something that I would do. However, I did explore the inner terrains of my thoughts and feelings and recorded them faithfully in my trusted notebook.

If you haven't read Harriet the Spy and would like to, here is where you should probably stop reading. Spoilers abound. In the book, Harriet's friends and classmates read her notebook. They discover that she has written many unflattering things about them. Harriet is ostracized. Her classmates even form a Spy Catcher's Club. Also, during this time, Harriet loses her nanny and confidante, Ole Golly, who has fallen in love and moves away to be with her fiancé. Ole Golly tells Harriet that it's time, that Harriet has grown up and no longer needs a nanny. When Ole Golly is gone and dire things begin to occur, Harriet is not so sure.

As an adult reading this book, I fell in love again with Harriet. Here she is, at the start of the book, with her friend Sport, saying that they are going to play a game, which basically consists of making up a story. Sport is baffled. Why can't they play something normal? Harriet tries to explain to him the wonder of this activity but to no avail. Then there are the tender, wise scenes with Ole Golly, particularly the one where Harriet meets Ole Golly's boyfriend and goes to the movies with them. These moments are pure gold.

But this time, I was unsatisfied with the ending. That feels like sacrilege to say, but hear me out. In the story, Harriet gets in trouble with her peers because she wrote nasty things in her notebook, and they find out. At school, the teacher takes away Harriet's notebook because she's spending all her time writing in it instead of paying attention in class. In the end, Harriet's mother convinces the principal to let Harriet be editor of the school newspaper. As editor, Harriet does write an apology to her friends, but she continues to write nasty pieces about her other classmates and other people in the community. I ended up wishing that Harriet had figured out the solution to her problem, and feeling that she hadn't learned as much as she needed to.  It was something I hadn't thought of as a child, but as an adult, it really felt like a missed opportunity. Don't get me wrong. I will always love Harriet the Spy. I just wanted her to be a better writer by the end.