That’s what Therese Walsh dubbed it when we came up with the idea of an editor’s advice column on the new, up-coming Writer Unboxed newsletter.
We’d been wanting to collaborate for a long time, take our guest appearances on each other’s blogs to the next level.
As soon as we thought of adding my advice column to her newsletter, we knew we’d hit on the right idea. So we’ve been hustling for the past few weeks to make it happen.Therese and her partner Kathleen have solicited questions from the Writer Unboxed Facebook community, I’ve put on my editorial thinking-cap, and we’ve created the advice column we hope will serve aspiring writers best.
And today we went live.
Hurrah! Kazoos!
However, the newsletter is still in development, so we went live on the Writer Unboxed blog, a demo of the column as it will appear in the newsletter, so you can all get a window into what’s in store. Ain’t life grand?
We’re over there right now answering the reader question:
Dear Victoria,
Aside from meticulous proofreading, how can we, as writers, make your job easier?
Hey, guys, I just spent the entire day trying to develop video for this blog. Guess what? That’s right. So let’s talk about how my experiment with video mimics the experience of writing fiction:
It always seems like such a good idea at the time.
Who has not begun a story with the gripping, overwhelming conviction that this is the best idea ever?
It gets intensely complicated, overblown, and unwieldly really, really fast.
Writing fiction is enormously complex and involves far more facets than can ever be entirely remembered or even explained. We try and try and try to simplify the basics so we can build a sense of competence and an inner sensory map—a body memory of how to navigate these complexities—but the sheer number of layers always makes the overall picture invisible from any particular vantage point.
It involves a whole lot of little, nickpicky details you simply can’t see coming.
Fiction is all details: the details of character, the details of plot and subplot and plot thread, the details of setting, the details of tens and tens of thousands of words and sentences. Detail overload. . .and yet every one of them is essential.
The exact aspect of any and all illumination is crucial.
If we don’t have complete control over where we shine the light when we create, we can’t hope to show our audience what we want them to see.
Repeated attempts to accomplish the same piece of the project over and over again becomes something akin to hammering jello on porcelain.
Revision is massage taken to the point of pummeling. The breakage can be, eventually, deafening.
Stagefright is a constant.
Although the camera acts as an audience in the external world, our critical faculties act as an on-going internal audience, so that the accumulation of silent tut-tut’s can be paralyzing if we listen.
Halfway through, you’re guaranteed to forget what you’re doing.
We are a simple species, and one of the most predictable of our reflexes is the urge to mentally step away when things stop being fun. This is especially true right about when we’ve acquired 36,000 of the 72,000 words we need.
Freezing in the headlights is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.
Fortunately, the fact that none of this is live means we can freeze for as long as we like. It’s never detrimental to the final product, and it’s often the key to quality.
It turns out you don’t actually have a single, consistent voice.
Did you know this about yourself? Even when you’re talking? Me neither.
The longer you struggle, the more obvious it becomes this can’t possibly end well.
A writer falls over a cliff and is clinging helplessly to a vine while two editors crouch on the edge, shouting advice. Suddenly the writer sees the most beautiful strawberry in the world just out of reach.
“Reach for it!” cries the first editor. “A perfect thing is worth the sacrifice of your life!”
“Don’t reach for it!” cries the second editor. “It is in toil and dedication that success lies!”
“My novel’s a piece of shit!” cries the writer and jumps off the cliff.
Hey, welcome to 2012! We’ve had such a luxurious vacation catching up on our lives around here and cleaning our offices and writing stories and all that good stuff. Now we’re gearing up for the new year in that very special way that we writers have: with panic.
First I want to thank all of you with my deepest gratitude for your nominations for the Write to Done Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest. You guys got me into the Top 20 Blogs for Writers, which is exactly where I hoped to be. Although I am greatly honored to have been one of the Top 10 last year, I spent the first three months of 2011 working my heinie off trading guest posts with the other nine folks, and I suspect I am not the only one of them to have trembled at the thought of doing that all over again.
So thank you. Thank you so much.
Now, I have a few new things lined up for this blog in 2012:
Video
My son has become quite a video afficionado, as can be seen in the trailer he made for The Art & Craft of Fiction. And he’s going to be making short videos of me talking about craft, little five-minute versions of the video interview Joanna Penn did with me last fall.
Writer & Editor Jokes
I’m sorry. I’m apologizing in advance for the groaners. This is what happens when an editor spends a little too much of her holiday vacation exploring the possibilities of chai and rum.
New Guest Column
I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag just yet because we’re still working out the details, but within a few weeks I’ll be able to announce my regular guest column on the upcoming newsletter for one of the best blogs for writers in existence. I’m extremely excited to be working with these folks. Stay tuned!
A Writer’s New Year’s Resolutions
And these are just for today:
Lose weight
Trim, trim, trim. Cut, cut, cut. My manuscripts will lose their flab and tone their muscle until they can eject a reader to 5000 feet without leaving the ground.
Eat healthy
Out with cheap crap! In with the greats! I will devote my precious reading time to only those writers whose dedication and talents have shaped and continue to shape this craft we all love, and I will resist the urge to waste my time on mindless drivel just because everyone else is doing it.
Exercise
I will practice my writing skills until for every 1000 words I hope to publish I can proudly boast 10,000 words of honing my craft. I will spend far less time talking about writing and far more time doing it. I will focus on the sheer tangible pleasure of writing—because that’s the reason I’m a writer.
We call this week between the holiday and the New Year “time out of time” at our house. It’s our annual step outside the tide of daily struggle and strife to stop and think and search again for the peace in our lives. In the same vein, we’ve been talking here for the last few weeks about how to find Joy & Fulfillment through Writing, how to find Gratitude through Writing, how to find Community through Writing.
All of which leads to the greatest mystery of all, the purpose of fiction and the purpose of everything in general: discovering what makes life worthwhile.
Meaning.
How does being a writer help you find meaning?
Know that meaning exists.
It’s out there. It might not be intrinsic to this mortal coil—why are we here? where did we come from? where will we go? are there any answers? who knows?—but it is intrinsic to the self-awareness of the living. There is a spark inside you that animates the body in which you live, that makes it walk and talk and learn to play cards.
The fact that you are aware of this spark is profoundly meaningful. What are you? You are alive.
And the fact that you have the written word through which to explore that awareness will lead you to another question: “Who am I?” What does it mean to you, deep down inside, that you are alive?
Know you have to search to find it.
The meaning of life is not going to be served to you passively, like monetized blogs and television commercials. The only thing of value that you will ever get without trying is life itself (and even that goes away if you lie down and refuse to feed or clothe or nurture yourself).
As it happens, writing is excellent work for philosophers and spiritual seekers and questioners because writing isn’t easy. Writing is, in fact, quite a merciless angel, and it’s going to kick your butt. It is—for those of us who love it more than anything else—the ultimate metaphor for quest, the quest for meaning.
It is the powerful struggle with that metaphor—in all its convoluted, inexplicable, word-heavy impossibility—that makes the answers to our questions about life matter.
Understand paradox.
So when we have accepted that there is meaning to our lives, and sought that meaning through this extraordinary craft that is our chosen tool for revelation, and faced that meaning in those ephemeral moments of brilliance in our writing, and accepted our inevitable thwarting at its hands (which thwarting, I’m afraid, really is inevitable), we come to understand something.
We come to understand that a thing is true only because its opposite is also true.
We understand that for everything we’ve learned to express through the written word there is an equal and opposite thing yet to be expressed, and that no matter how long and hard we work at this craft, or how talented we were to start with, or how skilled we become in time, we will never write everything we could.
When we grapple with the potential buried deep inside that paradox, we come to grips with our unlimited freedom to write anything, although it will never be everything. That epiphany allows us to choose.
And those choices illuminate the meanings of our individual lives.
It’ll be the Winter Solstice in a few days, which is the holiday we celebrate at our house. We’re pretty tired of the dark by the time the sun gets to the end of its tether every year, and we’re pretty darn excited about sunlight coming back into our lives again. It takes its toll on us, this long night of the soul, and reminds us that things matter in this world, that the passing of the years is deeply significant. So we’ve been talking here for the last couple of weeks about how to find Joy & Fulfillment through Writing, how to find Gratitude through Writing.
We’ve also been remembering cause-&-effect, because that’s what everything is all about, and don’t let anybody tell you anything different.
So let’s talk today about community among writers, all of us here in this hapless little rowboat on the high seas together, sharing the benches and taking turns at the oars and scratching our heads over the constellations and occasionally pulling someone back into the boat before the sharks get them.
This is where gratitude will always lead you—to human bonding.
Be in it for what you have to give.
I honestly, sincerely believe in the power of modeling behavior, so I’ve been here on this blog for almost three years now teaching for free what I know about writing fiction, hoping that you will take away not only craft but a sense of compassion for your companions in this writing life.
I’m not going to deliberately lose my house to the bank, but I am aware that writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme and that even the most experienced mentors are no better than writers have ever been at making more than a sort of lower-middle-class living at this work we love best. I wake up every single day and remind myself what it was like to be young and and broke and passionately in love with words and to have nowhere to go for help.
Give as generously as you can. Don’t be bossy, and don’t assume you know more than those with greater experience, but show compassion to your fellow writers and share the camaraderie with kindness and an open heart.
Serve your turn at the oars.
Be thoughtful about what you need to take.
Nobody’s an infinite well of resource. We all give, and we all take. We pass the torch from hand to hand, from experienced to innocent, from generation to generation. Where you stand now I once stood, and when you move up the ladder of knowledge tomorrow someone else will arrive to take your place.
I have learned what I know from some of the best, and I continue to read and study every blessed day the writers and mentors who have come before me in this parade of literature holding the lantern high. Right now I’m reading The Notebooks of Henry James. He will never know the unbelievable gift he has given this unknown editor, just a stranger born long after he died, but he would not want his wisdom to stop with me. So what I get from his notebooks I will share with you.
When it comes time to ask for what you need, know where you stand on the ladder and do not underestimate what you are asking of others. Above all, treat everyone with humility and great good humor.
Never be the one making it more difficult.
Be the one making it easier.
Respect the act of communing.
And when you have made that connection between yourself and other writers, when you have arrived here at the dock and found your seat in the rowboat, when you have said hello and shaken hands and asked politely where they keep the water and rowing gloves, take a moment to bow your head for the beauty of it all.
What goes on between human beings really cannot be explained.
I give everything I can to you because in giving it I’ve found myself.
So this week let’s respond to that joy & fulfillment. Because everything about being writers is about cause-&-effect, even living the life.
Let’s be grateful.
Recognize the source.
Sometimes it’s the littlest things.
I know I’ve mentioned once or twice before a ceremony we do at our house, in which we light a candle and everyone around the dinner table says what they’re thankful for. We wanted our son to have a sense of what’s meaningful in life—in this Age of Meaningless Consumerism, when we don’t really know what we truly need or or want, but we sure know how to buy—and over the years this ceremony has served its purpose well. We’ve all become pretty adept at naming things we appreciate.
Sometimes it’s huge and touching and profound, like having each other, having our health, being safe together every night in a largely dangerous world. Sometimes it’s topical and specific, like the excitement of finishing an important project or the relief of not having to mow the lawn or the peacefulness of the cats not fighting under the table. And sometimes it’s utterly trivial, even silly, like gratitude for spoons and forks, for a particular joke, for curtains, for hair.
When my son was very young, he was often simply thankful for the candle.
Write in great, glorious, intensely specific detail about the touching and profound, the topical and specific, the utterly trivial, even the silly. Write everything you know, everything you imagine, everything that happens to you and everyone you meet or hear about or suspect exists. Write your life.
That’s your source.
Realize what it’s worth.
Train yourself to live in service to this source, and when you have written be aware of how little you bring to this work, how much of it is simply channeling your life into clean, clear words.
Ask yourself what you would do without your source. Hang in suspended animation, forever and infinitely barely surviving, without the extraordinary gift of your five senses or your ability to perceive through them? The ancient Greeks understood stasis and subjected the dead to a period of limbo before resolution to remind us of the value of living.
Your life is the most precious commodity you will ever own.
Give thanks.
So give it its due. Stop right this instant and breathe. Look around you.
Where are you? What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? How does it smell? Stick out your tongue—how does it taste? Writing puts all of that into specific words so that it fixes in your memory forever. Working with those words, struggling to find just the right ones in just the right order, learning the many brilliant techniques of written language to re-create the experience of this moment out of all other moments in life, yours or anyone else’s: that is an act of thanks.
You are here. You are you. You are alive.
Writing is your lens through which to refract your gratitude, so it will never leave you.
I’m not here this month—December is my month to go offline every year and watch my son grow up. He’s already within a few inches of me in height now, meaning I really don’t have any time to lose. So I’ll be blogging in absentia a series of posts on how to find everything you need through the craft of writing, this amazing work that you and I and all of us here have chosen as the craft of our souls.
Let’s start with the good stuff: joy & fulfillment.
Ignore the hype!
It is deafening.
But it is not writing.
It is hype.
Right now we happen to be living through a time of enormous change in publishing, which has brought with it an absolute avalanche of emphasis upon the industry of marketing. Congratulations on the Era of Marketing! Enjoy it while you can, marketers. It hasn’t always been this way for writers, and it won’t always be this way for writers, because it isn’t, in fact, intrinsic to writing itself.
This too shall pass.
And when it does, we will find lying in its wake—just as fully and magnificently as before the avalanche hit—our writing. It does not change just because someone out there changes the process through which we expose it to the public view.
It’s still writing.
Recognize the craft.
Writing is not the same thing as selling our work. It’s not even the same thing as being read.
Writing is using the written word to reach into the fog of invisibility that shrouds our every waking moment and retrieve the primal experience of being alive. All of the arts are tools for this. Painters do it through painting, sculptors do it through sculpture, dancers do it through movement, playwrights, actors, and directors do it through theater, musicians do it through music. But storytellers do it through story, and writers do it through the nearly-infinite variety and flexibility of literacy.
This craft is our chosen tool for retrieval. We writers spend our lives learning to wield this particular tool as perfectly as we are able.
It’s ours.
Reach for the joy!
The truth is we arrive here on this planet mostly just because our parents have sex, and while we’re here we do a whole lot of crying, raging, suffering, wondering, and sometimes noodling around simply being bored.
But we’re in it for the joy.
So focus upon this craft you have chosen—these words and sentences and paragraphs, these pens and pencils and notebooks, typewriters and keyboards and computer screens, these facets of dialog and flashes of action and glimpses of intricate settings. Forget your themes and ideas and feelings, and simply burrow through your written words into the vivid experiences of living. Record those experiences in all their beautiful and dreadful, enormous and tiny, complementary and contradictory detail. Detail.
Wake up from the dream and go outside. Come in again and sink back into the dream. Over and over and over. Reflect your world in words as if you were a mirror, and eventually you will begin to glimpse in the distance behind the figures in the mirror that poignant, often-bittersweet joy we suspect but can’t always feel. You’ll stumble unexpectedly upon a transitory moment of insight into what it all means, especially when you don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say. That moment is what makes life worthwhile and what we writers are after all along.
It’s the unsayable.
That depth of vivid experience is where fulfillment lies.
Guess what I spent the Thanksgiving holiday doing? That’s right—giving myself repetitive stress injury writing my annual 45,000-word children’s book for my son. I didn’t start until halfway through November this year, so it got pretty darn busy toward the end there. Now I have a completed book (hurrah!), but I also have a gimpy elbow, which means today’s post is going to be more a checklist than a regular tirade. (Sorry about that.) We’ve been on the subject of first drafts all month: Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo , 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel, 3 Vital Steps to creating an excellent, story-worthy protagonist, and 3 Crucial Aspects of Writing Scenes.
So let’s sit down together now and ask all those hard, necessary questions a writer must ask themself when they finish a first draft of a novel:
Is your protagonist the same character at the end as the beginning?
Is the catastrophe your characters are heading toward at the Hook the same one they wind up with at the Climax?
Does your protagonist matter more than anyone else in the story?
Does your Climax matter more than anything else that happens?
Can you clearly state your protagonist’s two mutually-exclusive needs, which drive them relentlessly forward throughout their story?
Can you account for every single scene in relation to one or both of those needs?
Can you justify basing an entire novel on those needs when you ask yourself why a reader would care?
Can you identify exactly how your Climax forces your protagonist to choose between their two needs?
Can you link every single scene in an inevitable chain of cause-&-effect toward that Climax?
Can you pin-point the tension in every single scene that’s so powerful it makes the reader turn the next page?
Have you made your protagonist interesting, entertaining, smart, human, and unique enough to hold a reader’s attention for 50,000 words?
Have you shown your protagonist’s world in significant, telling details that simply couldn’t describe anybody else’s fictional world?
Have you stuck to only essential dialog?
Have you choreographed your action scenes for tightly-paced action?
Have you skipped all urges to repeat yourself?
Have you avoided every paragraph, sentence, and word of exposition humanly possible?
Is any and all exposition left just so brilliant and essential that your story can’t exist without it?
Have you moved the Backstory from the beginning to its rightful spot after the Hook (or else cut it altogether)?
Have you resisted the urge to ramble in Resolution after the Climax?
Is this story truly, sincerely important to you, above and beyond its basic quality of containing a whole lot of words?
Will you love sinking ever-deeper into this story in the New Year as you launch into the revisions that are, in actuality, the real work of writing a novel?
Are you proud—not of yourself—but of your story?
Are you in love?
You are a high-dive artist who just dove into the deepest point of the entire ocean. Congratulations! You’ve got some kind of crazy-brave glitter shining in your eyes!
And when you return to this story later, after a well-earned respite over the holidays, you will begin swimming home.
This time last year a reader notified me of a contest going on over on Write to Done. They were soliciting nominations for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers of 2010. I said, “You want to?” and you guys said, “Sure!” And a bunch of you stampeded over in what I like to think of as the greatest writers’ rave ever, and you nominated me!
And I was overwhelmed and deeply moved. Awwww. You guys!
Imagine then my surprise to learn during the December holidays that your nominations had placed me in the Top 20 Blogs for Writers.
People! My chin wobbled a bit. I really hadn’t realized the power of this online community we’ve built, the spirit of giving you have in you, or thrill of being our own tribe. You’re all too darn sweet for words.
And I was grateful and touched and filled with the zeal to do even better for you in the coming year, to earn the faith you’d shown in me. To really be what you need: the mouthpiece for the greatest writers’ rave ever.
So imagine my total shock and amazement to learn a week later that your nominations had earned me a spot as one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. The top ten! That’s like the ninetieth percentile of the Writers Digest Top 101—with cherries!
Yes, I cried a little. (No, I did not let my loved ones take pictures.)
But I did hold myself to that promise to do even better in 2011 than I’d done in 2010, to work as hard as I could to teach you what it’s taken me thirty years in this art and craft to learn—how to create wonderful fiction—and to do it in a way that becomes so intuitive once you get it you can’t remember a time when you didn’t know this stuff.
Also, I got the chance through the Top 10 Blogs for Writers to meet the most fantastic other folks out there today blogging for writers:
I brought them here to meet you and sent you over to their sites to meet them. And almost all of them have become permanent good friends of mine here in the online writing community, people I turn to again and again throughout the year to share our thoughts and ideas, interviews and book giveaways, the myriad aspects of our developing careers out here helping you do what you do best.
You people are the very reason this blog exists. You keep me sane. Plus you bring me cherries.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.
And now I’ve just been informed that Write to Done has opened nominations for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest 2011. So if you’re still in the nominatin’ mood—I would be so honored if you’d drop by over there and nominate me again:
They do want a reason for each nomination or it won’t count, so in case your mind is a blank (as mine so often is) I’m going to suggest some reasons below. Please feel free to use any of them or mix-&-match. But if more than one of you wants to use the one with baby lions and tutus, I suggest you coordinate behind the scenes so the contest judges won’t think you’re just toying cavalierly with their heads:
Encouragement
Because when I work I picture myself at Victoria’s desk and hear her whispering in shock over my shoulder, “Holy crap, that’s good! Hang on, I’ve got to make a phone call—”
Community
Because all these other nominations for Victoria are from my friends over on her site, and everyone’s kind to everyone else, and we share our nachos and guacamole.
Professionalism
Because Victoria’s cat The Grey Peril is a harsh mistress. And that makes me a better writer.
Inspiration
Because her site always makes me think of happy little baby lions and lace tutus. Writing great literature.
Advocacy
Because when I read Victoria’s blog I know I’m in league with her, shoulder-to-shoulder with all the others who love beautiful fiction, fighting our valiant fight against the dreaded Cheap Shlockers.
Enthusiasm
Because I like having complex concepts explained to me through things like the Dalai Llama’s hairstyle.
Sheer love
Because I’m Victoria’s mother. (Don’t use this one, though, unless you really are. Mom.)
And whatever you do, never forget: I love you people!
We’re talking about tackling first drafts this month, for the sake of all you NaNoWriMoers scampering around out there. We’ve looked at Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo (doing what into the what?), 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel in general (doing it how?), and 3 Vital Steps to creating your protagonist (doing it why?).
And today we’re going to look at writing individual scenes. Because that’s really the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in your squirrely little head right now.
Or anyway it had better be!
What you need to accomplish
We’ve been talking over on Jami Gold’s blog last week about the Story Climax, which is—it turns out—the whole point.
And this is true of every single scene you write, as well.
What’s the whole point of this scene? Why are you writing it? Why can your story simply not exist without it? Not because it’s:
characterization
That has to happen as texturing in other scenes, the ones that move the story inevitably forward toward its Climax.
atmosphere
See above.
info dump
See above.
The only thing that’s fair game for a scene is a simply inescapable step in the progress of your characters’ trajectory from the first moment they jump out of the pan until the instant the land in the fire.
Whatever that step is—that’s this scene’s climax.
How you need to accomplish it
This part is fun! This is the part about pitting your characters against themselves and each other and watching the fur fly.
Since all fiction is about cause-&-effect, it’s a given that your characters’ movement through a scene is all about their desperate grappling with their fates. This grappling is what causes whatever you’ve already decided needs to happen in this scene’s climax. And this grappling is enormously entertaining to readers.
This is why you’ll hear that every scene must have an aim. That simply means that every scene must have something that makes your characters fight. Nobody wants to see them lying around picking lint out of their navels. We want them to do something! And in order for that something to matter, they must have deep, fundamental motivation to do it, motivation rooted—you saw this coming—in their conflicting internal needs.
So they spend the grand bulk of this scene wrestling with something with everything they’ve got (sometimes in solitude, sometimes in dialog, sometimes in action, even, um, wrestling).
I have to have it!
No, you can’t!
Nooooooooo!
That’s this scene’s development. It’s the bulk of the scene. And it’s a blast.
Why you can’t avoid accomplishing it
Because, naturally, if your characters could avoid going through all this hell they certainly would.
But they can’t. Because of the climax of the previous scene.
They did something in that last scene, made a decision and sealed their doom, and whatever it was acted as the effect that caused this scene. How does the opening of this scene show that, the immediate and dastardly consequences of those actions they thought—they thought!—in the last scene were the only actions humanly possible?
That’s this scene’s hook.
Now, most scenes average 1,000-2,000 words, which is four to eight manuscript pages. Use this information as you write. You can go ahead and write the climax first and park it there at the end where it belongs and then go back and fill in with lots of madhouse antics. I do this a lot. And it’s generally not too hard to figure out what to use as the hook that’s going to demonstrate the soup your characters are in now, because you’ve got the climax to that previous scene sitting there staring you in the face. That’s where they were giving their all trying to avoid this exact situation.
Just be aware as you write this first draft of how many pages you’re looking to fill.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
