Month: May 2013

I write out of order.  I skip around within scenes, writing the parts that come easily first.  I skip around within chapters, writing the middles, the ends, the beginnings as they come to me.  I always write the middles of books first, writing all the scenes that I’m excited about before I make myself go back and write the first chapter.

The reason I do this is based in productivity; if I get bored or stuck with what I’m working on, I can continue to make progress somewhere else until I figure out what to do with the part that slowed me down.  I do this all the way through the book, but when I first start drafting, I skip around more than I will later in the process, because I like to start with scenes I’ve already begun when I was doing my freewrites, and then expand them into the emotional heart of the book.  If there’s a romantic arc in the book, I’m likely to write all of the key scenes in that arc during this process, because writing the emotional heart of the book helps me to set the tone for the rest of it.

The scenes I write during this process act as structural landmarks around which I can build the rest of the scenes.  Once I know what the tone of the emotional keystones of the book are going to be like, I can set the tone of the more plot and action heavy scenes to build up to them.  Also, I can write my way into the book doing things I’m excited about, so by the time I get to the stuff I’m avoiding, I’ve got a strong hold on the characters and the voice.

Then, usually after about 6-7k, I’ll run out of steam.  There will be no more scenes that really jump out at me left.  Then I know it’s time to get that first chapter written.

I didn’t learn to outline until halfway through my third novel.  Before that, I was still figuring out how a novel went together, and feeling my way through as I wrote.  If I’d tried to outline my first novel, I don’t think I would have been very successful at it, because I didn’t have a good feel for how a novel was written.

But halfway through my third novel, I was miserable.  I didn’t know what came next and my writing slowed to a crawl.  And that’s when I discovered that if I don’t want to give in to the despair that hits in the middle-blues of the first draft, I always need to have a plan for what I’m going to write next.  Hence, the outline.

Over time, I’ve come to rely increasingly on the outline.  If I want my plot to form a smooth arc, with nicely-paced supporting scenes along the way, then I better know the end from the beginning.  If I want my characters to grow and change and become different, more interesting people, then I need to have an idea of where they’re going from sentence one, so I can drop little clues and change them inch by inch, making progress toward the end goal in each scene.  That’s just how I roll.

I like to outline in a spreadsheet.  (Sometimes I start on a big wall of plastic that I later transfer to a spreadsheet, if I want to be able to see the whole thing at once.)  I’ll make the first column for plot, and write one sentence per scene all the way down the far left.  Then across the other columns I’ll write the name of every major character.  In each character’s column, I write their growth and reactions to each plot event in that event’s row, so each column represents another arc that will take place in the book.  If I’m planning on developing a setting element as a character, I’ll write down the arc for that in another column.  One of the things this does for me is make sure all the major characters (and even the minor ones) have consistent character development across the book.  It also forces me to have a clue who everyone is before I begin; failing to develop side characters is a bad habit of mine, and having to fill all those empty squares in the boxes under that character’s name helps me to have a clue what they’re doing.

My plot outline is usually twenty sentences or less, with the whole outline amounting to not more than 1000 words or so.  If my book is going to involve more action, I might have a separate action-plot outline where I make more specific plans; if the book is more character-centric, my outline will be shorter, and have

By the time I’m done with this process, I’m finally ready to begin to draft.  The book might sit for years, waiting to be the outlined-project I am most excited to work on.  When I’m ready to draft something, I’ll sort through the options, trying to pick something that makes sense as a business decision, but that I’m also excited about.  Last time I couldn’t pick between three books, so I pitched them all to my agent and made him choose.

But, eventually, each book gets its turn to be written.

Earlier this year, I was re-reading The Opposite of Fate, by Amy Tan.  It’s half a book on writing, and half personal essay.  I love Amy Tan’s novels, and her essays as well.  This time, as I was reading, I was struck by some things that she said about sarcasm and compassion.  She writes, “Many beginning writers think sarcasm is a clever way to show intelligence.  But more mature writers know that mean-spiritedness is wearying and limited in its one-dimensional point of view.  A more successful story is one in which the narrator can treat human foibles, even serious flaws, with depth and hence compassion.”

I was most struck by this line: “Gratitude led to a generosity of spirit, and that was what my soul required so I could write.”

I began to wonder what would happen to my own writing if I focused on cultivating a generosity of spirit, and approached my character with that attitude.  I sometimes struggle in my early drafts with character likeability, especially because in early drafts, I tend to overuse sarcasm, or have my characters be clever when they ought instead to be kind.

One thing that I did when I was revising Chasing the Skip for publication was to cut the whining.  Sentences, paragraphs, exposition, dialogue; no passage was safe from the sweep of my pen as I cut all the places where I’d allowed Ricki to wallow and complain.  Why?  Because no one likes a whiner, and if I was going to ask you to spend an entire novel caring about Ricki’s family problems, I needed you to like her.

Sarcasm is easy to write, and it can be entertaining.  Witty narrative is fun to read.  But sarcasm is a neutral trait; it doesn’t make your character likeable or unlikeable.  Sarcasm holds people at a distance; it doesn’t invite intimacy between reader and character.  If we know nothing about your character except that they are sarcastic, that’s not going to make them likeable.  And if they are sarcastic and mean, you’ve coupled a neutral trait with a negative one.  Now I hate your character, unless you’ve done significant work to give them positive traits that make me like them, despite their meanness.

Whining about things that don’t seem worthy of the whine is a negative trait.  Whining about things that do seem worth whining about is neutral.  Going through something hard without whining is a positive trait.  If you want readers to like your protagonist, this is most likely the place you want them to be.

It’s easy to write characters who are unreasonable.  It’s more tricky to write situations in which everyone is right, and yet conflict arises naturally because characters, like people, have different priorities, desires, and ideas about what is best.  When everyone has a point, conflict gains nuance.  Solutions are harder to find.  Tension feels more authentic.  Everyone can be likeable, and still be in conflict with each other.  Obviously not every story calls for this treatment, but especially when writing about family relationships, this is often the sort of conflicts that you want your characters to have.

Several months ago, I read a comment Sara Zarr made on her Tumblr blog, about what to do when you’re writing things that aren’t trendy.  She said that if your book won’t sell because it’s not on trend, it is your job to make it irresistible, so that an agent or an editor cannot say no.  The whole thing is worth a read; I love that she talks about taking responsibility for your own work, instead of relying on factors that are mostly out of your control (like trendiness).

When I read this, I started to think about what might make my own book irresistible, first to editors, and then later to readers.  For some of my unsold books, I found I could not answer that question.  For ones I’ve been working on more recently, I found that what made the books irresistible to me (and then hopefully by extension to others) were the relationships–the characters who loved each other deeply.  The places where I approached my own characters with a generosity of spirit and let them love each other were also the places that I found them most compelling; as they loved each other, I loved them.  Other characters who distanced the world through their sarcasm drew less emotion to me.  I loved the ones who were vulnerable, who had so much to lose that they didn’t dare disconnect from others.  That’s what was irresistible to me.

Chasing the Skip, for example, is mostly about Ricki and her father.  They love each other, but they both do so badly, so neither of them can recognize that love in the other.  But because Ricki cares, she has something to lose.  That vulnerability begets tension for me, which I hope will be mirrored in the reader.  I can see that, looking back, but now I set about intentionally, to do it working forward.

I started asking myself these questions about my current projects: what does my main character love?  What does she love so much she’s afraid to lose?  What does she do about that fear?  How can I bring that out from scene to scene?  I tried revising an entire novel, sitting down every day and telling myself, “this is a love story.”  I tried letting the story be about love even when the scene at hand wasn’t romantic.  What about my character’s love for the people who weren’t the romantic interest?  How could I bring that out on the page, and raise the stakes in every scene?

And as I did, the book that had formerly been miserable to write became irresistible to me.  This was a revelation, an epiphany.  It made me love writing again.

Whether it will make my work irresistible to others isn’t something I can fully predict.  But here is something I can work on, something I can do to make my stories better.

It’s something to work on.

Even when I’m drafting, I often think about other books I have in the pipeline that are not the current work-in-progress.  I used to have a rule that I was allowed to write whatever I wanted on any project, as long as I only used a pen and paper on things that were not my main focus project.  That way I could jot down scenes and dialogue and ideas all I wanted, but I wouldn’t risk project hopping.

These days, I type everything, but in my days of paper freewrites I developed a rhythm that’s still useful to me.  I might open a file and write down a scene, but once I’m done emptying my head of the ideas, I’ll stop writing, not pushing myself to do more like I will on the project I’m focusing on.  I’m allowed to do that as often as I like, but I don’t skip out on the project I’m supposed to be doing to write long sections of other books, because I don’t want to get distracted by shiny projects when I should be doing other things.

Still, I love freewriting.  I get to write whatever I want, no matter how stupid it is.  I get to write scenes exactly how I picture them, without having to fit them into the plot.  The parts of the book that I daydream about are almost always the climactic relationship scenes: moments of conflict or resolution or fulfillment between two characters where for both parties, the stakes are high.  I almost never include setting or much action; I always write long, long strings of dialogue.  Writing these scenes helps me to figure out how my character will react to conflict and pressure, and how struggles between her and other big players in the book might go.  These scenes are always heavily re-written if they make it into the book, but getting the ideas down helps me to figure out what I want the character arc to look like.

Those are my rules for pre-writing: write it down and put it down, don’t project jump, write whatever I want, explore the relationships.  This is one of my favorite parts of writing, so I try to enjoy it.

For me, writing a pitch is the first part of turning an idea into a novel, and it’s the first thing that I write down.  This isn’t because I will need to sell the idea to others, although I do use the pitch for that and it’s handy to have one ready for my agent when I tell him what I’m working on next.  But in truth the pitch is for me: I’ve found that if I try to write a book I can’t pitch, I’m setting myself up for trouble.  For years I thought I was just bad at pitching, and then I discovered that actually, there was something wrong with the books I was writing.

My pitch will contain the main conflict of my novel.  The so-what.  The tension.  The hook.  That’s the piece of a book that gets readers reading, and keeps them there as the pages go by.  Without knowing that, I can’t possibly write an effective outline, I can’t flesh out the characters, I can’t structure a plot, I can’t know which pieces of floating story belong in this book and which ones I should throw out.  The pitch is my focus.  It’s the filter for every other aspect of the book.  As I create more things to go in the novel–characters, plots, events, settings–they all have to fit under the umbrella of the pitch, which will curtail the addition of anything that does not fit in its shade.  If I can’t pitch the book, then I don’t know what it’s about.  And if I can pitch it, then I know what it’s NOT about, which is just as valuable.

Another perk of having a pitch at this early stage is I have something to tell people when they ask what I’m working on.  And the pitch is the only thing I tell to anyone (besides my husband), until after the first draft is written.  This protects me from unwelcome comments, and from burning myself out on the story by talking about it too much.

So how do I go about forming a pitch?  I take my initial idea–whatever drew me into the story in the first place.  And then I figure out who my character is, and what the tension they are going to experience is.  Then I try to assemble a single sentence that will convey all three.

Here’s an example pitch from a book I’ve been working on:  sixteen-year-old Penny’s older sister is trying to adopt and failing, so Penny decides to get pregnant, so she can give her sister a baby.

I first came up with the idea to write this book while looking at a website full of profiles of families trying to adopt.  Because these profiles were essentially appeals to birthmothers, they had to keep the information positive and happy, but through every word bled the pain and suffering these families were experiencing from so desperately wanting a child.  It felt heavy to me.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with the rhetoric surrounding the “wonder” of adoption, because before (and often after!) an average adoption can take place, all parties involved have to experience tragedy and pain.  So, there is the issue of trying to adopt and failing.  That’s my instigating idea, and what draws me to the book.  Into the pitch it goes.

The tension is, of course, that Penny is sixteen and pregnant and it’s not at all a simple thing to do for someone, and is of course a terrible idea, though a well-meaning one.  Penny’s character only goes into the pitch in the barest of ways, but after reading it you know that Penny is the sort of person who would want to help her sister, that her goal is to get pregnant, and that she’s trying to solve other people’s problems when maybe it’s not her place.

A good pitch is one that leaves the audience with questions, because then they want to know more.  I don’t know how well I did at that, since I’m the writer and not the audience, but there are a number of questions I’m hoping you ask after hearing the pitch.  How will Penny go about getting pregnant?  How will her sister (and parents) react?  How will their family sort out the complexity of relationships?

The answers to those questions (which I will ask, even if you don’t) become the bones of the structure of my book.  Once I have a pitch, the next steps are build those bones into a functional plot structure, and generate all the ideas for the meat that’s going to hang on those bones.

I have a post up today over at the teamTEENauthor blog.  This month, we’re blogging about Twilight.  Hop on over and check it out.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me well that I write under what some consider ridiculous circumstances.  I’ve talked about this some in my Mommy Writer posts.  I write while my toddler runs around the living room.  I write while she stands, ever by my chair, saying “up.”  I write with her on my lap trying with all her toddler might not to reach for the ever tempting keyboard, because she knows if she does I will put her down.   I write  while my husband plays video games.  I write while he plays whatever music he wants.  I write while friends are over.  I write while on vacation to relatives’ houses.  I write, even in the dreaded silence that suddenly feels very distracting after all that chaos.

It’s because I do all those things that I write at all.

Sometimes the writing goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t.  And until recently, I thought that was largely outside my control.  I can control whether or not I sit down to write, I told myself.  I can control whether or not I try.  But I can’t control whether this is a good day or a bad day, writing wise, because some days things just go, and some days everything is stop.

And then I discovered this thing.  This wonderful thing.

My writing goes well in direct proportion to how much I have thought about what I was going to write while I was not writing.  

For a while there I had gotten compartmentalized with my writing.  In the first few weeks of a new draft, I would write all the scenes I had been daydreaming about.  And then I would go back and fill in the gaps.  This part would move ever so slowly, because I had already written everything I was thinking about while not writing.  I did a lot of putting my butt in the chair, but I was arriving unprepared.  When I showed up for work, I was like a director with an empty stage.  It’s time for the performance, and I’m still casting about, searching for the right actor for the part, making up the blocking, changing the script.  It should have been obvious why so many of those days were bad days.

A few months ago I sensed this pattern, and I started doing some enforced daydreaming.  Because of the aforementioned toddler, I have plenty of time where my hands are busy but my brain is not.  So during this time, I started telling myself that I was absolutely required to think about whatever that next scene was, no matter how straightforward.

Suddenly I started having a lot more good days.  I started getting a lot more done in a lot less keyboard time.  And, more than that, what I was writing started coming out better.

I discovered that it is simply boring to daydream about flat characters.  So to spare myself the boredom, I had to round them out.  I had to add more relationships to every scene, no matter how mundane, just to keep myself interested.  I had to stretch the tensions throughout the book just so my mind would have something to chew on.  I couldn’t afford to wait for myself to be bored.  Making myself think was also part of the work. I discovered if I made myself think about what I was going to write, I also had to figure out how to stop boring myself.  I started spending lots and lots of time asking myself, “how else could this happen?” or “how else could the characters react,” or “what would happen if they talked about this, instead of keeping it to themselves?”  And suddenly I was writing not only more scenes, but better ones.

Maybe this has improved the overall quality of my work, and maybe not.  I always got around to developing scenes eventually before, so I don’t know if this discovery will matter much from a reader’s point of view.  But for me, it was everything.  It gave me something tangible that I could control about a job where not many things work that way.

So now I think, and then I write.  And when the writing goes badly, I point a finger at myself and ask why I didn’t think about this scene before I came to it.  And then I pick up the whining toddler, carry her around the house as is always her most desperate desire, and think some more.  When I’m making sure to do lots of thinking away from the keyboard, scenes click together.  I work out answers.  I figure it out.  Some say your subconscious will do this for you if you just let yourself get bored, or if you spend time thinking about other things.  Mine doesn’t.  The problems are always waiting for me there at the keyboard, unless I make a conscious decision to solve them when I’m not sitting there.

Fortunately, my life is full of times when I can think but not type.  So I think, and I daydream, and I work things out.

And then I write.