Author: Janci

I don’t send my writing group my entire first drafts.  I already know much of what’s wrong with them, so I’ll get the most effective critique if I wait until later to send the books through the group.  But I almost always workshop the first few chapters in their first draft form, because large problems I haven’t thought of are likely to manifest themselves there.  If my readers are reacting the way I want them to during the first chapters, then I know the arcs are on track, and I can revise the way I planned as I wrote my List of Badness.   If their responses surprise me, then I’ll add to the list of badness new character and structural things that I need to work on to get the beginning of the book going right.

The other read I get at this point is a validation read.  Because generally by this point I feel good and miserable about this book.  It is a mess!  Way more messy than my other, already revised books, which in my post-draft delirium will feel like a totally fair comparison.  Therefore, this book will never be fixed.  Therefore I am wasting my time.

My husband is my go-to validation reader, though I have a few backups as well.  A validation reader is someone who likes all your work, and can tell you why.  Drew will read through the book (lately with me reading over his shoulder, so we can talk about it as he goes), and tell me what’s working and why.  He’ll also give me criticism, which is fine.  I’m still compiling my List of Badness, and can add his notes to it.  But the most important thing is that he remind me why I’m writing this book in the first place.

I’ve had a lot of readers over the years, but very few of them have been people I’d trust to be validation readers.  Because at this point, I don’t want to hear that the book isn’t working.  I’ll be ready to hear that at a later time.  What I need before I jump into the second draft is to feel good about the thing again, and to have a clear vision of why I’m trying to fix it.  Watching someone else react as if it has value is key.  And then, it’s time to jump into revision.

Congrats to Jenn Johansson on the release of her debut YA novel, Insomnia.  Jenn took a break from her busy horror-writing schedule to talk to us a little about bounty hunting, and, of course, her book.

Most important things first.  Tell us about the book.

Sixteen-year-old Parker spends every night trapped in the dreams of the last person he made eye contact with, and it’s killing him. He misses soccer practice, falls asleep at the wheel, and his mom thinks he has a drug problem. His exhaustion from never reaching the deeper levels of sleep is getting worse every day, and he knows his time is running out. Until he meets Mia.

Mia’s dreams are the first Parker’s encountered where he can finally get real sleep. A good night of rest after so long is
addictive. He has to have it. But getting it means he must follow Mia and find a way to make eye contact every day. Mia is increasingly
freaked out, even turning Parker’s best friends against him. To make matters worse, Mia starts to receive threatening e-mails, and her
wonderful dreams become scenes of a horror movie—and Parker is cast as the villain. He must discover who is truly tormenting her, and clear his name, before she turns him in for a crime he hasn’t committed–or worse, the true stalker makes good on his threats to end her dreams forever.

This is awesome.  I’m hooked.  

Now for the bounty hunting.  Pretend, for a moment, that you’ve skipped bail.  (Perhaps for stalking innocent girls in search of a good night’s sleep.)  The bounty hunter doesn’t care what your reasons were, so he’s looking for you.  What three things do you bring with you?

Hmm, interesting…
1 – laptop
2 – cash/jewelry
3 – sunscreen (If I’m going to be running, I’d rather not be a lobster while I’m doing it.)

Where does the bounty hunter find you?
Probably a bookstore. Addictions are tough to break.

Also, there are a lot of shelves to hide behind.  Now you’re the bounty hunter.  When three things do you bring with you while tracking your skip?

1 – a laptop (everyone should be carrying these around in my world)
2 – sunscreen (see above for my reasoning)
3 – Gary from the show Alphas (if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t…I can wait.)

*Adds that to required viewing.*  Now you’ve found your skip, right where you thought they would be.  Describe your location and approach.

She is on a park bench in Philadelphia. I don’t use any weapons, I lure her in using the closest Hot Guy I can find. Hot Guy gets her to come quietly.

Hot Guy sounds good to have around in a pinch.  Once you’ve just caught a skip, and you’re surprised to find them attractive.  What three things make them irresistible to you?

Oh dear…since my skip was a girl, I think I may need to re-evaluate some things in my life. Take some kind of philosophical journey of self-discovery and all that.

IF, my skip had been a guy, the answer would be:
1 – sense of humor/personality
2 – eyes
3 – dimples (I believe these are a vastly underestimated advantage in
life.)

Now we know what Hot Guy looked like.  Anything else you’d like to tell us?

I’m a total gamer geek. Video, card, board, D&D–you name it and I probably love it. Between my sons, my hubby and my boy cat, I’m drowning in testosterone. When I was a teenager, I considered shaving my head to see if people thought my eyes were pretty…admittedly, not the most well thought out plan.

We should have talked about D&D.  Next time.

Want to hear more about Jenn and Insomnia?  Find her on twitter, at her blog, on goodreads, or at the illustrious Friday the Thirteeners website.  

Thanks, Jenn!

 

 

 

While it’s important that I begin with an outline, once I begin drafting, my outline is fluid.  I frequently find places where the outline isn’t specific enough, and I have to stop and break it down into further beats so that I can write scenes more effectively.  I sometimes find that I’ve gotten the pacing of the character arcs wrong, and I need to change the order of things or add new scenes to make the threads pull together.  Often I think of new and better ideas as I go, and I’ll edit my outline to reflect them.  I also often delete the already-written parts of my outline as I go, so it functions as a to-do list, growing shorter as my novel grows longer.

I try to revise as little as possible as I go.  Sometimes I’ll realize something I’ve already written needs to change.  If it’s quick and important, I might go back and change it.  But if it’s involved or unimportant or both, I’ll instead jot it down on my List of Badness.  This List includes everything I know I’ve failed at in the draft, everything I’ve left out, everything I’ve done badly, everything I know is a problem.  It’s going to be my revision guide for my second draft, where I get rid of all the problems that I know about before I bother other people for serious reads.

There are a few kinds of critiques, though, that I find helpful at this early stage.  So I’ll get those before I move on.

 

First chapters are the worst.  There are so many things to establish that it’s easy to let them get bogged down with exposition, and striking the right balance of information flow, dialogue, and action is tedious and exhausting.  It always takes me ten times as long to write the first chapter as it does to write anything else in the book.  This means that while I’m working on it, I’m always dead sure this draft is going to take me the rest of my life to write.  If every chapter takes this long, I will think, then it’s going to be years before I finish this book.  And while I’ve done this many times, I can never really believe that the rate at which I write the first chapter will be different than the rate of the rest of the book.

So first chapters are my enemy.

Eventually I will get a draft of that chapter written, and when I have, I’ll grind through the rest of the book.  I’ll still jump around out of order, writing things as they excite me, but when nothing particularly jumps out at me, I’ll go to the next thing that needs to be written to continue from the beginning, and write it.  Slowly, ever so slowly, the draft pieces itself together.

In truth, this process can take as few as four weeks.  A long drafting process for me is about four months.  The difference between a fast book and a slow book is usually the number of characters involved and the complexity of the internal character arcs.  (More characters means more character introductions and more relationships to balance; it always takes me longer to get an internal conflict down than it does for a more external one.)

Even four months isn’t a long time.  But it will feel like an eternity.  Right up until the last few days, I will feel like the process will never end.  I will never put the words down fast enough to get to the end.  And then, one day, I will actually finish, in a mad rush of underwritten ending.

I don’t like the grind part of drafting.  After waiting, it’s probably my least favorite part of the process.  This is because drafts are bad.  A novel is a complex thing, with lots of pieces that have to all work together to form a story.  I often think of revision as running a magnet over a pile of iron shavings to get all the bits to point in the same direction.  If that’s so, then drafting is the part where I have to generate all those shavings, and they always come out as a bit of a mess.

This doesn’t mean that I draft lazily.  I do my very best to get the book down in the best shape I can.  But even at my personal best, my first attempt is far from publishable.  It’s not really even fit for anyone to read but me.  For years I thought that it would be easier to write a new book than to revise these messes I had just made, but I discovered through sad experience that each new first draft is just as bad as the last.  They all need revision, and lots of it.

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.