Are You Married to Your Writing?

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Warning: Cheesy comparisons ahead

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently revising the first draft of my very first novel, and I’m trying to decide what book to write next. But the idea I keep coming back to has a main character that might be hard to empathize with, and I keep questioning if there’s any point in writing it. I could easily write a book with a much friendlier, easier to connect with main character, but I can’t help but wonder if I could make this one work. I mean, if it was done well it would probably work, right?

And then last night I got to thinking so what if the character doesn’t turn out well? I don’t have to try to make every book “perfect,” and I’m allowed to experiment, especially since I’m just at the beginning of my writing career. And if I don’t like that book, I’ll write another one, and then another one after that. I’m committed to my writing and willing to keep trying in order to make it work. I remember reading that even Sarah Dessen wrote a book and gave it to her agent, but then they later pulled it out (I don’t remember if she made the decision or the agent, but even after having several published books, she still wrote one that “wasn’t good enough” for whatever reason). And that’s okay.

Anyways, I guess the point of this post is that I realized how committed I was to my writing and it was quite freeing. I’m not trembling with anxiety anymore to decide what to write next or if it will be good enough, and if it wasn’t, what would that say about me. Writing has made me embrace experimenting, be easier on myself when I make mistakes, and most importantly, be willing to try over and over.

How about you? Are you “married” to your writing—committed to making it work no matter what, or just writing as long as it stays fun? Has writing changed your approach to the way you work?

Using Your Core to Revise

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First of all, Happy International Women's Day, everybody!

Onto the blog post...

I recently finished the first draft of my first novel, and I’m currently revising it, so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the overall picture. I still need to make sure all the characters don’t sound the same when they talk, but before that I want to make sure I have its “essence” down. What’s an essence? Hmm, well, some people call it the core of the story (check out a cool post by my crit buddy, Jade, discussing the core of her newest novel where she references a blog post by Maggie Stiefvater). I like to call it: the feeling you’re left with after you close the last page of the book.

Let’s take Twilight as an example (since it’s very popular and most people know it) and use my definition on it. The book is about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, and her life is in danger during most of the book, but especially toward the end. There are some pretty violent scenes and if you go on Amazon you’ll see that the two categories the book is under is “Love & Romance” AND “Spine-Chilling Horror.” I was very surprised to see the horror category. When I closed the book I felt pretty happy—the core of the book is the romance between the two main characters.

So after reading Jade’s post, I knew I had to identify the core of my book. During revisions I would have to shift the emphasis around in the book, and I didn’t want to lose my core. After some thinking, I realized that the core of my book is all about believing in yourself. I was very happy to find this out. It also helped me decide how to tie up some of the plot threads so that I keep the emphasis on my core and I think it made the book stronger as a whole.

How about you? What is the core of your book? Do you keep it in mind while you’re writing/revising?

It’s Okay to Dream: Crafting an Original Plot

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In a similar vein to Monday’s post I’m going talk about another one of the many tips James Scott Bell has in his book PLOT & STRUCTURE. (Really a great book. You should get it. No, I don’t work for his marketing team. Why do you ask?)

Anyways, his suggestion was about how to come up with original ideas. He said that when you come to an important part in your book (a twist, a life-changing event for the character, or the end) you should let your mind wander and jot down ten ideas about what could happen. The next day you go back to the ideas and think about two or three of the ones that appeal most to you. This way you can have a more original plot instead of one with the scenes unfolding the very first way you imagined them (and also probably the very first way most other people will imagine them). And as he pointed out, you don’t have to end up using them, but it will help you to look at your plot in a different light or it might give you an idea for some other part of the plot.

Now, I was pretty hesitant when I read this at first—I’m a plotter with PowerPoint slides to keep everything just right. Abandon my pre-planned plot from six months ago? Never. Impossible! I mean, I’ve thought about it so many times that I can’t even imagine anything going differently. But no matter how brilliant your plot is, it’s always helpful to take another look at it—maybe a plot hole will pop up, or you will really be validated in your brilliance. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m going to. Soon. I just came up with a shiny new outline for a book yesterday (sort of yesterday, I’ve been thinking about it for a few months) and I can’t wait to experiment!

What about you? Do you think of different possibilities for scenes or just go with the first thing that comes to mind? Do you find it hard to change a scene that you’ve had planned out for a long time?

Get Your Character Through That Door!

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Yes, I’ve been gone from the blogosphere for the past, oh, two weeks and a half, but I have a great excuse. Okay, I don’t really have one except that I never realized how quickly days pass by and you realize you haven’t blogged. But all’s not lost. While I was gone, I read (both fiction and nonfiction) and revised, and read some more. So I want to share with you what I learned about structure from a little book called PLOT & STRUCTURE by James Scott Bell. Hopefully, you will find it useful : )

Apparently there’s an Act I, II and III (big news, I know). But wait! There’s more. Mr. Bell says: “Let there be a disturbance and two doorways!” He focuses especially on the connections between acts and calls them doorways. For those who are visual learners (like me), this is what it looks like:

Act I

Character going along the way they usually do

(In novels you want to keep this part pretty short, in my MS it’s only about 3.5pgs)

///Disturbance!///

Something unusual happens to the character, but they still go on living pretty much the same way

(This is usually what makes the reader interested in reading further)

~First Doorway~

Something happens to character and they have to face the problem, there’s no way going back

(This makes the character transition from Act I to Act II)

Act II

Character has to deal with challenges associated with the main problem, further complications arise

(This makes up the bulk of the story)

~Second Doorway~

Something happens to character and they have to face the final battle, the novel has to end, and there’s no way going back

(This makes the character transition from Act II to Act III)

Act III

Character has to gather whatever tools and help they can get and fight the battle to the end, conclude the novel

(This is about a fifth of the novel, about 65pgs in my MS)

Mr. Bell especially emphasizes the fact that whatever pushes your character through the doorways between each act, there’s no going back. Let’s use a movie I recently watched as an example of a disturbance and the first doorway. It’s called the Holiday and focuses on two women.

Example 1 – The Holiday, movie, 2006

Disturbance—Woman I breaks up with her long time boyfriend because she found out he was cheating on her, Woman II finds out a guy she’s in love with (and she used to date on and off) has just gotten engaged

Now, they can technically keep living more or less the way they were, but they both decide to do something unusual—take a vacation far away.

First doorway—they find each other online and agree to exchange homes for the holidays

This takes them through the first doorway and into Act II because they can’t really go back—alone in new places they have to face how their lives are going and what they want to change about their lives.

Okay, so I don’t want to talk about the second doorway in case someone wants to watch the movie (it’s a great movie!), but I can do another example.

Example 2 – The Woman Who Only Liked Bad Guys, novel, I just made this one up

Act I – Woman reserved to relationships because she’s only attracted to bad guys and has bad experiences as a result of it, takes the same route to work every day

Disturbance – A man asks her out while she’s getting coffee in the morning and gives her his number

First Doorway – She always, always turns men down, especially his type, but that night she calls him up and accepts to go on a date with him

Act II – She goes on a date with him, falls for him, thinks that maybe he’s different (even thought she knows deep down that he’s not), they keep dating, move in together, months pass, but she keeps finding strange things around the house, she’s afraid he’s cheating on her

Second Doorway – Two big guys from the police show up at her door and she finds out that he’s involved in trafficking rare government-owned ladles (yes, ladles, why not?) She’s surprised (she was so sure there was another woman) and dismayed (not the ladles! They were so important to their country).

She agrees to help the big guys find her boyfriend and track down the ladles.

Act III –With the help of the big guys, a lot of guns, and her highest heels she goes out to bring her boyfriend to righteousness. They find him and he goes to jail. The ladles are saved and returned to the country’s treasury. She breaks up with her boyfriend and realizes he really was bad (even thought not exactly for the reasons she thought). She’s sad, but then ends up hooking up with one of the big guys from the police and realizes that she can like good guys. Especially ones that know the value of a ladle.

Okay, so I got a bit carried away coming up with Example 2, but I hope it made the disturbance and doorways clearer. I should also mention Mr. Bell said that you don’t have to have these elements in your novel, but they make it more relatable to readers.

Agree or disagree? Does your novel have a disturbance and doorways?

What's Your Process Blogfest!

As we all (hopefully) know, today is the What’s Your Process Blogfest! over at Shallee’s blog Life, the Universe, and Writing. If you just found out, I’m sure it’s not too late to sign up and share your process.

Shallee mentioned some fancy ways to use Word (which probably aren’t really that fancy, but I still hadn’t heard about them until today. Useful stuff!) I’ve only written one first draft so I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ll still let you know how I went about it.

Firstly, I thought I would be a pantser, but it turned out I’m a plotter. A relatively detailed plotter. Either that, or maybe it’s the fact that I write so much slower than I plot that by the third chapter I had a detailed plot. Which worked for me, because something about not knowing how the novel would end, or what will happen next, or if it will all turn out okay made me really anxious and paralyzed my writing, so I had to figure it out before I could go on.

Abby Annis wrote a post about using post-its to help plan your chapters so I started out doing that, but the sticky notes kept falling off my dresser, and I moved onto fancier technology—PowerPoint. Very handy. I recommend it. You can move your slides around, and add new ones wherever you need them, and they don’t get lost under your dresser.

So after I transferred my sticky notes to PowerPoint slides, I arranged them around to my satisfaction. Each slide was a scene, and I moved them around till I got chapters. I found it really helpful to be able to see all the slides in front of me so I could “read” though my novel in a few minutes and check for pacing, and whether I’m missing something, and make sure there’s enough variety between the types of scenes (not too many action scenes right beside each other because they desensitize the reader, and not too many non-action scenes because they lead to snoozing).

As for how I actually write, I usually don’t write linearly because it becomes tedious for me. But I do write semi-linearly, as in I write up to a point, skip forward to write one or two scenes, and then come back to that first point, and continue. Writing a scene towards the end of the novel sometimes helps with fleshing scenes that happen earlier, especially if you need to add detail or foreshadowing to those earlier scenes. (If you already know what the later scenes sound like, it’s easy to slip in a few things here and there when you go back to write the earlier scenes.)

And that’s how I wrote my first draft. It’s at about 95,000 words right now, and I’m revising it, and trying not to freak out because it feels like it’s going to be just as difficult as writing it from scratch.

How about you? Is your process similar? Any revision tips are greatly appreciated : ) I look forward to reading everybody else’s entries!