Fighting mid-book paralysis

Holly Lisle has begun her How to Think Sideways walk-through, and I’m amazed at how much value she is adding to the course. By watching Holly work through the process, I’m finally beginning to grasp the subtleties of her techniques.

The first time I finished Lesson 1, SAFE and PERFECT were the obvious enemies on the field. Sixty thousand words later, there are just a few stragglers of the SAFE and PERFECT armies left fighting. In doing Lesson 1 again with the new worksheets, this time I discovered my mid-book paralysis could largely be attributed to VICTIM and FEEL – the two barriers I never thought would be an issue for me. But with a little bit of mind mapping and brainstorming, the reasons emerged on the page.

Along with something else. When I had the first 12,000 words of my manuscript critiqued, Josh asked me to consider what genre I was writing. At the time, I thought mythic fantasy with a side serve of paranormal romance. The discovery of what lay behind VICTIM and FEEL has left me with a certainty – my tale is a romance. Holly’s techniques to help me to break through the why-I’m-not-writing-barrier provided insight to the deeper, romance-oriented themes of my story – and the reasons I really want to write this book.

I’ll need to cut some scenes and beef up some others, but there is no question – the story I want to write is simply a love story. The setting and the tropes might remain mythic or paranormal, but this is just boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl and they live happily every after.

Abandoned Places

I’ve been reviewing the lessons, going back to the beginning – all the way back to the Sweet Spot Map.

I can see a very strong thread of ‘abandoned places’ in my story. Abandoned places are all over my maps – ruins, ghost towns, urban exploring, empty buildings. And when I’m looking for inspiration, I turn to Abandoned Places. I’ve used the picture on the cover as the basis for a key setting in Last Ride.

And when I went to get the link for this book, imagine my joy on finding out there is now Abandoned Places II available! (and my horror at finding out how much second hand copies of the first book were selling for – I bought my copy for AUD70, and I remember thinking it was expensive then…)

I know I’m not alone in getting shivers from ghost towns, fearing empty buildings or loving historic ruins. So those of you of a like mind might also enjoy this: http://fuckyeahghosttowns.tumblr.com/

Enjoy, and happy writing!

Back to writing

Today I added a thousand words to my MS, for the first time in a month.

I’ve allowed life to get in the way during September – big time! Sending my work off for a critique provided a perfect excuse to sit back and get distracted by other things. Some of those things were pretty important (like laying the groundwork to start my own business) and other things were pure leisurely goodness (like getting out in to the garden because it’s spring.)

I’ve also been doing a lot more socialising lately. When I’m writing, I don’t feel the need to socialise. I’m quite happy to spend days on end at home with just Little Pearl for company. When I stop writing, I’m bored, directionless, dissatisfied.

So I’m glad to get back to it. National Novel Writing Month will be upon us shortly, and while I’m not going to participate in NaNo with a new novel, I’m going to use the NaNo energy and impetus to FINISH THE STORY. I estimate between thirty and forty thousand words will be needed (allowing for going down a few dead ends and major cutting in the revision), so, while not quite the 50K target for NaNo, still pretty substantial.

The end of thinking sideways?

Of course not!

But I have received the last of my lessons. No more Tuesday-rushing-to-the-laptop. I don’t think of myself as a graduate yet – there are two more things I think I need to do before I can label myself a HTTS graduate.

1. Apply the remaining lessons to my manuscript (from Lesson 10 onwards)
2. Finish the manuscript!

It’s coming along slowly, as life is getting in the way a little at the moment. But the tally continues to creep up on my word counter, and now I’m two thirds to ‘finished.’ The new story is coming together more slowly than the old one, but I think that is partly because it’s a better story (less one dimensional) and because I haven’t been walking over winter, and walking helps me to connect with my Muse. But spring is here, and although it’s still very cold here in Canberra (not to mention magpie season) I’ll be back in walking mode from tomorrow.

Happy writing, everyone!

Hiatus

Sorry about the lack of blog posts recently.

I’m busy working on the first couple of chapters of Last Ride so they’re in a fit state to send to Josh Lanyon, the award winning author who very kindly offered a critique prize for the SavvyAuthors.com Summer Symposium.

Lucky for me, two of my fellow Sideways students have volunteered to read through the first ten thousand words before I send them off. Fellow writers – what would we do without them? Thanks Sassy Sways and Tanja!

Procrastinating

My word count went down, because I’ve edited the first thousand words of my novel to post to a critique forum at SavvyAuthors.com

The resulting critique pointed out some very useful issues and will improve the opening scene tremendously, but it was a bit of a blow to my confidence. Also, I don’t think I did a very good job of critiquing the other submissions.

I keep telling myself this is my first novel, and my first critiques, so I shouldn’t expect to be PERFECT. But PERFECT has always bugged me, I’m your classic high achiever My head knows that I’m learning the craft, and the only way to improve is to make mistakes and learn from them. The rest of me is screaming, ‘I should be good at this already!’

My ‘me’ needs a good talking to, I think. It’s time to go all the way back to Lesson One of How to Think Sideways, and remind myself of the techniques to break the PERFECT thinking barrier.

The other matter that’s getting me down is the amount of rewriting I need to do on the existing fifty thousand words plus now that I’ve merged two characters into one. Aside from the edits needed to merge the two, the storyline also needs to change radically (for the better.) The new plot line puts a bit more emphasis on the character arc of the protagonist and the romantic element of the novel. It also seems to have opened up lots of opportunities for LUC, muse bombs, etc.

Feedback is a gift. And it really is. The people who took the time to comment on my opening scene were generous with their time and expertise, and I can’t believe how much they picked up that I missed – including major issues with setting and character / action logic. I can see that now I’m going to have share my work earlier than I expected, because I have to learn as I go here. A couple of writer friends have already offered to critique, but I figure the more the better – so if you’re willing to help me out, please leave a comment! (And I’d be happy to return the favour, with the caveat that I am an inexperienced ‘critter’).

I’m learning so much at the moment, it feels like my head is going to explode. But writing here about it always leaves me feeling positive and motivated to get started again. Already, I’ve submitted my first critique at Forward Motion (fmwriters.com), and I’m going to read up on their guide to critiquing so I can do a better job for other writers. And right now, I’m off to redo my Sentences Lite and scene cards…

I’m a winner!

I’m very excited on two counts this week.

First, I passed the 50K mark on my work in progress this week. Yay me! *throws confetti*

Now that I’m going back to apply the HTTS lessons, the ideas and enthusiasm are piling up again. I think I overplanned and underbuilt, but these are easy mistakes to fix at this stage in the draft.

The Dot and the Line is something that throws a lot of people, so I’m going to add an example of how I went back to apply this technique. As I mentioned, I had under-built my world. One of the key problems was that I didn’t have a thorough understanding of how the magic worked. So I did a Line exercise, putting the two different types of magic on either side of the Line. Here’s how it came out:

Seidr                                                        Galdr

Feminine                                                        Masculine
Shaman & person oriented                        Rune & word oriented
Intuitive                                                        Technical and logical
Old as the human race                                New with my master practitioner
Many practitioners                                        Few practitioners
Many ways of doing the same thing                One right way
Dreams, necromancy, divination                Charms and spells
and astral travel
Energy drawn from within                      Energy drawn from blood or sacrifice
Need inborn talent / genes                        Need intelligence

My protag and antag are each master practitioners of a different art, so doing the Line exercise has benefited my story in two ways: I have more sources of conflict for the two MCs, and I have a better understanding of the magic.

(On a side note, have you noticed that the Norse seidr, practiced only by women, is very similar to Robert Jordan’s saidar in the Wheel of Time series, also only practiced by women?)

It’s been a blast over at SavvyAuthors.com, where the Summer Symposium has just finished. So many workshops! I learned so much that I want to apply to my MS straight away, but I need to organise and prioritise first. But the best thing? I won a three chapter critique from one of their published authors! I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it (la, la, la).

Is my MS ready for critiquing? No way. Am I? Equally not. But it’s too good an opportunity to miss. The poor writer who is assigned my MS will find plenty to say, I’m sure. Given that I blogged about the importance of getting feedback very recently here, I can only put my money where my mouth is. And the truth is, I am thrilled to win this prize- I just wish my MS was in a more advanced state (like second draft).

I’m doing several workshops at SavvyAuthors at the moment – Worldbuilding, Writing Figuratively, Active vs. Passive Speech, and Self-editing. So forgive me if the blog posts are a bit sporadic.

More on the critique later. In the meantime – onwards!

Mired in the Middle

I’m stuck, smack bang in the middle of my manuscript.

I can see too many problems with my story to go ahead in the same way I’ve been working.

- Narrative thread is uneven, because I haven’t written in a linear fashion.
- Only two of my characters have a distinctive voice – neither of which are the main character – and only one of them has a voice I think is RIGHT.
- My description is lacking… almost entirely.
- I still don’t have all the scenes and subplots needed to build the complex layers of a satisfying novel.

I’m not going to worry about the other issues such as use of passive voice and inconsistent POV, because those are issues easily picked up in revision. The other problems I’ve listed above – with the exception of insufficient description – are problems potentially affecting the structure and plot of the novel.

These problems began when I stopped applying most of the HTTS lessons, because I didn’t want to re-read. My Inner Editor takes re-reading as an invitation to edit, and the MS isn’t ready for that.  I thought I could adapt the lessons around my limitations. But, as I’ve read on the HTTS forum and in the lessons themselves, the harder you find a lesson, the more likely it is that you will get huge benefits from mastering it.

So writing the MS is in hiatus while I do a few things I should have done way back in the first weeks of writing the manuscript.

- I skimped on the character and world-building, and now I’m paying the price. So it’s back to Lessons 7 and 8.
- I need to fix the love interest / hero problem, so more brainstorming and clustering exercises to come up with more than just a few options.
- Then I’m going to print my MS as it exists, redo the outline, and begin applying Lessons 9 to 20… all of which I’ve read, but have mostly held back on applying because it meant revisiting what I’d written. I just have to put my Inner Editor back in his box.
- I’m going to continue writing every day – 500 words plus – of writing prompts if nothing else. Something that might spark some other ideas I can work on once I’ve finished this first draft.

I see fins in the water

I’ve been seeing signs of imminent danger in my manuscript for a while now. Unwillingness to deviate from the outline. Plodding through the middle with characters I didn’t feel I knew. Writing feeling like work again, because I’d written all the candy bar scenes. A nagging feeling that I was going to be finished with all my planned scenes at around sixty thousand words instead of ninety or a hundred thousand.

And then the shadows in the water resolved, and I saw the shark.

I hate the hero / love interest in my book. Actually, it’s even worse than that. He bores me. I don’t care if he lives or dies. And if my MC ended up with him at the end, as a reader I would throw the book against the wall in disgust.

In some scenes, he only seems to be there to ask questions so that the heroine can fill in backstory or exposition – a big no-no.

The love scenes with the hero lack sizzle. The scenes that pop are those with the villain, or the old flame. And in reading Lesson 20, I’ve realised that I’ve made a huge promise to the reader about that old flame – and then almost totally ignored it in the rest of my outline. He pops in for a few minutes in the big finale to add his two cents, and that’s it.

Lots of circling sharks. Major problems. Why did it take me so long to admit that I was in trouble?

Because the opening scene of my book, the scene I ‘saw’ in my head when I first conceived the idea for the book, has the love interest dying in the desert of Afghanistan and the heroine riding in to save him. I love this scene so much I’ve written it from both points of view, and it’s the touchstone of my novel. In that scene, I love him, I love her… and I have the sinking feeling that it’s a darling, and must therefore be murdered immediately.

Is the book wrecked? I don’t think so. There’s plenty that’s salvageable, because the romance sub-plot was just that – a sub-plot. What are my options?

1.Take time out to build the character of the love interest, and in revision go back and fix those horrible scenes where he appears as dull as dishwater. Delete or minimise the promises made about the old flame character.
2. Merge the ‘old flame’ character with the love interest
3. Lose the romance subplot altogether and leave the old flame character as backstory, but cut down the promises
4.Have her end up with either the old flame or the villain instead of the every-time-I-look-at-him-I-see-tumbleweeds-rolling-on-an-empty-road love interest.

I don’t like #4, because I think the reader will be bored with the love interest if I don’t either fix him or get rid of him.

I don’t want to go with #3 for two reasons – firstly, I like romance in my stories, so I want to retain the romantic sub-plot, and secondly, I’m already concerned that I won’t get my word count in without deleting more scenes from my manuscript.

Which leaves #1 or #2. I think I’ll sleep on it. Maybe my muse will come up with something overnight.

Update: Didn’t have to sleep on it – during the quiet cuddle / night time feed with my daughter, my Muse was whispering in my ear. I suspect she had the solution all along…

SavvyAuthors.com

I’ve just hit forty thousand words with the work in progress. WOOT! A real help to making this goal has been an online workshop on Plotting Subplots over at SavvyAuthors.com. Thanks to writing coach P. June Diehl, who teaches the course, I have several new subplots to help bolster my book’s sagging middle.

It’s made me think about some of the courses I’ve taken, and books I’ve read. I have many, many books about writing but, with a couple of exceptions, the techniques I’ve mastered most effectively are those I’ve learned through structured coursework. I think that’s just how I learn best.

SavvyAuthors.com is a recent discovery for me – heaps of cheap (US $10 – $15) online workshops on everything from undercover surveillance techniques to romance writing to dialogue. The workshops last between one and four weeks generally, and there are also heaps of contests, ‘boot camps’ and a year long mentoring track.

I’ve enrolled in several workshops. The quality and substance varies depends largely on who is running the workshop (as you can imagine), but I haven’t been disappointed by any of the workshops I’ve taken so far. That said, I think there is little point ‘lurking’ in the workshop – doing the exercises and being able to ask questions of the coach on the spot is one of the most useful aspects of these workshops.

Being in Australia, I’ve found the chat components of the workshops challenging (note: not all workshops have this component) – by the time I figured out how to convert Pacific Time to Australian Eastern Standard Time the chat had been and gone

If you sign up for premium membership of SavvyAuthors.com, you are also eligible to register for free workshops. I’m really looking forward to some of the four day workshops being offered in the SavvyAuthors Summer Symposium, which starts later this month.

Slowly I’m growing my writer’s toolkit of techniques that work for me. Most of them are Think Sideways techniques, but I’m adding a few more now from other sources. The subplots technique I learned today from June in the Plotting Subplots workshop was worth the cost of the workshop on its own!

Can you recommend any other good sites that have online writing workshops?