In honor of the upcoming holiday, I thought it only appropriate to write a post about the people in my life whom I’m thankful for.
And then I thought no one is going to want to read anything so boring. (Does anyone read these ramblings of mine anyway?)
So instead of detailing how I’m thankful for my wonderful husband, my family, my friends (those in IRL and in my virtual world), and all the good things that have transpired over the years, I’m dedicating this post to someone who will likely never know the influence he had on me: Mr. Baker.
Mr. Baker was my eleventh grade English teacher, and the person who is responsible for me first penning a work of fiction. You see, up until eleventh grade English, I’d never written a single story. Nor did I ever consider that I might have an aptitude for anything related to English class. Much as I loved reading, English was so not my strength.
But Mr. Baker, whether the curriculum dictated it or it was his own insidious plan, was determined to teach us how to write. And write we did in many styles, including narrative non-fiction and short stories. He gave out awards, based on his own judgment and class feedback, to those who wrote the best pieces for any given assignment. He called them Golden Pens (I suppose these days they’d be called Golden Keyboards – holy crap, I’m old), and hung up the winners’ names around the classroom. I won quite a few of them much to my surprise. It was the first time I’d ever had won praise for anything in English class, and Mr. Baker was the first teacher I ever had who encouraged me to write. Who told me I was good at it.
By age sixteen and not feeling like I was good at anything, that was huge. Can’t emphasize that enough. HUGE.
In fact, not only did Mr. Baker boost my self confidence, he encouraged me to take risks. I knew that in his class I didn’t have to write the typical blah essay response to class assignments. I could be creative, try different writing styles, and make weird leaps in my logic – not just regurgitate my class notes. It might not work, but he didn’t punish me for trying.
It was an odd experience, and one that would have long effects. I’m pretty sure I never would have written another short story if he hadn’t taken the time to offer advice and provide praise. And although I haven’t written another short story since college, nine completed novels later, I still recognize his influence. If one of those novels is ever published, Mr. Baker deserves part of the credit because it would not have happened without him.
So Mr. Baker, I am very thankful to have been placed in your class all those years ago.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Subtitle this one Writing at the Speed of Good
Well, after last week’s post, I can safely say that Inner Editor has calmed down. She allows me to make notes in a file called “edits” and has faith that I’ll get around to them eventually.
So my thoughts this week are on speed. (No, my brain is not on speed, my thoughts are about speed. Sheesh.) I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before, but I’ve noticed a definite correlation between how quickly I can write a first draft and how quickly the story moves when it’s all done. The faster I write, the faster-paced the story is. And usually, the better and more gripping it is.
I’d like to theorize it’s because my excitement about the story transfers to the page (and maybe it does to a degree), or that I instinctively know what makes a better story these days and thus get excited and write one faster (and maybe I do). But I think the real answer is that I write certain types of scenes faster – mainly, action scenes or tension/danger scenes. What slows me down? Emotional scenes or transition scenes, i.e. those ones that are necessary to move the plot forward in a way that makes sense but don’t add much else.
Now don’t get me wrong. I think a well-written emotional scene can be very gripping, and they obviously add an important layer to any story. I’m jealous of those of who write them well. But they are also, frequently, slower scenes. They allow the reader to breathe, to enjoy the moment, and relish the tasty emotional component of the story. Unless you’re writing something like a straight out, balls to the wall thriller, emotional scenes are good and probably necessary. I like my characters to have an emotional arc in the course of a story, and that requires them.
But I’m not writing romances or family sagas or dramas, etc. I’m writing urban fantasies (usually), and the less time I dwell on emotion-specific scenes, the faster my brain churns out story. For my first drafts, I need to focus on action and forward momentum. When I do that, the emotion tends to come out naturally. And thus I write faster, and the story flows faster. And, I think, in the end I wind up with a more gripping, faster-paced, better story.
Into my tenth first draft and I’m still learning things. I must be pretty slow. 
Has anyone else doing NaNo discovered insights about their writing?
Word count: 45,982
Probability of reaching 50k goal: I’d say about 100%. Shocking.
And Other Authorial Accidents
One of the fun things (sarcasm alert) about writing is that non-writers tend to think your characters are all you. And well, they are in a way; I created them. But I am not my characters, although my characters are many things.
In fact, one of the difficulties in creating realistic, fully fleshed-out characters is giving them all a unique life. Sometimes they bring their baggage with them, fully formed into my head. Some are bold; some are timid. Some are reckless; some are cautious. Some are the very definition of angst; others think they are the alpha of the pack. Where it becomes tricky for me as their writer is in the details. They all need their own voice, their own way of viewing the world, and their own manner (or mannerisms) of dealing with problems.
I do my best to not rely on the same old crutches every time. But because I did create them, it’s inevitable that parts of me want to slip in. And the part of me that tries its hardest to do so is sarcasm.
See, sarcasm is the language of my family. We are a sarcastic bunch, and I married a sarcastic man, one who can give and take like we do. I’m used to sarcasm being a sign of endearment. If we aren’t sarcastic around you–if we treat you with all due politeness–it’s because we either don’t know you well enough or we just don’t like you. So naturally my characters want to be sarcastic too.
Of course, not all of them should be. I may know not all of them have the personality for it, and yet I find myself fighting the urge to type sarcastic responses for them. It’s like little authorial accidents waiting to happen. And not giving in to them makes me twitchy.
So question for the day: what makes you twitch when writing? What authorial accidents-in-the-making try to slip into your stories?
It’s been a crazy week chez Ink, at least where work is concerned. Proposal writing time at the office is always insane, and when you factor in driving all over my state for another project… Just tell me when it’s Saturday, thanks.
But the NaNo WIP rolls on like a boulder picking up speed down the side of Mount Washington. Feel the momentum. It is unstoppable. Indestructible. Invincible.
And full of crappy writing. But hey, that’s what edits are for. Eventually.
Right now my Inner Editor (IE, pronounced like a scream, which is appropriate) is slowly coming around to what Elizabeth Kubhler-Ross identified as the acceptance stage of grief. First, IE was in denial: “You’re not actually going to try this NaNo thing. No way. You love me too much.” Then came anger: “Listen, you unrepentant writer, stop it right now. Listen to me or I’m going to revolt. I’m warning you! I’ll never edit for you again, biotch.” Then she bargained: “Come on, just this one fix. You realize how much rewriting you’ll have to do if you don’t fix it now? Do this for me and I’ll be quiet.” Slowly, she sank into depression: “I quit. You hate me. I’m going to go curl up and die in the darkest recesses of your brain.” But finally, she’s accepted: “All right, whatever. You want to go ahead without me. Fine. But I’ll laugh when you come crying to me later about all the problems that need fixing.”
It’s an uneasy truce, and occasionally she reverts, usually heading back to anger or bargaining. I hear her voice whisper in my head, “You haven’t even finished writing this scene yet. You can totally just delete those last 500 words and redo it.”
To be honest, it’s killing me to ignore her. I’ve always edited as I write, and it usually results in pretty clean first drafts. Not that I don’t have to go back and add or delete scenes or fix ugly sentences, but I don’t typically have to rewrite entire sequences or strengthen character arcs, etc. This time I will though, and I admit it makes me nervous. So we’ll see. IE might just get the last laugh.
Then I’ll have to kick her red pen-loving ass.
Word Count: 25,911
Instead of a collection of my random Friday thoughts, which aren’t all that interesting anyway, I’m posting a collection of random NaNo thoughts.
‘Cause I’m sure that’s WAY more interesting. /sarcasm
Ok, so it hasn’t been quite a week yet, but it’s close enough. If I’m lucky, I’ll churn out another 5k before midnight on Saturday.
My initial impression of this insanity is that it’s working well for my particular story. The voice is light and breezy, and it flows quickly. The material needs to move at a quick pace, and the manic speed at which I need to type helps that. I find myself doing a lot of pre-writing. In the car, in the shower, when I’m supposed to be working…. *cough* My brain is constantly trying to keep one to two scenes ahead of my fingers, which demands a lot more daydreaming pre-writing then if I’d been doing this at a more leisurely pace. I’ve also found it helpful to keep an “edits” file on hand, a place where I can jot down the stuff I know will need fixing later so it doesn’t weigh on my mind now and distract me. I have some serious research I’m going to need to do when this thing is done. But that’s okay. I love editing.
I can’t imagine this working for a heavier story, though. At least not for me. So I think choosing the right novel–for me–is key. It has to be fun, something that makes me want to write it, which is a tall order. I know, eventually, I’m going to run into scenes that I don’t want to write, and then this process is going to be painful. For the moment, though, the passion burns, and I think the massive amounts of writing everyday feed the flames. I’ve said it before, but writing a novel is like nurturing a relationship. It takes work.
In this case, it’s the work to survive a one-month whirlwind romance. Never having had one of those before, I’ve got to say it can be fun. Exhausting, but fun.
Current word count: 8255
Perhaps subtitle this one – NaNo, Oh no!
Or maybe – Don’t mind the crazy lady hunched over her laptop.
For all you non-writing folks reading, NaNo is short for NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month. A month-long challenge designed to get people to churn out 50,000 words of a project. That’s not long enough to be a full-fledged novel in most cases, but that’s not the point. The point is that people who dabble but never finish anything or those who need a kick in the butt to write have a “competition” to inspire them on.
So what possessed me to sign up for NaNo? I’m really not sure. Maybe it’s coming off the downer that was the last WIP that’s making me crave a pick-me-up novel. Or maybe it’s simply the thrill of the challenge to write 50,000 words in one month. Or it could be peer pressure from my fellow Purgatorians. Or maybe it’s simply that I’ve never done it before and this is the first year when I have something ready to go in time.
But more likely it’s because I’m crazy.
Because between traveling for work and Thanksgiving this month, I have a lot less than 30 days available to spew forth 50k from my fingers. Actually, based on the number of days I will at least be home and able to write, I’ll have to turn out 2400 a day to get out 50k. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that just because I’ll be at home that I’ll have time to write.
Still I know my writing style, and I know I do my best writing when I attack a story in a mad frenzy to get it out, before I lose that infatuation with my idea. And maybe that’s why I’m doing this. Keeping the pressure on myself means keeping the pressure on my MC, and that almost always translates into a story that flies.
So don’t mind me this November if I’m lost in my own little world, typing madly at the computer. If you worry, just set down a fresh mug of coffee and some food. I’ll get to it eventually.
And before I go (nuts), have a Happy Halloween! I’ll be leaving on that first business trip this weekend, so there will be no new post until next Thursday or Friday.
Last weekend I accomplished a goal I set for myself – I finished my YA dystopian novel. Yay! And I do mean YAY. 
It’s the tenth novel I’ve completed, but the first where I felt finishing to be a relief. My first couple novels I was happy to just type The End, to prove to myself that I could do it once and then that once was not a fluke. The last few I finished and was genuinely happy because I thought they were good, well-written (or would be after editing) stories. But this last one? Thank God the damn thing is done.
Don’t get me wrong. I adore the concept. The writing might either be some of my best or some of my worst. I can’t tell yet. But the story weighed on my back like Atlas’ burden. The dystopian is supposed to be about hope and faith, but it’s a heavy story and the ending is… well, different. There’s not much humor or romance or light-hearted moments. And I’ve learned something from that.
While it was nice to try writing something “serious,” I’m not cut out for it. I was depressed and mopey almost the entire time I worked on it. The moment I typed the last word, I immediately felt better. And that tells me one thing: I need to stick to writing that’s fun and humorous. It might not be the kind of stuff that makes people go “Wow, you wrote that?” or wins awards, but my sanity requires it. More importantly, I have fun doing it.
Oh sure, fun and humorous doesn’t mean I won’t torture my MC with chronic pain or major guilt (aka ‘Twixt), and it doesn’t mean I won’t squash her dreams like a bug and screw up her relationships (aka Strange Misery), and yeah, she’s going to have to fight for her life as people drop like flies around her (pretty much anything I’ve written), but that can still be fun.
And wow – for the next few novels, I am all about fun.
Nope, I didn’t do this last week. I guess I broke my fledgling tradition. Oh well.
It’s been a boring week here. Sure, the Phillies won the NLCS, but that’s not really anything interesting on my end. (Okay, not that I post anything interesting ever, but I try. Humor me. Kthx)
We did have good friends come visit last weekend, though, and it made for such a wonderful break in routine. Friend Lindsey blogged about it already, and she was good and actually took some pics. I suppose you could say we didn’t do much. We went apple-picking and made apple crisp. We played Uno, which is not a kid’s game when the four of us get together. (Get your minds out of the gutter. Let’s just say there is drinking, much vindictiveness, and much more creative swearing.)
It was a short visit, and the perfect thing to get my mind off writing for a while. Sometimes, we all need a break from the things we love, lest we start to hate them.
And now in lieu of anything creative, I will bore you with pictures of fall in NH. One of the few things I like about my state.
Baseball. It has to be the perfect sport for making analogies. It’s a team sport that lives for individual stats. It gives you the ability to break things down into bases. And it’s the one time when it is perfectly acceptable to hit something with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, it’s not okay to hit someone, but you know when the pitcher hurls one high and inside they’re just aiming for the batter’s head, so… *cough* I digress.
Hitting people = bad.
Anyway, it’s playoff time, and again my Phillies are hoping to make the World Series. And I started thinking: getting published is kind of like baseball.
The Line-up
Now for this analogy to even sort of work, you must assume writers are the ones at bat. They are on the offense. You can’t write or publish without being proactive, after all. Agents and editors are in the field, sometimes literally defending the their in-boxes from from the writers’ queries.
Getting to Base
So how do you end up published? Well, before you can run the bases, i.e. have a shot at it, you have to get on base. That means you need to learn how to hit. In other words, someone’s taught you the mechanics of writing–spelling, grammar, etc.–and you have an idea, and perhaps even a flair for communicating that idea with words. Great, but can you translate that idea into a full-blown novel?
Strikeout: An inability to finish your novel.
Drawing a walk: The few who will be “discovered” through their short stories or fabulous online presence. Don’t count on it for most of us.
Single: Finishing that book. If it was as easy it looks, batting .300 wouldn’t be an impressive stat.
Double: Finishing isn’t enough. You must edit, research publishing, and find the courage to send that novel out into the cold, cruel world. Some people won’t bother or will get discouraged too easily and quit. If you’re not one of them, congrats – you made it to second base.
Triple: It’s been called the most mysterious hit in baseball, and aside from an in-the-park homerun, it’s also possibly the rarest hit. Few will succeed. But if you manage to snag an agent, that’s probably the equivalent. Of course, finding an agent is no guarantee of selling your book. Which is why, you need the….
Homerun: A one-book deal is like a solo homer. A two-book deal, scores you and a teammate. Of course, the distance of that homerun has to be counted too. Did you barely clear the wall, or did you smack that ball into the upper decks with a 6- or more-figure deal?
Some Cheese for My Philly Steak?
Yes, please. Obviously, this analogy reeks of cheese.
But the great thing about baseball, unlike some other sports, is how many games you get to play in a season. The more games, the more at-bats and the more tries you get to swing and hit something out the park. And like learning to hit a baseball, the more you write, the more you improve and the better your chances are of writing something that brings a stadium to its collective, cheering feet. (Not coincidentally, the more I learn about the publishing business, the more convinced I am that you need a stadium’s worth of people to say “yes” before you succeed.)
But whatever your passion–be it writing, baseball, painting, etc.–you have to make the decision to get to the plate. And swing. And keep swinging. To go down swinging. Yes, take the time to learn how to improve your swing, but keep swinging. You’ll foul a lot. Miss a lot. Swear a lot, most likely. Yet one day you’ll probably make it to first base. Another day, hopefully, you’ll make it beyond.
