writing the novel

research and poetry

2011-12-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it seems it takes forever to do the research for one small detail. In my case, that small detail is key to a domino reaction that moves my novel along, so it's essential to get it right. I went back over the first part of my novel and realized I need to find a new "key" because the one I have now is just not enough to propel my characters into the nest of vipers. :) I'm mulling over options and waiting for something to bob to the top.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping the creative juices flowing by writing poetry. It may not be great stuff, but it causes me to visualize a snapshot of life, and try to bring it to my readers--much like photographers capture a moment in which emotions live on faces and gestures emphasize the intensity of that second in time when the shutter clicked.

My critique group seems to have been most fond of a poem about coming upon a hummingbird suddenly and how that few seconds of awareness struck me at the time. I love hummingbirds. I always feel like God gave me a special gift when I get to see one. Silly, but they have that effect on me, even when they're attacking the PG&E guys trimming our backyard trees.

One poem I wrote for my daughter when she was about three has been designated "a children's book" by my group, so now I have to work up the introduction to the action, and give it a proper ending. Thus, that snapshot has to turn into a panorama of sorts, spread out to give more of the picture. So, another thing on my writer's to-do list.

When you find your writing slowing down, try a bit of poetry. Most of mine don't rhyme--that's just my preference--and when they do, it's pretty much a sign I'm being facetious. I don't know that I can write a serious rhyming poem to save my life. But if you like rhyming, rhyme; if not, don't. But give it a try and see if it jumpstarts some of your other writing.

It's been a long, long time

2011-11-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

I've been away from the blog for a while. Actually, I've been going crazy writing poetry, since I discovered that I can write stuff people like. Now, if I could only sell some.
The novel languishes, not because the story isn't there, but because I need to sort out some very basic and important procedural elements that have to be dealt with before the story can continue. In the very near future, I hope to meet with a San Jose Police Officer to talk about criminal activity and hope I can get a lead on what I need. He is a very obliging officer and I'm already thankful just that he said he'd sit down and talk to me!
So, in a week or two, I expect some more pieces of my puzzle to come together and continue the novel. Meanwhile, I'll keep the creative juices flowing with poetry.

The generosity of the famous (or sort of famous).

2011-08-28T16:31:00.001-07:00

This past month, I've talked with a few of my favorite authors, thanks to technology. Facebook, blogs, email--what glorious options we have for "talking" to people.

I subscribe to Earlene Fowler's blogs, which are down-to-earth and warm letters about what's happening on the home front and the struggles she's facing with her latest book. She also posts where she'll be doing book signings and which book is coming out soon. I responded to one of her posts by asking her if she outlined her books or not (not), and received encouragement that there's no right or wrong way to write a novel--just YOUR way. Earlene writes cozy mysteries set along the Central Calif. coast.

Similar encouragement came from Rett MacPherson (see previous post) and Evelyn Sherry, who is part of my writers critique group. Evelyn hasn't published her first novel yet, but she's our most prolific member and we expect to see her in print soon.

Finding encouragement for your writing is truly wonderful. I know, I know, I've raved about my critique group before. A lot. But the support is priceless. And getting encouragement from my favorite writers (whose work lines my shelves) is just fudge frosting!

Write your favorite authors, or Tweet them, or check out their Facebook pages and see what you can learn about their writing disciplines, style, organization, and maybe you'll pick up the name of an agent on the way.

How Rett MacPherson writes her books.

2011-08-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

Rett MacPherson wrote: "For me, almost always, always, always, my books start with characters, not plot. (Including the ones that never see publication.) Usually, a character just springs forth and I'll start thinking about what she does for a living or where she lives, or maybe she's at a particularly crazy point in her life, in which the story will then unfold. I'll use Torie as an example, since it's the only examples of my writing that you've read. I knew I wanted to write a cozy-mystery series, and I had just seen Stephen King on a tour and he'd said, "Write what you know, write what you're comfortable with."

So, once I realized that my mystery character would be a genealogist/historian, little things started to come, like she lived in a river tourist town, she had children, etc etc. Then the character starts to "talk" to me. I get little snippets of dialogue floating around in my head. (Take a notebook with you, write it down. You may or may not use that dialogue, but you'd rather have saved it and not use it than the opposite.) Then others start to talk to me, Sylvia, Colin, Rudy. Somewhere in there, the book sort of starts to take shape. Like, I know how I want it to begin, how I want it to end, and I usually have two or three major scenes (like how she'll find the body, strawberry festival etc) that come to mind. Or maybe it'll be two or three confrontations that come to mind. It all swirls and swirls and swirls and then I sit down with pen and paper and start scribbling and it might be something like this: --A shop owner asks Torie for help. Her father never came home after the war. Torie agrees to trace her family tree, only to find her dead a few days later.-- I'll add (since it's a mystery) suspects, major players, and I just hand write no more than a page.

Then I sit down to the computer and write Page One, Chapter One and start writing. So, to answer your question, I do NOT do extensive outlines. I do know writers who do. In fact, one is a fairly well-known sci-fi writer and he told me that he does a chapter by chapter outline, which is basically a rough draft. Each chapter in his "outline" is about one typed paged. He asked me, "If you don't do an extensive outline, how do you know what happens?" Clearly, if he didn't do an outline, he'd feel lost. For me, if I did a major outline like that, then I feel like I've already told the story, and it loses some of the punch for me. The actual writing then becomes more of a chore than an adventure. So, I do about a one page outline, but not until after the characters are really developed in my head and talking to me. The rest is more organic. And one of the beautiful things about NOT doing an extensive outline, is if a brand new idea springs to mind right in the middle of chapter 14 and I go with it, it won't mess up my extensive outline. The book is more free to take on a life of its own and be guided by its characters. I'm a combo-writer, I suppose. (One other thing I do is as I'm writing, I keep a notebook and each time I write some new tidbit of info about a recurring character or place, I'll jot it down. Like, under Rudy, I might write,' brown eyes, plumbing salesman, has a sister named Amy.' So that when I go back to write them in the next book, those facts are there so that I don't have to hunt through my old manuscripts etc. And believe me, if people are reading your books back to back, they will catch those inconsistencies.) I'm afraid, even with my trusty notebook, I still made errors.

Now, with some of my fantasy fiction that I've written, where I've created entire worlds, I do a lot more planning on how the world works, but still, not a major outline. Anyway, I hope this helps. Just remember, don't force anything. If extensive outline is what you need, do it. If no outline is what you need, do it. The process should feel organic and natural, even if it isn't. There really are no rights or wrongs. If that makes sense. -- All in my humble opinion, of course. :-)"

(Rett is the author of a series of cozy mysteries starring genealogist Torie O'Shea, and may be starting a new series--or at least thinking of it. She is one of my favorite writers. I suggest you check her books out at your local bookstore or library.) This information is printed here with permission from Rett, who answered my question on her FaceBook page. Ain't technology amazing?

How does a novel start? With organiziation. Or not.

2011-08-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a precise scientific survey of writers to find out how they write their books. (okay, I've asked three other writers.)

Do they organize, outline, use sticky notes, or just start writing? Inquiring minds want to know. At least this one does. I'm not naming names here, but one very successful cozy mystery writer who uses quilt patterns in her titles (that's all I'm giving you) says she doesn't outline a thing. She says she just writes. And that, she says, is why she does a lot of rewriting. :) I love a writer with a sense of humor.

Another says she knows the beginning and the end, and maybe a couple of things she wants in the middle, but that's it.

I feel the need to have major events laid out--like fence posts, as I've mentioned in the past. Then I can write from point to point, linking up the key events. Maybe it's because I'm less experienced and I need that safety net of knowing where I'm going. I do detour here and there, but having the next "post" on the horizon keeps my writing on target. Not set in cement. Just on target.

I've asked another of my favorite writers to comment and will put her input in the next post.

Poetry called me, and I had to answer

2011-07-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at Poetry Center San Jose this past week. I had a horrible poetry teacher in college who seemed bent on picking his favorites, then destroying all other students so they never wrote poetry again. I was destroyed. I hadn't written any poetry (save a funny rhyme for my daughter when she was three) since about 1970. Baby, that's a long time! But Poetry Center let me come back, like John Donne's compass, to the point where I began.

My critique group (yes, I am extolling their virtues again) includes a poet, and one day she brought a piece about a tiny place in Texas which led us all to reminisce about small towns in our past. Evelyn C. challenged us each to bring a poem about a small town for our next meeting. One week to produce a poem after 40 years! Holy iambic pentameter! But I don't write poetry,which I kept telling them, but they wouldn't let me off the hook. So I wrote something about a little town in Oregon that keeps a pretty low profile.

The next week, I informed them I still didn't write poetry, I write short paragraphs. I read my piece and was informed it was "narrative poetry," and they liked it. Shock! I was so emboldened that I took it to Poetry Center, where Nils Peterson was reading form his recently published book--and his stuff is a lot like mine (similar style, but better, of course). At the open mic part at the end of their meeting, I read my poem about Scio, Oregon. I liked the feedback I got from this very warm and encouraging group. So, I guess now I'm a poet. Who woulda guessed?

the reason to write

2011-07-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

I have analyzed my struggle with the book. I began it rather naively--writing whatever scenes popped into my head after a brief outline. I'm sitting back now and re-planning the whole thing. I apparently need a strong outline, and my rather nebulous notes about what's coming in the book do not sustain my momentum. I know what makes my main character tick, for the most part, but I'm not sure why she cares about the secondary character, whose murder sets everything in motion.

And I am fragmented. I'm working on a quilt, keeping the homeschooling stuff going through summer and preparing for our classes in the fall, and we've had a death in the family this summer. That leaves a gap, and an emotional hole to dig out of to reach the surface again. Add travel plans to see my side of the family, keeping the household going, and arranging times for my daughter to hang out with friends. I'm a taxi service. So a lot of my notes are on little pieces of paper that I have to translate when I get home. Some of those notes require their own Rosetta Stone. I wish I had better handwriting.

What I have to do is to keep plugging away-and to remember that I'm telling a story because I want someone to read it, laugh, escape, and maybe pick up a couple of ideas of their own on coping with life.

To want, to need, to just do it

2011-07-03T16:57:00.000-07:00

I have been coveting a Kindle. I, who have always lusted after the smell and feel of paper pages turning, leading me onward in knowledge, or suspense, or...whatever. But it has occurred to me that electronics have their downsides, too. Can you order a book, used, for a Kindle? And I would miss the particular feel of a book.... Anyway, it's all a moot point because I cannot afford a tricked-out Kindle, I don't need one, and so, my desire ebbs and flows. No necessity usually means, for me, no product. But I do hope my book ends up on one. :)

The book has been a huge struggle lately. I write and I toss out, I delete and switch paragraphs around like cards in a deck. I have a troublesome character who seems to be refusing to enter the pages. I recently noted to a friend that while sitting one's backside in the chair in front of the computer is a necessary discipline, writing from a sense of duty seems to be a losing effort. The drudgery of dutifulness seems to cause my creativity to dry up like water on a hot skillet.

While we write from a desire (indeed, a need) to write, we still have to exercise discipline to keep focus, and keep the page count rising. The difference between discipline and writing out of duty seems to be, for me, like the difference between guiding someone to a focused end versus chasing them there with a broom. Like wanting a Kindle, the desire to write is not enough to get there. On the other hand, how many of us like it when we are MADE to do something--shoved there by outside forces and held with our noses to the grindstones? But if we feel the need intrinsically, discipline is what keeps us moving when we become discouraged or distracted.

The Kindle, I can do without (for now)--but I can't really do without finishing the book. I think I'd regret that forever.

Have you been taken in?

2011-06-10T21:42:00.001-07:00

My book continues at a snail's pace. I'm in a section I really can't rush because I'm introducing together the villain of the piece to the reader, but my heroine sees him only as her long-time mentor. So the description and dialog here need to imply a lot to the reader without making them think the heroine is excruciatingly dumb because she doesn't notice his evil, manipulative nature.

This struggle of course leads me to self-analysis--which is where nearly all my struggles, whether real or fictional, seem to lead me. I began thinking about people who've pulled the stocking cap down over my mascara and I have to admit there are too many. Well, one is really too many, because we'd all like to be wise students of human nature and spot the bad pennies. But we don't. In a way I think it testifies to basic goodness. Those who are pretty decent folks tend to expect the same of others, so they occasionally get surprised by the dastardly.

I'm asking you, and I'd really like to know, if you've been manipulated by anyone, how, and how did you "escape" their influence?

Larceny and violence in the writer's soul.

2011-05-09T14:02:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten how long it had been since I posted, until I got an email from Peggy from high school saying she'd been reading this blog. I figured I'd better get on with it so there's something new here to read.

April was an amazing, filled-full month, complete with a writers conference up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I was part of an intermediate fiction mentoring group, and they were very helpful with their critique of my first 20 pages. That's all they got to see. They missed the good parts with the body in the warehouse, another body in the heroine's car (unless I change that), and blood dripping from the ceiling. Fun, huh?

Actually, going to the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference is always wonderful. Lots of big trees, woodpeckers, squirrels, mountain air--and Christians, which I like. But because I'm not writing for Christians, there were times when I felt like a back slider. People talked about their projects, such as devotionals, Christian novels, etc. Then they'd ask, "What do YOU write."

"Right now, a murder mystery for the secular market. The heroine is a recovering alcoholic attorney whose clients keep getting killed off." But the folks at my tables during meals had lots of great encouragement for me. We quiet Christians--we understand larceny and violence. The sin nature is a great source for novels.

There are deep pools of hatred and murder, envy and irritability, and tons of sloth in me. Lots of good material to work with.

Hello, dark world

2011-03-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

I have been lost in the throes of my manuscript world. It's a darker and dirtier place than I'm used to, so I've been doing a bit of research to flesh it out, since I don't tend to hang out on the mean streets. I've been researching permit laws for carrying concealed weapons, Alcoholics Anonymous (lovely people there), some courtroom procedures, and I am about to visit my first pawn shop . I've learned enough that when a friend sent out an email about old ads we'd never see nowadays, I emailed him back and told him that a Colt .45 cost ten times as much now as it did in that ad.

I am a rather easily overlooked type of person. Nothing extravagant or amazing about me on the surface. A small, domestic looking person, in fact, with my gray hair and baby face. So when I start talking about concealed carries and the cost of a nice little matte black Colt, it doesn't quite fit. And that's one of the things that makes research so darned much fun.

manuscripts are like children

2011-02-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

I've concluded (nearly just this second) that working on a manuscript is much like parenting. You love the kid, you laugh a lot, you cry here and there, and you'll be dang glad when they are safely out there. I know I always like sending something off to an editor (articles at this point). It's unsure if they'll buy it, but it's so nice to get it out the door, or in the usual case, into the email. I recently got a very nice, personal rejection on a piece. The editor took a brief moment to tell me why the piece didn't quite fit them, although they liked it.

(For those of you who haven't been sending things to editors, the fact is, most editors don't bother to respond at all. So it's truly lovely when someone gives you a personal word.)

To stick with the parenting metaphor, it was sort of like sending your child to camp and getting them back after a week. You aren't done yet and you need to send them out again and again as they grow. And after a while, they only come back to say hello, with a smile (and, in the case of the manuscripts, with checks in hand).

My book is a perennial teenager--causing much angst, as well as fun. It's a lot of work and frustration, it is energizing and at times depressing. And I will be SO glad when it's finally out there, in print, where somebody can buy it.

Affirmed--I AM a writer

2011-02-05T10:09:00.001-08:00

There's just nothing like a check to affirm that you're really a writer. I recently received payment for an article that was published a few months ago. You know you are a writer when you sit down and write, or when someone reads your stuff and "gets it," or when you see the pages mounting up, and you know you've worked hard on them and they actually are worth reading. (Granted, some people are deluded about this last detail.) But when someone actually pays you for it, it's bliss.

Being paid stirred me up so much that I went back through my files to see what else might be worth sending out. I took a couple to my critique group (faithful ladies, what would I do without you guys?), and was told one was perfect and the other needed a new ending.

Back to the Writers Market Guide--only to be reminded once more how few publications handle short humor. But I found one in Canada that was perfect for this article--at least I hope so, because I sent it off to them. Now we wait. Waiting is the worst part of being a writer.

More on plot outlines

2010-12-31T14:07:00.000-08:00

I use the narrative plot outline to jump from scene to scene, to bring out the basic story but without the dialog or details I'll insert in the actual writing of my novel. Since I've already written out several pages of the book, my outline includes those scenes and some notes for planned scenes.

Though this is a partial outline that I have to finish in the days ahead, I learned a lot from it. I could see where I needed to bring in more about one of the characters I've mentioned but not had a scene with. I need him to be on the page earlier. I also need to introduce another character who, although not apparently a key player, will provide the key to action later on.

I can see where I've been thin on info my reader will need, and I can see where I have already thought through some issues pretty thoroughly.

The outline gives me sort of a birds-eye view of my story. From there I can see where I need more peaks and valleys for excitement, and where I need to slow the action to pick up on a side issue I'm dealing with.

So forget any phobias about outlining you may have picked up in grade school and give yourself that aerial view of your novel. It's not a horrible administrative-type task--it's just another way to tell your story to yourself before you embellish it for the reading public.

Outlines and other planning issues

2010-12-30T13:45:00.001-08:00

I finally broke down a while back and spent a whole day doing a narrative plot outline for my book. I got about two-thirds of the way through my story, and have yet to finish that outline, but it still helps an amazing amount.

For those of you who haven't been exposed to what this outline is, it's not like those horrible topical outlines we had to do in grade school (did you have to do that?). I once had a science teacher who outlined the whole book, day by day, on the black board. What do you think I learned in her class? I learned that Tommy S. could make his belly bulge out like a pregnant lady. That's about it.

A narrative plot outline is writing up a summary of the story in present tense. I will give you an example or two from mine, but I am not claiming I'm an expert. This is just the way that works for me.

The opening of the outline for my latest book reads: "Cody Caulfield, recovering alcoholic and attorney to losers, find herself with a case that's turning messy. She and her faithful sidekick Janet Engles watch petty criminal Nate Diggerson walk out of the courtroom a free man, thanks to their efforts. But his freedom is short lived."

Later on, I have a section that reads "On the phone Montgomery states that he and his boss had no need to do in Nate, because they've already retrieved anything of value he'd taken. Montgomery warns Cody to butt out or alcoholism won't be her only health problem."

What I learned from writing the plot outline is fodder for another post.

To end, or not to end?

2010-11-28T16:56:00.001-08:00

When is it time to end it? I don't mean, when is it the end of the book, or when have you finished your manuscript. I mean, when is it time to put the manuscript you've been diddling with away and work on something else? I'm finding myself slogging along in Book #1 because my heroine was not well formed at the outset. That is to say, she was not created with enough angst, enough crises in her life, enough personality to survive the first draft. I need to start all over. Remembering that I started this more than 10 years ago as an exercise to see if I could write a book, I am not taking this too badly. After all, I have two more books simmering away, with partial manuscripts in the computer. And I MAY pick it up again some day. It turned into quite a good learning process.

Book #2 has much more life: a more interesting main character who has enough flaws and personality quirks to get us through more pages. Cody is an accident waiting to happen, as the old saying goes. In this case, the "accidents" include at least two murders, a bit of romance, and a lot of saying nasty things to unlikeable people. Cody does all the stuff I'd do if I weren't too polite. Except for the alcoholism--that's not one of my vices, thank God.

And there's also book #3--a totally different kind of mystery, involving identity issues, "who's your daddy," and the horrible experience of becoming an adult.

In praise of praise

2010-11-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

It's been too long since I blogged anything about my writing--or anything else, either. Chaos occasionally takes over. We have family traveling, the holidays coming (not related to family travel, actually), and all sorts of deadlines for each family member. Makes me think of that old song lyric, "Every thing runs in a circular motion, bobbing like a little boat upon the sea..." although little boats bobbing don't, as a rule, run in a circular motion. But I digress, which seems to be my pattern these days.

I've been going through my manuscript like someone reading a diary. "Oh, I remember writing that," "This part is so lame, what was I thinking," and, of course, "This is pretty darned good." Writers generally labor in solitude, so, when my critique group isn't around, I must praise myself. As long as we aren't delusional, I think we writers ought to praise ourselves. I don't mean run around the streets telling everyone what a great writer you are. I mean just read your stuff and pick out what's good. After all, if you hate your writing, how can you expect anyone else to want to read it? So praise. Take a moment out of the chaos to remember your manuscript, and to pick out the really good stuff. Let the bad stuff sit for another day. First praise, then get back to work to make the whole thing praiseworthy once you're energized by your own good reviews.

of reading and baby books

2010-10-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spent a whole day at a seminar swamped with info on unschooling teens, college acceptance, and the risks and joys of "delight-directed" learning. Thank heavens we aren't quite at the point of college applications. It's been a rough year, but also enlightening. Dear daughter, who has always claimed she had no interest in writing (not having time for it due to shark studies), suddenly announced she'd started writing a story and asked if she could read it to me. Of course I was delighted, and astonished that the kid has a terrific grasp of dialog, setting, and the gripping scene. No character development yet, and the plot has not been revealed, but doggone it, I'm so proud of her.

How did she learn this wonderful stuff? She reads. Book after book after book. Many of them she reads over and over and over (Harry Potter books at our house have extremely frayed covers). She reads mysteries, romance, history, horse books, funny books, and books on sharks and oceanography. She's well known by our local librarians.

When she was an infant there were just a couple of things I wanted to see in her life as she grew: a love of God and desire to be his intimate friend, and a love of books. The first, of course, is a lifelong goal for us. The second was apparent from a very young age.

When she was a few months old, I used to take her in her stroller into a large bookstore near us and roll her over to the children's books. I'd hold up a book and if she showed any enthusiasm for it, that was a take home. Sandra Boynton was a fast favorite, and still is, for both of us. My baby loved books and wanted me to read to her for hours, something I was happy to do for a large part of each day.

What makes a book interesting to a baby may be pretty close to what appeals to adults. The covers may get us to pick it up, but the rhythym, the emotion (Boynton's humor and the sweetness of her books like The Going To Bed Book, for example), a story that engages us, and a character to whom we can relate make it an experience we want.

That's the kind of book I'm aiming for. I just hope I can keep up with Boynton.

Good grief, I just killed off another character!

2010-08-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

The problem with writing without an outline is that you may, as I did recently, get the bug to kill off a character, which leaves one, me anyway, with a problem. I just killed the guy who was supposed to be the big bad dude, the one responsible for the first killing and of whom everyone is afraid. Now who do I blame?

Well, I find this rather invigorating, because I have someone in mind. But it also brings me back to the fact that I really do need to sit down and make a map for my books so that I've got the road laid out, though not yet paved. I really do need to do that. My problem may be the same as yours if you're struggling to finish a writing project--time.

Time used to snail by, but now that I'm nearly ancient (according to my teenager), it moves like a bullet train. I know that one doesn't find time, but makes time. If I want to get these books done, I need to make time. And I feel like I need to make a huge block of time. And huge blocks of time do not just lie around waiting to be picked up and used at my house. I need a weekend retreat. And I'm going to plan one. Soon. I promise. I'll get back to you on it.

how to increase your writing time

2010-08-13T14:31:00.001-07:00

My daughter and I recently visited family in both the Northwest and in the Northeast. It was a long trip. We returned to find a DVR hooked up to the TV. Because I am technologically challenged, this has increased my writing time by about an hour a day. I have to ask my 13-year-old child how to turn the TV on. Yes, there's a booklet I'm supposed to read, but I'm still doing laundry from the trip while pulling everything I can out of the living room so the painters can get to the walls. When do I have time for the booklet? So most of the time, I just forget it. It's probably better anyway to spend my time doing more creative stuff than watching Perry Mason.

Like making some sort of skeletal outline that would keep my books moving along. Since the second book is taken from excerpts of a fictional book that I included in the first book, I have these little vignettes to serve as "fenceposts" for the story that I'm stringing out. This is a huge advantage over the first book, which began as a class project and has been sculpted and trimmed as I write along. Still undone, I do think I know where I'm going, but I haven't set it on paper. That would be good--to draw myself a map.

It's gotta be easier than reading the DVR booklet.

Letting the characters lead

2010-07-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

I am loaded with energy and optimism tonight. Critique group this morning went really well. Heard some great stuff from my buddies: poetry, biography, mystery. We're all progressing, albeit slowly, toward publishing real books full of good stuff.

Robert Frost wrote about The Road Not Taken, and I think about that a lot as I write. I made a choice this week to have one of my secondary characters, Barbara, step into a situation that revealed more about her, and in the process, it revealed a bit more about Anna, my MC. I had intended for Barbara to veer into something different, but she didn't want to go there. She wanted the road NOT taken.

Come on, you fiction writers, you know exactly what I mean. You create a character, and non-writers think you "make" them go where you want them. But once a character has been defined to a certain degree, and she begins to "live" for you. Like the Velveteen Rabbit she becomes "real" and then look out! Characters do lead writers along. As Stephen King says in "On Writing," you uncover the bones of your story--and your characters are the ones who do the real work for you. So make them strong and give them a variety of tools for their job--physicality, personality, spirit, and all the other strengths and weaknesses that make them resonate with your readers, then let the story unfold!

My name is Karen and I'm a library-aholic

2010-06-22T11:48:00.001-07:00

Right now, I'm having a hard time working my way through my writing. I would rather write something short and funny than keep my behind in the chair long enough to finish my books. A huge obstacle this summer is that my daughter is volunteering to sign up kids in the reading program at our nearest library. That means I have to run her there and pick her up, so I am around the library almost every day. And libraries, in case you aren't getting this, are full of books. Other people's books. Some of the writing is not so good, but there is so much good stuff that it's hard to walk away with just my daughter and her books. I have to pick up a couple more every time I'm in. I think I've read a dozen books in the last week, and at least one of them wasn't worth reading, and another couple were marginal. The rest were actually good books. Joanne Dobson's latest with her Professor Karen Pelletier, Death Without Tenure, was a book I'd been pining to read.

Now that I've read all these books, I think I need to contribute to the library system. I will finish my own books and hope they are added to the shelves and that others will find them better than marginal. As we have said in our critique group, "Friends don't let friends write mediocre books." God willing, mine will make it through the gauntlet to bookshelves in homes and libraries across the country. I just have to keep my bottom in the chair.

Good grief!

2010-06-11T17:49:00.000-07:00

It's summer already. My critique group will be splitting up for travel plans, coming back together when we can--we never totally knock off for any length of time. We've already had a couple of members take trips to spend time with family in other states. The rest of us have stayed put, for now, and all my energy seems to have gone into making brownies for all the end-of-the-school-year stuff. Yes, even homeschoolers celebrate that. Three or four batches for the various co-op classes, potlucks and recognition night. Whew. I do not want to see any more brownies for a long time.

The books are simmering. After my great time visiting an AA group for research on my recovering alcoholic MC in book #2, I'm just letting all that settle. Those folks are incredible. Such poignant humor about their situation. They were all upbeat and looking to the future. One of the women really seems a lot like Cody, my MC. She was at least six feet tall and athletic, although she didn't show any signs of being as irascible as Cody. The meeting gave me a lot to think about as I craft that book.

I need to re-do the outline for The Fictional Writer--the original has long since been changed so much that I dumped it. Better ideas rule. And I have NO outline for The Big Kissoff, the Cody book. I've been far too organic with that, and it's not going to work for long. Although I fully believe in letting the story unwind, I've concluded that if I don't have a destination, I'm going to be like the Israelites wandering in the desert.

Marketing hints for magazine articles

2010-05-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

I just got both a phone call AND an email from an editor who wants to publish the humor article I sent her. Pretty fast, since it just went out to her last week! I'm remembering what someone at a writers conference told us about selling magazine articles: You send the same piece out to similar publications in different markets. For example, regional parenting magazines, or different denominational publications--non-competing markets that may pay less than a huge national publication, but for which the total payoff will be higher. If I can sell this same piece to four or five different small publications, I can make as much as by selling it once to one national behemoth. Such a deal. Although the pay is less, the competition is also less, and total sales MIGHT make up for it.

Besides getting a little money out of the deal, I also have a nice fresh clip for my clip file. That's always good. And the pay will help cover the toner for printing out my novel's pages for critique group. That's also good. But the best thing about getting back in print is that it helps to boost my morale. I must be a real writer if I'm getting in print. And that's VERY, VERY good.

Why is it funny, and does it matter?

2010-05-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

Today, I read through some excerpts of the novel I'm working on about a recovering alcoholic attorney, and they made me laugh again, so I think I may be able to get back to work on it soon. It's important to me that my work makes me laugh. Most of what I write, even if it's sort of serious nonfiction, has a bit of humor. I sometimes don't even mean to be funny--it just happens. When I'm speaking at a podium that happens sometimes too. I don't plan to say anything funny, but then I hear people laugh. It pleases me to hear it, but I wonder if I ought to be concerned about how out of it I am that I'm not sure what I said that was funny?

But for now, I'm not going to worry about it too much. Worrying about being funny would be pretty deadly, wouldn't it? I think it would kill any creative influence you had leading you in a humorous direction. Things are funny because they take you by surprise, and if anything I write is even a little funny it's because a thought took me by surprise. Sometimes even as I type it. I like that. It lets me laugh, too. I don't know how stand-up comics do it. Having your living depend on being funny would make me very unfunny.

Mother's Day, distractions and skiving

2010-05-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's Mother's Day and I'm in here, typing away because, frankly, it's more fun than I've had all week. I like writing. I love my child and my husband, but a treat for me is taking time to write. We celebrated M-Day yesterday by wandering around an antique collective for more than an hour. By the time we left I was completely relaxed and ready to face dinner out. I love antique stores, and I told my newly teen-aged daughter, "Remember, we aren't going to buy anything. It's like a museum, and we just enjoy the great old stuff." My husband, who obviously feared he might have to live with some more "great old stuff," visibly relaxed. My daughter was disappointed. Somehow, in her pre-teen years, she developed the idea that she can't go into a store without buying something. As if she might offend the management. I disabuse her of this idea at every turn, to no avail. Each trip to a store, I invoke the gods of thriftiness. So far, it's not taking.

I did get my humor article off via email, in hopes of great riches--like maybe $50!? We shall see. If they don't like it, I begin anew the search for a worthy home for it. The article grew from a thought I had a few years back when news reports came out about the state considering outlawing cellphones while driving because they contribute to distracted driving. Here in CA, they have limited car use of cellphones to hands-free. But seriously, you're still distracted by the conversation, right? And cellphones aren't the WORST cause of distracted driving. Check your back seat. Is there a small person sitting there, tossing around the cheerios and yelling about a dropped water bottle? There's the problem.

My "problem" was four when I first began this piece, and the article has been revised, lengthened, shortened, published on line, and in both the newsletter and in the anthology of our South Bay branch of the Calif. Writers Club. It's seen some changes, as have we in eight years.

Okay, this post is not about writing a novel, but I obviously have been skiving off on that duty. But the pots still simmer away, hopefully brimming with new plot twists that will rise to the surface as soon as I can open those doc files again.

Wish me luck on the $50.

to market, to market, to sell my funny stories

2010-04-25T19:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's confession time here. I really am dedicated to being a writer. I am dedicated to each of the stories I'm writing. I think about my books throughout the day, in the midst of daily duties as a wife, mother, CEO of our household. But, doggone it I haven't written anything new all month!

I've been writing, yes--rewriting. Reworking a short story with the help of my brilliant critique group and getting it ready to send off. This is a huge challenge to me. The marketing side of things, and the time it takes to hunt down good markets and send stuff out, generally overwhelm me. It's so much easier just to write, but unfortunately, I'm one of those crazy people who actually want somebody to READ my stuff.

I do intend to send off two pieces this week: the short story, and a short humor piece. One publication said their only criterion was that it make them laugh out loud. I read their archived humor pieces and mine is really, honestly MUCH funnier. So I take heart. I qualify. But there seem to be some restrictions on what they accept--like coming from their home state. Sigh. Foiled again.

Universal themes, tapping the emotional bond

2010-04-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

I recently won a wonderful book in a challenge on R.L. LaFevers blog. A 12-year-old heroine, in a primitive culture created totally in the fertile mind of Frances Hardinge, proves something more than just the sister of her village's most important person. "The Lost Conspiracy" is beautifully written, mystical, and entirely engaging. If Ms. LaFevers hadn't sent me that book I might never have found it on my own, and that would have been a loss. Here is a heroine who rises to every challenge with cleverness, perseverance, and courage. And an author who weaves the story skillfully from various angles, and with gorgeous language.

What do I have in common with a 12-year-old child under incredible stress, pulled by duty and torn loyalties? On the surface, not much. But when I finished the book I realized that I was completely on board with Hathin as she tries to keep her sister safe while also seeking revenge. I admire her intelligence and creativity. And I completely understand her struggle with her own identity and value.

To create a character who is both so different from the reader, and yet so like us at the heart, is something to strive for. To be able to tell that character's story in such an lyrical manner, rooted in a whole world of superstition and tradition, is an absolute God-given gift. That's a gift I always pray for.

I come to praise...

2010-03-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

It is once again time for me to praise my critique group. They never fail to encourage me. One of our group told me a couple of weeks ago that I had no idea what a gift I have. Is that wonderful? Even my mother doesn't praise me like that!

And I enjoy praising their work, too. What an honor it is to encourage other writers, young or old (or in our case, middle-aged, mostly). To see someone's work improve and their confidence grow is a wonderful gift. How many of us miss that in our lives simply because we're afraid to share OUR stuff? Opening up to one another, reading those sometimes dreadful drafts, brings us so much freedom--freedom that shows in our ongoing work, and the ability to reach out to others.

This has been a year of many opportunities for me to praise and encourage others in the arts. And that has made it one of my most productive years--I think because the simple act of praising the creativity of others seems to open up my own creativity even more. May you be blessed with praise--both to receive and to give.

A season of productivity

2010-03-17T15:33:00.001-07:00

For some reason, late winter in my family seems to lead to a flurry of production. My niece is even making her own laundry soap, I have planted a myriad of seeds and created little greenhouses of two-gallon plastic zip bags to protect the fragile growth, new closet doors are in, rugs have been cleaned, and...and my book's main character is nurturing her own productive fantasies, about which I must write with joie de vivre and lucidity.

For inspiration, I re-read a couple of Rett MacPherson's books, an Anne Perry (my favorite, her first book about her Mr. Monk), and am looking longingly at my Donna Andrews collection. But somewhere inspiration ceases and procrastination takes over, so I won't go there this week. I think and talk about my fiction all the time, to my writer friends mostly. I am constantly writing scenes in my head while I wait to pick up my daughter at junior high Bible study, then scribbling them in the little notebook I carry in the car. Then I come home and they become the bones of my next chapter or segment. What a crazy life I live! How fun is this?

The Slowest Writer on Earth?

2010-03-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

I really must own that title. Who writes more slowly than I? As a copywriter, and later as a journalist, I churned out copy like a meat grinder. Chewed up all those ideas, and g-r-r-r-r out they came onto the plate, fully formed, coherent (mostly) stuff by the ream. But in fiction, I have spent too much time fretting about the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. I've never written a book! My specialty is generally 800 words or less. 1,200 words per article when a certain magazine asked, and I found that number daunting at first.

Now, I'm working on tens of thousands of words, for pete's sake, and have to worry about arc, characterization, dialog, subplots, and a number of other things I don't even have names for. Things have to make sense when I first put them down, and also a hundred pages or more later on. This is frightening! When I first started the story, it was just a paragraph that popped into my mind with a "what if" attached. Then a few scenes began to bug me, so I put them all down on the page and over the years cut out half of the copy and moved around most of the rest. I can't even remember when I started "The Fictional Writer." I think it was sometime before my daughter was born and she's 12 now! It was in very different form then, too, of course.

But the bottom line is that I think I've learned enough now (I sure HOPE so!) that I have a better idea where I'm going. I mostly need to flesh out the bones I've uncovered. (See previous post re. Stephen King.) And the second novel, begun recently, is moving much more easily. Writing the two in tandem is proving helpful because they are interrelated and sort of feed off of one another.

The call of the divine...maybe

2010-02-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

What is it with the need to write? Every time I sit down and start tapping out my stories, I move into a "zone" where a little movie plays in my head. I see my characters running around, doing their stuff, gesturing and stomping, hugging and hissing--sort of like a silent movie. Then I type the dialog and put those actions into context and the story begins to move ahead. We learn a little about my MC and her thorn in the flesh, as well as about the current pain in the behind. I am learning, right along with my future readers, who seem to hang over my shoulder, waiting with bated breath for the next installment. I need to write this out so I can see what happens, too.

Oh, sure, I have a plan of sorts, but I am not the kind who can outline in the formal sense. I know in general what sort of things will happen, but when the movie starts in my head, it sometimes takes me some place I hadn't thought of going. When authors talk about their characters taking over, I can see where that comes from. There is a mystifying aspect to writing--the story reveals itself as we, to quote Stephen King ( check out his book "On Writing"), uncover the bones. And I NEED to uncover those bones. And for pete's sake, if you own "On Writing," don't lend it to anyone because you'll never see it again.

What are first drafts for?

2010-02-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

Right now, I am simply forging ahead on my novels, including notes here and there where changes will have to be made (I use a series of capital Xs to mark the spots), but I won't make those changes now. In my last post, I mentioned that Anna in The Fictional Writer needs to be more complex--more stuff bubbling up to the surface. She has a lot of undercurrents of angst and ambivalence, but so far, I haven't made them big enough to truly trip her up. That will happen in the rewrites, but it is soooo hard to keep on writing and not go back to the beginning and start putting stuff into the story.

Patience is the name of the game. I put on blinders, in a sense, and keep advancing. Once the first draft is completely done (by the end of the year, God willing) I can go back and rework all the stuff, stick in the details I still need to find through research, and look for the holes in the structure. I will probably bribe a couple of my critique members to read through the whole book for me and give me their comments. One of them is particularly susceptible to brownies.

some times you feel like a nut....

2010-02-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, now that is a really OLD commercial, but today that's what I feel like. Since I'm working on two novels at once (with one, maybe two simmering in the background for later), I am bouncing back and forth between my main novels. Today, I felt like writing for Cody for a while, then I felt like working on Anna's story. On The Fictional Writer, I mostly tweaked some stuff based on comments from the last trip to the critique group. On The Big Kissoff, I finally got Cody's no-good client, Diggerson, into her grimy office so she can "chew him up and spit him out." Cody is so much fun. All those nasty feelings I've ever had toward employers or horrible neighbors, or people who cut me off on the freeway--all that energy goes into Cody. She's just fun/mean and I truly love her, alcoholism and all.

Anna in The Fictional Writer is not yet as complex as Cody in The Big Kissoff. I started The Fictional Writer over a decade ago, tossed half of it out a couple of years back, and I think Anna may be too nice for me to relate to, which probably means she's too nice for readers to relate to. Not that I want her to be as troubled and irritating as Cody, but I really need to bring out the ambivalence she feels about her father, about romance, about being a fiction writer v. a journalist. All her issues are undercurrents and I need to get them boiling to the top. I understand Anna better than Cody, because like her, my issues are mostly undercurrents, not obvious stuff like alcoholism and really poor people skills like Cody's. So, because she's farther from me, I can write her more easily. Still, I hate to think how much like me both of these characters are.

Burn out

2010-02-08T16:31:00.001-08:00

I don't know about you, but when I try to do too much, I burn out quickly. Up the number of pages I'm working on, increase my posts here on the blog, as well as get the cat to the vet (twice in one day last week, doggone it!), homeschool, shop and cook (you notice I didn't mention cleaning, which I pretend doesn't matter until I can't stand the level of dust on the bookcases), and I'm ready for a long nap.

I like working on two novels at once, but I really can't push for more than a few hundred pages a week or I just explode. My life is too crazy.

Let's be real. I live with a 12-year-old and a husband who works long hours, so I have responsibilities that require my attention. I need discipline, but not draconian rules. Pile me up with requirements and I fade immediately. As it is, I just put one foot in front of the other and keep plugging away at the books. As long as I do that frequently and stick with it, if only for 15 minutes at a time, I can keep the story moving. Time, personal limitations and family interruptions may keep me from the novel, but not forever. Writing is a priority for me--not just to produce the books, but for my sanity. I need the creative outlet and those characters keep jumping around on my brain. They want out, and I can see the next ones in line ready to come in and jump around for at least another couple of books, so I have to keep moving.

Praise the Lord and send in the critique group!

2010-02-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know I'm constantly yammering about my critique group. I can't figure out why we all clicked so well, but these women hold me accountable and tell me terrible truths about my writing--things I need to pay attention to if I want my book to really zing along.

Since I'm switching around and working on two novels actively, with a third simmering on a back burner (is your brain like a stovetop, too?)--I need a group that will hang with me as I alternate between the novel excerpts I bring to the group each week. I had one character tossing a tennis ball around, so of course, somebody sharp had to ask, "Where did the tennis ball come from? What's the story with that?" The others chimed in--they want to know, too. I had to give that some thought, but it came to me pretty quickly. When I got home, I began my editing--adding in suggestions from the group, including the story of the tennis ball. I sort of ignored some of their ideas about what it might mean (she was a former star tennis player??) and used it to help create a picture of her office environment. She's come down in the world from being on her way to a partnership in a huge legal practice to a crummy building where former tenants leave things behind (dirt, chipped light fixtures, and tennis balls) and nobody cleans it up. I see her office as a reflection of the crummy life she now has to climb out of. Now, what would I have done without them insisting they needed to know about the tennis ball?

Learning writing from reading fiction--good and bad

2010-01-31T17:00:00.000-08:00

Besides the enjoyment we get from reading a good book, there's nothing more delightful than coming across an author who has used some of the same approach YOU have. In my first book, I include excerpts from the book my MC (main character) is writing, so it was fun to find an author who included excerpts from a book her MC was reading. That book was written by another character in the book.

I experienced a sense of vindication when I stumbled upon Joanne Dobson's The Maltese Manuscript and saw those excerpts. I liked her writing and MC enough that I will now go back to the library to read the earlier books in the series. I thank God daily for the public library, otherwise I'd be broke. I enjoyed Dobson's skewering of academia, as well as the mystery. Her MC is a professor working toward tenure in the literature department of a small, elite college in the East.

Another book I read recently I will not name. It was one of those not so good books. The writer had alternated chapters between two characters, both speaking in the first person. I felt like a ping pong ball reading that one. It reinforced advice I'd been given not to split my book between two characters, although I was writing first, then third person as I alternated. I finally figured it was diluting the impact of my MC's POV. At least I picked up on that before I tried to publish the thing.

If you're writing fiction, read it. The good, the bad, but not the ugly. No one has to go that far.

Time stealers or transformers?

2010-01-27T13:39:00.001-08:00

There are so many wonderful distractions in life--things that relieve the moments of stress by making me laugh. Is it a waste of time to stop and laugh? How about crying? Staring out the window? Fretting over things that can't be changed? Some distractions are more valuable than others.

Today I was distracted by my daughter's poor choice in a matter that affected her trustworthiness. A 12-year-old cannot always be counted on to behave wisely. Then she makes some wry, insightful comment about the neighborhood and I'm laughing again. I'm saving all these moments for my second novel, which will probably end up being finished third. :) The main character in that book is based on my daughter in some, but of course not all, ways. Letting her steal my time is good for that novel, as well as good for us as a family.

I'm trying to transform the things that steal my time into things that inform my writing, as well as my life--to lighten up. Maybe I need to think about wasting time as simply restructuring my use of time. I'm not advocating spending ALL DAY staring out the window or at the ceiling, but some down time renews us creatively. See Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I've mentioned here before. Waste some time creatively today.

Window time pays off!

2010-01-26T20:08:00.000-08:00

The window time (or out-of-window staring time?) has been good today. The sky is gray and the birds are very quiet--a perfect, somber atmosphere in which to write about a cranky, alcoholic lawyer who's trying to get her life back on track. Today, her craving can be hot chocolate, just like mine. She may want to add a shot of something else, but she won't. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow either.

I have to kill off her client, but first I have to let him wreak havoc for her, lead her into a nest of vipers, prance out of a courtroom too freely, then end up--well, dropped onto Portland's Marquam Bridge? We shall see. The interim leading up to his demise is my next fun part. And he can't die until the romantic lead gets involved because he's going to be the cop who investigates the death. I need to get some input from a local police detective. Hmm, I think I know one. More research! I love it.

The trick with research is to be willing to leave big holes in my manuscript while I carry on with the story. Otherwise, I'll still be doing research when my kid finishes her PhD and the book will never be written.

Of revisions and 100 words a day

2010-01-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, I wrote a few hundred words today, passing that daily goal of 100 words. I also did a bit of revision on yesterday's stuff because, frankly, it needed help. It was all "telling" so I inserted a whole telephone conversation with dialog and asides to convey the same info. More fun for the reader, and also for me. I do find that what is going to be more interesting for a reader is actually more fun for me to write. I sometimes write long descriptions of activity, then go back and edit so the characters slug it out or talk it through, instead of just me telling the story.

As I think about the number one thing I like about certain writers, it's that they keep the action moving. And I'm not talking about thrillers here, either. Every book needs to keep the MC (main character) moving along, toward a goal, around obstacles, in the wrong direction, back toward the goal--head'em up, rawhide! Sorry, I grew up on Westerns, but actually herding cattle is a bit like rounding up your story elements and moving them along in an interesting direction.

An expert's view of procrastination

2010-01-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

I never thought of myself as a procrastinator until I tried writing a novel. Now, as the years have rolled by, I can find a lot of good reasons why I don't get that butt-in-chair time, but I'm also smart enough to know there's still time for writing if I really want to do it. In my paying jobs, I wrote a dozen different projects in the course of a week, and I learned not to wait for some airy muse to float in and dump a bucket of inspiration on me. I thought, because I wrote all day long in a paying job, that I would do that at home. HA!

Every time I raise my eyes from the monitor, I see the dust I need to get at, the mess that needs straightening, and the laundry spilling over in the baskets in my office closet. My office is the staging area for nearly everything that needs doing in the house, which makes it a nest of distractions for anyone willing to be distracted. That means me.

I hear my child watching TV when she's supposed to be finishing her lunch. Therefore, I have to stop occasionally to offer input on her activities, guidance on her assignments, and answers to questions that seem to arise from nowhere.

The only cure for procrastination is to face the fact that we are doing it, sit ourselves at our computers, and start writing. I will not try to prime the pump by typing "I will not procrastinate" a hundred times--that's just more procrastination. I will write the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page...you get the idea. The mess will always be there, so get to it after you've written the number of words you've set as your goal each day. Borrow my motto: Dust is my friend.

How to write a novel, 100 words at a time.

2010-01-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Writing a novel has proven a much longer commitment than I initially expected. I started my first book about 12 years ago, before my lovely daughter was born. Of course, the book as I started it is not the book I have today. I have long ago tossed zillions of words, and changed characters around. After 12 years, when you re-read your stuff, you can really tell what's bad. The way I write, and the time I invest in it has changed, so the book did, too.

Evelyn, the wisest member of our critique group (I don't think anyone else in the group will disagree with that assessment) suggested we try to write 100 words every time we sat down and faced those pages. One hundred words is a pretty piddling amount, so of course, if you set that as your task, you will always succeed. Well, nearly always.

This challenge breaks things down into very tiny bites. One hundred words easily becomes 300, 600, or 800. Still not a huge volume, but at least the work progresses. And because it's an easily handled amount, it's not terrifying to sit down to work on. Paragraph by paragraph, page by page, I'm getting there.

More on the virtues of staring out the window.

2010-01-24T17:24:00.000-08:00

I believe we don't spend nearly enough time staring out windows. My main windows to stare out are in my living room--watching the street, waving to neighbors, seeing what my child is up to, looking for the cat--and in the home office upstairs in the back of the house. Upstairs, I can turn from my computer a quarter of a squawk (old oak office chair) and see the green leaves of the pittosporum trees that line our back fence. If I lean a bit, there's the orange tree--sour oranges, but a nice bit of color.

The squirrels and birds seem to be wrestling for power inside the leafy pittosporum--the leaves are nearly always in motion. And in the right-hand corner of the yard is the shed. Its roof provides a lounging spot for a white, feral cat who suns and sleeps there peacefully when he's not foraging for sustenance.

Something about looking out at all that green gets my creative juices bubbling again. I also get ideas from the people I see on the other side of the front window. A stranger jogs by with his dog--what's their story? Cars rip down the street with teenagers honking and waving at a friend who lives a few doors past us. There are a whole bunch of stories, or a huge cast of players for a coming-of-age novel.

Don't let yourself become short-sighted. Look out at the world, pull in some nature, stare out the windows and let the ideas roll around for a bit.

What do sitting, reading, and staring out the window have in common?

2010-01-24T15:06:00.001-08:00

Sitting at the computer is the one place I really need to be if I'm ever going to finish my novels. B.I.C.--butt-in-chair time is obviously important. If I'm not there, doing it, it certainly isn't going to get done.

Reading? Reading about writing, reading other people's writing, reading my own stuff with an editorial eye--heck, I'll read nearly anything. Any magazine within reach at a doctor's office, a newspaper, a booklet--some are better examples of good writing than others, or course. But I recently picked up some really good advice from a very poorly organized book.

Staring out the window? I read recently (I cannot remember where) that Woody Allen can't work in a room with a window. I don't know that it's true. I can't work in a room without one. I once wrote all the publication materials for a nonprofit organization, where I had a cubicle in the middle of the building. Not a window within my line of sight. Then, they shuffled us around and I worked in a cubby by a big window. I figure my production during that period (I was later moved back, doggone it) was up at least 30 percent.

I now work in a home office on the second floor, looking out into the tree tops lining our backyard. I see the sparrows on the telephone wires, squirrels on the fence, cat on the shed roof. Without that view to stop and stare it, I don't know that I'd ever get anything done. Instead of distracting me, it gives my mind a nature break and re-energizes me as I sort through my ideas.

So sit, read, and stare a bit. More about staring out the window later. I am convinced they'll all help you become a better writer.

A license to be nosy

2010-01-23T16:01:00.001-08:00

One of the best things about being a writer is that people actually EXPECT you to be nosy! What a marvelous thing it is, too. Because of my research on alcoholism for the mystery novel, I had a couple really delightful emails from Peggy, whom I "met" through emailing the AA website. She is very candid and opinionated, and gave me a some valuable pointers right off. I also have a master gardener in Oregon who answers my ignorant questions about what my heroine's landscaper should be putting in her yard. A couple years back, I emailed one of the city engineers in Portland, Oregon about the bridges that crisscross through that city, and I got a wonderful rundown of traffic patterns and which bridge would best suit my purposes (a murder that clogs up rush hour traffic). What a life a writer has!

moving along

2010-01-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

Last week, I took a bunch of stuff (fairly decent stuff, too) to my critique group. One thing was the opening of the novel (Number Three) that is excerpted in novel Number One. It was ridiculously fun to write, knowing I had several bits that will serve as sort of an outline for where the book is going. It's a mystery, so now I have a romantic comedy, a coming-of-age story, and a mystery in the works. It's honestly helping to juggle at least two of them at once--I sort of feed off the energy of one in writing the other. The coming-of-age story will have to wait a bit, I think. It requires me to put myself in a sort of sad place of rejection and middle-grade angst that I don't want to do right now, just as my daughter is dealing with that sort of thing.

The key point is that I'm finding that while I can read about how others work, or talk with other writers, this odd way of working seems to do it for me. Keeps the juices flowing and the prose coming along. Time is still an issue, but the energy is up, which is essential for me. I cannot write when I'm exhausted or over stressed, unless I'm doing nonfiction on a deadline. That I can pull off.

If you're working on a project that has gotten stuck, think about what's been your pattern in the past when you've been chugging along. It may not fit anything anyone else would advise, but seek out your own path. Just like finding your voice in writing, we need to find our own rhythms and ways to discipline ourselves into getting the work done. I wish you all many blessed days of production, finding your own way to get there. Chocolate may help, too.

The experiment is working...sort of.

2010-01-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

My experiment with writing three novels at once is working pretty well. I managed to take a few pages of each of two novels to my critique group this morning. You remember them--the ladies who let me know that I have used the world "really" a dozen times in three pages. So I had to come back home and rework the stuff, delete all but one of the "reallys" and crank out a couple more pages before my wild child required my attention. Why did I think I needed a couple of hours to be in the zone to get some writing done? My life is forcing me to write faster in shorter time spans. I think the limited time works like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in that you are forced to shut down your natural editing tendencies and just write if you want anything to end up on the page. The stories are beginning to move along again, so I guess the switching around among the three novels is, indeed, working to my advantage. I've focused on the two novels that are connected. Maybe next week I'll work on the third novel. Or not. Whichever calls my name at this point.

And in the meantime...

2009-12-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

Ever ready to take the advice of members of my critique group, I have started novel number three. I know, I haven't finished the first one yet, but I've been working on two at once all year, so why not start a third?

I'll tell you why this makes sense to me: I've had a lot of jobs that required me to switch gears from one type of writing to another. If I tired of working on one project, I'd pick up another for a change of pace, then go back to the first one later. I nearly always had at least three projects in some stage of construction at any given time. So why not three novels? Number one is a light romantic comedy, number two a slightly more serious coming-of-age book, and number three is a sort of a spoof of the Dashiell Hammett-style hero (heroine in this case--a hard-boiled lawyer/sleuth). I'm finding that a little work on number three gets out a lot of hostility and stress so I can focus better on number one and two. BTW, there is a direct connection between books number one and number three: the spoof is included, partially, in the romantic comedy--it's excerpted as the book that my main character is writing. :) Fun!

We'll see how this shapes up. If it goes well, maybe I'll get all three done before my daughter goes to college (about six years from now). If it goes REALLY well, I may get all of them done within the next year or two. If it does NOT go well...I'll know by February.

Why isn't everyone reading Rett MacPherson?

2009-12-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

Rett is one of those "least known, best writers," to quote Liz Duckworth (another one of them) who write really good books, but who doesn't have a lot of name recognition. Add Marion Duckworth (Liz's mother-in-law), Nancy Kennedy, Donna Andrews (well, Donna has a bit more attention, maybe), and a whole slew of other writers who labor in heart-felt anguish (I may be a bit melodramatic here) to produce great reading across a multitude of genres.

Those of us who write for publication risk never being read. Our books have to pass through agents, editors, publishers, and bookstore owners to get to "street-level" readers. If they do sell, we make about 50 cents off every book. So, obviously, we're not in this for the money, and judging by the writers I've named above, we don't get much fame either. So, accepting there's really no money or fame in the game, we obviously write for our own pleasure. There, I admit it. It's all about me, after all. :)

Great ideas come from other people

2009-12-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

Because of my background in journalism, and since this is my first foray into fiction, I'm always hunting around

the world for ideas and information that will help my writing process. Becky Levine, an author I've mentioned here before, has a great blog about her writing . ( Why is this stupid thing indenting? I wish I were more techy.)

It gives me lots of great info. This list came just in time, since I'm hung up about where to go next in my novel.

I've revised it by leaving out the name of Becky's heroine, but otherwise, these questions are straight from her.

Questions to ask about my heroine:

• What did she do in the previous scene or few scenes?

• What were the consequences of those recent actions?

• How does she feel about what she did and about what happened?

• Who did she set up a conflict with?

• What other character has a strong goal at this time?

• What story element have I not dealt with in, perhaps, too long?

Can you see how brilliant these questions are? Thanks to Becky for putting them in her blog so I can use them, too! Please check out her blog at http://beckylevine.com/2009/12/01/what-would-caro-do/

It is a myth that writers work alone. Most of us need a team, whether we know them or not! Yes, the writing time requires being alone with our stories, but I am not one of those writers who enjoys creating without input from others. Which is why I'm always talking about my critique group. BTW, Becky has just released a book on critique groups, through Writers Digest Books.

A little more here, and a lot more there

2009-11-28T13:00:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving is past and now that I have finally finished the clean up (it took two days to cook, why not another two days to clean up?) I am freer to sit down and look through my last "entry" in my novel, then go from there. Right now, she's in a good place, but it may be more like the frog in the warm water--there's trouble brewing just ahead. It has to be that way. The poor girl will end up fairly happy at the end (we have to have a few unmet desires), but the story wouldn't be very interesting if it were all smooth sailing!

My critique group includes a few of us who are well along in our books--and one who is done with the manuscript, but doing a bit of finessing--and we have laid on the table the idea of meeting weekly to encourage faster progress. I'm not sure how I feel about this. If I were the average woman my age, my child would be grown and married, and I'd have the time for it. Now, I'm not sure that it wouldn't just create more pressure in my already pressurized world. I have to be aware of my limits all the time. If I blow past them, everything melts down until I can get back in balance. I may be interested in creating calamities for my heroine, but not for myself.

Of time and rewrites.

2009-11-15T21:52:00.000-08:00

Time. It runs out, it races, it stops at the worst possible moments, it's "on" or "behind" or "over." For me, it's just too short. Every day it's a challenge to control it and make time for BIC (butt in chair) work.

This is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated), when writers sit frantic and frenzied, writing a whole novel! The goal is to write about 50,000 words in the month of November--about the equivalent of a first draft. The idea is not to produce a publishable novel, but a draft from which you can sculpt a decent work of art later on.

I have to admit I like the idea a lot, but I never get there. Being mom takes over most of my time (as I truly believe it should), so there are only little puddles of time that I have for writing. When I worked in radio copywriting and later in news, I found that when you write on deadline, you can't sit around waiting for some muse to waft in and dump great prose on you. You just put your BIC and write. That myth busted, there was another I DID succumb to: I thought I needed a block of time to write. You know, like a couple of hours to get into the zone, live out my characters, really inhabit that fictional space. Let's bust that myth, too.

As a mom, I don't have two- or three-hour blocks of time. The "zone" is like the muse--not there. I have to write anyway. When my head is doing laundry I still have to write about a journalism professor conflicted over identity and love. When I'm in the middle of chaos, I still have to write about my heroine's peaceful home. When my characters seem stupid and alien, I still have to love them and make them lovable to others. And that all has to be done in very short bits of time, wherever I can find it. At least at the moment I can rest in the saving knowledge that it's just a first draft. NaNoWriMo'ers may produce 50,000 words this month, but my goal will be closer to 1,000.

All right, all ready!

2009-10-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

Just when I get a new chapter done on my book, half the critique group comes down with the flu and we cancel for this round. Rats! Now I have to wait until Nov. 4 (we meet twice a month). I guess that gives me time to re-write the chapter (again, and maybe a fourth time). I know we're supposed to (according to all the "experts" at writers conferences) write the whole stinking book first, then go back and rework it--and I will, sort of--but first, I have to reread the section leading into where I want to start, so I can get the rhythm. And that makes me want to reword stuff here and there, drop a sentence, improve a description...I can't help myself.

I did have some minor satisfaction this week, besides the writing. My 12-year-old daughter asked me something like "do you have any presidential autographs?" (only the Lord knows why) so I dug out a photo from my news days. I was standing with Gerald Ford, and the photo was signed "best wishes" to me. The usual photo op that news people get with any president, especially one campaigning, as Ford was at that moment. My kiddo was muy impressed. She wanted to borrow the photo to show her friends, but I suggested it was really not for handing around the neighborhood, and besides, nobody would really give a rip. It's not like it was REAGAN, for pete's sake!

Well, back to the novel. At this rate, it may actually be done in time to pay for a couple of her college textbooks.

Playing make believe

2009-10-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, sometimes writing fiction is simply a heck of a lot of fun because it's an extension of playing make believe. I create people, a place for them, and all the action. That is an awful lot of fun.

I always liked playing the bad guy when we kids were cowboys. The bad guy didn't have to play by the rules. If someone accused me of not being fair when I ambushed them, my response could be, "What's fair? I don't care, I'm the bad guy!" At least it was fun until my sister got mad and threw a broken toy gun at me. The ragged edge caught my cheek and left a nifty triangular scar that lasted a good many years.

I still find the bad guys more fun, and easier to "play." Am I warped? I have a character in my current novel who is full of herself and bad tempered. A lot of what she says is mean spirited and sarcastic. I love her! She says a lot of things I have thought of saying to people, but am too nice to say. And my niece said something really horrible recently that was so funny I'll probably put it in my character's mouth, too. A good line is a good line, if it's in character and advances the story, and I have the perfect spot for that line.

My heroine has to be a better person than that, but not completely good, or she'd be a total drag. Nobody would relate to her. So I also get to enjoy "playing" her bad side. And when she's good, she's so conflicted that I'm beginning to find that fun, too.

Playing make believe is a truly wonderful pastime for kids or adults.

The source of what you write

2009-10-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

A lot of my writing stems from my daughter's struggles. A second novel (yes, I know I need to finish the first one) deals with a young girl as she grows from 12 to about 18 years old. She has been abandoned by her mother, doesn't even know who her father is, and is raised by her maternal grandmother. Is she what her mother said by abandoning her, or what her precious grandmother tells her she is, through the gifts of love and grace? It's about identity, in a different way then my current book is.

I'm finding that nearly everything I've written since my daughter's birth has been about identity. It's plagued me before, but took on a different perspective when I became a mother. As a military kid without roots or many real ties to extended family, I always felt somewhat adrift. I think now that this was a gift from God to give me more empathy with my daughter.

The identity of an adopted child affected with attachment disturbance is in constant flux, which causes upheaval. During the rough times, my life is all about her. During the calmer times, as I evaluate the situation, I also tap this rich source of angst and stress in our lives for my writing. I won't go into any detail about what our lives are like. Suffice it to say it's tough and it's precious--and every minute of grace counts. I will say I believe I can use those emotions to help me create real and relatable characters without exposing my husband's or daughter's personal secrets (I am pretty transparent about my own issues); and perhaps I can help bring healing to someone who reads and identifies with my characters. While I am sometimes a bit uneasy about how much of myself will be revealed in my work whether I intend it nor not, I think that is part of the healing process. And I do hope that as we heal in our household, some of my readers will come along with us. I don't write my books specifically to bring healing, but I do hope what I write will be more than just a fun ride.

After the big hooray

2009-08-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

I find very few moments of peace to use for writing, let alone time for thinking these days. My daughter has some special issues and that sometimes makes for a difficult week (or month, depending). When it all hits the fan, writing is NOT my top priority, and even if it were, it simply is not possible.

You may have a child like this, too. One who needs special attention, and a lot of it, and often for extended periods of time. A child is a greater calling than a book or article, a richer reward in every way than a million-selling book, or a NY Times best seller (does that even count these days?), and a much more wonderful "product" at the end of our lives. To feed into the life of another can be difficult--and sometimes for great lengths of time, unrewarding. But in the end, I fully believe it is the most important endeavor of my life, and that keeps me plugging away.

So, right now I don't have a lot to say about my book, and my book is not gaining many words. This is a season of working through, hanging on, and wrestling with difficulties. But it is also a season of great laughter, because my daughter is one of the funniest people I know. And humor helps the whole family get through the windy spots.

When the winds calm a bit more, then I can turn back to my book, but in the meantime, we will batten down the hatches and weather the storms.

the big hooray

2009-08-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

There is just nothing like a really productive day at the keyboard--one that produces hundreds of words that are actually useable and advance the story. It's the satisfaction of getting moving after a string of very slow writing days. Some days the story just bursts out and heads on down the road; other days, it drags its feet and keeps backtracking, zigzagging, then squatting in the middle of that road. Those days I search for ways to kick it in the behind. "I do not have writer's block," as my heroine tells her publisher, "I have too many choices."

Today, my MC (main character--an abbreviation I'm stealing from Becky Levine--do check out her blog http://beckylevine.com/) wraps up a meeting with the hero, and gets a phone call including devious plans from her best friend, as well as one from her irritating stepmother, who is the intended victim of the devious plans.

We move onward with hope. A character who had no name now has one, a question about what to do with a certain plot element becomes clearer, and my heroine is left smiling, "an evil smile, filled with victorious malice." She's not an evil character, but it's fun for her to enjoy the thought of getting her stepmother wrapped up in confusion and situations that will discourage Stepmom's current intentions. How does one write an evil laugh here? Nya-ah-ah. Let the fun begin.

Now, if I could just solve the mystery of why my typeface sometimes changes font and size on its own, although it looks fine in the composing window! I've no idea how to get an answer from blogspot, although I've filed a question in the discussions. AAAUGH!

I'm writing my wish

2009-08-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

I moved to the Silicon Valley of California in 1983 after grad school in Oregon, the state I consider my home state. Military brats get to choose their home states, since they often don't feel they really belong in any particular spot. There were no jobs in Oregon, so...I ended up in Calif. That said, my heart belongs to a tiny town in the Willamette Valley that has only 800 people. It's boomed up from about 700 when my family settled there after my dad retired from the Air Force. I never really lived in Scio--just sort of camped there between terms at OSU and U of O, so my idea of what the town is, is probably rather romanticized. I remember the six-party phone line when we first moved there in 1968, and the friendly people at the two grocery stores, the P.O. (we were general delivery at the time), and the bank.

Scio is the model for Baxter, Oregon in my book. But I needed a private college, so I selected Linfield College in McMinnville--just for its looks. In my mind, Linfield is the perfect Preston College for Anna's journalism department. I love the brick buildings, the white pillars, the grassy lawns. I even took photos to use as inspiration when I write about Preston. As far as I know, Linfield is nothing like Preston. I am taking abundant liberties with both Scio and the college to mold them into Baxter, Oregon and its Preston College. In actuality, I have only stolen my *impressions* of these places, since I never spent a lot of time in either, and certainly was never involved in the town politics or the newspaper in Scio--and I have only driven through Linfield. Nothing about Baxter is really Scio. Baxter is bigger, has more shops and, of course, the college. But I hope that Baxter will feel to readers the way Scio feels to me. Small, cozy, friendly, full of pickups and normal people. It is a place where you have to slow down on back roads because there's a tractor in your lane. It's a place where just outside of town, you can drive up on a hill that gives you a view across a beautiful green valley, and where there used to be several covered bridges scattered like little jewels over wide streams. I love Scio and its environs, and I'm working to make Baxter the kind of small town my readers will love. It's the place I wish I could live.

Of plants and bridges and research

2009-08-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

What plants will win a spot in my book? I have a landscaper (or IS he?) hero, advising my heroine on plants in her yard. Granted, this does not further the plot, except as an excuse for the two of them to meet, and meet again, and talk, and wander around the backyard together, and for her to notice his green eyes and other attractions. But I can't just stick any old plant in the ground!

My story takes place in Oregon--the Willamette Valley, specifically. I live in California--in the South Bay area--Silicon Valley. Plants grow better one place than another, so talking to a landscaper here can only give me input on how he approaches his business, not on any plantings. As for my personal gardening expertise: I seem to be able to kill plants in two different states with equal skill (or lack thereof). So, ages ago, I contacted a Master Gardener in Oregon. Neil was very helpful, but I really wasn't ready to ask too specific a question. Now I am, and hope to be able to reach him again, or find someone equally cooperative. Ahhh, research.

My favorite research email was from a city engineer in Portland, OR who gave me the rundown on the bridges in that city. He was a godsend, although I originally worried that he might interpret my email as being from a terrorist who wanted to clog up the city commute. Luckily, nothing untoward happened shortly after he sent his answer to cause him to notify Homeland Security. Sometimes writers ask weird questions. I'll bet if someone were really paranoid, mystery writers would show up on all sorts of alert lists for some of the stuff they research.

down time

2009-07-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

I find it fascinating what comes to you when you sit and stare at the wall for a while.

Recently, I have been occupied with an upcoming confrontation between the sisters and their stepmother, wondering about dialog, letting my mind wander. Then I checked my email and got an absolutely hysterical note from my niece about some problems they had with their realtor's lack of communication. Her statement to the realtor was sooo rude, it's perfect for what Yvonne would say! As I've mentioned before: writers are thieves of other people's words and actions, so...I'm stealing my niece's comment. It's just too funny, being just the sort of thing most of us would long to say, but wouldn't unless the gloves really came off. When you let your mind wander, sometimes God delivers the best stuff right to your inbox! For it is by grace that we are saved, and by grace we write our novels. (Apologies to the Apostle Paul.)

editing, rewriting, and reconstruction

2009-07-20T21:47:00.000-07:00

Any writer who's accomplished anything tells us they rewrite and rewrite and sometimes throw the whole thing out and start over after all that work. I figure by the time anyone is published, they must make about 25 cents an hour on the deal--if that. Evan Marshall in The Marshall Plan Workbook, a book about structuring not just your novel, but your writing career, has a great first section that brings home the financial reality of most writers' lives: "Any of us can name writers with healthy six-figure incomes who have no need to undertake any additional work to support themselves. And as an agent I can tell you that many writers who are patient eventually work their way up to advances and royalties large enough to live on. But to expect this kind of monetary reward from your novels one, two or even five books into your career can be a big mistake."

FIVE books in? Heck, I'm only a half a book in and I already know there's no money here unless someone buys it for a film. I'm not writing the kind of book that is going to be a crazy, trendsetting novel. I'm writing a romantic comedy, a mostly light, sometimes thoughtful expose of a looney woman who has to write fiction, deal with her relationship with her father, and juggle a day job. In that sense, it's mostly biographical. Except that she's nothing like me in personality--or is she? I've discussed that before. I never know how much I'm revealing about myself, but I do know that I have to finish the book before I can start the real work on it--editing, rewriting and reconstructing in part. I already did the part of throwing most of it out, so I hope I can skip that this round.

The value of friends

2009-07-03T22:03:00.001-07:00

The critique group met again this morning. I read my latest few pages and it was pretty quiet. When that happens, I usually assume they are all struggling for the most creative way to tell me it sucked. This morning, however, they really liked it. They pointed out a couple of things that needed tweaking, but I felt quite gratified by their accolades. There are so many times I think, man, I just don't want it to be mediocre--if it's going to be mediocre I want to skip it. Thank God for a critique group whose motto is "Friends don't let friends write mediocre books." And friends give friends the encouragement to carry on with a process that requires continual persistence.

the novel that ought to be???

2009-06-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

It's pretty rough when I find the best parts of my novel are the excerpts from my heroine's novel. There's more energy and conflict in those brief paragraphs than in pages and pages of the rest of my book, mostly because fo the brevity required. But I need to light a fire under my girl so she gets irked. (There's another great word, Steph.) I just had the first kiss of my heroine's two main characters and, believe me, it's a lot hotter than Anna and Tip (my heroine and her sweetie). Maybe because the heroine I've created for Anna's book is a pretty prickly sort of creature, so the guy she's getting involved with is equally irascible. My book is getting to be more fun as I go along, and I'm about to kick Anna and Tip into a faceoff over his true identity. Sister Yvonne will be giving her two cents worth, you can bet, but Daddy will still be in the dark. Oh, what a tangled web we weave--all of us--when we write a novel.

and then she said...

2009-06-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

I love writing dialog. I like hearing my characters' voices in my head and putting them down on paper, along with action. I see the scene happening as I write. I find I rarely use "he said" or "she said"--I tend to use an action. For example:

“Why don’t you just kill her off?” Yvonne grimaced and slurped her tea at my kitchen table. “She’s such a burden.” My precious older sister fingered the flowered saucer rim as if it were in Braille and might give her some further insight. The light in my kitchen flamed her short, auburn hair.

I like using the dialog and tags to reveal something about the character, instead of just "she said." I want my readers to see Yvonne with her short auburn hair, making a face and running her finger around the saucer rim. I want them to see action, not just hear her voice--which is pretty matter-of-fact. Yvonne sees life very simply. What works, works. What doesn't ought to get dumped. And she feels that having an alter-ego author of best-selling books (Claire) is making her sister Anna (the heroine) crazy. Or maybe just crazier.

Of course, there's more dialog to this picture of Yvonne, which reveals Anna's confusion and insecurities. I mean, that's what the whole book is about: insecurities, overcoming, giving up hiding, finding Anna's own identity. I'm finding that almost everything I write these days has something to do with identity. I've probably said that before.

Rats. Now I'm distracted by the fact that I can's figure out how to get this back to single space. I'll never cut and paste into this again. :)

There will be peace at the keyboard

2009-06-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

Just back from a trip back east to see the family--my husband's side. Some planned adventures fell through because I was staggering through the visit with a cold and sinus infection. Nothing like a clear brain--nope, I was foggy throughout.

But the change did give me a different focus. I encountered some interesting people both on the planes and on the ground. If I get a chance to actually talk to those sitting near us, I consider that a great blessing. Some interesting insights can come of it, and did this trip. I know I'll eventually find a place to use them.

My heroine, harried as she is, has a focused core. Deep down, she knows what she wants, but is sort of slogging her way to it at this moment in the story. Knowing that and communicating that is important because I want my readers to know that, tossed by many winds as she is, she will continue on toward the goal. I need to know that's true of me, too. And I do.

Just finish the book!

2009-06-09T18:34:00.001-07:00

"I don't think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn't really his fault." So starts Dick Francis's "To The Hilt," and clearly shows you why once you open one of his books, it's awfully hard to put it down. I picked this one up recently and planned to use it during a trip that starts in a couple of days, but I made the mistake of actually opening it up. Oops. Now I need to find another book to take on the trip. Maybe I'll grab one of my Rett MacPherson mysteries--she's always fun.

I tend to collect great openings and descriptions. Maybe I hope I'll pick up good style by osmosis. But certainly reading good stuff helps improve our writing. I still remember a description by Ngaio Marsh of a lawyer's musty office. So good you could smell the place and practically taste the dusty air.

I'm trying not to go back and rewrite my opening (again) until I finish the whole book. Charlotte Cook of Komenar Publishing says that the ending of a book "informs" the beginning--it tells you what pieces need to be in the beginning of the book. So I really do need to finish the piece before I start poking around it again, and again. I am prone to do that, and everyone advises against it--at least everyone I've ever heard talk about writing a novel. I once had about 5 minutes with a famous agent who, when I asked a question about whether a book I had in mind was adult or young adult fiction, asked me, "Why are you asking that question? Just finish the book!"

life intervenes

2009-06-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

Just when I begin to pick up some more momentum in my writing, a family emergency arises, a health scare pops up...well, you've been there. We are wrapping up the homeschooling year, sort of. Since we homeschool year round, we only wrap up the regular school-year schedule of field trips and co-op classes in science, etc. Math, history and writing continue for both my daughter and me. I don't know how long I can stay ahead of her in math. The history and writing I think I've got sorted.

In a couple of weeks we drop everything and head for the Philadelphia area to see family and take a little historical tour of the city. I plan to take a lot of notes, in case I ever want to send a heroine there. Never waste a good city.

Meanwhile, back in fictional Baxter, Oregon my characters are happily bumping into one another, yielding romance, humor, and some chagrin, if I can get it right. My critique group awaits the next chapter.

When life interrupts art, I think it's time to see what art can make of it. So I'm evaluating all the emergencies and pitfalls of my month and wondering what Anna Branson would do. One hopes the daily bruising yields something for the page.

Hooray for critique!

2009-05-16T10:47:00.001-07:00

My critique group met yesterday and proved, once again, that they are worth more than the pennies it costs to make them tea and put out a few goodies. My latest pages were praised and criticized (in the most helpful way), so now I have rewrites to do, notes to put aside for later consideration, and I shall move onward toward the end of my novel. Which is miles away, it seems.

Still, we march forward with the story and I hope I can finish the thing by the end of the year. It's been too many years....

Any tiny step forward

2009-05-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Things have been tough here on the old homestead, as my dad used to say. But I managed to churn out three pages--a whole scene worthy of the first part of my novel. Sure it needs work--it's just a draft. Sometimes I think we writers get bogged down in our writing because we want every page to be amazing, but until the book is done and you start the re-write, the mantra has to be "it's just a draft."

BTW, I sent my mom the pages of my novel she didn't get to read while she was visiting in March. I made her promise not to give me any feedback unless it was good. I have my critique group to give me the bad news. :)

So, if you're writing a novel right now, remember: It's just a draft.

From whence cometh inspiration?

2009-05-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

Inspiration comes from the most wonderful places. As I'm struggling with the romance scenes (being a bit shy and private, and wanting to write a book my mother will happily read), I came across a wonderful blog by Pioneer Woman. Ree Drummond tells the best story of how she and her husband met, courted, and married. So far, her blogs take you up to the wedding day. It's funny, it's a little hot, and it's a lot just plain romantic.

It was just what I needed to be reading to get in the mood. God sends inspiration by odd and amazing means.

Pen name or real name?

2009-05-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, you know the writing is not going well when you consider using a name other than your own on the book cover. I've been struggling away and seem to get nowhere. Maybe I shouldn't have my real name on the book, so I won't be embarrassed.

If it really stinks, no one knows it's you. If your romance scenes turn a little hotter than you'd like to discuss in public, no one knows it's you. On the other hand, if it turns into a best seller and is made into a movie, no one knows it's you!

So I am sustaining myself by reading and re-reading wonderful, encouraging emails from folks in my critique group who tell me my book is marvelous and who want me to finish so they can read the rest of the story. "Brilliant," said one of my more generous friends. "Just finish the thing" is the usual following comment. So maybe I will.

I really suck at romance

2009-04-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, the hero and heroine are together, close, sparks fly--uh...well, maybe not too many sparks. I don't want a sex scene in my book, but I do want these two people to experience some definite, very warm interest. My daughter has been playing Taylor Swift's new CD over and over and over and.... The title song, "Fearless" really sums up what I want my couple to experience. So I'm listening as it plays and thinking about what makes people connect and then I think, "Doggone it, Tip (my hero), just kiss the girl!" But a lot has to happen before we get there.

Years ago when I was single (back in the dark ages of the 80s), an older friend asked me, "Why do you young people make it so hard? Don't you think if it was meant to happen, you wouldn't have to work so hard?" But that's REAL life, and this is fiction, and it has to be hard or the story will be over by page 60. She has hangups, he's torn because...well, the reader has to find that out later. At some point, do they have to really dislike each other or is that a cliche? My heroine only dislikes him when she feels betrayed because she finds out he's...well, the reader has to find that out later. How will this resolve? Will her sister stick her nose in? What about her mother and best friend? I want them all in it, stirring the thing up so that it seems impossible for Anna, my heroine to either go for the guy, or get to the truth about what she really wants. And what that is, the reader will have to find out later.

Is my heroine messed up because I am?

2009-04-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a scene which is the first time the hero and heroine meet up for any length of time. I have based her reaction to him on something I used to go through in college. For some reason I have only sort of figured out, I used to be really rude to extraordinarily good-looking guys. If they flirted with me, my reaction was really dismissive. "Yeah, whatever." I always liked ordinary looking guys and even sort of ugly ones. So, drawing on that feeling, my heroine, Anna, is rather stressed about having to deal with Tip, the attractive hero. BTW, I've described him as having a "lived-in" face--not plastic model handsome, so he ought to be approachable by the average female.

If I want to use that feeling for my heroine, I need to figure out why she feels this way and how she overcomes (or doesn't) the tendency to flee any attractive male. She is not me, so her reason has more to do with her father, whom one of my most precious friends has called "the Adonis of Academia." I told her I was going to steal that phrase and use it in my book. (See my previous post about writers being thieves.) Her relationship with her father is problematic.

But another question for me, because I am who I am, is how much of my heroine is me? How much of myself is being revealed on the pages I blithely hand around at my critique group? My readers may end up knowing me better than I know myself...whether or not my heroine is me.

Quick, hand me a shovel

2009-04-06T19:13:00.001-07:00

Sometimes when I listen to writers talk to large groups about their writing processes and publishing experiences, I am acutely aware of the hype involved. I mean, if I am ever speaking somewhere about my book (should I ever get the thing published), I am POSITIVE I would always tell the absolute truth about how hard to write, and how fun it is at the same time. But I think after a while, some writers begin to think the process was always easy for them. I'm sure after the 10th book it is, but.... They make it sound as if it all just "happens" and that makes me feel like a complete failure. "Writers MUST write," they proclaim. And I think, well, sometimes I must do other things besides writing--like parenting my child.

I firmly believe, being a parent of 12 years, that writing and parenting have a lot in common. There are things no one tells you about, and things everyone tells you about. Unfortunately, some of the most important things are the ones you aren't told about, or which are glossed over, or which they couldn't tell you about it they wanted to.

For writers, it seems that no one can really tell you about the process of writing--how many hours a day you'll need, how much energy, how many rewrites, how many letters or conference meetings with agents and publishers it will take. Those things are so individual, and some so serendipitous that only God knows what your process will be. After that 10th book, you may have a better idea.

Both parents and writers face the question of whether what we are doing is the best thing. We grapple with insecurities about the depth of our commitment, and we spend a lot of time in the middle of the night dealing with issues. Well, I say "we" and I mean "I" do. If I awaken in the night and my thoughts turn to my novel, I start reworking scenes, or creating new ones, or asking myself if I can make the book deeper and more meaningful, instead of just entertaining. As a parent, I ask myself many of the same questions about the way I'm relating to my daughter--am I paying enough attention? Am I giving her enough depth, instead of just entertaining her?

Writing and parenting--two worlds of insecurity. So when someone goes on and on about how the book just "flowed" out of them, maybe you need to pick up a mental shovel.

Somedays, it's all beyond me!

2009-03-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

There are days I can sit and write, focused on where the book is going and aware that I am blessed by being "in the zone." But today...ffft...nothing. I need a certain amount of energy to be able to write. I'll never know how people who struggle with chronic pain or debilitating illness can write. I just don't have the steam to keep my characters going if I'm not rested (or partly) and fairly healthy. And today, I'm pooped!

I just put my mom on a plane back home to Portland, and now I'm in the "getting back to the normal schedule" mode. It was so nice to have her here, but traveling upsets everyone's usual routine--isn't that at least partly why we do it? So now I have to rearrange the room we used as a guest room, launder sheets and towels, and see what's left in the refrigerator. Then, maybe, I can get excited about what's happening in Anna Branson's (my main character) world. Funny how the details of life can slow down the creative process.

Time flies

2009-03-16T18:06:00.001-07:00

Holy cow! What's happening to March? I feel as if I haven't written anything meaningful since December. I think having a co-writer would be handy about now. I'd get to the point where I've got the book moving along and then stalled out. "Here," I say to my blessed partner in crime, " take the next 50 pages." How generous of me. And she would write us out of the problem situation, then I would pick up again, refreshed by her ingenious creation and buoyed by her cheerleading: "Now, take it back and give me drama, pathos, comedy." I will praise her work, and then I will give her all that and more.

But for now, I have to write my own book, all by myself, sitting by the sunny window where my tomato seedlings interest me more than my plot. Why is it I have all sorts of suggestions for everyone else, but when it comes to myself, I have no clue what to do? That's why I need my critique group, which I will have to miss this week due to a visit from my mom. Maybe I'll make Mom read my draft and see what she has to say. But first I have to tell her she must cheer me on when she's done reading, even if she hates the book. That's the rule.

The doldrums.

2009-03-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

The last few weeks have been crazy at home. My pre-teen daughter is going through the usual pre-teen stuff that requires a lot of my attention and sympathy--and discipline. My main character has gone to sleep on me and the hero is waiting patiently for her to wake up. So what do I write? The blog, the book, the article on attachment disorder that I want to send to women's magazines? I hate those query letters that must precede the article writing. I am not a great query letter writer. I think for this week's critique group, I should get feedback on my cruddy query letters. I need to get some money coming in with my writing, but I'm sitting here on my ship, sails ready, but no wind.

Oh, the dailiness!

2009-02-25T12:01:00.000-08:00

"Writing a book is an endurance contest, and a war fought against yourself, because writing is beastly hard work which one would just as soon not do. It's also a job, however, and if you want to get paid, you have to work. Life is cruel that way." Tom Clancy in Writers Digest Magazine, January 2001

I love that quote which, while a bit depressing, pretty much sums up the "glamorous" life of the writer. It is a lonely, persevering, sometimes heart-breaking job. It is occasionally transcendent--there's just nothing like being in the zone with your work, forgetting the world around you and seeing a world you're creating unwrapping itself like the gift from God it is. But most often it's just discipline, application of craft, nitpicking, and analyzing what is good vs. what is best. Some days, I'd rather do some ironing, dusting, nearly anything but write, but I am forced by fate to write.

What stops a writer from writing on weekends.

2009-02-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

I sit at my computer, with a scene in mind--completely acted out like a movie, ready to go. As I begin to type it in, my daughter charges up the stairs and wants to know if she can go visit the neighborhood cat. This animal hangs out on our street and is fed by at least three families, so she is as fat and sleek as a pet pig. Yes, please, go visit the cat, but don't plague the neighbors while you're out.

Then my husband wants me to know he's heading for the gym. Then the phone rings and it's my 90-year-old mother in Oregon. After we hang up, I remember I have dishes in the drainer and more to wash, plus emptying the dishwasher of the things in there.

The scene continues to run through my mind as I sort out all the dishes and wipe down counters. But I see the plant from the nursery, sitting in its plastic pot, right next to the clay pot I need to put it into (all right, into which I need to put it). Now my scene is fading rapidly.

This is probably the story of nearly every day of my life, but on weekends it seems like the traffic up and down the stairs, through my brain, over the kitchen counters and out the back door increases to Grand Central Station. I am constantly distracted. I finally have to run upstairs and type in a few lines to remind me where I'm going with this scene, then run back down to join my daughter visiting the cat.

Living with your characters

2009-02-11T20:14:00.001-08:00

I find the characters I have (supposedly) created for my novel really do seem to have lives of their own. Sometimes they yell at me about not getting enough page time, or they tell me they are NOT going to do what I planned for them to do. As soon as I start writing that particular scene, they balk. They will not speak, they move like heavy, poorly strung puppets. Other times, their stories come pouring out, vining together with other characters, showing me their relationships, their affections, and their biases. It's pretty amazing to be writing along and have a character holding a pad and pencil and as I see him in my mind, there he stands, pencil in his left hand. "By golly," I say, "That guy is left-handed. I wonder if that means anything in my story. Why is he left-handed?" At this point I do not know.

My heroine is neurotic, for sure. Conflicted, as any honest person living a lie would be. Can I even call her an honest person? Does she know how to be honest any more after ages of living a double life? What "tangled web" will catch her, forcing an explosion in my plot? I rub my hands in glee. Conflict, at least on the page, makes me joyful. Conflict means there's something interesting going on she's going to have to deal with.

Tonight, as I lay my head on my pillow and just begin to cuddle down under the comforter, someone will probably yell at me, "I don't like the flowers you put in my garden, I can't stand my sister, I want a horse," and other such crazy details. But tonight I'm jotting down a few notes, then telling them to shut up. It's been a long day.

Honestly

2009-02-08T18:47:00.000-08:00

If I can't be honest about the fact that I am not one of those people who can write alone in a garrett (or back bedroom in my case), I'd better drop the blog. The whole idea for me was to evaluate honestly the process as it happens. A diary of the (mostly weekly) successes and failures. And like most writers I know, there are more days of failure than of success. Pretty much like the rest of life.

critique members save me again

2009-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

This Friday was our bi-weekly critique group, so I brought what I have from my last chapter and read it. Then we talked about what needed to be in that section, and how I could insert those elements into the text I have now. The brainstorming may make it seem to some that I am writing my book by committee--but I think of it more as the team of support folks with the water and first aid that are there for the marathon runner. Iron Man assistants, so to speak, since a book really requires a variety of skills from a writer: creative writing, self-editing, rewriting, and imagining a scene with its feelings, smells, and sounds. Those assists along the way--whether in a regular critique or just a passing comment from a friend that lights the bulb of an idea--are essential to me.

I may not be physically capable of an Iron Man competition, but I am sure giving it a try in the world of publication.

bummer scene

2009-01-30T20:56:00.000-08:00

I just get stuff down on the page so that the ideas and general gist of the scene is there. But it's pathetic when I read it. It waits for the "telling detail" about the setting, a character's gesture, the smell of the place, sounds, other movement--all that stuff that makes a reader really enter the story. The last scene I wrote was especially superficial. Funny how all the stuff about the senses changes the way the whole thing flows. Dialog without any action or expression of feeling just lies there. Once the gesture is there, the whole line makes sense. It's in my head when I first write it, but I don't always get it all down until I read back through and visualize the scene happening--like watching a play. Once I step back into that scene as a reader, not as the writer, it's easy for me to put in the things that color and animate my story.

My main goal is to get the book finished, then go back and add a lot to the detail stuff, but when the first read-back of a scene is so boring, I really have to fix SOMETHING then. I can't just leave it there, crying for a life. And that's what makes reading other writers so valuable. Not that I want to spend too much time reading other people's stuff and not writing my own, but reading good writers reminds me where I want to go, and where I want to take my readers. And sometimes it even shows me how to get there.

Other great writing books

2009-01-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

I've discovered another favorite writing book: Writing Away by Elizabeth George. I find each chapter makes me stop and take notes for the scenes in my books--character development, dialog, setting, landscape--she's very challenging to read and I am stirred to respond by making my own writing more alive and evocative.

Just for fun, read Stephen King's book, On Writing. It is a superb look at the way he approaches his writing, and is very encouraging. As he talks about his own writing journey, he vividly brings to life his past jobs and scenes from his personal life that make me glad I don't read his writing. He is very good at making things real and in-the- moment. I can't handle horror books, and I can tell from his writing in this book that his novels would scare me for decades!

And so I labor on, with George and King as part of my team of guides.

Progress is daily on the road to glory

2009-01-22T19:15:00.001-08:00

I was recently reminded about one of the best books I ever read/acted on: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I'm planning to re-read it in the near future--even got it down and put it in the stack of books by my bed--but I've lived by it for more than a decade. Cameron's book is about nurturing our creativity--making room for it in our lives, balancing input and output, reaching for our goals, finding our way. You read one chapter a week, write three pages a day of anything (when I first read it in the 90s, I wrote a journal, now I use the idea for my book) first thing in the morning, and have a date with yourself once a week to go someplace that nourishes your spirit and gives your creativity a boost.

As I finished another scene in my book today, I felt again how important it is to write every day--to keep the momentum going, the story line straight in my mind, and my characters awake in my consciousness. Right now they are clattering around all over the place, anxious to break out and tell their stories. So I guess Cameron's method is working.

sorting it all out

2009-01-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how stepping back to take a look at my manuscript helps build excitement about what I'm going to write next. I have gone through all the chapters, listing the people and key action that occurs in each and noting what needs to come up next. One of my critique group (ever vigilant) commented on something I'd said about computer cabling and classroom bells. She reminded me how long it's been since I've been in a college setting. Around 25 years! So, I need to do a bit of research with the local colleges about how they handle class changes and computer installation. All these little details, if not taken care of, may distract a reader and kill their interest in your story.

In one section, I commented on a certain bridge in downtown Portland, Oregon. It's one phrase, but if I'd gotten it wrong, anyone familiar with Portland would immediately distrust other things I have to say. The research for that particular remark wasn't laborious, but I did sweat it a bit. In these times, when you ask a city engineer about which bridge in the downtown freeway system would really botch up the afternoon commute if it were closed for any reason. . .well, I'm just glad nothing happened to that bridge after I asked the question.

Ahh,the fun and games of research.

Critique groups

2009-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

Today my critique group met to present our latest manuscript pages, poems, etc. If I had not had these women to turn to over the last several years, my book would long ago have been put into a drawer and left to rot. With grace, wit and great wisdom, they edit and comment on what I bring to them. They laugh and admire a paragraph or two, then point out what is slowing the story down, what is unclear or downright stupid (although they never use that word).

They are helping me with two novels: one I've described in this blog, and another that is a coming of age story about a young girl whose mother has rejected her and left her to be raised by her grandmother. Both books will eventually be finished because of these faithful and diligent friends. I count on them to counteract my nearsightedness about my own work.

Some writers choose not to join a group, some have joined one and found it unhelpful. I've been in several, some better than others. Things just work in my current group. If you have not been fortunate in critique groups, keep trying. Find one with people that share your particular values and outlook, or maybe your genre. Fantasy and sci-fi writers may need to find a group that sticks to their genre. Some of the rest of us have no idea how to advise you. But for most of us, a general group can work very well. However, all groups need to follow some simple rules.

Come prepared to share your work, and prepared for it to be criticized. This is the purpose, after all. I've been in critiques where certain members wanted to read their material and be praised. Any suggestion that changes needed to be made was rejected and they eventually left the group. Get real, people.

Come prepared to offer your most gracious help to the other readers. Give kindly critique, helpful direction, gentle guidance--honesty with grace, please.

Come prepared to share the time. If any one person dominates, someone else loses the chance to present their labors.

Come to triumph over all the things that keep you from finishing and marketing your work.

planning the book

2009-01-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

Whew! The holidays took their toll on my writing schedule. Now, I'm back at work, but doing a bit of evaluating, rather than writing at the moment. I need to get a grip on all the details, where I am, where I'm going, and I'm checking out what's missing that needs to be added to the manuscript as it currently stands. THEN, off I go again, moving things along.

My hope is to wrap up the first full draft by late spring so I have summer to edit and rewrite. And rewrite and ....

planning the novel v. letting the muses run

2008-12-28T21:27:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I can say how much I let the muse run the story and how much detail I plot out ahead of time. I mean, seriously, if I just let my muse run, I would have some lovely ramblings, but the plot would be hopelessly lost. So I have to have a bit of a plan, at the very least.

Since this is my first book, I've been stumbling along a lot, but I did start with narrative outline--that's a narrative written in present tense that walks through the basics of the storyline. "Anna sees Tip and hates his guts... He flees from the ceanothus around the pine tree..." That sort of thing. BTW, I can guarantee you neither of those phrases exists in my book.

I have changed things a lot, giving a great deal of credit to what has to be the best writers critique group ever. Because of those changes in the plot, or in characters, the old narrative is pretty much gone, but some of the landmarks still provide a bit of a guide for me--like shadows in the fog.

I know that certain things have to happen at specific times, that I need to show my characters personalities through dialog and action that also moves the story forward, and I need to balance the "exposure" the reader gets to each character so that the more important characters get more page space than the lesser ones. Periodically I stop and evaluate these sort of things. Is it time to bring the hero back in? Is it time to reveal more about her father and the rift there? Is it time to put in another excerpt from the book that Anna, my main character, is writing? ( I do that here and there. I use it as foreshadowing or sometimes just as a parallel to what is going on in Anna's "real" life.) So I have sort of a story within a story. The excerpts are also often comic relief. Anna's fictional heroine is Cody, who is a six-foot bombshell lawyer who sometimes talks like she came out of a Dashiell Hammett book. She's not very nice, and is a lot of fun to write. Anna is, as one of my critique group says, "creative, repressed, tormented, and in trouble." I like her too much to call her neurotic, but...there's a lot of contrast between Anna and Cody, the bold character she's created for her books.

Steven King calls his writing "uncovering the bones"--gradually revealing your story as archaeologists do when they sweep away the debris at a site. That suggests his writing just unfolds. I don't believe he uses an outline as such, but I'm sure all writers need to know basically what direction they're going as they write. But what has been working for me is to let the story unfold from what ideas I have in my head, and if some other direction occurs to me in mid-scene, I may investigate it, write it out, toss it later, or refine it. So far, I've tossed out a couple of characters to allow more of the father/daughter thing, for example. But I do know pretty much the highlights of my story--what's coming up to cause some more tension, what's going to be an obstacle to a relationship, what's going to strengthen it in the long run. But a lot of the details pop up as I go.

waiting for the muse

2008-12-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

I worked a bit on my files today--labeling things with a Sharpee so that now you can be asphyxiated looking for things in the file drawer. Whew!

The book is on simmer--that's what I call it when I'm mulling over a bunch of stuff, trying to figure out how to write a certain section, or determine what needs to be revealed next. A whole bunch of ideas just bubble away until, all at once, something pops to the top that clarifies my direction.

To change the metaphor: writing is a lot like walking into doors. Some are open when you come down the hall, some open just as you get there, and some you aren't sure are closed until you smack into them. Ouch! Not that one right now. Of course, some are also hidden doors that only open when you accidentally hit the secret button. And secret buttons are usually found only in the process of keeping the butt in the chair and producing verbiage. Then, somewhere in the midst of writing a paragraph, the whole next scene opens up for you. But those doors are rare.

you're asking ME?

2008-12-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

A friend just emailed me for advice about an article she's doing for an e-zine. She's an artist, and the comments she puts under the reproductions in her portfolio are profound and touching. Yes, I'm an experienced journalist, so I gave her some basic advice and offered to check her work when she's ready to send it off, but sheesh...

This woman has so much heart and maturity, so much insight, peace and presence in the moment that I can't imagine that her piece won't be absolutely poetic and inspiring.

Some people are able to open up their hearts to the world in an extraordinary way, and to put that into words that are simple, deep, and moving. I find that quite often they are NOT writers, at least they wouldn't label themselves that, and they've perhaps never written anything for publication. But their words lift us up, open an experience to us, delight us, make us think and feel. I think the more we can drop our defenses, the better our writing is--the more we expose our nerve endings, the more real our fictional characters can be, and the deeper the experience for our readers.

the more I struggle...

2008-12-18T12:06:00.001-08:00

Writing is such a balance of discipline and inspiration. I need energy to write--emotional and physical energy, and I need to harness it with b.i.c. (butt in chair) time. I can't squeeze out those words, but I can sit down and write something, and write something more, then something more. Then I edit and come up with about two-thirds of what I started with that's worth keeping. I can't MAKE the book come out, but I can encourage it out, coax it out. When words start flowing onto the page, eventually, the dam breaks and the real stuff comes--like priming an old-fashioned water pump--anybody remember those? Of course, then that is followed by editing, re-writing, and re-writing some more. One writer once said, "It's easy to write a book. All you do is sit in the chair and open a vein."

Christmas "interruptions"?

2008-12-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm supposed to be diligently working on my book, but some things really are more important. Today, I'm trying to get the CHRISTmas cards out--haven't sent any for a few years and feel deep, crippling guilt. Well, maybe not, but I do need to get them out. The project reminds me to take time to thank God for all the friends and family we have scattered around the world (mostly England if outside the US), and the richness they bring to our lives. Although I don't base any of my characters solely on any person, I do draw from the wonderful humor, wit, and joy these special folks bring to my life. Even the messy ones bring texture to the mix and challenge me to be kinder, more patient, and to choose to look for good.

Today I'm tackling a particularly tough scene in my book and I will draw on my love for the difficult people in my life as I do it. Someone once said that writers have no original ideas, that we are, at heart, thieves from the world around us. May we steal only the best and pass along what gives a little insight and entertainment.

since you asked

2008-12-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

Helen,

I suppose it would be nice to give blog readers an idea what my book is about. Anna is a 30-ish journalism professor who has always been the dutiful daughter of her academician father. He's the dean of the J-school where she works, and he disdains fiction. She has moonlighted with a few mystery novels and has been very successful under the name Claire Donaldson, which she doesn't want Daddy to know about. Now, Claire is becoming famous, some people are beginning to wonder who she really is, Anna's stepmother wants to interview a celebrity for a feature article (and of course, chooses Claire), a new landscaper is in town and may not be who he appears to be... Well, you get the gist of it.

I always liked the old romantic comedies, so that was my model as I started. Now, the book is becoming an exploration of why we get stuck doing things we really don't care about, about our identities--do we choose who we are, are we formed by those around us, is identity thrust upon us by divine design? How do we find and nurture our individual identity? Anna has a few sidekicks in her adventure: an older sister who seems to have always known who she is, a best friend who is willing to go to the mat for Anna while being beset with twin toddlers and an infant in tow, a mother who understands what taking a stand against Daddy really means... And I hope the thing is funny, as well as thought provoking. My writers critique group laughs.

I hope a publisher friend of mine is right: she says any writer who can sum up a book in three sentences is probably a better marketer than writer. At least I don't seem to be a very good marketer--and I hope that bodes well for the writing in the book!

now I'm stuck

2008-12-11T17:33:00.001-08:00

Every once in a while I reach a spot like today where the story hangs up. I need to think about how to increase the complications while weaving in a couple more complications. I've got to get back to my hero who, while not saving the day, will certainly add some solutions along with his complications. And what about the heroine's relationship with her father? More on that is needed.

You see, we have all these elements hanging around our novels. We need to weave them throughout, some more strongly than others, and they have to lead somewhere to justify their existence in the story. My hero, the main character's father, and the father's second wife, are all antagonists to some degree. They have to be likeable, though, because they are part of the main character's daily life. In the long run, there is no villain like the one that lies within your own heart, so Anna, my heroine, has to face those things in her life that led her to where she is and keep her from getting to where she wants to go. Ohh, this just made me think of a good place to pick up my current scene. Later...

stop diddling and write

2008-12-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

Well, setting up the blog, I finally figured out how to get a photo in, but I couldn't crop. I'm techno-challenged, but I don't want to bug my husband for help, or Stephanie, who helped me set it all up. I'll have to have another photo taken by my 11-year-old, who isn't really getting the zoom stuff straight.

I am about to stop fussing with this and get back to my manuscript. We were out all day and my behind has only been in the chair long enough to check email. I need to finish at least other scene or two to make me feel like I'm productive. The book calls, the main character is nagging me, and a couple of the sidekicks want more page time. Maybe doing this blog will make me work on the book more so I have something to report, some thought process upon which to ruminate. Does the book already exist, rattling around my brain? I think it does.

the"butt in the chair" commitment

2008-12-10T10:40:00.000-08:00

As a recovering journalist, I face fiction with some trepidation, but I find my time spent in radio news and copywriting has helped give me an ear for dialog, and, as Elizabeth George has said, "Character is story. Dialogue is character." And so I continue to plug away, unglamorously, word by word.

This fall I read through the whole manuscript and deleted half of it--everything from one of the character's points of view. How hard it was to toss those pages--and how freeing to fix something wrong with your story and have it move so much more fluidly.