Possibilities

Last night, I told my six year old to hold both sides of his plate.
"Wouldn't it be cool," he asked, "if our plates could float? And then we would have to hold them?"
That's a cool idea, isn't it? There's not a huge lesson here, but it was a nice reminder to me to look beyond what is, to what could be.

In "Character and Viewpoint," Orson Scott Card shares a writing exercise that he's done when visiting schools to show how easy it is to develop an idea by asking questions.

Do you want the story to be about a boy or a girl?
-A boy! No, a girl!

Ok, then, we won't decide yet. How old is this person?'
-Ten! No, Twelve!

Twelve? Why Twelve? What happens when you're twelve?
-You can stay up later.

Oh? And what do you do when you stay up later?
-Watch TV!
-The good shows!
-Scary shows!

What else can you do?
-Stay up late!

He continues with this exercise until they have a kid who is babysititng and the baby won't stop crying (What can go wrong when you're babysitting?) and he ends up calling an ambulance, which gets there right as the parents get home. Pretty good for fourth graders!

The point is, you keep asking questions. Even ten drafts in, writers should be asking questions. How can these characters have more tension between them? What's the craziest thing that could happen?

How do you develop your ideas? Is it different in rough draft vs. polishing? Do you have a favorite question you ask your story?
Glutton for Punishment?

How to Eat an Elephant?

Please excuse me for getting a little personal here- I'm working on some posts about flashbacks and pacing and a brilliant post about how I got my agent...I'll let you know as soon as I work out the details on that one! But for now, a bit about writing and how being a Sunday school teacher gave me a little push.

I started writing a few years ago as a result of being a teacher in the Young Women's organization at church. The girls, 12-17 years old, all participate in "Personal Progress," a program with hundreds of activities designed to develop different virtues. These activities could be anything from reading the scriptures daily and recording what they learn to learning a new skill.

In addition, the girls are required to complete a ten-hour project for each of these virtues, and I'd often ask the girls about their progress. As a teacher, I was encouraged to work on my personal progress alongside the girls, and that was why, when an idea flashed through my brain, I picked up a pen and wrote it down. I already had the goal in place and the time had come to act on it.

Two years after beginning to write in earnest, and four years from that first sketch, I realize that my little idea has taken slightly more than ten hours to develop!

It can be done, and here are some things that have helped me.

• Track your progress. Whether you use a star chart or a marker on your bathroom mirror, write down your goals and what you do each day to meet that goal. It doesn't have to be number of words- that only worked for me for the first draft, but perhaps an amount of focused time? Perhaps it will be to mark up so many pages a day with tiny scribbles that seem perfectly legible until you try to decipher them a week later.
• You can write a paragraph in five minutes, and eventually you'll fill a book. It adds up. So don't waste your spare moments. Sometimes they're all we get.
• Eliminate the junk. I don't mean that you can't allow yourself to enjoy some leisure time- even TV can can be a nice break- but if you want to write, you have to give yourself the gift of time to write.
• Don't get upset if you mess up. Start again. Say it with me: Today is the first day of the rest of my life!

How do you stay focused on your goals, whether writing-related or not?

I hope that you all have had a wonderful 2010, that this coming year will find you well and happy. Enjoy this video--it got me a little pumped!


Glutton for Punishment?

Opportunity Knocks

Three years ago, Nathan and I moved to South Carolina, intending to stay with the in-laws for a few months while we saved some money and looked for a new house. We'd spent the previous five years fixing up a 90-year-old Victorian, and I was always too busy during my few free hours, caulking and tiling and wielding my prybar. So when we sold the house, I lost a huge piece of who I'd been, Kelly the Remodeler, but I chose to look at it as an opportunity to try something new. 

This picture has nothing to do with anything.
No, wait. I can do this...Ummm...Okay. Here goes.
I like taking pictures of unusual churches,
but I don't have time to pursue photgraphy, either.
It's about choices.

And it was nice. Weekends weren't inevitably full of project after project, and with 3 out of 4 kids in school, plus a few days of preschool co-op, I had more free time than I'd had since pre-kiddoes. By far. I wrote a lot. I read a lot, too. It was heavenly. 

Alas, we are homeowners once more;)

I'm excited to be picking out paint colors and curtains again, but I will miss the closeness we've had with Nathan's dad and stepmom. My youngest has no memory of life without in-house grandparents, so once they close on their house and move out, nuclear family life will be totally new to him. It's definately bittersweet.

I've already cut back on my blogging and internet time, but I'll probably cut back to one post a week, instead of closer to two. I'll still be checking in with you guys, but I may not be on here every day. There literally aren't enough hours in the day, and I am a terrible person when I'm tired. Really grouchy, and prone to crying, and I don't want to be that mean mom.

Though I enjoy writing even more than I did three years ago, I've been able to pull back from being obsessed by the book to being preoccupied with it. There's a fine line there, but on this side, my kids don't ask me why we don't go anyplace fun anymore. And the neighbors don't wonder why no one ever leaves that house. Is it haunted?

I have a paintbrush in hand once more. Left hand, that is. Right hand is holding a pen.

Any tips on achieving balance? On loving the life you have instead of wishing for change? Did anybody else have a special opportunity to follow a "one day I'll..."-dream, as I did?
Glutton for Punishment?

Summer is Over, People!

The trips are over, the lazy days at the pool are done, because school starts on Thursday for us. Just one last trip up to Mama's house today, and that's it.

This is First Day of School from a couple of years ago, but they're still about that cute.

I'm practicing commonly used phrases-

• Your breath still stinks. Go brush again.
• I don't know where your shoes are, but they're whereever you left them.
• Five more minutes and this bus is leaving!
• Walk fast! The bell rings in two minutes!
• Sit down and finish your homework.
• Why are you up? Finish your homework.
• Finish your homework. You're not allowed to jump on the couches until AFTER your homework is done.

I'm missing some, but you get it.

I've come up with a writing time plan to help me stay accountable, and to help me realize that there are really only so many hours in the day, so if I blow an hour watching Youtube, I won't get it back unless I allow my kids' brains to atrophy by letting them veg in front of the tv, which I don't like to do. They fight a lot more and are way more whiny when I've gone that route.

So- my plan-
M-F 5-7am=    10 hours
M-F 8:30-10=  7.5 hours
Sat 7-10=          3 hours
Preschool 2x/week = 5 hours
Total=25.5 hours of potential writing time

25 seems like a lot of time, and it is, but I don't actually use all of that time wisely. I'm going to keep a log for a few weeks and see how I do. I lose time by sleeping in, which gets me off sinc with my hubby, who is trying to maximize his triathlon training time by getting up at 5 also. And I lose writing time by still not having much self control with books- I have a compulsion to read books all in one sitting.

I've actually gotten up at 5 a few times this Summer, only to be so haunted by the book I was forced to put down the night before (thanks, honey. I do hate book hangover) that I got up ridiculously early and finished a book. It's so dumb, but my brain won't let me slip back out of stories. So I read Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson basically ALL Saturday (great book, by the way. He has very strong male and female characters, and has made up some really cool magic). The kids can't distract me when I'm in my reading zone. Nothing can.

Do you have a plan? Do you have a goal? Haven't you read '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'? lol
I'll share my goal on Thursday. Happy Writing!
Glutton for Punishment?

Slave to the Story

*reminder to leave a comment by midnight EST tonight on the interview with Maria Snyder

for a chance to win a copy of Inside Out*

I like to critique, especially writers that have gotten the mechanics down and are trying to find the heart of their story. I think that's the key. You have to find the biggest problem, the most emotion-packed part of your idea, and focus on that.

By focus, I mean relate everything to it. Your main conflict has to be the center point that everything else ties to.

My hubby saw the Avatar movie with some friends (husbands of my friends that I went with to see Twilight! I think the guys got the better movie, but that's a different post.) He came back and was telling me about the aliens, that they lived in the trees and had tails.

And I said, 'Why do they have tails? Did their tails 'do' anything?'
He then told me how cool the whole concept was, that the tails were an interface between the aliens and the animals on their planet.

You see, I thought it was just an empty detail. A detail that didn't mean anything except 'Hey. I'm an alien. Look at my tail.'

But it was more. The tail meant "Hey, I'm an alien. I can use my tail to link with the brain of my cool flying beasties and into the soul of the planet. It defines how I relate to the world and explains my deep connection with nature."

See the difference?

Every detail must be a slave to the story. Relationships to other characters need to be shown in relation to the conflict. Don't let your characters get to know each other for ten or twenty pages, then get to the conflict. Start your story on page one, then work in the details around it. Let the reader get to know your characters as they work to stop the giant asteroid falling towards the earth.

Integrate the back story in only when their previous experiences cause them to do something unusual! For example, in Avatar, EVERYTHING we learn about James Sully is necessary to explain why he is on the Navi's planet. He's a soldier, now a parapalegic, whose identical twin brother was killed, and Sully was asked to take his place in the Avatar program. That's all we know about his backstory. The rest of who he is he shows us as he interacts with the Navi.

Not details, but telling details. Details that make us care and have an emotional response to the characters and their situation.

Stick to the story and the reader will stick with you. How do you make sure you're using telling details?
Glutton for Punishment?

I'm not obsessed. I can prove it.

Okay, I can't prove it, but you can't prove the reverse.

I found this on the blog 'Old Picture of the Day'.

This is a man, I know, but you'd be surprised at how few

beautful pictures there are of women with a bow and arrow.  

If you read Tuesday's post, you know I've been studying the opening chapter of 'The Hunger Games'. 

"Why?" you ask. "Are you obsessed?"

No! But yes! I have a little problem, you see. I had this idea that I could tell my story by letting events unfold and the reader would figure it out, like a beautiful 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately, ten different people have read my first chapter and they all say basically the same thing.

That's really interesting and I want to read more, but what the heck is going on?

The first two comments are encouraging, the third I thought would resolve itself by the time they got to chapter three. But they were still confused. What to do? Info dumps are bad. Very bad.

I checked out about ten current YA books and read the openings (and more if I was intrigued enough: Shiver). But I got out a pencil and took some notes in 'The Hunger Games'. (I bought HG. I don't write in library books. Why did you think that?)

I discovered something shocking. Out of the first 109 lines (first four pages), 81 lines are exposition in past tense. Collins spends 81 lines explaining the world. I was trying to spend 0. No wonder my world is murky!

Some of the chunks of exposition are inherently interesting, like when Katniss talks about how she tried to kill the cat or how she and Gale met hunting, but some of it is about how close her house is to the woods, how often the fence is electrified, how the other coal miners are scared of the woods. 

Lesson: It's okay to explain a few things. Find what makes your world different and tell the reader. Turn on some lights and let them look around. Just don't describe the china pattern or the brand of air freshner.

Okay, back to rewriting! Remember to never follow the rules off a cliff. Thanks to the many readers who have suffered some confusion so I could figure this out. 

Any rules you've misapplied? Any tricks to share? Thanks for commenting!  

Glutton for Punishment?

Again! With Focus.

Or what I've learned from writing a query

Some authors write the book blurb or their elevator pitch first, before they even start their book, but not a pantser like me. My planning stages involved several false starts, a first draft that that has almost entirely been written over, and some early attempts at an outline. Currently, I've outlined up to Ch.11 (out of 30), but I did finish my 3 pg. synopsis, so I'm congradulating myself, even if noone else is.

As for my query, I started working on it maybe eight months ago and have gone through 10+ revisions, and still haven't got it right. I highly recommend writing your query as you write your book for three reasons.

Reasons to work on your query now instead of waiting until you finish your manuscript:

1. You will have something to say when someone asks what your book is about.

2. Your query needs time to develop through rewriting just as your book does.

3. It helps you to focus on the main points as you revise. 

In trying to pull out the major conflict that causes my MC to leave her perfect world and come to our fallen world, I realized that my opening chapters are diffuse. (Anybody watch that Medium episode? I was writing, but my husband told me about it. Joe gets asked by his boss to read the  boss's epic Sci-fi novel and keeps hounding Joe to give his impressions. So Joe finally says 'It was diffuse.' Which is not a word that I'd like applied to my writing, and this guy didn't like it either. So in Joe's performance review, everything was 'diffuse'. Communication skills? Diffuse. Organization skills? Diffuse. The moral- do not EVER tell your boss what you think of their writing. Just say you can't wait to buy it when it gets published and leave the heavy hitting for agents. Is this how people get delusional? Absolutely. Do it anyway. Save yourself!)

In real life, Allison Dubois is a psychic medium who works with the police and husband Joe is an aerospace engineer, which makes their viewpoints very different. This clip was posted by CBS, so there's a 0.5 second commercial (really, it's that short, so don't give up), but I thought it was worth the wait. And it is interesting that the producer says here that it was the husband/wife relationship that made him want to do the show. Not the cool cases she solves, not the pyschic dreams. But their unique relationship. That's what I'm trying to show in my query!

Anyhow, diffuse. As in, there are too many motivations for my MC to leave her world and come to ours, but none of them stands out. There's no moment of decison, no leading the reader to see that OF COURSE she has to make this terrible decision. It's hard, and scary, but she has to do it. I realized this when I was trying to explain her motivations succintly in the query plus I have some crit partners who have made some comments that led me to start thinking about it.

I've stopped believing that there is only one way to write this story. There will be versions that feel more mysterious, versions that feel more grounded and explain the world more quickly, and it's up to me to judge which serves the story best. Because the story is there. I just have to let it out. So thank you, query. I'm working on it.

Has your query/synopsis/blurb writing helped you?
Glutton for Punishment?

Likeable Characters

How to take silly, whining, self-absorbed, and/or weak main characters and make them thrive!

Have you watched 'The Wizard of Oz' recently?

Dorothy is a bit of a brat in the opening. And she develops an opium habit.

I've been reworking my query and realized that I have the same trouble explaining the premise of the story as I do in the actual manuscript. There's not enough action inside the MC in the first section of the book. Things just happen to her and around her for the first forty pages.

My MC is introduced as limp as a piece of spaghetti because her character arc is to learn to stand up for herself. She has to start out as a bit of a push-over so that she can learn to make her own decisions.

Enter protagonist: Mother uses Lara's empath against her, using guilt to force obedience. Lara even helps Mother to 'delve' her sisters so they will follow the rules, too.

I had some reviews on early chapters that said that they didn't connect to the MC because she was spineless. But that's the point, so how do I get around it?

She yearns to be stronger. That's it.

We imperfect human beings tend to have a lot of sympathy for people who want to do what is right, who want to control their destiny, rescue their friends, save the world, etc. BUT can't do it...

Yet.

Or they can't do it alone, or they can't do it until they care about others more than themselves, or they could do it all along if they'd only believed in themselves, or whatever moral is being expressed.

Still, you want to find out how they succeed, so that you can believe it's possible for you, too.

I've added some blurbs of Lara trying to resist Mother. Here's a section I adjusted recently. You tell me if Lara is likeable or not.

“Please, Mother. Don’t.” I squeezed my eyes shut. I wouldn’t look.
“I have to be sure.”

I opened my eyes and glared at her shoulder. I wouldn’t look any higher.

“Lara,” she chastised. “You will not go near the orchard. Or inside it.” Her eyes narrowed on me, and I leaned away, tilting the rocking chair back as far as I could. I looked up into the skylight, letting the sun scorch my eyes. She pressured me and my breath caught in my throat. I lowered my eyes to her face, letting her look. Her face was blotted out of my vision by the sunspots, but I could feel her probing, finding my fears and crowding them out of my mind with contentment.

She relaxed. My throat opened and I gasped, quietly, though. I didn’t want to make her feel bad; her guilt would infect me, too. Besides, she didn’t like to force me, but we both knew the welfare of the geroth was too important. She dropped her eyes and stood, then laid my veil across my knees. She left as silently as she’d come.

I hope this isn't too far out of context to make sense and please remember this is a middle draft! (could I use the word 'look' more?!) I also see some areas where I need to be more specific about what Lara is experiencing, but I think she is relatable now. That the reader might root for her.
 
How do you balance your characters?
Glutton for Punishment?

Question: What number am I thinking of?

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: Authors, do not send out your manuscripts until they are ready. Agents and editors will remember, even if they don't know that they're remembering. I'll explain.

Whenever I see the fractal pattern of an MRI, I am reminded of how I felt standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon.

On real MRI film, I recognize the amygdala, the frontal cortex, and the hippocampus, but that's about it. People who study the brain can learn a bit more, but there is still a limit to how much they can process, and how detailed they get. How long would it take to sort through all of the millions of neurons that fire while you decide if you want to watch "Fear Factor" or "Dancing with the Stars"? But computers can do it in real time.

I listened to an interview on NPR of Orson Scott Card yesterday, and he said that if he knew what story would get a response like ENDER'S GAME, he would have written it. Card has been extremely successful, so it's hard to feel bad for him, but I know what he means. As a writer, you want to touch people and connect with them. If you're not doing that, you might as well write textbooks. Textbooks on brain imaging, perhaps.

Check out this video of an fMRI of a brain watching the trailer for "Avatar". Amazing, huh?

What images illicited the strongest responses? The alien? The kiss?

Will we put people in an MRI and watch their brain while we read our entire book to them? Our editor might come to us and say, "Cut this paragraph. The test listener wasn't engaged. And Ch. 7 needs a bump. Can Wanda slap Gregory then? Or they could have sex. Either one."

The funny thing is that the first fMRI done was by researchers trying to understand "The Pepsi Challenge" blind taste test (and now Pepsi, according to this *wink* article, is done with trying to change people. Thanks, Jeff). Researchers wondered why people would continue to drink Coke if some of them liked the taste of Pepsi better. They discovered that emotions help process decisions. I don't drink Co-cola anymore, but I still think of it fondly, because my grandma loved a snickers bar and a coke. LOVED them. Together. And when I think of Coke, a tiny part of my brain accesses my memories of her. EVERYTHING we look at gets checked against our previous experience.

It's a little tricky ethically. Input changes brain chemistry. Would you like it if someone wanted you to buy Miracle Whip and injected dopamine into your brain so you'll put some in your shopping cart? Watch this (ten seconds will be plenty to get the gist. Miracle Whip is the new beer.) and tell me if that's not the intention. In the comments below the video, however, people- apparently young people- are a little, shall we say, confused about this new direction, and someone compares Miracle Whip to orthopedic shoes. In other words, "Don't bother, MW. You're not cool." Neuromarketing says it doesn't matter too much what the hipsters say, the association between MW and cool is being made.

Are we ruled by these associations? No. Are these associations bad? Not necessarily. But think about this:

At the marketing meeting hubby went to, the speaker, Steve Whigham, told a story about a marketing guy who approached a bum and gave him ten bucks to let M.G. write the bum a new sign. The bum agreed, and M.G. left for an hour and then came back to see how the new sign was working. The bum gave him his ten bucks back and told him how great the sign had worked- instead of the usual $6-7 a day, he'd made $60. And what did the sign say?

"What if you were hungry?" Simple empathy.

Is marketing reminding us of things we already decided or manipulating us? I don't know.

For Thursday- my first experience with Sonic and a new game system with a foil hat. Yep. It reads your mind.

Answer: 1984

Glutton for Punishment?

Advice to an aspiring novelist

Hello world! I have a friend that has just started a novel. She asked for some writing tips and is a little reluctant to join an online writer's workshop because of possible idea theft. (Links to the the best writing tips are at the bottom!) This is my response:

I was concerned about letting people know what my story is about at first, too. But now that I'm talking to writers and understanding how much work it is to get something publish-worthy, I think the feedback I get from OWW far outweighs any risk. Everybody on their has their own "baby" that they're nurturing, and it's just too much work to take someone else's incomplete idea. Anyway, you only post up to three chapters at a time, and someone would have to stalk you for months to get the full story, and you don't have to post the polished version if you don't want to.

In addition, your computer files have save dates on them, and if someone uses large chunks of your work- not just the general ideas, because that's very very hard to prove and also extremely unlikely- you're protected that way.

Unless you're writing term papers, the risk of plagiarism is very unlikely. More likely is what happened to Stephenie Meyer- She sent out a few copies of a draft and that friend gave it to her friend, which gave it to her friend, etc.

(This happened after she was on the NYT bestseller's list. Most writers have to struggle to find someone who loves them enough to struggle through the early versions, myself included.)

So unless you don't want to risk *anyone* reading it, I wouldn't worry about posting it piece by piece online. Of course, this is my advice and you have to make the decision about what you feel comfortable with. But even after starting as a good writer, studying and writing constantly for a year, I find the impartial advice of people that aren't afraid to hurt my feelings (and to tell me what works) is the best best thing I have done to improve. Way cheaper than conferences, too.

The great thing about being in a workshop is you can also read other people's reviews of other writers' submission. This helped me to understand the vocabulary, to have the words when something wasn't "right", and to glimpse what experienced writers see when they read. It's a whole new process.

If you don't find things that bother you or you wish that they'd handled a little differently in MOST of the novels you read, then you either pick the greatest books ever penned or you need to develop your inner critic.

Again, this is meant as friendly advice based on my experience. Read, study, write. Make sure you understand passive voice and can spot it (and slay it like a dragon).
Find out what an info dump is and make a solemn vow not to do so. Don't overuse
"that, just, really, kindof, sortof" or other words that aren't necessary. Avoid adverbs unless you really really need one. No more than one exclamation point every ten pages, and the same for metaphors. Get a book on grammar if you don't have one already.

Be aware that when you send in a MS, you will have to change italics to underline, because the agents have weak eyes, poor things! And you will have to have your MS double spaced, one inch margins, with name/TITLE/page # in the upper right hand corner. Start each new chapter half-way down the page. 12 pt Times New Roman or Courier are the preferred fonts.

There's also the option, if you're really concerned about theft, to write short stories and post those to develop your skill as a writer but keep your novel at home.

The thing about early drafts is that they're early drafts. I can't say if your idea will fly because I truly believe in the hands of a persistant writer any story can be worth reading.

I write (roughly) for plot and character the first draft, consistency and flow the second draft. Deep characterization and believability in the third draft (where I'm at right now). It takes a lot of work to get it pretty, correct, charming, balanced, smooth, flowing, engaging, generous, surprising, and lively. I read an author's blog who posted all twelve of his versions for his chapter one. I read 1,2,3,4,5,8,and 12...and wow. He was a hack in the first draft, but by the end...it was good writing.

(And the book is getting published. I've searched for his blog but it's lost. Should have bookmarked it- Drat!)

My kids' guidance counselor has a quote on her bulletin board that I smile at everyday when I walk Eli to his door. "The great thing about being a writer is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. -David ???" I'll update tomorrow morning after I get his full name:)

Okay- that's all I 've got! Good luck, and send me your Ch 1. and a plot summary if you're still game:)

I would add, read up on writer's and agent's websites. A good place to start is my friend Teresa Frohock's Very Thorough Post of links to writerly tips. Nathan Bransford, super agent, put it all together in one place for you, too.
And, for anyone interested, I love Online Writer's Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Happy writing!

Is there another word for synonym?

Glutton for Punishment?