One of the reviews says something like "the story was strangely compelling and the structure was interesting enough to keep me reading, which made the experience of reading it more pleasurable than it had any right to be with such a depressing message." (You know, after typing all that out, I should probably go look for the actual review again, but that would probably distract me so much that I would never get this entry written.)
Anyway, I love that review. The story itself forced them to keep reading. I suspect it had less to do with my structure and more to do with voice, though I know that the structure is still part of it. (It's "An Almanac for the Alien Invaders" and the structure was the only way I could parse a nearly untellable story.) But the point is, I managed to make something compulsively readable. Which is excellent. That, seriously, is like the number one goal I have as a writer, no matter what the length I'm writing to.
Now. Just to figure out how to do that compulsively readable thing every time, eh?
But it makes me think... what do I find compulsively readable? It's nearly always character coupled with voice. It's rarely plot, and almost never anything else. Is it that way for everyone, or are there actually plot readers? Readers who merely read to discover the logical and inevitable conclusion of events? Or do most people actually read to find out how the character is going to turn out, and respond to the events?
Of course, is there any point in really examining this question? I write like I write. I don't know that I could learn to write another way. I write like I'm telling myself a story, just the way I did when I was eleven and going to sleep at night. "What excites me? What thrills me? What's going to distract me from my existential angst? What makes me want to keep working at the story??"
Really, aren't those the same questions that the reader is hoping to have answered?
Hm.
The good news is, I'm rooming with
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dendrophilous, and kelly_swails has promised that we will throw down some drinks in an appropriate locale, and iuliamentis has promised to stop in at the con on Sunday. I also have a panel. (Looks up panel info.)Sunday 10:00-11:00 a.m.
Lilac C: Rowling and Meyer
What are our kids reading now? Is there truly a young adult revival of
speculative fiction or are these anomalies? Are our kids reading more
SF or still playing it on the Wii(TM)? Find out from our panelists.
M. Haskell, J. Hines, R. Neumeier, J. Smith-Ready
Oh! With Mr.
jimhines, I see. And R. Neumeier, I believe, is Rachel Neumeier who wrote The City in the Lake, which I read at penmage's enthusiastic recommendation, and it was very good, and later, when I was shopping for agents and saw that She Who Ended Up My Agent rep'd Rachel, I remember thinking "That's a goooood sign." (Among many good signs.)Okay, so that's Windycon. The next weekend is More Seriouser Retreat (as opposed to Feral Writers Retreat). I have a couple of extra beds for that, btw... And I need to send out the invites for Hastings Point in the spring. And at some point I need to confess to my friends that I won't be hosting New Year's this year, since I'll be in North Carolina. And then Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.
Somewhere in there, I'm supposed to write the rest of my last year's NaNo novel (I'm clipping along, but my progress is going to take a serious dive this weekend). And... She Who Ended Up My Agent said that she's going to do one last read on my novel, and start sending it out to the (tuba notes) Editors.
(Of course, this morning, at the bus stop, I started thinking, "But I didn't get that thing right! And I think I forgot entirely about that thing! And there's a dangling modifier on page three!" But in fact, I don't actually remember forgetting anything, and I don't actually remember any dangling modifiers, either. I remember finishing the rewrite, and double-checking the list of things She Who Ended Up My Agent wanted me to focus on, and saying, "Yay, I'm done!" So I have to trust that I was not crazy when I did that, and just because I don't remember typing in a specific sentence, I really need to not email She Who Ended Up My Agent and ask her if I forgot those things. For one thing, she will tell me.)
Okay, writer-crazy done. Mostly.
Other things that are making me tired:
The 154 unread items in my inbox.
And the stories I need to put back in circulation.
And the fact that my dayjob is a non-stop thrill ride. I remember when one had the leisure to read 154 email messages in a week at my dayjob. Those days are long, long gone, apparently.
And my husband's enduring insomnia.
And my mother's unexpected visit this weekend for her cousin's funeral.
I would suggest that things should slow down, but in my experience, if I let things slow down, I get sick. So I may as well keep going too hard, and just avoid that, eh?
The hardest-won revelations on the part of a writer in a book are the ones that will be most satisfying to the reader.
Well, I can hope, because I just had a hard-won revelation, and it felt soooooo good having that little piece fall into the narrative just so, shink, just like the wedge going into a pie token in Trivial Pursuit...
It probably feels so good to the writer because it's a release of tension. "HOW AM I GOING TO GET THIS TO MAKE SENSE?" --> "OKAY, THAT'S HOW, NOT TO BE DYING NOW."
Whereas, to the reader, it's probably just a gentle, "Ah. That makes sense." If that much.
*sigh*
kvtaylor.I'm afraid I'm going to surly. Thoughtful, but surly.
1. Are you a “pantser” or a “plotter?”
I couldn't tell you. Neither. Both. The only time I plot ahead is if I've stolen the plot from elsewhere. Except when I do plot. But that usually works out so poorly, that I have to steal plots. That's why I rewrite fairy tales so often. I know how those end.
Plot is my ever-present weakness on its own. It only ever makes sense to me in the context of character. It's always shocking to me to remember I can plot something that is beyond character control, like natural disasters or falling down the stairs...
2. Detailed character sketches or “their character will be revealed to me as a I write”?
This one I can answer with authority! Yes! I do both. I write. Then I stall. Then I figure out what I don't know about the character, and then I pause to do a character sketch. Then I write some more.
Also, as often as not, the first chapter or first few paragraphs usually ends up being a character sketch, by accident.
3. Do you know your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts before you start writing or is that something else you discover only after you start writing?
In a general way. I usually know the goal or the conflict, at the very least. Motivation is always so murky to me, because I think real people have very murky motivations, and I certainly do, so that always takes a lot of time to figure out.
4. Books on plotting – useful or harmful?
If you read a book on writing without understanding that it's more descriptive of someone else's process than prescriptive towards your own--no matter how the author puts it, because of course they want you to think it's prescriptive--then you shouldn't read any books on writing.
5. Are you a procrastinator or does the itch to write keep at you until you sit down and work?
Both, of course. I'm good at getting itched to write beginnings. I procrastinate endings. I'm only happy when I'm writing middles, and at that point, I neither itch nor procrastinate, I just do.
It's much like using shampoo. I'm always dying to try new shampoo. Then I fall into a routine and just use it. Towards the end--before it's even hard to squeeze out--about the last fifth to tenth of any given bottle, I stop using it, because I'm tired of it, or I'm already dreaming about my new shampoo. I'm like this with everything. Food stuffs. Makeup. Glasses of water. It drives my husband crazy. But it's clearly a personality trait.
6. Do you write in short bursts of creative energy, or can you sit down and write for hours at a time?
Almost never short bursts. But rarely many hours at a time. I like a 2-3 hour chunk best.
7. Are you a morning or afternoon writer?
Like I've ever had the luxury of figuring that out. I write when I can.
8. Do you write with music/the noise of children/in a cafe or other public setting, or do you need complete silence to concentrate?
I like to mix it up. If I'm blocked, a change of venue almost always releases the flow.
9. Computer or longhand? (or typewriter?)
Computer, unless I'm blocked.
10. Do you know the ending before you type Chapter One?
Mmmmm... I didn't used to. I think I do now. (As of last 2-3 years.)
11. Does what’s selling in the market influence how and what you write?
No. I've always loved YA, before it was the new hotness. And I think with my propensity for writing science fiction Regency romances, for which there is no meaningful market, I clearly don't have market influence pinned to my bulletin board.
12. Editing – love it or hate it?
Much like shampoo, I love it at first...
.
.
.
Oh, wait, no, I have a better one! "This room is waaaaaay to messy to write in."
.
.
.
Both of those may be true.
elfbiter:There's an exercise in Chris Baty's book No Plot, No Problem! where you make a list of things you like in stories. Then you make a list of things you hate in stories. He calls them Magna Carta 1 and 2. He recommends that you post them somewhere obvious, because it's surprisingly easy to find yourself writing things you don't even like to read, and forgetting all about the things you do like.
So, here are my Magna Carta 1 & 2.
I took this rather generally. Because, specifically, it would come out like "swordfights!" and "assassinations!" and "dragons!" and "snogging!"
( Things I love in fiction. )
( Things I hate in fiction. )
MS Word count on 8/14: 66507
Trim file count on 7/29: 0
Trim file count on 8/14: 21063
Yes, I've managed to ADD yet more wordcount to the overall writing of this book, while I've been trimming. To the tune of, what, 3,691 words? I mean, not a crazy amount of writing by any means, but the more I do, even cutting, the more I write.
*sigh*
I am almost entirely done with massive structural cuts. Which I've said before. But this time I mean it. I'm also done with the maddening parts--the part where I couldn't figure out how to marry the new way with the old and almost drove myself to tears, I was so frustrated, which has seriously not happened to me since I got my head on right about writing. (Sometime in 2005, I adopted a stringent attitude of "if it's not fun, don't write it." Well, I had to break that rule, though only briefly: I basically walked away from the rewrite until I could come to it clear and unfrustratedly, which is why it's taken me two weeks to get this far.)
I realize this might not be any way to run a career. I don't know that I can produce books at an awesome rate. I may have to accept that I am not a phenom. Oh, NOES! Not a phenom!
Oh, well!
Not much left now. Would be done if I hadn't rewritten the last third of the book a second time, but it was mushy. Would be done by now, part the second, if I hadn't caught Ze Dread Earache. Would be done by now, part the third, if I had figured out how to rewrite the book about a month earlier. So, really, there's no one thing.
I was a bit daunted to jump back in tonight. The papers, the notes, the arrows, they are too much. So I took a picture of them:
Click through, if you dare. There are Notes.
Once I captured their soul on film, the notes became much less intimidating, and I dove in and fixed some problems in my last scene written, and starting porting over the last 5k of the book, plus connective tissue--basically, Chapter 40 on. I also hung a lantern on some boats. Literally--well, sort of--this isn't writer jargon. I went back in the book and noted the detail that there were lanterns on some boats. Because it came up that there would need to be.
I'M THAT CLOSE. And the scent of victory is making me a little crazy. Obvi.
sartorias's journal...Just reminded me to articulate something I've been feeling lately.
( gets a little dull and navel-gazey. MORE dull and navel-gazey. )
What with starting a pretty diligent writing habit pretty much concurrent with the onset of puberty, that's... a lot of years of practice. It's not all been to the good, I'm sure; I resisted instruction at many points, for a while feeling that if I couldn't get it by intuition, it wasn't worth getting. Maybe five years ago, I started to diligently suss out techniques and to consider my craft. To the point that, you know, I couldn't look at a piece without book-reporting it, per
sartorias's entry linked above. I also, for a while, couldn't look at anyone else's work without book-reporting it--critiquing it on the fly, and thinking, "That's not how I'd do it!"Various folks assured me that this can (and does) go away, and it has. In fact, I can turn off book-report-head at will, most days; that's why I could enjoy Twilight, frex. And turning it off is how I get that energetic first draft down on paper, and theoretically, turn it back on to examine structure and character and rising action and all the rest and attempt to make sure I've written a satisfying story.
Lately, though, I've not had to think as hard about things, even in the rewrite. I can do more and more of it intuitively. Every leap forward is a leap backward. There was a joy in learning the craft, of course, but there is far more joy in having long, immersive moments of writing by intuition.
To the point where my general feeling is "Oh, THANK GOD."
Anyway. Just wanted to document that. I'm sure I'll forget all about this moment in a few years.
The problem struck when I realized No, I really, really, really need an end goal for the last third of the novel. Like. A structure. A plot. A map. I know I had this realization before, but I was kind of writing it all out and planning to go back and structure then, but I am mired. So I can't do that. To move forward, I have to go backward. And basically rewrite this section all over. Not bigly, but somely... Just, need to make sure events happen in the right order, threads don't get lost.
Anyway, as I was settling down with my Brainstormin' Paper, I got mugged by a short story: "Five Rules and One Exception for Commuting to the Underworld."
So I stayed up until 2 AM working on that. And I have absolutely no plot for it, but it is delightful to write. And short. So maybe it can survive without a plot. Or just be literary.
I want to finish this book. Maybe tonight.
But not tonight. No, today, we squared away Chapter 35 and most of Chapter 36, and wrote a whole new scene and a couple of scenelets and moved a whole bunch of stuff around. Unfortunately, the end of the book is feeling a bit disjointed to me, and I think I'm going to have to chart out the action and see if it rises enough, or whatever it's supposed to do.
And, in fact, if it doesn't rise enough, I'm probably going to have to add some more to the book. I mean, I'm not sure what, but I suspect that there are enough mysteries lying fallow for book 2 that I could waken a few of those.
Ugh.
Have I ever told you that one of my "other duties as assigned" at my day job has been space planning for the past three years? It started with reorganizing the mail area, and morphed from there. Every time we add new staff, I start measuring things, then hop onto Visio and draw up a new plan. Thus, we have managed to improve workflow and fit three additional people into about a thousand less square feet, or something ridiculous like that. (That's not even one of my insane hyperboles.) This has actually been a rewarding bit of my job, and considering I have no training in it other than having rearranged my childhood bedroom about eight times a year, a little bit amazing--I didn't actually know I had spatial organization skills.
Anyway, the point is, whenever I get down to the end of a new space plan, I always end up with what I call a "mushy area." Where my ideas haven't quite coalesced, and my brain is going to have to go through a number of REM cycles before I figure out how to actually make the last section fit together better. It almost always comes down to a mushy area, too, unless I'm working on just four desks or something small.
I'm really hoping the end of my book is just a temporary mushy area, right now, and that I'll be able to get all the furniture in place soon. Like. Tomorrow. Wednesday at the latest.
But, I'm almost there. Mushy or not, here I come.
But one note from my agent in particular has been giving me some grief. To the point where I had almost sorta decided to ignore it, if I couldn't figure it out. And that was "to show more of a sense of awe and wonder" during my main character's early explorations of the underworld.
Well. How in heck do you show more of a sense of awe and wonder? I mean, I went through the draft a second time, putting in character reactions.
Like so:
And then went back to "It was amazing." And decided to come back to it later.
The usual tactic (think of when you've experienced awe and wonder; extrapolate) only semi-applies. I mean--okay, I remember standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and thinking, "I can no longer tell which way is up." I was staggeringly overwhelmed there for a good 5 minutes. But I've got a character who needs to be thinking and doing, not standing there. I suppose I could put a little of that in.
But the other problem is--when do we experience awe and wonder on that kind of scale? On the scale of "Holy f*ck, are those jeweled apples?" Awe and wonder, for me, goes hand in hand with being overwhelmed and vertiginous (Grand Canyon), dazed (Brighton Pavilion, maybe?), and repulsed/annoyed/horrified (THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN, where "that" = appalling personal behavior). Awe and wonder are, in fact, pretty far outside of my personal repertoire, and I can literally only think of the examples I just cited.
Beyond that, I've been cultivating unflappability, skepticism, and satirical calm for so long, I'm sort of afraid I lost my ability to feel awe along the way--am I supposed to feel it more than I do? Do I know how to properly express this stuff? And--the other side of it--having had to feign enthusiasm for a myriad of mundanities throughout my life (the "you pooped in the potty!" variety, I guess; sure, it causes awe once, but you have to cheer about it for like MONTHS), I'm not really sure what I'm feeling when I wax effusive about things anymore.
So, obviously, I'm of no help to myself anymore...
I did re-read most of Karl Iglesias's Writing for Emotional Impact, but the paragraphs on wonder and awe were kinda skimpy, and the wonder he talks most about is the "I wonder why the character how the character will get out of the forest of jeweled apples" variety. It's not an SF book, and it's not a novelist's book. And it's certainly not a book to address my specific problems. It's done a bunch of other stuff for me, so I can't complain.
So... now we go to Google. And two hits in particular were very good for me:
1) HP Lovecraft's Notes on Writing Weird Fiction:
Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately - with a careful emotional "build-up" - else it will seem flat and unconvincing...
In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.
Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing.
Okay. So, maybe I wasn't totally off with my correlations with my personal experiences. I need to relate the character's wonder to the character's mood. To completely distill Lovecraft's thought to its most literal, journeyman-minded, writing-as-a-craft essence. Also, the "careful realism" thing rings true to me...
2) And... NOT a note on writing, but a bio entry on a woman who works with the aesthetics of astronomical images, that I think works very well when you consider writing is a similar kind of interpretation:
She considers the methods astronomers use to translate the telescope's data into aesthetically pleasing scenes that communicate with non-scientists and ultimately argues that the images rely on the visual language of Romantic landscapes to convey a sense of wonder and awe as well as propose the possibility of conquering another frontier.
I read that, and started scribbling notes. Wonder needs to open up possibilities. A-duh.
And then, everything clicked into place. And by everything, I mean a bunch of other things entirely.
And it was good. For now.
Things which have been saving my soul lately: My husband. We just had a long(ish) conversation about "novels are haaaard." Of course, what I was unable to convey is that it's not hard, it's just difficult.
Do you know what I mean? No, you probably don't, since my brain is wired funny on this topic. "Hard" is like, well, things where the learning curve is prohibitive. Where I'm not given all the information and making the leaps is problematic. Like my ninth-grade geometry class, where the teacher didn't actually understand geometry, let alone how to teach it, and I didn't realize that I could cheat and solve the problems algebraically and reverse engineer the learning of geometry. Where the super-difficult stuff was (somehow) intuitive for me, but the basic concepts left me in the dust, so that when I took the state proofs test, I got a 0 out of 4 on the basic question and a 4 out of 4 on the impossible question. Geometry is HARD (all caps). Reading Robert Graves is Hard (speaking of funny-wired brains) (one cap). Reading Tartuffe in French is hard (no caps, as long as one has a dictionary, but good luck getting all the jokes). That's my scale of hardness.
Novels aren't hard, by this definition. Not anymore, anyway, praise be. My first novel was HARD. My first novel was like figuring out the importance of f-stops and ISO in the first week of photography class.
This novel isn't hard. This novel is like hand-tinting a perfectly exposed print. I have to do it right, and it takes a lot of concentration and precision and a good eye for color and the right tools and some patience and about 45 minutes (which is 40 minutes longer than anyone else is going to spend post-enlarger on their print for this week's critique).
Only. It's like hand-tinting a book of prints.
Which, you know. Time-wise? Concentration-wise? Is hard. But it's not really on the Mer Haskell scale of hardness, when it comes down to it.
Things which have been saving my soul lately, part the second: Karl Iglesias.
I read Writing for Emotional Impact a while back, but honestly, it's a journeyman writer's book, and most of it went over my head. I knew it was good, but a lot of it seemed irrelevant. But on Friday, I got it into my head that this book would save me a great deal of trouble. And probably had the character stuff in it that I've been looking for, to the depth that I needed it. Like a beacon in my brain (or something) the memory of this book returned.
Well, it's not stocked at any of the local stores of course, and it's not at my library, so I was a bit vexed. I was pretty sure I needed it, like, a week ago. (Which is true.) I wondered if the author had posted any snippets or essays on-line, and when I found his website, I hit the jackpot: e-book of Writing for Emotional Impact, cheaper than the book, in a useful format.
Angels sang.
I read through a few chapters of the book that night, furiously scribbling notes, solidifying helpful things like my freakin' theme ("Can compassion change the world?") and good character moments that I needed to hit. Between that and my giant Post-It calendar? I'm feeling pretty good.
And this, in spite of two power outages. (Thank goodness for my diligent daily back ups; they aren't fancy--I email my nightly changes to my Gmail account from my Exchange account, save daily to my thumbdrive, my netbook and my laptop--but they are effective enough.)
Back to the hand coloring.
So, guess what, little bit? You gotta go! I'll immortalize you here in LJ, though.
( Reveka and Frumos, the first meeting in the forest. )
- Mood:le sigh
But I disagreed with Sanderson right off.
Now, this was remembered advice, spoken impromptu on a podcast, so the fact that I'm about to pick nits with the wording is very much a, uhm, whatsit. A strawman? I'm just setting up the argument the way I want so I can go "BOO! Ya ain't nothing but moldy straw!" (Isn't that what a strawman argument is?)
Because I think, "Yes. It's about training yourself to get it right on the first try. Because if you don't enter the training, faithfully, and with the dedication of a triathlete, you will lose your freaking mind."
You, in this case, being me.
Mostly, that's because I'm slogging through this rewrite, trying to figure out the motivations of secondary characters and things like that--things I probably should have known when I was in the outlining stage. Today, I think I just figured out the purpose of the Underworld. It's not like the Underworld isn't the second most important thing in the book, and the impetus for the whole plot. It's not like the King of the Underworld isn't the antagonist. It's not like the last third of the book takes place in the Underworld.
These are things that make writing much easier, you! (You--still meaning me.) You don't have to go back and layer in all the meaning if you know these things from the beginning, you! You should probably get that right the first time, next time, you.
God knows, if I don't get that right the first time from now on, I'm probably going to have a conniption.
So, IMHO, (I told the iPod), Reknowned Agent is SO RIGHT.
Of course, by the time I'd gotten done with this argument in my head, Sanderson pointed out exactly what I just said, but in his own words, and more eloquently.
But I never said I was a solitary genius.
1) Become relatively adept at using Minnow's tiny keyboard, to the point that when I tried to check my mail on Dann's laptop, my fingers couldn't adequately reach to all the keys the first time I typed my password. I am slightly concerned about going home to the desktop tomorrow, but I guess if I'm back to laptop usage as my main writing computer, that's no real hardship--I'm more likely to get out to the coffeeshop some weekends, this way.
Mostly, I'd just like to be fluent with both keyboards, all the time. I have this vision that someday I'll be able to come home with my Great Ideas, and when I start dinner, I'll sit down at the dining room table in between frying things. I'll let you know how that goes.
2) Gone for a run. I did 5 of 7 60-second jogs/90 second walks in the Couch to 5K running plan. Naturally, I'd like to have done 7 of 7, but I decided that I'd give myself a chance to get up to speed before cracking any whips. The goal is to get two more in of at least 5/7 in the next week. Weds or Thurs, and Sat or Sun. We shall see. The wind was just perfect off the lake for the first/last chunks of my run, drying all my sweat before it appeared. I didn't start sweating noticeably until I went inside. Running would be a hell of a lot easier if it was always like this.
3) Added 2000 words of necessary material to my novel. Connective tissue, explanatory tissue, character development, tension-building stuff. Booyah.
I know that at least half of what has made this novel work is that I didn't shy away from writing longer works for a while, as unsaleable as they are. This novel, frex, developed out of a 12k word story. At the same time, I know that simply finishing loads of short stories helped me with the comprehension of overall story structure. And I'm sure that all my false starts to the six other novels I've written helped me, too, in spite of the fact that they were not completed. But. The single biggest thing that contributed to finishing this novel was the threat of library school that I held over my head. I could be content being a librarian. But I wouldn't be content like I am right now--even now, book half-rewritten, unpublished...
It's the difference between marrying a good guy and the right guy for you, I suspect.
4) Did a jack tonne of more research for this book. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, I scratch something and uncover a billion more things I didn't know or think to know about 1489 Romania. Like, it didn't really hit me until recently that jannissaries were relevant to this setting. Ah, DUH. So, last night, read up on devshirme and figured out that, no, that doesn't play a huge role in the book, but it's a factor--in the culture, and in at least one character's background.
5) Stuck to Phase 1 of the South Beach Rewrite Your Eating Life Plan. Being at the lake and NOT eating cheetos, ice cream, cookies and red licorice at whim? BLASPHEMY. But I did it. Just eating like a normal person at the lake is hard--actually, maybe harder, in some ways, because you don't have the diet to fall back on. But we're about an hour from leaving, and I haven't even opened the bag of Twizzlers sitting on the counter. The hardest part was not getting any potato at dinner, and not getting chips with lunch. But I lived to tell about it. That would make tomorrow one week in on my low-glycemic index carbs and no refined anything effort, and I could already tell by Friday that some of my pants were fitting looser. Lunch today was Brussels sprouts and buffalo burger, which I rather enjoyed. About three days ago, I thought I might kill for a piece of fruit. Today--eh. We'll see what I think at the end of the week. Interestingly, the dairy at this phase has not set off my lactose intolerance...
Right now, I seem to have the ability to comb through sheets of manuscript pages and pull out the ones with marks. Seriously. That's all I got. Oh, and I can pet the cat, too.
*pulls out MS pages with Red Markings On Them*
*peers*
steve_buchheit is apparently from some elvish race. He writes in runes.Anyway, back to our story of Workshop Recovery.
I was making time a little too well on the drive home, so I decided to stop at the Leila Arboretum. I've been looking for a labyrinth to walk for a few years, but only recently discovered the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator--which tells me that there are something like 38 labyrinths within a reasonable drive of my house, and at least three that are as close as the nearest Whole Foods. And yet, I've still not managed to get out to one since discovering this pertinent set of facts. But! The Leila Arboretum has a labyrinth, so I walked it.
I was at low ebb after I dropped Amy and Larry off at the airport. There's something about any big event that, once it has passed, sort of glumifies me for a bit. So, the labyrinth was an attempt to de-glum, and it largely worked. I was back in reasonable spirits by the time I hit the highway.
And, of course, now I'm home, and I'm staring at this novel rewrite and wondering where to start.
Back to sorting MS pages... And petting the cat.
We are on Hastings Point, workshopping novels. The weather the first day was great, and we all went on a nature walk (except for
steve_buccheit, who was still en route when we went) down around Elmwood Beach, saw wild ladyslippers, unfurling ferns, trillium, dogwood, and skunk cabbage. And lilies of the valley, which were the whole goal. Mayflies and gnats are everywhere, but at least it was very windy a few days.... and rained a lot... anyway, we got a nice afternoon yesterday, but we were trapped inside critting. Today looks good. The lake is blue, and the sun is bright. plot
Critiques are done, and life is good. We crammed four crits in yesterday, rather than leaving one isolated on its own for this morning. Should we do this format of critique again (which I'm still debating), or even really any other format, I don't think I'll plan in an iso-crit again. Maybe leave Sunday as a buffer zone for spillage? Or just leave it open for the travelers. We'll see.
Critiques in general seemed to be successful/helpful/satisfying for people. I think blood was let, but it all seemed productive blood, and no one had to jump in the lake, which I believe people had to do at Milford the year I was there... I amused myself by guessing how
kaiweilau writes novels, and being validated. (I guessed she was a non-sequential writer. She is. Though my guess was more lengthy and detailed than that.)I, of course, did not have That Brilliant Revelation on my novel, but that probably wasn't going to happen anyway, and hey, I sort of had That Brilliant Revelation a few weeks ago, anyway. It's really a matter of putting it into action. Or words.
characters
toriw7 has been aiming cameras at us on the sly throughout the event, and kaiweilau has taken up residence as our chef. dendrophilous, who brought sylvrilyn up from IL with her, steve_buchheit, and Larry of No Known LJ, round out the group. kaiweilau is conducting an anthropological study of the Midwest, and we have taught her how to collect kindling, how to build a fire, and how to toast marshmallows. (This seems fair payment for her excellent culinary skills: last night she created a French/Italian cassoulet for us, and the night before we got a Thai/Indian curry. Both full of vegetables and served over brown rice, which allowed us to feel virtuous when we scarfed down s'mores later.)For non-critique group events, we went with three rounds of Cranium, which resulted in some pretty good moments. Larry of No Known LJ, for example, did a stunning rendition of Dances with Wolves in charades.
steve_buccheit and I proved to be an excellent team, so much so that they forcibly split us up later. goals
We are about to hit up Sandy's for breakfast.
motivation
For we are hungry.
Describe your main character(s) in one word. Demonstrate the word throughout the book, but never--not even from the mouth of another character--relate the word and the character.
( mine )
From
learningtoread (at this post here):Give your main character an assignment: Tell me 20 things you've learned about life by the beginning of this book.
( mine )
From Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass, Secondary Character Development.
Pick a secondary character who aids your protagonist. Write down the character's defining quality, and the opposite of that. Create a paragraph in which the character demonstrates the opposite of that. Then create an inner conflict: what does the character most want, and what's the opposite of that? How can this character want both things simultaneously? How can they be mutually exclusive?
( mine )
"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.
Of course we love active, even aggressive, prose that sweeps us along. But passive voice is not usually at fault when writing gets passive. Too much was/wereing and passive protagonists are often at fault--not the passive voice. Passive voice itself is flavor, the marbling in the meat, and varies sentence construction pleasingly. Personally, I am happy when Word's "grammar" catcher bitches that I have used the passive voice 2% of the time in my work. 2% seems like a goodly amount to me.
Profile
- fairmer
- Fairly Merrie
- Merrie Haskell
Syndicate
