Blog Chain: Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Amparo asks:

It's a new year, and some writers have taken it upon themselves to switch things up. *points at self* It might be the genres you write in or your revision process. It might be your main character's voice. What's one thing you've chosen to change in your writing this new year? Why do you wish to change it? If there's nothing you're going to change, why do you think it should remain as is?

This year I'm changing my one-WIP-at-a-time rule. Inspired by the productivity of some of my critique partners (you know who you are), I realized the only thing holding me back is me. Not this one project. Not anybody I'm waiting to have read my stuff. Just. me. 

I'm excited to be working on two projects seriously, a third project first-draft-ly -- and I'll also be starting a new adventure as an editorial assistant for Month9Books. 

The editorial staff have been excellent, and in case you haven't noticed, they have a beautiful variety of books coming out in MG/YA speculative fiction (which happens to be my very favorite kind). 

Enter their contest for A Shimmer of Angels swag going on now.

Because of the very basic work I'll be doing with Month9, I'm going to be learning a lot about the pieces and parts of a novel -- and that can only be good for my personal growth as a writer. Not to mention all the amazing books I get to read pre-publication. #jobperks

My study of style has been ongoing for several years now, but my study of structure has only just begun in earnest this year. I've talked a good game about outlining, but I'd always believed in a sort of blind outlining where you just feel things out. I rejected formulaic outlining as being somehow... well, 'formulaic.' That word has all kinds of negative connotations for writers. As it turns out, having a formula only gives you walls to push against, rules to break. And that's good. 

That's the biggest change I have made so far this year, and I'm going to keep moving in that direction because the results already have been delightful good fun. 

Voice-wise, I'm still trying to get rid of my rhetorical questions disease. (It's particularly bad in first person POV.) And I've got to stop beginning every other sentence with a conjunction. Seriously, Katrina, it's epidemic. 

And now I'm talking to myself. (Shoot, did it again with the conjunction.)

What will you change about your writing this year to improve your craft? Or your marketing? Or your... quit it with the conjunctions again, Katrina. 

Blast! 

And goodnight.

Please check out Christine Fonseca's post yesterday, and tomorrow (today, actually, as it's midnight) check out Lisa Amowitz's blog for her biggest change of the year.

To-do Lists

Picture from this site

Some people hate them. I love them. But I generally lose them after about a day.

To-do lists are my cure for insomnia, and that really came in handy recently, after a few all-night reading binges which completely threw my circadian rhythm out of whack! Not that I'm complaining. There are few things more gratifying than reading a book straight through the night and reaching the awesome reader's catharsis right as the room lightens with sun. It's sublime.

It's also exhausting! Not to mention how irresponsible it is for me to be up all night reading when I've got a to-do list a mile long, including being there for two very cute munchkins who canNOT pour themselves cereal in the morning without making mom a cliché (crying over spilled milk).

So as I was going absolutely insane the other night (because I'd taken a late nap with the boys to keep my brain functioning at minimum capacity and now couldn't sleep a wink) I went to my desk and hand-wrote an old fashioned to-do list. It felt so good to let those spinning thoughts spill out onto the paper, to get them out of my head. And when I was done with the list (the first twelve of which had to do with reading or writing and one of which was as nebulous as 'Clean whole house thoroughly')...

I felt free. I slept soundly.

It's the same with my writing. When I've got a killer idea or a nagging dream, I can't rest until I've written out characters, city names, familial connections, and obscure paranormal abilities in some sort of chaotic list. While cleaning up my desk just now, I found nearly ten separate sheets of paper crawling with penned scribbles about my recently completed manuscript. It was almost comical to see these 'Lost Notes' (as I'm sure they'll be called when I'm famous) since almost every little idea had been changed, discarded, or implemented in a totally different way in the actual manuscript. They're helpful, though, as I'm about to begin the first round of revisions.

Those random lists of notes will remind me how I wanted to flesh out the bad guy and never got around to it on my sprint to the climax. They point out discrepancies in the secondary relationships, and minor characters who disappeared after their cameos, never to appear again.

Lists are awesome. I can't imagine my writing process without them.

How about you? Written a to-do list lately? Or maybe a list of your MC's freckles and all their names? Good, because that would be weird. It's near midnight, so I'm automatically excused for bloggish weirdness. But you! You have no excuse.

Happy Monday, everybody! Make it a good one. :)

p.s. Simon and Schuster Pulse has the first 100 pages of a new dystopian trilogy up on its site. The book is called WITHER and it's part of The Chemical Garden Trilogy. They're saying fans of Hunger Games will love it, so feel free to check out the first hundred pages with me if that sounds like your thing.

Runaway Plot Slides Toward Home

That's my writing headline for yesterday. You may have noticed I blog about this a lot, and by this I mean plot running away or outlines getting thrown off course. That's because it happens to me just about every time I sit down to write. I figure I have two choices when my characters get ahead of my outline:

1) Go with it and see where it leads

or

2) Scrap it and send my characters back to the fork in the road

As painful as #2 is, there have definitely been times when I've had to do this. The plot twist just happened too soon, or in the wrong way. Or maybe a side character became way more important than he/she was meant to be.

But my favorite is when I've been thinking about the story and characters so hard and for so long that even my plot twists aim me back home. That detour I took? Turned out to be a shortcut. Suddenly that open-ended mystery I dropped into chapter three makes perfect sense, and it's totally by accident.

Or is it?

There's obviously something brainish(TM)* going on here. My subconscious knows, even if I am not aware, how this story is going to unfold. I may think I've plotted six points and am meandering through them on my way to a fully developed story, but my subconscious mind already put A and B together with plot point E, and did it in a way I never expected.

I love this and I hate this, but it's the way I write. Any more structured and the story starts to feel contrived. Still, the only way it works is if I THINK about my story. All the time. This annoys those around me, most especially my poor husband who has to put up with plot and character epiphanies during our favorite TV shows, while we're brushing our teeth, and even during the sacred family dinner time.

Are you working on a novel? Is it embedded deeply in your subconscious?

*When Google Chrome red-underlines a word, I assume I've made it up and add the TM for kicks and giggles.

The Challenge of Story Structure

Ninja Warrior Obstacle Course, pic from this site

Have you felt this way about your story? Like good story structure is a ninja obstacle course with an un-hole-y plot on the other side, but you just can't seem to reach it across that mud pond?

Lots of people say the answer is to outline. But what if you write an outline and then blow it off for an exciting new development? Is there a perfect medium between outlined and inspired?

I'm wondering this myself. See, I totally wrote an outline for my WIP using the six-point structure of screen writers. 

Stage 1: The Setup


Stage 2: New Situation


Stage 3: Progress


Stage 4: Complications/Higher Stakes


Stage 5: The Final Push


Stage 6: The Aftermath

I wrote a short paragraph for each stage, making for a pretty complete synopsis, what would function as a book proposal if I were writing non-fiction. But when I got to about page twenty of the actual writing, something went wrong. I accidentally wrote a detail that derailed the other five stages.

Crap.

So then I cut the offending piece and moved it to my gigantic EXCERPTS file, but I wasn't satisfied with my storyline anymore. A complication--an appealing complication--had been introduced into my mind. Suddenly, I needed to explore that. I had to write a bunch of scenes from different POVs to explore what could be. I had to reevaluate whether or not I even wanted to write the whole thing in dual POV. Present or past tense? And should it be her story, or his?

You could say that all this resulted from my failure to commit. Some people romanticize it by saying their characters surprised them or their story took on a life of its own. As for me, I prefer to think of it as a test. It's the universe testing me to see if I have what it takes to write this story. Maybe that's just my stubbornness talking; I do tend to see everything as a test of my will. :)

So what can you do when your story takes over and spoils your well-laid plans?

There's nothing to do but THINK.

I believe this point is what separates those awesome published writers I idolize from beginning writers. A beginner will just plow through and hope it all comes together somehow. A seasoned writer will know this is the time for deep thought. They're being given an opportunity to make their story something more than what they intended. But without careful thought and re-imagining, the story can easily become an unrecognizable blob of half-stories that don't quite click together.

What do you think? Does your story ever take over? What causes it, and what do you do to get your story moving again?

For a nice pick-me-up, go read literary agent Sarah Davies' 2011 wishes for you.

Also, from Larry Brooks at storyfix.com, 12 Worthy Writing Resolutions

And for eye candy plus a reading/writing tip from Amparo, check out Do What You Don't