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.

Know Thyself (and, um, your character)

I just started reading Noah Lukeman's THE PLOT THICKENS: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, and was much encouraged when multi-published regency romance author Sarah M. Eden mentioned she owns, loves, and more importantly, uses the book!

So I'm reading it, and the very beginning is rough because it has all these characterization questions to ask yourself, and that just makes me want to put the book down and write. I think maybe I should be taking copious notes while I read it.

Lukeman, a literary agent, suggests looking at your character through a series of lenses:

- like an eye witness describing the character to a police sketch artist
- like a doctor asking his patient for personal history
- like a banker considering the applicant for a loan

There's much more than just that, but it basically ends with you knowing more about your character than you know about your own mother. Which is cool. And I can see this type of method really helping me out with my problem.

My problem: If I don't outline, I get lost. If I do outline, my characters surprise me with revelations, making me feel like I just married someone I don't even know (and basically ruining my next plot point).

I can imagine, however, that if I filled out this sort of questionaire about my main characters - made it so detailed that it inspired the plot, which is kind of the point of a character-driven tale - then I wouldn't have to deal with surprises that derail me into that dreaded black forest of crap-manuscript.

I'm excited to read more of this book. I think I'll be learning a lot as Noah Lukeman guides me through characterization to plot points to the all-important hero's journey. Plot has been my downfall for far too long. It feels good to be studying it at last.

Now you know my weaknesses in writing. What have you learned in your writing journey this week?


(p.s. I'm over at Operation Awesome today talking about bite-sized goals.)

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

Thynopthith Thursday: All About Tension and Plot

(Photo courtesy Photos8.com)

Okay, so I'm stretching the days-of-the-week alliteration. :-)

But I was up late last night formulating the SYNOPSIS for my favorite (right this minute) WIP, and I just had to blog about it today. As @KayCassidy taught me (get THE CINDERELLA SOCIETY here), I'm using Michael Hauge's six-point plot structure on all my story ideas.

And it's making all the difference in the world!

I can't stop myself writing the first few pages of a burning new idea, but after that, I do start to wander unless I have a very clear idea where I want the story to go. Therefore, I've become a plotter/pantser combination, which I think most of us probably are. Currently, I lean toward plotter.

My goal with this YA Paranormal Romance is to keep tension throughout. I watched TWELVE ANGRY MEN for the first time a few nights ago and was blown away by the genius of it--so much tension and conflict/high stakes, all shot in that one little room. Masterful! I decided I needed to at least try to infuse my stories with that type of tension.

There are plenty of ideas about how a story should begin. Lots and lots of experts say to start with loads of action. 

Reginald froze. The icy ring of the gun barrel chilled his neck, sending waves of panic through his nervous system. But there was a sense of familiar inevitability in the weapon's cold pressure. Nobody can run forever.


I think this can be a useful way to start a story, as long as you don't find yourself adding in tons of flashback exposition. There's nothing more distracting to me as a reader than when I'm reading an action scene, and the character stops to think about how he got there. Yeah right, I'm thinking. Like anybody thinks this eloquently when there's a gun to his throat. 


Not that there's anything wrong with flashback (especially if you're writing an experimental backwards plot novel), but it kind of defeats the purpose of starting with action, which is to keep a high level of tension throughout.

So what I prefer to begin with is internal conflict. Publishing pros are always talking about how important it is for them to love the voice and the main character, and it needs to happen right away--a sort of literary love at first sight. I believe that revealing the hero's inner struggle from page 1 solves both problems: 1) create tension and 2) establish an emotional connection to the reader.


A smudge of gooey ink from the hotel pen marred the page as Reginald's fingers trembled. It was done. His wife was certain to find the five pages in her mailbox at the conclusion of her writers conference. He half-hoped she wouldn't go home at all. She could do him the courtesy of leaving, at least. In any case, she wouldn't find him in their little tudor house. 


It was time for him to check out. His only regret was leaving the dog behind. 


Okay, not the best writing, but you get where I'm going. Nobody is in fatal peril. Still, plenty of conflict and tension. And since I've started with his internal conflict, I can move on to the external conflict without it seeming forced. The character is established as a nervous man whose wife doesn't love him and he knows it. We know he regrets having to leave everything that's familiar to him, but that he's willing to do it. Now I can have a desperate addict walk into his cheap hotel room and put a gun to his throat. OR I can send him to Tennessee where he'll meet a saucy waitress who brings out his inner rogue. His flirtations thereafter incur the wrath of her wannabe gangster boyfriend who puts a gun to Reginald's throat, and we come full circle.

The goal is a steady supply of tension.

Don't forget the comic relief, though. Personally, I can't read or watch something that has no break in the tension. 

*The story samples above are completely made up on the spur of the moment, having nothing whatsoever to do with my WIP, but I'm not ready to share my premise with the world yet. You know when you have the perfect baby name for your future tikes and you just know that if you say it out loud, it will become the most popular baby name of 2010? That's how I feel about my premise. And I'm really not paranoid because it's happened the last two times I started writing something fun, first with mermaids and then with super villains, so forgive my superstition.

Also, a plug for using the six-point plotting technique for your synopsis:

This is the second project for which I've started plotting only to discover that my villain didn't have a believable motive, or didn't have the chops to be that bad. In both cases, a secondary character stepped forward as the true villain. I love it when this happens, and it probably would have taken many rewrites to figure this out had I not done the difficult thinking beforehand. I'm now very excited to get going on this story, which already has twenty-eight pages.

Plotting...buwahahahaha!

Plotting: The skeleton without which exquisite, fleshy prose sags.

I have to say a big THANK YOU to @KayCassidy for introducing me to the Hauge 6-point plot structure.

The other day on twitter, she mentioned that it changed her writing life. Now I have to confess, it is changing mine, as well! From my first attempts at writing (just butt in chair, pummel through writer's block) to my more recent (stream-of-conscious, first-person nanowrimo project), I've struggled through problems with plot. I always say I'm an idea girl. Coming up with what people call high concept ideas for novels is easy for me. I have about a dozen truly original, mostly fun concepts tucked away in raw synopsis form. But when it came to writing the high-stakes parts--rising action, climax, CONFLICT--I bumbled. Well I am bumbling no more!

Thanks to Kay Cassidy, author of The Cinderella Society, I can now plot just about any story that pops into my mind. Rather than sticking my fabulous ideas in a paragraph-length blurb, I've begun writing an entire synopsis/book proposal for each idea, based on the six-point plot structure. I number the elements on six notecards:

1. Setup

2. New Situation

3. Progress

4. Complications/Higher Stakes

5. Final Push

6. Aftermath

Then I force myself to adhere to these guidelines in creating a full, fleshed-out premise and plot. The size of a notecard makes brevity necessary, a great thing if you're outlining for a book proposal or one-page synopsis. Last, I transfer the six paragraphs (without numbering them) into a word document.

Ta-da!

I have a synopsis, formerly one of the most difficult parts of the writing process, for me. Knowing that I have a full idea, complete with character names, conflicts, and resolution, makes writing the story a much more flowing process. It also takes a load of stress off, since I won't have to condense an entire novel into a synopsis after I've written it (you know, at that point where you think leaving minor characters and subplots out of the synopsis is a crime). If I get a request for a synopsis from an agent, I already have a document that merely needs fine-tuning before I send it out.

Having the synopsis already written does more than provide the crux of my proposal. It also helps me while I'm writing.

Writer's block is so much rarer now than when I began seriously writing two years ago. Knowing the story from beginning to end provides me with a framework, with guideposts that keep me from getting totally lost. I still have plenty of flexibility to change characters and subplots as so inspired, but if I accidentally write myself off the page and into Neverland, I can retrace my steps and get back on course.

Foiled again, no more. Now I must return to my plotting. Buwahahahahaha!!