A New Adventure: A Novelist in Short Story Land

December 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you read this blog, you know that I’m a novelist. I think long and I like to use a lot of words. (My husband is nodding his head vigorously.) I never thought short stories would work for me. I had written some while getting my Masters’ degree, but they had been a struggle, so I shied away from them once I got out of school.

Recently, at the behest of Jonathan Maberry, I tried my hand at them again. And I like doing them! There are a lot of “scholarly” reasons I’m enjoying them (see my Tuesday post on The Author Chronicles for details), but I think the main reason I like them is that they are…short.

Don’t get me wrong, writing short is not easy. Short stories are an art form unto themselves, and the lessons you learn as a novel writer don’t always translate. But I have found the instant gratification (getting from first draft to polished in days rather than months—or years) very satisfying.

My writing friend Donna Galanti also said short stories keep her writing fresh. She’s right—it lets us appease that urge to follow the new, shiny idea (don’t look so innocent—you know what I’m talking about) without distracting us from our novel-length project for too long.

So, I’m using some of my newly found writing time to learn the craft of short stories. I have one that is ready to send out, with two more in the final stages of polishing. I’m taking some deep breaths and readying myself to send them out in the world.

The funny thing is, I am not so nervous about them being rejected as I am about the query process itself. It’s different than for novels, so I feel a bit out of my depth. Right now I feel like it’s my first day on the job and I’m nodding my head like I understand when I really have no clue. (Come on, you’ve all done it.)

But as my friend Keith Strunk would say, “fake it until you make it.” Because I know these “first day” jitters will pass with time and experience. Will my stories find homes? I don’t know, but I’m ready to find out.

It’s a new adventure! What new adventures are you embarking on?

GoosesQuill FB

Preschool and the Craft of Character

November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My daughter started preschool this month. Hard to believe she’s old enough, but she is. Watching her go into that school all by herself was a little surreal. She was ready, though—she turned and gave me a big smile, that smile that showed she was proud of herself. And she should be—she’s handled the new routine very well.

The really weird thing for me is that now she has this entire facet of her life that I’m not a part of. Seven and a half hours a week where she’s “off stage” to me and I have no idea what’s going on with her. My toddler is no help, either. When you ask what she did in school, she says, “I don’t know.” Sometimes I think 3-year-olds are really teenagers in disguise.

The point I’m making (there really is one) is that my daughter’s “off stage” activities will change her as a person and will change the way she interacts with the world once I pick her up. This is the same with all of our characters—they all have a life “off stage” in our stories, too. Or they should.

The main character, and perhaps some of the other leading characters, don’t have much off-stage time. But some of the supporting, recurring characters do. We need to remember that their lives continue even when we don’t see them. Every time they show up in our book, they should be subtlely different. Perhaps one time they’ve had a fight with their other half, the next they’re late for work, the next they just learned that they got the job they’ve been wanting. They don’t need to have experienced a life-changing event to be different. Maybe they simply haven’t had their morning cup of coffee.

We need to remember this for every character we see more than once in the book—even our main character. If there is a scene where they are off stage, take a moment to think about what they are doing while this other scene is happening. Are they sleeping? Driving in a car frantic to get somewhere? Having lunch? Talking to mom on the phone? Once you know what they’ve been doing, you can introduce the results of their activities the next time we see them.

The reader need never know what our characters do off stage—honestly, they never should know, because if it was important enough for the reader to know we probably should have shown them in the first place. But keep in mind that whatever it was will affect how that character interacts with the others. If their off stage activity has made them irritable, show it. If it’s made them happy, show it.

By shading our recurring characters with the impacts of their off stage activities, we add depth to them and give the reader a sense that their lives go on even when we’re not watching. After all, that’s what we want the readers to believe when they close the book: That our characters are real people whose lives continue after the story ends.

Adventures in Queryland

September 27, 2012 By 2 Comments

I’ve sent out 4 queries for my WIP. I’ve heard back from one, and am in limbo for the rest. The long wait times are not unexpected—I’ve been here before. It is funny, though, how jazzed I get when I first send queries out. I check my email every hour for the first couple of days. Then slowly the adrenaline fades and I check a couple of times a day.

I wrote a while back about patience being a writing virtue when it comes to revision. Patience is also needed once you reach the query stage. Sometimes it takes weeks for an agent to get to your query. And some agents have that no-response-no-interest that lengthens the silence into eternity. While I am not a fan of that, I do understand where they are coming from. I do wish that all agents would set up an auto-response confirming they got your query, though. As the silence stretches, I can’t help but wonder if my email missed the mark and is lost in the ether somewhere!

So I am back to patience again. I do intend to send out a few more queries this week, but then will likely wait a few weeks before sending out another round. And of course if I get no responses by November, I will probably suspend querying until January, since the holidays make things grind to almost a halt in the publishing world, as far as new acquisitions go.

I have heard over and over on various blogs and from successful authors that to make it in the traditional publishing world requires (aside from a great book) patience and perseverance. I think I’ve got the patience thing going on, and I don’t have any intention of giving up, so hopefully I’m good!

I already can hear some of my writing buddies wondering why I don’t just self-publish, and cut through the waiting. I have nothing against self-publishing, and fully expect to use it for certain projects in my career (particularly the genealogy books I am writing). But for my first book, and hopefully for the majority of them, I would like to have the backing of an agent and publisher. It’s just a personal preference—what I need to feel more secure when starting this new phase of my career.

So for right now I am waiting. But I am not idle. I am working on an outline for a sequel, and I have another middle grade in mid-revision right now. I am also returning to a YA paranormal that I feel is almost “there” but needs another look now that I have learned so much in revising my current WIP in submission. Because that is another piece of advice I have heard over and over:

Never. Stop. Writing.

It is the cure for over-active nerves while waiting to hear from agents.

Patience. It really is a writing virtue.

Patience Is A Writing Virtue

September 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

After reading my Facebook post on completing my 2nd round of developmental edits and beginning my polish edits, my best friend (not a writer) commented, “Geez, aren’t you ever allowed to FINISH a book?” I laughed and replied “After agent edits and publisher edits, yes!”

Still, her comment got me thinking. Of course I can finish a book—I have completed drafts of more than 16 novels. So getting from beginning to end of a book is not an issue for me. But finishing a book and completing a book are two different things.

Most of those 16+ novels will never see the light of day. And while I may poach themes and characters from them, even plot points, they will never be completed in their present form. Completing a book—making it shine in all facets—takes a whole slew of skills I didn’t have back then. Some are life experience skills and some are craft skills, including both techniques on the page and story theory, learned from thousands of hours of writing and reading.

But the most important skill I learned is patience.

It takes patience to complete a book. As a new writer, I’d finish a manuscript, give it a couple of proofreads, and it would be “done.” Of course, I was mostly writing for my own amusement back then, so the bar was set much lower. Now, with my sights set higher, that level of “done” would never cut it.

Now, instead of saying, “It’s good enough!” I ask myself, “Why isn’t this good enough?” In other words, I look for ways the novel can be stronger. Yes, I actively seek out ways to make more work for myself! I ask critique partners and beta readers and professional editors to poke all the holes in it they can so that I can fill them, learn from them, and raise my writing to the next level.

And that takes a lot of work. A lot of time. A lot of patience. To go back into your manuscript for 7+ revisions can make your head spin. You can get sick of your own novel. You can lose perspective and wonder if it’s any good at all. You can want to throw it in a drawer and move on to something else.

When I was a new (and young) writer, I never could have done what I am doing with my current WIPs. I never could have approached yet ANOTHER revision with eagerness and excitement. I never could have made myself stay up late, eyes like sandpaper, to edit this for the billionth time.

It takes patience to do that. Patience with my work (understanding that this process is not infinite, it will end), and patience with myself—allowing myself the mistakes I make, and learning from them.

The result? I am more excited about my current WIP (now in revision 7 and headed for query land next week) than I have ever been about any other work. Or rather, I am more realistically excited about it, since I now have also learned what goes into making a marketable book.

I said to my writing buddy Nancy Keim Comley the other day that this is the first manuscript I really feel has reached that professional bar. And it only took 16+ novels and 28 years to get here.

Patience. It’s a writing virtue.

 

Developmental Edits: Complete!

August 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’m on vacation this week, but I wanted to update on how my editing on my current WIP is going. When you last tuned in, I had gotten back my developmental edits from fabulous developmental editor Kathryn Craft. After a few hours of despair (“I can’t do this, it’s too hard!”) I buckled down to it and found that it was not as hard as I thought. In fact, it was a challenge that I ended up enjoying!

Put succinctly, my main problem was that some of my scenes were out of focus, not keeping the main underlying idea front and center. Luckily, I was able to keep most of my scenes and just refocus them (explained in more detail in this blog post). I only wrote 2 completely new scenes and a half of another one. The rest were all repurposed with judicious trimming and adding of content. The edits Kathryn suggested helped a great deal–the story really came together.

Working hard, I managed to finish all those edits BEFORE I left for vacation. I’m going to let it sit until I get back, then go through a final polish/tighten edit. With all the cutting, pasting, and adding of words, I only added a new 513 words, but I would like to trim the whole thing down by about 1,000 words to get it to my ideal word count. Shouldn’t be too hard!

Then (drum roll, please!) I start the query process and see if this manuscript has legs!

Enjoy the end of summer, everyone – I am!

Total Control

August 16, 2012 By 6 Comments

Have you ever thought you were totally in control of something, only to find out you weren’t? I had that happen recently. I thought I had absolutely everything I needed for a meeting at my daughter’s school, only to find I didn’t have the proper immunization records, the registration form they had mailed me, AND that her birth certificate had disappeared.

Sometimes the same thing happens in my manuscripts. I am a partial-pantser (writing friend Marie Lamba calls us “thongers” but that’s just not an image I want burned in my brain), so there’s plenty of space in my manuscripts to go off the rails. Reading over the rough draft, I find things like neglected plot clues, inadvertently changed place names, and minor characters left in the bathroom from chapter 2 until the end of the book.

So what to do when things firmly in hand spiral out of control? The only effective way I’ve found to deal with this is to concentrate on fixing one thing at a time. I called my toddler’s pediatrician and got her records, picked up another registration form at the meeting, and still haven’t found the birth certificate, but I can pick up another copy from the vital records office.

As far as mistakes in the manuscript, the same rule applies: tackle one thing at a time. I always go from big picture to nit-picky because changing big picture items will inevitably change the smaller things. Why waste time fixing commas in sentences you might cut out altogether?

Sometimes I can’t have everything as under control as I’d like. (This is a lesson I am learning over and over as the mom of a toddler.) All I can do is control what I can, not beat myself up for what I can’t, and fix what needs fixing.

Total control is impossible.

Getting to the goal by tackling one issue at a time is not.

The Dreaded Synopsis

August 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

While my WIP is with an editor and readers, I am filling time by working on my query and synopsis for that WIP, so I will have the marketing materials ready ahead of time. That way, once I get my WIP feedback, I can set to work revising and be ready for querying immediately.

I have a query I quite like. A few other people are going to give me feedback, but I feel the underpinnings are solid.

My big problem is the synopsis. I can easily tell the story of what happens, at whatever length is required. What always seems to elude me is the voice of the book and the emotional heart of the story. By the time I have editing the plot down to something synopsis length, all of the voice and life have vanished and it reads like an outline in prose. Boring!

I have a first draft, which I will return to and try to liven up. But even if I get the voice in there, I feel I have missed the heart. A lot of the plot points I include are only important because of the emotional arc attached, but that somehow does not come through in this draft.

This part of the process always frustrates me, because I feel that I should be able to do this much better than I do. After all, this is my book—who else knows it as well as I? My passion and excitement do not come through on the synopsis page, and they need to. It reads like one of the many college papers I wrote. I got A’s on them, but the synopsis is judged by a different metric.

Perhaps I will approach the synopsis more like a short story. Perhaps viewing it through that lens will open up that emotional heart I’m lacking.

I believe that if I can write a great synopsis once, I will have the “lightbulb” moment that will show me how to do it consistently. Here’s hoping the lights come on soon!

How do you approach synopsis writing? Any advice to share?

Rebooting the Writer’s Brain

August 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

Every writer has a distinct way of “rebooting” after they finish a long project. Short projects, or going back and forth between several projects at one time is one thing, but being completely immersed in a project and then suddenly having it finished is a different mental process. Some writers like to dive right into the next project; some prefer to take a little time off. Everyone has a unique spin on what recharges their creative brain.

As for me, for the first few hours after a project is finished, I find myself at loose ends, almost lost mentally. I’ll find a few spare moments and then have no idea what to do with the time since my project is done. Solitaire sees a lot of me in those first few hours!

Once the fuzzy-headed period passes, though, I go on an organization spree. I’ve just spent a month intensely editing my middle grade manuscript, and finally finished. Like usual, when I get deep into a project, I let everything else go except what is necessary. I had piles on my desk, non-writing household projects that have backed up, and EastEnders TV shows clogging up the DVR.

So far I’ve cleared my desk piles, finished a non-writing project and a half (and added a few more), and have checked a score of other items off the never-ending To-Do List. I haven’t gotten to the DVR yet—mostly because I’m watching the Olympics instead.

I find that taking a few days to catch up and organize clears my brain. It resets the switches so I can come to my next project focused and ready to roll. Not having all those loose ends takes the pressure off so I can have some fun with words.

How do you refocus after a long or intense project? What rituals work for you?

Villains and Writers: Why is it so hard to be evil?

July 26, 2012 By 8 Comments

One of the things I often read on agent and editor blogs is that the antagonist in a manuscript isn’t strong enough. That they are cardboard, nebulous, and somehow not as threatening as they should be. I’ll admit I struggle with my antagonists. Obviously, I am not alone. But why is it so hard?

I think it’s because most of us are decent people. We can’t fathom hurting others or blocking some event that is clearly a good thing for humanity. Sure, we all have our moments of making rude gestures to other drivers, or using words we don’t want our 2-year-old overhearing, or even thinking some very vengeful thoughts. But for most of us it stops there. The darkness we all have inside of us scares us to death.

When I see someone like the Colorado shooter, I cannot fathom his thinking. Sometimes with bad guys, you can see where they’re coming from, see how they are damaged emotionally, see how they think what they’re doing is the right thing. But by all accounts, this shooter had everything going for him. And yet he killed 12 people in cold blood. How do you get inside the head of someone like that? How do you write someone like that believably?

The key, as I alluded above, is to know their damage. When writing a villain, we must remember that he has his reasons for doing what he’s doing. And they make sense to him. He is the hero of his own story, and he believes HE is the one doing the right thing.

We as the writer must know the emotional driver behind our bad guy’s thinking, his actions. Only by letting the reader understand this will our bad guy gain the strength he needs to be a gripping antagonist. I think accessing the darkness inside terrifies a lot of writers. We don’t like to think it’s inside us. And once we unleash it for a book, can we put the genie back in the bottle?

While you may discover some uncomfortable truths about yourself during this process, writing the antagonist doesn’t need to be so gut-wrenching a process.

I have found some guidance by using Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. Maass walks you through the antagonist’s world. Outline the story from the bad guy’s POV. Justify his actions using literature, mythology, law. Justify them in such a way that for just a moment your hero can actually AGREE with the villain. In other words, don’t just understand WHAT the bad guy does in your story, but understand WHY.

How do you approach your antagonists? Do you ever scare yourself?

Polish Editing and Potty Training

July 19, 2012 By 2 Comments

This month I’ve been neck-deep in revisions, trying to get my manuscript ready for the editor by August 1st. I added about 20,000 words to my middle grade WIP during “big picture” edits, and now am in the process of trying to pull out 12,000 to get my word count back to where it should be. (For the record, I’ve cut a little over 7,500 words so far.)

Some of those cuts have come in large swaths, where I deleted large amounts of words by restructuring a chapter or two. For example, it occurred to me suddenly that my entire first chapter was window-dressing. Aside from about 200 words, I didn’t need any of it. So I cut the entire chapter and moved the 200 words to other places in the book.

Unfortunately, most of my word-pulling has not been so effortless. And since I am a mom as well as a not-yet-published writer, this intense editing is not the only thing on my plate. My two-year-old announced this past weekend that she wanted to wear big girl panties. Great for her! Bad for me.

My productivity drops like a stone when escorting a toddler to the bathroom every 20-30 minutes.

But I found that potty training and this level of intense editing have a lot in common:

1. Both are painstaking processes. Often success seems almost impossible, but each small victory moves us one step closer. Toddler has a Potty Chart. I have an Editing Progress Chart. Hers has flower stickers. Mine has color-coded squares. It’s all good.

2. Both require constant concentration. Toddler has to pay attention to her body. I have to pay attention to every single word and see if it deserves to live.

3. Both are best accomplished by taking them in small increments. We set a timer for 30 minutes for Toddler. For 20 if she’s been drinking a lot. I focus on one chapter at a time. One paragraph if I’ve been drinking a lot. (For the record, I don’t drink.)

4. Both have their share of accidents. Toddler—well, you can guess. As for me—Did I really just delete half a chapter?!? UNDO! UNDO!

5. Both will be successfully accomplished. Toddler will eventually stay dry all day. I will get this manuscript polished and ready for the editor. I will likely reach my goal first, but I will not complain if Toddler beats me to it. 🙂

Working on two very intense yet completely different projects saps my energy, but I am managing to muddle through.

As long as I do not become potty-mouthed in my writing or try to delete my daughter, things will work out fine.

Oops, there’s the timer! (I feel positively Pavlovian.)

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