Kathryn Craft Archives - Page 2 of 2

The “Black Moment” of the Writing Process

October 3, 2013 By Kerry Gans 7 Comments

My friend Jerry Waxler likened the writing of a book to the Hero’s Journey. As most of you know, one of the stages of the Hero’s Journey is the black moment or dark moment–that moment in the story where all seems lost and hope is gone. I think Jerry is on to something with his analogy, because I have experienced a black moment in the writing process just recently.

Over the weekend, I got my YA novel back from my developmental editor, the wonderful Kathryn Craft. I knew I was in for a lot of work, but I didn’t mind because I am one of those writers who actually enjoys revision. I did not have a chance to look at Kathryn’s report over the weekend, so I waited until Monday.

Monday was a bad day to look at the report. My daughter had gotten me up before 6 AM, meaning I was running on about 4.5 hours sleep. That’s never good for morale. And I was in a bad mood for other reasons that had nothing to do with writing. So when I read Kathryn’s report, my eyes filled with tears and I said, “This rewrite is never going to happen. I can’t do this.”

The whole rest of the day I struggled with defeat. Why was I even trying? Why bother? No one really cares if I ever write another word or not. I’m not writing anything deep and meaningful. I’m not going to change anyone’s world.

I have been here before, crushed by the knowledge that my very best effort still is not anywhere near as good as it needs to be–anywhere near where I want it to be. On good days, this is what I love about writing–the knowledge that there is always more to learn, the excitement of scaling the next mountain, reaching the next plateau. On bad days, all I see is a debris pile that used to be my manuscript, and the toil involved in clearing the rubble seems beyond my strength.

I am slowly coming out of the overwhelmed funk. Time helps. Being stubborn (ahem, persistent) helps. Chocolate helps. Being addicted to writing helps. But what really helps is that Kathryn is not only a fabulous editor but an enthusiastic cheerleader, who when I emailed her in a panic told me that I could do it and it would all come clear.

Writing can be lonely, and facing a huge rewrite can be demoralizing. Like our protagonists in their blackest moment, it is our friends who help us find the strength to push through the darkness and continue the journey.

It’s not Thanksgiving yet, but I am thankful for my fellow writers-in-arms. Without them, I would not be where I am, and I certainly would not still be moving forward.

How about you? Do you hit “black moments” in your process? How do you work through them?

Thanksgiving 2012

November 22, 2012 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

In our culture, it’s easy to not be grateful for what we have. We are constantly bombarded with the newest gadgets, bigger houses, more elaborate lifestyles. And even in our daily life, we wish some things were easier/better, or that we had what someone else has, or that a dream we held dear would come true.

It is so easy to lose sight of what we have.

Thanksgiving is, of course, a good time of year to look at our lives and be thankful for what we have. Coming so close on the heels of Hurricane Sandy, I am immensely thankful for the sturdy roof over our heads, the electricity running through our power lines, and the easy fulfillment of our basic necessities such as food and water and heat. We were so, so much luckier than so many of the people not so far from us.

The other things I am thankful for sound familiar, and that’s because these things should be the most important in our lives. I am thankful for my family. I have a wonderful, loving husband who supports my writing dreams and me in every way. I have a healthy, energetic, intelligent Toddler girl who can drive me up a wall but whom I love with all my heart. I am lucky enough to still have my parents, healthy and active. And my brother, who I fought like crazy with as a child, but who I am so proud to have as an ally in my life now. My extended family—sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, mom-in-law, cousins, aunts and uncles—is warm and generous and I am grateful knowing that if I ever need them they will have my back.

I am thankful for my writing community, who have helped support and forward my dream—including all of my blog readers. My Author Chronicles pals have shared the burden of creating author platform, my Advanced Writing Workshop classmates help keep me laughing and energized, and my beta readers, Nancy Keim Comley, J. Thomas Ross, and Bob Drumm lift my writing to higher levels. Professional mentors (and friends) Jonathan Maberry, Marie Lamba, and Kathryn Craft have help sharpen my writing skills and keep me from giving up on this long journey.

I am thankful for my health and that of those I care about, for the opportunity to pursue my writing dream, and for the 3 mornings a week my Toddler is now in preschool so I can write!

Mostly, I am thankful for the love in my life.

Without love, the rest means nothing.

With love, I already have everything.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Developmental Edits: Complete!

August 30, 2012 By Kerry Gans 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!

Old Fashioned: Writing with Pen & Paper

May 17, 2012 By Kerry Gans 15 Comments

I used to write everything longhand. I still have copybooks filled with my young scribbling. But once I got to grad school, I found that between school and working full time, I had no time for the luxury of writing longhand and then typing it in. So I’ve switched to writing everything on the computer.

This year, I attended some writing sessions with Kathryn Craft. These sessions involved writing exercises. Because I don’t like lugging my laptop around, I elected to do this writing on paper. The funny thing was, I loved the experience of returning to paper.

There is something visceral in writing with pen and paper. I feel the words more intensely through my fingers. The smoothness of the paper is soothing. The pen pressing into the pulp lends the words a tangibility that the computer screen lacks. A permanence exists, too—no computer glitch will randomly erase your work!

The visual aspect of writing creates creative energy, too. Not only do the letters themselves have shapes that I am creating, I can deviate from the linear plane by writing in the margins, adding arrows, or writing sideways. This is akin to using another creative outlet such as painting or music to release writing creativity. I find that simple starting to write, even if I don’t have a clear idea where I’m headed, acts like doodling for me—and sometimes I will doodle as well, while I’m thinking.

I have found that writing on paper meshes better with the speed of my brain while doing writing exercises. Certainly, when in the writing flow state, typing is faster than writing. But when I am trying to come up with an idea, trying to create a scene or character on the spot, writing on paper is a good speed. I don’t get frustrated because my writing outpaces my ideas and leaves me staring at a blinking cursor on a blank line.

To my great surprise, I found the writing from these sessions to have a different tone from my usual writing. In many cases it was infused with a humor I struggle to find in my writing. I often felt that the writing was more powerful, even in its unedited state, than what I normally wrote. Perhaps this is a fallacy, perhaps it was because the writing was meant to be experimental and I felt less constrained, or perhaps there was a raw emotional connection facilitated by the physical connection of pen and brain.

I hope I can import this new depth, feel, and humor into my computer writing, but if I cannot, I know I can revert to the pen and paper. And whenever I am stuck, or struggling with a particular scene, I will try this simple change of medium and see what sparks in me.

Writing on pen and paper may seem old-fashioned, and certainly is no longer the norm, but it still has power and uses that should not be overlooked in our pixel-dominated lives. I look forward to incorporating it into my writing process and letting the ink flow!

The Literary Toolbox: Description as Emotion

March 29, 2012 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

One of the things we learn early on about description is not to “info dump.” In other words, don’t bore your readers to tears with pages of detailed description of the world of your novel. Drop it in slowly, as needed. But something we writers learn as we get further into the process is that every word in a novel should be multi-tasking.

Description is no exception, as we discussed in one of Kathryn Craft’s workshops. What your characters notice and how they interpret what they see says a lot about who they are and their state of mind. Description should add to the atmosphere and the emotion of the scene—and it can be a great way to show your character’s emotion without telling and without being cliché. For example, a character overhearing another character laughing can interpret that laughter as jovial or as somehow derisively directed at him, depending on if the character is happy or embarrassed.

But how do you choose which descriptive details to include in order to convey emotion? Very simply, you put yourself in your POV character’s head. What would your protagonist be most likely to notice about a scene in his situation, and what would be his emotional reaction to it?

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Just get inside your character’s head. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, at least for some of us. J. Thomas Ross did a wonderful post on Author As Actor that describes the process and problems of getting into character—or not.

I always think I’m inside my character’s head, but my crit partners constantly find tiny mistakes that show that I am not inside my character enough. This is likely one reason why my description tends to do only one thing—describe. That is not enough. Description, like every other facet of the story, must support the plot/conflict/tension of the book.

In conclusion: 1) It takes a surprisingly small amount of description to give a reader a good idea of the scene. 2) The reader will assume that anything you take time to describe is important to the story. 3) Anything you describe should be important or necessary to the protagonist. 4) How the protagonist interprets what he notices should reflect their current emotional state.

I’m going to work further on using description to effectively convey emotion. I know that it will bring a new level of depth and professionalism to my writing, and I am eager to get practicing!

The Literary Toolbox: Writing Simultaneous Action

February 16, 2012 By Kerry Gans 6 Comments

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of going to a workshop run by editor Kathryn Craft. This workshop was a focused one, dealing with a single element of writing for two hours. Last week’s topic was writing simultaneous action.

Normally, when writers want to show action happening at the same time in two different locations, we write the events as two separate scenes. We may quickly cut back and forth between scenes, but each action happens as its own discrete event.

Not so with writing simultaneous action. The events are woven together within the same paragraph, the sentences jumping back and forth between events with no segues. A good example of this from the movies is the baptism montage from The Godfather. The example Kathryn gave us from literature was from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

We practiced this mind-bending technique by writing one scene based on a prompt, then writing a second based on a different prompt (we had numerous prompts to choose from). When writing the second scene, we were supposed to try NOT to think about the first scene, to just write as if it wasn’t going to be integrated with the first. Of course, our subconscious knew it, so it did some pretty remarkable things with this exercise!

Since we were constrained to a short time period, we meshed the two scenes together rather willy-nilly. All of us were amazed at how well they meshed! Unintentional reinforcements of words or themes or metaphors or symbols layered deeper meaning into the story. We did find that confusion as to what was happening where did occur (although sometimes that added unexpected texture to the piece), but since this was a rough exercise that was expected. One trick that helped alleviate the confusion was using the present tense in one event and the past tense in the other event. That may sound contradictory, since both events are happening simultaneously, but it worked well, especially when the two events were present action and a flashback occurring during the present action.

Writing simultaneous action kind of made my head hurt, in that time-travel-paradox kind of way, but even the short exercise we did showed how powerful a tool it could be if used in the right place. In fact, I thought of a particular story I am writing where this would be perfect for a certain scene.

I’m going to share my writing exercise below so you can see what I mean by writing simultaneous action.

Scene 1: Driving in the rain is awful. Driving in the rain in the dark is horrific. Kaleidoscopic light refracts through the rain from oncoming cars, water slashes across the windshield so hard the wipers might as well be turned off, the tires just barely grab the road, the lines on the road all but invisible. Exit 47. How much farther? A flick to turn on the overhead light, a glance at the paper with the tear-stained directions. A nearly fatal glance, as the tires rumble on the strip at the road’s edge. The wheel fights me, the tires slip, but the car keeps to the road. Five more miles. Five miles takes about 15 minutes in this weather. 15 minutes could be too long. The end was near, they’d said. Only 15 minutes more to reach her bedside—and I still might be too late.

Scene 2: A crack shattered the night, the sound made visible by a blinding sulphurous light. The tree, steaming in the rain, stands for a moment as if in shock—the half of it falls away, splintering the trunk as it smashes to the ground. The tree tears down wires, pulverizes two cars, and lays across the road with the finality of death. Among the crushed limbs and shredded glass, the wires spark like disheartened fireworks, the only light left in the neighborhood.

Combined: Driving in the rain is awful. Driving in the rain in the dark is horrific. A crack shattered the night, the sound made visible by a blinding sulphurous light. Kaleidoscopic light refracts through the rain from oncoming cars, water slashes across the windshield so hard the wipers might as well be turned off, the tires just barely grab the road, the lines on the road all but invisible. The tree, steaming in the rain, stands for a moment as if in shock—then half of it falls away, splintering the trunk as it smashes to the ground. Exit 47. How much farther? A flick to turn on the overhead light, a glance at the paper with the tear-stained directions. A nearly fatal glance, as the tires rumble on the strip at the road’s edge. The wheel fights me, the tires slip, but the car keeps to the road. The tree tears down wires, pulverizes two cars, and lays across the road with the finality of death. Five more miles. Five miles takes about 15 minutes in this weather. 15 minutes could be too long. The end was near, they’d said. Among the crushed limbs and shredded glass, the wires spark like disheartened fireworks, the only light left in the neighborhood. Only 15 minutes more to reach her bedside—and I still might be too late.

So there’s a rough example of how it works (or doesn’t). Add this to your literary toolbox and use it to amp up some of the action in your story!

Collaboration: The Meeting of the Minds

December 15, 2011 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that my middle grade WIP, The Egyptian Enigma is the product of a collaboration with two totally awesome co-writers, James Kempner and Jeff Pero. You will also know that we just got incredibly detailed and spot-on notes from developmental editor Kathryn Craft on said WIP. So now we have massive revisions to do.

How do you do that with three people?

The revisions are fundamental in that we have to restructure the plot. That means adding scenes, re-envisioning existing scenes, and cut, cut, cutting what we already have. In essence, it means starting over.

I don’t mean totally, of course. There are many existing scenes we will be able to rework and salvage, and our characters will remain much as they are. But since the plot needs so much work, our process is starting over again.

We are having a meeting Dec 28 to discuss everything and get a new outline for the book. We have an agenda, because with 3 authors it is important to know what we will talk about so as not to waste time or run off on tangents. We know from experience that we can only work productively together for about 3 hours and then our focus collapses. So we have no time to lose. Thus the agenda.

To make our time even more efficient, we are all going to email each other our ideas for the new plot. We will do this a week before we meet, so we have time to read and react and absorb everyone’s ideas. Then we will discuss on the 28th and come to a final plot, a final outline. The hope is that the best of our ideas will come together and create some alchemical magic so we have a lean, strong, potent new outline.

Once we have that, I get to work. I will write the new first draft. Then it goes to Jim, who gives it to Jeff, who gives it back to me for a final voice revision.

Before all of that, though, there will be the meeting of the minds—and the synergy that comes with it.

Character Goals in Fiction

December 8, 2011 By Kerry Gans 3 Comments

I talked last week about the Premise in fiction, and how it can help underpin your entire story. I mentioned briefly in that post that clarifying character goals was also recommended to help make my middle grade manuscript The Egyptian Enigma more focused.

One of the exercises developmental editor Kathryn Craft suggested to me was to go through the entire manuscript and write down the characters’ goals for every scene. If your main character’s goal in the scene is not somehow related to the book’s overall story goal, then the scene is either not needed or needs to be reworked.

I figured that would be easy. I mean, my main character is doing all these things to try and accomplish a specific story goal, right? So obviously he has a goal in every scene.

Turns out, not so much.

Or rather, his goal sometimes has nothing to do with the main story goal he is pursuing. When his goal is to set the table, that doesn’t do much to forward the plot. That scene can go.

And of course you must remember that your main character is not the only character in the scene with a goal. Every character in a scene has their own goals they are trying to accomplish—and ideally they should be conflicting with the main character’s goal. This creates tension and conflict in every scene.

This scene-goal exercise does not take a very long time to do. The real trick is to be honest with yourself while doing it. Don’t write the goals you meant your main character to have—write the goals he actually has as written on the page. Once you do that, excess scenes become very clear.

So, to recap: Your main character will have a story goal—what he is trying to accomplish in that book. If your book is part of a series, he has a series goal, which will be resolved in the final book of the series. But he also needs to have scene goals, which drive the scene, give it purpose, and forward the overall plot. Other characters will also have scene goals which will conflict, obstruct, or sometimes coincide with the main character’s goals.

That’s a whole lot of goals—but looking at them closely will give you a tighter focus to your entire book.

Confessions of a Conference Virgin: Day 3 of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference

June 5, 2011 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Today was the final day of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. I started it off by getting lost on the way in, but I still made it on time.

I also found that a friend and colleague of mine, James S. Kempner, had taken 3 different prizes in the PWC contests—one a first prize! Congrats to Jim!

This morning kicked off with a 1-day workshop by author and editor Kathryn Craft, who enlightened us with 13 Tips and Tricks for better writing. I wanted to whip out my manuscript right there and start applying them—they are a sure way to improve your writing.

Then on to the final day of author Kelly Simmon’s Novel: Plot workshop. Her 7 Cs checklist gives a comprehensive yet manageable way to approach plot, particularly if you are not a natural outliner. I’m a partial outliner myself, and can easily see that incorporating her ideas will help me improve my novel before I ever write a word of it.

After lunch, author Gregory Frost wrapped up his advice on Novel: Character. After a review of simplex, complex, and multiplex characters, we created a character from scratch. While we rendered a rather hilarious persona and the ghost that haunts him, the exercise showed us the basic steps to creating a multi-dimensional character with enough room to grow throughout your novel.

In the YA workshop with author Catherine Stine, she spoke about how to find agents and editors, and shared some of her experiences with agents. We also practiced our 3-sentence elevator pitches and discussed the competing yet very similar merits of writing programs Scrivener (about $50) versus yWriter (free).

My mind was far too fried to stay for the closing panel, but I’m certain it will be as informative as the rest of the conference. I’m thinking I should book my reservations for next year!

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