Tag: writing

A Year

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A year ago, I wrote this:

I’ve been 30 for nearly four months now, and quite honestly, have enjoyed this year so far.  I’ve burned off the fat that I needed to, I’m writing again, and at this point, my only regret is that I didn’t do this 5 years ago.

I know it’s stupid and a little trite, but the proverb that, at the end of your life, you only regret what you haven’t done, has been playing itself in the recesses of my mind lately.  Knowing how to balance patience and consistency while moving in the direction of my dreams will be the skill I will need to cultivate.  Hopefully, I don’t make myself crazy in the process.  But, more importantly, I don’t want to be in the same place next year as I am now.  Each step needs to take me closer to my goals, and in a year, I will achieve my goal of finishing a story.

This post was my very first post on this blog. I was high from a successful year at my paythebills job, and from regaining my ideal body composition. I worked really hard at both, and saw the fruits of my labor. I was happy. I reached my goals. But, strangely, I was still restless. I was not content. And I think reaching those other goals only increased the discontent.

Before this post, I only dreamed of writing a novel. I toyed with the idea for years (YEARS!), but that was something Other People did. Not me. Besides, I wasn’t smart enough, experienced enough, good enough, whatever enough to write a novel, so why bother?

A year ago, my mindset shifted. I obviously CAN reach goals. Actually, if I was honest with myself, I have always reached goals. I just never set myself up to choose goals that mattered to me. And writing mattered to me.

So, instead of “Why bother?” the question became, “Why not?” If I can spend so much time and energy to achieve goals that, at the end of the day, I don’t really care about, why not chase after The Goal that I’ve been dreaming about for years?

A year ago, I said this: “I don’t want to be in the same place next year as I am now.” Now, let’s see how far I’ve traveled on my writerly path.

A year ago, I cringed at the thought of anyone knowing that I was trying to write a novel. Or, even be identified as A Writer. Now, I embrace that identity. I am a writer.

A year ago, I started several novels, but was easily discouraged from finishing any of them. Now, I have a novel, WIP1, which is now in the revision phase, and am drafting WIP2.

A year ago, I was overwhelmed with low writerly self-esteem, and pre-rejected myself from submitting my writing to anyone (even to potential writing partners…I felt I was doing them a kindness). Now, I’m writing some short works to submit to various publications. And, my writing partners will be getting part 1 of WIP1 shortly.

A year ago, I felt very much alone (which is probably why I was so easily discouraged!). Now, I have amazing writer friends who I met through the magic of social networks. I even went to an annual writer’s conference last week and chatted with Other Writers about books and stories and other nerdy things. (Indiana SCBWI’s annual conference…highlights of that conference coming soon!)

I’m so thankful for this past year, and look forward to another year of progress toward my goal.

Thank you for your company on this journey.

Thursday Thoughts on the WIP

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The writerly blogosphere seems to be abuzz this week about conflict.  Check out these posts that I found during my blog time just scrolling down my blog subscriptions:

The Writing Lair: Why We Need Villains
Tempering the Steel: Death, Destruction, and Despair: Writing Conflict
Ink-Stained Scribe: Character Flaws – Make Them Matter!
Erin Writes: I’ve Been Thinking A Lot About Antagonists

I thought these posts about conflicts and character flaws and resolutions fit perfectly with my own recent mindset since I had to conquer (yet another) mental obstacle before I can push on and make progress on my WIP (any WIP, really, including my guest post for a friend).  I wrote a ridiculously long blog post last night about the root cause of my work stand still, but Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) captured the essence of what I felt when she said: “…some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.”  The end result of my realization was my comment on Sierra Gardner’s blog:

“You are a different person, which means that your success will look different as well and that is a very good thing!”

Thank you so much for this post! Not so long ago (coughcoughlastyearcoughcough), whenever I saw others finishing books, landing agents, etc, I ended up thinking, “why bother?” and stopped writing. But, I would always pick up my pen again or start doodling another idea in my journal, like I’m some kind of unstoppable masochist.
It took a LOT of stops and starts (a lot, a lot!) to realize that
1. I obviously love The Writing, otherwise, why would I keep going back to it against all my ridiculous reasoning and
2. The need/desire for stories will NEVER run out, so I should stop feeling like the world will sell out of agents/publishing houses.

Plus, all this reminds me that I am in charge of my own success. I’m accountable for how much (or little) work/effort I put into the WIP. So, if I haven’t been putting a lot of effort into it, then I really have no right to complain.

The Shiny: My To-Read stack

So, not only did I have my own random (and fleeting) feelings of inferiority to overcome, I’ve had SO much fun (maybe too much fun) recently reading the GLUT of books that I’ve been desperately waiting for, that I have only given my WIP half-hearted attempts.  Well, enough of that.  I have a hard enough time getting over my own mental obstacles, and writing around a full-time work schedule, that I don’t need pretty shiny books distracting me.  (But, oh, The Shiny!)

So, I have reined in my readinglust to one fiction book and one non-fiction book a week.  And, I will only get to read another book with each chapter I finish revising.  I’ve also put my wordmeter back up from my days of NaNoWriMo, to keep me accountable to my words.

For my mental obstacle?  Well, even though I feel like it’s sufficiently solved, there may, MAY, be a time when it will rear its obnoxious head again.  And, when it’s time for me to relearn, I’ll revisit Anne Lamott’s words in Bird by Bird (what, you didn’t know she wrote it specifically for me?):

“You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story.  You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive.  But you cannot will this to happen.  It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.  So you might as well just go ahead and get started.”

Time to get started.  Again.

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Confessions of a Consummate Scribbler

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And What shall I Write

Image by tomswift46 (No Groups with Comments) via Flickr

I woke up this morning so proud of myself.

I listened to my body last night and went to bed at a decent hour.  I woke up feeling rested and without my too-familiar reading hangover.  I poured my cup of coffee and went straight to my computer, opening up my WIP to its current draft.  I read over my changes so far, and with a rush of ideas, started to attack the next scene.

Then, nothing.

After about a minute, the cursor spent more time standing still and blinking rather than trailing words behind it.  I turned on Pandora radio, and tuned to my trusty Disturbed station, hoping angry, discordant music would remind me of whatever it was I wanted to say.  Still nothing.

It wasn’t for lack of ideas.  After all, the rough draft for WIP1 is finished.  Sure, most of the words cobbled together barely pass for sentences, but at least the words are there waiting to be rewritten.  Yet, the internal ramblings that woke up with me this morning and prodded me to my computer just, well, stopped.

Finally, I started doodling on the notepad that I keep on my desk, humming along to some Linkin Park.  And, what started out as daisy chains on a yellow notepad became the scene that I dreamed about when I woke up.

Thinking about it, I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’ve always been a scribbler.  I’m never without at least a notepad; my Moleskine notebook is a constant fixture in my tote bag.  I wrote most of my rough draft by hand first, before my fingers were able to fly over the keyboard and flesh out most of my thoughts.

I just figured in this drafting stage, I would be able to just do the changes straight on the computer.  Clearly, my brain disagrees.  There’s just something about the blinking cursor that my muses do not enjoy and so render me wordless in its presence.

So, I’ve made peace with the idea that I will just scribble and type through this drafting stage as well.  Though it may seem like an extra step, at least it’s helping me move in the right direction: a finished draft for my beta readers.

So Tell Me: do YOU have any writing quirks? Surely, I can’t be the only one with a writing Monk-ism.

Seasons of Inspiration

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Tornado Warning

Image by RaGardner4 via Flickr

Here in Indiana, weather is…unpredictable.  The calendar may say that we are firmly in the spring season, but nature has its own ideas.

Last week, I…

…hid in the basement during a tornado warning.

…took pictures of hail pelting my car.

…pulled on my fuzzy boots because it snowed. Again.

…woke up in the middle of the night as a thunderstorm rolled in and I thought a tree crashed through my roof. (That’s happened before.  Twice.  So, you can understand my paranoia.)

…basked in beautiful sunshine as I ate my lunch outside, to the delight of my sun-starved skin.

It’s both awe-inspiring and humbling to see the influence that nature has on us and how we in turn, respond to it.

I have been working on a couple of Works In Progress now, which isn’t as confusing as it seems since they’re so different and are at different stages.  My first WIP is in a revision stage, and honestly, I plan to focus on it more this month than my second WIP, which is only in the rough draft stage.  So even though first WIP gets more of my structured writing time, I still let my muses play with second WIP during random times like driving to work or while my store is empty.  That’s the beauty of a rough draft: unbridled creativity and imagination.

My first WIP, I started writing in the fall during NaNoWriMo.  It’s dark and disjointed and looking back, probably reflected the madcap emotional turbulence of both NaNoWriMo and working through two retail jobs during the holiday season.   My second WIP was born on a bitter morning, the bleak winter landscape a perfect setting for a character filled with the helplessness, anger, and resentment that biting, sub-zero temperatures can create.

This week,though, something odd happened as I drove to work.  Well, two things really.  First, because of extremely gusty winds (I’m talking blow-you-into-the-next-lane-without-warning gusts), I ended up driving 5-10 miles under the speed limit.  (No comment on my normal driving speed.)  Second, I realized that I was dreaming up words for another WIP.

Now, this bout of inspiration didn’t just happen.  The WIP my muses brought to mind is one that I’ve had in the back burner for basically my whole life, but I have never dared to capture it in words.  My current WIPs were born out of fun ideas that I followed to their inevitable conclusions.  They are exercises in my mental stamina and discipline to finish a task. This other WIP, though…it’s different.

This WIP (which for clarity we’ll call third WIP) matters the most to me because it encompasses all of my unspoken fears, hopes, loves, dreams.  It’s basically a straight window into my soul.  As such, even thinking about it both inspires me and intimidates me.  I’m too emotionally invested in it, which is why I never felt like I can write it the way it needs to be written.  The way it deserves to be written.  So, I’ve gotten used to just ignoring it.

But then, the wind whipped just right and I imagined a curling wave.  The humidity and warmth reached a specific threshold and I delighted in memories of tropical sun showers.  My cautious wariness of other cars brought to mind the winding road to Hana (on Maui).

Now, I can’t help but wonder: should I follow my muses into this third WIP?

SO TELL ME: I know writers find inspiration everywhere, but do YOU have seasonal “moods” when it comes to your WIP? Do YOU find yourself reading a book or genre during specific times of year because it “felt” more like summer or winter?

The Count of Monte Cristo is My New Novel Role Model

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Cover of "The Count of Monte Cristo (Barn...

Cover via Amazon

My husband is a proud, self-proclaimed non-reader.

Don’t get me wrong.  He’s read all the classics, and has probably read more of those than I did.  (In high school, I could take tests on books I’ve not read and ace them because the tests revolved more around themes and big picture things versus knit-picky, scene specific details like his tests were.  Don’t worry, he still graduated valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 GPA in an uber-competitive private school.)  But, he definitely does NOT have my love for reading books.  He doesn’t wax poetical about the feel of the paper, the smell of a crisp new book, nor does he get starry-eyed delighted by a fantastical new read.  He rolls his eyes when I get excited that a book became available for me at my local library (Finally! Y’all need to quicker!).  He looks askance at my piles of books that signal that I’m planning on another reading marathon (where I read through my day off from work into the night, oftentimes devouring whole stacks of books by the time dawn rolls around).

However, despite all the eye rolling and sighs and proclamations that “books are stoopid,” he does have a favorite: The Count of Monte Cristo.

We brought it along to listen to on our 20+-hour road trip to Florida last September.  He listens to it repeatedly as he works on the house.

In short, he’s a fan.

And, in true fandom form, when asked why he loves this book so much, he just chuffs, and says, “Because it’s awesome.”

But then a wonderful thing happened.  The other night, we decided to watch the (ridiculously horrible, why does it even pretend to be Count of Monte Cristo because it’s nothing like the book) movie starring Jim Caviezel, and I was able to glean a lot from the husband’s utter disgust toward the film.  Between horrified outbursts of “They weren’t even friends!” and “That’s not what happened at all!” I developed a picture of why he liked the story and what about it I can emulate in my own story telling.

First, Why He Liked The Story.

The Story Delivers.

The main reason why the husband loves this story is because it delivers on its promise for revenge. The story starts out with a poor, naïve Edmond Dantes, and ends with him transformed as the larger-than-life, stone cold Count of Monte Cristo.  He spent years plotting his revenge against four men who betrayed his trust, and, in the end, he delivered his revenge.  There was no flip-flopping to create unnecessary tension or drama.  These men ruined Dantes’s life.  They were the bad guys.  They deserved what they got.  The End.

[To see how a revenge story can fail to deliver its promise, I would direct you to the movie Law Abiding Citizen.]

A lot of Change, A lot of Range

The story, setting, characters…all undergo huge changes.  First of all, there’s the timeline. Dantes is in prison for fourteen years, and uses another ten years to plot his revenge.  The settings cover from Turkey to France. The character types range from pirates to princes.  The characters themselves swing from poor to rich or rich to poor; ill repute to honor to public shame.  And, even though the plot could have been non-stop action from start to finish, Dumas allowed the tension and conflict to build and fall throughout the story.  Sure, there may have been some parts that could have been edited out, making the story a little bit tighter, but overall, he knew how to pace the story to keep the reader interested and hungry for more.  Plus, like I said above: the story ends in a way that fulfills the reader’s expectations.  Dantes gets his revenge, and gets the girl.

The Count of Monte Cristo Was a BAMF

It’s not enough to know that The Count slowly and patiently laid the groundwork to utterly destroy any shred of happiness or prosperity that the four backstabbers acquired while Dantes was imprisoned, which alone makes him worthy of his BAMF title.  Dumas goes a step further, and also shows other people’s reactions to The Count.

For example, The Count wasn’t just rich and powerful because he found a lost treasure.  We know it, because The Count traveled with a speed unheard of in that day and age (he kept fresh horses around willy-nilly, which is the equivalent of rolling around in a Lamborghini).  We see it by the way members of polite society were in awe of him, and tripped over themselves to be acquainted with him.  We see it in the way his servants didn’t want to displease him, because they didn’t want him to send them away.  Finally, after he totally ruins four families’ lives, he sails off into the sunset with a nubile young thing as his new love.  If that doesn’t scream BAMF, I don’t know what does.

[Side note: The husband protests to the term BAMF because it sounds like an explosion caused by a water balloon and not worthy to describe this awesome colossus of a man.]

What I Got Out of It:

So, I know all of this fan gushing can really be distilled to the same time-honored principles in writing, namely show don’t tell and write memorable characters.  But, I think my writerly aha moment came to me when the husband shared, “The Count does the things I would do, or wish I could do.”  The Count is more than just another memorable character, a BAMF, an awesome colossus of a man.  He allows the reader to be engaged in the story itself.

I’ve recently become so caught up in the story line or plotting of my latest WIPs, that I forgot the most basic rule of engaging the reader.  Heck, that’s one of the reasons why I write.  I want to write a story that creates the hungry, obsessive need to read into the middle of the night.  Sure, there are many ways to do this, but I think the most basic way is to create characters that would resonate with the reader.  Not even that they need to be believable characters, but that they are so larger than life, that the character(s) make me believe in them.  The rest of the story will come from the character’s decisions and the conflicts that the MC faces as the result of those decisions.

Story, then, doesn’t come from carefully plotting out the MC’s decisions; it comes from the following through on what the MC decides as he overcomes the obstacles we crazy writers throw in his way.  This creates more complex and believable characters, a more engaging read, and creates readers out of non readers.

At least, that’s what I got out of movie night this week.

What about you?  Any fun, writerly aha moments float your way?